Meaning of Cool

There's an entire page at Wikipedia on the meaning of "cool."  I think it misses something essential about it.

When I first became aware of it in the 1950s, cool seemed to emanate from the jazz world, then became applied to a certain Marlon Brando type: hip, with it, fashionable in a not necessarily fashionable way.  There were many ways to be cool, but sunglasses seemed to always come into it.

Lots of stuff was cool in the 50s, but cool cooled off in the 60s, to be replaced by "groovy," "fab," "fantastic" (pronounced "fun-tastic" in the British way) and so on. "Oh, wow!" was not cool but it replaced cool as a typical reaction among the frequently stoned.

But by the 80s cool was back, and it's been omnipresent for awhile now, having driven out nearly all competitors, at least over the long run.  By doing so it has acquired so many meanings to be almost meaningless except as an expression of approval.

But beneath and behind it all, it does mean something.  I'm willing to accept that jazz saxman Lester Young brought the word into multivarious slang use in the 1940s.  And that it might have African roots makes perfect sense, for it probably did originate among African Americans.

"Cool" would seem to refer to temperature, as opposed to hot.  That works for jazz, and perhaps in the McLuhan formulation for media.  But the meaning is not precisely about temperature in an important way.

Keeping your cool, being cool, is about not sweating.  That comes closer to what cool is actually about.  It's about not sweating.  And that doesn't necessarily have a direct relationship to the ambient temperature.

Keeping cool is most specifically about grace under pressure.  But still, there's a potent meaning beneath that one.  For there are people who can afford to keep cool.  That don't have to sweat it.

So who sweats?  People who do manual labor.  So who doesn't sweat?  People who don't have to do manual labor--which at the other extreme especially means rich people.  Since they are rich, they don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or being on time for their jobs, or whether they can keep their jobs or take care of their families.  They are free of the necessary activities and anxieties of the less than rich.

In communities where sweaty labor is the standard, a cool guy may be somebody who has found some other way to make his money--which may be why gangsters and musicians were the first to be cool.  They didn't have to sweat it--they were in that sense like the rich.

The rich are always cool.  People who are "cool" look and act like they are rich. That's basically the meaning of cool.

It's all there in the 20th century handbook of rich and poor in America, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

"...Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor."

Defining the Darkness.6

"Gutting Obamacare might be the least controversial part of Tom Price’s health care agenda.

By tapping the tea party Republican as his top health care official, President-elect Donald Trump sends a strong signal he may look beyond repealing and replacing Obamacare to try to scale back Medicare and Medicaid, popular entitlements that cover roughly 130 million people, many of whom are sick, poor and vulnerable. And that’s a turnabout from Trump’s campaign pledge — still on his campaign website — that he would leave Medicare untouched.

“They will … not just roll back five or 10 years of progress — but 50.” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a consumer advocacy group that supports Obamacare."

Politico
11/29/2016

A Republican American Tragedy

Update 1/28: Further evidence of GOP government cynicism: the state gov provided bottled water for state employees in Flint beginning at least a year ago.

The tragedy of Flint illustrates the major features of the current Republican destruction of the American political process.

First, the demi-fascist takeover of cities by the Michigan state government, who appoint an "emergency manager."  Nearly all of the white representatives of the Republican politico-corporate complex rule over minority majority cities,  industrial ruins made more ruinous by racism.

Then the refusal to believe any reality that runs counter to rabid right ideology.  Then the incompetence bred by contempt for government, resulting in political appointees or corporate stooges.  Then the deflection of responsibility to others while the high priced ass-covering goes droning on for years.

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker has the basic story. To save some money, the Flint manager stopped getting water from Lake Huron that had been clean and safe for years, and tapped into the highly polluted local river in Flint.  Not even copious chlorine could sanitize it, and either from gross incompetence, contempt for the non-white non-rich of Flint (Davidson's emphasis) or another attempt to save money--likely some combination of all three--they failed to add an anti-corrosion agent to the water.  It was flowing through lead pipes, and the lead began to corrode and crumble into the water.  The citizens of Flint--including the most vulnerable, growing children--were being poisoned.

And the state government headed by new GOPer darling Rick Snyder insisted it wasn't happening, the water was fine, just a bunch of lazy whiners in Flint, as per GOPer mythology--sorry, GOPer Gospel.

 Meanwhile their supposed environmental people were doing a heckava job trying to support their governor's contention with bad or downright fraudulent testing.  Because polluted lead-infested water is a liberal hoax, like global warming.  Just a lamestream media fantasy.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Flint were getting hit with exorbitant bills to pay for the water that was poisoning their children and possibly killing them.

The regional branch of the federal EPA was not blameless either, and it took citizen agitation and the independent research of a whistle-blowing professor who had previously exposed danger in the DC water system during the GW Bush administration. But eventually even a GOPer darling governor had to face the poisonous reality.  Though some heads rolled, the state investigations illustrate another facet of corrupt GOPer governance: investigation of state actions under GOPer control by GOPer state officials, in this case directed by an attorney general who both defends and investigates the state government he hopes to lead (pronounced "leed") by running for governor in the next election.

Meanwhile, starve-the-government conservative Gov. Snyder is complaining that the federal government isn't giving him enough money to pay for all the damage done as a consequence of his style of non-governance.   Flint is reconnected to the Lake Huron water now, but the pipes may carry lead poison until they are replaced.  Which in Flint may mean never.  It hasn't gotten any less black or poor, after all.

Reality has consequences, and this will for years, not only feeding layers of lawyers and investigators for years, but the illnesses and conditions and stunted growth and disabilities that well may accrue.  Not to mention that it's all going to turn out to be much more expensive, further hobbling the economic future of Flint.  (And let's not forget the folks in  the auto companies and their industrial satellites that polluted those waters and the pols who refused to deal with that reality.)

