Lance Mannion

Snob

Don’t tell Rick Santorum on this guy:

Tony Lee always dreamed of owning his own business and sending his kids to college. Today, he's co-owner of Ring Masters, a company that makes engine rings for industrial use, and his daughter is heading to college next fall. Tony is hoping she'll be the first college graduate in the family.

Actually, this is a great story, if you can ignore the reporter’s boosterish rah-rah tone that seems to imply that creating five jobs makes up for the loss of thousands. 

Janitor Turns Owner Rescues Failing Ohio Factory.

It’s our own fault for not being happy with our Happy Meals

AP had a story the other day about Baby Boomers putting off retirement and reconciling themselves to having to work till they drop.

The story, by John Rogers, looked at some of the reasons behind this, although taking the usual business reporting tone of “These things happen, what are you going to do?” as if the financial collapse that wiped out retirement savings was an act of God and not the result of a massive act of collective theft, fraud, and criminal incompetence and as if there’s no government that could do anything to salvage things, which, effectively, there isn’t, but still.  That was annoying enough, but then, in surveying the decline in manufacturing that has taken place throughout the Boomers’ working lives, Rogers wrote this:

At the same time, companies began moving other jobs overseas, to be filled by people willing to work for far less and still able to connect to the U.S. market in real time.

Did you catch that phrasing?

“…filled by people willing to work for far less”

Willing?  Willing?

And far less?  As in how far less?  Subsistence level wages?  Starvation wages?  Essentially no wages, only rudimentary bed and board?

How about telling it as it is, like this:

Companies began moving as many jobs as they could overseas to places where people were so desperate they would work for pretty much slave wages, to countries where people of all ages, including children, could be forced to work till they dropped.

And like this:

At the same time, corporations at home decided it wasn’t worth the money to expand, innovate, or retool when they could increase profits by laying off workers, keeping wages down, shuttering factories, buying up the competition, with the goal of eventually cannibalizing themselves or selling themselves off to other cannibal corporations.

If the words Bain and Mitt just popped into your head, good.

Now maybe Rogers was just being lazy and not thinking about his phrasing or maybe he was being over-fussy in an attempt to be “balanced” and acknowledging that not every job that leaves the United States goes to China.

But I hear something else in that paragraph.  The voice of the collective wisdom of the corporate elite and their flunkeys and apologists in Washington and the political press corps.

That voice speaks in a condescending and accusatory tone and says:

Shut up and stop whining.  It’s your own fault anyway.

You’re the ones who bought houses you really couldn’t afford.  You’re the ones who didn’t save enough.  You’re the ones who didn’t invest in yourselves by going to college.  You’re the ones who took jobs that didn’t make you rich and that you should have foreseen we were going to decide were inessential.  You’re the ones who demanded benefits that are just not worth paying you.

Blaming the poor for their poverty is an old, old trick of the aristocracy.  But because it sounds harsh and because it admits that there is such a thing as poverty, another trick is to guilt-trip the poor in a different way by telling them to count their blessings.

Look at how well off you are, comparatively.  You could be living in one of those countries we’ve moved your old jobs to where you’d be wearing rags and living in squalor.  So be thankful for your flat screen TV and your one dinner out a month at McDonalds.  There are children working themselves into an early grave in China who would think you’re rich.

Like I said, I don’t know if Rogers was just being sloppy or over-fussy, but intentionally or not he echoes the voice of the 1%.  That voice doesn’t shout, but it doesn’t mumble.  It speaks in smug, confident tones it thinks are reasonable and persuasive but have the unmistakable sound of the lord of the manor lecturing the village folk on how they need to remember their place.  And more and more lately that voice isn’t just directed at the poor.  The middle class have been coming in for a scolding as well.

The Boomers’ big mistake was trusting their future to a system they expected to do for them what it had done for their parents and grandparents (although, because it was Morning in America, at less cost) but which had been reprogrammed by a greedy and conscienceless few who believed other people exist only to be used to serve their needs and increase their wealth.

That’s just the way it is, these things happen, nothing to be done about it, and if it means that most of us have to spend our golden years pushing brooms or bagging groceries, well, at least we have the consolation of knowing we’re not as bad off as those children in China and we can stop off at McDonalds on our way home from work we’re damn lucky to have to pick up a Value Meal to eat while watching the flat screen TV that only has ten payments left on it until it’s ours.

The Donald contextualizes the Mitten

Last week Mitt Romney took some flak for saying, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”  He’s still taking it.

Good.

But I don’t think that was the only dumb thing he said last week.

“I’m so honored and pleased to have his endorsement…”

Actually, I can understand why the Mitten didn’t reject the Donald’s endorsement.  That would have taken courage.  But why did he appear with him?  What good did he think it would do him to have Donald Trump’s picture following him into November?

Doesn’t he already have the rich asshole vote locked up?

Mitt’s miffed because he thinks people are taking his remark about the very poor “out of context.”

Ok.  Here’s what he said, in “context.”

I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor — we have a safety net there.  If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.

Ok, Mitt.  In that context it’s still a dumb thing to say.  If you’re very poor you’re not fine.  You’re poor.  Very poor. That means no money.  No money for food. No money for medicine.  No money for rent.  If you’re very poor the safety net, if you’re lucky and it catches you, keeps you from starving and freezing to death out of doors.  At best the net saves you from becoming worse than not fine.  Mitt seems to think if it catches you you bounce up like a circus performer and land right back on that middle class tightrope you were walking.

Mitt wants us to look at the whole of what he said.  Fine.

But as Paul Krugman points out, the whole of what he said is a lie.  The safety does need to be repaired and Mitt has no intention of fixing it.  Just the opposite.  His proposed economic plan pretty much slices it to ribbons.

Also, while we’re at it.  Mitt went on to say that he’s not concerned about the very rich either, because “they’re doing just fine.”  But, again as Krugman points out, that’s a lie too, because if Mitt thinks the very rich are doing fine and are not worth his concern, why is he promising to shower them with money if he gets to the White House?

Mitt forgets---or he hopes we’ll forget---that everything candidates say on the stump is part of the larger context of their campaign.  Everything they say is by extension and implication and design a reiteration of everything else they’ve said, proposed, and promised.  

The larger context for Mitt is this:  He’s running for the Republican nomination for President.  Republicans don’t like the safety net.  They don’t think it’s a net.  They think it’s a king-sized, top of the line Sealy Posturepedic mattress with linen sheets and piled high with down comforters in a if not four-star hotel then a very nice Best Western with complimentary breakfasts and if you let the poor climb into it and settle under the covers they will never want to climb out.

There are no Eisenhowers left in the GOP. No Rockefellers. No Fiorello LaGuardias.  No Everett Dirksens. No Howard Bakers. No George Romneys.

It’s getting to the point that there’s no place for any Ronald Reagans.

Once upon a time Republicans believed it was their job to look out for business interests while taking care of the whole country.

These days they believe that advancing corporate interests is taking care of the whole country or the whole of it that matters.

Once upon a time there were Republicans who stood up for Civil Rights.

These days Republicans on all fronts are working furiously to take away rights, from gays, from women, from black and brown-skinned Americans.  The Republican base seethes with anger and hatred directed towards anyone who is not by their narrow definition US.  They have made it plain that they think of millions and millions of their fellow Americans as THEM, as the enemy.

And Mitt wants their votes.  And he has shown over and over and over that he will do or say anything to get them.

He demagogues every chance he gets.  He lies and then he lies again and when he feels that wasn’t enough he tells an even bigger lie.  He has repudiated everything he ever stood for before he started running for President in 2008.  He has repudiated everything productive he did as governor of Massachusetts.  It’s gotten to the point where he’s practically written those four years out of his resume.  His main qualification for President, as he wants us to see it, is that he started a business that made him a pile of money.

“Vote for me cuz I’m a really rapacious rich guy with no conscience!”

And he’s done all this---debased himself, dishonored his father’s memory, insulted the intelligence of the majority of the electorate that is not made up of Right Wing yahoos and corporate greedheads and their flunkeys---to serve one single, low purpose.  To get himself elected President.

That’s it.  That’s all he stands for.  Money and self-aggrandizement.  That is the context of what he said.

And in that context, chumming up with Donald Trump makes all the sense in the world.

Photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the New York Times.

The discounted life in Mitt World

There’s got to be more to life than making it possible for a few people to pocket gobs of money while the rest of us are required to feel grateful that thanks to them we’re saving 50 cents on a bottle of shampoo.

Mitt in context

Looking forward to reading a lot of earnest well-meaning commentary about how when Mitt said he likes to fire people he didn't mean it.

Ha.

Hard to feel a guy like Mitt is suffering a great unfairness here, considering he’s gotten to the point where he can’t go five minutes without telling an outrageous lie and he’s proud of an ad that takes something Barack Obama said about John McCain wildly out of context to use against him.

Still he didn’t mean to say he likes to fire people, generally, just people who offer a service he’s decided he doesn’t want anymore, specifically health insurance.

Of course what he actually meant shows him to be clueless about how health insurance works/doesn't work for most Americans.

Most of us can’t “fire” our health insurance company, whether we’d like doing it or not, because…

A.) Many of us don’t have an insurance company to fire.

B.)  Many of us who do can’t afford to hire a better one.

C.) Most of us who do are locked into the insurance we have because it’s picked for us by the company we work for, which isn’t much interested in whether we’re happy with it or not only in whether or not it’s costing them more money than they think we’re worth to insure.

The only people who can just up and fire their insurance company are rich people.

So if Mitt wants his words placed in that context, which is “Gee, isn’t it great to be a self-satisfied rich asshole like me,” fine.

But the fact is he DOES like to fire people. He apparently enjoyed his time at Bain and thinks he did the world good there.

The most authentically conservative thing about Mitt is his belief that most people are expendable in the cause of making rich people richer.

In that cause, firing people gives him the same satisfaction as a car owner gets replacing old spark plugs.

Or a real estate developer tearing down a neighborhood to put up a high-end shopping mall.

To a predator like Mitt people are either tools, resources, or costs to be used, exploited, or reduced.

Firing people is how it's done. So, yes, Mitt likes to fire people.

So unless you're going to explain how he's callous and out of touch on health insurance and he made millions of bucks firing people for fun and profit, please…

Spare us the concern trolling about context.

Adapted from my Twitter feed. Thanks to Brad DeLong for the link to Aaron Carroll’s post.

