Month: January 2012

Hit me baby one more time

by digby

Ooops:

One of the biggest requests that labor had made of Congressional Dems was this: Don’t sell out unions when the long-term Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization is renegotiated with House Republicans. Unions saw this as a top prioritiy for 2012.

Well, now the verdict is in: Over a dozen unions — including a number of AFL-CIO affiliates, like the Communications Workers of America and the International Association of Machinists; and possibly the SEIU — are preparing to unleash a new letter blasting Senate Dem leaders for reaching a bad deal with Republicans on this core priority, claiming it could compromise their ability to organize in the future. They will demand that Dems pull out of the deal and insist that Dems push the GOP harder for a “clean” reauthorization that doesn’t rewrite labor law.

One labor official told me that the deal has led to “significant union discontent” with the Senate Dem leadership, which may not bode well for Dem-labor relations heading into an election year.

Sargent has the background. It’s not pretty.

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Chipping Away At Romney’s Sense of Entitlement

By tristero

Imagine how galling it must be to Mitt Romney to be lectured to by a Bush – yep, one of those Bushes, the ones born with silver spoons pre-inserted in their rears – on how important it is to “earn” Jeb’s endorsement, and not simply expect it.

These are very strange and creepy people.

Shame strategy

by digby

Oh, my goodness:

Stephen Hester, head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, gave way to heavy political pressure last night to forego his £963,000 bonus.

The final straw for the RBS chief executive appears to have been the looming threat of a vote in the House of Commons condemning the Government for failing to block the payment.

He is reported to have feared becoming “a pariah” over the controversy.

But here’s the problem. He’s going to be sullen and unhappy now and unwilling to create any jobs. And then where will we be? It’s not like there’s anyone else who can do his job. (Even worse, all the employees of the bank will be demoralized because they’ll feel as if they work for the civil service. Or something.)

Big mistake folks. By not insisting that this fine fellow take his million pound bonus they’ve robbed average citizens of their badly needed jobs. I hope they can live with themselves.

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Creative decay, courtesy our corporate overlords

by David Atkins

Kurt Andersen of Vanity Fair penned a great article this month on the comparative lack of cultural innovation over the last 20 years. Andersen notes that in architecture, art, fashion, music and other aspects of popular and consumer culture, there is very little difference between the culture of 20 years ago and that of today. By contrast, think of the enormous differences between 1992 and 1972, or between 1972 and 1952, or 1952 and 1932, or 1932 and 1912. Technology has changed significantly, of course, but styles haven’t:

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

Go deeper and you see that just 20 years also made all the difference in serious cultural output. New York’s amazing new buildings of the 1930s (the Chrysler, the Empire State) look nothing like the amazing new buildings of the 1910s (Grand Central, Woolworth) or of the 1950s (the Seagram, U.N. headquarters). Anyone can instantly identify a 50s movie (On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai) versus one from 20 years before (Grand Hotel, It Happened One Night) or 20 years after (Klute, A Clockwork Orange), or tell the difference between hit songs from 1992 (Sir Mix-a-Lot) and 1972 (Neil Young) and 1952 (Patti Page) and 1932 (Duke Ellington). When high-end literature was being redefined by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, great novels from just 20 years earlier—Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—seemed like relics of another age. And 20 years after Hemingway published his war novel For Whom the Bell Tolls a new war novel, Catch-22, made it seem preposterously antique.

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012.

Andersen has a lot more evidence where this comes from in his lengthy 3-page piece. Suffice it to say that it’s a fairly compelling case. The key question is why?

Andersen speculates on a number of reasons, not all of which I find convincing. But one reason occurred to me immediately while reading the piece, which Andersen does eventually address: the fact that culture and media are increasingly dominated by shareholder-interested, risk-averse conglomerates that have too much to lose by taking significant creative initiative:

Part of the explanation, as I’ve said, is that, in this thrilling but disconcerting time of technological and other disruptions, people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past. But the other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

This isn’t exactly news to anyone who goes to the movie theater. Producers come up with sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots galore because there’s built-in audience and branding for them. Doing new things and telling new stories are dangerous and potentially expensive endeavors.