Yet the GOP is so invested in its increasingly insular and detached from reality gospel that the likelihood that they learn anything from this approaches zero.

It's an American tragedy, different from the Greek.  In classical tragedy, the leader's hubris brings him down.  In American tragedy, the people pay for the leader's hubris, with their lives.  The leader may have to learn to survive on speaking fees and corporate board handouts.

Dueling Billionaires and other matters

Apart from wars, torture, corrupt politicians and hugely bad weather, what else is new?

Thanks to the unjust blindness of our Supreme Court that somehow can't tell the difference between dollars and words and therefore condone the massive influx of money to dominate political debate and jockey for the agenda: a couple of new billionaires are vying to get into the act.

One is at least on the right side of reality.  From the NYTimes:  "A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers."

The donor is Tom Steyer but before you get too impressed, he just provided $11 million to elect the dubious Democrat Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia.  Still, he's organizing other billionaires to join the fight, as a counterweight to the notorious Koch brothers.  If it sounds like something out of the Wild West, well...gunfighting is speech too, pardner.

Meanwhile, a new wild bunch of Republican billionaires are entering the political fray, though perhaps the interesting thing is they seem to be trying to save the party from the Tea Party, and once again, the notorious Koch brothers.

In other climate crisis news, that is apart from the usual bad news (yes, the Arctic is melting, etc.) there's the interesting situation in Nebraska where a judge has countered the high-handedness we've become used to from Republican governors when it comes to sucking up to their fossil fuel billionaires, and denied permission for the Keystone Pipeline to run roughshod through the state, "condemning" farm land in favor of pipeland.  He ordered the pipes people out of the state.

Some interesting reading:

Slate finds the research that says what many of us have figured out: Internet trolls are sick and evil.  Nothing to say however about the ones who are paid to be sick and evil.

A concise history of newspapers, and why they are still the best medium to explain the daily world, though they may have lost track of that.

A journalist crashes a secret society of the 1% and they are as disgusting as we figured.  So far it seems this is a real story, though not far from an Andy Borowitz column.  Meanwhile, Jonathan Chiat demolishes another of the psychotic 1% arguments, and this one involves Iron Man.

On the other side of the ledger, the Wonkblog reveals "how Obama secretly became the anti-poverty president."

Everyone agrees that Congress isn't going to raise the minimum wage, though President Obama has raised it for federal contracts, and some individual businesses are raising theirs.  So take comfort in the fact that there are no more good arguments against raising it.

And finally, in the new Baffler, David Graeber chronicles the long history of science's most perplexing mystery: why is there fun?

Follow the Money

President Obama spoke to a labor union audience in Toledo on Monday.  He noted how at the GOPer convention, speakers demonized union workers, and especially the unionized government workers, and even more especially, teachers.  But their opposition to unions is not about economics, he said, it's about politics.

More specifically it's about the economics of politics.  Rachel Maddow again made the case that GOPers try to destroy unions and drive down union membership because only the big labor unions can even compete with corporations and the megarich in providing financing to political campaigns.  If GOPers can destroy unions, they destroy the Democratic party.

The numbers drive the policies, but they extend beyond opposing unions.  They help explain GOP virulence against government workers, because with the decline in private sector unions, the public sector is a major source of unionized workers.  GOP governors and legislators have driven the decline in state workers that continues to drag down the employment numbers.  While private sector employment grows, it is offset every month by lost public sector jobs.

There are other ramifications that drive other policies.  Unions (far more than entrepreneurial business) have provided support for newcomers who start low in the labor market to work their way into the middle class.  Unions were crucial to the generations of immigrants who came to America in the first half of the 20th century--like the ones extolled by GOPer convention speakers.  They were Polish, Italian, Irish, etc.  They were the ones who sacrificed, who bled, in the battle to unionize major industries, and eventually they were the ones who benefited--along with their descendants now in suburbia.

GOPers continue to oppose unions even in those older industries (opposition that President Eisenhower said in the 1950s was "stupid") and even rolling back hard-won union rights and programs. 

But those industries have declined, and unions have declined for jobs now held by those former ethnics--now simply identified and self-identified as white people.  Unions have again become crucial to those comparatively fewer workers who start at the bottom, who now come from different countries, and are classified racially as African American, Latino and Asian.

There's another component to this.  While many unions championed civil rights, and equal hiring rights, it has been the public sector that has provided jobs without prejudice based on race, gender or partner preference.  That's partly because of Civil Service and other means that make qualifications strictly based on exam results or other measures of merit.  But it also because those public sector unions are the most diversified, with a higher proportion of women and racial and other minorities. 

So in attacking immigrants (meaning principally Latinos), attacking women's rights and harking back to a time when women were necessarily more dependent, and even attacking public education itself, the GOP is trying to deny the Democrats the means to sustain itself as a party, financially and otherwise, while appeasing its incredibly shrinking base.

Longterm it's a losing strategy, unless the GOP can lock up the process now, with unlimited money and official voter suppression.  In the now, it is cruel, biased, cynical and ultimately harmful not only to the people under attack, but to the country as a whole, and the country's future. 

In pursuing these policies, the GOP is helping to drive U.S. education, health care, income mobility, etc. down further and further in the ranks of the industrialized nations.  The U.S. is losing competitive ground because of this, and because the GOP privileges its fossils and their fossil fuel industries over the industries of the future that other countries are very busy developing, and creating a perhaps insurmountable lead.  By going so far as to deny the science of the climate crisis, GOPers are wounding the world's future--which they may be surprised to learn necessarily includes the U.S.--and specifically destroying this country's unique ability to lead, or even to participate.

All so some billionaires can hug their money tighter, pile it higher, and provide themselves with fancier graves.            