Barista health care

The broken barista’s replacement has shown up and her mother has taken her away, but before leaving she and the manager got into a little discussion with a customer about why they work here at Famous Overpriced Coffee, the customer having assumed that they were there for the famous overpriced coffee and candy drinks and pastries.

It turns out that the broken barista doesn’t like coffee.  She doesn’t like tea either.  She doesn’t like hot chocolate even.  And the pastries are the devil’s work and she resists temptation as staunchly as she can.

She works here because Famous Overpriced Coffee offers health insurance.

The manager is here because she was between jobs, as they say when they are in no mood to talk about how they lost their last job.  Friday’s her last day here though.  She has a new job, which she took just because the company offers halfway decent health care.

She tells the inquisitive customer, “I don’t care what they have me doing.  They can ask me to don anything and I’ll do it, for that.”

In case you were wondering why Republicans hate the idea of public health care even though the system we have costs businesses pots and pots of money they’d rather spend on other things---desperate, frightened, and therefore obedient and compliant employees.

Free the money!

The quotable Atrios feels the need to be redundant:

I know I'm repeating myself on this issue. It's because people's brains freeze up a bit when you talk about the central bank creating money and handing it out. But that's what they're doing! They're just not doing it in a way which benefits people broadly, they're doing it in a way which benefits rich assholes.

All horseplayers---and stockbrokers?---die broke

Maybe I’ve been reading too many Damon Runyon stories lately, but these people sound as compulsive, superstitious, and as addicted to the rush and prone to magical thinking as gamblers, although, of course, in a real way, that’s what they are.

It is hard to fall back asleep once the adrenaline from trading starts pumping. Even so, Mr. Gorman said it was worth the price:“You can’t get the same feel for market psychology looking back at the charts in the morning as when you are up,” he added.---trader Craig Gorman, explaining why he gets up in the dead of night to check on what the European markets are doing, quoted in an article in the New York Times, Awakening to the Glow of a Bloomberg Terminal.

Hat tip to Atrios.  Photo by Marcus Yam for the New York Times.

Going Joad

You’d think conservatives would hate The Grapes of Wrath as much as liberals hate Atlas Shrugged.  More, because Steinbeck’s novel is well-written and bears more than a passing acquaintance with economic and political realities and truths about human nature.

Imagine how much more you’d dislike Atlas Shrugged if you actually liked it and had to admit it was a good novel?  If Rand could write like this?:

A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn.  a day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts.  The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way.  Now the wind grew strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields.  Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away.  The wind grew stronger.  The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke.  The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing sound.  The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the darkening sky.

Plus, the movie version is a bone fide classic and you don’t have to pay people to go see it.

But over at Whiskey Fire, Thers has found a conservative recommending Steinbeck.

To the unemployed.

As a self-help manual?

Meanwhile, some people are acting on their frustrations and blaming the wrong people for their trouble. Instead of doing something about their problem, they wait for the government to act, or try to get someone to do something for them.

Instead, what they ought to do is start brainstorming and start a business. If you are an unskilled laborer, it may seem like there are no opportunities. But, there are if you move to where the jobs are. In the 1930′s and 1940′s, there were several great migrations in the United States. The migration from the Great Plains to California was captured in the John Steinbeck novel about the Joad family. Many families moved from the rural south to the industrialized north for work. Just because you have lived your whole life in one area of the country doesn’t mean you are stuck there.

To which, Thers responds:

Yes, the Joads packed up and left the Dust Bowl heading due north, only to arrive in Silicon Valley, where, as Steinbeck so eloquently recounts in that novel he wrote, they invented the iPhone.

(Roy Edroso---and a tip of the hat to him for alerting me to Thers’ post---terms this advice Going Joad.)

The post is by Jeff Carter.  No, not the hockey star.  No, not the professional bowler, either.  This Jeff Carter describes himself as an “independent speculator [who has been trading] since 1988”.  Presumably he’s made money at it because he’s invited to come on TV from time to time to tell other people how to make money “speculating.”  But, you know, just because you’re sharp enough to know what to look for when buying a car, that doesn’t mean you know how to design and build one.

Carter doesn’t just write about how to buy a car.  He gives instructions about how they should be designed and built---that is, he pontificates about history and economics, subjects on which he is less than sharp.

We’re dealing with someone who seems to think carpenters are unskilled laborers.

And plumbers and electricians and painters and masons and glaziers---anyone who works building houses.

Skilled labor, by his lights, includes people with college and graduate degrees, who at one time would not have been defined as labor at all.  But this is ok.  He’s doing the Occupy Movement’s work here, helping to point out that from the view of would-be serf-owners like the Koch brothers, we’re all labor now---cheap and disposable labor.

Maybe I’m giving him too much benefit of the doubt in supposing he’s just a pompous, self-congratulating ignoramus.  He is, after all, a corporate apologist, and dismissing carpentry as a skill is a good piece of corporatist propaganda, encouraging a certain breed of “skilled labor”---the overpaid skimmers on Wall Street---in their contempt for people who do real hard work.

At any rate, his gloss on The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t just show that if ever even opened the novel he stopped reading before the Joads arrive at the migrant camp.  It shows he stopped reading after the first sentence of the Cliff Notes.

To go after everything he gets wrong about Grapes of Wrath and about the economic conditions the novel grew out would be to rewrite the book.   But in getting the novel wrong he gets the economic conditions of today wrong too or, more likely, he cheerfully ignores them.

(He gets history wrong too.  Unlike the Joads’ flight west from the Dustbowl, the south to north migration he refers to was largely an African-American story and people weren’t just moving north for jobs in the factories there---the South was industrializing at the same time, although more slowly---they were trying to leave behind Jim Crowe.  I’d recommend he read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, but we’ve already established he doesn’t read.)

The Joads don’t leave Oklahoma because they’re fired with the entrepreneurial spirit.  They leave because they’ve been kicked out.  They and their neighbors are tenant farmers.  They don’t own the land they work.  They don’t own the crops they raise.  They don’t even own the little houses in which they live and that they call home.  Their feeling that they do is sentimental and illusory but up until the point where the novel begins it's been sustained by a deal with the actual owners that allows the owners to keep most of the (small) profits from the crops and the tenant farmers to keep their dignity and sense of self-worth.  But now the owners can’t afford to honor the deal anymore.  They’re having trouble making ends meet themselves and are under pressure from the banks that, Steinbeck implies, are the real owners of the land and of, well, everything.

Steinbeck, of course, is sympathetic to the Joads’ plight but he makes it clear that they’ve been unwittingly helping perpetuate a system that exploits them.  The trouble is that in leaving Oklahoma for California, they are going from bad to worse.  At least under the tenant system they were farmers.  They did work and had skills and a store of knowledge that the owners were obliged to respect and value.  In California, they’re hired hands, cheap and disposable unskilled labor.

Any Americans who took Carter’s advice and went Joad would be putting themselves into competition for jobs and pay with migrant workers.  Admittedly, some Republicans talk as if they expect Americans to take on the jobs illegal immigrants now do but won’t be able to do once we get the fence built and the drones are flying.  But this ain’t gonna happen.

Unemployed carpenters going to work picking grapes, I mean.  We’ll see about the fence and the drones.

There’s more to it, though.  Packing up and hitting the road for where the jobs are is a reasonable course of action.  In fact, people do it every day.  But it’s not easy to do and it’s harder for some than for others.  It depends on what the jobs are in those places where there are jobs and it depends on what you’re leaving behind and how able and willing you are to leave it.

The Joads leave nothing behind and have nothing to hold them back because they own nothing and are invested in nothing but their memories and their own self-respect.  An unemployed carpenter might very well own a house he can’t sell.  His wife might very well have her own job she doesn’t dare give up.  They and their family are emotionally invested in their neighborhood and town, but although breaking those ties bears a psychological cost, the real problem with leaving is that it costs money to buy into a new town and neighborhood and the carpenter’s family is probably already deeply in hock.  The Joads fit all they owned on the back of their truck and it costs them only the price of gas to get to California.  How many of us own only as much as will fit in their car’s trunk?  Who’ll pay for the movers?  Who’ll pay for storage?  Suggesting that if they stay put they should start their own business isn’t necessarily bad advice, but it’s cheap and facile if it doesn’t also come with advice on how to finance the start-up.  Banks aren’t in a very giving mood these days. 

But, you know, I don’t believe Carter believes that any of the “unskilled” he’s offering this advice will read his post.  He’s really writing to people he flatters as “skilled” labor.  And he’s doing it as part of his job as a corporatist propagandist.  He’s writing to encourage these readers’ contempt for people who are down on their luck and to make sure that any of these readers who are worried about the state of their own “luck” will feel bad about themselves and blame themselves if their luck gives out so they won’t go looking for the government to help them out.

The default psychological state of the Right has always been paranoia.  Right Wingers are afraid that someone is going to take it all away from them, their money, their property, their status, their sense of self-worth (all of which tend to be bound up together) and so they have to be constantly on their guard.  They live in fear.  It starts with their religion.  They live in terror that their irritable and vindictive God will withdraw his love.

Those who aren’t overtly religious in this way subscribe to various forms of social Darwinism.  Nature is all about the survival of the fittest and that leads them to worrying about their own fitness to survive.  Any slipping in wealth or status, any evidence that someone is taking it away from them, suggests that they are not among the fittest.  Which to them means the same as inferior and therefore disposable.

So they are constantly on the lookout for signs they are still God’s or nature’s favorites, and they usually find it not in their own lives but in the lives of others who have clearly lost favor or who deserve to.  This is why they scapegoat the poor and the unemployed.  This is their prayer of appeasement to heaven:  Look over there, at them!  They’re the ones!  Punish them! They screwed up.  They failed.  They have earned your displeasure and your wrath.

There’s always a they.

