Skip to content

Month: September 2016

I gotcher isolationism for ya

I gotcher isolationism for ya

by digby

Pretty sure this means war:

When Trump talks about nationalism, it’s not  really about unfair trade practices. It’s about the US being dissed by what he sees as inferior countries.  Which is all of them. America (is) First.

.

Donald Trump on falling wages: “People need to work really hard”

Donald Trump on falling wages: “People need to work really hard”

by digby

From the man who allegedly has the white working class enthralled a look back at the primary debates:

CAVUTO: Mr. Trump, as the leading presidential candidate on this stage and one whose tax plan exempts couples making up to $50,000 a year from paying any federal income taxes at all, are you sympathetic to the protesters cause since a $15 wage works out to about $31,000 a year?

TRUMP: I can’t be Neil. And the and the reason I can’t be is that we are a country that is being beaten on every front economically, militarily. There is nothing that we do now to win. We don’t win anymore.

Our taxes are too high. I’ve come up with a tax plan that many, many people like very much. It’s going to be a tremendous plan. I think it’ll make our country and our economy very dynamic.

But, taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world.

I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum.

But we can not do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.

I wrote a little bit about Trump’s economic “plan” for Salon a couple of weeks ago:

But while it’s obvious that the subtle and not-so-subtle racial messaging are among the primary attractions for Trump voters, they are also responding to an economic appeal, much of which stems from the misconception that because Trump himself is a successful businessman he must know what he’s doing. But as Dave Johnson of Campaign for America’s Future pointed out, many of the white working class folk who believe Trump’s promises to “bring back jobs” would be surprised to know what he actually means by that:

His “plan” is to compete by pitting states against each other to lower wages, particularly by encouraging businesses to move to low-wage anti-union states. Once the lay-offs start, workers will be willing to take big pay cuts to keep their jobs. Johnson shows how Trump believes “companies should continue this in a ‘rotation’ of wage cuts, state to state, until you go ‘full-circle,’ getting wages low enough across the entire country. Then the U.S. will be ‘competitive’ with China and Mexico. 

Trump says the U.S. is not “competitive” with other countries. He has said repeatedly we need to lower American wages, taxes and regulations to the point where we can be “competitive” with Mexico and China. In other words, he is saying that business won’t send jobs out of the country if we can make wages low enough here.

This is Trump’s plan for American workers. To make things worse. He will kill unions, and create a race to the bottom among the states to lower wages so “we” can be competitive with other countries like China and India.

When Trump says “we” by the way, he’s not talking about workers. He’s talking about some global contest in which America must be “rated” number one by arbitrary economic statistics and fear and loathing (what he calls “respect”) from other nations.

Message: he cares

Message: he cares

by digby




In case you were wondering:

Donald Trump has held onto the support of evangelical Christians even as he has screwed up the name of a book of the Bible, said he doesn’t feel he needs forgiveness for anything, and struggled to answer the question that Jesus posed to Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” But, according to a recent report by Pew, Trump’s doing terribly with Catholic voters, particularly those who are regular churchgoers.

Catholics who attend Mass weekly have increased their support for the Democratic nominee by 22 percentage points relative to 2012. They support Hillary Clinton at about the same rate as fallen-away Catholics; even though among white, non-Hispanic Catholics, those who attend Mass less frequently are slightly more likely to be registered Democrats.

.

That depressing media story

That depressing media story

by digby

When I first started writing online many moons ago, the issue that drove me to it was the fact that we were dealing with impeachment and a stolen election substantially because the media was putting their thumbs on the scales in our politics in ways that enabled a malevolent right wing force to take advantage. I never thought they were right wing themselves, simply that they found it easier to capitulate to the right’s pressures and were far too willing to chase the narratives the right helpfully provided for them. This helped pave the way for some horrifying disasters — the Iraq war and the financial crash among them. It has certainly prevented real progress and led to cynicism. And they simply don’t seem to be able to see it. (What’s even more depressing is the fact that so many people who are able to see media malpractice when it comes to government malevolence can’t see it when it comes to political coverage.)

Anyway, James Fallows has written an important post about the media at The Atlantic that you should read. Here’s an excerpt:

Twenty years ago I published a book called Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. The Atlantic ran an excerpt as a cover story, called “Why Americans Hate the Media.”

