NEON GODS

Fox News knows it's viewers are too stupid to notice

A brilliant smackdown of Sean Hannity by Jon Stewart (and funny too!):

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Does anyone REALLY believe that the wrong video clip they played was an accident?! Is this just further evidence that Fox News knows it's viewers are too stupid to notice?

We need to put people back to work

Paul Krugman asks a provocative question:

Consider, for a moment, a tale of two countries. Both have suffered a severe recession and lost jobs as a result — but not on the same scale. In Country A, employment has fallen more than 5 percent, and the unemployment rate has more than doubled. In Country B, employment has fallen only half a percent, and unemployment is only slightly higher than it was before the crisis.

Don’t you think Country A might have something to learn from Country B?

Indeed!

This story isn’t hypothetical. Country A is the United States, where stocks are up, G.D.P. is rising, but the terrible employment situation just keeps getting worse. Country B is Germany, which took a hit to its G.D.P. when world trade collapsed, but has been remarkably successful at avoiding mass job losses.

Actually the difference between the two countries is that Germany believes the government is in place to help it's people.  The United States believes it's the government's job to help corporations make more money.  High unemployment is great for corporations.  It gives corporations a large pool of desperate workers to choose from who are willing to work cheap.  There's an added benefit for our government: high unemployment results in a lot of young kids who can't find work and turn to the all-volunteer military for a paycheck and possibly learn a skill.

We should be looking to the past, when the government used to work for the people.  Krugman reminds us, "...we should note, for the record, that at their peak, the W.P.A. and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed millions of Americans, at relatively low cost to the budget."  And the work they did made our country better.  You can see still see the improvements they made to national parks like Shenandoah National Park.

This is what I would like to see: a new Civilian Conservation Corps that provides jobs and job training for millions of people who would be used to clean up our inner cities, our national parks, beautify and clean our rivers, build trails and shelters in our national forests, etc.  They would make it a point to hire inner city kids and get them out of the cities and into places they've never been.  Provide job training for those who show the desire and the aptitude.  Provide counseling and drug rehabilitation for those who need it and provide them all with free health care.

Imagine a program that beautifies our cities and national parks, employs the unemployed (saving jobless benefits), provides health care and job training, gets inner city kids and kids from poor rural areas out into places they've never been, show them that they can be important and productive members of society.

I grew up in an America that loved challenges, a country that believed we could solve any problem we faced with imagination and hard work.  When was the last time our country made you proud?  When was the last time the United States did something that impressed the people around the world.  When was the last time other countries looked at us and said, "Wow, look what they accomplished"  Today we import almost all our manufactured goods and export bad banking practices and housing bubbles.  Let's dare to be great again.

--Trakker

Catholic Church threatens to stop helping DC's poor unless they get their way

In a surprisingly bold and seemingly unbiblical move, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is threatening to discontinue its social support for nearly 70,000 people -- including a third of Washington's homeless -- because of its opposition to a proposed same-sex marriage bill.

They claim it's because if the bill passes they will be required to treat gay employees the same as strait employees.

Way to go Catholic Church!  Even though the Bible is far clearer about the evils of divorce than being gay, the Catholics are willing to jettison 70,000 poor people to show their displeasure at the DC government.

Tell me again why we exempt this church from taxes?

--Trakker

America's Number One Problem

Sobering facts:

With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada's, eight times greater than France's, and twelve times greater than Japan's. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors—Russia and Belarus...African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than that of whites...nearly 60 percent of all young black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five. And the incarceration rate for this group—black male high school dropouts—is nearly fifty times the national average...

For an entire cohort of young black men in America's inner cities, incarceration has become the more-likely-than-not norm, not the unthinkable exception. And in part because prisons today offer inmates little or nothing in the way of job training, education, or counseling regarding their return to society, ex-offenders' prospects for employment, housing, and marriage upon release drop precipitously from their already low levels before incarceration.

I can only imagine what the current recession is doing to the inner city communities, but I suspect it will only increase the number and percentage of people of color in our prisons.

I believe this is the number one problem in America, the lack of education, the crime rate, the resulting incarceration rates of inner city people, and our refusal to try to rehabilitate those who end up in prison.

David Cole reviews two new books that have some answers.

--Trakker

How the nutters took over the Republican Party

I'm still reading Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, the book about how the far right created a groundswell of massive support for a reluctant Barry Goldwater that resulted in Goldwater's selection as the Republican nominee for President in 1964. 

The book explains how the far right captured the Republican party back in the early 60s and hasn't let go since.

What we see in Perlstein's book is that the right wing nutters have always been with us.  Always.  At any given time 20-30% of our population is ripe for scary conspiracy theories, easily convinced our nation is in grave danger of attack or invasion or from subversives in our government.