They lost their jobs because they weren’t as smart and savvy and on top of things as you and they can’t get new jobs because they aren’t trying, aren’t thinking, aren’t willing to take the risks you would take if it it happens to you, which it won’t, because you’d try and you’d think and you’d take the risks, but, you know, if…

Carter posted his nonsense at Town Hall where it’s no doubt been pored over by the regular apocalyptic reactionaries who read that blog for signs and portents that their world is coming to an end but they, the righteous, shall be saved by their hatreds and anger, most of whom, I suspect, even if they qualify as skilled labor by Carter’s definition, are far from rich and not on their way there and own no more stock than what’s in their shrunken 401ks.   They read Carter’s posts because it makes them feel successful to be in the know.  But Carter has it cross-posted on his blog, Points and Figures, where it might get read by real investors and entrepreneurs and bankers and business people, that is by reasonably intelligent people who actually read.  And I like to think that some of them might be inspired to read The Grapes of Wrath and I get a kick out of imagining them wrestling with passages like this, especially if the last book they read was Atlas Shrugged:

Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.  And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves.  Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some of them were afraid, and some of them worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.  If a bank or finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank---or the Company---needs—wants---insists---must have---as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.  These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time.  Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters…

Or maybe they’ll at least watch the movie and see what it really means to go Joad:

There are lies, damned lies, and then there’s “balance”

You’ve probably noticed I have a penchant for car metaphors when I get worked up about the Republicans and the economy.  (So does the President.)  So, naturally, I got a kick out of a good one from John Cole over at Balloon Juice.

For some reason, PolitiFact insists that the Democrats are lying when they say the Republicans want to get rid of Medicare, even though the Republicans have boasted that this is what they intend to do and have even voted to do it.  No matter how often it’s been pointed out by smart people like Paul Krugman (and me) that PolitiFact is just plain wrong, PolitiFact has stuck with their story.  Recently they listed the Democrats’ truthful warning as a finalist for lie of the year.

Which sent John to his garage to haul out:

The PolitiFact stuff really is amazing, especially for a group that normally does good work. Here’s what is happening:

America turns off the lights, goes to bed, leaving their Mercedes in the driveway. While we sleep, the Republicans sneak into the car, drive it off, and sell it, but they keep the Mercedes hood ornament. They then split the proceeds between their rich buddies, and go out and find a Ford Pinto up on cinderblocks in a field, with the grass growing through the floorboard. They place that in the driveway, cleverly glue the Mercedes ornament onto the front of the Pinto, and sneak off into the night. The next morning, America and Democrats are screaming- “What the hell happened to my car.” Republicans say- “What are you talking about, there is your Mercedes right there, we just modernized it and fixed it up a bit for long-term financial stability,” and point at the Pinto.

Then, the rocket scientists at Politifact drive by to take a non-partisan look at things, see the Mercedes symbol on the front of the car, and tell us all we’re lying about the Republicans stealing our Mercedes.

As Krugman says in the post John links to, if this is how PolitiFact’s going to handle things, by reaching for “balance,” voters can’t count on any help from the rest of the political media to deal with the onslaught of Republican lies.

_____________________

From Lance’s wrecking yard:

Car Talk with Congressman Paul Ryan.

The Crash.

This is the best of all possible worlds---keep that in mind while you’re enjoying your cat food supper

In another attempt to prove that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, Dr Pangloss of Harvard University writes in the New York Times that the fact that most of us can no longer look forward to a comfortable retirement and have to face the prospect of working till we drop is quite possibly a very good thing.

Dr P is Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard, who has written a book with the very Panglossian title Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, which makes me think he’s an expert at looking on the bright side of life.  I should refer to him as Professor G, but since he reduces a generation on the brink of a financially insecure old age to a cartoon he calls Dr B. Boomer, I figure he won’t mind if I reduce him to a literary caricature.

Dr P is quite chipper on behalf of Dr B. Boomer, a sixty-five year old dentist he’s invented who has to keep filling teeth and fitting dentures for years to come because she can’t sell her house in this market and the crash of ‘08 devastated her portfolio.  Working deep into her old age will be good for her and good for the economy, asserts Dr P.

Dr P seems to think that the collapse of the economy was just one of those things, like a tornado or a hurricane, nothing could’ve been done to prevent it, nothing to be done now, we just have to learn to live among the ruins and make the best of it, and Dr P is happy to assure us that there is a best to be made, even if he’s never quite specific about what that best is.

It doesn’t cross his mind that a lot of people’s retirement savings were essentially stolen from them by banksters playing dangerous games with our money.  He also appears never to have heard about wage stagnation or how the country’s wealth is being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few.  And he never stops to think about how corporations managed to convince politicians that real pensions should be replaced by opening tabs at the casinos for banksters and giving them workers’ savings to play with.

He acknowledges that some people can’t keep working at their current jobs into old age---coal miners, for instance---but he has no suggestions about how they’re to support themselves afterwards.  He just seems to assume they’ll find something.  All the other old people will just keep plugging happily and profitably away.  He seems confident that companies will be glad to keep all these elderly workers on the payroll until they drop.  He’s not all concerned that for a lot of people working until they drop means working until they drop in the aisle at Wal-Mart or behind the counter at McDonald’s.

By now you’ve guessed I don’t have a lot of patience for Dr P’s optimism.  But this is the bit that really steamed me.  Pangloss---Glaeser---thinks we’re going to be just fine with this:

The United States has always had a Calvinist backbone. We’ve long been comfortable with shorter vacations and longer workweeks. In this light, the mid-20th century retirement boom seems like something of an aberration. In a sense, the current rise in the working elderly is a reversion to form…

Sorry, no.  This is a cynically manipulative lie in the form of flattery apologists for the owner class tell to make workers feel bad about feeling bad about working long hours and long years with few breaks and little money.  We’ve had to put up with long workweeks and short vacations because the owners and bosses, who give themselves nice long vacations and take off from work any time they want, are greedy and exploitive.

The reason we don’t work more, that we don’t put in twelve to fifteen hours days, seven days a week, that some of us have paid vacations and can take sick days without fear of getting fired, that there are such things as pensions and retirements is that workers, far from being stoic Calvinists comfortable with their own exploitation, have fought for shorter work days and work weeks and weekends off, for higher pay and decent health care and the prospect of secure if not luxurious retirements.

This is not the best of all possible worlds, but it could be a lot worse if we listen to Dr P.

The crash

Here’s what happened to the economy in 2008.

We gave the keys to the family car to a gang of wild teenagers who ought never have been issued licenses.  They roared off, texting and drinking as they drove, playing chicken with every oncoming truck, taking hairpin turns on two wheels, and eventually driving right off a cliff they knew was up ahead.

But after they crawled out of the wreckage with only a few scratches the insurance agent came along and paid them twice the book value on our car while we were left to fix the thing ourselves with no money pay to pay for it.

And now while we’re making do with cheap rentals or walking or taking the bus to work, they’re tooling around in shiny new SUVs and sulking behind the wheel because the government wants to lower the speed limit by 5 or 10 miles an hour, raise the gas tax by a penny, and make them promise to put their smart phones away while driving and they’re blaming us because they’re not having as much fun as they were having just before they drove off that cliff.

Why you don’t need me anymore

Cuz you got Charles Pierce blogging at Esquire.

Sinecured New York Times columnist David Brooks, loafing his way through another space-filler for the op-ed page, sees the silver-lining in the bankrupting of the American middle class---we’re relearning the virtues of thrift, prudence, and temperance, “trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system”---and Pierce pounces:

What American capitalism knows about "moral norms" is that they are for other people. The people who did all the real damage are not in any way interested in "repairing the economic moral fabric" that "is the essential national task right now." They are interested in keeping the money they stole and in stealing as much more of it as they can. But David Brooks is far more concerned with some guy, sitting around his kitchen table, bills up to his elbows, who decides that, in the interest of the "economic moral fabric" of the country, he won't take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese tonight on the family MasterCard. Congratulations, good and faithful servant, says David Brooks, and orders another brandy.

Read all of Pierce’s post, David Brooks Does Not Get the Moral Norm of Being Broke.

h/t Steve Jobs

More notes from Occupy Wall Street. Wednesday, October 5, 2011. Hated to have to say so long to my marching comrades Tom Watson, Lindsay Beyerstein, and company, as soon as our contingent set foot in Liberty Park, but I had to dash to catch my bus home.  While I was dashing, they strolled over to a bar on Fulton Street to rest and recuperate and sort out their impressions of the day.  They’d barely settled down with their drinks when the news flashed on the TV screen over the bar.

Steve Jobs had died.

There was CNBC announcing the sad death of America's most successful (and indeed, truly beloved) capitalist, the man most responsible for an explosion in portable digital entertainment. In the watering hole of the neighborhood that can safely be described as the backyard of the New York Federal Reserve, our gaggle of technophiles gasped aloud at the news. At the table there were a couple of iPhones and one majestic iPad - that sleek George Jetson consumer device that seems straight out of Vonnegut to me - along with the usual sad copycattish Android screens (including my own). To Twitter we did go, like we're supposed to.

Meanwhile, I was hearing the news as our bus bounced its rattletrap way onto the Monsignor Deegan Expressway from a fellow rider reading it off her smart phone and I can’t tell you how hard I was kicking myself for having left my iPad at home or how frustrated I’d have been if I’d had it with me but had to wait to reach our rest stop an hour up 87 to get online.

Tom immediately made the connections between Steve Jobs’ life’s work and Occupy Wall Street, the obvious ones: that the protests here, and in the cities it spreads to, have been organized and coordinated on devices built to transport information electronically and instantly that exist mainly because of Steve Jobs; that the hedge fund managers and bankers whose control of the economy Occupy Wall Street has come together to challenge are as dependent on what Jobs accomplished as the protesters---try separating a broker from her smart phone; that the coverage of the occupation and today’s march and the arrests that would come that night, along with the gathering and delivery of the news of every kind from everywhere, including the news of Jobs’ own death, was carried out via technology that Jobs pioneered, developed, or made commercially viable and nearly universally available, and every news story, blog post, Facebook status update, tweet, and text message should probably conclude with h/t S. Jobs.

But Tom also picked up on the ironic connection.

The news of Steve Jobs' death at 56 flashed on the television screen above my head in a neighborhood bar on Fulton Street, about five blocks from the spot where cops were swinging their truncheons at the subset of protesters who were trying to invade the holy shrine that is the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets, a  symbolic corner that represents the American public stock markets that made Jobs a billionaire.

Jobs and his partners got rich selling computers, but they got really rich selling pieces of the company that made those computers. A lot of people lined up and continue to line up to buy into Apple.  What made Jobs a billionaire was the price of the stock he owned.  Jobs and Apple are creatures of the stock market as much as any modern corporation and its CEO are and its not stretching it too far to say that over the course of time Wall Street has ended up helping to finance and equip its own occupation.

Tom notes one more connection, which might be best described in terms of a generational disconnect.  Most of the people behind Occupy Wall Street and the occupations of everywhere else are just young enough to take Steve Jobs and his achievements for granted.

