09.13.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Rock 'n' Roll at 9:14 am by George Smith
Should’ve been a folk hit. But we’re not really into even letting a few eke out a few pebbles on social music, are we?
Friday music loud electric folk rock for modern raging inequality:
“Blessed are the job creators, ’cause they can always hire way more waiters.”
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what has happened.
Krugman, from today in the NYT, ‘Rich Man’s Recovery:’
“Basically, while the great majority of Americans are still living in a depressed economy, the rich have recovered just about all their losses and are powering ahead.”
Just published Piketty/Saez (UC Berkeley) data on inequality and the recovery of the super-wealthy after the Great Recession.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 8:45 am by George Smith
From a Clueless Old Fool Who Time Has Passed By, a LOL moment as he sends advice to “jihadis” he no longer has:
(Reuters) In an audio speech released online a day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 strikes, Ayman Zawahri said attacks ‘by one brother or a few of the brothers’ would weaken the U.S. economy by triggering big spending on security … ‘We should bleed America economically by provoking it to continue in its massive expenditure on its security, for the weak point of America is its economy, which has already begun to stagger due to the military and security expenditure …”
You’d laugh harder if work force participation weren’t the lowest since, well — ever, and there weren’t already 48 million Americans on food stamps due to our corporate Zawahiris.
No link.
Next week, a new issue of al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, with another special on how to set fires in national parks, urinate in ice machines at motels, yell “fire” in crowded theaters, and sneeze in salad bars when you have the flu this winter.
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09.11.13
Posted in Cancer at 1:29 pm by George Smith
It was two years ago — on 9/11 — that my friend Don was given a bad diagnosis.
Together with a friend we met at the Huntington Gardens to walk and talk and try to divine the future. This time of year brings fine weather to Pasadena. Today is just like then, exceptional, and it is a wonderful place to gather. And I will be outside this afternoon, looking at nature’s beauty.
We sat and talked about what was coming, having soft drinks, making contingency plans, imagining that at some point we’d get back to the gardens under better circumstances. But four months later he was dead.
We couldn’t tell there were no more chips to cash in, that time was almost gone. Hope was entertained and it was a good if very bittersweet day. We didn’t know it would never be the same again.
That’s my 9/11 anniversary memory. It has replaced the other one. It has more meaning.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:05 am by George Smith
Perfectly illustrating the daily attitudes of the Culture of Lickspittle in which all are against all for the sake of the top, Sandy Banks, one of the Los Angeles Times’ very well-compensated star pundits, on Monday, complaining about McDonald’s strikers wishing to double their take home:
Fast-food workers have become the current face of a resurging labor movement. Employees of fast-food restaurants in cities across the country have been striking, protesting and rallying for pay raises that would practically double their average hourly wage.
My heart is with the workers; the industry’s typical take-home pay leaves many stranded in poverty with no room for advancement.
But my mind rebels when I contemplate what a raise like that suggests about our priorities and the value of an educated populace.
How do you justify paying $15 an hour for someone to bag fries? That’s almost on par with the average hourly wage of a paramedic, whose job involves saving lives.
Banks makes six figures a year writing color and opinion columns for the Los Angeles Times. She is self-absorbed, apparently not realizing that you could easily rephrase her paragraph:
How do you justify paying $125,000 a year for someone to write whatever comes into their head once or twice a week? That’s almost on par with the average hourly wage four to five times the annual pay of a paramedic, whose job involves saving lives.
“I do applaud the audacity of the workers’ demands,” Banks adds. “We need to raise the national minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour, beyond even the $9 that President Obama is asking Congress to approve. And we ought to use this fast-food campaign to launch a public conversation about the link between corporate greed and the proliferation of low-paying jobs.”
And then she adds another gripe about the theoretical wage increase for fast-food workers — which hasn’t happened — using what her daughter earns as further context:
But we undercut our message that preparation matters when we pay the cashier at Carl’s Jr. more than my college-educated daughter earns teaching writing to low-income middle-school students — so they can go to college.
While she has made a point about the necessity of making a reasonably-priced college education for everyone, nowhere in her piece does she mention her own great good fortune, a rarity, in the modern American economy.
Perhaps an editor could have pointed this out. Perhaps one did and it made no difference because Sandy Banks is one of the winners, a star here in southern California. And no one tells our chosen anything. It’s they who do the telling.
In the business section of the Times, Monday, on Richard Trumka:
In a fiery speech Monday, the leader of the nation’s largest labor federation took aim at top American corporations and the U.S. Supreme Court, which he accused of waging a “war on democracy.”