Perlstein relates the kind of rumors that swept the nutters back then.  For example Sen. Tom Kuchel complained that at one point about 10% of his mail dealt with two rumors that were sweeping the nation: 1) Chinese commandos were training in Mexico for an invasion of the U.S. through San Diego, and 2) that 100,000 UN troops, including 16,000 "African Negro troops," who were cannibals, were secretly training under a Russian colonel for a UN martial-law takeover of the U.S.

The latter rumor gained credibility when it appeared in a constituent's newsletter from Rep. James Utt, who represented Orange County, California!  In other words, what we are experiencing today with the birthers, tenthers, and tea-baggers is nothing new. Back in the 60's there was the John Birch Society, which was bigger and just as loony as the tea-baggers.

I'm also seeing a lot of parallels between the Republican party of the early '60s and the Republican party of 2009.

In the late '50s Barry Goldwater emerged as a straight-talking, authentic, son-of-a-pioneer who was an outspoken anti-communist.  He also advocated getting the government off of everyone's back, letting capitalism and the free market solve our problems and make everyone prosperous.  He was just what the far-right was looking for to lead them out of the hated New Deal programs, unions, and wimpy politicians who were cowardly to use bombs on our enemies.  The right wing of the Republican party, energized by Ayn Rand's writings and the Birchers, set out to take over their moribund party of moderates.  They caught the party leadership off guard and took it over.  Then they began pushing their hero, Barry Goldwater, to run for President.

Goldwater knew he wasn't Presidential material, but as his popularity grew by leaps and bounds, the pressure for him to run became overwhelming.  He finally gave in, but he insisted that he run the campaign his way.  He was determined to run as an honest citizen who spoke his mind rather than a scripted politician.

That, of course, was a mistake. Goldwater spoke his mind and the voters began to see that Goldwater's ideas were actually a bit nutty - even dangerous, and he lost the election by a landslide.

I see the same thing happening today.  The far-right nutters already own the Republican party, and they are now searching for their savior, someone who will be just as nutty as President as they are.  Right now they are fixating on Sarah Palin, but unlike Goldwater, Palin is a true lightweight who will soon show the nutters that she really, really is too stupid even for them.  I give her a year before she, too, joins Joe the Plumber in the annals of nutter history.

Once Palin falters, who will they pick as their new savior?  The closest thing to Sarah Palin in looniness is Michele Bachmann.  Michele could turn out to be their standard bearer in 2012 because I suspect she's a lot smarter than she lets on.  She's certainly smarter than Palin (Bachmann has a masters degree in tax law from William and Mary).

If the nutters, now the Republican party's base, embrace Palin or someone like Bachmann for President in 2012, we will see one of the angriest, looniest Presidential elections ever, but they will probably lose big, just like Goldwater did in 1964.  The more energized the nutters get, the more voters they turn off.  The only way they could come close to winning is if Obama totally alienates his base (like he seems on his way to doing) and they (we) stay home or votes third party.

I highly recommend Before the Storm.  This is the background story of how the far right took over the Republican party back in the '60s and consciously, willingly, turned it into the white man's party.  It contains some great lessons for us in 2009.  One of the biggest lessons for us is that even though things are loony today, they were even loonier back in the '60s at the height of anti-communism and the fear of angry negroes.

--Trakker

Shame, self-loathing...and elation

Sometimes when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates I feel like I'm eavesdropping on a deeply private conversation that I have no right to be listening to, and yet his painful admissions of his feelings help me better understand what others experience.

A couple of days ago he wrote about how he used to feel riding the train back to his home in Brooklyn,

When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got.

I was there among them--the blacker and fatter--and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters...

The metaphor is, of course, deceptive--more about how it feels, than how it is. For one thing, because of where we live, some of the most afflicted areas of black America are five minutes away from major media. Unless someone kills a census worker, media generally avoids Clay County, Kentucky. ... And then there's the absurd illusion of WhiteLand--this mythical place where there are no problems, because white people don't actually have problems.

But intellectually understanding something doesn't change your religion. In every black person, there's a desire to, as a buddy once put it, "show these motherfuckers." I keep going back to Bill Cosby, not as a leader, but as a marker of how we feel. "My problem," he once told a crowd of black men, "is that I'm sick of losing to white people." When I heard him say that, I heard my mother and father. I heard my older brother. I heard the Babas from my old Rights of Passage program. I heard my professors at Howard. I heard one of my good friends--and his wife is white.

One of the most moving moments of my life occurred the night Barack Obama won the Presidency.  When all the news networks finally declared him the winner MSNBC's commentators went silent and the cameras cut to dozens of scenes around the country where crowds of mostly African Americans were seen overcome with disbelief and elation.