Race and Class

I am a white person, a white male, an old white male.  What constitutes racism in a person's psyche is complicated and in some ways unknowable.  I do believe that we all carry some unconscious racial prejudices that we absorb culturally, and that we as white people in a traditionally white dominated society possess beneath the surface. That includes white people who marched on Washington with Martin Luther King (as I did) 49 years ago today.  That commitment didn't automatically eradicate all racial prejudice or bias. It takes a different perspective brought to our attention to reveal these into our consciousness.  That in part was what "consciousness-raising" was about, not only in terms of gender but also in terms of race and class.

Racist behavior however can be determined more easily, though it too can be complicated.  Racist policy is easier to determine objectively: results and consequences count, not intention.  That's why under certain sections of the Voting Rights Act, it is the effect of laws and policies on racial minorities, not the intentions of the lawmakers and rule makers, that is the determining factor.

The current attempts by the Romney campaign to appeal to racial stereotypes in their lying ads about welfare, among other overt and covert tactics, is racist by definition, for it is designed to exploit conscious and unconscious racism in white voters; moreover it is doing so by attempting to link racist implications with the intentions of a black President. 

Unconscious racism, by the way, can be really unconscious.  It is very often supported by an apparently rational, allegedly fact-based allegation or theory about what's really happening in the real world.  And suggestions or allegations of unconscious racism typically are met with outraged denial.  That's why some political observers suggest that part of the intent of the current Romney strategy is to get "liberals" to charge white working class voters with racism, which will motivate them to repudiate it by voting against "liberals," and President Obama.

Class on the other hand is working against the multimillionaire Romney, with his multiple homes and dancing horse, Swiss bank account and Cayman Island tax shelters.  It's a problem not only of image and unconscious bias but of fairness.  All the taxes that rich businessman Romney avoids are paid by the rest of us and our descendants. 

The class divide is immense, and voters are only starting to learn how immense.  For example, Think Progress visualized a fact about the wealth of GOPer moneyman Sheldon Adelson, who recently pledged half a million bucks to a congressional campaign.  With a fortune estimated at $25 billion, Adelson could give half a million to each and every GOPer running for Congress-for the next 128 years.

The Romney-Ryan program is transparently a huge power grab for the very wealthy, at the expense of everyone else, first and foremost the poor and the sick.  Unless you are very wealthy, being sick for very long still leads to being poor, and with Ryan hacks to Medicaid, to being poor and without medical treatment.

The only way to get this program enacted, the only way to get elected for the GOPer ticket, is to get a high proportion of the white vote.  The estimate being bandied about today was 61%.  Combine that with a fact that even I found startling.  I've been calling the GOP the White People's Party for awhile, because that's the effect of their policies and their pronouncements, and the majority of their membership.  I figured it would be as high as 75% of the party.  But I was wrong.  According to Pew, the proportion of GOPers who are white is 89%.  In 2012 we have one of two major political parties that is composed of almost 90% white people.

The GOPer combination of race and class was exposed in a heated response to GOP chair Reince Priebus by MSNBC's Chris Matthews.  By my lights, Matthews can be way off base at times, but this time he's not only nailed it but did so with electrifying eloquence:

“I have to call you on this, Mr. Chairman,” Matthews said in an appearance with Priebus on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” as he responded to Republicans’ criticism that Obama is running a very negative campaign. “But they’ve both negative. That cheap shot about ‘I don’t have a problem with my birth certificate’ was awful. It is an embarrassment to your party to play that card.”

“You can play your games and giggle about it but the fact is your side playing that card. When you start talking about work requirements, you know what game you’re playing and everybody knows what game you’re playing. It’s a race card and yeah, if your name’s Romney, yeah you were well born, you went to prep school, yeah, brag about it. This guy has an African name and he’s got to live with it. Look who’s gone further in their life. Who was born on third base? Making fun of the guy’s birth certificate issue when it was never a real issue except for the right wing.”

Matthews exposed the sense of class privilege that lurks behind the coded racism of the Romney campaign.  When Romney and Ryan say they didn't need government help to succeed (which by the way is a lie to begin with) it may sound good to lower middle class people for whom applying for welfare would mean a devastating loss of self-status, but only if they forget that Romney and Ryan came from wealthy families, and could buy their way into the best schools and the networks of class success. 

The Obamas freely admit that their success depended not only on their own hard work and determination, not only on their parents' dedication and sacrifice, but on help from government and other institutions in the form of school scholarships and loans, etc.  They celebrate this as an American thing, and see it as a key to expanding the middle class.  They want it for others.  They want it for all others.  Without that kind of help, lower middle class white kids like me never would have gone to college.  I don't think that's changed.  We're still all in this together.  And that the definition of "all" has expanded is really to the greater good of us all, and the future.
        

Re-Running the Nightmare

The polls are going to be pretty useless for the next month.  The next poll that will say something about the state of the presidential race will be in September, a week after the Democratic convention.  Although of course we will be watching the size of the expected bumps after each convention.

The fact that it's August also leads me to not be so concerned with the "enthusiasm" numbers--which purport to measure how many people of each party say they are engaged in the election.  People who have pretty much made up their mind are unlikely to express a lot of interest in the campaign.  Plus people who don't focus until the fall.

But there are some other indications that do trouble me, especially in relation to GOPer voter suppression laws and their likely effect of preventing people who want to vote from doing so, or at least making it harder.

One is a poll finding I saw sweep by on TV--I don't know how credible it is, but it said that of the people who said they do NOT plan to vote, nearly 50% would vote for Obama, and 20% for Romney.

The other is this Boston Globe story which shows that new Democratic registration in swing states is way behind the 2008 pace, despite vigorous efforts by the Obama campaign, and that Republicans and Independents are registering in greater numbers.  The Obama campaign points out that partly because of those huge gains in 2008, there are fewer unregistered Dems and their overall numbers are good, a point that the Globe story concedes to some extent.  But it is troubling nonetheless.

