Month: October 2012

If this doesn’t prove he’s a socialist, nothing will

by digby

Via the New York Times

Through Friday, since Mr. Obama’s inauguration — his first 1,368 days in office — the Dow Jones industrial average has gained 67.9 percent. That’s an extremely strong performance — the fifth best for an equivalent period among all American presidents since 1900. The Bespoke Investment Group calculated those returns for The New York Times.

The best showing occurred in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, when the market rose by a whopping 238.1 percent. Of course, that followed a calamitous decline. When his term started, the Dow had fallen to one-fourth of its former peak. In 2008, the year before Mr. Obama took office, the Dow declined by roughly one-third.

After Franklin Roosevelt, the next-best market performances occurred under Calvin Coolidge, Bill Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower. These exceptionally strong markets helped all of them win the next election — and the stock market is undoubtedly helping Mr. Obama, too, even if he isn’t saying much about it.

“What I find most ironic about these numbers is that one of Obama’s weaknesses is said to be his economic record,” said Paul T. Hickey, Bespoke’s co-founder. “While the stock market isn’t a complete reflection of the economy, it is an important indicator, and the stock market is one of the great things the president has working in his favor. But it’s a sensitive subject. With Wall Street so despised by the average American right now, it’s probably something he doesn’t want to be too quick to trumpet. But facts are facts.”

But he called some rich guy a fat cat once. Let’s not forget that.

Youtube of the day

by digby

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Coates writes:

I always point out that slavery wasn’t that long ago, but it’s really hard to illustrate the point. Louis CK’s joke that the period between now and slavery is two old ladies back to back helps. It also helps to know that John Tyler, born in 1790 and president in 1840, still has grandsons alive today.

I suspect that to kids today that show seems as long ago as the civil war. But I watched it as a kid. In fact, I was probably about the same age watching that show as that fellow was when he saw the assassination.

(And yeah, it was pretty much assumed that everyone smoked and they gave away cigarettes as prizes.)

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Setting up the scapegoats

by digby

Marco Rubio’s sexist slip is showing:

All over the morning talk shows and on the various chatter streams, I’m hearing Republicans claim that talk about women’s issues, particularly abortion, is a sign that the Democrats are losing. I don’t agree with that, but I do know that if Romney wins, the Democrats will almost certainly blame their emphasis on women’s issues as the cause (and will likely start thinking of abortion the same way they think about gun control.)

How do I know this? Because the GOP is setting it up that way and the Democrats always blame the left side of the dial for their losses. It’s just a matter of finding the right left wing faction to pin it on. I’m going to guess it’s the women’s turn to pay.

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Exceptional sophistry

by digby

This opening paragraph about American “exceptionalism” by Scott Shane in today’s New York Times is quite compelling:

IMAGINE a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers.

What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.

The candidate might try to stir up his audience by flipping a familiar campaign trope: America is indeed No. 1, he might declare — in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China; in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times the rate of Japan; in energy use per person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany.

How far would this truth-telling candidate get? Nowhere fast. Such a candidate is, in fact, all but unimaginable in our political culture. Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.

It’s really about a narcissistic culture. The right uses the “USA! USA! Fuck Yeah!” approach. The left uses the “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” approach. But in the end it’s all about how great Americans think they are. And I don’t think facts will change that.

Unfortunately, Shane then takes us to the land of he said/she said:

Democrats are more loath than Republicans to look squarely at the government debt crisis indisputably looming with the aging of baby boomers and the ballooning cost of Medicare. Republicans are more reluctant than Democrats to acknowledge the rise of global temperatures and its causes and consequences. But both parties, it is fair to say, prefer not to consider either trend too deeply.

Both parties would rather avert their eyes from such difficult challenges — because we, the people, would rather avert our eyes.

Thanks. That’s a big help.

First of all, the deficit is not even remotely equivalent to the global warming crisis. The worst thing that happens if the debt becomes the catastrophe all the deficit hawks say it will, is economic turmoil down the road That’s not a good thing, but we’ve weathered economic turmoil many times and it is highly unlikely to cause droughts, famine and refugee crises all over the planet killing millions of people. This is a truly silly and absurd comparison.

