Pitchforks & Torches

How else could a committed redistributionist like me react to news like this:

According to a report from financial news agency Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, for example, has set aside $6.8 billion for bonuses, and Morgan Stanley, $6.4 billion.

[...]

[Stephen] Gandel, who's a Money magazine senior writer and contributor to Time.com says, "Compensation should be down 70 percent but, because all this new money is coming from the government, the firms are now saying they can pay more, and so they're only going to cut bonuses by 40 percent.

Even without bonuses, the mean annual salary for a securities industry employee was just under $400,000, David notes, ten times more than the average U.S. worker.

When the howling jackals of the political right screech about "Marxism" or "communism" or some other such hoary authoritarian bullshit extracted from deep inside their partisan id, remember that for them it is only bad to redistribute when it goes downhill. Increasing the wealth of the wealthy, to them, is far preferable to spreading the wealth so those who don't got a lot, get a little more.

That's bad.

Somehow, one is stealing and the other is... um... not stealing.

What is most appalling to me is that these people see nothing wrong with what they are doing. Somehow, because they've read Ayn Rand and imagine themselves some kind of mighty John Galt-type, astride the world and held back from even further greatness and glory by hangers-on, bloodsuckers and sycophants, they see this as their due.

They think we owe them this kind of treatment because we wouldn't exist without them. Sez them. Clearly, it is the other way around. Try doing my job for a day. I'm sure I could fake my way through theirs for a day, or even longer, much more successfully.

Something more akin to the French Revolution should be in order for these people.

If someone doesn't go to jail over this, that may very well be what happens.

That Didn't Take Long

Though I enthusiastically supported Obama's candidacy and am moved beyond words by what his ascension to the presidency says about who we have become and are becoming as a nation, I have said since he became the nominee and his victory began to look inevitable that he will likely piss me off more than make me proud for the majority of time he's in office. He's a centrist, I'm not and in a world where a post-Nixon-Reagan-Bush1&2 GOP has pulled the center WA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-AY to the right over the last forty some-odd years, being in the center is still sitting way too far to the right for me. I'm thinking of O's FISA vote, just to name one example.

And now comes Number 2.

He's told the Democrats in the Senate to leave LIE-berdouche alone.

The Quisling from Connecticut gets rejected by his own state party, actively curries favor with the opposition party, campaigned against the head of his own purported party and said some pretty nasty things along the way in so doing and he gets to keep his seniority and his committee assignments.

Way to go, O. I know you're all about reconcilliation and all of that kum-ba-ya shit, but this guy fucked you over loudly and in public and he is now going to suffer no reprimand whatsoever. What are you afraid he would do, say something mean about you on Tee-Vee? He's going to do that anyway and now, if the D's get really close to 60 votes in the Senate, we'll need him again (dammit) to put us over the top and all the bobblehead shows will naturally court him like a rockstar because he'll hold the balance of the Senate in his greasy little hands.

I would say he doesn't get it, but then he went to Harvard and is the President-Elect of the United States and I'm just a bitter partisan. I'll shut up about it.

For now.

(Found the picture above at this guy's facebook page)

VOTE

This one is for my work cohort who had her sign stolen:

9/11Ru9/11dy G9/11iul9/11iani9/11

I'm of two minds about this.

One, I don't think a bunch of elected officials (with a HUGE conflict of interest in deciding the issue) have any right to overturn a decision made by a public vote about whether or not they are able to continue in their jobs. If the public installed term-limits, only the public can rescind term-limits. You can't just decide that the law which doesn't operate to your advantage simply no longer applies. It smacks of cronyism and the kind of corruption for which New York politics is famous. After eight years of gleeful, cackling, sociopathic GOP law-breaking, though, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that even a mild-mannered billionaire with a Napoleon complex figured he'd just vote himself an extension.

Two, however, I think Bloomberg has done a fine job overall. Were this law not already in place I wouldn't think twice about re-electing him for a third term - I just don't like the precedent this will set vis a vis other laws the city council doesn't like. In fact, he will likely be re-elected and that will mostly be OK, despite the fact that I am one of those bitter partisans. As another hizzoner, the late great Fiorello LaGuardia, once said of being a mayor: "There's no Democratic or Republican way to pick up garbage."

But, if Bloomberg gets a third term, I mostly just love the fact that it will be a huge FUCK YOU to Rudy Ghouliani who couldn't get the law overturned and thus himself a third term as "America's Mayor" - EVEN in the wake of September 11th.