It’s even worse in videogames, exceptions like Portal notwithstanding. Cracked had a great article on this subject last year:

But this isn’t about any lack of creativity among game developers, artists, writers or anyone else. It’s about money, and the fact that the market has trapped games in a fucking creative coffin (and developers will tell you the same). Everybody complains about sequels and reboots in Hollywood, but holy shit, it’s nothing compared to what we have in gaming right now.

For instance, each of the Big Three game console makers took the stage at E3 to show off their biggest games of the upcoming year. Microsoft led off with the aforementioned Modern Warfare 3, which is really Call of Duty 8 (game makers like to switch up the sequel titles so the digits don’t get ridiculous). Next was Tomb Raider 10 (rebooted as Tomb Raider). Then we had Mass Effect 3, and Ghost Recon 11 (titled Ghost Recon: Future Soldier). This was followed by Gears of War 3, Forza 4 and Fable 4 (called Fable: The Journey).

Next were two new games, both based on existing brands and both for toddlers (Disneyland Adventure — a Kinect enabled game that will let your toddler tour Disneyland without you having to spring for a ticket — and a Sesame Street game starring Elmo).

Then, finally, we reached the big announcement at the end (they always save cliffhanger “megaton” announcements for last, Steve Jobs-style) and they came out to announce that they were introducing “the beginning of a new trilogy.” Yes! Something fucking new!

Then this came up on the screen: Halo 4. Confused? So was the audience. By “new trilogy” they actually meant that there would be three more Halo games. Did I mention that Halo 4 is actually Halo 7? Which means they intend to put out at least nine Halo games before they’re done? Oh, wait, they also announced they were doing a gritty reboot of the decade-old Halo to make it an even 10.

Sony came up next and announced a sequel, another sequel and then a reboot. After that it went sequel, sequel, special edition of a sequel, new FPS, sequel, new FPS, sequel, special edition of a sequel, new game based on an existing property (Star Trek), sequel, sequel and sequel. Then they introduced a new system (the PS Vita) and showed it off with four sequels.

Nintendo’s list went: sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel and (hold on, let me double check here) a sequel. And you already know what those were, even if you haven’t played a video game in 15 years: Mario Kart, Mario World, Luigi, Zelda, Kirby, etc. Then they showed off their new system (the Wii U) with a demo reel promising that some day it would allow us to play sequels like Arkham Asylum 2, Darksiders II and Ninja Gaiden 3.

Think about the situation with Hollywood — movies are expensive as hell, so studios are scared to death of taking creative risks and thus we get a new Transformers movie every two years. But now take that and multiply it times five, and you have the situation with video games. Literally. A video game costs five times as much as a movie ticket, and therefore customers are five times as cautious about experimenting with unfamiliar games that might wind up being shit. Game publishers respond accordingly.

And yes, we gamers are ultimately to blame. We don’t even perceive how incredibly narrow our range of choices has gotten. For instance, every single gaming forum on the Internet right now is hosting at least one passionate discussion about which is better, Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3. [Emphasis added]

The videogame industry is particularly problematic in this regard. But the problem is a cultural universal with similar symptoms across the board. The malaise of large-scale corporate domination of our economy isn’t just political and economic. It’s cultural, too. It’s the slow death of conformity and creative strangulation disguised as cool and individual expression through ironic nostalgia and the commodification of discontent.

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Virtually Speaking Sunday

by digby

6pst 9est

digby and Stuart Zechman discuss developments of the week, highlighting what’s been neglected or misrepresented on the Sunday morning broadcasts, drawing from their work of the prior week and the wickedly funny Bobblespeak Translations. Featuring CoT’s the ‘Most Ridiculous Moment’ from the Sunday morning talk shows. Follow @digby56 @bobblespeak @Stuart_Zechman.

