Month: September 2011

Even before last night’s Republican debate, conservatives were pondering what it means that their frontrunner wants to make old people eat cat food. It’s true that there is some kind of bad blood between Texas Governor Rick Perry and Karl Rove, but that doesn’t mean that Rove isn’t correct in his analysis:

Perry’s campaign has not backed away from what Perry wrote in his book “Fed Up” — that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme,” a “failure,” “something we have been forced to accept for more than 70 years now,” and one of many New Deal programs that have “never died, and like a bad disease, they have spread.”
But Rove pulled no punches today, calling that stance “inadequate.”

“They are going to have to find a way to deal with these things,” Rove said.

“They’re toxic in a general election environment and they are also toxic in a Republican primary. And if you say Social Security is a failure and ought to be replaced by a state level program, then people are going to say ‘What do you mean by that?’ and make a judgment based on your answer to it,” he said.

All of that was pre-debate. But Rick Perry didn’t back down during the debate. He reiterated his belief that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme and said any suggestion that Social Security will exist for young workers is a ‘monstrous lie.’ That led Romney’s campaign to declare that Perry has already lost.

He has lost. No federal candidate has ever won on the Perry program to kill Social Security. Never has. never will.

Yet, declaring Perry’s campaign to be doomed doesn’t make it true. If he were to win on this platform, he’d have a mandate to eviscerate the New Deal, including Social Security. And, right how, he has a big lead in the polls against his opponents, including Romney.

According to Nate Silver, Perry’s lead is based on the impression that he is electable. If that’s the case, his position on Social Security could undermine his frontrunner status. Yet, what’s clear is that the Republican electorate is not happy with Romney, and no one else appears remotely electable.

As for the merits of Perry’s critique of Social Security, so long as there is no lockbox, Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. We give our money to the government and a bond is created. The bond doesn’t belong to us. The money is spent on general revenues, working as an effective subsidy for rich people because it allows a lower tax rate than would be required if the government didn’t have Social Security funds to spend. Then, when the government looks at the costs of Social Security (repaying all the money they stole from the system) they decide that they need to reduce the benefits or raise the retirement age. That doesn’t mean that the money won’t be there for young workers, but it does mean that they’re not going to get what they’ve been promised. The problem could be fixed quite easily by raising marginal tax rates or by increasing how much income is subject to the FICA tax. But, that would require the Republican Party to go away.

Steven D recently wrote an article here titled Shootings: Omen, Infotainment or Tragedy? It was an examination of last weekend’s surge of violence in the United States. At the end of the piece he wrote the following:

Now go back and look at the title to this post and tell me how you would answer the question it raises. My answer: All of the above.

I disagree.

My own answer?

None of the above.

It’s all accident.

All of it.

All and everything.

Nothing more and nothing less.

Read on for more…or less…or don’t.

As you must.

You are an accident too, as are we all.

Not an accident waiting to happen…an ongoing one.

Deal wid it.
I live, work and travel in a mixed-race, largely working/lower class subset of New York City (The Bronx, the subways, the mixed-race dance and jazz venues, etc.), and I work at night as often as I do during the day. I can smell when things are going to get rough.

I recently republished an article that I had written at the beginning of the summer called War + Revolution as Earthbound, Traveling Infections. Again. In it I wrote:

G. I. Gurdjieff on “war.”

What is war? It is the result of planetary influences. Somewhere up there two or three planets have approached too near to each other; tension results. Have you noticed how, if a man passes quite close to you on a narrow pavement, you become all tense? The same tension takes place between planets. For them it lasts, perhaps, a second or two. But here, on the earth, people begin to slaughter one another and they go on slaughtering maybe for several years. It seems to them at the time that they hate one another; or perhaps that they have to slaughter each other for some exalted purposes; or that they must defend somebody or something and that it is a very noble thing to do; or something else of the same kind. They fail to realize to what an extent they are mere pawns in the game. They think they signify something; they think they can move about as they like; they think they can decide to do this or that. But in reality all their movements, all their actions, are the result of planetary influences. And they themselves signify literally nothing. …It must be understood that neither Emperor Wilhelm, nor generals, nor ministers, nor parliaments, signify anything or can do anything. Everything that happens on a big scale is governed from outside, and governed either by accidental combinations of influences or by general cosmic laws.

Further:

As I have said before, man’s chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him – all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.

Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels – all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, invent anything. It all happens.

