Syrian Second Amendment

Click image for full Mark Fiore/Mother Jones animation.

Grapes of workamping

The race to the bottom is over. The 1% won. American capitalism - the kind without a human face - looks more and more like the bastard spawn of neo-feudalism and indenture to the company store.

Workampers - some of them, anyhow - are the Okies of the Great Recession. Psst, only white people have RVs. Good demographic!

At least the workampers can go mobile. The locals are completely stuck between penury and abuse as temporary, disposable employees:

Industry consultants describe the temp-staffing business as "very, very busy." "On fire." Maximizing profits means making sure no employee has a slow day, means having only as many employees as are necessary to get the job done, the number of which can be determined and ordered from a huge pool of on-demand labor literally by the day. Often, temp workers have to call in before shifts to see if they'll get work. Sometimes,they're paid piece rate, according to the number of units they fill or unload or move. Always, they can be let go in an instant, and replaced just as quickly.

In another mind-numbing warehouse:

A few days later, I had breakfast with someone who coincidentally works with the CEOs of logistics companies. Telling him about the conditions and the sterility and the mind-numbing sadness of the warehouse made him almost too bummed to eat his oatmeal. "Somebody did studies and spreadsheets and crunched those numbers," he said, "and figured out that the cheapest way to get that job done is to treat people like that." Which is important, he explained, because "the profit margins on those contracts are razor thin." Of course. A lot of the Internet retailers' merchandise is nearly worthless—ice princess star-shaped ice cube trays, cheap sunglasses, anthropomorphic stuffed bacon toys—and is sold for nearly nothing, often with free or reduced-price shipping.

Susie told me it's pretty dispiriting to act as though her workers are as disposable as the products they're shipping. But that's just the way it is, she said. The logistics clients aren't interested in spending money on a better or more sustainable work culture. Nor do they need to. There are 100 people employed in the warehouse I visited, and Susie could fire every one of them today without costing her bosses a dime of lost profits. She has applications from hundreds of people ready to take the job.

And the logistics companies call their abusive work rules their culture.

All I can say is that Americans are heavily armed, and woe be to those who are inflicting this "culture" on us when we finally figure out that it's not the liberals who are to blame for every ill the wealthy are inflicting on us.

Law of unintended consequences

No reason the unintended consequences should always be negative:

if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

[Rick] Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

Treehuggers and bird-lovers - and public health advocates who cared that poor kids were being poisoned - saved the cities and hundreds of millions of IQ points by getting lead out of gasoline.

But all politics is theater

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The national press corpse (most of it, but obviously not Rachel) eats up theater. The only insight they need to report on it is their subjective impression of how good the production values are. Back in middle school, they already knew enough to write up their feelings about Moby-Dick, so they can surely tell us whether they thought Mitt Rmoney, the charity drive Ahab, performed well in a good show or not. No need to investigate or even question the moral values expressed by his cynical theater, they've got their superficial and banal impressions.

Sure, Rmoney caught a bad break that Hurricane Sandy gave President Barack Obama such an easy chance to look presidential. To be presidential. Never mind how badly past Republicans have muffed that easy chance. But we all know the Mitt is all about ... Mitt, and only his policies are Bushist. You think he's whining behind the scenes about his gosh darn bad luck? While New Jersey and New York recover bodies?

Hurricane Sandy happened. One candidate actually did something constructive. It helped, of course, that he was already President and had that big FEMA club in his hand. The challenger, already on record  as favoring the end of FEMA, tried to appear to help - and utterly failed.

Rmoney didn't keep the Potemkin Village of his theatrical presentation hidden. So the press Villagers will probably hit him hard. He unwittingly let the audience in on the seaminess of backstage.

I'm still waiting for the press to care that Rmoney and his kiss-up-piss-down friends are simply and irrefutably wrong, both morally and practically. They don't care what happens to those who suffer disasters, large or small - because they are safe in their gated worlds, looking down on all of us whose lives are so contingent that one natural disaster can leave us homeless.

If we were Galtian heroes, we'd have as many houses as we needed.

Didn't build that

Just came around for the harvesting...

(h/t Robert Reich)

Ayn Rand wouldn't have helped

This 2008 ESPN video has been coming 'round on the git-tar again:



I saw this on Facebook.  Actually, I saw a similar vidlet on something called Godvine, edited to hide its origin.  Google helped me find this version, which at least is clear about its origin.  I'd embed something from ESPN itself, but all it has is this print story.

I can see why Godvine would want to claim the story, even though none of the fine sportswomen mention God, at least on air.  It is a heartwarming story of virtue and altruism, just the sort of values that Jesus honored.  Those who aspire to godliness should want to set a social norm of generosity and helpfulness toward their fellow humans.

The radical capitalists don't live this way.  They don't put their character before their profits.  Wall Street defends its profits as deserved, even as it denies that deserving matters.  The very accrual of wealth is self-justifying to the moral midgets of the plutocratic right wing.

They'd look at the young women who helped their opponent to their own detriment as willing losers.  They'd scoff at their sacrifice, at altruism in any sense.  They'd deny even the possibility of altruism and assert that Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace must have derived value from their act, even though they lost the chance to reach the playoffs because of it.  Of course, the selfish, Rand-inspired capitalists would also sneer at anyone so naive as to put sportsmanship above profit.  Those softball players need a good capitalist re-education camp to learn the value of having no values other than mercenary ones.

This contrast between wealth and Christianity is a tension among conservatives.  They've tried to spackle the fault line with the prosperity gospel, a totally ahistorical and patently laughable attempt to claim the divine right of wealth.  If those people are going to heaven, it's hard to see the meaning of Jesus' ministry to the poor and powerless.

