Month: May 2013

In solidarity

by digby

I got this from Paul Ryan’s challenger, Rob Zerban, in last year’s congressional election. It seemed like something worth passing on:

Sometimes, it’s hard for us to imagine what life might have been like a hundred years ago. Without television, without the internet, without air conditioning. But there is a lot more that we take for granted than just these modern creature comforts.

127 years ago today, the Governor of Wisconsin ordered the National Guard to fire upon a crowd of 14,000 workers who had gathered for one simple demand: that their workday be shortened to only 8 hours of physical labor. Seven people died that day and several more were injured in what would come to be known as the Bay View Massacre.

Over the course of the week, there would be several more demonstrations around the country in places like New York, Chicago, and Cincinnati. The battle over the 8 hour workday would last another 30 years and cost many more lives. But, their sacrifice bought us more time to spend with our families and to live our lives our way.

Today, I’ll stand with scores of union members and Milwaukee residents to commemorate this moment of history and honor those that stood against an oppressive governor. All I ask today is that you take a minute to remember their sacrifice when you head home from work tomorrow.

In Solidarity,
Rob Zerban

We just aren’t killing them fast enough

by digby

… and if a few innocent people get executed, it’s the price we have to pay for “closure”:

States across the country have spent the last few years reconsidering the wisdom of capital punishment. Over the past six years, five states have abolished the death penalty entirely, including Maryland just last month. But Florida, where the execution rate is second only to Texas, isn’t having that conversation. Instead, Gov. Rick Scott (R) is currently considering a bill passed by the legislature this week that would speed up executions in the state by limiting “frivolous” appeals by inmates and shortening the time they spend on Death Row. (Florida has about 400 people on Death Row, 10 of whom have been there more than 35 years.)

Called the “Timely Justice Act,” the bill would create new deadlines for certain filings and force the state to move faster towards an execution after a ruling by the state supreme court. Florida legislators behind the bill believe it will save money (executions currently cost state taxpayers about $24 million each) and bring closure to victims, but legal advocates say that it’s likely to do nothing but raise the possibility that Florida will execute an innocent person. They’re on pretty solid ground with that argument, given that 24 people on Florida’s Death Row have been exonerated since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s.

24 people!

I guess it’s just me, but the idea that anyone thinks it’s ok to even take the chance of executing innocent people is just beyond my comprehension. To actually make it more likely is just evil.

I am against the death penalty on a moral basis — I simply don’t believe in killing except in cases of self-defense and since these people are in custody, I cannot see how one can construe the death penalty as anything but revenge. But even if one believes strongly in the concept of an eye for an eye, our system of determining who’s responsible for the first eye is racist, inconsistent and … human, which means it is imperfect. Which brings me back to this incomprehensible notion that we should just accept that occasionally killing innocent people is the price “we” (actually “they”) have to pay to make somebody feel good. Yes, evil is a good word for that.

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Is there a sadder bunch of loser misfits than Hollywood conservatives?

by digby

Taken in by by one slick hustler after another:

To those who knew him, or thought they knew him, he was a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood’s political conservatives. David Stein brought right-wing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs.

Over the past five years Stein’s organisation, Republican Party Animals, drew hundreds to regular events in and around Los Angeles, making him a darling of conservative blogs and talkshows. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein’s cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll.

There was just one problem. Stein was not who he claimed. His real name can be revealed for the first time publicly – a close circle of confidants only found out the truth recently – as David Cole. And under that name he was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. He changed identities in January 1998.

Read the whole pathetic story. It’s a fascinating peek into the world of right wing chumps and charlatans. This one is a champ.

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Perminterns: another sign of a broken economy

by David Atkins

Reminder #1,271,689 that the economy is still broken: the permintern.

In so many ways, Kate, who was born in 1987, is a perfect reflection of the opportunities and hardships of being young today. She’s smart and motivated and has a degree from an Ivy League school, yet at 25 she worries she’ll never attain the status or lifestyle of her boomer parents. She majored in political science and has a burnished social conscience, something she honed teaching creative writing in a women’s prison. But Kate’s most salient—and at this point, defining—generational trait might be that she doesn’t have a full-time job. Instead, she has been an intern for a year and a half.

Kate moved to DC after dropping out of her first year of law school. She has cycled through one internship at a political organization and another at a media company and is now biding her time as an unpaid intern at a lobbying firm. To make ends meet, she works as a hostess in Adams Morgan three or four nights a week, which means she often clocks 15-hour days.