To establish this fact for oneself, to understand it, to be convinced of its truth, means getting rid of a thousand illusions about man, about his being creative and consciously organizing his own life, and so on. There is nothing of this kind. Everything happens – popular movements, wars, revolutions, changes of government, all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as everything happens in the life of individual man. Man is born, lives, dies, builds houses, writes books, not as he wants to, but as it happens. Everything happens. Man does not love, hate, desire – all this happens.

Wake the fuck up.

It is on, baby.

On.

Watch.

The infection must be allowed to run its course.

Thanks, Doc.

I feel better already.

Really.

Ummmmmm…you sure about that?

The operation was a success, but the patient died.

Oh.

So it goes, eh Doc?

So it goes.

I was on the street at night all of this weekend. I didn’t watch any TV news and I didn’t read much news either, but when I found out that there had been 48 shootings in the city over the Labor Day weekend I was not in the least bit surprised. The violence quotient has been going up here since just before hurricane Irene hit. I saw more openly expressed interpersonal anger on Friday, Aug. 26th than I have seen in NYC for decades. It was everywhere, from gypsy cab drivers blowing their horns if cars in front of them hesitated for a split second when a light turned green right on through traffic situations where people got out of their cars and banged on other’s windows and accidental pedestrian bumps on the sidewalks/in the subways turned immediately confrontational. It was so tense here that I left town the day before the hurricane was supposed to hit…not from fear of the storm itself as as much as worry over whether the population of the city would be able to handle the stress.

Luckily the storm spared NYC to a great degree. But the tension and heightened potential for violence remains.

Why?

Gurdjieff’s explanation is as good as any other.

It must be understood that neither Emperor Wilhelm, nor generals, nor ministers, nor parliaments, signify anything or can do anything. Everything that happens on a big scale is governed from outside, and governed either by accidental combinations of influences or by general cosmic laws.

The ongoing attempt to “blame” anyone or anything for this sort of occurrence is totally empty. It just happens. There were no more guns in NYC this past weekend than there have been for the past several years of weekends, yet gun violence peaked.

Why?

Call it what you will.

Accident.

Planetary influences.

An accumulation of tensions due to the recession.

The coming tenth anniversary of 9/11.

A spike in the drugs used to feed McDonald’s farm animals.

The Chinese or Al Qaeda or little men from outer space put something in the water supply.

The truth of the matter?

It’s just the way it is. It cannot be “figured.” Deal with it.

Politicians will use this to their own ends, just as they always do. So-called “liberals” will try to get better gun control and so-called “conservatives” will make the argument that if everyone was armed to the teeth no one would dare start shooting, but that’s all empty bullshit. If there had been no guns in the entire city this past weekend people would have been hitting each other upside the head with baseball bats and tire irons. Bet on it. The argument that “the crime rate has been going down” is equally empty, both because the true “crime rate” goes up or down quite randomly over long periods pf time and also because said “crime rate” is a fiction produced by politicians. police and the media for their own purposes. If the following passage from “The Graduate” were to be written today…

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

…a much more apropos word than “Plastics” would be “Security.” It’s a cop world in America now, and it has been so since 9/11/01.

Get used to it.

It will change eventually, but almost no one will understand why it changes.

So that goes as well.

Just as it has always been.

Just as it has always been.

Kurt Vonnegut knew.

The opening words of his masterpiece “Slaughterhouse-Five” were “”All this happened, more or less.”

Yup.

So it goes.

Deal wid it.

As Winston Churchill once said about the rigors of old age, “The alternative is totally unacceptable.”

Deal wid it.

AG

My power has been out since 6pm. How’s the debate going?

Perhaps you missed it. It hasn’t been picked up for syndication yet but I’m sure some sharp TV programmer will have it ready in time for the first Fall season cancellations. And it beats the heck out of “Lock-Up” on MsNBC:

A total of 67 people were shot between Friday and Monday and 13 of them died.

That included this gunfight in NYC:

Three people were killed and two police officers were injured in a gun fight in Brooklyn Monday evening — the latest bloodshed in a violent holiday weekend in New York City that saw at least 48 people shot. […]

Of course since then, we’ve had a few more. First there was the IHOP shooting in Nevada by a man with what has been described as an AK-47 for which no one can provide a motive:

And today, West Virginia joins the show:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — Authorities say a man who killed five people near Morgantown and ran down an elderly woman in neighboring Pennsylvania also shot and wounded a gas station attendant as he crossed back through West Virginia. He then took his own life in Kentucky.