“Apple,” Tom writes, “is the exceedingly rare corporate entity with hordes of cultish fans who treat retail shops like churches and product launches like encyclicals.”   But he means the Apple product users who are now middle-aged or bordering on it.  For their children and younger brothers and sisters, an iPhone is just a tool.

Their vision of technology is far more utilitarian and radical. They look up from their screens. They unplug their earbuds. They keep the message short and wide. Chants and drum circles, cardboard signs and masks. Tiny performance art pieces and costumes. Derided as spoiled trustafarians stinking of patchouli, they don't seem to care. Radically, they're using decentralized digital technology to power a massive amplification of their movement. Twitter and Facebook are just the glaze on their sweet profiterole network, with hashtags used to effectively lure tens of thousands of more casual supporters and hangers on…

…on the day when the last beloved CEO died, the use of media and technology was changing - not in the labs of Silicon Valley, but on the streets of New York.

Read all of Tom’s reflections in his post, Here we are. Now, entertain us.

Photo by Matthew Yohe via Wikipedia.

h/t Steve Jobs.

The panic of the plutocrats

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized…

---Paul Krugman. The Panic of the Plutocrats.

Your near-flung correspondent flings himself into occupying Wall Street

The Teamsters local is sending a contingent down to New York City to join in the big Labor March to Wall Street today and I’m going with them.

No, I’m not a Teamster, although next to some bloggers I could name I am.  The Teamsters have offered me a seat on their bus and I can’t thank them enough.

There have been a lot of high-minded (and not so high-minded) criticisms of Occupy Wall Street for not having specific goals or, even, much of a point.  But it seems to me, particularly as it keeps building and spreading, that however mixed and mixed-up the messages on the signs and placards are, the size of the crowds is the message and the point and the goal.

It all boils down to a general reminder to politicians, banksters, the media, and each other that there are more of us than there are of them.

The goal is obvious too.  We want to live in a country that isn’t run just for the benefit of bankers, hedge fund managers, and a few sociopathic rich people like the Koch Brothers.

How to achieve that goal needs to be worked out, but it was very exciting to me when I was watching the final episode of Ken Burns’ Prohibition last night to learn that although the evils wrought by Prohibition and the Volstead Act were well known and popularly regretted for years and that the forces behind it were suspect either as hypocrites or political reactionaries with a mean anti-immigration streak---the Ku Klux Klan were sworn tea-totallers, so there you have both hypocrisy and reactionarysim---a movement to repeal the 18th Amendment made no progress until a determined rich Republican named Pauline Sabin got fed up with the hypocrisies and the meanness and set to work mainly getting people to show up to voice their support for repeal.

There was a lot more to what she did than that, but that’s where it started, with people showing up to remind politicians, the Drys, and each other that there are more of us than there are of them.

So, today, a lot more people will be showing up, including me.  I don’t think I’ll be able to report much from the scene but I’ll have pictures and stories galore tomorrow and probably for the rest of the week.

Meanwhile, crayolathief has already shown up---the photo above is one of his---and he’s posted a photo essay.

If you can’t show up but would like to show your support, MoveOn has site where you can sign up to take part in a Virtual March on Wall Street.

That’s all well and good, but an even better way of showing up if you can’t show up is to write letters---to your local newspaper, to your Congresscritters, to your state legislators and governor, and to friends and family. 

It sounds almost quaint to say it these days, but email is far more effective than Twitter and Facebook for spreading the word.

Phone calls work well too.

Related and immediately relevant: The Importance of Activism for Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party by E.D. Kain at Forbes.

“You can’t dance forever.”

Skim this article by Jessica Pressler in New York Magazine until your eyes light on this, and you might think what you’re reading is an old review of Carl Hiaasen’s Strip Tease:

“I was pretty surprised, to be honest,” says one former dancer, whom we’ll call by her former Scores name, Heather, since she’s now married to a doctor and living in a small Christian town in the Midwest. At the same time she was dating Starr, Passage was dating other wealthy, eligible men, including a record producer and a celebrity chef. “But I guess Ken was kind of her knight in shining armor that was going to give her a better life,” Heather says. “I mean, you can’t dance forever.”

A former stripper married to a doctor and now living in a “Christian” town in the Midwest?  Come on, Carl. That’s pushing it.

But it’s not Hiaasen. It’s not fiction. It’s real.  Part of the story of Diane Passage, a former dancer who married a high-rolling money manager with a speed dial list of celebrity clients on his cell and went from shaking it at bachelor parties to mingling with Hollywood royalty at Oscar parties.  Passage, whom Pressler describes as:

one of those people that it feels like New York invented, though they thrive wherever male egos and dumb money coexist. She’s the kind of woman who is able, through physical charms, nifty tricks of persuasion, and sheer gall, to inspire men to pay for … well, everything. She’s like Holly Golightly, if Holly Golightly had to kick a guy in the nuts when she went to the powder room. Which, in postrecession New York, she might have…

was living the life of “Cinderfuckingella” until:

…federal agents showed up at their apartment and arrested Starr. The SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s office had charged him with conducting a massive Ponzi scheme. “It’s a mistake,” he told her, after the cops dragged him out of the bedroom closet. But it wasn’t. Documents showed Starr had embezzled $33 million from clients. Passage was named as a co-defendant, and her bank account was frozen. It was as if her fairy godmother had suddenly reappeared and said, “Sorry, wrong girl.”

In the days after Starr’s arrest, the tabloid reporters camped outside the Lux heard an agonized wail coming from inside. “I’ve done nothing,” said the female voice. “Now I have nothing.”

This March, Passage, now 35, sat in a courtroom and listened as a judge with glasses and Janet Reno hair pronounced her husband guilty. “He seemed to have lost his moral compass,” the judge said, “partly as a result of infatuation with his young fourth wife.”

Things haven’t been so hot for her since, although she’s been able to keep up her spirits and maintain a sense of humor, as you’ll see when you read Pressler’s article, A Holly Golightly for the Stipper-Embezzlement Age.

Photo by Patrick McMullan, New York Magazine.

via Nancy Nall.

Where do our Galtian Overlords imagine they live?

I’m sure that by now most of you have read Warren Buffet’s op-ed for the New York Times.

It’s important for people to hear it, again, and again, and again, but Buffet didn’t say anything that most people didn’t learn when they were children.  From those to whom much is given, much is expected.

And a lot of rich people believe this and live by it.  Even the Koch Brothers.

President Clinton’s Global Initiative depends on thousands of rich people, and corporations who as Mitt Romney reminds us are people too, living by it and living up to it.

The question is what do we mean by that much that is expected?

For many rich people (but of course not just the rich) what’s expected is charity and a high-level of community service.  Funding the local public library or symphony orchestra, establishing scholarships, endowing a chair at a college or university, helping to build a new wing of the hospital, sitting on the board of the art museum, buying a painting and giving it to the museum, donating to relief agencies local and international.

Not all of these public goods are continuing just because rich people are supporting them.  But many of them only exist because some rich people gave them to their communities as gifts.  Our little public library here in Mayberry is such a gift and it continues to be a gift because the family that gave it to us also gave us a trust fund to pay most of the bills for generations to come. It’s debatable how efficient and equitable this dependence on the charitable feelings of people who as a class aren’t generally supposed to have them (a prejudice I often indulge in myself) is and it’s also open to argument just how much the rich are responsible for keeping things going---a rich donor is rewarded with quite a lot of flattery way out proportion to the amount they’ve actually donated---but the fact is they do give.  They know much has been given to them and much is expected of them and so they give much in return.

Where things get contentious is on the matter of how much more is expected of them, particularly when that more comes in the form of taxes.

Ok, here’s where I always tie myself up in knots over terminology.  There are a lot of people who call themselves conservative who are actually Right Wing Reactionaries.  But there are also a lot of people who call themselves conservatives who are only relatively conservative and are actually quite Progressive.  They believe that the point of a civilized society is to improve itself by making life better for all its members.  What distinguishes conservative progressives from liberal progressives is how active a role they believe the government should play in this improvement.  Conservatives believe that individuals ( under the leadership of local elites) should take the most responsibility for improving their own and their neighbors’ lots.  Liberals believe that the best way for individuals to take this responsibility is as a group and in a democracy that group is called the government because it is the government. 

Liberal and conservative progressives believe that public libraries, good schools, hospitals, and even art museums and symphony orchestras are as necessary to a functioning society as good roads and safe bridges and competent police and fire departments and reliable trash collection.  But liberals tend to believe that the former should be funded and run just like the latter.  While conservatives often accuse liberals of thinking there’s an endless supply of rich people with inexhaustible wealth who can be taxed out the wazoo whenever some new liberal pet project is in need of dough, on a practical level there just aren’t enough rich people to go around and those that are around don’t always direct their charity to where it is most needed.

Still, if the debate was just between liberal progressives and conservative progressives there’d be plenty of room for agreement and compromise and Warren Buffet’s op-ed would be carrying more of the day.  The trouble is that there are, as there have always been, plenty of rich people who don’t have any charitable impulses at all, who in fact have just the opposite impulses.  To them it’s not that they have been given much.  They haven’t been given enough.  They want more.  And more.  And MORE!

These greedy bastards we have had and will always have with us.  What makes them a bigger problem is that they are allied with a class of three thousand dollar suit wearing parasites who may not think they haven’t been given enough but who think they have already given way more than should be expected of them.

These are the Randians and the self-styled libertarians who basically believe that they’ve given enough simply by having made themselves piles of money.

Their gift to society is their greed.

They are the skimmers and parasites who believe they are “wealth creators.”

They aren’t, of course.  The Koch Brothers are wealth creators.  The Koch Brothers are under a different delusion, that we live in a feudal society and they are Medieval land barons and the rest of us are their serfs and retainers.  Never mind them for now.  I’m talking about the retainers.

The country is lousy with people who are essentially corporate flunkeys who think they are John and Jane Galts.  They haven’t invented anything.  They haven’t built any industries or businesses.  They don’t own anything.  From junior vice-presidents on up to CEOs,they are all employees.  And they make their money mainly by skimming.   But they make a lot of it.  They are wealthy.  They have “created” wealth, for themselves, at least.

And they’ve convinced themselves that simply by acquiring all this loot and then spending it willy-nilly on whatever toys, gadgets, gizmos, luxuries, or whims they choose they are creating wealth for the whole nation.  It’s more deluded than that.  They’ve got themselves convinced that they have created the nation’s wealth, all of it.

All by themselves, just by showing up to collect their paychecks.