“I don’t mean to sound like I have an ego, but I am an intelligent, hard-working person,” Kate says. “Someone would be happy they hired me.”

It’s a refrain heard many times from the millions of twentysomething Kates who are scrambling to find jobs with a steady paycheck and benefits. Mostly, though, they want to find a way out of the low-paying—or nonpaying—apprenticeship track. For Kate, it feels more like an internship vortex.

After all, who wants to still be an intern at an age when you should have a 401(k) and a modicum of job security, or at least be earning more than you did at your summer job during high school? “People my age expect to start at the bottom,” Kate says, “but in this economy the bottom keeps getting lower and lower.”

Welcome to the slow, sputtering economic recovery, Generation Y.

Keep in mind that this is the situation for Ivy League grads in D.C. Nor is this an aberration: it’s also a major problem in the entertainment industry on the West Coast. And these are the well-to-do kids doing everything they can to climb the social ladder, do what they’re supposed to, and get ahead. Many of them will give up and take a low-paying, insecure dead-end job, or get sucked into the vortex of debt and unemployment that is much of graduate school. Matters are worse for most more normal people.

For those twenty-somethings who do manage to find a decent job, buying a decent home is usually still well out of reach due to home prices that skyrocketed far beyond stagnant wages. Older Americans who bought their homes decades ago are still doing fine due to policies that have prioritized asset growth over wage growth. But for those who were children or yet unborn when housing started to shoot upwards, things are far more difficult. Of course, as bad as Millennials have it, it’s even worse for the middle-aged who have been forced out of jobs and whose homes are underwater.

The economy is still broken. It will stay broken until wages rise to meet productivity growth, and until the middle class reclaims much of the wealth that has been stolen by the very wealthy.

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Saturday Night at the Movies



Take me to the river


By Dennis Hartley

Stygian journey: Paulina Gaitan in Sin Nombre

Dennis is off this week, so I thought I’d re-run this piece from a few years back in honor of Cinco de mayo week-end.  — digby




Every now and then a debut film comes along that has a voice. And when I say “voice”, I mean that the director’s confidence and clarity of cinematic vision has a tangible presence-from the very first frame to the closing credits. Maybe I’m a little jaded, but it doesn’t happen that much these days. So when I saw Cary Fukunaga’s amazingly assured first feature, Sin Nombre, it “…made my big toe shoot right up in my boot,” (as Little Richard described his reaction the first time he ever saw Jimi Hendrix perform on stage).


Defying all expectations, this modestly budgeted, visually expansive gem hinges on a simple narrative, but is anything but predictable. It’s an adventure, yet it is informed by an almost meditative stillness that makes the occasional frisson that much more gripping and real. It delves into gang culture, but it isn’t a movie about gangs. It has protagonists who are desperately attempting to immigrate to the United States by any means necessary, yet this isn’t yet another earnest message film about “the plight” of illegal immigrants. It’s a “road movie”, but the future’s uncertain-and the end is always near.


The film is basically comprised of two stories, which eventually merge as one. One story begins in Honduras, centered around a headstrong teenaged girl named Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) who joins her long estranged father and uncle as they journey to Mexico, where they plan to ride the rails as far north as possible before making a final dash across the border to America, where dreams of milk and honey await in New Jersey (they hope). Sayra’s father hopes to use their time together on the road to become reacquainted with his daughter. Sayra, who seems to be working through some abandonment issues, is polite but set on keeping a cool distance from his belated attempts at offering fatherly advice and exerting parental authority. Still, Sayra, her father and her uncle begin to form a family unit, precipitated more by circumstance and necessity than by genuine affection.


Another type of extended family unit is examined in the film’s companion narrative, which takes us to the southern Mexico state of Chiapas, and is centered on a local chapter of the notorious “MS-13” gang. We are introduced to the group by witnessing a brutal initiation rite, a 13-second long “beat down” on a disturbingly young inductee nicknamed “El Smiley” (Kristian Ferrer). Punches and kicks are soon replaced by congratulatory hugs, as Smiley is welcomed as a “brother” by his new homies, and anointed a “son” by the leader, “Lil Mago” (Tenoch Huerta Mejia). We also meet Willy, known to his homies as “El Caspar” (Edgar Flores) who is Smiley’s sponsor, and a de facto big brother figure to the young boy. While he is a dedicated and respected member of the gang, Willy gives us glimpses of a creeping disenchantment with gang life; we sense that he dreams of a better life. He also has something that appears to be lacking in his fellow homies-a genuine heart and soul. This pang of conscience leads to a fateful conflict with Mago, a repugnant sociopath who will accept nothing less than unquestioning, blind obedience from his underlings. Circumstance puts Willy in the same train yard where Sayra and her relatives await to jump a train that will take them north; and thusly their stories converge.