The path of violence that Shayne Riggleman cut through three states before committing suicide during a police chase was “one of the most heinous crimes I’ve ever witnessed,” State Police Capt. James Merrill said Tuesday.

Why did he do it? I don’t know. Here’s what was on his Facebook page; see if you can make sense of it.

On a public Facebook page for a Shayne Franklin Samuel Riggleman, a string of Wall Posts from the past week seem to hint at a troubled relationship.

“There is a direct corelation between the amount of love you have for someone and how crazy you go when you lose them,” reads one.

“I mate for life, not like a penguin though,” reads another. “I mate for life like a praying mantis.”

And one, ominously, says only, “We’re not promised tomorrow.”

Riggleman’s profile page, meanwhile, contained several quotes.

At the top of the list, unattributed, was this one: “I ain’t goin’ out without a fight. I’m with whatever. it WILL be YOUR LIFE before MY LIFE.”

Some of you may think I’m being insensitive regarding the victims of these shootings so let me say that I deeply grieve the deaths of these shooting victims and the losses suffered by their friends and families. I once met a man and woman, husband an wife, who belonged to an organization for which no one would willingly become eligible: people who have lost loved ones to murder. The man told me that it didn’t much matter why someone was murdered–the loss was just as bad whether you knew the motive or not. He also told me no one but those who have endured such a loss can understand the pain that he and others like him suffer each day. I believed him. All I can do is offer my condolences. I cannot comprehend the pain the families of these shooting victims are going through.

Some others of of you may think I’m waving the bloody flag of gun control in this post, but that’s not true either. We are beyond any ability to control the hundreds of millions of guns in the hands of American citizens. We live, whether we like it or not, in a society that at any moment can erupt into a shooting gallery, in the public square or in the privacy of individual homes. Children, police, physicians, ordinary people in the wrong place at the wrong time and even members of Congress have all been targets of gun violence. Some of these shootings have been motivated by specific political or religious beliefs, and others appear meaningless, the last desperate act of delusional or mentally unstable individuals. It matters little though, in the final analysis.

You know what happened when everyone knew Obama was going to be elected back in 2008? Rumors and lies were spread that he and the Feds were going to confiscate everyone’s guns, or make it illegal to buy guns, or illegal to buy ammunition (none of which happened) and so Americans, during the worst collapse of the global economy in my lifetime rushed to gun stores and gun shows to buy more guns and more ammunition. They bought so much that there was a shortage of bullets for all those guns, for which predictably many gun people also blamed Obama:

“It started the day that Obama got elected,” Johnny Dury, who owns Dury’s Gun Shop in San Antonio, tells NPR’s Michele Norris. “It is when everything just went crazy in the gun business.”

Dury says people are buying guns as well as ammunition, creating a shortage of both. He says people are buying the guns to protect themselves because they perceive Obama’s policies as socialist and rewarding those “people who are not working hard.” They are also afraid, he says, of more restrictive gun laws.

No, this isn’t a post calling for more gun control. I’ll let Mayor Bloomberg try to slay that dragon. But I do believe that much of what he says is true. We have created a society which rewards the very few at the expense of the very many:

Mayor Bloomberg on Wednesday blamed last weekend’s spate of violence on what he said was a national scourge of “young, disaffected people with guns.” He said there were remedies, however, including … social programs like his new initiative to help black and Hispanic young men. […]

Mr. Bloomberg said that violence was also caused by “an educational system that hasn’t included everybody,” a condition he suggested that his young men’s initiative would attempt to redress. The initiative will include, among other things, assessing city schools based on the academic progress achieved by black and Hispanic male students.

Mr. Bloomberg is helping to finance the $130 million program with $30 million of his own money. The billionaire investor George Soros has also donated $30 million, and the city is providing the balance.

The trouble is that this isn’t a problem limited to a single city or race or ethnic group much as that quote by Bloomberg seems to suggest it is. You see, we’ve spent the better part of three decades limiting the educational and job opportunities for most Americans. You all know the story of America’s large income inequality by now. You also know how we have cut funding for education, health care, including healthcare for those with mental disorders. You know the massive debts with which most college graduates are saddled as well as the loss of opportunity for many to obtain a college education at all. You know of our the failure to invest in critical infrastructure and cutting edge technologies. You know of the rampant consumerism and “easy credit” that is a plague upon our population. You know the consequences that the deregulation of our financial industry caused.

