The oligarchs vs Iran, etc ; 3 Nov 2011

above:Bachmann: Iran Threatened U.S. with Nukes Uploaded by TheYoungTurks on Oct 31, 2011

"GOP Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann makes a transparently false charge that Iran has threatened the U.S. and Israel with nuclear weapons it denies possessing."

It's axiomatic in many quarters to say Michele Bachmann is just crazy. She may be, but she may also want a war with Iran on behalf of Israel, whether per her religious views regarding the end times or for some other reason. We seem to live in an age where both the democrats and republicans want war, where wanting war is "the new normal" even when it's also seen as bad manners to say that about somebody. But it's ok to say somebody's crazy, or to say "we have have a responsibility to protect." (I don't think I've heard anybody accuses Samantha Power or anybody else associated with Obama administration foreign policy of being crazy.)

It's not crazy so much as it's monstrous to hunger for wars and bloodshed, and bang the drum for them. Dismissing somebody as crazy sounds a bit like absolving them of the moral dimension of what they advocate, as if you're suggesting they probably don't know any better. Also, if you say Bachmann is calculating rather than crazy, this reflects on how monstrously calculating other, more sober-sounding persons may be.


below: Uploaded by Testarossa1982 on Jun 18, 2011




Lastly, this interview with Alan Simpson is from June 30th, when the debt ceiling faux debate was still going on. Unfortunately Reuters has not permitted embedding at this point, at least not of the YouTube version. I think this is interesting because, by turns, he plays scandalous truth-teller and shifts back to shilling for collapse. (It takes a lot of brass to shill for 1890s style government, as he does in the debt commission report, and simultaneously attack the GOP for being unduly influenced by Grover Norquist.)

Breaking Down: healthcare and other cultural artifacts

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Above: "Man Robs Bank for $1 To Get Health Care in Jail/"


Liz Goodwin, Yahoo: Suspected domestic abusers go free as Topeka city, county officials bicker over funds

A bitter argument over money in Topeka, Kan., means that city and county authorities have neglected to prosecute or charge people suspected of domestic battery since Sept. 8.
In other words, the local justice system has spent a month effectively sending the message that misdemeanor domestic assault will go unpunished--at least for now. The dispute started last month, when Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor announced that a 10 percent budget cut to his office in 2012 meant he would no longer be prosecuting any of the city's misdemeanors, effective immediately.

The Chronicle for Higher Education,August 11, 2010 "Salary for Interim Commissioner Raises Eyebrows in Louisiana":

Should Louisiana’s interim higher-education commissioner be making $25,000 a month—plus $1,500 a month for housing and $600 for a car?


Balloon-Juice, "This class war thing is more complicated than you'd think":

Archer, 52, abruptly quit her job on Aug. 19 as the No. 2 official at the powerful Department of Administration. She made $124,000 in that position. She was to start the following Monday as legislative liaison at the Department of Children and Families, but began taking paid medical leave that day.

She is making $99,449 in that job – $39,129 more than her predecessor. That 65% pay hike was possible because Walker’s fellow Republicans turned 39 civil service jobs into political positions earlier this year.

Daniel Politi, Slate, Sep. 15, 2011
Postal Service Could Get Slower:Plan calls for shutting down more than 250 mail processing facilities and eliminate 35,000 jobs.

CNN, "Financially-strapped cities cut jobs, services"

Christian Science Monitor, "A long, steep drop for Americans' standard of living"


New York Times, "Use of Private Contractors Don’t Save Government Money, Study Finds"

The government paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost federal employees to perform comparable services, according to the study.

via Gary Farber who writes, "The study found that in 33 of 35 occupations, the government actually paid billions of dollars more to hire contractors than it would have cost government employees to perform comparable services. On average, the study found that contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers. Remember: government is inefficient, and privatization is wonderful!"


Louisville, Courier-Journal, September 9, 2011: "Sherman Minton Bridge closed indefinitely due to structural cracks"
via Thom Hartmann,"America’s infrastructure now ranks 16th in the world"

The Sherman Minton Bridge is just one of several bridges in danger of collapsing –- As the American Society of Civil Engineers points out, 34% of all the bridges in Kentucky are considered “structurally deficient.” Of course – Kentucky is the home state of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – who opposed increased infrastructure spending in the 2009 stimulus bill – opposed it again when Republicans blocked a jobs bill in 2010 – and threw cold water last week on President Obama’s “American Jobs Act” that includes billions in transportation infrastructure products. According to a study by the Urban Land Institute – our nation’s infrastructure needs $2 trillion worth of repairs.

