December 2011: Already Under The Tree

This week's done deals:

Continued congressional hostage taking; over basics like unemployment compensation, and with the obligatory "compromise" to be made by Democrats.

"Even a liberal Democrat" endorses pushing Granny and her Medicare over a cliff.

And this development ininstitutionalizing the police state—on the 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, no less.

Ebeneezer Scrooge 2011 has the face of Gingrich, Limbaugh, or any prominent Republican. But such greed and sociopathy will not be hindered by a paltry Ghost of Marley. Instead, Idea Man Gingrich can breezily propose child labor for the poor, and Limbaugh can deem hungry children in need of school meals year-round "wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the state."

And the other team? They went all out, on what Charles Pierce called "National Sellout Day"—

The Democratic party certainly has gone to great lengths... They have made great preparation. They have cooked the goose (their own, naturellement, and ours) and placed it on the table in the traditional manner, with a knife stuck in its back... They have filled the wassail bowl to overflowing with the customary holiday libation, Hot Mulled Blood of Constituent. And later, we will all gather around the fire while our party elders read the famous story. I particularly like the part at the end when Scrooge realizes that reformation has its limits and sells the Cratchit children into indentured servitude so that the other men of the Exchange won't think him weak, or mired in the past.

Pierce also says it: what Americans really want are only the most basic protections—items Not On The Table, much less under the tree—

The American people are not angry at government because people yell at each other and nothing ever gets done. The American people are angry because people yell at each other and nothing the American people really want ever gets done. They want higher taxes on billionnaires. They want Medicare kept out of the hands of the vandals. If they think about it a little, they even like their jurisprudence with a little habeas corpus sprinkled on top. Instead, they get endless platitudes, and the steady, futile placating of an insatiable political opposition.

A Gift For All Seasons

Mr. Charles P. Pierce: not only is he blogging regularly as of late, but he seems to be doing it quite continuously.

This—on Scott Walker and the Wisconsin recall drive—really needs to be read in whole, not quoted.

...But it's too hard to resist a sample; on December 2—

There were new rules in the state capitol that morning. There are new rules in the state capitol of Wisconsin on almost every morning these days. You see, ever since last winter, when Walker rammed through his assault on the state's public workers, touching off a general uprising all over the state, and a specific one outside on his front lawn, many of his fellow citizens have taken to expressing in imaginative ways how much of a walking pustulation they believe their governor is, both inside and outside the capitol building. So, in the interest of not being told to his face what a walking pustulation he is, Walker and his Department of Administration have concocted a veritable symphony of pettiness to drown out the noise....

And this, on Obama's pretty words in Kansas vs. the reality of the 99%—

...In the middle of his lucid exposition of how we of how we got into this mess — and, more important, who got us into this mess — Obama felt obligated to say...

"I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren't Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values or 99% values. They're American values."

Because, among all that's wrong with that picture, "The Republican party gave up on these 'values' the first time they let Arthur Laffer into their corridors of power without handing him a mop and a bucket," Pierce continues—

I regret to inform the president that these actions are necessary specifically because the Republicans — and, alas, too goddamn many Democrats — do not accept the fact that "this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules." I regret to inform the president that, up until recently, not enough Americans believed in those "American values" to get their sorry asses to the polls and elect enough people put those "American values" into action. The people most clearly doing the latter are the people doing it in the streets today.

"You Are America"

1985 item from Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor—

12/1 President Reagan is honored by friends in the entertainment industry at a black tie event at an NBC studio. Among those paying tribute are Burt Reynolds, Dean Martin, Emmanuel Lewis and Charlton Heston, who tells the President, "To the world, you are America." Reagan reveals his "dream Cabinet," which would have included Secretary of State John Wayne, Defense Secretary Clint Eastwood and Treasury Secretary Jack Benny.

What, no nutrition post for a Hollywood fundie pal?