Hey, guess what, you miserable little fuck? We just didn't want you. Now go crawl back into that coffin you sleep in and quit walking among the living.

Call Your Representatives

Call your congress-critter and tell them to vote against the bail-out.

Here's the number to the main switchboard. Call it and ask for your representative's office:
(202) 224-3121

If you don't know who your representative is, here's a webpage to help you find him/her:
https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml

Don't let Nancy Pelosi and the Wilting-Violets in the Democratic Caucus in Congress obediently scrape and bow to the "wise" old crooks in pinstripe suits (GOP-ers, to a man) who will frown and scowl and in patient "I have special knowledge that you must respect so don't fucking question me" tones tell them that this no-strings-attached $700 Billion bail-out is The. Only. Way. To save. Our economy.

I would like to note that the proposal conveniently has the following Wall-Street-Masters-of-the-Universe approved Fact Cat-protection clause:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Ahh, checks and balances. Give us your fucking money but don't ever question anything we say or do, peon. What's mine is mine and whats yours is mine, too. Welcome to AmeriKKKa. As thers writes today over at Eschaton:

"[R]ight now the choice is, Bush's Plan, or Something Else. Kill Bush's Plan now, worry about Something Else later."

Fuck 'em. Let 'em swing. Our petroleum-dependent economy is going to go down the tubes whether we actually enact this bailout or not, so why not just let it happen now? Sort of like ripping off the band-aid instead of pulling slowly.

And, just for spite, I reiterate my point from my previous post that we throw the entire lot of them in prison and make their families buy them out. We'll see how attached their families are to those yachts and private jets and multiple homes when they would have to give them up, and I mean give them all up - in toto - to get their respective patriarchs out of the clink. Besides, why do we have to bail these assholes out when they get to keep all their stuff?

Once again, I leave it to digby (full disclosure - I once was an avid follower of Ayn Rand, then I realized she was full of shit and a crappy writer, to boot. It was college. I was young and foolish and taking lots of drugs):

(SEC Chairman Chris) Cox is just a natural symptom of the illness of modern conservatism's Randian philosophy, which, at its core, really does hold that the Big Money Boyz should be allowed unfettered freedom to make money without restrictions or rules. And when they gamble on the wrong thing, they believe that it is the right thing for the rubes to bail them out. Their basic philosophy holds that the taxpayers are parasites who benefit when the John Galts of the world make money so they should shoulder the burden when they fail. Indeed, they believe the serfs should be grateful for what they got out of it

Know your place, serf.

Schadenfreude

Watch this video (via Wonkette):



Then read this news story:
GOP delegate's hotel tryst goes bad when he wakes up with $120,000 missing


Say it with me now: Schadenfreude.

Seeing Will Be Believing

So, I see that the cretinous bastards who run the Democratic Party in Washington have started to wake up to the fact that Joe LIE-berman is a Quisling P.O.S.. The best part is the word "may" : Democrats May Kick Out Joe Lieberman If He Addresses The Republican National Convention

Ahh, well, Mr. Reid - better late than never. If it happens at all. I will believe that you have a pair when you actually kick the SOB out of your caucaus and strip him of his committee assignments, which you should have done two years ago when the hard-working people on the ground for your Party in Connecticut did not see fit to return him to Washington. I guess they were just too stupid or naive or unsophisticated to understand that Joe-nertia deserved to be there, even if the mechanisms of democracy failed to do so in a real-world exercise. I guess we should have been more grateful to our ruling class for protecting the natural order of things.

Which brings us to the heart of the mattter when it comes to right-wing versus left-wing politics. Left-wing politics is always difficult and an awkward fit with the trappings of power precisely because The Left - what makes it "Left-wing" and not "Right-wing" or anything else - is the opposition to entrenched power. When left-wingers lose their way, they become "Limousine Liberals" or corrupt union bosses or, in our current political climate, the bloated, Renfield-esque capitulators of the current Democratic establishment in Washington.

Because right-wing politics is a natural fit with the trappings of power precisely because what makes right-wing "Right-Wing" is the impulse to protect and extend privilege and power. In a democracy, by itself a radical notion (the horror! the riff-raff having a say in how I spend my money? Never!), such a point of view is hard to market beyond its natural adherents, so they have to gussy it up in guns, flags, country music and - when necessary - racial politics in order to build large enough coalitions to win elections. Although, in all fairness, once they win (or act like they won) a sufficient number of elections, they can simply obliterate the legal mechanisms that impede their urge to gut that pesky democratic process and finally stop acting like the opinions of the masses actually matter.