Speaking to thousands of union members at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, President Richard Trumka denounced the “powerful forces in America today who want our country to be run by and for the rich.”
He singled out Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, saying “their whole business model is about keeping the people who work for them poor,” as well as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whom he called an “apostle of greed” for his efforts to limit collective bargaining by public employee unions.
Trumka’s scorching remarks came on the second day of a convention that he has sought to portray as a crucial turning point for a shrinking labor movement that has seen membership fall to just 11% of American workers, down from 35% in the 1950s.
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09.09.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 2:40 pm by George Smith
Today, more phlogiston on the “sharing economy” at the New Yorker, where swell James Suroweicki explains that in the new American economy, your possessions are your portfolio of assets.
If you’re dead broke, unemployed and on food stamps you still have a portfolio!
So start looking to see what’s in it: The couch (good to rent to other bums to sleep on), your bathtub and shower (for obvious rental and more esoteric purposes, like a containerized room for making shake-and-bake methamphetamine), etc!
You can rent out your home theatre or your lawnmower (although in soCal the latter would never work; the illegal gardener force has it covered much cheaper than any theoretical crowd-sourcing app to put spoiled white people in the 1 percent servant force in touch with others like them who wish to rent their’s).
No need to make so many consumer goods anymore. No need to buy them. Just use your smartphone to locate someone who will rent you stuff, stuff — like a hammer or a power drill or a pipe wrench — you used to use free by borrowing from a neighbor or a friend.
Now you fire up the ol’ iJunk, log on to some shnazzy-named site, find something to rent from a total stranger in the new economy, have a payment electronically taken from your account, get in the car to drive across town at rush hour to pick it up, bring it home and use it, then drive it back. All much better than getting to know someone, going next door and engaging in a bit of door-knocking.
And now if you’re shopping or strolling in my section of Pasadena and feel the urge you’ll find public toilets are few and far between. But I have leveraged the sharing economy to help you out.
You can activate your smartphone and with my app, almost instantly access Shidt, which locates my toilet in my apartment and notifies me you’ll be coming and going in a minute or two. It deducts a $2 fee automatically so all you have to do is knock, come right in, follow the arrows, do your thing in complete privacy and leave.
If you don’t like the experience you can give me a bad review on the Shidt trusted network because ratings on the Internet are the best way of judging all things.
Shidt is to semi-public restrooms what AirBnB is to the hospitality industry.
Shidt expands doing the business nationwide by instantly and frictionlessly using previously underutilized and hard-to-monetize personal assets. Shidt is now rapidly coming to most American urban centers. Since I invented it, a small ten percent transaction fee is deducted from all Schidt partners for use of this sharing network.
I got the idea from seeing all the business going on in the plastic outhouses trucked in for the Rose Bowl/Parade New Year’s holidays in Pasadena. They are impersonal and ugly, unsanitary, plus nobody likes them because the new breed of consumer wants a more customized and personalized business service experience.
And Shidt is that customized, personalized experience nationwide, disruptive toward the old doing the business model of the large and uncaring American corporation in charge of installing and maintaining portable sanitary facilities.
Already Shidt has 222,000 rentals worldwide, which is 5 times the capacity of public toilets in LA County.
The New Yorker:
“[Digital technology] has made it much easier for buyers and sellers to find each other quickly, and to evaluate the people they’re trading with. The effect has been to make sharing a much more plausible business model. We now have hundreds of millions of consumers who are carrying in their pockets powerful computers that are always connected to high-speed networks … That makes it possible for people to rethink the way they consume.???
Or in this case, Shidt!
(Next week, Tom Friedman is coming to interview me in Pasadena. We will drink strawberry lemonades at the Caltech Athenaeum & I will tell him all about Shidt.)
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09.07.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 4:40 pm by George Smith
What’s wrong with this picture? Rhetorical, obviously. Everything’s wrong, a visual argument for ending all DHS grants to urban and suburban police forces. This is national disgrace, in a photograph.
It’s major failure, a heavily-armed troop of police, one resembling a squad of US Marines, leading away a poverty-wage worker protesting at Wal-Mart in Seattle.
The US is a corporate fascist nation, one of a kind, preeminent in the world.
You have the freedom to shop and shut the fuck up.
If you don’t have the money to shop, you either remain silent or get arrested by heavily armed police for the temerity of imagining you were in a better place.
News sources estimated the arrests over the weekend at about 100, one week after Labor Day. That there is not more social unrest remains remarkable. Fear, a citizenry suffering from various degrees of Stockholm Syndrome.