Later that month—

12/15 60 Minutes interviews Berkeley professor Michael Rogin, who posits the theory that the President honestly can't tell the difference between movies and reality. The evolution of a Reagan anecdote* is traced from the point where he credits it as a movie scene to the point where he tells it as if it really happened. Viewer response proves this to be one of the least popular segments in the program's 17-year history.

*Some quotes from the show in this 12/85 LA Times review.

Sandwiched between those two bits of media news—

12/9 [Former Reagan employer] General Electric buys RCA (and with it, NBC) for $6.3 billion.

Keeping Folks Occupied...

That they do, the representatives of the one percent.

They provide opportunities for camping out in a patriotic manner—

(NYT "Black Friday" coverage, via Bag News Notes.)

Meanwhile, they're also busy having the wrong kind of campers evicted... Nearly three hundred arrests after midnight yesterday, as LA police broke up the Occupy site at City Hall.

Bag News again—on the LAPD's bringing in "embedded media" to cover the action—while keeping out independent reporting.

Writer Tina Dupuy was on the scene. Talking today with Sam Seder (segment starting at 33:00), she had a lot to say about the media who were let in, and about the meme that the encampment was dangerous and unsanitary—the story line used by authorities around the country as the for-public-consumption reason to break up Occupy camps.

Touching on actual threats to public safety is Joshua Holland—on the connections among OWS, the gutting of social services, and militarized police forces.

In Britain today, public sector workers took to the streets, in protest against the austerity scam their government has created.

So much happening; now, if only we had a news media...

Though, after suing the Fed for access to its records, Bloomberg News reports how Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress.

It sure would be nice to see a bit of media (and prosecutorial) interest in an insider scam on a very grand scale—for the benefit of insiders so grand, they can only be a micro-percent, next to whom others of the One Percent are mere hoi polloi.

It would also be nice to see interest in the "sideshow created to distract everyone from what the Fed was up to."

Witnessing and Reporting

The death of Tom Wicker on November 25 is slightly old news, but a reminder of a (sometimes) better era of journalism.

The media being "professional" as it is, coverage focused on shop talk—along the lines of, "reporting the Kennedy assasination made his career."

Less prominent was the fact that Wicker's career at the NYT included taking stands on issues. Among those mentioned by Robert D. McFadden, in the Times' obituary—

He denounced President Richard M. Nixon for covertly bombing Cambodia, and in the Watergate scandal accused him of creating the "beginnings of a police state."

...

...Speaking at a 1971 "teach-in" at Harvard, he urged students to "engage in civil disobedience" in protesting the war in Vietnam. "We got one president out," he told the cheering crowd, "and perhaps we can do it again."

He was among the observers who tried to mediate during the Attica uprising, before New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the fatal storming of the prison.

His writings on civil rights reflected a topic of deep concern to the North Carolina native.

McFadden notes another subject among Wicker's books—

"On Press" (1978) enlarged on complaints he had made for years: the myth of objectivity, reliance on official and anonymous sources. Far from being robust and uninhibited, he wrote, the press was often a toady to government and business.

And Wicker noted the central Reagan scam; Thom Hartmann often cites this 1985 column—

... it now appears the deficit was deliberately created by Mr. Reagan in order to do away with Democratic social programs dating back to the New Deal.

Who says so? David Stockman, the departing Budget Director, at second hand, and Friedrich von Hayek directly. He's the Nobel Prize-winning economist who's been a guru of Reaganomics.

Wicker's warning still rings horribly true—"Congressional Democrats should realize the source of the pressure they're under to sell their political birthright."

Now, that could have been written yesterday—to fall again on predominately deaf ears.

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.

Golden Calf: My, How You've Grown

Water Tiger: "You shall not make for yourself a graven image..."

She also observes—

So nice to know that the safety of this statue is more important than the safety of First Amendment rights.

Note handed to Obama—just in case he might care that "Banks got bailed out. We got sold out."

The note math has Occupy arrests at 4000.

Which leaves out mention of the level of police reaction in scenes like this.

Or this...

Any sound from the fetus lovers will be to condemn a pregnant woman for being in a place where out of control authority could decide to assault her.