As it happens I agree with them, sort of.  I believe that everyone who earns a paycheck is helping to create wealth.  (Actually, so are a lot of people who aren’t earning paychecks, but that’s another subject.)  I wouldn’t mind that they think they are creating wealth by working for the real John and Jane Galts (the very few of those who actually exist) if they understood that everybody else who worked with them for the Galts, including the secretaries, janitors, loading dock workers, truck drivers, and repairmen were creating the wealth too.  But they don’t understand it or they pretend not to or they understand it fine, they just hate the idea.

So we have all these suit-wearing skimmers and parasites who believe they have given all they need to give by building a McMansion on an acre of land in an exclusive suburb but who also feel aggrieved because they don’t feel that they’ve been given much in return.  They’ve turned the aphorism on its head:  From whom much has been expected, much must be given.   And what have they been given?

They don’t see that their McMansion, their suburb, their jobs that earn them the wealth they think they’ve created wouldn’t exist without good roads, safe bridges, airports---every frequent flyer coupon these business class travelers rack up should be stamped “Your tax dollars at work.”---competent police and fire departments, reliable trash collection, and good public schools turning out not just a well-educated work force but a well-educated citizenry everywhere!  Not just in their neighborhoods but all across the country.  Heck. All over the world, now.

Their governing philosophy is I’ve got mine and in getting mine I’ve given you yours and it’s more than you deserve, so you know what?  I want you to give it back!

Why we shouldn’t be even thinking about raising the retirement age

Corrected.

Yeah, we’re living longer.

There are lots more human beings surviving into their seventies, eighties, and nineties than there were, say, a hundred years ago.

The main reason so many Americans are living to be old men and women is that so comparatively few Americans die when they’re children.

Relatively fewer of us die in our twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, as well.

Restaurants offering early bird specials aren’t crowded with octogenarians because human beings made an evolutionary leap forward.  Medicine advanced.  Lots of us are here and will be here for a while longer because doctors now can do things our great-grandparent’s doctors couldn’t do.

Things that killed people in their fifties two generations ago---mainly heart disease and cancer, but let’s not forget car crashes and industrial accidents---don’t kill them anymore.  They get to live to be sixty.  And when they’re sixty, things that used to kill sixty years olds don’t, and they get to be seventy, and when they’re seventy…

You get the picture.

The point is that what living longer means is that we get to be old longer.

And being old sucks.  Even for the lucky who thanks to having taken care of themselves and having been born with good genes and having had the wherewithal to have kept themselves well-fed and well-nourished, and having managed to avoid crippling accidents or debilitating diseases.

The fact is that after about 30, the body stops growing stronger and starts to wear down.  Some would say the wearing down starts even earlier.  The wearing down is gradual at first, but when you get into your fifties it starts to accelerate.  It really gets rolling in your sixties.  Every day after seventy brings a new discovery in loss.  If you’re of an optimistic temperament, you can say that every day brings a pleasant surprise---“Wow, I can still do that?”

After a certain point, the big news of every day is that you’re still here to see it.

The wearing down occurs at different speeds with different degrees and types of debilitations for different people.  Some people are still relatively youthful at seventy (you have to hit that relatively hard) while some people are old at fifty-five.

There are seventy year old retirees who could go back to their old jobs and happily put in another five or ten years.

There are sixty year olds clocking into work who don’t know how they’re going to make it through the day, never mind another seven years!

I don’t mean to be a downer.  I think it’s great that so many of us are still here and will be here for a while longer.  There’s more to life than being able to vault fences and lift bales of hay with one hand or run up a flight of stairs or bend down and touch your toes.

There’s more to life than working for the Man.

Lots of people in a panic---or pretending to be in a panic---about the coming “crisis” in Social Security and how we have to take drastic steps to save it now---and by saving Social Security most of them mean saving politicians from having to raise taxes--- are insisting that one of the things we need to do is raise the retirement age, again.

After all, people are living longer, what would it hurt them to work another couple of years?

When asked about what happens to the people who have worn down or worn out while still not sixty-seven, never mind sixty-nine, most of them go deaf.  The few who admit there might be a problem will cough and mutter something about “disability” before changing the subject.

Here’s the problem with that:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Laid-off workers and aging baby boomers are flooding Social Security's disability program with benefit claims, pushing the financially strapped system toward the brink of insolvency.

Applications are up nearly 50 percent over a decade ago as people with disabilities lose their jobs and can't find new ones in an economy that has shed nearly 7 million jobs.

The stampede for benefits is adding to a growing backlog of applicants — many wait two years or more before their cases are resolved — and worsening the financial problems of a program that's been running in the red for years.

New congressional estimates say the trust fund that supports Social Security disability will run out of money by 2017, leaving the program unable to pay full benefits, unless Congress acts.

Again, the fact that more people are living longer doesn’t mean that people have stopped getting old.  More people living longer means, simply, more people who have lived long enough to get old.  Raising the retirement age, again, will decrease the number of old people collecting Social Security.  And it will increase the number of old people collecting unemployment and disability.

___________________________

It’s actually stupid---and delusional---to be talking about raising the retirement age in an economic climate where businesses don’t even want to hire young people, let alone keep around older workers.

We should be talking about lowering the retirement age which would not only open up jobs to younger workers but save businesses money.

We should be talking about lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare for similar reasons too.  It would encourage older workers to get out of the workforce to make way for their grandchildren and it would save businesses money by freeing them from years of expensive medical insurance premiums and higher payroll taxes.

But I keep forgetting that the point of austerity isn’t to save money, it’s to punish people who didn’t have the good sense and superior virtue to get rich.

___________________________

I don’t know how much credence to give to AP’s story.  The very next sentence following the last one in the extended quote above is:

About two decades later, Social Security's much larger retirement fund is projected to run dry as well.

Um, no.  In twenty-six years, which is in about three decades, Social Security will be paying out more than it’s taking in, which is not quite the same thing as running dry.

I’m all wrong, Social Security is already paying out more than it’s taking in.  And I knew that.  What will happen in 2036 (Revised downward from 2037) is that the combined trust funds for SocSec will in fact run dry and after that the money coming in will only be enough to pay for 3/4ths of the scheduled benefits through 2085.  That’s according to the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees’ report.  The report doesn’t say what will happen after 2085.  The Board doesn’t seem to be in a panic and is seems to be suggesting that only minor “legislative” fixes are needed to take care of this, although it would be a big help if the economy improves---which is to say, if more people get jobs and the jobs people have started paying better.

Disability is a big drain.

Update:  Earl Bockenfeld explains some things in the comments below.

Down in Washington, things like time, money, numbers, and facts mean only what politicians and lobbyists and their pet journalists need them to mean and they definitely carry no weight when they suggest that the solution to a problem is spending money to help the poor and the middle class or raising taxes on the three thousand dollar suit wearing classes.

Think I’d better go looking to find another story or two on this subject, just in case this reporter has been infected with the “panic” by the Pain Caucus.

Every story I’ve read online gives conflicting versions of what’s happening or going to happen and some seem to treat Medicare and Social Security as the same things.  All of them seem to me to have accepted the Pain Caucus’ belief that we need to do something drastic right away!

Does anybody have a link to a good analysis by somebody who isn’t either in a panic or actually arguing for privatization?

At any rate, since I’ve confused the issue, I’d like get back to my original point here.

Many of us would be happy to work until we’re 75, never mind 69.  But the odds are really against either our health or employers allowing us to.  A lot of people in their late 50s and early 60s who’d be glad to work until they’re 69 have been or will be forced out of their jobs years before that and very few of them will find good new jobs or any new jobs.  Raising the retirement age means increasing the number of people who will need disability and/or unemployment and decreases the number of job openings for younger workers.

Building the ideal bookstore

I have no real idea what did Borders Books in, but I’m fairly certain that all the stories being reported on the corporation’s demise and the imminent closing of all the remaining stores are getting it wrong.

These sorts of stories tend to be covered by youngish, single, male techno-utopians, early and eager adapters all, who can’t imagine anyone isn’t in a rush to live life as virtually as they’re living it.  If they even begin to get their heads around the fact that lots of people like to read and own books on paper, it’s with a condescending, How quaint.

Most of the stories about Blockbuster’s failure were techno-utopian fables that focused on the competition from Netflix and streaming video and ignored the fact that the company was heavily in debt from over-expanding at the beginning of the real estate bubble.  When the bubble burst and the economy tanked, Blockbuster found itself paying exorbitant rents in emptying suburbs or in suburbs that had failed to develop as expected, serving customers who were cutting way back on their spending on everything.

Also, I haven’t seen that any business reporters have noticed that there are still hundreds of Blockbuster stores in operation and the company’s new owner, DishTV, appears to be planning on keeping them open for a while, which means that there are still people who can tear themselves away from their computers or put down their tablets and smart phones and make themselves leave the house in pursuit of fun and entertainment.

All the reports about Borders I’ve seen and read have featured some version of “Borders failed to move aggressively into ebooks”.  In short, Borders was kindled and nooked to death.  Except that the company was in big trouble before kindles and nooks were anything more than new toys for early adopters.

More likely, the fact that Borders failed to develop its own significant online presence ten years ago was the more serious self-inflicted wound.

But I’d also guess that Borders suffered from the same things that have killed off so many retail chains---over-expansion and mismanagement due to the incompetence, greed, and indifference of its executives.  Very few corporations are run by people who have any idea how the actual business they’re in works or any incentive to learn it.  I’d bet you could walk into Borders corporate headquarters and fling nooks and kindles every which way by the dozen without hitting someone who knew what they were or who had even read a paper book since leaving college, not counting the ones they read because they believed their bosses were reading them.

Still, while I feel sad about the end of Borders and terrible for all the people losing their jobs, my feelings are slightly abstracted because I don’t feel I’m losing anything in the closing of any of the stores I know as stores.  There are---were---two Borders Bookstores around here, but neither one was a regular stop.  Neither was on a route we traveled routinely on the way to and from other places we had to be and both were just far enough out of range for an easy special trip.

What’s more, neither one was worth a special trip. 

Not for browsing.  Not for a cup of coffee.  Not to chase down a particular book.  And definitely not for the company---neither was a clean, well-lighted place, despite being well-scrubbed and actually over-lit.  I mean that neither was very welcoming of people who wanted to come there just to be in the company of other people.