In Congress and state legislatures around America, wealth is attacking anyone who is weaker.  The social consensus that this bleak greed is ugly and wrong seems to have died in our age of selfishness and bullshit.  But there may come a reckoning for the wealthy class warriors, when at last people understand that Republicans will take food from the disabled so that their kleptocrat corporate cronies can sneak a hundred more Havana cigars across the Gulf of Mexico for their smoking parties.

Republican paradise

The world Republicans want to live in:

• makes birth control harder to get
• makes abortion impossible to get
• funds ultrasound machines to convince pregnant women - by lying if necessary - to birth their babies
• provides no medical care to those who can't afford it
• abandons all concern for the welfare of the fetus as soon as it becomes a baby

And this is how they expect to get to their version of seventy some-odd virgins.  Though for these fundies, heaven won't involve something so base and corrupting as sex...

Good to have allies

From Mother Jones:

Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Kevin Drum asks the key question, "How did we get here?"  It's a question near and dear to my heart, one I first wrote about here in 2007 under that exact title.

Drum and I agree that the Democrats' surrender of social class has led to rampant plutocracy and to government policy that encourages huge growth in income disparities. We even agree in part about why.  Drum says:

Parties need money. And parties need organizational muscle. The Republican Party gets the former from corporate sponsors and the latter from highly organized church-based groups. The Democratic Party, conversely, relied heavily on organized labor for both in the postwar era. So as unions increasingly withered beginning in the '70s, the Democratic Party turned to the only other source of money and influence available in large-enough quantities to replace big labor: the business community.

I say:

Democrats gave up their unity voluntarily as a result of the marketplace, not of ideas, but of campaign contributions. They passed post-Watergate reforms in reaction to the financial abuses of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), but they ran afoul of unintended consequences.

Democrats could no longer raise large chunks of money from wealthy ideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Obviously, we find different causes.  Drum emphasizes the decline of organized labor.  I point to an unintended consequence of post-Watergate reforms in campaign finance.

One reason I doubt the union decline as the main cause - though any big change in society is bound to have many causes - is that unions remain to this day influential in Democratic Party politics, at least in states where unions have influence at all.  Their members are less reliable (ask Martha Coakley), but their leadership is not, and it's true that the disaffection of membership began during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, exactly the right timing to help explain America's political degeneration.  So I'd have to concede that the union decline does figure in the decline of America as a liberal and forward-looking country.

Another cause I hadn't thought enough about is the retirement of the World War II generation.  Men and women who had been 30 years old at the end of the war were leaving the work force in 1980, just in time for the Reagan retrenchment.  It didn't hurt that he, as one of them, could co-opt them with his neo-1920s economic ideology and his sunny disposition.

Reagan said that government was the problem.  But he smiled.  And his age cohort, who had seen muscular government succeed at many things, could stop thinking about complicated problems and let go of the responsibilities that they had borne so well.

In any case, it's good to have Drum working this beat - strength in numbers and all.  Of course, that has been the promise of unions, a promise now forgotten along with the history of dire worker exploitation by the mercenary corporations of a century ago.

Serbs and Croats

Hard as it may be to believe, the South still harbors people who believe the Civil War ended with the wrong victor. These pro-treason neo-Confederates blame the Union for its unprovoked attack on their peaceful secession (cough, Ft. Sumter, cough). They blame a tariff that didn't pass until after they seceded.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans don't blame their forefathers for holding other humans in brutal bondage. Their ancestors were fighting for liberty! Well, liberty for the landed white male gentry, anyhow...

Defense of slavery is still - publicly - a bridge too far even for these historical revisionists. So they deny that it was an important cause of the war. The overwhelming historical record that proves otherwise? Their heads are too far up their asses to see that.

Consider the source

Even a hard right-winger thinks the teabaggers are crazy and bigoted and around the bend:

Instead, he remarks, his party turned toward demagoguery. Inglis lists the examples: falsely claiming Obama's health care overhaul included "death panels," raising questions about Obama's birthplace, calling the president a socialist, and maintaining that the Community Reinvestment Act was a major factor of the financial meltdown. "CRA," Inglis says, "has been around for decades. How could it suddenly create this problem? You see how that has other things worked into it?" Racism? "Yes," Inglis says.

(h/t metulj on KnoxViews)

Look no further for fascism

It's pretty clear that the local authorities in Louisiana are in bed with BP. The federal government should be there enforcing the U.S. Constitution. At gun point, if it's necessary to arrest some of the LEOs for civil rights violations.

Major Malcolm Wolfe of the sheriff's office [of Terrebonne Parish] says the deputy's pulling someone over in his official vehicle while working for a private company is standard and acceptable practice, because Wheelan was acting suspicious and could have been a terrorist.

Update (7/5): I can understand why the local authorities could be bought and paid for many times over by BP, but I don't understand how the Obama administration can find any reason whatsoever to be seen working fist in glove with BP.

Stock in trade

Wingnuts - and even ordinary conservatives - will believe whatever Karl Rove tells them to extend the lies and the obvious bullshit that led us into Iraq. Wingnuts want to say that they were honorably motivated. They weren't. Ordinary conservatives want to salve the consciences (which wingnuts lack) about the imperial rush to a war of choice. (Aside: Are there any ordinary conservatives left?)

The truth is the Bushists wanted to invade Iraq. Duhbya was no doubt tired of hearing how his father had left Saddam Hussein in power. Darth Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to project American power into a permanent client outpost at the crossroads of the Middle East, in short to implement the neocon PNAC plan.

Republicans lie. Karl Rove lies for a living - and quite a handsome living at that. They do it to get what they want. Because all you have to do to Americans and especially Washington Democrats is wave a bloody shirt, they succeeded. That shame should be on all of us. Instead, the wingnuts revel in it.