Sharpening the Pitchfork
by matttbastard
Oh FFS, part deux:
“Last February, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune wrote on the Huffington Post, ‘For the mega-rich, recession brings with it the ability to live well at a lower cost and with less of a hassle.’
In Decemeber, Arianna Huffington’s daughter Christina came out at New York’s International Debutante Ball.* The organizer’s justification for the $14000 a table event: ‘Watches cost more.’”
Watches.
Cost.
More.
Buh?!
Ok, not to get all class war and shit, but. a FUCKING COMING OUT PARTY IN 2009 DURING A FUCKING RECESSION?! You know what? Fuck it — Sarah, via email (h/t), is absolutely fucking correct:
[T]hat’s exactly when we need to get all class war. Right now, when even my Republican parents are pissed about bailouts and CEO pay.
I mean, an asymmetrical class war has already been going on for too fucking long (Tax cuts! Welfare reform! Deregulation!), only with hostilities coming from the top down–and they’ve been kicking our fucking asses. With all that wealth still concentrated at the VERY top, it’s about goddamn time the little people finally started fighting back. Because it really, really says something that some people (even nominal progressives ) still have the fucking stones to throw $14,000/plate debutante balls during the worst economic crisis since the Great fucking Depression.
That’s it — I’m fucking done taking hunks of cake without question and pretending to like the taste. Time to import a non-violent modern variation of the French Revolution to North America post-fucking-haste.
*[insert tart observation about how not paying your writers really helps with the bottom line -- and the coming out party expenses.]
Shorter Rick Santelli: “My wife feels you’re glib, Matt.”
by matttbastard
The political establishment has never come to terms with, and the media establishment just refuses to acknowledge, how deeply unpopular and discredited the GOP is among most Americans in the wake of the eight-year Bush disaster. Political and media elites don’t want to acknowledge that because they lent their continuous support for eight years to Republican power, yet — even with Bush gone — it’s scarcely possible to imagine how a major political party could be held in lower esteem among voters. By huge margins (63-29%), Americans believe the GOP opposed Obama’s stimulus package for political reasons, not because they genuinely believed it would be bad for the economy; they overwhelmingly disapprove of Congressional Republicans (38-56%) while approving of Obama (68-25%) and even Congressional Democrats (50-44%); trust Obama over Congressional Republicans to handle the economy (61-26%); and trust Democrats over Republicans “to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years” (56-30%). Those are enormous margins.
The punditry’s claims that Americans want Democrats to dilute their policies in order to attract and include Republican support is entirely misleading. The endless media stories that Eric Cantor, Michael Steele and Rick Santelli are now riding some resurgent, anti-stimulus GOP wave are pure fiction. And the incessant calls for “bipartisanship” are anti-democratic in the extreme.
The Villagers stubbornly insist on reading from a hackneyed, out-of-date script, one that no longer even remotely resembles reality (if it ever actually did). But no matter what steaming, stinking bullshit manufactured outrage merchants like Santelli, Ratigan, or Michelle Malkin brazenly peddle, as Greenwald notes the bottom line is this:
[T]he reason that Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats in the last two elections and overwhelmingly against Republicans is because they want Democratic policies and not Republicans [sic] policies . They drove Republicans out of office in massive numbers because they don’t want Republicans and their policies governing the country.
In other words, spittle-flecked fauxpulist motherfuckers like Rick Santelli can suck it. Hopefully he gets banished to the PJTV wilderness post haste, so he can serve heaping plates of bloody red meat to the Chicago Tea Party massif alongside his ideological (and, um, intellectual) brethren Glenn Reynolds and Joe the Plumber. And the rest of us can get back to, y’know, trying to fix the mess we inherited from the previous administration.
Der Spiegel: Former Peace Negotiators Call for End to Hamas Boycott
by matttbastard
They were part of the peace settlements in Cambodia, Somalia and Bosnia, they negotiated with militant groups like the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or the IRA in Northern Ireland and a few of them were also engaged in the Middle East peace process. Fourteen elder statesmen from Europe, Australia, South America, Africa and Asia are calling in an open letter for the Mideast Quartet, comprised of the European Union, United Nations, Russia and the United States, to end their diplomatic boycott against Hamas.The signatories of the letter, which is being published exclusively by SPIEGEL ONLINE in Germany and the Times of London on Thursday, include former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami; Alvaro de Soto, who served as the UN envoy for the Middle East Quartet from 2005 to 2007; Lord Chris Patten, the former British governor of Hong Kong and European Commissioner; and Lord Paddy Ashdown, who served as the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina and oversaw the implementation of the Dayton Accords.