I don’t need for a store or a business to have been a part of my personal experience to feel its loss personally.  I just have to know that the people who shopper there needed it and its closing is a blow to the community.  But these two stores weren’t part of any community.  One was---is---in a mall removed from any city, town, or village whose communities they might have reached out to or served.  The other was at the far end of strip mall land, cut off from the city it was officially in by highway---it suffered from being out of sight, out of mind, but also from there being no easy access to it from the direction most people would be trying to get to it from.  Plus there was a larger, much cleaner and more well-lighted Barnes and Noble closer in that people didn’t have to drive a mile past to get to a legal turn-around and double back to.

But it wasn’t just that these stores didn’t serve a community.  The customers they had aren’t losing a service they can’t get elsewhere.

Ideally, the shutting down of a bookstore should hurt the cultural life of a community more than the closing of a chain video store.  But when our local video store closed a lot of its customers were suddenly without a way to watch movies.  Many couldn’t afford premium cable contracts.  Many weren’t on the internet.  Many didn’t want to be on the internet.  There are still lots of people who don’t have time to waste online.  There are still lots of people who hate computers.

The very soon to be former customers who relied on these Borders as a source of books can get their books elsewhere, easily.  There’s no Barnes and Noble near the one in the mall but there are other sorts of places nearby, places that are clean and well-lighted, places that aren’t just parts of communities but at the hearts of them.

They’re called public libraries.

We’re lucky.  Our area still has many well-funded and well-run libraries.

Not nearly as well-funded and so not as well-run as they used to be or should be, but still.

I know there are Borders around the country that are---were---clean, well-lighted places and not just parts of a community but at the hearts of them.  A friend who lives in New Orleans is still mourning the loss of her local Borders, one of the first to close back in February when the company announced it was bankrupt.  That Borders was in a big old mansion in the Garden District that had been a famous restaurant and then a funeral home when Borders bought it and converted it and it sounded like a very cool place.

I’m not saying anything here except the two Borders near us weren’t great bookstores.

But here’s the thing.  I’ve never felt at home or welcome in any Borders I’ve ever been in, and that includes the original Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

My sample isn’t large.  Six stores.  The two here.  Two near Mother and Father Blonde’s outside Philadelphia.  One that was near Mom and Pop Mannion’s---that one closed a couple of years ago.  And one in Syracuse which is the one I spent the most time in.

I was only at the Ann Arbor store once.  I was disappointed by it.  But I’m not counting it in my sample.

These six Borders shared qualities that made them less than ideal bookstores.

I could say that they all lacked the same qualities necessary for an ideal bookstore.

But I’ll tackle this from the first direction.

To start with all of them had staffs that seemed to be made up exclusively of early twenty-something hipsters and artistes who when they were actively hostile to customers who weren’t other twenty-something hipsters and artistes were indifferent to their presence and incapable of helping them anyway.  When you could force one to pay attention to you, his or her usual response was “It’s over there in our whatever section” followed by the vaguely directional wave and the walk-away or “Check at the information desk,” followed by the  vaguely directional wave and the walk-away. 

It almost goes without saying that there was usually no one staffing the information desk.

The cafes were either too small or too big, the too few tables crammed together or the still too few tables spaced so widely apart that sitting at one you felt simultaneously isolated and exposed.  The snack and dessert choices were limited and all seemingly deliberately stocked for their dryness in order to make sure you bought something to drink with them, and the drink choices were limited to what must have struck the company buyers as hip and trendy enough that they could justify over-charging for.  And then those cafes were staffed by the hipsters and artistes the management had deemed to be too anti-social to work as booksellers.

Even if there was no one ahead of you in line, you had to wait ten minutes to place an order while the solitary barista finally realized that pretending you weren’t there wasn’t going to make you go away or the two or three of them behind the counter deigned to break off their conversation about whatever concert, album, TV show, or party they were mutually excited about---I swear I never heard any Borders employees talking to each other about books.

By the way, there is a lot of turnover within this pool of employees and in the Syracuse store, where we used to go a couple of times a month (We’d hit the Barnes and Noble at least a couple of times a week) because it was in a mall we frequented, I had the impression that I never dealt with the same clerk or barista twice, although since they were all of a type and affected the same look, costuming, and attitude I couldn’t be sure.

Not one of these six stores had a decent children’s section.  I could write a whole post on what makes a good children’s section in a bookstore, but at the very minimum it should be staffed by clerks who know what’s going in the world of children’s books beyond when the next installment of the currently most popular series is coming out and who also know and like children and understand what sort of help their parents and guardians need.  None of the children’s sections in these Borders were staffed at all.  Every now and then one of the hipsters and artistes would wander through, make a half-hearted stab at straightening up, and wander off.

Also, in all of them the children’s section seemed to have been an afterthought in the design of the store’s layout, stuck in wherever it would fit and be out of the way, with no thought as to what would be comfortable, comforting, or safe.  The exception was the Borders in Syracuse, which wasn’t comfortable, comforting, or safe, but it wasn’t out of the way.

It was in the way.

It was in an open space in the middle of the store close to the entrance to the mall.  Children were always in danger of being trampled by the crowds coming and going and customers coming and going were in danger of tripping over children and strollers.  It wasn’t a space where you felt safe taking your eyes off your kids for a second or even letting go of their hands, which made it very hard to pick out a book or read to them if you managed to pick one out.

Finally, all the stores were badly lit, the lighting either too harsh and bright or too dim.

So here’s what I think makes an ideal bookstore.

A helpful and knowledgeable staff.

A comfortable and welcoming atmosphere with just the right level and kind of lighting, lots of places to sit and read, a good cafe with an appetizing menu.

A connection to the community that involves it in its social and cultural life.

A children’s section that is more than just about selling books for children to adults.

I know that there are---were---plenty of Borders bookstores that met those criteria.  It’s just my bad luck I’ve never been a regular customer at any of them and my good luck that the Barnes and Nobles that were around as alternatives in Syracuse and close to here and near Mother and Father and Blonde’s did offer those things.  The two Barnes and Nobles near Mom and Pop Mannion come up short in different ways.

As addicted as I am, WiFi isn’t necessary, while offering  good selection of books goes without saying.  What makes for a good selection, however, is a good question.  It isn’t necessarily a large selection.

Unfortunately, few independent bookstores can afford to offer all these things, but a friendly and knowledgeable staff and a comfortable and welcoming atmosphere can make up for a lot.  And most independents are very much involved in the life of their communities.

Used bookstores are a whole ‘nother matter.  I’m not an automatic fan.  A lot of them aren’t at all comfortable or welcoming and aren’t meant to be, not to casual browsers at any rate.  Many are little shrines and chapels devoted to book worship and wandering into one of them just to take a look around feels like blundering into a church during a novena just to admire the statuary.

And some of them aren’t so much stores as windows into the mental closets of their owners and that view can be really disturbing.

So, your turn.  You don’t have to build an ideal bookstore for us, but what experiences have you had that have made for good or bad bookstore-going experiences?  What would you miss if your favorite bookstore closed or, if it’s a Borders, will you miss when it closes?

Updated Tuesday night to rearrange the shelves:  The comments from bereft customers and former employees on this post by SBSarah at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books are making me feel the loss less abstractly than I claimed above.  Clearly, there are---were---many Borders that approached the ideal.

Thanks for the link, Ken Houghton.

Photos of the nearest surviving Borders taken by the Mannionville Daily Gazette’s intrepid photographer, Wednesday, July 20.  Mannion guys had gift cards left over from birthdays they needed to spend while the spending was still good.  The cafe closes Friday.  The whole store shuts down mid-September.

Work ‘Til You Drop, the graphic adventure

You might remember my post from a couple weeks back, Working Until We Drop: A Fable for Our Times.  Reader Dean Reklaw liked the post, but thought it would be more effective if it was illustrated.  So he took on the job himself and created a graphic version.  Which I love.  But who told him I’m a big fan of Mr Six, the dancing old man from the Six Flags ads?

At any rate, click on the image below to see the whole graphic full size.  It also stars Joan Crawford and William Shatner.

Graphic created by Dean Reklaw.

Working until we drop: A fable for our times

Boy, you feel good today.  Full of pep.  Up at five.  Took the dog out for a good long walk, actually enjoyed a bit of a run, and were hardly winded.  Had a nice big breakfast when you came home, two cups of coffee, caffeine still hardly bothers you.  Had a cup after dinner last night and still slept like a log.  And here you are, five hours into the day, work piled up to the ceiling, but it’s all good, it’s money coming in, and these days, who’s going to complain about that?  Maybe you can keep the business running another few years.  You think?  Dad’d be proud, see the company he and Uncle Al founded still on its legs, sixty years later, even if some days it feels like it’s just limping along.  Besides, you’ll stay late tonight, an hour or two, clean it all up. No sweat.  Not bad for someone’s turning seventy-two next month and’s been at this since age fifteen, coming in after school to learn the business from the ground up.  Hell, screw staying late.  You’ll knock off at five, hurry home, the two of you’ll go out to dinner, go to a movie.  Come in a little early tomorrow and finish it all up.  Another few years?  Nah. You feel you can do this till you’re a hundred and five.

You get up for a stretch, wander out onto the floor to get a cup of coffee, give people the eye, remind them you’re here, still the boss.  Not that they need the reminding.  Good people.  Hard workers.  You hardly have to say a word to some of them.  Work their asses off for half the money, which, you know, you’d like to pay them.  Business is good, as in ok, but it’s not like you’re making the bucks so fast you can’t find space to put it all, it’s piling up so fast.  Help if you could lower the overhead a little.  Actually, though, what would help is if you could afford to hire a couple more people.  You got reps here doing the work of two.  Lots of orders falling through the cracks.

Well, three, in the case of those picking up the slack for Sid.

Sid.  Look at him.  Geezus.  Five years younger than you and looks like he could be your father.  Ok.  That’s a bit of an exaggeration.  But he’s not looking too good these days, is he?  Too bad.  He used to be such a dynamo.  Worked like a hero.  Put in seven days a week if you’d let him.  Best you had.  Then he turned sixty-five and it was like he hit a wall.  Bam.  Just knocked him flat and he’s never been able to get up again, not really.  Mostly, for the past year, he comes in, goes through the motions.  He’s become a real drag on the business.  He really should hang it up.  But what’s he gonna do?  You always paid him a fair chunk of change.  Never was going to make him rich, but he got by pretty well.  But 2007, 2008.  Everybody’s 401k took a big hit, then his wife got sick, and their house went under water.  He’s going to need to collect full benefits on his Social Security.  He needs to stick it out for one more year.