Yes, liberals are unwilling to concede that future debt is more important than the health and security of the people, particularly since the country has more than enough wealth to pay for it and currently spends trillions of dollars on military adventures it does not approve of. (How about this as a solution?)

Moreover, the need to focus on the alleged “debt crisis” that is “indisputably” looming at the expense of our current economic problems is irresponsible in the extreme. Indeed, it will be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Starving the economy today is what will lead to a more low growth and higher debt. Liberals are against this deficit hysteria because we know that it’s exactly the wrong thing to do to fix the projected debt!

Global warming, on the other hand, may not play out the way the scientific consensus believes it will — but God help the species if it does. The consequences are so horrifying that it’s not just irresponsible, it’s immoral to delay, much less deny its existence as the right increasingly does.

I won’t even get into the economic motivations of the people who are pimping deficit fetishism and global warming denialism. It’s easy enough to see where the money is on both of those arguments.

But hey — let’s all agree that both sides should get together and hold hands as they jump over the cliff. The liberals will agree to give up the social insurance programs that have kept the nation from having even worse statistics than those outlined above while the right will “agree” to let their children have air to breathe and water to drink. What an awesome deal. We really are exceptional, aren’t we?

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George McGovern: too decent to be President

by digby

I was too young to vote for George McGovern, but I was a volunteer and I didn’t know a single person under the age of 30 who was for Nixon. (I know they existed, obviously, I just didn’t know them.) On the other hand, my father was a big McGovern hater, so I certainly understood that plenty of salt of the earth Americans truly loathed him (and more importantly, his followers.) Not that my father loathed me personally, of course. He just hated hippies in general.

But even at my young age I knew that this epic loss was a harbinger of bad news for the Democrats. The abandonment of the left began almost immediately — and it has never stopped. I don’t blame McGovern for this, of course. He was up against a formidable machine in the middle of a cultural shit storm and he stuck to his principles. It would have been better for the world if the Democratic Party had done the same.

Joan Walsh wrote a very nice piece about McGovern that’s well worth reading. This excerpt speaks to my point above and, I think, may explain to some younger folks the dynamic that created so much of what we see today:

When I asked labor historian Jefferson Cowie in an interview whether he could identify one crucial moment in the Democratic Party’s post-’60s unraveling, I expected him to fudge like a good academic, but he surprised me; he had one: “The 1972 decision by organized labor…to destroy McGovern. Because that solidified a moment. It said, ‘We can’t work with the unions,’ to the left and to the women’s movement and the rest. It said organized labor is just about guys like George Meany, and Mayor Daley, it’s really the same monster, we can’t deal with them. And that creates a natural alliance between the New Left and the New Democrats, who were much more sympathetic to important issues of diversity than to labor.”

McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, would pioneer the idea of “New Democrats” who owed no allegiance to labor. When he ran for Senate in 1974, Hart titled his stump speech “The End of the New Deal.” That same year he proclaimed that his new generation of Democrats were not just ”a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” slandering labor’s longtime champion. A young Bill and Hillary Clinton got their start on the McGovern campaign, and it’s hard not to see the impact of McGovern’s defeat on Clinton’s careful centrism and Democratic Leadership Council politics. The DLC was formed in direct reaction to Walter Mondale’s 1984 loss, which was even more lop-sided than McGovern’s. But it was designed to eradicate McGovernism from the party – to define Democrats as tough on crime and welfare, friendly to business, hawkish on defense – everything McGovern supposedly was not. It also involved the party running away from its proud New Deal legacy, and defining itself more as what it wasn’t than what it was.

We now bemoan the loss of the labor movement in America and for good reason. But the rift between labor and the left during that earlier era deprived both of a necessary ally. Labor thought perhaps in those days that they were powerful enough that they could ally themselves with the right on cultural issues without weakening their political clout. And after the defeat of their idealism, the left thought they could co-opt business and industry for their own aims. Both were completely deluded about the reactionary nature of the American Right.

Joan sees the coming back together of the left and labor in the Obama coalition of 2008. I wonder if that’s true. And even if it is, it’s with a much diminished labor movement and a Party as divided as ever on issues of war and peace. It was a very costly rift.

