And However Will We Cope With So Much Leisure Time?

Interesting conversation from Sam Seder with Robert McChesney: "Internet vs. democracy."

McChesney views popular journalism's decline from the historical context of its having been supported by advertising (and postal subsidy). Targeted "smart advertising" has eliminated conventional ads as a funding mechanism, and broadcast ad revenue is going to networks, not reporting.

Ironies abound in McChesney's look at the early promise of the Internet—to democratize, by equalizing access to information—in contrast to the real outcome: the vast reach of the Internet has, through economies of scale, proved best suited for monopolies like Amazon and Google to emerge and triumph.

Strikes me as a bit reminiscent of how Progress would create so much free time, we just wouldn't know how to handle it.

National False Expectations Day

Before today, I had no idea that the International Workers' Day ignored in the US had been declared "College Decision Day."

Whenever that branding became official, I have no idea. Taking into account the realities of the price tag, and the post-graduation jobless economy most will face—sorry about those 30+ years of Reaganism, kids—"Near-Future Rude Awakenings Day" seems more like it.

Meanwhile: elsewhere.

The More Things Change...

Via Digby, here's a bit of old history I've been reminded of too, thought about, too, and it does give a sense of déjà vu—

WASHINGTON -- On Jan. 1, 2000, the world awoke to find that little had changed since the night before. After years of hype around what was then called Y2K -- the fear that computer systems across the globe would collapse, unable to handle the year shifting from '99 to '00 -- the date change turned out to be a momentous non-event.

Next week, the United States is in for much the same, after months of frantic hype about the economic disruption that awaits if Congress and the president fail to reach a deal and the federal government goes "over the fiscal cliff." (The difference between Y2K and the fiscal cliff being that computer programmers worked around the clock to ensure the former was a non-event.)

The so-called fiscal cliff is a combination of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1. But the agencies responsible for implementing those changes, including the IRS and the Pentagon, are well aware that congressional and White House negotiators will most likely come to some sort of deal within weeks or months -- and so they are planning to carry on as usual, according to a broad review of private and public government plans.

In other words, there will be no cliff. There won't even be a slope. Congress and the president can have their public and private dramas, but the government officials responsible for carrying out their eventual orders have seen this movie before, and they know how it ends.

Oh well: some truth in labeling, at last. Though the "post-bipartisan" has always amounted to as much.

The libraries have wait lists for copies of this, but I have heard David Graeber's Majority Report interviews, including this.

As I remember his historical summary, cash markets evolved around military operations. When paper money came into use, a bank would lend cash to the king, who would go into in debt. The king would then lend his debt to the populace, who used it for the exchanges that make up an economy, before sending it back as taxes.

"If the king ever paid back the debt," says Graeber, "there'd be no money."

The Easy Part Over

It's not as if a Republican had won by a single vote; ergo, no "mandate."

It is, on the other hand, a narrow escape.

This makes no difference when the narrative is pre-determined: that The American People want deficit reduction and bi-partisanship. There's plenty of concern that the former aligns with the president's goals.

Of the latter, Obama's instinct to be "the adult" has seemed all about willingness to compromise with insatiable bullies. Charles Pierce writes at length here, about history as a river that "churns up the muck from the bottom and brings it to the surface," with "backwaters so obscure that they no longer appear on modern maps."

Given the noise machine's four-year rampage of bringing up "some of the deepest muck from the river basin," it's hard to disagree when Pierce wonders if Obama, in taking an overly flattering view of the citizenry, can realize "the bottomless thirst the country has for snake oil."

But there is also the matter of willingly selling snake oil, in the forms endorsed by the owners.

And the apparent decisions that, bully pulpit be damned, truth-telling and rule of law are just too impolitic. As Pierce suggests, the president

... has granted immunity to the country by granting immunity to many of the people who did that country the most damage, whether they were the criminals within the previous administration, who tortured without conscience or spied without warrants, or whether they were the criminals within the financial sector, who rigged the game, cheated millions of ordinary people out of their money, and then escaped back into the institutions that had been Too Big to Fail and that, remarkably, came out of the scandal even bigger than they were before.

With a House gerrymandered to stay in the grasp of lunatics, impeachment will begin in January (if not sooner). The noise machine may have been caught a bit off-guard last night, but soon enough it will function as if the election had never happened.

On the very positive side: Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, among other wins.

And passage of marriage equality measures in four states. A truly heartening sign that demographics are changing, and that this particular wedge will lose its power for more of the electorate.

Service With A (Proper To Her Station) Smile

I've been reading Jan Whitaker's 2006 Service and Style: how the American department stores fashioned the middle class. It covers a lot of commercial and social history, from the nineteenth century to the stores' heyday in the Depression. Department stores expanded after World War II, but were soon forced to move from selling unique store brands to carrying the nationally advertised brands consumers demanded. National brands sold themselves through their marketing, so that stores no longer needed to provide a high level of service and were now forced to compete with discount retailers selling exactly the same brands. Ultimately, the customer exodus to the suburbs led to the demise of many stores; others survived mainly in malls, not city centers.