[...]
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Ben-Ami told SPIEGEL ONLINE the letter was directed equally at the European Union and the United States, but also at Israel. “Israel has to start thinking outside the box. I can recall the case of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO didn’t recognize Israel as a precondition, but as a result of the Olso process. The same should happen with Hamas.”
The letter (PDF format)
The Shock Doctrine 2: Clean Slates
by matttbastard
Chapter One: The Torture Lab
Ewan Cameron, the CIA and the maniacal quest to erase and remake the human mind
(previous posts in this series here and here; Sarah’s take on chapter one is here)
“Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.”
- Hannah Arendt
The first chapter of The Shock Doctrine is, without a doubt, one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in some time. Naomi Klein renders her shock therapy metaphor viscerally literal, outlining a horrific series of Cold War-era CIA- sponsored experiments conducted on unwitting Canadian mental patients by renowned Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Campbell of McGill University–techniques that Klein contends are now (or, at least at the time the book was published, were) “being applied to prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.”
Rebecca Lemov explains what Cameron did on behalf of his generous patrons in the U.S. intelligence community:
Cameron’s goal was to wipe out the stable “self,” eliminating deep-seated psychological problems in order to rebuild it. The CIA wanted to know what his experiments suggested about interrogating people with the help of sensory deprivation and psychic disorientation.
Cameron’s technique was to expose a patient to tape-recorded messages or sounds that were played back for long periods. The goal was a condition Cameron dubbed “penetration”: The patient experienced an escalating state of distress that often caused him or her to reveal long-buried past experiences. At that point, the doctor would offer “healing” suggestions. Frequently, his patients didn’t want to listen and would attack their analyst or try to leave the room.
In a 1956 American Journal of Psychiatry article, Cameron explained that he broke down their resistance by continually repeating his message using “pillow and ceiling microphones” and different voices; by imposing periods of prolonged sleep and by giving patients drugs like Sodium Amytal, Desoxyn and LSD-25, which “disorganized” thought patterns.
To further disorganize his patients, Cameron isolated them in a sensory deprivation chamber. In a dark room, a patient would sit in silence with his eyes covered with goggles, prevented “from touching his body — thus interfering with his self image.” Finally, “attempts were made to cut down on his expressive output” — he was restrained or bandaged so he could not scream. Cameron combined these tactics with extended periods of forced listening to taped messages for up to 20 hours per day, for 10 or 15 days at a stretch.
In 1958 and 1959, Cameron went further. With new CIA money behind him, he tried to completely “depattern” 53 patients by combining psychic driving with electroshock therapy and a long-term, drug-induced coma. At the most intensive stage of the treatment, many subjects were no longer able to perform even basic functions. They needed training to eat, use the toilet, or speak. Once the doctor allowed the drugs to wear off, patients slowly relearned how to take care of themselves — and their pretreatment symptoms were said to have disappeared.
So had much of their personalities. Patients emerged from Cameron’s ward walking differently, talking differently, acting differently. Wives were more docile, daughters less inclined to histrionics, sons better-behaved. Most had no memory of their treatment or of their previous lives. Sometimes, they forgot they had children.
Klein drives home the destructive impact of Cameron’s experiments by profiling Gail Kastner, one of the victims of his attempts to “penetrate” the human mind. Kastner resides in a cluttered apartment within what Klein describes as “a grim old age home”, beset by chronic pain due to severe injuries suffered during her time spent as one of Cameron’s subjects. The legacy of trauma is not just physical; Kastner suffers from lingering psycological damage, severe nightmares involving Cameron, long dead, and the shocks that he administered 63 times during the course of her ‘treatment’, sending “150 to 200 volts of electricity” coursing through “the frontal lobes of her brain, while her body convulsed violently on the table, causing fractures, sprains, bloody lips, broken teeth.”
