12.30.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 3:26 pm by George Smith
I’ve been storing up the energy to for a review of “Slap Shot,??? the Seventies movie with Paul Newman as the player coach of the Charlestown Chiefs (modeled on the Johnstown Jets) of western Pennsylvania. I have an old videotape and have had it on replay. “Slap Shot” can also be viewed through the lens of America’s forty year slump, a movie framed at the time big business resurrected a devotion to unrestricted preying on its human labor, and — as it turned out — hundreds of millions of future livelihoods.
The backdrop for “Slap Shot” is the perfect picture of it. The steel mill is set to close in “Charlestown,??? laying off thousands.
“Ten thousand people put on waivers,” says Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), the Charlestown Chiefs’ leading scorer, to Paul Newman, as both stand outside the steel mill waiting for a ride from Lily (Lindsay Crouse), Braden’s wife.
“What’s going to happen to them?” Newman, as Reggie Dunlop, the Chiefs’ player/coach asks.
It’s every man for himself, replies Braden.
They realize it’s the end for the Chiefs. No money, no ticket sales. What there are of the fans won’t be spending what they have left at War Memorial ice hockey arena.
Strother Martin plays the general manager and is making phone calls trying to find a new job and people to buy the team’s old equipment.
Newman as Reggie Dunlop gets the idea to revitalize the team for the remainder of the season with a stunt, using three comical brothers to attack the opposition. The matches turn into brawls as the Chiefs snap a losing streak and stomp their flustered opponents.
Newman plants a ludicrous story in the local newspaper, one that intimates the Chiefs are being avidly sought by a buyer in Florida, one who wants to bring the team to a community of retirees who miss old time ice hockey.
The working stiffs of Charlestown come back to Chiefs games for the blood and circus, organizing a pep squad that even follows the squad around to its away matches. The fan hysteria reaches a climax when the Chiefs play in Hyannisport against “the Presidents.”
A Hyannisport lout throws a key ring at one of the Hansen brothers after a goal is scored and the trio assault the crowd, intimidating the locals. The police are summoned. It’s another publicity windfall for the Chiefs.
Paul Newman finally confronts the owner, a wealthy woman who admits the team is making money now that it’s winning but she’s going to kill it, anyway, because her accountant advises the tax write-off would be better for her bottom line.
“Well, we’re human beings, you know,” replies Newman.
He curses, calling her “garbage” for “letting us all go down the drain” when they’re doing better than ever.
She replies: “I don’t think you understand finance.???
I grew up through that systemic result in Pennsylvania.
From the mid-70’s to today, one unrelenting slump.
It never got better. More jobs were always lost. People made less and less money. There were no moments when anything turned around.
Occasionally, because of presidential propaganda, people felt better about it.
Largely, we bought the swill about “trickle down economics,” the need to squash labor unions, that firing thousands of people was “right-sizing” to get lean, mean and efficient, that life would be a different set of opportunities in which you’d go back to school or be trained four or five times, every ten to fifteen years, this so you would fit the workforce of the glorious future!
All convenient lies. And that’s only a fraction of it.
Manufacturing flushed down the toilet
When I was entering college, Alcoa aluminum closed the biggest extrusion plant in the world in Cressona, PA, where my father worked. He escaped lay-off and was transferred to a small soda bottle-cap manufacturing plant outside Lancaster, a three hour drive every day.
The metal-working plants closed. A recession was in full swing when I graduated from college in Reading, PA. There were no jobs so I enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Lehigh.
During the Reagan years, the nation’s economic policies destroyed Bethlehem Steel. The center of Allentown and the south side of Bethlehem turned into slums. I saw it happen. The people voted for the man who was killing their future. So did the rest of the country.
In November, I was invited to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving and during dinner I sat across the table from a man, my age, who declared Bethlehem Steel had gone out of business because it was “inefficient.” He told me he based this position on having been to one of its plants, one time.
I lived there. Yet that was the type of received wisdom you can routinely hear from Americans who know nothing of the subject except the trivial, making broad statements that it was bad business and everyone had it coming
When you rip the economic heart out of a community it takes a lot down with it.
I went to work for the Allentown Morning Call for a short period.
Advertising revenues, at its owner — Times Mirror, and readership were always in decline.
Losing Bethlehem Steel by no means explained total newspaper weakness but it surely did not help. As with the Chiefs, that so many people had so much less to spend and much less vital economic futures made a difference. A newspaper is a luxury one could forgo, even well prior to the internet, in bad times.