As it happens, pre-Labor Day I had just finished a chapter on stores' personnel, including founders and the masses of hired staff.

Women sales clerks made up most of the workforce by the 1890s, when most major stores had evolved from dry goods businesses staffed by men. Clerks' pay was poor, and hours abusively long—

... Sixty hours a week was commonplace even in better stores. Overtime pay was unheard of, and clerks were often expected to work Sundays and holidays to prepare for sales. If they were late, they could face fines for every minute of absence. Humiliation was routine. A guard searched them for stolen merchandise each day as they left the store.

Even worse, the public suspected clerks of accepting money for sexual favors from "mashers" who hung around their counters and employee entrances. According to popular lore, saleswomen were audacious flirts who used glances and smiles to sell goods—and who knew what else?—to male customers.

... In retrospect, the issue of sales clerk morality looks like a case of middle-class vexation over the invasion of public space by large numbers of working-class young women, many of whom refused to display the degree of deference and maidenly timidity demanded by polite society.

More sympathetic women believed that if young clerks sometimes went wrong, it was mainly because pay was too low for them to support themselves. Many middle-class women undertook reform efforts, working for stronger labor laws and threatening store boycotts. Especially decrying the long hours and lack of overtime pay before Christmas, reformers asked stores to reduce night hours, and the public to "shop early." Stores did respond by ordering merchandise early and moving the start of the shopping season to early December.

By the early 'teens, says Whitaker, pay increased (but very slightly), and "leading stores" began organizing clubs and leisure activities for employees, along with calling them "associates"—a euphemism I had assumed was quite recent.

Whitaker has interesting material on how stores worked to bridge the gap between middle-class patrons and poorly educated clerks with instruction in middle-class behavior and esthetic standards. She reproduces a lesson on proper speech, including such "Wrong–Right" contrasts as—

Lady, is this your package? – Madam/Mrs. Brown, is this your package?

The party who... – The person/woman who...

I have this in four sizes. – We have this in four sizes.

This is swell/grand/nifty. – This is smart.

Stores established

Dress codes, speech correction, and "lifestyle" training… The ideal clerk was efficient, knowledgeable, helpful, and pleasantly mannered, and she could answer questions and provide assistance without inserting her "self" into the transaction. She was supposed to maintain social distance. To the status-conscious customer, nothing could kill a sale faster than hearing the clerk say, "I wear that kind myself."
...

Emotional labor was at the heart of the sales clerk's role. She was supposed to avoid showing impatience or giving offense, since customers remembered affronts and avoided stores that had offended them in the smallest way. But she was also supposed to flatter the customer and create a pleasant association with the store. Flattery required a clerk to "read" the customer, to listen with minute attentiveness, and to recall her name and preferences on later occasions.

Though, Whitaker notes, class friction could work in many ways. Clerks had to address everyone as "madame'—

including washerwomen and immigrants speaking broken English. The low-status customer could be the most demanding, almost provoking a clerk to lose her temper. Frances Donovan, a sociologist who conducted research by working in department stores in the 1920s, noticed that customers employed as servants sometimes played out a role-reversal game, treating clerks as their servants. Interestingly, as a middle-class woman, Donovan could not bring herself to call them madame.

Employers' preferred "reforms" were to provide activities for workers. There were companies that provided summer camps, organized concerts by employee choirs and orchestras, summer camps, and published regular newsletters. I enjoyed the January 1925 Hess Brothers (Allentown, PA) newsletter, which was full of positive thinking exhortations to the store's "Co-Workers," along with this—

Co-Workers and Mr. Chas. Hess Exchange New Year Greetings.

On New Year's Eve, Wednesday, 31st, 1924, the following cablegram was sent to Mr. Charles Hess who from last reports was visiting Monte Carlo, France.

Continued Good Health for 1925

Co-Workers

On Friday, January 2nd, 1925, the co-workers received the following cablegram from Mr. Charles Hess, which was dated January 1, 2 p. m.

Wishing Everybody a Happy New Year.

Charles Hess

Stores often had a cult of The Founder, which was useful for advertising and "branding" purposes. Many stores also remained for generations under family control, but Whitaker says things changed when—

Scientific management entered department stores in the 1920s and transformed them from one-man shows and rule-of-thumb operations into businesses like all others.... With the adoption of modern methods, records were kept and statisticians hired to pore over anything that could be quantified. In the 1920s, the comptroller became the most influential person in a store. Executives were hired from outside the store, while family members had to prove their worth. Founders' sons had to take business courses just like anyone else aspiring to management. Buyers [a position that had become a means of advancement for women] lost their power as personnel departments took over hiring and merchandise managers supervised budgets and buying decisions. Each department was rated on its productivity, balancing its sales volume against the square footage it occupied and the number of clerks it employed. Many store functions were contracted to outside agencies....