Kastner does her best to compensate for the damage, scrawling out seemingly inconsequential details on scraps of paper and old cigarette boxes, “extremely dense handwriting: names, numbers, thousands of words”. Klein explains that, for Kastner, these constitute “something more than an unconventional filing system. They are her memory.”
As Klein notes, “Gail’s mind has failed her; facts evaporate instantly, memories…are like snapshots scattered on the ground”. Cameron’s desire to “unmake and erase faulty minds , then rebuild new personalities on that ever-elusive clean slate” was all-too effective, leaving Kastner and others who were victimized in this quest to dissect the human consciousness “as empty as Eve,” as fellow shock therapy survivor Marilyn Rice described her remade and remodeled self. Klein gets to the root of where Cameron and, as further detailed later on in the book, economic shock therapists like Milton Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs are misguided in the chosen method of treatment:
The problem, obvious in retrospect, was the premise on which [Cameron's] entire theory rested: the idea that before healing can happen, everything that existed before needs to be wiped out.
(Creative) destruction in order to cleanse the world of corruption.
Sarah notes that the evils perpetuated by Cameron and, later, by “pro-war hawks who call for the bombing of countries ‘back to the stone age’”, (an analogy made by Klein that is, in my mind, all-too-apt) are not borne of comic-book villain malevolence; rather, “these people quite often do think in a strange way that they’re helping.” Still, regardless of intent, the goal remains the same, as do the means of achievement: “wipe out the stable “self,” eliminating deep-seated…problems in order to rebuild it.” As we’ll discover in later chapters, this clinical quest to return entire societies by way of severe trauma –and, consequently, the individuals like Kastner who collectively make up these societies–to what the disaster capitalists believe to be an Edenic state of uncorrupted economic purity has been embarked upon numerous times throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
And the consequences have been no less devestating than what Kastner now has to live with for the rest of her life.
Next week: The Other Doctor Shock: Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Laboratory
The Doctrine in Action
by matttbastard
Hooray for shock therapy in Afghanistan:
Senior British, US and local aid workers have described a number of problems [with reconstruction in Afghanistan] including bribery, profiteering, poor planning and incompetence. The overall effect has been to cripple the development effort structured under the Bush administration’s insistence on an unregulated and profit-driven approach to reconstruction.
“The major donor agencies operate on the mistaken assumption that it’s more efficient and profitable to do things through market mechanisms,” a senior American contractor working in Afghanistan told the Guardian on condition of anonymity. “The notion of big government is a spectre for American conservatives and this [the reconstruction process] is an American conservative project.”
The contractor said the “original plan was to get in, prop up Karzai, kill al-Qaida, privatise all government-owned enterprises and get out. It wasn’t a development project, that wasn’t a concern. Development was an afterthought.
The Graun calls this “poor planning and incompetence.” Sorry, but “an unregulated and profit-driven approach to reconstruction” may be indeed reflect willful indifference and a shoddy understanding of what proper reconstruction of a failed state actually entails. But it goes well beyond ‘poor planning and incompetence;’ This is outright criminal negligence on the part of pathologically obsessive free-market ideologues who didn’t give a good goddamn about cleaning up the mess they made.
In other words, textbook disaster capitalism.
“The Party of Hoover”
by matttbastard
(Image: Kyle Cassidy, used under a GNU Free Documentation License)
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., one of the three Republicans who voted for the [stimulus] legislation, said the GOP risks becoming “the party of Hoover,” echoing a warning that Vice President Richard B. Cheney delivered last year during negotiations over the Bush administration’s rescue of the auto industry.
After Hoover left office in 1933, amid the economic rubble of the Great Depression, Specter noted, “not until Eisenhower came up decades later did a Republican win the presidency, and he was a war hero.”
First he lobbies and votes for the recovery package; now he’s standing up against continued GOP douchebaggery in the legislative branch. Arlen must have finally found–and cracked–the safe where the Senate Republican leadership was keeping his testicles locked up all these years.
The Shock Doctrine 1: The Erased World
by matttbastard
Introduction: Blank is Beautiful
Three decades of erasing and remaking the world
The Shock Doctrine opens with a quote from the Book of Genesis, chapter 6, verse 11:
Now the Earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the rest of the earth.