The nightmare I am starting to relive is 2000.  I remember how a lot of voters, including progressives, entirely spoiled by the Clinton years, felt it wasn't all that important who won the presidency, Al Gore or George W. Bush.  It was ok to make a statement for Nader.  It was ok to not bother to follow the campaign, and especially to not bother to vote. 

We all know how that turned out, and believe me, it turned out only a little worse than I believed it would during that summer and fall leading up to the campaign.  Maybe the emotional tide, fed by extraordinary events and creative outpouring, isn't there this year to propel the Obama campaign.  But there should be one motivating emotion, and that's fear. 

The rights and protections that could dissipate and disappear are staggering--there's been nothing like this threat in my lifetime.  A Romney Ryan presidency would be a greater disaster than eight years of Bush, and on top of those, will weaken this country's ability to respond to future dangers and opportunities to a truly scary degree.

This is a big, diverse country with lots of crosscurrents.  But sometimes, as in 2000, a mood takes over and its like watching the last act of a tragedy.  I don't like that feeling.

There's another motivation to consider as well: that this election more than any in my lifetime, the very act of voting is a powerful statement.  It is a powerful statement not only on behalf of candidates, but on behalf of the right to vote itself.  It is the only weapon we all have equally to defend our rights and our lives, and to promote what we believe is essential for the future.  We are always voting for imperfect people in a pretty corrupt system.  But we can help limit the damage and improve the chances for positive change.  We do this one by one, vote by vote.  But if enough of us do so, we get the better outcome.

To not exercise that right and that power is--this year more than ever--to invite losing that right and that power.  To not do everything in your power to vote this year is to cede the future to oligarchs and fascists, without a fight, and quite possibly, weakening or taking away this potent weapon from future generations.

What few policies and positions the Romney Ryan ticket are taking--those that are not outright lies--are so extreme and destructive that some analysts predict a landslide against them.  Women, Latinos, African Americans, seniors, students, the poor, the middle class--virtually everybody but a small number of rich white men and deranged members of the Rabid Right would pay an enormous price if the policies they advocate were put in place, even partially.   Both men are singularly unprepared to be president and vice-president by any standard of any election in generations.  Their domestic policies are oppressive and destructive, their foreign and military policies are all dangerous bluster and aggressive ignorance.  Yet such is the nature of politics in 2012 that complacency by Democratic voters could hand them the reigns of power.

So this is my nightmare that I am now reliving.  I really don't want this nightmare to be rerunning in 2012.

Name That Majority

Rachel Maddow spotted and spotlit this paragraph in a Washington Post profile of two Rabid Right pols whose claim to fame is helping to create Rabid Right tyranny by scaring people about illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico: Kris Kobach and Michael Hethmon.  The graph quotes Hethmon:

Immigration is “on track to change the demographic makeup of the entire country. You know, what they call ‘minority-majority,’ ” said Hethmon, who is general counsel at the Washington-based Immigration Reform Law Institute. “How many countries have gone through a transition like that — peacefully, carefully? It’s theoretically possible, but we don’t have any examples.”

So if you were wondering why illegal immigration is such a big deal to these folks, apart from the usual cynical lying GOPer politics, you (as usual) won't find it in the facts.  Immigration from Mexico for instance is severely down from its peak, and because of demographics (fewer young Mexican men in the current and future generations) is unlikely to ever increase much. Border enforcement and other federal enforcement of illegal immigration is stronger. And (according to the new Pew study) at least as many Mexican families are leaving the U.S. to return to Mexico as are coming from Mexico to the U.S.  But the real "issue" is a certain political fear: a perceived threat to certain whites who are afraid of losing the "white" majority.

The economic impacts, good and bad, are highly debatable. So let's parse the racial issues.  Part of the impact of immigrants in a given town or city or region is cultural, if they are from unfamiliar places.  That's real, and it is also not new. Before the relatively recent waves of immigrants from southeast Asia and now from Mexico, there were the huge waves of poor people from Ireland, eastern Europe and Italy.

 Countries in Europe experiencing waves of immigration now, even greater in some respect than the U.S., are coping with the often difficult changes, especially when immigrants become the face of all the other change.  All this can inspire a panic turned into a principle of racial and national purity, which has its own ideologies or "pragmatic" fears (for Hethmon wants to sound pragmatic), along with lots of ugly history.  In its most obviously warped expression, it's behind the massacres that killed 77 people in Norway, most of them teenagers, by a man (now on trial) upset by the racial tolerance represented by broadcast of Roots and a popular children's song based on a Pete Seeger ditty about multiculturalism (which some 40,000 people sang to the murderer in Oslo on Thursday.)

But it's more than a racial rainbow that scares Hethmon, it's the end of the white majority, and therefore of white privilege and supremacy.  He is afraid of a "minority majority" in the U.S. caused by immigration.  First of all, he doesn't need to be afraid of new immigration--even without it, the minority majority is in the demographic cards.  The 2010 Census made it clear that we'll achieve this by the middle of this century.  There are already fewer white infants than non-whites.

To get a little personal, those of us of a certain age are watching the world we knew slip away, and it does cause anxiety.  We understand a world dominated by English-speaking white people, English/American institutions and culture.  Even those of us who welcome the wisdoms and liveliness of other cultures into the common culture, are nervous about being overwhelmed by intrusions, and by what we cannot understand.  But let's face it--that applies as least as much to the world of a thousand aps and computer viruses as it does to an influx of other languages and behaviors from other countries.    

But that's very minor stuff compared to the fears of people like Hethmon. What really scares Hethmon? I don't think it's what he says (societal stability, more or less), at least not directly.  What threatens Hethmon and GOPers is finally out in the open--it is the loss of their political control.  That's why this virulent anti-immigration scare stuff is of a piece with voter suppression and other efforts to maintain their control, to keep minorities out of democracy, and (in Michigan for instance) democracy out of minority communities.  That they are likely Democratic voters is of course the proximate reason but probably not the entire one.  White supremacy--their supremacy--is the motive, and he all but announces it.