It wasn't until the New Deal that minimum wage laws increased worker pay, and hours became restricted to a 40-hour 5-day week. Strikes intensified in the '30s, particularly by Teamsters. Employer reaction was predictable: lockouts, along with such PR efforts as the San Francisco Retailers Council advertising in 1938 for public support against "the attempt of arrogant union leaders to Sovietize our business." Union activity united retailers into city-wide groups to oppose it. Delivery driver strikes led stores to use common delivery services, a move that boosted the fortunes of United Parcel Service.

For all the controlling paternalism of stores toward employees, it's startling how Miss Kunesh of the alterations and tailoring department could not only retire, but be given "a three-week, 10-country tour of Europe." Maybe she managed the department, or maybe not; this store was considered a luxury goods dealer that may have been extra-generous.

Retirement party for Halle's employee, 1968.
"Off to Europe-- For completing 50 years of service with Halles, Miss Anna Kulesh, 7510 Pearl Rd., was honored with a reception at the downtown store yesterday and presented a three-week, 10-country tour of Europe. Miss Kunesh is in the alterations and tailoring department." -- photo verso. Text on verso contains two different spellings of honoree's last name. The presenter is Walter Halle.

Nearly another fifty years on, the still-employed—for a paycheck and little else—are mostly service workers, thanks to The Owners' successful arrangements. Those still serving do so under the demand for a never-ending process of outdoing oneself—without ever, ever exposing any of that troublesome self.

Exceptional Media For An Exceptional Country

French voters, like the Greeks, just rejected austerity.

1943: "Four Freedoms" matchbook, printed for distribution in occupied France.
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Archive

The horse race results from France were reported here; the word "austerity" was even mentioned. But the term is conveyed as a foreign word for a foreign policy; our considerate media spares American voters having their heads hurt by polysyllabic words in any context they could relate to their own economic circumstances. Besides, the story line has long been in place, with said media long ago following marching orders on The Issues That Matter To American Voters: cut taxes; a federal budget is exactly like a family budget, and the rest of the drill.

While we have ever-better methods of vote suppression being put in place, it turns out the French encourage voting, by having it take place on weekends (to the tune of 80% turnout).

In other media spectacles, there's been the impressive speed with which a previously unknown Chinese dissident was pushed into being a top story, day after day. He went to the U.S. embassy but wanted to stay in China, and then said he didn't want to stay—and, oh yeah: he just happens to be a campaigner against his government's abortion policy.

Clearly a set up, from the beginning. My attempts at finding connections led to two kinds of results: the "objective media" take—Huge story! Obama mishandled! Scandal!—and all sorts of Catholic and Protestant fundie anti-abortion material. Like most of us, corporate journos may never have heard of the guy before, but those fundamentalist groups sure knew him.

For days, the only questioning note I could find was this kos diary: "Something's amiss: Chen Guangcheng, Fox & Abortion". There, dannyinla references a Washington Post story that mentions this actor, based in a certain location—

MIDLAND, Tex. — One week ago, Bob Fu was an obscure crusader for religious rights in China. His nonprofit group, China Aid, improbably based in this dusty West Texas oil town, followed the plight of persecuted "house churches," opposed forced sterilizations and abortions, and promoted pen-pal campaigns for pastors in prison.

In the past 72 hours, Fu has become an international media figure at the center of the most sensational human rights crisis in China in a decade. It erupted when blind lawyer and dissident Chen Guangcheng fled house arrest and took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing — just as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was arriving this week for critical and wide-ranging talks with Chinese officials.

On the WaPo site is stephenslhs' comment from May 2—

In the past 72 hours, Fu has become an international media figure at the center of something the media is trying to make into something bigger than the Cuban missile crisis.

To which ChasL1 replied on May 4—

You don't say, google this "Bob Fu China Aid Southern Baptist Convention". The whole episode timed right before the China economic summit is no coincidence. The players are linked to the International Republican Institute as well as SBC - yes the Republicans, upcoming election. Poor Chen Guangcheng is a mere pawn.

Thanksgiving á Lá Ronnie

From Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor: for the season, two facets of Reagan's shtick.

One was to play what seemed his preferred role: America's avuncular (if forgetful) Master of Ceremonies—

11/18 [1981] President Reagan receives the annual White House turkey, which upstages him by squawking and flapping its wings madly. Not to be outdone, the President recalls a Thanksgiving
long ago: he was carving a turkey, noticed what seemed to be blood oozing from it, assumed the bird was undercooked, then realized he had sliced open this thumb. Everyone laughs

11/23 [1982] The annual White House turkey is presented to President Reagan. As it did last year, this reminds him of the time he gashed his thumb while carving a similar bird, and he does not hesitate to tell the story again.

The other pole of his "charm"—jibing at one of the Right's favorite scapegoat—

11/21 [1983] President Reagan receives the annual White House turkey. "You're looking at the press a lot like I do sometimes," he says to the bird,"with your mouth wide open and a total misunderstanding of everything they're asking."

11/25 [1985] "Go ahead! Atta boy, Wilfred. You tell 'em Wilfred. Yes, sir, Wilfred, you let 'em have it!"
—President Reagan, saved from having to answer reporters' questions by the screams of the annual White House turkey, this year named Wilfred

In the 1980s even St. Ronnie's "charm" failed at convincing the majority of people that his administration didn't hurt the poor.