(Creative) destruction in order to cleanse the world of corruption.
What happens when neoliberal economic theory is applied–in many cases through violent, often horrific coercion? Naomi Klein begins her best-selling chronicle of capitalist Utopianism run amok in post-Katrina Louisiana, where Milton Friedman, revolutionary evangelist of coolly amoral free market fundamentalism, sees an opportunity in Katrina’s destructive wake:
“[I]nstead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they then could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state.”
The result?
Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it just ran 4. Before the storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31.
Klein refers to this sort of opportunistic, ideologically-motivated renewal project ‘disaster capitalism’, noting that, over the past several decades, “Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.”
‘Shock.‘
It’s a theme Klein continually examines and reexamines throughout the book–and not simply in a metaphorical sense, as I will discuss further in later installments.
What stood out most for me in the introduction was how effectively Klein weaves together seemingly disparate strands of neoliberal economics, US foreign policy, and experimental psychology into a coherent thesis. She manages to avoid the logical inconsistencies of conspiracy theory, meticulously spreading the foundation for her thesis and taking advantage of her background as an investigative journalist to provide ample support for her contentions.
A few minor quibbles aside (The Cato Insitute is not a ‘neoconservative’ think tank, as Klein dubs it, but, rather, a right-leaning libertarian organization that, contrary to her insinuations, opposed the war in Iraq), the introduction provides both an expansive overview of the themes Klein will explore more in depth in subsequent chapters and an inspiring call-to-arms for those of us who have looked on in horror at the wreckage (both psychological and physical) that has been left behind after decades of neoliberal shock therapy.
If you haven’t already done so, make sure to check out Sarah’s first post–and, please, don’t hesitate to offer your own thoughts, opinions, and observations in comments. We want this to be an interactive dialogue, and look forward over the coming weeks to having you all read along with us.
Next week: The Torture Lab: Ewan Cameron, the CIA and the maniacal quest to erase and remake the human mind
The Shock Doctrine.
by matttbastard and Sarah J
We’re watching the collapse of capitalism in real time, slow motion.
The economic crisis was largely the result of a vast speculative bubble, one that inevitably had to burst, and those in charge of U.S. and global economic policy knew this, but did nothing to prepare for the impending crisis. The effect was magnified thanks to a deliberate ongoing campaign of ideologically-motivated deregulation for the sake of deregulating. In other words, this didn’t just happen in a vacuum. It didn’t sneak up. It was very much deliberate.
Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine details exactly how we got to this point. The book came out in 2007, but right now serves as kind of a ‘how did we get here,’ with ‘here’ being the new Depression.
It’s a fairly well-known and well-read book in progressive circles, and yet neither Sarah nor I had read it yet. With the bottom falling out of the economy, and inspired by Erik and Rob’s posts on From Colony to Superpower, we decided not just to read the book, but to blog it, reading chapter by chapter, in two places, to see what we each draw from it.
Reading The Shock Doctrine allows us to examine a series of cataclysmic events that have occurred over the past 50 years, so we can hopefully avoid repeating the same mistakes (or allowing the same warped, Utopian ideals to usurp the public debate).
Most importantly, to prevent the same tactics from being applied now, in the wake of the biggest global economic shockwave yet.
Because the more we read, the more imperative we think it is to tie Klein’s thesis and investigations into what’s happening right now, as Friedmanite ideologues continue to preach the doctrine of deregulation and tax cuts as panacea.
So, starting tomorrow, we’ll have posts up once a week, mine here, Sarah’s at Alterdestiny. We agree on lots of things, but come from different backgrounds and areas of expertise, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to draw different readings of the book. We’re inviting all of you, whether you’ve read the book or not, to join in the discussion, and hope we can cross some of our audiences back and forth and gain some insight into the global economic mess.
(x-posted @ Alterdestiny)
The Return of ‘Lawful Access’
by matttbastard
Well, isn’t this lovely:
The Conservative government is preparing sweeping new eavesdropping legislation that will force Internet service providers to let police tap exchanges on their systems – but will likely reignite fear that Big Brother will be monitoring the private conversations of Canadians.