The main argument was that habits of mind within the media were making citizens and voters even more fatalistic and jaded about public affairs than they would otherwise be—even more willing to assume that all public figures were fools and crooks, even less willing to be involved in public affairs, and unfortunately for the media even less interested in following news at all. These mental habits of the media included an over-emphasis on strife and conflict, a fascination with the mechanics or “game” of politics rather than the real-world consequences, and a self-protective instinct to conceal limited knowledge of a particular subject (a new budget proposal, an international spat) by talking about the politics of these questions, and by presenting disagreements in a he-said/she-said, “plenty of blame on all sides” fashion now known as “false equivalence.”

I could explain it more, or I could suggest you go read the article. (It’s free, but it never hurts to subscribe!)

Through the rise of Donald Trump, I’ve been watching to see how these patterns of mind might reassert themselves, particularly in the form of normalizingTrump.

That is: The argument of the previous 90-odd entries in this series is that Donald Trump is something genuinely new in the long history of major party nominees. He has absolutely no experience in public office. Almost every day he says or does something that by itself would have disqualified previous nominees. He does not have policies so much as emotional stances. What he has done renders irrelevant the normal “Trump says, but critics answer” approach to journalism. Donald Trump says, “Mexico will pay for that wall!” All relevant figures in Mexico say, “Like hell we will.” And Trump says it again the next day.

There’s a lot more and it’s all important. But what he says about all this making people jaded is very important. It’s not just the press, of course. We’re in the middle of an epic hangover from the economic crisis and people are still feeling the pain. It takes a while to work that out an the political ramifications of big jolts like that can be huge. So, a lot of this is real — or it’s sincerely felt anyway.

But the way the media is covering this campaign is making things worse. And, as usual, they seem not to give a damn.

Here are a few more pieces you should read on this subject if you’re wondering why it feels as if the media is operating on another dimension right now:

Paul Krugman: Hillary Clinton gets Gored

Josh Marshall: About as clear cut as they get

And this, from some months back from Jonathan Allen: The Five Unspoken Rules for Covering Hillary Clinton

That last link may be the most important. This isn’t some crazy partisan delusion. It’s real.

.

Labor Day musings by @BloggersRUs

Labor Day musings
by Tom Sullivan


Labor Day parade, marchers, New York, 1909. (Library of Congress.).

A friend said the other day that to Europe the U.S. is a laughingstock. That observation wasn’t exactly authoritative, but echoes the complaints from Donald J. Trump going back at least to the Reagan era. Except where Trump insists other countries laugh at us because of weak U.S. trade and military policies, my friend meant that across the pond they cannot believe so many Americans take the know-nothing, bigoted scam artist seriously. Trump claims we’re being chumps. He has set about proving it by asking us to turn the country into another Trump casino.

Are Americans that easily “insulted, taken for granted and made fools of?” the Washington Post Editorial Board asks:

Donald Trump seems to be betting that the answer is yes. How else to judge his assumption that he can be elected without sharing basic information? He has released no meaningful health records. He has put forward virtually no serious policy proposals. Unlike every other major-party nominee of the modern era, he refuses to release his tax forms.

All of these would be essential reading material from any candidate, but the need for disclosure is especially urgent from Mr. Trump. He would be the oldest president ever elected, so his medical history is relevant. Unlike Hillary Clinton and, again, every other modern major-party candidate, he has no record of service in politics or public office by which he can be judged, so his policy intentions take on added significance. He has been on so many sides of so many issues that even serious position papers at this point would have limited credibility. But they would be better than nothing.

Because his claim to the presidency is founded on his claimed success as a businessman, his tax and financial records are particularly salient. Has he really made as much money as he boasts? Has he paid taxes? Has he sheltered money in the Cayman Islands, done deals with Russian oligarchs? Who knows?

Quite a few of Trump’s voters don’t care so long as they can vote with their middle fingers, as a South Carolina used-car dealer put it ahead of the primary there. Just to whom they mean to give their middle fingers is unclear. Similarly, a prominent Sanders supporter here urges friends to “Vote against the oligarchy.” But such pleas always recall David Crosby’s: What are their names? And on what streets do they live? If the goal is to rain down fire on enemies, a little more specificity with grid coordinates might work better than just firing blindly.

A few bright spots for workers on this Labor Day.

