Robber barons

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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.

Old media won't tell you this

(h/t MoveOn)

Didn't build that

Just came around for the harvesting...

(h/t Robert Reich)

Counting on overwhelming us with propaganda

The Republicans can't win without lying. They know they have to lie early and often to make their points stick with the advertising-addled late deciders.

I'm sure we're all eager for the tsunami of bullshit that's coming our way in the next few months.

What Republicans want

Disaster for America...

Owing our soul to the Bain Company store

Mitt Rmoney is exactly wrong for a democratic America, and nominating him was an act of supreme hubris. Why won't Democrats make the Republicans pay?  Robert Reich explains:

Romney is the only casino capitalist who is running for president, at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing.

[W]hy don’t Democrats connect these dots? ... Part of the answer, surely, is that elected Democrats are still almost as beholden to the wealthy for campaign funds as the Republicans, and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Wall Street can give most of its largesse to Romney this year and still have enough left over to tame many influential Democrats (look at the outcry from some of them when the White House took on Bain Capital). But I suspect a deeper reason for their reticence is that if they connect the dots and reveal Romney for what he is—the epitome of what’s fundamentally wrong with our economy—they’ll be admitting how serious our economic problems really are. They would have to acknowledge that the economic catastrophe that continues to cause us so much suffering is, at its root, a product of the gross inequality of income, wealth and political power in America’s new Gilded Age, as well as the perverse incentives of casino capitalism. 

I've been working this theme for a while:

Democrats gave up their [class] 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 wealthyideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Go and listen to Reich, as well.

The log in conservatives' eye

Sleep of reason

Robert Reich has it right:

Why is Obama not using the bully pulpit? Perhaps he no longer trusts that Americans will hear him. Whatever the reason—that he’s embroiled in the tactical maneuvers that pass for policy-making, or intent on preserving political capital for the next skirmish, or cynical about how the media will relay or distort his message—he doesn’t try. ...

[H]e allows himself to be trapped by situations (the debt-ceiling imbroglio most recently) within which he tries to offer reasonable responses, rather than be the leader who shapes the circumstances from the start. He cannot mobilize Americans around the truth, in other words, because he is continuously adapting to the prevailing view. That’s not what Americans thought they were getting when they elected Obama president.

Politics is always disappointing, always filled with compromise. But it's not always like this. Barack Obama and Harry Reid wasted 2009. They should have killed the filibuster, told Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to go fuck themselves, and passed a truly Democratic program - $1.5 trillion in stimulus with a much higher proportion of public works and infrastructure spending, a much more progressive income tax, an end to hedge fund managers only paying 15% on their income, inheritance taxes, major banking reform (motivated by a drumbeat of prosecutions, perp walks, and prison for the Wall St. abusers), health reform that at least included a public option and started right away, faster withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and more.

We need more Democrats who'll stand up to Republicans and their teabagger mainstream. Extreme conservatism is not sweeping the country. It swept the 2010 mid-term election because American voters lashed out stupidly in the wrong direction - or stayed home while the wingnuts voted their favorite  ignoramuses into office.

If you're going to be a one-term President - a fate that I think awaits Obama in 2012 - you should at least govern on behalf of the people who elected you.

What the wealthy call socialism, I call a healthy middle class

Update: More from Robert Reich:

The President should advance ideas that work, and go to battle for them.

Supply-side economics doesn’t work. It’s been tried for thirty years, to no avail. And now, when our continuing economic crisis is so palpably being driven by inadequate demand, it’s more bogus than ever.

The last thing we need is for the President to go over to the supply side.

Please sir, I'd like some more

The residue of thirty years of trickle down economics:

The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

...

In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

Wealthy elites pushed this, first via their wholly own subsidiary, the Republican Party. They found a way, paradoxically and utterly without conscience, to make their desire to escape fair taxation appear populist to today's teabag types.

Then Democrats, by and large, meekly and weakly acquiesced - the buffet they could now get into was so sumptuous. I used to think that the pressure of post-Nixon campaign finance reform drove Democrats into the eager and mercenary arms of Goldman Sachs and friends, and I still think that had some effect. But the full story is more complicated, as it usually is.

Liberals triumphed over labor and conservative Democrats in 1972, and the party focused more on race and sex than on class. Actually, we focused on the poor, too, just not on the middle class, where we had traditionally been strong defenders of a fair share for wage-earners (even when that bled into racism in the South and ethnic discrimination in the North).

We liberals brought better education into the fore of the Democratic Party, but we also brought less staunch willingness to call bullshit on the elite consensus about economics, which was the wolf in sheep's clothing of the neo-classical synthesis. I almost bought into it myself as an undergrad. Almost. Then I saw how convenient it was for the elites to believe that the invisible hand of the market had magically selected them (to be born well!), and I'm always skeptical of the use of so-called knowledge to reinforce entrenched power, especially if that knowledge comes with a willingness to ignore glaring contrary facts.

Reform without all the mess

All the messy reform, that is.

If there's no public option, the option Roy Blunt (R-Status Quo) calls "a non-starter," there's no sense wasting time on a health care bill. Once again, the Republicans are the party of no.

Note to CNN: Blunt is not "heading up health care efforts in the House." He's a Republican in the house which has no filibuster. He doesn't have a leadership role that matters.

Update (6/13): Robert Reich hits this topic in Salon.