The goal of the move, which would require police to obtain court approval, is to close what has been described as digital “safe havens” for criminals, pedophiles and terrorists because current eavesdropping laws were written in a time before text messages, Facebook and voice-over-Internet phone lines.
The change is certain to please the RCMP and other police forces, who have sought it for some time. But it is expected to face resistance from industry players concerned about the cost and civil libertarians who warn the powers will effectively place Canadians under constant surveillance.
Constant surveillance–how so?
The concern of critics is that unlike a traditional wiretap that cannot commence without judicial approval, lawful-access legislation in other countries has forced Internet providers to routinely gather and store the electronic traffic of their clients. Those stored data can then be obtained by police via search warrant.
“That means we’re under surveillance, in some sense, all the time,” said Richard Rosenberg, president of the B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association. “I think that changes the whole nature of how we view innocence in a democratic society.”
Um, yeah, just a li’l bit.
Oh, and, via Michael Geist, it seems our loyal opposition is also doing its part to represent the best interests of the nation by, um, once again proposing its own lawful access legislation–a bill even more odious than the government’s':
…Liberal MP Marlene Jennings has reintroduced her lawful access private member’s bill, called the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act. The Jennings bill is a virtual copy of a failed Liberal lawful access bill that died in 2005.
[...]
[T]he Jennings bill would require ISPs to disclose customer name and address information to law enforcement without court oversight.
The Magical ConservaLiberal Unity Pony drops yet another stinking, steaming load on our heads; I love the smell of bipartisan turdblossoms in the morning.
Cough. Anyway.
From what I can tell, the only substantive difference between Van Loan’s proposed piece of legislation and the one then-Public Safety Minister Stockboy Day tried to surreptitiously impose in 2007 without any public input (before backpeddling quicker than you can say ‘Ogopogo’) is the apparent requirement of judicial approval (which, as noted, may not provide much in the way of protection for a citizen’s private online information–and Jennings’ PMB offers, um, none). Otherwise, the state will, in essence, be forcing ISPs to fulfill the darkest fantasies of the tinfoil-adorned black helicopter set.
And, as Impolitical (h/t) notes:
The dangers of such powers being placed with law enforcement and the potential for abuses have been made abundantly clear by the experience Americans have had with the Bush administration and the revelations from whistleblowers in the last year.
Two examples:
Am in full agreement with Geist here:
…Van Loan should commit to active consultations with the privacy community before introducing the legislation; renew the government’s pledge for full court oversight (including for customer name and address information); and there must be full hearings on the bill that place the burden on law enforcement to demonstrate that there is a problem with the law as it currently stands.
Bottom line: this is not a path any purportedly ‘free’ society should hastily embark upon.
PSA: Support the Uniting American Families Act of 2009
by matttbastard
Great News! Rep. Jerrold Nadler plans to reintroduce the Uniting American Families Act on Feb. 13!
You can make the bill a success by convincing your Representative to support the bill from Day One. Reintroducing the bill with as many cosponsors as possible will show powerful momentum for the rights of gay and lesbian binational couples!
Please call your Representative and ask them to be an original cosponsor of the “Uniting American Families Act of 2009”
It’s easy!
- Find out who your U.S. House Representative is. Go to http://www.congressmerge.com/onlinedb/index.htm, enter your address, and you will be provided the name of your U.S. Representative.
- Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202)224-3121 and ask to be connected to your U.S. Representative.
- Tell your representative’s staff:
I am calling to ask Representative ________________ to be an original cosponsor of the Uniting American Families Act of 2009. To cosponsor, he/she must contact Rep. Jerrold Nadler who is the lead sponsor.
The U.S. government discriminates against gay and lesbian binational couples by not allowing us to sponsor our foreign-born life partners for immigration. Because of this, we face the terrible choice of separating from the person we love or leaving our country. As Americans, we should not have to choose between family and country. Please ask Rep. _________________ to cosponsor the Uniting American Families Act of 2009 by reaching out to Rep. Nadler before February 12.
Thanks for asking your member of Congress to celebrate love this Valentine’s Day by cosponsoring UAFA!
h/t Sarah J
Stretching a Gapingly Inapt Analogy (Without Forceps, Even!)
by matttbastard
According to [Missouri] Republican State Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the proposed pro-choice “Freedom of Choice Act” is the biggest federal power grab since the “War of Northern Aggression.”