Since then, the propaganda machine has made sure to include among its campaigns a war on empathy.

Holidays are the usual time to bring out those themes; a couple of Thanksgivings ago but typical is this column—published in a once upon a time respectable Washington Post—

If there is anything viler than a plump, well-fed, rosy-cheeked white guy getting all huffy about a USDA study on food insecurity because he sees poor people who are fat...

Charles Lane, who took refuge at Freddie Hiatt's House of Horrors after his unsuccessful stint at the New Republic as the editor for Stephen Glass, has decided that his effort to make the world a better place as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday is to argue that poor people need less food, not more.

The photo of Lane* accompanying Tintin's post is of a smug (and yes, very well-fed) face.

*Not to be confused with the great (and skinny) Charles Lane.

And thirty years after Reagan, there are so many poor people to be blamed for their condition.

The policies that got us here have been bi-partisan, to be sure. Ending Welfare As We Know It played its part; it was during the Clinton administration that Barbara Ehrenreich researched this.

Add eight years of Junior in the White House—by this year's tenth anniversary of Nickel and Dimed's original publication, Ehrenreich says—

In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained.
...

The most shocking thing I learned from my [2008-9] research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America.

Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
...

So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America's working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list -- a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.

Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.

Setting Examples

Portland— Natalie Behring/Getty Images
caption: Police in riot gear work to remove remaining protesters from the streets around the Occupy Portland encampment November 13, 2011 in Portland, Oregon. Portland police have reclaimed the two parks in which occupiers have been camping after a night of brinksmanship with protesting crowds of several thousands.

Not Portland—another image from Bag News Notes, where Michael Shaw compares the two— Khalil Hamra/AP
caption: Egyptian riot police beat a protester during clashes in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011. Thousands of police clashed with protesters for control of downtown Cairo's Tahrir Square on Saturday after security forces tried to stop activists from staging a long-term sit-in there. The violence took place just nine days before Egypt's first elections since the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak in February.

Word is out today; here via David Atkins—

Two people were killed in Cairo and Alexandria this weekend as Egyptian activists took the streets to protest the military's attempts to maintain its grip on power. And guess how the state is justifying its deadly crackdown.

"We saw the firm stance the US took against OWS people & the German govt against green protesters to secure the state," an Egyptian state television anchor said yesterday...

And why would they not draw that conclusion? Stopping the lower orders by whatever means is the goal of the owners everywhere, so the message is dutifully promoted by their media servants.

Our superstar versions of the latter are so very well cared for: defaming activists is all in a day's fabulously overpaid work for them, as they ignore or excuse police brutality and use of "pain compliance" against peaceful protestors. Demonizing protest applies to US streets, at least; similar demonstrations abroad may get better PR, depending on a regime's current branding by the owners.

Yet world-wide austerity for the 99% is a sacred cow of the pundit class.

Again: why not? It's a mere abstraction, this drive to destroy what little is left of a safety net not needed by anyone they will ever have to know.

Thatcherism, Thirty Years Later

She didn't do it alone; just as in this country, a putative opposition party saw to it that the Right's policies became institutionalized. But Thatcher certainly got things started toward heightened social inequality.

The violence in part of London and other English cities is senseless, but not without cause.

A take on youth unemployment and hopelessness in Tottenham here.

Meanwhile, it's austerity for the many, as the usual forces pull the strings.

At least one force has been receiving some unwelcome scrutiny—in Britain, if not here.

A protester dressed as Rupert Murdoch holds a puppet of David Cameron.
Photograph: Isabel O'Toole for the Guardian

Take Your Medicine

Drug store. Seneca, Kansas.
John Vachon, 1940
Library of Congress, FSA/OWI archive

The unpalatable pill did get a sugar coating, at least as far as the media was concerned: the sudden emergence of Bipartisan Human Interest Story .

Or, as Digby says, Congresswoman Giffords' surprise return to the House was "a great way to make this vote for The Deal a nearly sacred act."

It's wonderful that she is making such incredible progress after the brain injury. But the coverage, with its tone of "the system works, and we're all friends in the end," was making me gag.

It also makes me wonder if the next thing will be for Rep. Giffords to give a public blessing of Super Congress...

Matt Taibi's take is probably right—and was the only possible outcome, if the donors are to get the Democratic Party results they've paid for.

The "Eat Your Peas" Doctrine

It sounds so sensible, and well, adult.

Not a jarring phrase—as, say, "Shock Doctrine" might be.

The president's choice of "peas" is interesting, as poking around the Library of Congress FSA/OWI archive suggests.

That's where I found a series of 1939 photos by Dorothea Lange; among them— FSA caption:

Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is a native Californian. Destitute in pea picker's camp, Nipomo, California, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Of the twenty-five hundred people in this camp most of them were destitute.

It's a different view of a family more familiar here—
Digby posted this interview with Michael Hudson:"Guns, Finance and Butter - Finance Is the New Mode of Warfare" [transcipt here].