Oh wait.  It’s 2020 now, isn’t it?  They raised the retirement age for people Sid’s age back in 2011.  He can’t collect full benefits until he’s 69.  So he’s going to stick around for three more years!

Three?

Think about it.  His wife’s health is shaky.  Sid’s is none too good himself’s.  No way he can make up for the difference in medical costs for what the vouchers won’t cover.  Sid needs to work here till he drops just for the medical plan, which is no great shakes, it costs you both an arm and a leg, but it’s not like it’s suddenly got cheaper to go the doctor’s.  Even a simple check-up dings you, never mind if you need something big taken care of.

No, Sid’s here for life, unless…

Nah, you couldn’t do that to Sid.  Not after all the years he’s put in.

Could you?

You could do it to Mary.

In a heartbeat.

Well, not really.  Just some days you’d like to.  She’s just not pulling her weight.  She’s another one, old age caught up with her real fast.  And that car accident last year, she’s still hurting from that.  You can see it whenever she has to stand up, which no wonder she avoids doing.  She’s got everybody else fetching and carrying for her.  The time last month you called her into the office to talk about it, she starts crying, thinking you were going to fire her, because she knows, and it embarrasses the hell out of her, she hates what’s happened to her.  Like Sid, she used to be one of the hardest workers around here, but it’s not her fault some idiot runs a stop light, t-bones her like that, not her fault she’s not thirty years old anymore.  She’s crying on you, telling you like you don’t know how she needs this job, how her husband never found real work again after he was laid off by his company during the Recession for the crime of being in his fifties and why wasn’t that considered age discrimination, she wants to know, as if you were responsible and of course your conscience bothers you because you’re thinking how much you’d save by dumping a few people around here who aren’t exactly young anymore, like Mary…

Oh, and then she brings her daughter into it.  Kelly,  She’s just moved back in with them, because she hasn’t been able to find a good job in her field and she’s been out of school what?  Couple of years now, and those student loans were killing her.

Kelly, you think.  You’ve met her.  Good kid.  Lot like her mother used to be.  Hard to believe she can’t find a job.  You’d hire her.  You’d be thrilled to have a young version of Mary around the place again, working up a storm, leaving everybody else to eat her dust.  And you could pay her…

Forget it.  What are you going to do, fire Mary and as she’s on her way out, cardboard box full of her personal stuff in her hands, trinkets and toys and photos and souvenirs and awards she’s piled up over thirty years, ask her to send her daughter in for an interview?

But she’s only sixty-three.  She might be here for another six years. Hell, like Sid, she’s going to stick around till she drops, you let her.

And you’ll let her, right?

Right?

Right.

But it sure would be nice to able hire a Kelly.  Two Kellys, if Sid leaves.  Two?   Make that three.

Think of that.  For what you’re paying two worn-out, demoralized geezers who’d just as soon not be here and who are, not to be too harsh on them, mostly collecting paychecks to hold down their chairs in case there’s a sudden gravity shortage and they might fly up to the ceiling, you could hire three energetic kids, desperate for work, who’ll give you a hundred per cent for maybe twenty years, bringing in all kinds of business, maybe enough they’ll pay for themselves, and you’d still be saving a bundle.  Forty or fifty grand a year.  Think what you could do with that.  Buy a couple of new trucks.  Expand the warehouse.  Give Sherry and Brian the raises they haven’t had in three years.  You know Brian and his partner have been looking for a new house they can afford.  Sherry’s nursing her car along, hoping it’ll carry her another hundred thousand miles…

This is getting depressing.  You pour your coffee, take another look around, this time trying to avoid laying eyes on either Sid or Mary, sparing yourself and them both, and what do you see?

When did everybody get so old?

Half the people who work here, they’re gray or bald already.  How’d that happen?

Demographics.  They’re all Boomers and Gen-Xers you hired during the Clinton years when it seemed like the good times were going to last forever.  Twenty-five years later of course they’re getting up there.  But for Chrissakes, in another few years it’s going to be a geriatric ward in here.  Sid you can afford to keep around another three years.  Mary?  That’s a tough one.  But some of these others, they’re going to want to stay for twenty more years and who knows which and how many of them are going to turn into other Sids and Marys?

And it’ll be worse out in the warehouse.  Bad backs, bad knees.  How many guys already literally can’t carry their own weight?

Maybe it’s time you did a little housecleaning?

You wander back into your office, sit down at the desk, call up the payroll records on the computer, and you start making a list…

____________________

Inspired by a report from dday via digby that a new plan to “save” Social Security includes cutting benefits by raising the retirement age---that is the age at which new retirees can start collecting full benefits---to 69 for everyone now 58 and younger and by this op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas Goeghegan arguing that what we should be doing is just the opposite, lowering the retirement age and increasing benefits.

In a time when we need to create jobs, plenty of people have been hammering on this idea, that we should be looking for ways to encourage older workers to get out of the workforce to make room for younger workers.  Apparently, though, the geniuses down in Washington, have decided that what this country really needs is a whole lot of people working into their seventies or until they drop dead.

Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and the GOP are counting on the votes of old people who hate their grandchildren

According to digby, Congressweasel Paul Ryan, author of the Republican plan to kill Medicare while lowering taxes on the rich, is becoming a hero in his own mind.  He’s begun comparing himself to Winston Churchill even, apparently in the belief that this is his finest hour, because standing up to (or, actually, running away from) a roomful of angry grandmothers while being sainted and lionized by the Washington D.C. establishment as the nation’s most Very Serious Person is somehow equivalent to rallying the people of London as the buzz bombs fall.

Of course, if Ryan were to out and out say, “Never have so many owed so much to so few,” he would mean that it’s time for the many of us who aren’t rich to hand over much of the little money we have to left to the few who are already so rich they can’t begin to spend what they’ve swindled, skimmed, and gouged from us over the last ten years.

Charles Blow says Ryan is known around Washington as a numbers guy.  It must be in the same way Mitch Daniels is known as a charisma guy.

It’s been pointed out again and again that the Ryan-Republican Budget doesn’t add up.  But it doesn’t need to add up.  It doesn’t need to add up any more than a bank robbery needs to add up.  That’s because it’s simply a scheme to transfer more money into the hands of the wealthy.   But taken at its face, it doesn’t add up because it can’t add up.  It’s not dependent on math, it’s dependent on a belief in miracles, the main one being that in just a couple of years the United States will experience a surge of economic growth on a scale that has never occurred in history. 

Another miracle will take place in ten years or so when the first vouchers are mailed out and just that act will cause the cost of medical care to plummet to levels where seniors won’t even need to spend all the money the vouchers represent.

It’s not surprising that when Ryan and the Republicans can’t get the math right in their economic planning, they can’t get it right in their political calculations either.

Ryan can’t understand why he is on his way to becoming the most reviled Republican politician not planning a bus tour or releasing a two hour vanity production of movie.  And the decline in his reputation is a bit unfair, since Ryan is to the Republican leadership what Bugsy Siegal was to Meyer Lansky, a hatchetman and a front getting a little too full of himself.  You have to give the guy credit for guts though.  He is out there defending his Party’s plan to kill off Medicare and a whole lot of sick old people along with it.  Like too many of us these days, Ryan is on Twitter.  I know this because like too many of us I’m on Twitter.  And Ryan’s been tweeting his defense.  One of his recent tweets was:

Our budget ensures no changes for those 55 years old or older. But for future generations, we need real reform.

Which digby has translated into something less weaseling:

Let me repeat the *only* Americans who will be hurt by the Ryan Plan are the 79% who are currently under age 55.

That ten year span before the GOP plan wipes out Medicare isn’t there to give people under the age of 55 time to start saving up to pay for their hip replacements and cataract surgeries out of pocket in their old age.  It’s there to give Republicans five elections in which they’d hoped not to have to deal with the wrath of angry seniors who suddenly can’t afford to go to the doctor.

It hasn’t worked out.  They didn’t do the math.  There are an awful lot of people under the age of 55, including about half the Baby Boomers, who can do the math and have figured out that ten years---or fifteen years or even twenty years---is not enough time to save up all the money they’re going to need if there’s no Medicare for them, even if they didn’t need that time to rebuild their 401ks or save something extra to cover what their Social Security won’t cover and pay off the mortgages on houses they won’t be able to sell at near what they paid for them and put their kids through college.

But it’s not just that 79 percent who are mad.

Among other all the other delusive aspects of Ryan’s plan, he and the Republican capos are figuring that there are a significant number of people over the age of 55 who, as long as they get their hip replacements paid for by the government, don’t give a damn what happens to their children and grandchildren.

“I got mine, you get yours” has been a guiding principle of the Nixonian-Newtian Republican Party for over 40 years, but now there are no Old Guard Rockefeller and Eisenhower Republicans left to mitigate against it, and the Party is in a fever to make that principle the basis of every single thing they do.  What’s more, they assume that a majority of Americans think this is a good thing, that we want to live in a country where our neighbors will let us suffer and die as long as they get their checks from the Feds.

Last November’s election seemed to suggest the Republicans were right.

Maybe they were.

But I think that there are a lot more people who have lived their lives by the principles that it’s their responsibility to provide for their children and grandchildren and to help out their neighbors and try to leave the country a better place they found it.

Probably I’m biased because I know that my parents would gladly give up some of their benefits to ensure that their grandchildren will get to enjoy what they’ve enjoyed themselves and because I know that I and my brothers and sisters would give up ours to see it to that our parents don’t have to do that.

Maybe that’s what Ryan’s counting on, that those of us under 55 will agree to miserable, sick old ages of our own as long as our parents and grandparents aren’t miserable and sick.

Either Ryan and the Republicans think we’re a nation of assholes or they’re counting on us being a nation of saints and martyrs, and I can’t decide which would make them the bigger cynics.

But what they apparently haven’t counted on is that we are a nation of pragmatists who don’t think we need to be either assholes or saints and martyrs just to save rich people from having to pay what they’re currently paying in taxes.  And we’re also aware that we have been sacrificing along the way by paying for our parents’ Medicare with our taxes in the expectation that our children will be doing the same for us.

Ryan and the Republicans are counting on us being too selfish or too reflexively generous or just plain too stupid to notice that his plan to end Medicare is part of the Republican plan to cut taxes even more for the rich.

The same thinking’s at work in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s shakedown of the country using the entire population of Joplin, Missouri as hostages.  Cantor is adamant that there be no help for the people of Joplin unless the money is offset with cuts in the budget elsewhere. 