Call in number to speak with the host(646) 200-3440

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What is this “democracy” you speak of?

by digby

John McCain was just born to be a tyrant. He hid it well for a few years, but it’s always been under there, lurking, waiting until his ambitions were burned out and he could be himself:

“We’ve got to stop the debates,” McCain told Meet The Press’ David Gregory. “Enough with the debates, because they are driving up our candidates’, all of them, unfavorability. We have enough of that. They’ve turned into mud wrestling instead of an exposition of all our candidates views. And it’s time to recognize who the real adversary is, and it’s not each other.”

In every election there are a bunch of people demanding that candidates drop out, to stop the debates, to end the primaries because it’s hurting the ballclub. There is a very strong strain in our country (a bipartisan one, by the way) to not allow the people to decide who’s going to run for president. (This is the same impulse that immediately writes off everyone but the anointed frontrunner — anointed, by the way, by a bunch of millionaires and the Village press corps.)

I realize it’s uncomfortable for everyone’s chosen candidate to have to compete for votes and make his case in something besides a 30 second ad, but it’s still nice to let people at least pretend that they are participating in this thing we call “democracy.” Presidential Debates are just about the only thing we’ve done to further that cause in the past 30 years — so naturally the establishment is clamoring to end them.

The system will survive and the eventual nominee will come out ok. Everybody should just relax.

Allen West Apparently Wants the Majority of Floridians to Leave America

Allen West at a Palm Beach GOP fundraiser:

“This is a battlefield that we must stand upon and we need to let president Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain’t on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America. Yeah, I said hell.

This is not about 1% and 99%. This is about 100%. 100% American. And I will not stand back and watch anyone defame, degrade or destroy that which my father fought for, my older brother, my father-in-law, myself, my nephew and all my friends still in uniform. I will not allow Obama to take the United States of America and destroy it. So if that means I’m the #1 target for the Democrat Party, all I gotta say is one thing: ‘Bring it on, baby.’

On the other hand, here’s a new NBC Marist poll from Florida:

Obama: 49%
Romney: 41%

Obama: 52%
Gingrich: 35%

Obama: 50%
Paul: 36%

Obama: 50%
Santorum: 35%

It’s early, of course, and polls are a snapshot in time. But it certainly appears that at this moment, Allen West would prefer that the majority of Floridians leave the country for more socialist climes.

Perhaps it’s Allen West who might need to leave America for a more libertarian paradise. He could go to the bottom of the sea for it. But I hear Afghanistan and Somalia are lovely places where no oppressive government will enforce equality of achievement on anyone (no one with a penis, anyway.)

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Do you like Gladiator movies Newtie?

by digby

I’m sure it’s going to be tempting for certain wags to say this is because women think Mitt is dreamy, but I think it’s probably more that Newtie is just so … Newtie:

Newtie’s having that framed, I’m sure. Mitt too for that matter. Conservative boys just love a naked, sweaty Gladiator fantasy.

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Making things worse — forever

by digby

Noting Jared Bernstein’s reporting on how the misguided insistence on cutting government spending is delaying a robust recovery, Krugman adds this:

But it’s even worse than he says. Why? Because if you look at what’s being cut, it’s heavily focused on investment:

That is, we’re sacrificing the future as well as the present. Oh, and the cuts that aren’t falling on investment in physical capital are largely falling on human capital, that is, education.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. Never mind multipliers and all that (although they exist too); this is a time when government investment should be pushed very hard. Instead, it’s being slashed.

It’s very hard not to believe the conspiracy theorists who say that this is consciously being done to lower wages and standard of living. Can anyone really be this dumb?

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Unimpeachable Revolutionary

by digby

Think Progress:

Norquist is now mapping out how he can ensure further anti-tax victories by securing Republican majorities. In an interview with the National Journal, he mused that a GOP mandate would obviously enact an extension of the Bush tax cuts, work to maintain a repatriation holiday for corporate profits, and even pass House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan that jeopardizes Medicare. But when asked what Republicans should do if faced with a Democratic majority that won’t keep the tax cuts, Norquist had a simple answer:“impeach” Obama.

NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

Grover forgets that President’s can only be impeached for treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. (But then they lowered the bar so low with the last one that the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors is now anything equivalent to extramarital blow jobs, so maybe he has a point.)

Still, I think it’s time to give Grover his due. It’s tempting to make fun of him. His name is kind of funny,and he seems to be a bit of a clown to outside observers, but the truth is that he’s probably had more influence on American politics than any other single person in the last 30 years. He has systematically pursued his “market leninist” strategy with focus and patience and resisted the lure of compromise even when the Democrats offered up big cuts to “entitlements,” (something that even surprised me.)

He keeps his eye on the prize — the prize he’s been seeking since 1978:

In the handful of Marxists on an elite campus otherwise drained from a decade of political activism, Grover could find sustenance for his view that America’s power structure was dominated by Leftists arrogantly running roughshod over the lives of true Americans. And when he graduated cum laude with a degree in economics in 1978, he could pour more concrete around his already impregnable ideology by drawing on the promise of the tax rebellion erupting throughout the country. All around him, from Massachusetts to California, he saw a popular uprising against bureaucracy and socialist creep. “Get rid of the Soviet government,” he would say, “and I don’t really have much use for ours.”

He was convinced that the adults behind this tax revolt saw what the prep-school radicals at Harvard couldn’t, or wouldn’t: The struts and supports of America’s sprawling government were producing weak and dependent people.(And with the lessons in self-sufficiency that infused Grover’s childhood, he didn’t harbor much tolerance for weak, dependent people.) Government had the pernicious power to steal money from the strong and corrupt the weak with handouts. Government was communal, which meant other people (bureaucrats who weren’t as smart, otherwise they wouldn’t be bureaucrats) telling people like him what to do. The government used taxpayer dollars to create all kinds of mischief.

Norquist is philosophically a hardcore libertarian. But he’s a strategist who will use any means to achive his goals. If that means temporarily making common cause with theocrats and imperialists he’ll do it.

His most important and enduring tactic is the anti-tax crusade which he has never once compromised. Through it, he basically controls one of the two major parties in America. And he will not give up until he achieves what he set out to achieve — bankrupting the federal government.

He’s a fascinating fellow, whose personality seems almost underdeveloped in some respects:

Grover’s parents left him with a confident righteousness about the world and how to maneuver in it. In doing so they raised a supremely confident young man, but one who seemed to his friends strangely incapable of connecting with others. “He’s not a fellow who is motivated by or particularly needs a whole lot of human warmth or interaction,” explained one friend.

Grover would have trouble understanding, coping with, or even deciphering flaws in those around him. While friends insisted he had a strong moral compass for his own actions, the nuances of human personality in others often eluded him. Friends and allies worried: Grover would embrace a bad apple, based on a precariously built certainty that the person was an ideological loyalist. Just as readily, he’d turn against an ally, based on an equally dubious conclusion that the person was (or would be, or might be) a betrayer to the cause.

Politically, this overcharged sense of self-sufficiency produced in Grover an intolerance for the view that people might turn to government for help as an arbiter, an equalizer of society’s power imbalances. People were best off left alone; a coddling, meddling government could only sap reservoirs of individual strength. From his upbringing, too, came a natural empathy for the survivalist rhetoric of the gun crowd and the antigovernment themes of Western libertarians. Raised in a chic Northeastern suburb, Norquist would increasingly sound like a man spawned from the individualist West. “I’ve always thought,” he would explain later, “that it is part of the American ideology, the American worldview, that people should be left alone to take care of themselves, and other people shouldn’t tell you what to do.”

There’s a certain kind of psychology that leads people in Grover’s ideological direction. I’ve met any number of them over the years, many having some of those same personality traits.

But it’s a rare person who has his strategic mind and capacity for serious long term commitment to a single, powerful tactic to achieve his goals. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves for the state of our politics today. He’s a major figure.

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