George McGovern was a fine politician and a good man. Like Joan, I think he may have deserved a better party than the one he had.

As Perlstein says in this book review:

While the meaning of McGovern may change, clearly one thing remains: the unfair abuse of George McGovern by shameless opportunists.

RIP

Update: More from Perlstein on McGovern’s passing:

Even after the landslide a novel called President McGovern’s First Term held fast to the fantasy—imagining that had McGovern only run a last-minute ad inviting voters to ask, “Do I really trust Richard Nixon? … Do I want to contribute to giving him a blank check, a license to do what he pleases for four long years?” he would have eked out a victory.

The fact that in real-life McGovern had run exactly that sort of campaign didn’t deter the novelist. One of his TV commercials displayed all the headlines correctly laying the Watergate scandal on the Oval Office’s doorstep—and when reporters ignored Watergate as an election issue, in an astonishing speech to a conference of UPI editors, McGovern yelled at them, calling Nixon’s “the most corrupt administration in history…and every one of you in this room knows it.” In another astonishing speech—well, it wasn’t really a speech at all: instead, the candidate just played a recording of a Vietnam veteran saying, “I don’t think the people really, really understand war and what’s going on. We went into villages after they dropped napalm, and the human beings were fused together like pieces of metal that had been soldered.”

If only elections could be framed as referenda on decency. If only someone shooting straight from the hip could call Americans to their better selves. If only … then the world would change. This, more than any alleged policy extremism, was the soul of McGovernism. But Americans were not prepared to be called back to decency like that.

Read the whole thing.

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Romney the bully meme

by digby

This explains why the right has finally rallied to their man: they don’t care what he says as long as he’s an asshole.

And Democrats are just relieved when their candidate resembles something other than a welcome mat.

(That’s a good impression of Obama, btw.)

I got your Godwin right here

by David Atkins

The terms “fascist” and “Nazi” get thrown around quite a bit in American politics, especially by people who have the least understanding just what those terms actually mean. So it might be helpful to take a look at a place where an actual, politically active and successful neo-nazi fascist movement has arisen and whence it develops. Right now, that place is Greece:

On the streets of Greece, it’s now common knowledge among immigrants like Hussein that black clothes are the unofficial uniform of Golden Dawn, or Chrysi Avgi—a kind of cross between Hezbollah and the Tea Party. Since 2008, Golden Dawn supporters have assaulted immigrants with brass knuckles, knives, and batons. There have been nearly 500 attacks this year alone, according to the Migrant Workers Association, some of which have been captured on video and proudly posted on Golden Dawn’s YouTube channel.

But Golden Dawn is not just a gang of radical right-wing thugs. It is now the fourth-largest party in Greek politics. In elections this year, it won 18 of 300 seats in parliament on an explicitly anti-immigrant platform. Its growing constituency includes many ordinary Greeks who fear that waves of impoverished foreigners are draining the state’s dwindling resources and taking their jobs in a country where nearly a quarter of the population is unemployed. And as the country’s economy continues to collapse, Golden Dawn is becoming increasingly entrenched in the mainstream of Greek political life.

The popularity of Golden Dawn marks a new turn for Greece, which has a long history of accommodating the disenfranchised. In the middle of Athens stands a monument to Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou, who fought against the persecution of Greek Jews during World War II, when the country was occupied by Germany and Italy. Even amid the most bitter partisan battles of the postwar years, the country never viewed xenophobia as an acceptable rallying cry.

It turns that when you throw a proud people who have lived a relatively decent lifestyle with modest provisions for the middle class into the desperate grinder of austerity economics, fascist movements start to develop. That’s pretty much how it happened in Germany in the first place, which is why the the rest of the world learned from its Post-WWI mistake to implement the Marshall Plan after the Second War. When people start to lose everything, it’s easy to blame immigrants and the dispossessed. Those people start to become scapegoats for the sorts of scoundrels who use jingoistic xenophobia for career advancement in the guise of patriotism.

It’s no surprise that the ascendance of the far right in the United States tracks alongside the erosion of the middle class. Fortunately, America has been spared the full force of austerity. So far.