  Hethmon refers to the lack of any precedent of a peaceful, careful transition.  Well, "careful" is about control, and we don't control who has children, at least not yet, although we can carefully manage any sort of transition--that's what governments are supposed to do, by matching support and solution  to need, with housing, community support, employment policies as well as law enforcement.  But peaceful?  No such transition is possible without violence?  There is no precedent for this?

In a way he's correct.  There was violence and people died--mostly black people--in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.  On the other hand, you could hardly call African Americans "immigrants." There was also violence involved in the 20th century union movement, mostly by police and agents of the 1%.   For the union movement was largely representing prior waves of immigrants, who were the workers in American industries--in the textile mills, the mines, the steel mills. 

But these were white immigrants, weren't they?  Not always by the definitions of the times.  Even in the 1920s, Italians--with dark skin, hair and eyes (like those in the top photo, or to the right)--were considered black.  Polish and other eastern Europeans may have been pale, but they were--in an expression that survived in Pennsylvania well into the second half of the 20th century--Not Quite White.  For Hitler, these folks weren't "white" or Aryan at all--they were racially inferior and planned for eradication.  The extermination of the Jews was to be just the first act, partly to test the equipment.

If you go by early 20th century definitions, the U.S. is already a minority majority country and has been for at least half a century--not entirely without trouble, but successfully.  Of course, many of the participants don't choose to see it that way.  Some of the most rabid oppressors of new minorities have been and are from these nationalities, previously scorned as Not Quite White.  This entire concept of "race" is fraught.  There's no more scientific justification for it.  It's all about other things now.  And one of those things is power-and-wealth.

But Hethmon and the white supremacist police state that the GOPers support is also congruent with their anti-Obama racism.  This is yet another test of the strength of the American constitutional system and the American culture in creating common ground as a civil culture, as a self-governing society.  In the end, all the issues about economic fairness, equal opportunity, tax equity, equality before the law, rights of women and members of all other groups--they all come down to this: the basis for self-government.  Because without these, we're seeing the future in Michigan (where state appointed dictators negate elected officials) and in the laws passed by GOPer legislatures and signed by GOPer governors that dictate to doctors how to treat their patients, that take away rights of individuals to govern their own bodies and lives, that substitute the rule of the few--including the wealthy 1%--for self-government.  That's the minority we really need to be worried about.

Rich Richney and His Class War

How rich is he?  Double the combined fortunes of the last eight Presidents.  But it's not just money.  He's rich in his soul.  And not in a good way.  In the eye of a needle way.  Tough to get into heaven.  Richney can't even get to Earth.

Rich Richney, the likely GOPer candidate for Prez, thinks rich.  This means that he lives in a world where it is accepted, in fact expected, that he would structure a $100 million trust fund for his sons so exactly zero taxes would be paid on it, in defiance of the U.S. gift and inheritance taxes that lesser mortals (including mere millionaires) must pay.

Rich Richney has the eyes and heart of extreme wealth.  He managed to mangle his post-Florida message  about being for the middle class with the immortal statement, "I'm not concerned about the very poor."  It could be called a kind of Freudian slip, except that he repeated it.  Twice.

But the GOPer class war for which Richney is the poster boy goes beyond Richney's announced tax reforms, which would mainly benefit him and his insulatedly superrich ilk.  For example, another Wednesday story that seemed to be about the culture war, or the war against women: the major foundation (run by a GOPer, the senior vp of which is a Rabid Right pol) that cut off funds to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening.  Of course it is Rabid Right politics and culture war and war against women, but it is also and perhaps more basically class war.  Because rich women will still get their breast cancer screenings.  They don't need Planned Parenthood. The women who won't get breast cancer screenings are poor women who depend on Planned Parenthood--but who don't concern Rich Richney.  Class war is a subtext elsewhere as well.

Not that all this is new.  We've been here before.  Only now much, much worse, and getting worse than that.

Superpacs reporting their funding sources showed many million dollar donations to Richney's superpacs, especially from the Wall Street class.  They helped Richney crush the otherwise execrable but merely sort of rich Casino Newt with three or four times the few millions Newt got from his sole Casino daddy (who is himself so rich, somebody figured out, that the $10 million he threw Newt's way works out to be a proportion of his income that for someone making the U.S. average would amount to $45.)  Brute money as brute force.  Welcome to Obscenely Rich Guys United.

The class war of the Richney class, which plays the poor GOPer Tevangelical base like a fiddle (a base fiddle?), adds geometrically greater warping to the already skewed values of our decadent "democracy."  The rich may be different from you and me.  But the Richney rich are different from you and me and the Vulcans and Klingons. 

How all this plays out is described in this classic commentary by Lawrence O'Donnell, which uses an interlocking tale involving American Airlines, pensions, the federal government, and Bain Capital to expose the values universe we're trying to navigate.            

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

War for the Future

Solyndra: it sounds like the name of a new supermodel, or perhaps a new drug you see commercials for on TV that spend half their time telling you about the strokes, liver failure and suicidal depressions you might get if you take it.  But Solyndra is a company that makes solar panels, that has gone bankrupt despite a half million from the federal government, support that began in the Bush administration but was touted by the Obama White House in their green jobs initiatives.  And so it's the toast of Fox News, and has led to congressional hearings and apparent perp walks for executives who invoked the fifth amendment.

Joe Nocera in the New York Times calls it a phony scandal.  He asserts that despite the bad images, neither of the executives has done "anything remotely illegal."  Nor had the company.  Their business failure, he asserts, has everything to do with the drop in prices of solar panels (which they built), largely because China is in this business in a big way.  With not enough big customers and no new investors, the business failed:

"Harrison and Stover are on the hot seat. Anything they say in their defense — even an off-hand remark — can and will be used against them. Their lawyers would be fools if they didn’t insist that their clients take the Fifth Amendment.
Do the Republicans know this? Of course. Do they care? Of course not. For an hour and a half on Friday morning, they peppered the two men with questions about this “taxpayer ripoff,” as Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, described it, knowing full well that Harrison and Stover would invoke their constitutional right to remain silent. Joe McCarthy would have been proud. The purpose of the hearing — indeed, the point of manufacturing a Solyndra investigation in the first place — is to embarrass the president."