Regarding "negotiation" over the debt ceiling "crisis," Digby quotes Hudson—

It’s a good cop-bad cop charade. The Republicans are playing the role of the bad cop. Their script says: "You cannot raise taxes on anybody. No progressive income tax, no closing of tax loopholes for special interests, not even prosecutions for tax fraud. And we can get a lot of money back into the economy if we give a tax holiday to the companies and individuals that have been keeping their money offshore. Let's free the wealthy from taxes to help us recover."

Mr. Obama can turn around and pretend to be the good cop. "Hey, boys, let me at least do something. I'm willing to cut back Social Security. I'm willing to take over what was George Bush's program. I share your worries about the budget deficit. We have to balance it, and I've already appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission to prepare public opinion for my cutbacks in the most popular programs. But you have to let me get a little bit of revenue somewhere."

In the end the Republicans will make some small token concessions, but they'll get their basic program. Mr. Obama will have sold out his constituency.

"The problem is, how can Mr. Obama move to the right of where George Bush stood? The only way he can do this is for the Republicans to move even further to the right. So the Republicans are accommodating him by pushing the crazy wing of their party forward, the Tea Party. Michelle Bachman, Eric Cantor and their colleagues are coming with such an extremist, right-wing attitude that it gives Mr. Obama room to move way to the right as he triangulates, depicting himself a the less crazy alternative: "Look. I'm better than these guys are."

There's very much more, in Hudson's analysis of financial class warfare against all other segments of societies, and the havoc it has just begun to wreak internationally.

As to Hudson's domestic forecast:

... We're going into a depression that is unnecessary – except to drive down wage levels and strip away government obligations to pay for Social Security, Medicare and other public programs. This will enable the government to get rid of what remains of progressive taxation on the higher wealth and income brackets.

In other words: Republican policies, promoted by a nominally Democratic president elected with a mandate for change—
just not of this particular brand.

But, maybe Obama is on to something with those peas.

Eat 'em or pick 'em: it's been done before.

More photos from Lange in 1939, with FSA captions:

Pea picker camp. This family had been farm owners in Oklahoma, lost their farm and for the last three years "have been draggin' our children around California. We're a have-to case."
Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California.

Why should Americans become too soft, when they can experience a character-building return to the old days?

Migrant pea pickers on the road. California.

Like pea eating, pea picking is a healthy activity.

Just think of it: life in the open air, communing with nature...

Migrant pea pickers camp in the rain. California.

This could be a bracing lesson in Back to Basics...

Pea pickers in California. "Mam, I've picked peas from Calipatria to Ukiah. This life is simplicity boiled down." California.

And a big bonus: plenty of fresh air for the youngsters.

Children of migratory pea pickers in Brawley camp. California.

What's Not To Trust?

Bedford, Virginia.
John Vachon, 1941
Library of Congress FSA/OWI Archive

Negotiate with Republicans?

A-OK! We can always rest assured they are selling
Good *NOT* Bad used ideology.

Just as we can trust that what trickles down from windfalls for "job creators" will lead us to the prosperity that's just around the corner.

During the week, I just happened to look through this.

I was struck by how the author, in discussing painter George Grosz's politically formative years in Germany, notes—

"The German revolt of 1918," historian Sebastian Haffner has observed, "was a social democratic revolution that was suppressed by the social democrat leadership—an event unparalleled in world history."

After uprisings in Munich and Berlin, elected socialists heading the government—in league with right-wing forces—used military force to brutally suppress the revolt, murdering leaders and an estimated 700 participants.

It's the broadest kind of comparison, yet the model of a party leadership out to suppress its constituency certainly brings to mind the leader of our supposed Democrats.

"Hope and Change" were hardly meant to inspire revolution, itself hardly something a U.S. presidential election would ever bring about. Still, 2008 really was a mandate—and not one for Republican policies.

Yet Obama seems never to have met a Republican policy he didn't like; perhaps, in a slightly different, "moderate" form. And he always is willing to meet Republicans "half-way."

Beau Hodai has just published a detailed piece on the Republican state house trial runs in progress around the country. These are the onslaught of bills meant ultimately to end the "unfair competition" of public services over corporate-controlled services and infrastructure.

The bills may be before different legislatures, but they are all written by the very well-financed, secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and they aim at

... privatizing public education, transportation and the regulation of public health, consumer safety and environmental quality including bringing in corporations to administer:

• Foster care, adoption services and child support payment processing.
• School support services such as cafeteria meals, custodial staff and transportation.
• Highway systems, with toll roads presented as a shining example.
• Surveiling and detaining convicted criminals.
• Ensuring the quality of wastewater treatment, drinking water, and solid waste services and facilities.

It's become too sickening to follow daily details of negotiations over a phony deficit scare steamroller that Obama did not have to jump aboard if he hadn't so chosen. In any case, the media pretty much covers this as a clash of personalities, not as the negotiation with terrorists that it is.