But the rise of a Golden Dawn in the U.S. isn’t at all unthinkable. All that need happen is for the Very Serious People to get their way in voucherizing Medicare and Social Security, destroying the safety net, and remaking society in Ayn Rand’s image.

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* Dennis has the week-end off so I’m re-posting an oldie but goodie  — digby


Saturday Night At The Movies




The Docu-horror Picture Show


By Dennis Hartley






















Whatever happened to Fay Wray?

In honor of Halloween , and in a desperate search of a theme for this week’s post (heh), I thought I’d eschew the usual “Top 10 Horror Films” tact in favor of something REALLY scary-real life. Because, let’s face it. Try as they might, Hollywood can never really match the thrills, the chills and grotesqueries of, say, reading the newspaper, watching CNN, going online to look at your 401k, popping into a Denny’s at 3am, or waiting for next Tuesday’s results. Documentary filmmakers have been on to this little secret for years.


So forget the exploding squibs, the fakey Karo syrup blood and severed prosthetic limbs-here’s my Top 10 list of creepy, scary, frightening, haunting, spine-tingling tales that you literally could not make up (as per usual, in no particular ranking order). Er….”enjoy”?


The Atomic Cafe-Whoopee we’re all gonna die! In a big, scary mushroom cloud. But along the way, we might as well have a few laughs. That seems to be the impetus behind this harrowingly funny compilation of U.S. government propaganda shorts from the Cold War era, that were originally designed to “educate” the public about how to best “survive” a nuclear attack (all you have to do is get under a desk…everyone knows that!). In addition to the Civil Defense campaigns (which include the classic “duck and cover” tutorials) the filmmakers have drawn from a rich vein of military training films, which generally reduce the possible effects of a nuclear strike to something akin to a barrage of shelling from, oh I don’t know… a really big field howitzer. The genius of the film lies in its complete lack of narration (irony speaks louder than words, too). This also gives the film a timeless quality; you could very easily apply its “message” to the current world stage (everything old is new again). It makes a perfect double bill with Dr. Strangelove.


Brother’s Keeper– An absolutely riveting documentary about a dirt-poor, semi-literate rural upstate New York farmer named Delbert Ward, who was charged with murdering his brother in 1990. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky follow a year or so in the life of Delbert and his two surviving brothers, as they weather the pressures of the trial and the media circus that surrounds it. The clock seems to have stopped around 1899 on the aging bachelor brothers’ run-down farm, where they live together in relative seclusion in a small, unheated shack (at times, one is reminded of the family in the classic X-Files episode, “Home”) The prosecution claims that the brothers conspired to kill their ailing sibling, coming up with some rather oddball motives. The defense attorney’s conjecture is that the victim died of natural causes, and that Delbert was coerced by law enforcement into signing a written confession (admitting a “mercy killing”), thereby taking advantage of the fact that he was uneducated. He also cagily riles up the town folk to rally behind “the boys” by portraying the D.A. and investigating authorities as city slickers, out to railroad a simple farmer. Is Delbert really “simple”? Watch and decide.


The Corporation – While it’s not exactly news to any thinking person that corporate greed and manipulation affects everyone’s life on this planet in one way or the other, co-directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott have managed to deliver the message in a unique and engrossing fashion. By applying a point-by-point psychological “profile” to the base rudiments of “corporate think”, Achbar and Abbott build a solid case to prove that if the “corporation” were, um, corporeal, “he” would be Norman Bates. Mixing archival footage with observations from the expected talking heads (Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, etc.) and the unexpected (some CEOs who are actually sympathetic with the filmmaker’s point of view) along with the colorful (a self-professed “corporate spy” who makes McCain’s ratfuckers look like Boy Scouts), the film gives us the full perspective not only from the watchdogs, but from the belly of the beast itself. There are enough audacious “exposes” trotted out to keep conspiracy theorists, environmentalists and human rights activists tossing and turning in sweat-soaked sheets for nights on end.