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09.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 1:40 pm by George Smith
Why isn’t there more social unrest in America? That’s the trillion dollar question.
Increasing hunger is a policy goal of almost half the government legislative structure. And over the weekend there were editorials: Food stamps steal from the betters in American society.
The mantra is regular, always louder, unceasing. Hunger is not a problem to be addressed by the American government, moochers only take advantage. Paradoxically, the lowest wage providers of employment, the fastest growing parts of the economy, rely on pay made so miserly that workers must rely on food stamps.
The message, that financial aid to combat hunger needs elimination or trimming, is so often repeated, even one benighted man, out of work, dismissed from the economy and on the same benefits, talks about “moochers” in a NYT piece today:
As a self-described “true Southern man??? — and reluctant recipient of food stamps — Dustin Rigsby, a struggling mechanic, hunts deer, dove and squirrel to help feed his family …
[Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a man who could assuredly poison poison itself] advocates mandatory drug testing for food stamp recipients — a position that draws support from Mr. Rigsby, who dreams of becoming a game warden and said it irritated him to see people “mooch off the system.???
But when benefits drop in November, the Rigsbys, who say they receive about $350 a month, can expect $29 less.
Mr. Rigsby, certainly a mixed-up fool, “eats once a day,” says the Times. His ambition to become a game warden is nothing but a pipe dream in 2013 America. And one sees evidence of Stockholm Syndrome, where people have been so beaten by tormentors they’ve been traumatically bonded to them.
More excerpts:
In Dyer County [where the Rigsby families lives], it found, 19.4 percent of residents were “food insecure??? in 2011, compared with 16.4 percent nationwide …
In Washington, House Republicans propose cutting $40 billion more in food stamps over the next 10 years by imposing work requirements and eliminating waivers for some able-bodied adults. The cuts would push four million to six million low-income people, including millions of “very low-income unemployed parents??? who want to work but cannot find jobs, off the rolls, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning research organization.
But the arguments of Mr. Rector, the Heritage Foundation scholar, are gaining traction with Republicans on Capitol Hill. “I think food stamps have in the Republican mind become the symbol of an out-of-control, means-tested welfare state,??? Mr. Rector said.
A number of PARIAH covers have dealt with it. But this one will do today.
The Republican philosophy is a metastatic cancer on the nation. To adhere to its beliefs is to embrace death.
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09.02.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:58 am by George Smith
I’ve said it before. The American workplace and economy is about contempt for people. It is the oxygen on which our country runs.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. A lot of people get it:
In 1894 Pullman workers, facing wage cuts in the wake of a financial crisis, went on strike — and Grover Cleveland deployed 12,000 soldiers to break the union. He succeeded, but using armed force to protect the interests of property was so blatant that even the Gilded Age was shocked. So Congress, in a lame attempt at appeasement, unanimously passed legislation symbolically honoring the nation’s workers.
It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts — that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy — look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans …
You might ask why we should provide any aid to working Americans — after all, they aren’t completely destitute. But the fact is that economic inequality has soared over the past few decades, and while a handful of people have stratospheric incomes, a far larger number of Americans find that no matter how hard they work, they can’t afford the basics of a middle-class existence — health insurance in particular, but even putting food on the table can be a problem. Saying that they can use some help shouldn’t make us think any less of them, and it certainly shouldn’t reduce the respect we grant to anyone who works hard and plays by the rules.
But obviously that’s not the way everyone sees it. In particular, there are evidently a lot of wealthy people in America who consider anyone who isn’t wealthy a loser — an attitude that has clearly gotten stronger as the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else has widened. And such people have a lot of friends in Washington.
And so, the anti-labor Labor Day thing, from Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute, a poor man’s right wing Heritage Foundation:
Since 2009, the Fair Labor Standards Act has dictated that the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Some people think that’s too low; others think it’s too high. But it turns out that, in 35 states, it’s a better deal not to work—and instead, to take advantage of federal welfare programs—than to take a minimum-wage job. That’s the takeaway from a new study published by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes of the Cato Institute.
“The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work,??? Tanner and Hughes write in their new paper. “Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit,??? which offers extra subsidies to low-income workers who take work. “In 13 states [welfare] pays more than $15 per hour??? …
Obamacare is doing much to make it harder for Americans to find work, especially full-time work. At the same time, the aging of the Baby Boomers and the growth in welfare payments is making it easier for Americans to give up on looking for work. If we do nothing, this won’t end well.
Yes, on Labor Day, a report issued by right-wing libertarian dbags on how Obamacare will make the country into a nation of parasites.