You also know of the policies of “free trade,” globalization and “neo-liberalism” that have shipped jobs overseas and eliminated well paying jobs at home. You know our manufacturing base has shrunk. You’ve witnessed the war on unions and indeed the eradication of entire sectors of our workforce from the ability to essentially organize and collectively bargain. You’ve seen a generation of people’s lives ruined from lack of good jobs, affordable healthcare and even a place to live when “times are tough.” Tough for some people that is.

You see this is a post at its heart about anger and despair. My despair is over the fact that we have the resources to provide better healthcare to all our citizens, to give a college education to everyone who wants one and to create good jobs. However, since Ronald Reagan became President we have chosen a separate path. A path that prioritized fighting overseas wars, killing and maiming thousands of foreign civilians and our troops and massive spending on the military over the general welfare of our people. A path that made made mega-corporations persons with greater rights than real people. A path that demonized racial, liberal, ethnic and LGBT communities. A path that eviscerated the union movement and lowered taxes on the wealthiest corporations and individuals making it easier to transfer wealth from the Poor and the Middle Class to people like — Charles Koch.

You all know Charlie, don’t you? The man who held a “seminar” at the resort town of Beaver Creek, Colorado for some of his closest billionaire and multi-millionaire buddies in which he compared Barack Obama to Saddam Hussein and applauded guest speaker Anthony Napolitano of Fox News for making this statement:

So what does the government fear the most? I think the government fears fear. I’m afraid the government is going to take the property and the freedom of everybody in this room. The government should fear that we will take its power away from it and put it into the hands of worthy custodians of our freedom.

Napolitano and Koch and all their “friends” in that “room” weren’t talking about freedom for you and me, oh no. They were speaking solely about ensuring that government does their bidding and helps them maintain their wealth, power and influence. As for your freedom, well, that’s not really a priority for them. Their “worthy custodians” will work for their interests not ours.

Oh, they’ll let you keep your guns (and anyone else who has one as well), but protect the social security and medicare benefits for which you paid into during your adult working lives? Perish the thought. Allow you the same measure of “free speech” that they can buy but you can’t? Not likely. Provide educational benefits to all Americans? Not unless they can profit by it. Allow women to determine what happens with their own bodies? Don’t make me laugh. Provide people the ability to actually exercise their “right” to organize and collectively bargain? Who are you kidding? Create well paying jobs in America? Only for themselves.

See, that is why I am angry and sad, both. Because these shooting sprees and other acts of violence have been going on for a while now. They have just been slipping under the media radar, except on your local nightly news, of course, where they help sell advertising for products you likely don’t need. We as a nation are at a tipping point and I for the life of me can’t convince myself that a peaceful outcome is the most probable one.

You know what happens when you put a bunch of rats into a confined space and then begin to cut their food supply? They begin to fight one another. Some even become cannibals. Now go back and revisit that wealth and income inequality gap, and healthcare gap and education gap and employment gap and all the other gaps these high and mighty plutocrats, or to use a phrase that seems fitting, robber barons, of our times have created. Now go look at the vast number of guns estimated to be in the hands of Americans, many of them who have been pushed into poverty and desperate straits, or who live under the threat of losing what little they have, by the very policies Charlie Koch and his pals seek to preserve and even expand.

Now go back and look at the title to this post and tell me how you would answer the question it raises. My answer: All of the above.

It comes from the Majority Leader:

“We need to get this relief funding to the American people as quickly as we can, and we’re going to do that — I’m going to bring a free-standing bill, and we’re going to have a chance to vote on it,” [Harry] Reid told reporters at his weekly Capitol briefing Wednesday. “Some of my Republican colleagues are trying to — I was going to say something that was vulgar and I’m not going to do that — are trying to cater to the Tea Party by holding up relief efforts.”

Can you guess what he wanted to say?

Admittedly, the president’s jobs proposal has not been fully released, so we’re relying on drips and drabs supplied to select reporters. Having said that, it’s been clear that the administration’s proposal will not add to the deficit. You could have learned that from Norah O’Donnell’s presentation for NBC News, or from reading Jackie Calmes’s piece in the New York Times, where she wrote, “Mr. Obama has said he will propose long-term deficit savings to offset the short-term costs of his stimulus proposals, though that is not likely to satisfy Republicans.” If that isn’t enough, in today’s White House press briefing Jay Carney said that “The [proposals] will be paid for.” If you want to see how the Republicans operate, watch the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, Jeff Sessions (R-AL), describe the president’s proposals. These are lies told from the Senate floor.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the debt that we’ve now incurred is already weakening our economy,” Sessions said on the Senate floor. “It comes to a point that you can’t keep borrowing in a futile attempt to stimulate the economy when the increased debt itself is weakening the economy.”