The Cruise-I used to hang out with a co-worker who had a bit of an enigmatic soul. He would pace about his living room, quaffing beers and expounding on the universe. Sometimes, he would stop dead in his tracks, give me a faraway look, and say, “Trust me, Dennis-you don’t want to be in here,” while stabbing a finger at his forehead. Then, he would resume with his pacing and his (always entertaining) pontificating. The idea of being in someone else’s head is always a bit “horror show”, don’t you think? If you can take it, you might want to check out this one-of-a-kind doc that spends nearly 80 minutes in “here”. Specifically, inside the head of one Tim “Speed” Levitch, a tour guide for Manhattan’s Gray Line double-decker buses. Levitch’s world view is, um, interesting, to say the least. And he is nothing, if not verbose. Is he crazy? Is he some kind of post-modern prophet? Or is he just another eccentric, fast-talking New Yorker? It’s a strange, unique and weirdly exhilarating roller coaster ride through the consciousness of being.


The Devil and Daniel Johnston -The full horror of schizophrenia can only be truly known by those who are afflicted, but this rockumentary about cult alt-folk singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston comes pretty close to being the next worse thing to actually being there. Johnston has waged an internal battle between inspired creativity and mental illness for most of his life (not unlike Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson and Joe Meek). The filmmakers recount a series of apocryphal stories about how Johnston, like Chance the Gardener in Being There stumbles innocently and repeatedly into the right place at the right time, steadily amassing a sizeable grass roots following. Everything appears to be set in place for his Big Break, until an ill-advised tryst with hallucinogenic substances sends him (literally) spiraling into complete madness. While on a private plane flight with his pilot father, Johnston has a sudden epiphany that he is Casper the Friendly Ghost, and decides to wrest the controls, causing the plane to crash. Both men walk away relatively unscathed, but Daniel is soon afterwards committed to a mental hospital. The story becomes even more surreal, as Johnston is finally “discovered” by the major labels, who engage in a bidding war while their potential client is still residing in the laughing house (only in America). By turns darkly humorous, sad, and inspiring.


Grey Gardens -“The Aristocrats!” There’s no murder or mayhem involved in this real-life Gothic character study by renowned documentarians Albert and David Maysles (Salesman , Gimme Shelter), but you’ll still find it to be quite creepy. Edith Bouvier Beale (who was in her early 80s at the time of filming) and her middle aged daughter Edie were living under decidedly less than hygienic conditions in a spooky old dark manor in East Hampton, L.I. with a menagerie of cats and raccoons when the brothers decided to profile them (their halcyon “high society” days were, needless to say, behind them). The fact that the women were related to Jackie O (Edith the elder was her aunt) makes this Fellini-esque nightmare even more twisted. You are not likely to encounter a mother-daughter combo quite like “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” more than once in a lifetime. The intrinsic camp value of the Edies was not lost on Broadway; a musical adaptation (I think that’s a first for a documentary) ran for 2 years. Coming soon: a dramatized version produced by HBO with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore (oy vay).


In the Realms of the Unreal -Artist Henry Darger is not usually mentioned in the same breath as Picasso, but he nonetheless makes for a fascinating study. Darger was a nondescript recluse who worked as a janitor for his entire adult life. He had no significant relationships of record and died in obscurity in 1973. While sorting out the contents of the small Chicago apartment he had lived in for years, his landlady discovered a treasury of artwork and writings, including over 300 paintings. The centerpiece was an epic, 15,000-page illustrated novel, which Darger had meticulously scribed in long hand over a period of decades (it was literally his life’s work). The subject at hand: An entire mythic alternate universe populated mostly by young, naked hermaphrodites (the”Vivian girls”). Although it’s tempting to dismiss Darger as a filthy old pervert, until you have actually seen the astonishing breadth of Darger’s monster from the id, spilled out over so many pages and so much canvas, it’s hard to convey how weirdly mesmerizing it all is (especially if you catch an exhibit, which I saw here in Seattle last year). The doc mixes Darger’s bio with animation of his artwork, and actors supplying narration from his tome.


An Inconvenient Truth– It’s the end of the world as we know it. Apocalyptic sci-fi has become scientific fact-now that’s scary. Former VP/Oscar winner Al Gore is a Power Point-packing Rod Serling, submitting a gallery of nightmare nature scenarios for our disapproval. I’m tempted to say that this chilling look at the results of unchecked global warming is only showing us the tip of the proverbial iceberg…but it’s melting too fast.