Listen:
Oh well. At least the fetus fetishists appear to be finally broadening their eye-gougingly overwrought rhetorical palate. I mean, really–genocide analogies are, like, so 2008.
Quote of the Effing Century (Or, On the Original Stimulus Package)
by matttbastard
I rather adore the willy. In fact, when these long, drawn-out discussions about sex happen on radical feminist sites, I sometimes find the urge to hop in, scream “I LIKE DICK!” and run away, giggling like a third-grader. The fact that I haven’t done so is a testament to my general self-restraint and, uh, amazing level of maturity. Or something.
- Natalia Antonova, who, btw, is made of pure, undiluted WIN (and infinite maturity. Or something.)
h/t Sarah J via email
The problems of the modern GOP, encapsulated in two paragraphs.
by matttbastard
From yesterday’s WaPo:
“If you get the principles right in the first place . . . the politics will take care of itself,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), a leader of the new conservative vanguard. “It comes down to basic principles — who’s better at preserving jobs, small business or the government? If you think it’s small business, look to the Republicans.”
Curly Haugland, a Republican National Committee member from North Dakota, said there is little need for ideas when the main task for the GOP will be fighting back Democratic ones. “We’re going to have plenty to do just playing defense,” he said. “These people [the Democrats] are going to be aggressively on the march.”
Not to get all Eastern Elitist on y’all, but when you have a Taliban Wing “conservative vanguard” led by people named ‘Jeb’ and ‘Curly’ determining policy strategy, well, congratulations — you’re no longer a viable national party.
Perspective.
by matttbastard
I stand by my previously expressed policy objections to the compromised Senate version of the recovery plan. I also still think the ‘moderate’ Kabuki performance that apparently trumped the real-world consequences of cutting funds to the states was despicable (but, hey, as long as the ‘workhorses’ keep garnering kudos from the Village). Hopefully a lot of what was stripped from the bill is put back in when it goes to conference committee.
With that said, the following graphic illustrates why, considering how urgent it is to pass a recovery plan as soon as possible, something is better than nothing (literally):
(h/t)
Related: Americans United for Change launch radio ads praising Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe for “providing the leadership we need to get the job done” and helping the Senate “reach agreement on a plan that has support from a broad range of groups — including the US Chamber of Commerce and organized labor.”
The Rhetoric of Bollocks (or, Has John Pilger Always Been Such an Insufferable Prick?)
by matttbastard
Shorter John Pilger: “Both parties are the same! Vote Nader!” (h/t O-Dub for inspiring the distillation, with pwofessional pwogressive thumb-sucker David Sirota providing the original purity mash.)
To save y’all the trouble of ever having to suffer through a martyr-posing Pilger polemic again, let me summarize the tiresome formula:
John Pilger loses the plot somewhere up his ass; bravely inserts his own head in a daring rescue attempt, despite overwhelming suppression efforts on the part of the Ruling Elite. Repeat, ad infinitum, until you’re ready to beat yourself to death with the collected works of George Orwell.
Awesome. Can’t wait for 4 more years of doctrinaire paleo-lefty contradiction-heightening, delivered in a hectoring, teeth-itchingly self-righteous tone of rote high dudgeon and affected disgust directed towards The Absolute Worst Empire in teh World–Evar (oh, and of course Israel, which is still number two with a depleted-uranium-tipped bullet!)
Sweet Jesus, I hate purity trolling.
(That said, I will throw down with anyone who disses my homie Robert Fisk.)
Action Alert: Fight Back Against GOP Attempts to Scuttle Hilda Solis’ Nomination
by matttbastard
The Senate Labor committee postponed [Hilda] Solis’ nomination yesterday because of a recent USA Today report about her husband’s outstanding California tax liens. (NOTE: it was her husband’s auto repair business, not anything to do with Solis herself.) Though the tax liens have since been repaid, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) and his Republican cohorts are still delaying the confirmation vote, claiming they need to investigate Solis’ involvement with American Rights at Work (ARAW), a pro-labor non-profit. But this really boils down to the GOP’s inherent fears over the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill Solis co-sponsored in the House that would enable workers to unionize more easily and negotiate for equitable wages and benefits and safer working conditions.