There was a rival to the Allentown Morning Call in Bethlehem. I subscribed to it. It died during the time of the steel collapse.
Newspapers have been going extinct ever since. Once I moved to California, layoffs always, like clockwork every two years, or even more frequently at the Los Angeles Times. An endless river of cutbacks.
However, no matter how people were squeezed or how many were disposed of, the publishers and owners always made more.
Always.
A proudly antagonizing pleasure over the annihilation of people was part of the spirit of it. You would have had to been blind not to have seen the corporate joy over the tearing down of so many working people, of the disposition of them into waste-bins with the added insinuation that it was because of the alleged manifold weaknesses in the American worker.
It is an excrescence in character that has come to be seen as both virtuous and normal.
Forty years of slump. Pitiless. Period.
Now it’s the beginning of the end. The cancer is developed, it’s “stage IV,” fully metastasized, everywhere, as a doctor might say. We never wanted to admit this was festering, growing more toxic. Instead, we have always been full of misplaced optimism, slogans, bromides and fix-it patent nostrums on reinvention and revival.
My parents were steeped in it, believing things were getting better all the time, that America was the best, even as bitter proof of the opposite stared them in the face.
How can you tell it’s really bad? It’s an insane question but I’ll humor you.
You can tell it’s almost terminal because the six and seven-figure explainers have taken it up in essays and television shows, even as they have absolutely no skin in the game.
A timely example is Robert Reich, who was part of the American ruling class work over as a piece of the Clinton administration. His movie, “Inequality for All,” got largely great reviews. And he is a fantastic celebrity explainer. But who is he explaining things to?
In the movie, it’s his class at Berkeley. Is that an audience with any exposure to the 40-year slump? Of course not! Americans can’t afford Berkeley in 2013. It’s a school for the offspring of the plutocracy and their immediate most well-paid servants, the latter who just haven’t yet been properly obsoleted.
You should be so lucky to have a camera crew following you around at Cal and for the well-off to laugh at your jokes, eager staff who’ll edit your shit, get financing and a KickStarter campaign going, put it on YouTube and pass it around everywhere because you’re, well, YOU.
Do you have that?
Great message! Wrong messenger. I don’t need to be told it. Neither do you. I already have a good friend who is unemployed, just like me. And others who have either greatly diminished prospects, been fired or who are regularly threatened with lay-offs by bosses who continue to rake more in.
You see, it’s just “[we] don’t understand [American] finance.”
But even the forces of systemic political evil had the last laugh with Reich’s movie. It’s publicity campaign was run over by the shutdown and blanket news coverage of the latter.
But back to “Slap Shot.”
At the end of it American optimism still rules. The Charlestown Chiefs win the championship but are shut down, anyway. Charlestown gives them a parade. For a day it’s all right.
Newman as Reggie Dunlop excitedly tells his ex-wife, a beautician who is leaving Charlestown because there’s no business, that he has a new job as coach of a team in Minnesota.
When he gets there, he’ll bring up “all his guys.” Clueless hope springs eternal.
However, it is still a great movie. View it again. It’s humorous, coarse in a good way, with wonderful ensemble acting. “Slap Shot” rewards repeated watching.
In America, though, for the majority, places like “Charlestown,” Johnstown — in real life, they never came back. The people just had to deal with ever diminishing expectations and opportunity, with slowly but inexorably more crabbed and desperate lives.
Any social contract that existed was shredded by corporatism.
Despising American labor and wishing for only ever larger immediate gain, US business de-industrialized the country, chasing slave labor, or whatever was closest to it, around the globe.
The belief that Americans were a great resource in human capital was made anathema. American labor was something to be crushed in an allied political and business vice.
To corporate America people are good for only two things: Buying stuff and working for as little as possible.
And when they can no longer buy there’s no use for them at all.
We may have believed this country still was showing signs of vitalism, progress and ways forward. But these were illusions, booms for the few, mostly at the top.
If you were in the national security megaplex, you did fine and will continue to do so. During the slump, beating up on piss ant little countries with the biggest military in world history was tremendous business opportunity.
Oil, financialization and Wall Street, even better.
And now, ad nauseam, the tech industry, heavily engaged in writing software, swipe-your-finger “apps,” to take what little everyone else has have left while telling us how inferior we are for not being able to deal creatively and imaginatively with “disruption.”
An old American story, just a different buzzword.
Some day soon, maybe you too will be able to go to work for nothing or next to it, disrupted and atomized by computer code, courtesy of the mechanized all-against-all economy and a civilization [cough] that’s socially bankrupt.