It's all about anti-Obama politics, and it's all economically self-destructive:  "Over all, the American solar industry is a big success story; it now employs more people than either steel or coal, and it’s a net exporter.  But solar panel manufacturing — a potential source of middle-class jobs, and an important reason the White House was so high on Solyndra, which made its panels in Fremont, Calif. — is another story. Not so long ago, China made 6 percent of the world’s solar panels. Now it makes 54 percent, and leads the world in solar panel manufacturing. Needless to say, the U.S. share of the market has shrunk. The only way America can manufacture competitive solar panels is to come up with innovative technologies that the Chinese can’t replicate. Like, for instance, Solyndra’s."

So did the Obama administration do something wrong in backing this company?  Nocera says no:
" But if we could just stop playing gotcha for a second, we might realize that federal loan programs — especially loans for innovative energy technologies — virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take. Indeed, risk-taking is what these programs are all about. Sometimes, the risks pay off. Other times, they don’t. It’s not a taxpayer ripoff if you don’t bat 1.000; on the contrary, a zero failure rate likely means that the program is too risk-averse." 

He asks whether the risk was worth taking in the case of Solyndra, and he concludes that it was, because of the industry's potential, economically for America, and ecologically for the planet's future.

GOPer zealots don't seem to care about America winning its future, if there's a chance Obama might get some of the credit.  They want to cut green jobs support.  But as Nocera points out:  the real winner isn’t the American taxpayer or even the House Republicans. It’s the Chinese solar industry."

Meanwhile, besides providing a complete timeline and description of the Solyandra situation,  Climate Progress highlights conclusions of a Brookings Report that the rest of the media is busy getting wrong, concerning the larger impact of green jobs.  For example: there are currently 2.7 million green jobs in the U.S. and the number is growing.  It is a growing sector of the American economy that cuts across all industries and occupations, and encompasses jobs requiring different skills--they aren't all college degree jobs.  And while particular segments that have green jobs have been hurt by the Great Recession,  the overall Green Economy grew during it. 

Which I guess is another reason GOPers hate it so much.  They're only for the "Job Creators" in fossil fuel industries, like the Koch Brothers---whose net worth went up by 40% in the past year to a combined $50 billion (more than the GNP of a number of entire countries, as Rachel Maddow pointed out),  while their companies have shed tens of thousands of American jobs.  With "job creators" like them, this country's economy is doomed.  Unless you count the highly paid p.r. firms and lobbyists they finance, and all their political influence peddling to make sure they make more billions for the rest of their brief lives, regardless of the consequences for the American middle class of now, and the future--no, let's say it right--The Future, because their financing of Climate Crisis disinformation is potentially that consequential.  The Future, by the way, that those solar panels may help save.

It's all part of the GOP class war.  And it's also a war for the future.

Last Week: A Warrior for the Middle Class

Standing next to a bridge badly in need of repair that spans the states represented by the House and Senate GOPer leaders, President Obama on Thursday said this: "I`m a warrior for the middle class. I`m happy to fight for the middle class. I`m happy to fight for working people."

It's a change in tone, of strategy, of tactics.  It is at last a bold rejoinder to the charge that apparently has baffled Dems for years, that they (and not the GOPers who actually are fighting and--so far-- winning it) are engaged in class warfare.  But I've been arguing that, if you were paying attention, it's not that big a change, and that there's understandable reason for tactical changes that have do to with governing, not electoral politics.

You've read this reasoning here before, but it was stated earlier this week in this way:

Today`s "New York Times" quotes White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer saying, "It is fair to say we`ve entered a new phase. The popular narrative is that we sought compromise in a quixotic quest for independent votes. We sought out compromise because a failure to get funding of the government last spring and then an extension of the debt ceiling would have been very bad for the economy and for the country. We were in a position of legislative compromise by necessity. That phase is over.

This of course doesn't stop commentators of any persuasion, some of whom may legitimately feel that there's another story, but all of whom make their considerable livings promoting themselves and their views.  It's amazing how many progressive commentators are taking credit for President Obama's recent policies and speeches.  In substance however, there's nothing new--everything he is advocating now he has advocated before.  His strategies and tactical objectives have been questioned all along, and are questioned by some even now.  But there were good reasons for those choices, even if they turned out to not always yield optimal results. Of course, it is always possible to argue that if he had pursued a different strategy using different tactics, he would have been more successful.  There's no way to prove that but there's also no way to prove it isn't true--and there in a nutshell you have the secret of successful punditry.

Time will tell more about the relative success of Obama's strategies and his accomplishments.  Much of the health care law hasn't kicked in yet.  It's very difficult to make an obvious case that had it not been for his stimulus package, things would be much worse--but those who know those numbers are quite sure it is so.  The stimulus benefited state and local governments above all, but mostly by keeping them from collapsing, from firing a lot of police, teachers, etc., but they didn't have to, so while the status quo was a victory, it's not an obvious one.

Even the deal that the White House got under the duress of the debt ceiling hostage crisis may turn out to have turned the tide of GOPer power.  Last week the GOPer House tried to force cuts in a green jobs program--for hybrid cars--to balance FEMA funding for emergencies, as part of the overall federal government appropriation.  When they couldn't get any Democrats to support it, it was defeated because the more Rabid Right members also voted against it--because it didn't cut enough.  Then they passed another such bill, which won't pass the Senate intact.  All the while claiming they wouldn't force a government shutdown--a very marked change in tone.  It could be because such a shutdown would violate that earlier agreement and set all kinds of things in motion.