[...]
Solis might understand the needs of workers better than anyone in Congress. There’s no question she could help ensure President Obama’s plan to create 3.6 million jobs by next year actually happens. We must fight like hell to get her approved. Join this Facebook page and help confirm Hilda Solis now. Then, sign American Rights at Work’s petition to support the Employee Free Choice, where you snag their Employee Free Choice widget for your own personal blog.
Go.
Record-Breaking Canadian Job Losses in January
by matttbastard
The recession hit home where Canadians live last month as a massive 129,000 workers joined the ranks of the unemployed and the country’s jobless rate surged to 7.2 per cent.
It was the worst monthly employment drop in at least three decades, topping figures seen in either of the two previous recessions in the 1980s and 1990s.
Almost all the jobs were full-time and were mostly in a battered manufacturing sector that has been most affected by the severe downturn in the United States.
The carnage was everywhere. Ontario shed 71,000 jobs, half in the manufacturing sector. British Columbia and Quebec workers were also hit hard with losses of 35,000 and 26,000 respectively.
Since October, when most economists say the global recession hit Canada’s shores, the country has lost a whopping 213,000 jobs, wiping out a year’s gains.
Somebody get Guinness on the horn — Statistics Canada calls this “the largest employment decrease since the agency began keeping what it described as comparable figures in 1976.” Highly “regrettable” hemorrhaging, as hapless Finance Minister Jim Flaherty blandly put it last night. Understatement as performance art — I love our (probationary!) Conservative government.
And let’s not be Negative Nancys. Displaying that keen sense of priorities that sets apart the Queensway elite from the scrum, Chantal Hebert proudly reports that civility has finally returned to the House of Commons, welcome news that should help salve the pain of economic woes. Try not to rejoice too boisterously (not that y’all can, um, afford to celebrate with anything more extravegant than a bottle of Baby Duck and a box of Kraft Dinner).
Anyway, here’s hoping those 129,000 newly unemployed individuals are all eligible for EI.
RIP Lux Interior 1948-2009
by matttbastard
Fuck:
“It’s a little bit like asking a junkie how he’s been able to keep on dope all these years,” Interior told The Times some years ago. “It’s just so much fun. You pull in to one town and people scream, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ And you go to a bar and have a great rock ‘n’ roll show and go to the next town and people scream, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.’ It’s hard to walk away from all that.”
Walk on home, boy (in red pumps, of course).
Read This Now
by matttbastard
Over at Global Comment, Sarah Jaffe, in a devastatingly on-target critique, utterly eviscerates yesterday’s head-pattingly patronizing L.A. Times article/future-bird-cage-liner (where the credentials of Dr. Jill Biden were examined [and dismissed] in a manner that was maddeningly glib, highly gendered–and entirely sexist).
Jaffe’s point about the underlying (and intersecting) double standards at play is especially sharp:
I have to wonder, if we were discussing a male academic who taught at a prestigious Ivy League university, the reporter would feel the need to spend the entire piece debating whether he deserved the prefix “Dr.”
The article’s dismissive tone is symptomatic of the way the media treats women, particularly accomplished women in the public eye. Jill Biden has several advanced degrees, and yet chooses to teach in a community college, helping students who often cannot afford to attend school full-time. This is worthy of respect, not a quibble over whether she deserves the title as much as someone who stitches up wounds, treats skin conditions, or performs nose jobs.
Highly recommended reading–the whole damn thing, goddammit.
Go.
Update 02/04: The Women’s Media Center has reposted Jaffe’s article in its entirety. Check it out, and show some love.
Dear Moe Lane
hugs ‘n’ kisses,
The Online Left, who will be sleeping like babies tonight because most of us didn’t swallow the bullshit sammich served up yesterday by the LA Times.
#rebelleft
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GlobalComment
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WorldBridge: Refugees International’s Blog
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LabourStart
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Keith Olbermann: “It May Be Time For Mr. Cheney to Leave This Country”
by matttbastard
Shorter: FUCK yo couch, you lying sack of monkey shit.
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