Or you could stay home and drink whatever cheap stuff you can find. Hell, I’ll drink with you.
“Yeah? Well, then normal is fucked.” –Lindsay Crouse as Lily Braden, Slap Shot
Lily Braden, played by Lindsay Crouse, pictured above coming out of the state store, Pennsylvania’s infamous government-run liquor control business, plays the movie as a drunk. She is enraged, trapped in Charlestown, a “goddamn dump,” while her husband Ned is always on the road with the Chiefs. To ease the pain, she gets shit-faced.
Newman/Dunlop concedes the same thing happened to his wife, she wound up drinking and driving.
“Why do you talk dirty?” Newman/Dunlop asks Lily, one furious night after a game in which her husband, Ned, has checked into a hotel to avoid being with her.
“My family has money,” she replies, in tears.
A minute later she pulls up in front of Newman/Dunlop’s place, realizing she’s been manipulated again: “Get out! Beat it!”
E-mail from a friend in the Lehigh Valley a couple days ago: “Did you know that downtown Allentown is changing? A hockey arena is being built, with buildings around it for offices and restaurants. Leases are being signed. I just can’t picture it, but who knows, it just might work.”
Errata and please pardon the faux pas: It is pointed out to me, quite correctly, that I misspelled “Reggie Dunlop” as “Dunlap” through the entire piece. Oof. Now, so corrected! Thanks, TP!
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11.26.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 10:24 am by George Smith
“The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current,” in a transcript from PBS, a longer news piece on the impact recent cuts to the food stamp program have imposed on the needy:
MARY JO BROOKS: Most Republicans don’t dispute statistics which show two-thirds of recipients are children, the elderly or disabled. But they say more than three million Americans are able-bodied and could work. Cutting benefits for those people would save the program $2 billion a year.
Representative Tim Huelskamp is a Republican from Kansas.
REP. TIM HUELSKAMP, R-Kan.: We believe in work. We require productivity. We think it’s good for the taxpayers. But, most importantly, I think it’s better for these adults and families. Now, the vast majority of folks receiving food stamps wouldn’t be in this category of able-bodied adults.
But there are 3.5 million Americans and — that fit this category and we’re just expecting them to actually look for a job, because, in my area, if you look for a job, you’re going to find one.
MARY JO BROOKS: Huelskamp says tightening restrictions, including eligibility, will help reduce long-term dependency on the entitlement program.
These are the daily lies of our time, the orthodoxy of a political party, of a world view — WhiteManistan’s — driving the nation into collective insanity. It is the nullification of human beings. A world-leading country wouldn’t tolerate it. The vengeance practiced on the weak forbidden, the political party and its ideology put down. But America isn’t capable of it.
The majority of food stamp recipients already have a job. And in the last week it was impossible to overlook news about workers in America’s sweat shops, Walmart and McDonalds, living in food insecurity, on food stamps and — in one most incredible instance — working in a Walmart operation where the employer organized a drive among others in need to gather and distribute food for Thanksgiving.
Kathy Underhill, of Food Bank Colorado, tells PBS what the Republican cuts to SNAP would mean, if enacted:
It would really change the entire landscape of hunger in America if the $40 billion cuts went through. You would be looking at the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition spiking incredibly. But you also have an economic impact. Talk to grocers, and you find out. They will tell you, it means they need fewer employees. They need to purchase fewer products.
That’s means there’s future — fewer trucks moving that product. I mean, it has this whole rippling effect that would be quite profound.
“The lawmakers on Capitol Hill who will determine the size of the next round of cuts will resume their work after the Thanksgiving break,” concludes PBS.
Thanks, America. You’re all heart. Ruining Thursday and the holiday season for millions, an accomplishment worth savoring.
Spam this into the comments sections of news and debates on the food stamp program and the poor!
Get your MP3 from Dirpy.
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11.25.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 1:53 pm by George Smith
From a book by a man named Henry Giroux, who was interviewed by Bill Moyers recently:
“The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current…”
He adds: “Yeah, it sure does. I mean, to see poor people, their benefits being cut, to see pensions of Americans who have worked like my father, all their lives, and taken away, to see the rich just accumulating more and more wealth.”
Giroux gets directly at the American belief system that poverty is a matter of personal inferiority and that it is proper to victimize the poor because they deserve it.
“Young people are seen as disposable,” he says.