While this is a very human story, containing all the elements of classic drama (love, hope, betrayal, revenge, personal sacrifice), it is also very much about geography, and the elegiac tone that it evokes for what is essentially a harrowing tale. As the train whistle stops its way the length of Mexico, that country’s rugged beauty is captured in gorgeous “golden hour” hues by cinematographer Adriano Goldman. Goldman’s work here started to remind me of the great Nestor Almendros, who did the magnificent photography for Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven. In fact, I found myself flashing on Malick’s film a lot (the Texas prairies used as backdrop in Days of Heaven are in the same neck of the woods, and some story elements and the protagonist’s point of view are reminiscent of that film, too). Whether or not Malick was a conscious influence on Fukunaga is a moot point, because this film stands on its own. Besides, one could have worse influences.


For an unknown cast (many acting in a film for the first time), there are an astonishing number of outstanding performances. I think this adds to the naturalistic, believable tone of the film. My film going companion, who is a native of Mexico (she’s from Colima), was quite impressed by that element, and seconded the motion that the milieu was muy autentico. Sin Nombre is another rarity these days-it’s meant to be seen on the big screen.


Previous posts with related themes:


The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada/El Norte


Gomorrah

*Note: If you want to watch it this week-end you can get it on Amazon 1-click here.
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Low life trash on Fox update

by digby

They just have no limits, do they?

TANTAROS: I mean look, if the president is going to talk about his daughters, typically I would not talk about the daughters, unless, of course, they go to the Bahamas on spring break and we have to pay for it and I think it’s wrong, which I do. But they’re not grown women. So I’m just wondering, at 15 years old, is the Obama daughter, Malia, going to go on birth control? Are they gonna put her on birth control? Because he’s very concerned with the contraceptives and pharmaceuticals that are going in the mouths of everybody else’s 15-year old daughter.

But it’s definitely collectivism, right? “It takes a village.” Do you hear it, everybody? “It takes a village to raise your kids.” President Obama is now the parent-in-chief. Kathleen Sebelius is raising your kids. Joe Biden is raising your kids. Oh not even, it doesn’t stop there. It’s not kids. They consider 15-year olds to be women. They want to tell grown women what to do. They know how grown women feel. They have no idea how women feel. They should stop talking about it, because they have no clue.

I’m not one to say that certain topics shouldn’t ever be discusses (and the administration’s paternalistic policy does raise questions.) But this approach to the issue is so tasteless that it really takes a special kind of social depravity to talk about it in these terms. All it does is tickle the lurid lizard brain of the average right wing audience member in a particular offensive way.

That incoherent rant is an unfortunate window into the increasingly unhinged minds of Fox News pundits. Glenn Beck must be so confused about why he was singled out for censure.

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Tolerance in a time of bigotry

by digby

Yes, back in the day people were bigoted. It was common to hear racial, ethnic and homophobic slurs dropped casually into conversation. But it was never a requirement:

Multiple players who played for Vince Lombardi, the legendary former Packers and Redskins coach, say that he knew some of his players were gay, and that not only did he not have a problem with it, but he went out of his way to make sure no one else on his team would make it a problem.

In 1969, Lombardi’s Redskins included a running back named Ray McDonald, who in 1968 had been arrested for having sex with another man in public. In the Lombardi biography When Pride Still Mattered, author David Maraniss writes that Lombardi told his assistants he wanted them to work with McDonald to help him make the team, “And if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood, you’ll be out of here before your ass hits the ground.”

Lombardi’s daughter Susan told Ian O’Connor of ESPNNewYork.com that her father would have been thrilled to have a player like Jason Collins, the NBA center who publicly revealed this week that he is gay.

“My father was way ahead of his time,” Susan Lombardi said. “He was discriminated against as a dark-skinned Italian American when he was younger, when he felt he was passed up for coaching jobs that he deserved. He felt the pain of discrimination, and so he raised his family to accept everybody, no matter what color they were or whatever their sexual orientation was. I think it’s great what Jason Collins did, because it’s going to open a lot of doors for people. Without a doubt my father would’ve embraced him, and would’ve been very proud of him for coming out.”

Dave Kopay, the first former NFL player to come out, also played on those 1969 Redskins, and he says that while he never told Lombardi, he believes Lombardi knew not only that Kopay was gay, but that Kopay and another Redskins player, Jerry Smith, were in a romantic relationship.