This is the late-stage republic we find ourselves in now. When Rome was in a similar spot a few years back, some cat named Julius something-or-other rolled into town and clarified that whole "will-of-the-people" thing. Get ready for a similar naked power-grab in the wake of some as-of-yet unseen crisis. They used the last one (tall buildings + airplanes) to maneuver into place all the legal materiel needed to obliterate all those annoying limitations on power so that next time they will be able to completely sweep away this creaky, rotted ediface we like to call "American democracy."

And if you ever had any doubt about where the Democratic Party, the supposed "Party of the People," stands on this whole thing, that should have been clear in the wake of the 2006 realignment election. The Connecticut Democratic Party said to the national party in Washington "We don't really care anymore for the fellow who has represented us up to now, so we're going to try to send someone new" to which the national party said "OK, but we really like the guy you've been sending us up to now" and we saw a really clear break within the party over the status of Joe LIE-berman. Some senators came out publicly in support of the state party's choice to submit a different name for consideration, but most others came out in defense of Holy Joe's claim to the seat and, in the ensuing confusion with a lot of help from Rethuglican friends, he was able to rally and return to Washington - this time with a chip on his shoulder and not only with an axe to grind, but the will and unique position (in an evenly divided senate) to do it. And to do it good and hard.

Of course, Harry Reid cried poverty over and over again when the left-wing of his party - the base of power in his party BTW - cried foul. "We need the votes" he'd say, or "He votes with us 99% of the time." How's that workin' out, Harry? It seems to me that the passing of the new FISA legislation should put to rest any notion that the Democrats in Washington learned anything from the 2006 election. They are so locked into the Bi-Party mentality that they think a rejection of the opposing party is automatically a victory for their Party qua Party, and not for what their party represents as an opposition party - in this case the rule of law, free and fair elections, freedom from the burgeoning police state and rampant militarism - in other words, anti-fascism. Instead, the bloated capitulators in Washington took the 2006 landslide election as a validation of their claim to the reigns of power, this time helpfully enhanced and value-added by a power-mad GOP, with a special mention for the corpulent visage of a leering Darth Cheney. I'm pessimistic about the lessons they'll learn should Obama survive the march to the White House.

Because what I find most irksome about this news about the idea that some Democrats are upset about Pal Joey perhaps speaking at the GOP convention is that - once again - we who were right all along and were continually dismissed with any number of smirking tsk-tsk condescending pats on the head don't get credit for being right. We are instead hated for it. Surely, we should get some props for being right about George W. Bush way back in 1999 or the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. Every bad thing we said was going to happen did happen and yet, and yet...

So, here we sit, watching the Dems yet again tying themselves in knots over whether or not "Rape Gurney" Joe should be kicked to the curb when the GOP has never had to worry about such things because their internal party discipline precludes ever having to ask the question. He should have been kicked out long, long ago. Maybe this time, they actually do something.

Or maybe they'll just issue another even more sternly worded letter.

Phil Gramm Lives!

This worm has finally crawled out from the dank underbelly of the private sector rock for which he's always had a stiffy, even when he was getting every stage of his education and subsequent career paid for by the public. I've had the great pleasure of hating this S.O.B. for most of my adult life because he was my Senator in Washington from the time I became aware of such a thing as politics at around 14 until I left the great state of Texas in 1996.

Make no mistake, this man is as disingenuously sleazy as disingenuously sleazy gets, and all with a gooey smile and squinty Georgia drawl - for he was only the Senator from Texas because he had a job at Texas A&M when he decided to enter politics. His entire reputation and career as an economist and then a politician was essentially an audition for the corporate lobbyist job he's had since leaving the U.S. Senate in 2002, his creed a shrill, mythological fantasy variation on the tired old libertarian retread of deregulation and complete lack of government oversight as the silver bullet for whatever economic woes beset any civilization anywhere, throughout time.

Or something like that. Who really know with these people. Their "theories" are not intended to actually illuminate or explain anything; they only exist as a faux-expertise patina to cover whatever sleazy thing they originally wanted to do in the first place, which is more often than not reinforce existing inequities and wealth-generating power structures. Kinda like the way their revolving set of names for creationism are just shitty, dim-bulb attempts to prove a pre-determined set of beliefs.