House GOPers crow about President Obama's declining favorables, but theirs are in the tank--less than half of the President's.  They're on the defensive, despite the media's fixation on the President's numbers.

As for 2012, Cowboy Rick has had two universally panned debate performances in a row, while the debates have exposed the true nature of the Rabid Right, with audience cheers for the high number of executions in Texas and the death of someone because he didn't have health care, and for booing a soldier serving in Iraq because he admitted he is gay.

At the moment the same punditry that was anointing Cowboy Rick as the certain nominee is claiming that he is done.  But the next round of polls will tell that tale.  If Cowboy Rick hasn't slipped substantially, they may well be stuck with him.

Here It Is

President Obama this morning:

"It comes down to this: We have to prioritize. Both parties agree that we need to reduce the deficit by the same amount -- by $4 trillion. So what choices are we going to make to reach that goal? Either we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share in taxes, or we’re going to have to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare. We can’t afford to do both.

Either we gut education and medical research, or we’ve got to reform the tax code so that the most profitable corporations have to give up tax loopholes that other companies don’t get. We can’t afford to do both.

This is not class warfare. It’s math. The money is going to have to come from someplace. And if we’re not willing to ask those who've done extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit and we are trying to reach that same target of $4 trillion, then the logic, the math says everybody else has to do a whole lot more: We’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the poor. We’ve got to scale back on the investments that have always helped our economy grow. We’ve got to settle for second-rate roads and second-rate bridges and second-rate airports, and schools that are crumbling.

That’s unacceptable to me. That’s unacceptable to the American people. And it will not happen on my watch. I will not support -- I will not support -- any plan that puts all the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans. And I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share. We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable."

Ezra Klein comments:

The White House's strategy here isn't to appear so reasonable that Republicans can't help but cut a deal. They feel they tried that during the debt-ceiling debate, and it failed. The White House's strategy here is to produce a popular plan that strikes directly at Republican vulnerabilities on taxes and Medicare. If that scares the GOP and makes them more interested in coming to an agreement in the supercommittee process, then great. If not, it gives the White House a message to base its reelection campaign off of."

And here's Andrew Sullivan's take, with the numbers made easy.

Economy

from the photonovel, Ruins of Detroit

Later today President Obama gives his speech before Congress outlining his proposals to spur job growth.  The Democrats at least are likely to keep pushing the jobs issue to the forefront, though how successfully remains to be seen.  Despite persistent high unemployment and underemployment, there wasn't a lot of prominent and consistent attention towards the jobs issue until now, as several commentators have noted.

In a way this inattention was surreal, but telling.  Apart from the attention focused on health care costs--a huge drag on the economy and the finances of small businesses and families--and apart from the distractions fomented by GOPer politicians, the seeming invisibility of unemployment pain was a reflection of the current corporate economy.

With financial corporations bailed out by huge government loans, the world economy avoided a catastrophic implosion in 2008 and 2009.  Banks and then major corporations based in the U.S. recovered quickly.  They have been rolling in cash for well over a year.  Apart from a very slowly recovering housing market (due to part to banks thwarting efforts to settle foreclosures),  the economy has been slowed by a lack of corporate investment in the U.S.



India

 That investment has gone overseas, where production is, and increasingly, where consumers are.  American corporations are prospering because they have new markets in the rest of the world, as something like a middle class grows in places like India and China.  U.S. corporations don't have to hire Americans because they can hire workers elsewhere who work cheaper, and they are closer to growing markets.  U.S. corporations don't have to worry about impoverishing a U.S. middle class, because they no longer depend on Americans to buy their products and services.  For these corporations, the U.S. supplies infrastructure, some skilled and professional labor not so readily available elsewhere (at least temporarily), and increasingly, the U.S. serves as a tax haven.  If corporations could just get rid of regulations and environmental restraints, they could complete the process of turning the U.S. into their ideal, a Third World country on a hill.

That's the U.S. economy in the fall of 2011.  It is unsustainable and it's temporary--perhaps very temporary.  Everyone knows this, or at least suspects it is.  Fear of the future may not be a conscious component of the denial that has become the increasingly aggressive posture of U.S. corporations, especially in fossil fuels.  But it is itself the fuel.


China


The resources of planet Earth cannot support a world of 7 billion people with the lifestyles of middle class Americans or Europeans.  We would need several more planets for that.  That's just the math.  If peak oil hasn't been reached already, it will be soon enough.  The global Climate Crisis is already wreaking havoc on food costs and supply, and in drought areas, even on human water supply.  Huge populations remain available for the kind of low-wage labor and virtual (if not actual) slavery that capitalism apparently demands. But wages for skilled labor will go up, and quickly approach U.S. standards.  So costs will go up for the currently deliriously wealthy global corporations.

In the short term, the U.S. economy still has a lot of residual strength.  Some of it may even spark an upturn next year.  Buried in the dismal employment numbers last month were continuing growth in health care jobs--a sign that the affordable care act is not depressing employment, and may be spurring it, as its major provisions unfold.  There are other positives that may pay off.

But that residual strength can also mask a situation that may well be worse than it might appear.  America is still awash in cheap stuff.  People don't look like people looked in the Great Depression.  They are better clothed, they have TVs etc.  Food is still plentiful, even if what's cheaply available is bloating people to a grotesque degree and creating long-term health problems.  The first visible sign of trouble now is housing, and that's likely the first to become very obvious.  We've somehow learned to live with a degree of homelessness that was unthinkable between the Depression and the 1980s.  But it could get more obviously worse.

All that Americans have to hang their hopes on at the moment is their vote, and GOPers are aggressively trying to take their right to vote away from them.  It's hard to see how an election can be really decisive, since 2008 turned out not to be.  But it was always going to take more than one election.  Then there's some hope in the demographics, which is what's driving a lot of current politics: it's the last of the white supremacists, now driving the GOP.  The economy itself may spring a few surprises, but when corporations seem so blindered that they don't care about the catastrophic future they are creating--along with the equally cynical fostering of present pain--they can't be counted on to do anything but evil.             