“Lombardi protected and loved Jerry,” Kopay told O’Connor.

Some people have always had empathy. And quite a few went out of their way to defend minorities even when it was socially risky. That’s not to say that people who went along with the prevailing attitudes were all horrible people. Someone like Lombardi had every reason to be secure in his status and career, which made this sort of thing much easier. And a lot of people just don’t have natural empathy if it isn’t modeled for them. But the fact is that there were always whites from every walk of life and every region of the country who were vocally anti-racist and there were always men and women who defended gays. It’s not as if being tolerant wasn’t possible, even then. It’s always possible.

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“Oligarchy’s lies never die, while political truth is strangled every day”


by digby

One of Charlie Pierce’s great additions to the blogosphere, besides his sublime writing,  is his historical memory. In this post, he takes on La Noonan and her gauzy view of the old TipnRonnie trope and then lays some knowledge on all of us:

We must reintroduce the late Walter Karp, whose gimlet-eyed view of what was going on with Reagan and the congressional Democrats of his time was the most invaluable political analysis of the time. Karp saw that what actually was happening was that O’Neill and the Democrats were willing to sell out a lot of what had defined them as a party for the previous 50 years. It was Karp who first warned progressives against the dangerous narcotic effects of “centrism.” 

The great task of keeping the plain people stifled falls, as always, to the popular party, and the popular party has been laying its plans well, elaborating and perfecting them with tireless devotion since the 1984 elections.  

We must make of ourselves a “centrist” party, a “moderate” party, a “consensus” party, cry the leaders of the popular party in unison, not a single voice raised in audible dissent.  

We must “shed our ultra-liberal image,” cry the party oligarchs after four years of colluding with the Right. We must set ourselves upon “an irresistible course toward moderation,” says a “conservative” southern governor.  

We “will have to swing sharply toward the center of the political spectrum,” cries the president of the ubiquitous, tireless Coalition for a Democratic Majority. “We must move in a more moderate centrist direction,” says one Nathan Landow, party banker and broker and “liberal” promoter of the 1984 candidacy of poor Walter Mondale.  

The new party “centrism” is to be established under the guidance of the newly formed Democratic leadership Council …… Centrism is a purgative, antidote to “leftism.” It calls for the purging of noncentrists, of “leftists,” of “factions” of “liberal activists” and “special interests” and all bearers of “the new strain of neo-isolationism” until the popular party is free of every last vestige of freeness.  

“Centrism” is a victory strategy. We must win back southern white voters to the party fold, say the centrists. We must say nothing and do nothing and be nothing save what will contribute to the great southern white wooing, to the final production of a “centrist presidential candidate who will not offend the political and cultural sensibilities of southern voters”…  

Centrism is a new party platform set forth by the new Democratic Policy Commission, packed, as a matter of course, with “centrists” by Kirk, to supply “a broader agenda of the Democratic Party and the nation.” Let us have done with “the singular agenda of elite groups,” says Kirk, pressing into service Kirkpatrick’s great Political Science discovery of 1972: Oligarchy is democratic and democracy is “elitist,” for Oligarchy’s lies never die, while political truth is strangled every day. 

Of course, Reagan and O’Neill got along. Reagan was sharp enough to know that O’Neill was willing to sell out enough of the traditional Democratic party to give Reagan most of what he wanted. The reason Bill Clinton got the awful welfare “reform” deal together with Newt Gingrich and his group of Republicans was because the Republicans got a lot of what they wanted. However, at this current moment in history, the Republicans repeatedly vote against what previously were their own ideas — on health-care, on education, on immigration — simply because this particular president has proposed them.

There were people, you see, even at the time, who saw the Democrats for what they were becoming and “centrism” for the servant of power if really was.  The reason this is important is that for some reason, liberals have to “discover” these things over and over again and then in the throes of “new” knowledge, spend vast amounts energy and time educating their own allies about stuff they should already know.  This endless reinventing of the hamster wheel gives the conservatives a big advantage — unlike liberals who are stuck going around the same track, the other side is constantly evolving.  And liberals are always caught by surprise by what they’ve become.

I don’t know the answer to this problem.  But reading Charlie Pierce is a good start.

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QOTD: Emptywheel

by digby

[U]ltimately, there is a limit, both financial and societal, to how much the country is willing to spend on investigative resources. So every demand that FBI take 6 hours rather than 4 in investigating 1,500 potential leads a day is also a demand that FBI shift resources from somewhere else.