In effect, this is a demand that the rest of us agree that when our communities need government help to recover from a natural disaster people in other parts of the country will have to give up any help they’re getting.

Cantor is assuming one of two things.

Either that, if they don’t receive any Federal aid, the people of Joplin won’t blame Cantor and the Republicans (and their own craven idiot of a Tea Partier Congressman), they’ll blame the rest of us who happen to be represented in Congress by Democrats.

Or that the rest of us want to help the people of Joplin so much that we’ll agree to give up money that we might need to help our towns and cities deal with problems

Apparently, Cantor isn’t aware that helping communities dig out, dry out, and rebuild after natural disasters is one of the few things almost Americans agree the government should do.  We may not agree about how much money we should spend keeping a school running during the year or what should go on in the classrooms when it is running.  But we do agree that if that school gets flattened by a tornado the Feds should come in and help build a new school before we get back to arguing about the other things.

What’s more, we’ve already paid for this.  It’s part of what we expect our taxes to go towards every year. 

Cantor isn’t offering to cut our taxes while threatening to let Joplin rot under its own dust and rubble the way George Bush and his Republican Congress let New Orleans rot under the mud and the silt and the oil.

In fact, the Ryan-Republican budget very clearly raises taxes on the middle class and the working class.

So even if we were the nation of selfish cynics the Republicans are hoping we are---and have been encouraging us to be---there’s nothing in Cantor’s shakedown for us.

Cantor and the Republicans are offering us a deal the way the gangsters who come into your restaurant and note that it’s a beautiful place you have here, be a shame if something happened to it.

Cantor’s saying, “We’ll help your community the way we’ll help Joplin, by making you pay more while cutting the amount of aid some other community will get in the future.”

And we’re supposed to respond either, “We give in!  Please don’t hurt the people of Joplin!” or “It’s a deal, as long as you’re sure we’re gonna get ours when the time comes.”

Cantor, Ryan, and the Republicans are betting we’re either all saints and martyrs or we’re all just like them.

_____________________

Related: Charles Blow in the New York Times, Endangered Ryan-os.

Rick Unger, The Policy Page at Forbes:  Deadly Tornados Reveal The Failure Of Today’s Perverse GOP Ideology.

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Moloch

Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”---Genesis 22:2.

There’s a divisiveness fundamental to the Republican Lottery-style economic policies---“Give us your money and we promise you’ll hit the jackpot!”

You.  You will hit it.  Not any of them.

You are or will be one of the winners.  They are the losers.  And it’s not up to you to worry about what happens to them.   You don’t even have to worry, because they’ll be fine, the good ones among them anyway, the ones who are deserving, the ones who earn it, the ones who meant to be winners like you.

By now it ought to be universally acknowledged that Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget and sink the debt not too long after most Baby Boomers are dead is based on the assumption that in the future we’ll all be rich.  The good and deserving among us, at any rate, but aren’t we all good and deserving?

The future will take care of itself. But only if here in the present we do the right things to appease the gods.

We must sacrifice the poor and everybody in the working and middle classes who is not us.

Calling what the Republicans are up to government by lottery should conjure up allusions to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery which most of us read in high school although apparently many of us learned that the lesson of that story was Make sure you are among those who get to throw the stones.  But I have religion on my mind this morning, not literature.

The other day I wrote about how when pressed to defend their perpetually failing economic policies of rewarding the already rich in the half-hearted hope that the not-rich will benefit in some way, someday, they resort to magical thinking and call upon their Radian gods.

Mammon and Moloch in their incarnation as the Market will descend from the heavens, showering us with money.

Since I posted that I’ve been itching to tell you who Moloch is.  Tell you who I think he is, at any rate.

Mammon we all know.  Mammon is money and it’s easy to see how the worship of money is written into every chapter and verse of Ryan’s budget.

Moloch was an ancient Middle Eastern god with no other function than to mess up people’s lives and make them miserable.  Other cultures had gods and goddesses of fortune.  Moloch was the bringer of misfortune, a malevolent demon who hated human beings and got his kicks ruining their lives out of spite and anger.  He enjoyed making bad things happen to good people and to bad people and to people in between, to any and all people.  He sounds like the demon they worship out in the Utah State Legislature, the one who allows women to be raped and girls to be molested and abused by their fathers and brothers because he likes babies and doesn’t much care how they get themselves conceived and born. 

The two differ a bit.  Moloch liked babies for the pain and suffering they can cause getting born, the economic hardship that is often required to raise them, and because they themselves become new targets for his whims and his wrath.  The Utah demon god likes babies because they are so darn cute and old men and old women who don’t have to take care of them can get all gooey at the thought of them.

But they are alike in demanding human suffering and pain in exchange for leaving us alone.

The demon-god in Utah can be mollified with prayer and penance and will from time to time decide to reward his worshippers with his benevolence and favor.  Moloch had to be constantly appeased or he’d make life, which is hard enough as it is, even worse.  And the preferred way to appease him was with sacrifice.  Human sacrifice.  Human child sacrifices, mainly.

Who is Moloch these days?

Allen Ginsberg identified him in all the institutions that organize, empower, and reward human rapacity and greed.

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch was a destructive god.  But we’re talking about people who’ve made a religious tenet of creative destruction.  They’ve turned virtue and vice on their heads so that greed and selfishness are positive goods.  Moloch is the idea that the strong are meant to triumph over the week.  Moloch is the belief that the willingness to inflict pain on others is a sign of courage.  Moloch is the conviction that heartlessness can be the truest form of compassion.  Moloch is the will to dominate.  Moloch is power for power’s sake.  And Moloch still demands to be worshiped with sacrifice.

And not shared sacrifice.

If all were to go according to Ryan’s plan, it’d be ten years before the first seniors would have to make do without Medicare as it is.  That’s five Congressional and two Presidential elections from now. 

This is a plan that pits older Boomers and their parents against their younger siblings, their children, and grandchildren.  It is, as John Cole rightly calls it, a bribe.

Vote for us and we’ll cut their Medicare while we make sure yours continues as everything you need it to be.

You might think, reflexively, or want to think, “Come on.  Nobody can be that selfish and cruel that they’d wish a sick and poverty-stricken old age on their own children and grandchildren!”

But then you’ll remember all the mothers and fathers since the dawn of time who have gladly, gleefully sent their sons off to die in foreign wars.  You’ll remember that the tragedy of Iphigenia didn’t strike its original audiences as a fairy tale and that there are still people today who read the story of Abraham and Isaac without having to assure themselves that Yahweh isn’t really going to make Abraham slice his kid’s throat and not because they believe that He Who Shall Not Be Named is just testing.  They’re fine with it because they know Abraham passes the test, he’s willing to do it if God wants him to.  And these people worship this sadistic and selfish demon and want the rest of us to worship him too.

But mostly what happens, what the Republicans expect to happen because they work to make it happen, is that people either don’t allow themselves to think about it or they scapegoat.

They don’t have to think about their kids, don’t have to worry about them.  Their kids are going to be fine.  Their kids and grandkids are going to be among the winners.  It’s their kids who’ll suffer.  Them.  Those others.  The losers.

The losers will suffer.  And they will deserve to suffer because they didn’t practice the virtues and do the hard work that makes the winners winners.  Worse, the losers, by indulging the vices that made them losers, made it harder for the winners to win.  In fact, often they ruined it for people who should have been winners, would have been winners.

So it’s all right to feed them to the fires, to spill their blood on the altars.  And if their children have to be sacrificed too, well, then, it’s the losers’ own fault and it can’t be helped.  It must be done.  It’s for the good of all.  By these sacrifices, the god will be appeased and more of the winners will be spared.  Many of the losers will be turned into winners.  All be well, as long as the fires burn and the blood flows.

And so it goes, up and down the line.  Their health care is sacrificed.  Their schools and educations are sacrificed.  Their jobs, and their benefits, and their retirements, and their homes, and their children’s futures.

And of course such a vicious and bloodthirsty god is going to attract sadists into his priesthood.

____________________

Related exegesis: Sadly, Republican politicians aren’t the only acolytes in the Temple of Moloch.  The Pain Caucus may be the only truly bipartisan group in Washington. Here’s Michael Grunwald writing in TIME about the gushing over Ryan by the Pain Caucus’ media apologists: Profiles in Cowardice: How the Beltway Punditocracy Gets Paul Ryan's Plan Totally Wrong.

And Bruce Bartlett interprets Tea Party Scripture.

Hat tip to the Linkmeister.

Car Talk with Congressman Paul Ryan

So, say, your car’s breaking down and you’re standing in the driveway, looking it over, trying to decide what you’re going to fix first and figuring out how to pay for it when along comes your neighbor, GOP Congressman and Insider Media Darling of the Moment Paul Ryan.

Ryan says, “Let me have a look.”

He pokes his head under the hood, straightens up, frowning mightily, wipes the grease off his hands, and says, “Hand me that wrench.”

You give it to him and what he does is step back and start swinging away at the car.  He really whales on it.  Works his way down one side, around the rear bumper, and back up the other.  And when he’s done he’s taken out the headlights and taillights, shattered the windshield, smashed in the bumpers, caved in sections of the roof, and put so many dents in the doors and fenders it looks  like a herd of mules got mad at it.

Then he ducks back under the hood and starts whacking away under there until you hear the clatter and clang of metal falling to the pavement.

“There,” he says, tossing you the wrench, “That’ll take care of it.”

“Take care of it?” you scream in rage. “You destroyed it.  How am I supposed to get to work?”

He levels you with his gaze.

“Work?” he says.  “Like you work.  If you had a real job you’d own a car that never breaks down.  What you need to do now is find a real job and start saving up for a car better suited to your needs, preferably a used one.”

And before you can say anything else, he lifts your wallet and walks off with your credit card to go treat a bunch of his rich friends to a touchless carwash complete with detailing for their Beemers.

The next thing that happens is that some more of your neighbors, all them Very Serious People, pundits and politicians, wander out to survey the wreck that was once your car and when you tell them what just happened instead of giving you any sympathy they start praising Ryan.

“At least he’s tried to do something,” one of them says.

“What a brave and bold plan,” another says.

“And he was honest about what he was up to,” says a third.

“But he destroyed the car!” you wail.

“Good for him for starting a conversation about car repair,” they say.

“Instead of getting upset,” they add, “You should offer your own plan”

“Where,” they want to know, “would you have started banging away with the wrench?”