We certainly are not Germany in 1918. And our Democratic leadership will not have literal blood on its hands; it merely will be responsible for even more "sacrifice" by the poor and what's left of the middle class.

Sam Seder "attended" Obama's "eat your peas" press conference.

After that crack by the president, Sam's advice was: "'Eat your peas' now, before you end up eating cat food! Get as many peas in your system as you can!"

That was followed by an interview with Brian Beutler, who's been covering the "negotiations" for TPM.

Following the obvious conclusion about where "negotiations" will lead—and at exactly the moment I was thinking, "Thank You, Barack H. Hoover"—Sam suggested one bright side to full-scale economic depression: new productions of Annie.

While this may not be Brecht and Weil, it is catchy.

And the lyrics may not be completely out of date. As long as newspapers don't go away completely, they will come in handy for lining one's clothing in winter.

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.

June 2011: Our Republican Depression

A couple of images from that previous one, thanks to the Library of Congress FSA/OWI archive:

Eighteen year-old mother from Oklahoma, now a California migrant.
Dorothea Lange, 1937

Child of migrant berry pickers, Berrien County, Mich.
John Vachon, 1940

In the midst of this, they do what Republicans always do: all they can to enrich the elite by making the weakest suffer.

This should make it all better: poor Mitt having to subsist on an apparent worth of $208 million, at minimum.

The reality is the extreme rightward push of conventional bipartisan political wisdom since the last Republican depression. So that the idea that an administration elected with a mandate to tackle unemployment will so much as care about the growing ranks of devastated lives—that's so far in the past, the New Deal may as well be an ancient fable.

A strange tale from another world, when this, too, could have been thought patriotic:

Aberdeen, South Dakota.
John Vachon, 1942

A State Of Prosperity, 1954

Spotted at a used book sale:A 74-page booklet featuring 50s bounty, in one part of the country.

Michigan, USA; the 1950s: paragraph after paragraph noting the strength of industry—There are plenty of sections on touring the outdoors and state parks ("more than any other state"). There's also an entire page devoted to sightseeing opportunities here—
With the state booming, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the country, and this was pointed to with pride—The booklet's history suggests some facts that made prosperity possible—And: "We led the nation with a broad program, launched in 1928, to establish county and district public health agencies, which became a model for the nation and which provide 92 per cent of our population in 70 Michigan counties with full-time public health service."An educated, healthy population? Stopping that sort of thing has taken decades, but, we're pretty much there.

And then, there's what had to be stopped most of all— Another quaint point of pride: Michigan's labor history—

Labor Organizes—1818

... Some mistakenly regard the rise of unions as a recent development. Actually, Michigan has been a leader in the organized labor movement ever since its first union, the Detroit Mechanics Society, was founded in 1818.

Trade unions were born and flourished in Michigan in the decade before the Civil War. These groups, in turn, led to the formation of the Michigan Federation of Labor in Detroit in 1889.

The Federation of Labor undertook to organize auto workers as early as 1903, and founded a formal auto workers union in 1916.

And so on, about a history unknown to most Americans.

Which makes it all the easier to stamp out those pesky union elections, along with unseemly things like "free schools for all"; "public libraries"; "public health service"...

Start with Reagan's preaching government hate; add thirty years of right-wing activism. At the state level you get this year's crop of CEO governors installed to do what CEOs do: fire workers, hire cronies, and strip the place of the remaining assets.

In Michigan today, Rick Snyder's particular angle on this is to replace the ballot box with "financial martial law."

The promise of trickle-down prosperity is the public face of this stuff, pitched to a country that didn't exactly learn its lesson in the 80s.

The new tactic in Michigan is also a handy means of dealing with black people living on overly valuable real estate.

With another front being used to shut down public schools and opportunity for the poor.

Nothing To See Here

A romantic view of some Victorian-ish architecture...
A closer look:
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Abandoned mail order house.
John Vachon, 1939.
Library of Congress FSA/OWI photographs

It used to be that scenes like this were made by a Depression
(or at least, one publicly acknowledged).

In our time—after thirty years of Reaganomics—Think Progress snoops around the CIA Factbook to uncover the not so secret fact that income inequality now ranks us with Uganda...

And, worse than Pakistan and Ethiopia.

The Ronald Reagan Memorial Employment Plan

Entrance to Amalgamated Sugar Company factory at opening of second beet season. Nyssa, Oregon; 1939
Photographer: Dorothea Lange
Library of Congress FSA/OWI archive

No surprise that the jobs program is a closed door, for most of us.

But it's a great deal for all the former speechwriters and surviving members of his administration, what with their book deals and wingnut foundation gigs.

This Friday, Morning Edition gave nearly eight minutes to this, on the upcoming anniversary of Reagan's March 30, 1981 popularity surge.

Here, it's not a former Reagan staffer cashing in, but a WaPo writer (who happens to be married to an NPR correspondent). Wilber has detoured from his federal court system beat to devote 320 pages to "the day the shots were fired, and how Reagan managed to keep his sense of humor throughout the traumatic events."