In my lifetime I've witnessed so many terrible things that have happened to African Americans, things that must have just ripped their hearts out: lynchings, the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham killing four little girls, the years of brutality in the south directed at non-violent black protesters, the day Martin Luther King was murdered, the Rodney King beating by the police...the list is endless.  Is it any wonder that after a lifetime of being forced to compete on an uneven playing field many developed a burning desire to someday "show those motherfuckers"?

Finally, on that November night, a black man was elected to arguably the most important position of power in the world.  In the World!  Finally, a black man showed them.  I was moved to tears that night watching African Americans collapse, cry, and celebrate.  After reading Ta-Nehisi's post I can appreciate their elation even better.

--Trakker

Democrats - The party of cowards

Whoa! Take a look at this graph of national party identification!  As the number of people who identify themselves as Republicans nosedives to 20% you would think the number who call themselves Democrats would soar, right?  We'll it did rise until the new Congress was seated and now they, too, are tanking.  But look at those independents!  The Dems: talk about fumbling the ball in the red zone!

Republicans - the party of space cadets

Democrats - the party of cowards

America - desperately waiting for adult leadership

--Trakker

It sounds like the average worker can kiss their jobs goodbye

I don't know where Tom Friedman and the people he pals with grew up or what kind of schools they attended but they obviously live on a different planet than I do.

He begins today's column with a talk he attended by Michele Rhee, the new "Chancellor" of the Washington, DC, school system (sorry, I just hate the title).  The DC school system consists mainly of inner city schools and it has been struggling for decades.

Friedman somehow makes the jump between our nation's failed education system (debatable) and the recession.

While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.

Also attending Rhee's talk was Todd Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor.  Before the talk Martin had this to say to Friedman:

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges.”

Oh, really?  Tell me more.  Friedman:

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive ...

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.” [emphasis mine] Yada, yada, yada...

This just pisses me off.  These people don't have a clue about the real job market, or real people. They really don't.

Assuming you went to a public school in a working class/middle calls town or neighborhood like I did you will recall that for every A student there was a student who struggled.  By 5th grade you could see some of them maxing out.  No matter how hard they tried they couldn't grasp concepts that the smarter kids picked up in an instant.   Nothing has changed since then.  We will always have kids who will be lucky to graduate from high school.  College is out of the question.  Even the "average" student can be expected to have a lot of trouble getting a four year degree.  Everyone maxes out at some point.

If you listen to the experts these days you get the impression that the answer to outsourcing and our jobless recovery is for the American worker to be more flexible, continue their education throughout most of their career so as they lose one job they can bounce to another.  Work all day, go to school in the evenings, constantly learn new skills, move where the jobs are when they get laid off.  If you snooze, you lose.  And don't expect the government to mollycoddle you while you try to learn a new skill.  Uh, uh, this is YOUR responsibility. 

WTF?!!  What kind of life is that?  Look, kids entering kindergarten today are facing 13 years of public schooling, then an additional four years in college, and possibly 2-3 years more for an advanced degree to get a good job by the time they enter the job market.  17-20 fuckin' years of school just to get a good job.  And then there's no guarantee of a decent job after all that!  Faced with all that boring, mind-numbing schooling ahead of them, is it any wonder kids today seem unmotivated? 

I grew up in a factory town.  Our town had a population of about 35,000 and probably had 80 or so factories, plus more in a neighboring city.  Many of the factory jobs were low-skill, perfect for those kids who struggled in school.  These low skilled jobs have disappeared overseas (along with a lot of skilled jobs!) and a lot of these workers are now unemployed or underemployed.  Most of these workers are not going to learn the skills described in Friedman's columns, they can't.  And they make up a good portion of the job market.

Read Friedman's column and then ask yourself, is this the future you want for America, a future of long hours, lots of pressure to be constantly 'developing new ideas and recombining existing technologies" and be expected to occasionally reinvent yourself, spending a lot of your evenings in night class? 

We need to rethink our education model.  Most jobs don't require a four-year degree.  We need to cut the years of schooling for many, and we need to tailor education to teach kids basic life skills and the basics needed in the job market.  Those who need or want more education, make it available, but don't bog kids down for 17 years of school before they can begin a career. 

We also need to reconsider our employment model.  We need to find a way to make the job market more stable, increase benefits and wages, and give our workforce more leisure time, not less - and yes, we can afford it (it will come at the expense of the very wealthy).  Sorry, but that's what best for the country!