CNN, September 13, 2011: In one year, 2.6 million more poor

Amy Bingham, ABC News, September 13, 2011: "Tea Party Debate Audience Cheered Idea of Letting Uninsured Patients Die"

Carrie Gann, ABC News, Sept. 2, 2011:
Man Dies From Toothache, Couldn't Afford Meds

A 24-year-old Cincinnati father died from a tooth infection this week because he couldn't afford his medication...According to NBC affiliate WLWT, Kyle Willis' wisdom tooth started hurting two weeks ago. When dentists told him it needed to be pulled, he decided to forgo the procedure, because he was unemployed and had no health insurance.

I'm tempted to leave it there and let the reader make her own conclusions. But in 2014 when the so-called Affordable Healthcare Act fully kicks in, people like Kyle Willis and dollar bank robber James Varone still won't have universal healthcare, they'll have a universal obligation to purchase insurance, which isn't exactly the same thing. And if they don't they'll be fined. The plan, of course, is designed to be fully implemented after the 2012 election, and to include subsidies for poor folks.

Why was it designed this way? Was it a good-cop,bad-cop routine played out(and still playing out), not in an interrogation room on a television show, but on television screens nonetheless, before millions? Was it because the republicans are supposed to sweep in and gut funding for the Kyle Willises who need subsidies, so the democrats can't be blamed, and the GOP can tell their supporters they tried their damnedest to get rid of Obamacare altogether, but all they could do was defund it, because the courts wouldn't "let" them get rid of the individual mandate? And so the democrats who voted for the mandates could say, "let us back in power, see what happens when we're not there to protect you?"

What do you think?

The Ides of August, approximately

Nouriel Roubini, Slate, "Is Capitalism Doomed?"
Karl Marx was right that globalization, financial intermediation, and income redistribution could lead capitalism to self-destruct.
Posted Monday, Aug. 15, 2011, at 2:17 PM ET

There's something amusing about this story carrying a Goldman Sachs ad. Or maybe it's not the least bit funny.

IOZ, on Ron Paul(and Dennis Kucinich): "Ersatz intellectual diversity superimposed on the public facade of the ruling class is an affect overlying an underlying unanimity among the actually powerful."

Sibel Edmonds has a website,and links to a bunch of other links, here.

Dennis Perrin, "Nietzsche's Abyss"

Rob Payne announces his pick for the 2012 presidential contest.

Al Gore: So Close (2011 edition)

Keith Olbermann interviews his new boss, big Al Gore. I used to be really enthusiastic about Gore, and voted for him in 2000. I used to tell people that if he had been president in 2001-2005, that yes, he probably would have made war against the Taliban but not against Iraq, and we would have been out of Afghanistan by 2004, or even earlier. Did I know this? Obviously I didn't, anymore than the people who knew he would have fabricated evidence against Saddam and gone to war with him, just like the other Junior in the 2000 race eventually did. (That begs the question of whether even the Afghan invasion of late 2001 was justifiable, but it may have been next to impossible for a sitting president at that point, in our system, to avoid at least "a little" military action.)

For better or worse Al Gore will likely go down in history not primarily as the 45th vice-president of the United States, nor for the Nobel Prize, nor the lock-box and the sighing from the 2000 prez debates, or even for trying to suck his wife's face clean off in front of millions at the Dem convention in L.A. that summer. Instead he'll be primarily remembered for winning the popular vote and losing the White House in that excruciatingly close election, the funny business in Florida, Bush v. Gore, etc.

I did find myself wondering if his call for a 'nonviolent American Spring' in this interview was essentially a call for a Democratic party led co-opting of populist angst, designed to neuter it into irrelevance, but maybe that's being uncharitable or excessively suspicious. Otherwise, Gore comes pretty close here too, sounding good for the first six and a half minutes of this interview.


The Weekly World News folks also watched this, and discussed Olbermann's interview with Gore:

“We need to have an American spring, you know, the Arab spring. The non-violent part of it isn’t finished yet, but we need to have an American spring. A kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change where people from the grassroots get involved again. Not the, you know, not in the Tea Party style,’” Al Gore said on Current TV’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”

“There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party. I understand that. But that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch Brothers, and promoted on Fox News,” Gore said.

Gore said that he would happily lead the revolution but that he is “afraid of large crowds.”

OK, he doesn't really say that.