…

“And this plan calls for over $300 billion in spending anew,” he said. “Not paid for — we’re already in debt, we’re already borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend, so we’re going to add another $300 billion in spending, not paid for, borrowed, every penny of it.

“At some point, this country gets to a position where you cannot continue to borrow without damaging the economy. It’s just that simple.”

Again, all the reporting has suggested that these proposals will be paid for. The White House has been telling the press that the proposals will be paid for in the out-years of a ten-year budget window. The White House press secretary has confirmed that they are not proposing deficit spending, at all. And, yet, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, a man responsible for crafting the Republicans’ budget priorities, has no compunction about going on the floor of the U.S. Senate and telling the most audacious lies.

Are there ever any consequences for such behavior? Will his colleagues correct him? Is anyone embarrassed? Does the press even notice this kind of behavior anymore? This is on the Senate floor, mind you. It isn’t a campaign rally or stupid appearance on television. Shouldn’t there be an uproar when a U.S. Senator shamelessly and knowingly lies to the public from the Senate floor?

What about local Alabama reporters? Do they care that their senator is willing to tell brazen lies in the well of the U.S. Senate? Is that okay with them?

In a recent post here —America Is Alive and Well. You’re Just Not Looking In The Right Direction(s)—I wrote:

I fully expect to see an article in the Sunday NY Times about 15 or 20 white Williamsburgh no-dancing hipster wannabes having a “big” party in an abandoned Brooklyn warehouse.

It took a couple more days than I expected and it was in Queens, not Brooklyn…but there it was, large as (media) life.

Group Behind Underground Music Venue in Queens Seeks a New Barn

The future looks uncertain for the Silent Barn, a celebrated underground music venue in southern Queens. Members of the collective that runs the venue said they had decided to search for a new home and to shut down the space at 915 Wyckoff Avenue in Ridgewood, where they have been showcasing bands and performance artists for seven years. The reason: the city buildings department has ordered the musicians and artists living in the old industrial building to vacate it unless an extensive renovation is done.

—snip—

The Silent Barn has been a fixture in the underground music scene for years in Brooklyn and southern Queens, serving as an incubator for several beloved indie bands like the Vivian Girls, Teengirl Fantasy and The Dirty Projectors.

Now I don’t know about you, but I do not need to search out tracks by groups with names like “the Vivian Girls, Teengirl Fantasy and The Dirty Projectors” to know exactly and precisely how lame their musicianship may be, nor do I need a YouTube video to see the people who dragged themselves out of their onanistic little hipster-world warrens to go witness these undoubtedly fine examples of our ongoing musical and cultural collapse.

Just sayin’…the above article made the Google News front page today.

The NY Salsa Congress scene at the Manhattan Hilton that was the real subject of that America Is Alive and Well. You’re Just Not Looking In The Right Direction(s) article…5 days long, thousands strong, an audience of the same general age group as the so-called “hipster” scene, totally racially mixed and absolutely burning? Not a peep from the good TimesFellas.

Read on.
Now you might claim that the reason I’m pissed off is because latin music is an idiom in which I am artistically involved and the syndrome extends to almost all of the other groups w/which I play and have played for 40+ years in NYC. (Go here for another take on the same media act from the fine small publication The Brooklyn Rail. New York’s Best-Kept Jazz Secret by William S. Niederkorn. I play at that Baha’i Center venue often with a number of the bands mentioned.) But these sorts of things are simply small drops in the badly damaged and leaking cultural bucket of America. The corporate-owned media hype whatever is most profitable to the corporate world that owns those media. That corporate world would rather drop some garage band that literally cannot tune its own guitars into the mix than put a spotlight on a band like The Mambo Legends because more complex musical systems are harder and more expensive to produce plus real musicians will not allow themselves to be ripped off and are not easily discarded and replaced if they start to make waves.

And this syndrome is not limited to music, either.

Here’s a parallel story from the same day. Same newspaper as well. (More about that later.)