We need to acknowledge that most people work to pay the bills, not because they want to work.  Most people want to put in their 40 hour week and enjoy their friends and family in their free time.  It may not always be possible, but we need to make it our goal.  We need to recognize this and build our national policies around it.  Our government must put the needs of the people above the desires of the corporations, and if it means free-market globalization, so be it.  Remember, "We the People..."?

--Trakker

The Republican base and Ronald Reagan

Here is how the Democracy Corps focus groups study (more fully described here) described the people in the hard core conservative Republican base focus group.

The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, ... These base Republican voters dislike Barack Obama to be sure – which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush – but these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country.  They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism.  While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

Let's look closer at what they believe.

...these voters possess a deeply engrained conservatism.  In our favorability exercise, they give the National Rifle Association a 74.3 mean rating on a 100-point scale, and pro-life, anti abortion groups a mean score of 61.8.  They have extremely low feelings toward gay marriage, rating it even lower than they rate the state of the economy, and almost all – 90 percent – oppose health care reform out of hand. These views are more than matched by their views of President Obama: only 12 percent approve of his performance, 75 percent do not like him and 91 percent say the country is off on the wrong track.

According to the study this group comprises about 1 in 5 voters.  While that isn't a large percentage of the total voters, these people have a lot of influence in the Republican party.  Yet, they are hardly enthusiastic about their party,

...these voters had virtually nothing positive to say about the Republican Party.  They see their own party as weak, old, and out of touch.  They feel it has lost sight of conservative values and conservative voters and is in desperate need of new leadership.  They identified a clear disconnect between ‘the people’ and ‘the politicians,’ which poses a growing threat to the party’s ability to challenge Democratic control in Washington.  While they continue to defend George W. Bush personally, his presidency is an embarrassment to them and represents the culmination of a creeping betrayal of conservative values that started with the election of his father more than 20 years ago.  The lionization of Ronald Reagan in these groups was as strong as we have seen for any political figure, as was the desperate desire for a new Reaganesque figure to lead them out of their current wilderness.  [emphasis mine]

Ah, now we're beginning to understand what's going on here.  They pine for the good ol' days of Ronald Reagan.  You've probably noticed that over the years the late President Reagan has become akin to a God to the hard-core right wingers.

When you deify someone they cease being a fallible human being. They become someone who has/had all the answers.  Reagan has become their mythical America's founding father.

I suspect in years to come we will more fully realize that Ronald Reagan and the movement he spawned did little to make us a better nation.

--Trakker

Fear Alert: Cultural nihilists are sabotaging America!!

This religious/cultural rant is probably the stupidest and most offensive I've seen posted on a supposedly respected news outlet (Washington Post/Newsweek) in the past few years.  This man (Bill Donohue) has clearly lost it!

Take a look at his first few sentences:

There are many ways cultural nihilists are busy trying to sabotage America these days: multiculturalism is used as a club to beat down Western civilization in the classroom; sexual libertines seek to upend the cultural order by attacking religion; artists use their artistic freedoms to mock Christianity; Hollywood relentlessly insults people of faith; activist left-wing legal groups try to scrub society free of the public expression of religion; ...

I bolded some words to emphasize Donohue's technique.  Christian fundamentalists can't win with logic so they must use bombastic tactics to frighten the ignorant.

Also check out the way he describes the people he is warning about.  He calls them nihilists.  Nihilism is defined as 1) the belief that nothing has any meaning or value, and 2) the idea that all social and political institutions should be destroyed.  Take your pick, but he's clearly over the top here.

I wish he would explain how is America in any way threatened with destruction if multiculturalism is taught in the classroom?  I suspect Donohue doesn't even know what multiculturalism is (or, more likely assumes his readers don't know).  I assume what he means is that school kids should ONLY be taught about white Christian European cultures and how they influenced America.  Evidently every other culture in the world is crap and should be ignored because they might pollute little kids minds.

I'm also confused how America is "sabotaged" by "sexual libertines" (if only!) attacking religion or artists mocking Christianity?  If Donohue believes all Americans are required to adhere to a religion and that mocking Christianity is illegal, he should come right out and say it, and quote the appropriate sections of the Constitution and/or laws to support it.

Lets face it.  Christian fundamentalists live in perpetual fear that sentient beings with IQs exceeding 90 will realize what they are selling is nothing more than a massive hoax and they will be laughed at.  If there is a real Jesus/God, and he is all powerful, as they try to convince us, why should they worry about atheists, communists, socialists, sexual libertines or whatnot?  Really, why?

I love the way Donohue ends his rant:

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they're too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Ha,ha.  Christians will win this fight, not because their God is supreme, but because they breed like rabbits.  Ya' gotta' love them religious nuts!  They never disappoint...

--Trakker