See also "Obama throws 'downgrade party' at White House"

Bruce Levine, Alternet,"8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance"

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism "Only 17% Say Government Has Consent of the Public"

Rich people need hugs too

Arthur Laffer on Fox, via Media Matters

Fox Hosts Art Laffer To Claim "You Gotta Cut Government Spending" To Get Out Of Recession.From the August 5 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom.

I imagine there actually are people who don't realize how absurd Laffer's "two person economy" model is and need it explained to them. Laffer is a dangerously irresponsible man.


Alex Pareene, Salon.com The baffling paranoia of rich guys against Obama:

The president who preserved a system rigged for the haves now faces their (confused) wrath.

Ken Langone* doesn't strike me as being the least bit confused, and I don't doubt that he knew that BHO meant to accommodate the right wing agenda of his ostensible opponents. But hey, Pareene has a paid writing gig and I don't, so what do I know. This article from earlier this week originally had a video from late July(i.e. last week), which CNBC has subsequently yanked. I think this is it, below:



*Actually I agree with Langone that BHO shouldn't call the super rich "fatcats." It sounds kind of silly, and suggests that the president thinks poor people are just resentful and stupid, as opposed to thinking they are really hurting and being concerned with fairness. This is awfully unseemly of him, almost a "tell." He really should call them his employers.

Confuse dem

part 2 is here; MSNBC used to offer embed codes for their online videos, as I recall, but this one didn't have one.


1."Why Obama is winning the debt war"
[MSNBC video link is here] If you want to watch all of the video continuously it's here.

July 12: "MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell explains how President Obama continues to outsmart, out-strategize and out-talk the Republicans, in the debt ceiling standoff."

2.Salon, "Why Mitch McConnell will win the day", Robert Reich


3.Scarecrow(at Firedoglake), "Why Is Larry O’Donnell Implying Obama Lied to the Country and the Tea-GOP?"

The clip of Lawrence O'Donnell has to be seen to be believed. You probably should watch it continuously via the MSNBC link. I'm reminded of the healthcare debate in late 2009 and early 2010, when I got the distinct impression that the administration was trying to confuse people about what exactly was covered by the Democrat's/Obama's healthcare bill and how he regarded the public option McGuffin, as numerous interim versions of the bill were reported on, many released as downloadable PDFs[pdf; pdf2] but even the one that was finally voted upon in March '10 was in fact supposed to get some more fiddling down the road.

Now of course both Obama and the GOP are trying to confuse people, and getting able help from people like O'Donnell. In national polls you often hear about how people have a low opinion of the news media in general, but my impression is that they trust reportage a lot more than a positive or negative response to a poll question may suggest. After all, even though a majority of people polled are against increasing the debt limit, most of these people didn't worry about it one bit prior to 2009, while the federal debt grew like a cancer under George W. Bush, and majorities of republicans, democrats and tv reporters said nothing.

At any rate, FDL's Scarecrow(above) is absolutely correct that bragging about how crafty and dishonest Obama is being in negotiating with the republicans is absurd, even risible. O'Donnell's spin is duplicitous on several levels, apart from the obvious one of pleasing corporate, as BDR might say. He speaks (we assume) to democrats, congratulating them on their presumed worldliness and canniness in being "in on the con," encouraging them to find gamesmanship and opacity laudable, in much the way the grown ups in the story of the Emperor's new clothes thought they were being reasonable and adult by playing along. So a concession is not a concession, and anyone who says otherwise is not cool. Of course even MSNBC has millions of viewers, and one imagines some of them are republican, or at least lean that way. So at another level he's doing his job by annoying those republican viewers with that same schtick; one man's craftiness is another man's flim-flammery. On a third level, perhaps, is contempt for both of them.

Many observers have suggested that it took raving anti-communist Nixon to go to China and so it follows that it takes Obama the purported Muslim-Socialist-Commie to cut(or gut) social security and medicare. It certainly looks like we're headed in that direction, and the dancing around is meant to make sure stupid republicans will blame Obama and stupid democrats will blame the GOP. What if they're both right?

Maybe if Obama does as he's told he'll get to run against wacky Michele Bachmann, and if he doesn't he'll get to run against Mitt I-got-your-healthcare-reform-right-here Romney.(And if he really misbehaves, Rick Perry!) Speaking of polls, many recent ones suggest that even republicans generally worry about preserving these programs. To be mystified by who wants this to happen requires a belief in the 'combat' between the two parties and that the guys on your side are looking out for you, no matter what they may actually say or do. So it helps if you are confused.


see also

Mike Whitney, "Debt Ceiling Kabuki"

Rob Payne, "Balloon payment"

Dennis Perrin, "Obvious Things"