A Poetic Mentor Who Minces Few Words

—snip—

Four stories above East 12th Street, down the hall from Allen Ginsberg’s old apartment, one of the East Village’s last standing bohemians soldiers on.

Mr. Fagin, 74 years old, second-generation beat, New York School veteran, friend of Ted Berrigan, publisher of Ashbery, lives with his wife, Susan Noel, also a writer, in adjoining rent-controlled apartments in the building near Avenue A.

Although Mr. Fagin — a handsome, T-shirt-and-jeans kind of guy with a square build, tousled silver hair and a cheerful air of insubordination — now collects Social Security, his chief source of income for decades has been giving private creative-writing lessons and editing and producing small magazines and chapbooks from the work of students and friends.

He reports that despite former teaching gigs at the New School and St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, neither he nor his wife have held anything resembling a straight job for any substantial period of time, though he has worked, he says, as a librarian, a reader to the blind and a “black marketer.”

“I try to be disaffiliated from bourgeois society,” Mr. Fagin said the other day, “like most good people. Because all we have are these very few, precious days.”

—snip—

Mr. Fagin seems to exert a magnetic pull on his students.

“If you have any inclination to get in touch with the arts, to express yourself creatively, and you live in this century, and in this city, and you’re struggling to make ends meet –and I fall into this category — you’ll be enamored by Larry,” said Kate Thompson, 30, a former market researcher from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, who has studied prose fiction with Mr. Fagin for a year. “You walk into his apartment and it’s just filled with all this stuff you recognize and don’t fully know but you want to.”

In a classroom setting, Mr. Fagin has had mixed success. For about five years, until 2007, he was an adjunct at the New School, where he rubbed many people the wrong way, said one former student, Kathleen Kyllo.

“By the time the last class rolled around attendance was significantly lower,” she said in an e-mail. “Where students had once sat closer to him near the front of the room we were hanging back in a defensive mass.” She recalled an incident where Mr. Fagin announced to the class that her poetry was “too vaginal.”

Mr. Fagin acknowledged that he got “really mean” in the classroom. “You walk in and all these faces are staring at you and you want some reaction from them but they really have nothing to offer you. It’s like, come on you jack wagons!”

All in all, Mr. Fagin takes a blighted view of the current generation of aspiring artists, whom he likened to “pod people.”

“They are so inundated by information, they have no way to sort all this stuff out — it’s like being perpetually electrocuted but not realizing it,” he said.

This man is one of the real ones. He didn’t cop out, he just continued doing what he does.

Nor does he have much good to say about what has come of his once-beloved downtown art world, which, by his reckoning, ended in February 1975 at a dinner party around the corner hosted by Claes and Patty Oldenburg.

Mr. Fagin, who went with his friend the critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, recalled his excitement that the artist Robert Smithson was to be in attendance. “But when we got there, all anyone talked about was real estate,” he said. “They’d all just bought lofts in what was later to be called SoHo. We left and I said to Peter, `Well, that’s the end of civilization.'”

Yup.

But the interesting part is this…why is the NY Times covering both the Queens lamers and this serious poet and teacher?

The answer lies in the media’s 98%-2% “equal coverage” myth.

The best example of this…and the one with by far the most evil consequences to both the U .S. and the world in general…was the media’s selling of the Cheney/Bush II invasion of Iraq.

Surely you remember how the selling was done, right?

No?

Let me refresh your media-clogged memories, me news-saturated doogies.

I wrote this about a year and a half ago.

And The Mirror Broke

So…you say that you do not understand how the people who control this system could allow such epidemic fuckups to take place on an almost daily basis?

You watch TV and see poisonous foods being massively advertised as what you should eat?

Glossily produced spiels for drugs so poisonous that a good part of the ad must contain a voiceover listing its negative effects?

You are daily bombarded with fear-producing news about the ongoing dangers of terrorism and disease, yet the very forces that are supposed to protect you from those forces are quite plainly totally incompetent?

Is that what’s bothering you, bunky?

Well, lissen up.

—snip—

Never forget the run-up to the invasion of Iraq as well. It was rather crudely done…the media have come a long way in this regard over a span of less than 10 years…but it was very effective. Literally hundreds of military and (supposedly) ex-military “experts” blathering on about the necessity of war, balanced by an occasional frumpy looking nun or frazzle haired 50-ish ex-hippie talking about “peace in our time.”