It made me want to get his book, “Zombie Politics,” which is where this is from. And I’d buy it. But you can’t afford such things when all you can make is what comes from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk digital sweat shop.
The interview is here and it’s long but there is also a transcript.
Giroux has quite a lot to say, much of it which will be familiar to readers of Escape from WhiteManistan.
Some more excerpts:
So what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social– that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests. No society can survive under those conditions.
I mean, it seems to me that there has to be a point where you have to say, “No, this has to stop.” We can’t allow ourselves to be driven by those lies anymore. We can’t allow those who are rich, who are privileged, who are entitled, who accumulate wealth to simply engage in a flight from social and moral and political responsibility by blaming the people who are victimized by those policies as the source of those problems.
It believes that social bonds not driven by market values are basically bonds that we should find despicable …
What does it mean when you turn on the television in the United States and you see young kids, peaceful protesters, lying down with their hands locked and you got a guy with, you know, spraying them with pepper spray as if there’s something normal about that, as if that’s all it takes, that’s how we solve problems? I mean, I guess the question here is what is it in a culture that would allow the public to believe that with almost any problem that arises, force is the first way to address it.
Giroux asserts America is not a democracy. I’ve agreed for a long time. We live, or more accurately — survive, in a corporate fascist state.
And when it comes for you and it will, eventually, you’ll get to see what Mechanical Turk, or something even worse, is like, too.
On the bright seam of malevolence in American society, or as Giroux puts it — the ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current — a description of Tea Party philosophy, the same as the ideology of the old John Birch Society:
[Today’s] tea party is the modern-day rebirth of the John Birch Society. They share a world view …The same paranoid distrust of government. The same desire to protect the rich. The same cruel streak that blames the poor for their poverty and seeks to deny government help on that basis.
Hat tip to Frank at Pine View Farm.
Two faces of malevolence in America.
Want an MP3 for your devices? Click here.
And if you don’t think this is folk music or that it doesn’t efficiently use art to accurately describe the American condition, there’s something wrong with your head, a condition no one can fix.
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11.20.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Made in China, Psychopath & Sociopath at 9:16 am by George Smith
From the Guardian, on capitalism and Walmart:
“The bigger question there is why employers feel entitled to employ people, often at low wages, without providing healthcare for them. Is the idea that when they get sick or die, they’ll be replaced like lab rats? That’s a pretty diseased view of how capitalism should work.”
To which I say: Disease is us. We like disease.
Adds the paper, “When Walmart is implicitly acknowledging that its wages won’t let people afford one good dinner, its financial issues are way beyond Obamacare.”
And here’s some discussion from DD blog comments yesterday, resurrected for further use:
We live in a modern Dickensian country, the big item yesterday being the news of a Canton, OH, Walmart store holding a food drive for its sales associates.
The picture [in the Plain Dealer] alone says it all.
Walmart is a company that’s deservedly earned (and earns) … loathsome press. Yet nothing is ever done and conditions never change.
One can think of a lot of creative ways in federal, even state, law could be changed to punish a predatory corporation that uses food stamp subsidy of its workers to keep wages down and enhance its bottom line. One could do a calculation of a business based on its payment of such workers, retrieve an estimated number of them, and deduce what their food stamp benefit would be, then hit the firm with a claw-back in the form of a tax plus a large penalty for victimizing its workers.
Such money, collected nationally, could be given back to workers by placement in a national fund from which they could extract their share by simply presenting proof of employment at Walmart and a photocopy of their latest SNAP card.
With a little thought there could be a lot of remedies like this. None of them could ever happen in our world, unfortunately.
Anyway, from this we can conclude that Walmart management, as opposed to its labor force, consists entirely of sociopaths and that is what they look for when hiring. In fact, we have a national corporate economy, a fascist one, that selects for and elevates sociopaths. It explains why everything continues to turn from bad to worse.
Since it’s been building for decades, a good portion of the voting populace has now been conditioned to view it as normal, even proper, or worse — to be applauded. This, in turn, explains the malevolent nature of modern America.
And here’s a respectable discussion on remedying the Walmart problem, one that also mentions the not-unique idea of using a claw-back:
“The next proposal is more severe: Charge back the amount of public assistance any employee receives to the company he or she works for. It would be separate from tax filings, and simply be a direct penalty charged to the firm. I doubt there is much political will for this proposal, but I can see some people — especially on the Left — supporting it … My politics are pretty middle-of-the-road, and I find myself offended by subsidizing profitable companies this way.???