“Accelerating wage growth is boosting workers’ purchasing power,” according to the Los Angeles Times:

The falling unemployment rate has led to more competition for workers, spurring solid gains in average hourly earnings in recent months.

Those pressures, amplified by laws providing significant minimum-wage hikes in California, New York and elsewhere, also are triggering changes for the workers who need raises the most. Beginning last year, large companies such as Wal-Mart, Starbucks, McDonald’s and JPMorgan Chase increased what they pay their lowest-level employees.

Via Naked Capitalism. When the Labor Department announced in May that overtime pay protections would be extended, 12.5 million workers benefited. New rules are in place to hold accountable employers for “wage abuse, workplace discrimination, and unsafe working conditions.” Graduate students may now unionize, per a recent ruling of the National Labor Relations Board. So, a few victories to celebrate this Labor Day.

Still, the Washington Post in another editorial urges more attention from the major presidential candidates to the structural issues at play for American workers, something more than a retreat from “free trade,” as they describe it. But that attention should be on more than improving skills in the workforce, reforms to education, and aid to displaced workers, as the Post suggests. At Daily Kos, DarkSyde looks at “the grim world of the revolving quasi-permanent employee.” He writes about the ever-disposable temp:

It’s one thing for a department store to temp up during the holidays or another predictable spike in the workload lasting only a few weeks. If that’s your business model, there ought to be a better way to handle the upticks, but it’s understandable. But what’s going on these days is a growing trend, all over the country, where some of the biggest, wealthiest, most successful corporations on Earth are rotating temps through 365 days a year in an obvious concerted effort to get all the benefits of a full-time, regular workforce without having to pay any full-time, regular benefits.

I resemble those remarks.

Finally, see James Fallows’ visit to a tiny town in Maine where things going on on the other side of the planet affect their local economy.

Happy Labor Day.

An Elpee’s Worth of Covers: A Labor Day mixtape By Dennis Hartley

An Elpee’s Worth of Covers: A Labor Day mixtape

By Dennis Hartley

It’s Labor Day weekend, so I’m taking the day off as a film critic. And, I’m giving the original artists a day off so I can share an LP’s worth of my favorite cover songs. Enjoy!

1. The Jimi Hendrix Experience – “All Along the Watchtower” – “And the wind began to HOWL!” Jimi’s soaring, immaculately produced rendition (from Electric Ladyland) came out 6 months after the original appeared on Dylan’s 1967 John Wesley Harding LP.

2. Patti Smith– “Because the Night” – OK, Springsteen gave Patti first crack, so it could be argued that his version (recorded later) is technically the “cover”. I do feel Smith’s version is definitive (Bruce wins either way…so long as royalty checks keep rolling in).

3. Isaac Hayes– “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” – Got 20 minutes? Hayes deconstructs Glen Campbell’s Jimmy Webb-penned hit and builds it into an epic suite that eats up side 2 of Hot Buttered Soul. This is his magnum opus…symphonic, heartbreaking, beautiful.

4. Savoy Brown– “Can’t Get Next To You” – A bluesy take on the Temptations hit (written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Stong). The song features fine work from Dave Walker (vocals), Paul Raymond (piano) and founding member Kim Simmonds (guitar).

5. Judas Priest– “Diamonds and Rust” – It sounds like a comedy bit: “Here’s my impression of Judas Priest covering a Joan Baez song.” But it happened, and it’s one of Priest’s most popular tunes. This is a rare stripped-down version, from a VH-1 broadcast.

6. Julian Cope– “5 o’clock World” – The Teardrop Explodes founder reworks a memorable Top 40 hit by 1960s pop outfit The Vogues. I love how Cope cleverly (and seamlessly) incorporates quotes from Petula Clark’s “I Know a Place” for good measure!

7. Fanny– “Hey Bulldog” – Pre-dating The Runaways, this all-female rock band kicked ass and took names. Unfortunately, they may have been too early for the party, because they never quite caught fire. This strident Beatles cover is from their 1972 LP Fanny Hill.

8. Clive Gregson and Christine Collister– “How Men Are” – Gregson (founder of 80s power-pop band Any Trouble) teamed up with singer-songwriter Collister to cut 5 superb albums in the 80s and 90s. Collister’s vocal on this Aztec Camera cover is transcendent.

9. Chris Spedding– “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” – Spedding is the Zelig of the U.K. music scene; an official member of 11 bands over the years, and a session guitarist who’s played with everybody since the 70s. This Kinks cover is the title cut of his 1980 album.

10. Me First and the Gimme Gimmes– “Leaving on a Jet Plane” – Definitely not as originally envisioned by the late John Denver…but you can dance to it. This punk pop outfit (specializing in covers) is a communal side project for members of various bands.

11. Paul Jones – “Pretty Vacant” – I realize the gimmick of doing ironic lounge covers of punk songs is now as “ho-hum” as arrhythmic white guys trying to rap, but when this winking take on a Sex Pistols song was released in 1978, it was a novel idea at the time.

12. David Bowie– “See Emily Play” – Bowie was always ahead of the curve; even when he went retro. All-cover theme albums weren’t quite the rage yet in 1973, which is when Bowie issued Pin Ups in homage to the 60s artists who influenced him…like Pink Floyd.

13. The Isley Brothers– “Summer Breeze” – You could always count on the Isleys to inject just as much heart and soul into covers as they did for their own original material. This take on a Seals & Crofts classic is no exception. Ernie Isley’s guitar solo is amazing.

14. Julee Cruise– “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears” – David Lynch’s favorite chanteuse recorded this Elvis cover for the soundtrack of Wim Wender’s 1991 film Until the End of the World. This haunting rendition is quite reminiscent of the Doors’ “End of the Night”.

15. Ronnie Montrose – “Town Without Pity” – I had the privilege of seeing this extraordinary guitarist perform in San Francisco in 1980, and 2011 in Seattle (sadly, he died in 2012). He was one of the best. This is an instrumental cover of Gene Pitney’s hit.

Posts with related themes:

Top 10 Labor Day Films

More reviews at Den of Cinema

–Dennis Hartley

They know their audience

They know their audience

by digby

So this ad just came on during the football game:

I assume this product must have some money behind it if they can buy TV ads. I’m sure they’ll do very well.

They’re better than this one, I’ll say that for them:

The Village Redux

The Village Redux

by digby



Jamison Foser tweeted this out this morning with the comment “This is from a 1/5/1994 Washington Post editorial. It is extraordinary.”

That was Whitewater. The “scandal” was never a real scandal. It was pimped by hit men like David Bossie and reporters ate it up with a spoon. It ended up costing the taxpayers nearly 100 million dollars to investigate it. And it turned up nothing.

And they’re doing it again. The scolding, holier-than-thou, small town sanctimony among the Villagers is enough to make me vomit. This hand wringing over “elites” and the “favoritism” and the “smoke” and the “fire” and “the smell tests” which only seem to be relevant when Hillary Clinton is involved is a narcissistic superior dance that feeds the right’s crusade of character assassination. It’s mind boggling that it’s happening again.

I dubbed them Villagers for a reason which I wrote about here:

It’s about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for “average Americans” when it’s clear they haven’t the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.) It’s about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about things they all do, creating social rules for others which they themselves ignore.

The village is really “the village” an ersatz small town like something you’d see in Disneyland. And to those who argue that Versailles is the far better metaphor, I would just say that it is Versailles — a very particular part:

A Picturesque Little Village

Part of the grounds near the Trianon were chosen by Marie-Antoinette as the site of a lakeside village, a crucial feature of picturesque landscape gardens then so fashionable among Europe’s aristocracy. In 1783, Richard Mique built this amusement village where the queen played at being a shepherdess.

In 1784, Marie-Antoinette had a farm built, where she installed a farming couple from the Touraine region, along with their two children. They were charged with supplying the queen with eggs, butter, cream and cheese, for which they disposed of cows, goats, farmyard animals.

The Village is a metaphor for the faux “middle class values” that the wealthy, insular, privileged, hypocritical political celebrities (and their hangers-on and wannabes) present to the nation.

The perfect representation of this phenomenon is a famous column by the then doyenne of DC, Sally Quinn, at the height of the Starr investigation. She correctly noted that a majority of the country believed the scandal was absurd while those in the ostensibly sophisticated city of Washington D.C. were morally outraged. She posited that DC was different because it was the reputation of “their town” the president had besmirched. One quote in particular, from Muffie Cabot a former White House social secretary, summed up the unself-conscious arrogance and insularity:

“This is a demoralized little village. People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened. They’re so disillusioned. The emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.”

The extremely powerful political and media elites who make up the political establishment in our nation’s capital more often than not portray their allegedly “small town values” as being “typically” American — more typical than the 300 million or so Americans who live outside the beltway. No amount of polling or canvassing or interviewing can convince these influential celebrities and lawmakers and their various hangers-on that they are not the perfect reflection of America itself.

They went after Bill Clinton with everything they had. But it was always Hillary who really got them going. Bill was, after all, a charmer. Even Newt Gingrich couldn’t escape his spell. But Hillary Clinton was a calculating shrew, a feminist harpy who emasculated men and simultaneously hated all women. They hated her with a uniquely aggressive ferocity.

This is where the “she’s a liar!” chant heard at rallies all over the country this year really got legs:

Blizzard of Lies

by William Safire Jan. 8, 1996

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar.

Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.

1. Remember the story she told about studying The Wall Street Journal to explain her 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading? We now know that was a lie told to turn aside accusations that as the Governor’s wife she profited corruptly, her account being run by a lawyer for state poultry interests through a disreputable broker.

She lied for good reason: To admit otherwise would be to confess taking, and paying taxes on, what some think amounted to a $100,000 bribe.

2. The abuse of Presidential power known as Travelgate elicited another series of lies. She induced a White House lawyer to assert flatly to investigators that Mrs. Clinton did not order the firing of White House travel aides, who were then harassed by the F.B.I. and Justice Department to justify patronage replacement by Mrs. Clinton’s cronies.

Now we know, from a memo long concealed from investigators, that there would be “hell to pay” if the furious First Lady’s desires were scorned. The career of the lawyer who transmitted Hillary’s lie to authorities is now in jeopardy. Again, she lied with good reason: to avoid being identified as a vindictive political power player who used the F.B.I. to ruin the lives of people standing in the way of juicy patronage.

3. In the aftermath of the apparent suicide of her former partner and closest confidant, White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, she ordered the overturn of an agreement to allow the Justice Department to examine the files in the dead man’s office. Her closest friends and aides, under oath, have been blatantly disremembering this likely obstruction of justice, and may have to pay for supporting Hillary’s lie with jail terms.

Again, the lying was not irrational. Investigators believe that damning records from the Rose Law Firm, wrongfully kept in Vincent Foster’s White House office, were spirited out in the dead of night and hidden from the law for two years — in Hillary’s closet, in Web Hubbell’s basement before his felony conviction, in the President’s secretary’s personal files — before some were forced out last week.

Why the White House concealment? For good reason: The records show Hillary Clinton was lying when she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S.& L., and indicate she may have conspired with Web Hubbell’s father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers $3 million.

Why the belated release of some of the incriminating evidence? Not because it mysteriously turned up in offices previously searched. Certainly not because Hillary Clinton and her new hang-tough White House counsel want to respond fully to lawful subpoenas.

One reason for the Friday-night dribble of evidence from the White House is the discovery by the F.B.I. of copies of some of those records elsewhere. When Clinton witnesses are asked about specific items in “lost” records — which investigators have — the White House “finds” its copy and releases it. By concealing the Madison billing records two days beyond the statute of limitations, Hillary evaded a civil suit by bamboozled bank regulators.

Another reason for recent revelations is the imminent turning of former aides and partners of Hillary against her; they were willing to cover her lying when it advanced their careers, but are inclined to listen to their own lawyers when faced with perjury indictments.

Therefore, ask not “Why didn’t she just come clean at the beginning?” She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.

No wonder the President is fearful of holding a prime-time press conference. Having been separately deposed by the independent counsel at least twice, the President and First Lady would be well advised to retain separate defense counsel.

That was 100% bullshit from beginning to end. But it was in the New York Times and from that moment on Hillary Clinton was deemed a congenital liar. Today people say it as if it’s a proven fact and press treats it as if it’s a parlor game to try and finally catch the elusive spider in her own dishonest web.

She was never found guilty of a crime or even anything untoward. The cases were all closed and she successfully ran for Senate and became the Secretary of State. But the character smears just go on and on and on and a new generation of Villagers have now eagerly donned the mantle of insufferable schoolmarms in service of wingnuttia despite the fact that her morality and ethics fall well within the mainstream of Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. You may say that doesn’t make her honest. But it should at least raise the question of why she alone is treated in this manner.

.