The article about Mr. Fagin? He was cast in the 2% frumpy nun role while the other 98% of the paper hyped death, destruction and the end of American culture.

Those of you who wonder why I keep pressing on opposition to the media as the single most important effort that can be made if we are to right this floundering ship of state before it goes down with all hands? Why I write so often about Newstrike/Mediastrike/Culturestrike?

Go read this And The Mirror Broke article again.

I cannot say it any better. Read it.

NEWSTRIKE!!!

MEDIASTRIKE!!!

CULTURESTRIKE!!!

VAYA!!!

As the great basketball player and world class fuckup Micheal Ray Richardson said when asked about the state of one of the sad NY/NJ Nets teams with which he played:

“The ship be sinkin’.”

Yup.

Start bailing, folks. The water’s rising fast.

The first truly strong and effective action that you can take? It won’t need a great deal of time or effort and it will not only require no financial commitment but wlll actually save you money…

STEP AWAY FROM THE TV WITH YOUR BRAINS IN THE AIR!!!

BAIL OUT ON THE MEDIA.

TAKE A FLYING JUMP OFF THE END OF THE MEDIA PIER IN THE FULL BELIEF THAT YOU WILL FALL UP!!!

Yup.

You will fall up, y’know. If you dare to try.

Bet on it.  

I am.

Later…

AG

Personally, I think pork is an important part of the legislative process. When combined with transparency, pork gives Congressional leaders something of value to offer a lawmaker who doesn’t want to support a particular bill. During the lead-up to and aftermath of the vote on the Affordable Care Act, the Cornhusker Kickback showed both sides of the coin. Majority Leader Harry Reid needed Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska’s vote, but Sen. Nelson had no electoral incentive to support ObamaCare. So, inducements were provided. Concessions were made. And Nebraska had the federal government agree to pick up (in perpetuity) 100% of the tab for the Medicaid expansion in the bill. That sweet deal, along with painful concessions on the abortion language, was enough to win Nelson’s vote and pass the bill.

Yet, as soon as the details of the deal were revealed, it became a scandal. Rather than boasting that he had won an awesome concession for his home state, Sen. Nelson denied he had asked for the concession in the first place. Then the whole deal was eliminated in the budget reconciliation part of the health care reforms. The lesson isn’t that pork or special treatment are bad, but that you have to be a good judge of the politics. Ultimately, the people were more offended that Nebraska was treated differently than most of the other states than they were impressed with Nelson’s hardball negotiating tactics. In some other situation, saving an Air Force base for example, the people might actually reward Nelson for his savvy.

Pork and other special treatment can create suboptimal allocations of resources, and its unfair almost by definition. But a legislature needs ways to grease the skids so that they can actually get things done. As long as things are transparent, people can fairly judge why their representative has voted the way that they have, and they can punish or reward them accordingly.

This is just one more example of how John McCain is wrong about everything.

Which brings me to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans’ refusal to entertain any jobs proposals from the president. Historically, presidents have been able to rely on a couple of things to win sufficient support from the opposition to pass bills that address the urgent needs of the country. For most of the postwar period, there was enough ideological overlap and lack of party unity that most issues didn’t neatly line up along party lines. That’s no longer the case. The GOP is united in opposition for opposition’s sake. The New York Times reported on this in March 2010.

On the major issues — not just health care, but financial regulation and the economic stimulus package, among others — Mr. McConnell has held Republican defections to somewhere between minimal and nonexistent, allowing him to slow the Democratic agenda if not defeat aspects of it. He has helped energize the Republican base, expose divisions among Democrats and turn the health care fight into a test of the Democrats’ ability to govern.

“It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out,” Mr. McConnell said about the health legislation in an interview, suggesting that even minimal Republican support could sway the public. “It’s either bipartisan or it isn’t.”

Mr. McConnell said the unity was essential in dealing with Democrats on “things like the budget, national security and then ultimately, obviously, health care.”

In the past, the way to deal with such obstruction would have been to attack the most vulnerable members of the opposition. However, President Obama has been operating under some daunting circumstances in that regard. Of the twelve incumbent Republican senators who sought reelection in 2010, only one (Chuck Grassley of Iowa) represented a state that Obama won during the 2008 elections. Of the remaining eleven, two (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bob Bennett of Utah) were challenged and defeated in the primaries by Tea Party candidates. Murkowski managed to win reelection as an independent, while Bennett’s career was over. The problem, for Obama, was that Republican senators had much more to fear from cooperating with him than by opposing him. He did, however, have success in flipping Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to the Democratic Party, where he supplied vital support in the 111th Congress.