Or perhaps, after a lifetime in acting, he never broke character.

We'll never have so much airtime devoted to Reagan's record, so we'll have to settle for this dewey-eyed piece, as it rehashes the operating room anecdotes of he who was dubbed by Gore Vidal, the Acting President.

The segment did have one revealing bit, in an interview with the Secret Service agent who got Reagan to the hospital—

"Since he did live and do what he did for those eight years, you can see the results of saving his life. And that's what our job is, saving lives... Before that event, even though there had been attacks on John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King [Jr.], a whole bevy of problems for the Secret Service, we still took a defensive posture. With this event we realized that wouldn't work anymore, and we did it in a flash. That's what came out of it..."

Threats to Kennedys and King: ehhh...
To Reagan: wake-up call!

On other job fronts, if Wisconsinites could fire Scott Walker today, they likely would.

His moves since day one in the Governor's office couldn't have been more obviously patterned on Reagan's career.

There was the attack on unions [see: President Reagan]. His earliest tactic was to threaten teachers and nurses with the National Guard, and his "budget repair" is, among many things, an assault on the University of Wisconsin [see: Governor Reagan, on both counts].

Walker may be unpopular at home—and subject to recall next year—but he'll never be out of work. He's got the media spotlight and big money behind him; a made man with a lifetime ticket to the right-wing gravy train.

All around the country, everyone else needing a job can expect the aid and compassion the great man himself always displayed.

Some quotes from Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s— [1982]

1/19 At his seventh press conference, President Reagan:

• Claims there are "a million people more working than there were in 1980," though statistics show that 100,000 fewer are employed
...
• Responds to a question about the 17% black unemployment rate by pointing out that "in this time of great unemployment," Sunday's papers had "24 full pages of ... employers looking for employees," though most of the jobs available…require special training, for which his administration has cut funds by over 30%.

3/16 "Is it news if some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?"
—President Reagan—whose Presidency is based on the premise that people believe what they see on TV—complaining about coverage of the nation's economic suffering

4/15 "The statisticians in Washington have funny ways of counting."
—President Reagan explaining to Illinois high school students why, although the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a rise in unemployment, he believes the jobless rate has in fact declined

9/4 "South Succotash, with its population of 11 million, must be a considerable place."
—AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland on the unemployment figures

10/4 President Reagan suggests—and not, by any means, for the first time—that since he sees big help-wanted sections in the Sunday papers, unemployment must be caused by a lot of lazy people who'd just rather not work.

10/18 "Now we are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we are going to succeed."
—President Reagan getting confused during a GOP fundraising speech

12/23 President Reagan suggests that the key to solving the unemployment problem could very well be something as simple as hiring unnecessary workers. "If a lot of businesses ... could hire just one person ... it would be interesting to see how much we can reduce these unemployment rolls."

[1983]

1/18 "The President and Cap sit around and talk about how workfare got surfers off the beach in California. They have no concept of what is going on."
—Unnamed aide on President Reagan's failure to comprehend the seriousness of the recession

And some undated quotes:

THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION TALKS ABOUT THE ECONOMY

"The number of people remaining in poverty is very small and it grows smaller every day."
—Domestic adviser Martin Anderson

"An increase in the number of people seeking work who did not find it."
—Larry Speakes on the cause of unemployment

"Just remember, for every person who is out of work, there are nine of us with jobs."
—President Reagan on the unemployment rate

Fiction; Prediction?

Bonus marchers, 1932

By this time last week, I had given up on trying to function.after a physically and mentally punishing week at the office. So I spent most of the weekend immersed in Gary Steyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.

The story is set in a future time that's vague, yet seems to be just around the corner.

Lenny Abramov is heading back to New York after a year in Italy. When his pre-flight screening goes unexpectedly wrong, it's a hint that some things at home may be awry. Lenny is allowed to fly, but it's unclear whether or not he's been flagged for surveillance by the American Restoration Authority—the shadowy entity administering the country on behalf of the ruling Bipartisan Party.

But the incident seems minor to Lenny, who's just fallen in love with the beautiful Eunice Park. A 39-year old booklover, Lenny records his story in an old-fashioned diary; in a parallel narrative, the viewpoint of the much younger Eunice is told through text pulled from her e-mail account.

Lenny returns to a country where technology and consumerism are at bizarre levels, yet not completely unlike our real environment today.

Everyone—except the ultra-wealthy elite of HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals)—is required to carry a data device called an äppärät, for instant read-out of the bearer's Credit rating.

The äppärät is used to monitor the everyone, yet everyone adores it, with characters using it to stream their every thought and to rate the hotness of everyone in view.

Steyngart's take on consumerism borrows from current "street" marketing to invent even more absurdly crass products. Male characters wear SUK DIK logo clothing; Eunice, her sister and best friend compulsively surf a site called AssLuxury, in an endless quest for deals on the JuicyPussy fashion line.

The price of everything is noted: consumer goods costs are all-important, and they are expressed in "yuan-pegged dollars."