Here's Your Tea Party--How Do You Like It Now?



from Squids with Lasers


The Tea Party Republican victories in the states have led to this, as accounted by the Rachel Maddow Show, foremost among those paying attention to this ongoing portion of the systematic destruction of the middle class, the dismantling of the Founder's commonwealth and the final solution of corporate greed creating state-sponsored cruelty:

 In Florida, Republican Governor Rick Scott proposing a $1.5 billion giveaway to businesses to be paid for with $3.3 billion cuts in education.

In Arizona, Republican Governor Jan Brewer signing $538 million in giveaways to businesses over the next decade while proposing almost the same amount of savings from throwing poor people off the state‘s Medicaid rolls.

In Michigan, Republican Governor Rick Snyder proposing nearly $2 billion in giveaways to business to be paid for by raising taxes on poor people and old people.

In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker signing $140 million worth of giveaways to businesses just before signing a state budget to raise taxes on poor people to the tune of $49 million."

Meanwhile in Washington, GOPers are so corrupt in the pockets of their corporate masters that House GOPers chose a particular regulation to oppose--one aimed at preventing tobacco companies from marketing cigarettes to children and making cigarettes more addictive--after accepting nearly $300,000 in tobacco company cash.

Meanwhile, the Rabid Right's favorite talk radio hosts not only take the talking points devised by Rabid Right think tanks and publications--they're on the take for major wads of their cash.

But that's nothing compared to what DC GOPers are currently insisting they will do: they will bring down the world economy because Democrats want to close tax loopholes favoring corporate jets. 

They refuse to consider raising revenue by ending subsidies to their fossil fuel masters. They won't consider requiring the cringingly wealthy to pay taxes a little closer to the proportion non-wealthy actually pay.

And above all, they will not let it be known that the major cause of the budget deficit now is the Bushwars, and the major cause of the budget deficit for the next decade is the Bush tax cut for the numbingly wealthy.  If Congress cuts not a dime of spending, but the Bush tax cuts expire, the budget will be balanced by 2016.   

All of this enriches the already monstrously rich--and not the tricorner hat-wearing saps with their tragic misunderstanding of American political history.  Is it possible that they will wake up to see whose tea party this really is?

This is the "philosophy" that holds the world hostage, threatening to at the very least deeply wound the American economy, and the federal government's ability to respond to the critical needs of the American people, by refusing to raise the debt ceiling so the government can make good on all Bush's debts-- all for partisan political gain.  The conventional wisdom has it that the Wall Street masters will assert their control in time to prevent catastrophe but I'm not so sure--their greed is so great, and they may be willing to take some losses (with their money, not a problem) for the long-term risk of complete power.

Graphic Proof

The top chart shows the share of U.S. income received by workers falling off a cliff for the past several years, while corporate profits (in the second graph) are zooming up again.  The charts--and the sad story-- are from TPM.  President Obama met with a private sector task force on creating jobs that provided suggestions, but confirmed just how difficult the task is.  Still, it seems time to point out what's happening and how GOPers in Congress are deliberately obstructing job creation efforts for political motives.

Sunday Sermon #2: Catholic Workers

My Catholic upbringing and schooling has equipped me to understand a good deal of the authoritarian and dogmatic, with-us-or-against-us mindset and the moral hypocrisy of the Christian Right.  And it seems that in large part, the Catholic Church has become part of the Christian Right.

But there is an element that remains, embarrassingly in some instances, of another Catholicism: the Sermon on the Mount Mother Teresa Catholics, the Pope John XXIII Catholics, the Dorothy Day Catholics.  Even the establishment Church honors (however ruefully) the heroes and martyrs who sacrificed themselves for the least among us, and even the most conservative popes will issue at least one encyclical on behalf of the world's poor.

But acts of political courage on behalf of the weak and oppressed are so rare as to be almost shocking.  But even a lapsed and former like me is impressed, and feels compelled to acknowledge this one.

 GOPer House Speaker John Banal was invited to give the commencement address at Catholic University.  Banal went to Catholic schools and is a practicing member.  Following on a letter from American Bishops expressing their concern for the effects of the GOPer budget, dozens of faculty members at Catholic U. and other universities sent Banal a letter, which read in part:

"Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.

The 2012 budget you shepherded to passage in the House of Representatives guts long-established protections for the most vulnerable members of society. It is particularly cruel to pregnant women and children, gutting Maternal and Child Health grants and slashing $500 million from the highly successful Women Infants and Children nutrition program. When they graduate from WIC at age 5, these children will face a 20% cut in food stamps. The House budget radically cuts Medicaid and effectively ends Medicare. It invokes the deficit to justify visiting such hardship upon the vulnerable, while it carves out $3 trillion in new tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy."


The use of "shepherded" in the above graph is the Catholic equivalent of a dog whistle.  Added Stephen Schneck,  Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at Catholic U: "Speaker Boehner’s budget eviscerates vital programs that protect the poor, the elderly, the homeless and at-risk pregnant women and children. This is not pro-life.”

On Saturday Banal gave his largely non-political commencement address--but was also greeted by: " Katy Jamison strode toward her graduation from Catholic University on Saturday wearing the requisite black robe and mortar board — plus a neon green message to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Where’s the compassion, Mr. Boehner?” said the 8-by-10-inch sign pinned to her chest."

Jamison, 26, said Boehner, the keynote speaker at Catholic’s graduation and recipient of an honorary law doctorate, had cut too much in the federal budget aimed at protecting the poor. Doing so defied the Catholic church’s teachings, she said, and will hurt the people she hopes to help with her newly minted master’s degree in social work.

Shades of Dorothy Day.