Things are no better this year. There are only eight incumbent Republican senators seeking reelection, compared to 17 Democratic incumbents. Of those eight, four come from states that Obama carried in 2008 (Richard Lugar of Indiana, Dean Heller of Nevada, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Scott Brown of Massachusetts). The president has been able to get some support from Lugar, Snowe, and Brown on various issues. Sen. Heller is new to the Senate, but has so far shown no sign of fearing the president more than the rabid base of his party. Sens. Lugar and Snowe will almost definitely have difficult primary challenges from their right, which places them in a difficult spot. Right now, only Scott Brown seems to be in the classic position of feeling the need to work with a president of the opposite party or risk losing his seat.

It’s this lack of leverage that has plagued the White House for the last two and a half years. And it’s made even worse by another factor. The obvious solution to a situation like this is to go to the people and convince them of the correctness of your policies and plans. Obama has done that. The people agree with him on pretty much everything he is saying about jobs, spending, and taxes. The problem is that the Republicans don’t care. In the House, at least, many of these Republicans are vulnerable next fall. They are going to pay a price for screwing up our credit rating and refusing to compromise on anything. But they don’t care. That’s the final piece of the problem. The House Republicans have no sense of self-preservation. Their leaders will take them right over a cliff, and they’ll go along like lemmings.

It was possible to overcome some of this when the Democrats had 59 (and, briefly, 60) senators. With 53 senators, nothing can be done. That the Republicans now own the House is almost irrelevant, although it means we can’t even have votes for our priorities.

This is why Washington is broken. It is concerted obstruction, a lack of accountability in the undemocratic Senate, and a lack of any sense of self-preservation among House Republicans. The result is that Republicans don’t care what the public thinks or wants.

And this is why. Career Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren explains:

“A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption,” he wrote. “Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

One final note. When FDR passed Social Security his party controlled 75 Senate seats out of a total of 96. When LBJ passed Medicare, his party controlled 68 out of 100 seats. Asking Obama to deliver the same kind of major progressive reforms when his party doesn’t have a supermajority is not realistic. He has 53 votes and a determined and implacable opposition. Just sayin’.

A little Koch told me:

Charles Koch’s Welcome Remarks
Koch Brothers’ 2011 Summer Seminar
Ritz-Carlton Beaver Creek Resort – near Vail, Colorado

But we’ve been talking about — we have Saddam Hussein, this is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months. For the life or death of this country. So, I’m not going to do this to put any pressure on anyone here, mind you. This is not pressure. But if this makes your heart feel glad and you want to be more forthcoming, then so be it.

What I want to do is recognize not all of our great partners, but those partners who have given more than a billion – a mill-, no, billion – [sustained laughter, applause]. Well, I was thinking of Obama and his billion dollar campaign, so I thought we gotta do better than that. [inaudible] you can’t run on these deals. No, I’m not, I’m gonna go easy on you. More than a million over the last 12 months. If you want to kick in a billion, believe me, we’ll have a special seminar just for you. [laughter]

So you see, Bush couldn’t even get Saddam. Instead he became the President of the Greatest Nation on Earth while Bush and Cheney were looking in spider-holes, torturing people, letting KBR electrocute our troops and allowing someone to steal 12 Billion Dollars off pallets flown to Iraq. On the other hand, Saddam/Obama killed Osama Bin Laden, so maybe it’s a wash.

By the way, check out the Brad Blog audio and transcript of the event in which Charles Koch names 32 people who have contributed One Million Dollars or more anonymously (well not anymore) to defeat Saddam/Obama next year. I guess someone at Koch Bros. Enterprises is a Muslim Fascist Spy. I especially love this bit in which Judge Anthony Napolitano of Fox News tells the Millionaires and Billionaires in the room at the Ritz in Beaver Creek (the more exclusive Colorado resort town) that the Federal Government is out to steal their freedoms:

So what does the government fear the most? I think the government fears fear. I’m afraid the government is going to take the property and the freedom of everybody in this room. The government should fear that we will take its power away from it and put it into the hands of worthy custodians of our freedom.

I wonder who Napolitano considers a “worthy custodian” of our the freedom of Billionaires and Millionaires? The Koch Brothers? His employer, Rupert Murdoch? Rick Perry? Just asking.