I'll leave the Bill of Indictment to the late, great (and terribly missed) Molly Ivins:

Gramm, the great crusader against government spending, has spent his entire life on the government tit. He was born at a military hospital, raised on his father's Army pay, went to private school at Georgia Military Academy on military insurance after his father died, paid for his college tuition with same, got a National Defense Fellowship to graduate school, taught at a state-supported school, and made generous use of his Senate expense account

In other words, from the time he was born in 1942 until he retired from the U.S. Senate 60 years later, his entire existence - from birth until practically retirement age - was owed to public institutions, financing & monies. He's been really busy since slithering out of office, though. From Christy Hardin Smith at FireDogLake:

Phil Gramm has taken McCain's "Charlie Black Sweet Talk Expressway bus" to Lobbying Town all the way to the bank...literally.

Gramm only stopped lobbying for international banking giant UBS officially on April 18, 2008, well after McCain clinched the GOP nod -- but also well after Gramm had written and shaped the McCain campaign's banking policies in response to the subprime mortgage crisis...in which UBS is also embroiled, and for whom Gramm continues to be employed as a UBS vice chairman regarding investment banking. Yes, you read that correctly.

Who is UBS, exactly, that they have now restricted their international banking staff from traveling to the US during their pending SEC investigation? And why are they in legal trouble for allegedly running a tax-evasion arm out of their US branch? Josh has some background, including this link on McCain's speech on banking policy fully a month before Gramm quit lobbying for UBS. Funny how that speech calls for banking folks to decide how to handle things amongst themselves rather than tightening regulation -- wonder whose idea that was? Things that make you go "hmmmmm," indeed. Hilzoy has a good thumbnail sketch.

Why on earth would John McCain think this man was remotely appropriate to be his economic adviser? Because McCain knows nothing about economics. And just like his "pick a winner" foreign policy hodge podge, it's all about who might have a "reputation" among his pals who...quite coincidentally, I'm sure...also happen to be lobbyists for the very same industries would help to shape policy in a McCain Administration.

And Keith used the Good Mister Gramm to take this whack at the Senator from Arizona last night:



Rethugli-bots simply can't help themselves, the poor dears. Corrupt to the core.

Shifting Gears

As most of you know, I worry a great deal about all kinds of things, mostly the future (to which one can reply "what else is there to worry about - the past?" Yeah, well, tell my mother that). By which I mean the things I have been worrying about for a long time, for those of you who have been reading my blog(s) for a while - you already know what these things are: the climate is changing, the oil is running out and everything is about to change completely and forever.

Not to be overly dramatic about it.

And when I really start to worrying, as opposed to just a generalized anxiety, I worry that I haven't taken all the necessary steps to be really ready for what comes next. I have packed "Go Bags" for me and Mrs. Joe, which are useful if the shit hits the fan while we're at home together, but since most of our days are spent not working at home, it won't do either of us much good in most situations. Nevertheless, I have plans for the various scenarios should some immediate disaster like another 9/11 strike the city. I have fairly clear escape plans, or at least semi-developed ideas about where to go and what to do. Living through 9/11 in New York will make a person want to be better prepared for the next, potentially worse one.

If something more drawn-out should happen, the kind of thing for which we could have one or more days of advance warning - something like a Hurricane Katrina hitting the city, let's say - I'm still fairly well-prepared with the materials and supplies I have. I can't live my life as though any particular terrible thing is imminent, but neither can I pretend some large scale disaster is only the stuff of Hollywood movies and paranoids. Again, post-9/11.

But what about something really drawn out, large-scale, long-term and irreversible? What about multiple things? Things that go to undermining the very socio-economic structures I live by? You know, like, such as, Peak Oil and Climate Change? How can I prepare for epic calamities like those? What about money? How will I live? Will I have a place to actually live in? Will I be able to work? Have I taken enough steps to have a marketable skills-set in a post-petroleum economy? Will I be able to feed and defend myself and my wife in a possible world where those systems have broken down? Can I do all of these things and continue to pursue the life and career I enjoy now, without retreating to a cabin in the mountains and living like a paranoid hermit? If so, how?

Perhaps it is in our collective cultural memory that civilizations erode and collapse into anarchy: Imperial Rome collapsing into Dark Ages Europe is of course the reigning catalyst for this idea in our shared history. I think these historical patterns are important because we are again on the precipice of an utter failure of the very engine of civilization as the underlying technology we have chosen to build our entire Flat Friedman World is finite, with deep, powerful side-effects, the scope of which we are only just now beginning to grasp.

As everything begins to break down, the scale of the disaster now besetting us will make itself known in successive waves that, at the time, will each seem like the most horrifying and insurmountable challenge in the history of humankind. Until the next thing overtakes it. Right now, that thing is the housing bubble and concommitant mortgage crisis. But, on deck in the batting circle is the collapse of international credit and the implosion of currency exchange. All of these things have real-world consequences, as many, many people are beginning to learn.