Lenny works in "the creative economy." Reporting back to his nightmarishly hip workplace, he sees that employee names and ratings are now displayed on an old-fashioned Italian railway board

... the black-and-white flaps were turning madly, the letters and numbers mutating—a droning ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka—to form new words and figures, as one unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from "overcoming loss of a loved one" to "letting personal life interfere with job" to "doesn't play well with others." Disturbingly enough, several of my former colleagues... were marked by the dreaded legend TRAIN CANCELED.

I found the novel hard to put down: the first half or so is just that funny, although the comic inventions also seem believable enough to have a painful edge.

And the really dark notes are plentiful, early on:

People in the streets are being stopped by the New York National Guard—whose troops have oddly Southern accents. And the security checkpoints are marked by signs denying their existence; persons stopped are instructed that—

BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.

Credit Poles read the Credit ratings of pedestrians, as the authorities monitor LNWIs (Low Net Worth Individuals). Immigrants are watched, to be deported if they break the rules: Chinese must spend; Latinos, save.

Without good looks or wealth, Lenny still is able to establish a relationship with Eunice. She has to overlook other bad traits: Lenny reads books (the young say they smell bad), and he is too "brain-smart."

Whether the relationship can survive or not, the world around the two becomes darker as the novel progresses.

As the country's economic/political underpinning is threatened with investor "decoupling," New York prepares for the visit of the Chinese central banker, "unofficially the world's most powerful man."

Whole neighborhoods are cleared; the newly homeless camp in Central Park, in an echo of another century's Hoovervilles.

Veterans of the recent war with Venezuela are angry about not receiving their promised bonus. Events parallel the 1932 Bonus Army, as vets and other LNWIs camp in Tompkins Square and refuse to leave.

The National Guard are gradually supplanted by the security arm of Staatling-Wapachung, the sinister corporation that also employs Lenny.

Well before the novel's end, Lenny's Russian Jewish immigrant parents are afraid to go outside because of the Credit Poles; Eunice's Korean immigrant mother wonders if she and Eunice's father did the right thing in leaving a poor, war-torn country that unexpectedly became rich and peaceful while their adopted country declined.

Despite the comic exaggeration, Steyngart's vision of the future is entirely too believable—a very worthwhile novel, if not something that improved my mood at the time of reading.

The week that followed brought daily news stories resonant of the novel's atmosphere of life in a dying empire.

New York Stock Exchange bought by Germans.

Borders' bankruptcy suggests books are not mass market. Some places still support independent stores, but in my little town, Borders has been the last remaining place to peruse new books, even if the stock was increasingly showing the Kmart ownership.

It's certainly no news that there are separate standards for HNWI and LNWI, but as in Steyngart's tale, the gap grows ever more stunning.

Roy Edroso mused yesterday on severity of punishment for the ordinary person caught in the criminal justice system; the absence of consequences (other than greater wealth) for those who have destroyed the economy; the right-wing's ramping up the war on teachers' unions; and more—

One of the saddest things about the decline of this country is that we've relearned a pre-democratic contempt for the suffering of the less fortunate and a solicitous interest in the problems of the very fortunate. Poor saps who never had a chance are presumed to never have deserved one, while the rich are treated with kid gloves lest they take offense and go Galt on us. Once Americans cheered the underdog. Now I see there's a book out called Underdogma: How America's Enemies Use Our Love for the Underdog to Trash American Power which tells that this generosity of spirit is actually a dangerous delusion...

I don't know if Roy was thinking of Steyngart, or simply observing our "culture"—

We hear a lot of talk about "hippie punching" these days, but make no mistake: Under a certain, very high net worth [my emphasis], everybody's getting punched.

Bringing Good Things To Life?

State of the Union:

Unimaginable wealth for the few.

For the rest, something like Dickensian conditions—just with added technology. Which allows the bosses to constantly demand more of those whose jobs have not yet been exported.

Jack Welch's global war on workers led to rocketing share prices, which made him the "Most Admired CEO of the Century."


WPA poster, as revised by Micah Ian Wright
Propaganda Remix Project

Welch was followed at GE by this guy.

In the bipartisan corporate ideology of the last thirty years: Immelt's experience in demonstrating that ordinary Americans are too soft if they expect to earn a living wage and work under reasonable conditions makes him eminently qualified to fill us in on "Competitiveness."

If one company were to be singled out for doing the most to ruin this country, GE would be my pick.

There's the whole web of military, media, and financial industry involvement.

Reagan's political career was a creation of GE.

Someday, perhaps someone will combine it all into a Pynchonesque tale.

That would have to be a lot funnier than actually living with the product of it all.

Our Depression, Less Than Great

Drought refugee's car on U.S. Highway 99 between
Bakersfield and Famoso, California.
Dorothea Lange, 1939
Library of Congress FSA/OWI Archive
Regarding our government's economic priorities, the routinely brilliant image and text of Driftglass' take on our own Depression—"Napa Valley Grapes of Wrath"—says it all.

With a new year ahead, I plan to start focusing on some more recent history.


In preparation for what's coming up in 2011.