Adding a note of reality, I don’t have health insurance. So it’s really great to read the true American spirit in full flower on Labor Day:
Extending health care to people will make them welfare bums, proven by a libertarian report.
In my lifetime, this country will fail because of the triumph of such oh so Christian sentiment.
A collection of heart-warming recommendations:
At the National Review, the problem in our country is not that jobs pay too little, it’s that people are ashamed to take poor-paying jobs! Quote: “On the recent National Review cruise in Norway, I was very happy to hear Ralph Reed use a word that the public faces of the Republican party use too infrequently: poverty … Politicians used to talk about having ‘a job for every man who wants one,’ but there are many men who do not seem to want jobs, or at least such jobs as are available to them.”
From the Waterbury, CT, newspaper, food aid to the working poor is bad: “Labor Day, a day for celebrating the hard work of millions of Americans, should serve as a reminder to politicians of their duty to use tax dollars prudently. There is no excuse for recklessly spending the money of people devoted to making better lives for themselves and their families. A prominent example of reckless spending is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the food-stamp program.”
From the same paper, citation of another libertarian dbag “study” by an “institute” that only exists to provide comment that the minimum wage is bad: “A recent study from the Washington, D.C.,-based Employment Policies Institute concluded that over the last 20 years, minimum-wage increases consistently have led to job losses.”
At a Minneapolis newspaper, a 70-year old white man’s get-off-my-lawn anti-Labor rant: “So what are we doing to solve this labor-income problem? It seems we are taking a very dangerous route, that of entitlements. Entitlement growth per capita has been nearly twice as fast as income growth per capita for the last 50 years (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. census). Entitlements have grown from 7.8 percent in 1969 to 17.6 percent in 2009. I’m sure it’s gotten even worse in the last four years. We’ve got to not only stop the trend but try to reverse it with more people working …One of the most important lessons [we] should teach is how to work; if the kids want money, they’d better work for it. For most of us, only work produces wealth and money … Let’s save public assistance for the truly needy, the blind, the lame … ”
And at the end he talk about the two “interns” who worked for free for him this summer.
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09.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 8:55 am by George Smith
From the 27th , here:
Labor Day, as defined at the DoL: “The first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.???
I look forward to the expostulations and op-eds we get this time of year: Anti-labor and anti-union essays, bits on right-to-work-for-less, tributes to the biggest corporations for their innovation in trimming the workforce & making work not pay …
From one of TIME’s six figure explainers, a backhanded stealth piece that successfully delivers the implication that being hard on labor makes our country better, more successful:
Will you be barbecuing this Labor Day, or slaving away at the office? According to new survey data from Bloomberg BNA and Beyond.com, many Americans will have the somewhat ironic pleasure of laboring on the day that’s meant to commemorate the “social and economic achievements of the American worker.???
Bloomberg BNA data shows that 39 percent of employers will keep operations open …
So do we benefit at all from working so much more than our developed peers …?
If employers are required to give a worker a lot of time off, that worker is going to produce less. All else equal, this will make the worker less valuable to an employer, and lower his pay. In this time of over-indebtedness, both among citizens and the government, it hardly makes sense to enact restrictions on how much people are allowed to work, as it’s only through work that we’ll lower these debts …
Furthermore, apart from a few small outlying countries, American workers are the most productive in the world. Since that’s the case, we must be doing something right. Many economists believe our relative productivity is a product of having fewer restrictions on businesses, like requiring paid time off.
The debate over paid time off is actually quite similar to that over the minimum wage. After all, vacation time is just another form of compensation. Logically, requiring employers to give vacation time is going to decrease pay, and increase unemployment on the margin.
You can tell you’re dealing with the common journalist/asshole with the first sentence and the phrase: “slaving away at the office.”
Most people working over the weekend are not in the office.
They’re at Wal Mart, McDonald’s and retail, all in the rapidly expanding poverty-wage end of the economy.
This, from a piece published in a newspaper in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is — ahem — timely:
[23 million Americans] are either out of work or markedly underemployed, nearly 50 million are on food stamps, a fourth of our children are living below the poverty level, millions of jobs having been shipped off to nations with lower labor costs, and our elected leaders have been doing very little to effectively support the labor side of America’s wealth-creating equation.
The question we really ought to be asking is: Why isn’t this a day of national mourning instead of a celebration? After all, what do most workers, or those who want to work, really have to celebrate?
Since the majority of Americans can no longer honestly celebrate labor during this holiday, perhaps we ought to more properly rename it Shopper’s Day, Crony Capitalism Day or the One Percent Labor Beneficiary Day.
“Slaving away at the office.” — TIME
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