Could substitute the Waltons for the Kochs. Let’s sing for economic blight. Just sayin’.
Someone should put my Culture of Lickspittle album out on iTunes, I’m telling ya. Then I could come to your town, maybe, and play it for you.
Thanks to those who kept the comments alive over the weekend, if you know who you are and I think you do. It keeps things interesting.
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11.16.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll at 2:06 pm by George Smith
Today, more ridiculous advertising from the American guitar industry, one among many good examples of inequality, the abandonment of a middle class society, and the shift of domestic manufacturing to lavish goods for the one percent and their still employed white collar servants.
If you follow the rock instrument industry you run into hordes of American men who actually think these things are fine, to be coveted, great artisan examples from America’s top-of-the-heap craftsmen. And if you look for video tours of the Fender Custom Shop, you easily find hagiography in which the people who put together priced-for-the-aristocracy basic electric guitar models designed fifty years ago are called master builders. It’s to laugh bitterly.
Here, the eight thousand dollar Fender telecaster, customized until its original reason as an instrument for the Bakersfield country sound or weekend entertainment in the beach ballrooms of southern California.
Better, follow this link to pricing for crystal pickguards.
Fender is the choice for this lampooning in the Culture of Lickspittle because it is a company that continuously drapes itself in the glories of its decades past history when it no longer has any moral or legitimate connection to it other than the fact that the instruments look the same.
You can say many things about the two wine ads. What you can’t say is that they have something to do with the rock ‘n’ roll, only that the concept and spirit of it is demonstrably dead at Fender. When you’re a music equipment manufacturer passing off 35 dollar bottles of snob wine from Sonoma as something cool you deserve to be put down.
Readers may note that six bottles of said Fender wine cost 80 dollars more than a Fender telecaster, made in China, pictured below.
These advertisements are only small bits from the great national decline: Once justifiably famous businesses, places where things that changed the world for the better were made by everyday people, now corporations focused on making intelligence-insulting and/or idiotic luxuries for the top class who laughably think of themselves as rock n rollers.
Today’s face of American employment, what’s left for you when nothing else is available, the great innovation of crowd-sourced free-lance slave labor. May more soon be welcomed into it.
My account on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the pay stub after a half day of work.
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11.03.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Made in China at 5:22 pm by George Smith
Today, a short return to a common subject here, the bifurcation of “American” goods, following the rise of inequality, a study in contrast.
The video is of major US guitar and western guitar brands being made in China. You can ascertain the different brands by headstocks. But it’s an omnibus factory that does work for virtually all the majors.
On the other end of the stick, you have guitars made domestically in the Fender “custom shop,” in this video (do view part of it to get the flavor of worship and the custom manufacture of “worn” high-end instruments), for the haves/lawyers/bankers and upper middle class shoe-shiners not yet totally obsoleted by economic decline and digitization.
Here, the Culture of Lickspittle is in the fawning over he who already has everything, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.
American companies that have outsourced a great deal of manufacturing regularly complain about Chinese theft of their intellectual property. In fact, as readers know this was one of NSA director’s Keith Alexander’s big claims/hobby horses before the Snowden affair shut him up on the matter.
Does corporate America deserve concern and sympathy, even action, over this? Not anymore, I’d argue.
There is now a good business in the sale of Chinese counterfeits, guitars sold as cheaply as the licensed copies of the big names made in China, but with “Made in USA” and copies of the US trademarks on them. With Gibsons, they’ve come to be called “Chibsons” and there are quite a few videos on YouTube by WhiteManistan dudes who’ve bought them. Unsurprisingly, Chibsons are made by Chinese salesmen gone off the range who’ve availed themselves of the training and parts available from Gibson’s licensed manufacturing of Epiphones in China.
They are not of the same quality at all as the domestic-made high-end models. But it doesn’t really matter because people who buy them know what they’re getting and seek them out, primarily because they are cheap copies, with infringed trademarks that look like the high end goods.
Fundamentally, you should not care if corporate America loses its intellectual property to China. It made that deal along with one to sell out American labor for the sake of shareholders long ago. What’s the morality or even reason to support intellectual property for domestic goods made for the upper tiers because that’s where the purchasing power is?
I say there’s a fairness in encouraging a global environment in which American corporates are increasingly ripped off. Sadly, it’s far from crisis level yet. And the idea that NSA, or the intelligence and defense structure be empowered to defend them is appalling, the equivalent of protecting the gold of kings in a feudal society.
(First published, in shorter form, on Facebook.)
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