And this navel-gazing, following every successful or near-miss attack, only serves to obscure the issue. We, as a society, have chosen to pursue gun crimes exclusively “post-boom.” We have chosen to let financial criminals that have done far more damage than terrorism — at least in financial terms (though their crimes do have physical repercussions as well) — scot free. That may in fact be the outcome our country — or certainly the elites angling for political contributions — might want. But at the very least, we as a society need to be explicit that the choice has been made, not just to invest billions in surveillance technologies that affect us all, but to treat two brothers and their pressure cooker bombs as a far more heinous crime than school kids being gunned down in their classrooms or struggling families having their homes stolen by the million.

The “Find Every Terrorist at Any Cost Industry” is also, whether they acknowledge it or not, the “Let gunmen and banksters go free” industry.

Read the whole post.

Wanker of the century: Niall Ferguson

by digby

There’s a lot of chatter today about Niall Ferguson’s odious comments about John Maynard Keynes.  This is the gist of it:

An excerpt from Lance Roberts’ post at StreetTalkLive.com reporting a question from former PIMCO banker Paul McCulley (in bold) and Robertson’s notes on Ferguson’s response (its not clear whether these notes are verbatim or paraphrased):

Question By Paul McCulley: 

“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs…in the long run we are all dead.” 

Are we in a liquidity trap, are we at a zero bound of interest rates and stuck at 8% unemployment?

[Ferguson:] Keynes was a homosexual and had no intention of having children. We are NOT dead in the long run…our children are our progeny. It is the economic ideals of Keynes that have gotten us into the problems of today. Short term fixes, with a neglect of the long run, leads to the continuous cycles of booms and busts. Economies that pursue such short term solutions have always suffered not only decline, but destruction, in the long run.

Several details of Ferguson’s remarks that were included in the Financial Advisor story have not been confirmed by other sources. For example, Financial Advisor reported that Ferguson asked his audience how many children Keynes had and “explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated.” Other sources have not reported that rhetorical question or the additional disparaging remarks in Ferguson’s answer to it. No full transcript or video of Ferguson’s remarks has yet emerged.

Just wow. Gay people don’t care about the future because they don’t have kids. Except, of course, many do. And many straights don’t. Which means, what?

I’m always struck by this right wing fetish for austerity by people who seem not to realize that even their own worst case financial scenario is temporary even as they throw up their hands in the face of a very real existential crisis on the horizon. Ferguson to his credit, does acknowledge that climate change is a real thing. But for a man who apparently believes a love of one’s own children is the only motive for caring about the future, he sure has a fatalistic (yet appropriately chauvanistic) view of a planetary calamity:

Unlike Europe and Japan, the United States is one of the global Big Five in terms of mineral wealth, with known reserves of fossil fuels and minerals worth at least $30 trillion — more than Australia, Saudi Arabia and China, though less than Russia. In particular, the United States is poised to profit from an energy revolution that has seen shale gas leap from 1 percent of U.S. natural gas production in 2000 to 35 percent today. American natural gas is a quarter the price of East Asian and a third the price of German. The combination of an increasingly competitive labor market and cheap energy is going to spark a remarkable recovery of U.S. manufacturing in the near future.

So, the good news is that the US can continue to exploit fossil fuels and pollute the atmosphere. Awesome.

Even better:

Finally, as the world warms and climate becomes more volatile, North America will fare better than East Asia. Natural disasters will happen, of course, as Hurricane Sandy reminded us. But there will be more on the other side of the Pacific. Good luck to Asia’s coastal megacities. They will need it.

Niall apparently doesn’t have any Asian children, which explains his cavalier dismissal of mass death and destruction “over there.” (He’s not saying we won’t get our hair mussed, mind you. A few more Katrinas and Hurricane Sandys sure …) Never mind about the refugees and the dead bodies everywhere and the inevitable resulting global social and economic chaos.

The good news is that if this fine fellow’s belief system continues to prevail, we may be living in a global dystopia but, by God, we won’t have to worry about a budget deficit. That’s what right wingers call love.

Update: For those who may be unfamiliar with the full extent of Ferguson’s odiousness, Kathy Geier put together a nice compendium for you.

Update II:  Ferguson apologized for his anti-gay remarks about Keynes. Good for him.

Update III: Brad DeLong fills us in on where Ferguson got the idea that so smoothly flowed from his silver tongue that night: Joseph Schumpeter via Gertrude Himmelfarb (aka William Kristol’s mommy.) Apparently it has quite the right wing pedigree.

Update IV: Whoops. It looks as though this isn’t the first time good old Niall said this.  He put it in one of his books. Here too.

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