Sicko – Torture porn for the uninsured! Our favorite agitprop filmmaker, Michael Moore, grabs your attention right out of the gate with a real Bunuel moment. Over the opening credits, we are treated to shaky home video depicting a man pulling up a flap of skin whilst patiently stitching up a gash on his knee with a needle and thread, as Moore deadpans in V.O. (with his cheerful Midwestern countenance) that the gentleman is an avid cyclist- and one of the millions of Americans who cannot afford health insurance. The film proceeds to delve into some of the other complexities contributing to the overall ill health of our current system; such as the monopolistic power and greed of the pharmaceutical companies, the lobbyist graft, and (perhaps most horrifying of all) the compassionless bureaucracy of a privatized health “coverage” system that focuses first and foremost on profit, rather than on actual individual need. Better eat your Wheaties.


Zoo –When the Seattle press originally broke the story of a Boeing engineer dying from a perforated colon as the result of his “love” for horses, that alone was weird and disturbing enough (not to mention the cruelty to animals angle). But when it was revealed that the deceased was a member of a sizable group of like-minded individuals, calling themselves “zoophiles”, who traveled from all parts of the country to converge on a farm where their “special needs” were catered to, I remember thinking that it was a scenario beyond the ken of a Cronenberg or a Lynch; it was horror in the most abject sense of the word. That being said, there is still a “bad car wreck” fascination about the tale, resulting in an eerie, compelling and thought-provoking Errol Morris-style documentary about the darkest side of (in) human desire. To their credit, filmmakers Robinson Devor and Charles Mudede keep a sensitive, neutral tone; it is not as exploitative as you might assume.


Previous posts with related themes:


Oh come, all ye Pagans: DVDs for All Hallows Eve


Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels-Part 2: Klaus Kinski

Saturday Night at the Movies review archive

Yay!

by digby

Brooklyn’s biggest baby—at 242 pounds and counting!—is doing well after traveling from Alaska last week. Mitik, a Pacific walrus calf who was orphaned off the Alaskan Coast, is at the New York Aquarium—and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s staff and vets are giving him around-the-clock care!

Mitik, now only 16 weeks old, wasn’t expected to survive when he was found in July. The Alaska SeaLife Center diagnosed him with a bladder infection, a high white blood cell count, and he was badly dehydrated. However, the little big guy has been a fighter. Now, at his new Coney Island home, the WCS says he’s been “responding well to medications and is gaining as much as a half a pound each day. His last weigh-in put him at 242 pounds. He is bottle-fed every four hours.”

h/t to @tnapoles

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The Golden Dawn of austerity

by digby

Apropos of nothing, I just thought you might find this interesting:

The three parties in Greece’s uneasy coalition government are paying a high price for their unremitting support of more austerity measures, with polls showing the ruling New Democracy Conservatives have fallen behind the major opposition Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) and that the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is surging fast while the once-dominant PASOK Leftists have fallen to last place among the six parties in Parliament.

On the same day that 70,000 Greeks were demonstrating in Athens against more pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions being planned by the government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, a poll by the survey company VPRC put SYRIZA first with 30.5 percent, compared to 27 percent for New Democracy.

Golden Dawn, which got only 0.29 percent of the vote in 2009 when it was considered an extremist fringe party, is now in third with 14 percent, double what it received in June when it won 18 seats in the Parliament.

As Golden Dawn presses its anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-bailout, ultra-religious platform it is gaining with each extreme move, the poll indicated. The party is also benefiting from its fierce opposition to austerity measures that are attached to $325 billion in rescue loans from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank.

The biggest surprise, however, was the 5.5 percent given to PASOK, less than half the 12.3 percent it won in June. The party had 44 percent of the vote in the 2009 elections which it won, but is disappearing after former premier George Papandreou’s regime imposed austerity, which is still being backed by its new leader, Evangelos Venizelos.

But hey, let’s have some austerity. Surely the effect will be to create a groundswell for liberalism. Right? Isn’t that how that works?

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