After that, who knows? The end point, though, and each in their own way a driving force behind the other, smaller problems, are (say if with me now...) Peak Oil and Climate Change.

James Howard Kunstler has been banging this drum for years, but his larger point has always been that "suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."

Now, he doesn't intend to specifically demonize suburbanites living suburbanally in their own right as much as he wants to condemn the essentially wasteful and wholly unsustainable nature of our modern living arrangement, of which American suburbia is the largest, guiltiest and most tragic. In the decades following WW2, in keeping with American tradition, rural life was romanticized as pastoral and authentic but - apart from food production - a kind of luxury, while city life was viewed as gritty and inhuman but vital for economic prosperity. The post-WW2 consensus viewed suburbia as the best compromise between the two. Leave aside the class-based and racist implications that lay below those widely held assumptions for a moment and government and banking policy, while still the primary forces behind the suburban build-out, were only possible because for several decades almost everybody in the country, including anybody who had decision-making power about the allocation of resources in America, saw suburbia as the cure for all ills. Many of those "ills" were of course assumed to be racial in nature, mind you, and the post-WW2 suburban build-out has been part of the unexamined secret behind the Rethuglican rise to prominence since the 1950's.

Once we had warning shots fired across our economic bow during the OPEC oil shocks of the early '70s, though, instead of using these intervening years to develop alternative energy and, more importantly, change our land-use patterns and goods & services distribution systems, we chose to double-down and do more not less of exactly the wrong things. Complex cultural and distinctly non-economic factors drove this knuckle-headed collective choice, but the manufactured Myth of Saint Ronnie and the Cult of American Exceptionalism are major culprits.

So, now that the Democratic race is winding down (finally!), despite the mewling of the Hill-bot Brigades, my posting will be shifting a bit more towards my thought about what's next and how I and everyone I know can fit into this new world emerging around us.

Priorities

In a follow-up to my last post, wherein I ponder the stupidity (maybe "gullibility" is a more accurate word to use) of your average conservative, GOP, Reich-wing voter by way of Charlton Heston as NRA President, I once again have to admire the deftness of Glenn-zilla. In his post from Saturday, he rips apart the corporate media for always playing along with GOP narratives about personality-driven politics, never using their journalistic training to separate the wheat from the chaff and otherwise constantly on their knees, slobbering on the knob of Rethuglican power. He doesn't actually use those metaphors, but that's kinda his overall point.

For the Reich-wing, you see, an appearance of authority abetted by a pliant media is sufficient to merit its granting. Which is why actors who exude an aire of authority do so well in their firmament. It doesn't matter how phony their front may be, if they seem like they are regular dudes, then a sycophantic press corpse gleefully plays along. Fred Thompson - his entire adult life lived as either a Hollywood actor or Washington lobbyist (with a brief stint as Congressman, elected presumably on the comforting believability of his furrowed brow and prominent jowls) - as a regular 'Mer-kuhn from Tennessee?

Puh-leeze.

So, Glenn rips 'em a new one. I love this man, in a totally straight kind of way. Here's yet another reason why:

One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.

By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).

It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.

McCain is an asshole. That should be the personality-driven narrative that's out there, but the GOP base is always willing to forgive the serial philanderers in their high command because of Digby's Law (my name for her salient observations about the tribal mentality that dominates American, and particularly Rethugli-bot, politics). Also known as: IOKIYAAR.

A Turning Tide

The wheels of justice turn slowly, sometimes so slow as to seem like they don't move at all, but they do in fact turn.

Don Siegelman is a free man, again walking the street, breathing free air.

He isn't completely in the clear on the bribery charges, as his case still needs to be heard on appeal, but now at least he can appeal because the corrupt, Banana-Republi-thug judge Mark Everett Fuller (who, since the summer of 2006, has been holding-up the release into the public record of the transcript from his trial - which prevents him from even filing for appeal) finally had his decision overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

It was, naturally, a Karl Rove hit job and I think this might just be the one that brings down the Dark Sith Lord. But whether it does or not, America is just a little less of a banana republic that jails opposition party members on trumped-up charges than we were a couple of days ago.

Considering how bleak these last seven years have been for the rule of law and a just society, this is a welcome ray of sunshine. I'd like to think that this might be the beginning in a long string of chickens coming home to roost for the thugs, thieves and theocrats in the GOP. Whether a reckoning comes to pass or not, at least this man now has a reason to smile: