Boca Raton ... the location of tonight's foreign policy debate between the two major-party presidential nominees, is an interesting place.
For users of the social networking site Multiply, it should be noted that before the site was purchased and shipped to Indonesia, it was the previous corporate home.
It's also home of Florida's 22nd Congressional District, which is represented by easily-one-of-the-nuttiest men in Congress, Republican Allen West. He's the teaparty darling who, earlier this year, said "there's about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party that are members of the Communist Party." His long list of stupid statements and actions is legendary.
Then there's Romney.
Boca Raton is where Mitt -- presumably speaking off the record (meaning: he thought no one was listening to or recording his remarks) -- made his famous "47%" remark. There are lots of rich Republicans in Boca who really thought his quip that "I'd have a better chance of winning if I was latino" was really hilarious.
There are lots of hispanics in south Florida, you see.
Boca was also once home to the infamous Dennis Kozlowski whom you probably only vaguely remember from the Tyco International scandal. Dennis no longer lives there as he is now a resident and charge of the New York correctional system.
Boca.... what a town.
Good place for a presidential debate.... not.
With a name that, in Spanish, means "rat's mouth," at least as a location, it's apropos.
Back in the day, a nobody who made headlines was rare and generally ridiculed for his idiocy. Increasingly, today, it's the norm.
Take Terry Jones. Please.
Then, people called such nobodies "mice" who somehow managed to find enough voice to "roar." For several weeks now, I've heard nonstop "news" coverage and countless talking heads spinning their take on pipsqueak issues that have turned into national newsmedia roars.
Enough already. A burning book isn't newsworthy or attention-worthy.
How some "nobody" blogger whose objections to building an Islamic Recreation Center or an even bigger "nobody" Florida Christian preacher whose threats of burning books (... again... this isn't a new tool of the religious faithful: books are often the enemy of the religiously convicted ) managed to register on the national socio-political radar is simply shocking.
How did this happen?
It's tempting to think it's a phenomenom of the internet age: bloggers, 24-hour news cycles and inch-deep headline coverage is more given to shallow thinking than 23-page, indepth analyses in the New Yorker magazine. Right?
In fact, it might be that, at least a little.
American newspapers and magazines of the 19th century didn't have the luxury of repeating endless lies and distortions in 24-7 news cycles, but there's no shortage in our history of lies and distortions making their way into print and, hence, into the national narrative.
You can blame lots of American misadventurism on lies and distortions, whether as recently as wars in Iraq or Vietnam or as far back as the Spanish-American war. The supposed sinking of USS Maine in 1898 by Spain was a contrivance by those with a narrow agenda -- including a rather famous president -- to engage the country in war. A news media ripe for selling more papers went wild with rumors and misinformation that could rival George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld; the truth of the matter was irrelevant to the selling of newspapers and a fever of nationalism in Washington DC.
Sound familiar?
That said, it's still bewildering to think that in an age of thinking people having access to the internet Terry Jones (Jones?! Really?! ... yet another religious nut named Jones? Have we already forgotten the impact of that other religious nut who brought us Jonestown?) could command so much attention, whether on MSNBC or in the streets of Jakarta.
He's a nobody. Really! Treat him as such.
Jones once headed a church group in Europe, but was kicked out the the country by German officials for irregularities in his church's finances, violations of hate speech laws, creating civil disturbances and having claimed a nonexistent PhD degree.
Since he's an American, we can't toss his sorry ass back to Europe but we can do the next best thing: honor him with the level of attention he deserves. None.
Meanwhile, there are some real news items we should be paying attention to; for instance, did you hear anything lately about the anti-American rallies in Kabul resulting from Pentagon contractors killing 6 Afghan civilians -- including women and children -- because they got "in the way?" (Think: Blackwater tactics causing more Ugly American resentment) Serious things are happening and this superfluous roar is keeping us from hearing about them.
Boy, are we ever a nation desperately in need of an attitude / attention adjustment !
----------------------------
PS: Fred Phelps is now crying foul. He burned several Qurans in the past few years - including even in Washington DC last year -- and nobody paid him any mind. I wonder why?
I wrote a review of "The Road" awhile back (before Christmas was it?) but this isn't that.
This is a quick note to all my devoted followers ( all 1.73 of you ) that I'll be on the road for the next six days.
Unlike some people: when I travel, I travel. I'm usually up and am on the road by 8 and I typically drive until midnight or 1 AM, so 700- or 800-mile days are not uncommon for me.
Seattle calls (and rather desperately, too) so I'm heeding her siren and heading out. I'm almost all set ... and will be, totally, by tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.
If you couldn't care less about politics or political theory, this isn't the blog you're looking for: move along . . .
. . . however, since the business of politics is almost as much my vocation as avocation, it's right up my alley.
I posted this photo and the following caption on my Flickr page a few days back and got my first reply to it yesterday, which I answered this afternoon :
After much online discussion of the failure of the banking, real estate and insurance sectors and the insinuation of the failure of capitalism and democracy, I decided it was time to re-read some classics that I really haven't visited since my undergraduate days.
I've re-learned much that I had forgotten.
Not included in this photo are other books I'm currently digesting: John Bogle's 'Battle for the Soul of Capitalism' and Jon Meacham's 'American Lion' (about Andrew Jackson and his fight with the banking sector).
Comments
stached says:
i grew up in a communistic country and live for more than two decades in capitalism - the common experience of both of them - if you don't belong to the upper class (however defined) you're nothing
reading Marx can still be interesting but my Prophets are Orwell and Huxley ("the Island" !!!) btw. in Europe it 's quite usual in the menatime to talk about the "postdemocratical age" Posted 23 hours ago
chuck says:
Speaking of 'post-democratic . . . '
I think a great many people who say that actually mean post-capitalistic . . .
One thing I'm finding increasingly difficult to leave unchallenged is the constant conflation of capitalism with democracy. There's an inherent notion, particularly in the minds of less-educated Americans, that the two are inextricably joined at the hip, which is a completely specious notion.
Also, the experiment with so-called communism that exploded across the landscape in the early 20th century was nothing like what Marx, Engels or most political theorists ever envisioned; indeed it was quite the opposite. They were mere totalaritarian states calling themselves communist while the ideal involves less central control and more Israeli-kibbutz-like communalism . . . which is the point of the term, after all.
True communism of the Marxist variety is still as untried and untested as Ayn Rand suggested was the case for capitalism in ': the unknown ideal.' Unfortunately for Rand, we've seen a glimpse of what unbridled capitalism can look like the past few years and the carnage that 'ideal' can wreak isn't pretty.
Her ideas look more dated and irrelevant now than ever.
One thing I really miss about not enrolled in advanced education classes for the past few years is that lively and challenging exchange between thinking people whose concern is truth, ideas and concepts.
Mostly, now, I just hear shouting matches between unthinking people more concerned with ratings numbers or noisy agenda grinding than really thinking about big things.
*sigh*
At the risk of sounding old : I miss the good old days. LOL
If you've ever had reason to call 9-11 to report a dire emergency, you know the frustration of having someone on the other end grill you with endless, niggling questions.
Instead of asking the two important questions: where are you and how many people are in peril, they ask unnecessary things like "who are you and what is your house made of?"
It's an emergency, dammit. Ask me the color of my cat later.
~
During the summers, I listen to the radio a lot. My fishing season requires me to stand-by a radio a lot.
Weather updates, fishing announcements, emergency closures, tender advisories, calls from other vessels and about a gazillion other things reach me by radio and usually only via radio.
While the lion's share of that traffic is on Marine VHF radio, some of the most important stuff is on SSB (Shortwave Side-band) -- particularly the Emergency Frequency 4125 khz, which is the primary hailing frequency for all radio marine traffic as well as the main gateway to reaching authorities like the Coast Guard, Alaska State Troopers or medical emergency teams.
Because I monitor 4125 so often, I've gotten very accustomed to hearing the occasional sound of vessel A calling vessel B and Communications Station (ComSta) Kodiak calling its aircraft and cutters in an otherwise endless sea of 'nothingness' on that radio. Mostly static. Lots and lots of static. Noise. More static. More noise.
When, however, that rare moment arises when something truly important comes across, there's no mistaking the sound of a real emergency . . .
A man's voice during a cataclysmic event is unlike anything else you'll ever hear. The urgency -- the panic! -- is unmistakable and it's palpable.
Worse :: occasionally, while listening, you know you're hearing the last earthy sounds from the guy making that call.
That was the case late Tuesday afternoon, as the MV Northern Belle made it's MAYDAY call.
The Northern Belle is a Seatlle-based vessel that, as it happens, was on its way to Bristol Bay for the summer season, just as I will be in a few short weeks.
As routinely happens, vessels contracted to tender seafood products for the summer are also expected to leave Seattle fully loaded, carrying supplies for the canneries (and sometimes for the fishermen) in addition to their own larder stocked to last the entire season.
Crewmen say that Captain Robert Royer suspected the vessel was being overloaded -- and not properly balanced -- long before reaching the MayDay point in the central Gulf of Alaska, 150 miles south of Valdez -- and said as much.
Deadlines being deadlines, the skipper left Union Bay in Seattle and ventured forth anyway. Things seemed to be riding fine until they encountered rough seas in the gulf when, suddenly, something popped and the load shifted.
[Crewman] Robert Jack was at the wheel when he says the ship was hit by a surge to starboard.
"We had a load of freight on, we were headed to Dillingham, Alaska," Jack told KING-TV in Seattle on Wednesday. "Our load was a little heavy and the weather was supposed to pick up. We were in anywhere between 6- and 8-foot swells.
We just finished dinner and I went up to the wheelhouse to drive while the captain went up to his room and all of a sudden the boat took a very large surge to the starboard side and panic started to happen.
"I couldn't recover the ballast on the boat, it was extremely listing and it got worse and worse.
At sea, when things go terribly wrong, they go wrong in a hurry.
Once he was sure the crew was safe, the skipper fretted about the safety of the ship's boat dog, "an 8-year-old cocker spaniel named Baxter, a beloved pet that went everywhere with Royer."Anchorage Daily News 21 April 2010
Royer was the last off the ship, returning twice to the bridge to make the MayDay call that alerted the Coast Guard.
After making the frantic call and being assured the Coast Guard knew the ship's position, Royer left the wheelhouse and sought to don his own survival suit.
While attempting to leave the ship's deck -- which, at this point, had gotten weirdly angular, with the ship's stern deep and starboard rail (the right side) already underwater, his attempt to push off was unsuccessful and he was struck by falling debris.
Royer's decision to make a last-second mayday call before the vessel sank likely saved the lives of his crew, [crewman Robert] Jack said, but may have cost him his.
As the boat suddenly turned onto its side, Royer, rather than immediately jumping ship with the others, stayed in the wheelhouse to make a frantic mayday call and give their position to the Coast Guard, because the boat's Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) had not activated. Seattle Times 21 April 2010
The western Alaska summer fishing season hasn't yet begun and already tragedy has struck.
My anger, oddly, is with the clueless Coast Guard dispatcher who continued to prod for more details and -- quite honestly, this part struck me dumb when I heard the recording -- after hearing the initial frantic MayDay call, even had the audacity to ask if the ship was in need of assistance.
That wasted time might well have been the minutes Robert Royer needed to save his own life.
When an emergency strikes, details of ships construction or length are best found on the registry log, not wasting precious minutes of radio time.
My reaction to this is a combination of anger and sorrow. The Coast Guard is such a sorry mess that they anger me more every year, and I grieve that one of my fellows has tragically died . . . . . . needlessly so, I would say . . . .
. . . and this, coming just days, before my own great annual bereavement.
Saturday marks the 2nd anniversary of my mother's death.
You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed energy companies to dictate our national energy policy.
You didn't care when lies and distortions and phony memos pushed us to invade Iraq.
You didn't get mad when the White House outed a covert CIA operative.
You apparently weren't outraged at passage of the Patriot Act.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You were quiet about our massive war spending, growing to $13 billion every month!!
You didn't get mad that Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.
You didn't care that some 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq and was never accounted for.
You laughed when you learned that we were torturing people and laughed again when we called it "enhanced interrogation." It wasn't funny, though, when others started torturing our guys in retaliation.
You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade policies that actually encouraged companies to send 6 million American jobs out of the country.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when Bush let Bin Laden walk right out of Tora Bora.
You didn't get mad that Bush rang up $10 trillion in national spending deficits.
Where was your outrage at the horrible conditions exposed at Walter Reed and other V.A facilities?
I guess you didn't care that New Orleans drowned while Bush took a vacation trip to Texas.
You also didn't care that the filthy rich got tax breaks totally a whopping trillion dollars.
You didn't get mad at eight of the worst years of job creations in decades.
You didn't get mad when over a quarter million of your fellow citizens died for lack of health insurance.
You didn't get mad when the Bush Administration winked and nodded while banks, insurance companies and Wall Street fatcats lost 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values, all the while paying themselves unheard-of salaries and incentive "bonuses." So, when did you finally get outraged? When did you finally get mad?
You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.
Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 . . . that was all okay with you!
But, helping fellow Americans who are sick, have a black man as President or finally trying to reform the country's financial mess . . . oh hell no.
Go back to the cave you were living in for 20 years. You were worthless then and you're just a noisy pain in the ass now.
Imagine if, instead of Liverpool, England The Beatles had been an American band from somewhere in the South, like Memphis.
There was such a band and it was called Big Star.
I had my XM Satellite Radio turned to the NPR Now! for most the day today. I was just coming in the door from working outdoors when I recognized a song I haven't heard in years. It was Big Star's "Thirteen," and was a short coda to the end of the radio program "Fresh Air with Terry Gross."
Since I didn't hear why this was on, I went to the WHYY (Philadelphia Public Broadcasting) website and learned the sad news that Big Star's guitarist and primary vocalist Alex Chilton had died and Fresh Air will feature the band on tomorrow's show.
This is a tragedy that strikes me much as learning of the death of John Lennon did. This is truly a sad, sad bit of news.
I had intended to bring my CD and vinyl record collection to Florida with me this year, but my truck quickly reached storage capacity before I even around to loading those boxes and boxes of CDs and DVDs.
Since I have none of their music here to upload, I've bought a few tracks from LaLa.com and will share those with three tracks featured on Fresh Air today, so that if you're unfamiliar with their music you can get a taste of their remarkable talent.
I've always considered Big Star the "American Beatles," and Alex Chilton as the Paul McCartney of American music. His death just leaves me speechless.
He was only 59.
I posted a musical sampling on a new music playlist: click here.
I'm flat out of short witty zingers for a headline for this blog. Anyone got a good suggestion for me? Hurry. This is a limited-time offer.
The problem with trying to judge morals is that what passes as okay to one man might offend another.
After the massive and relentless purging Multiply did over the past few months -- sometimes surruptiously deleting members over the most trivial of 'offenses' -- I was concerned about some "images" I had used in previous blogs.
One was of an ancient Greek urn showing two nude males in a wrestling match and another was of Michelangelo's "David" which, as we all know, shows David in his altogether.
So... where does "art" rate on the scale of moral prudes?
Maybe you remember John Ashcroft's dust-up over the cast-aluminum statue in the Great Hall at the Justice Department back in the Bush years. John was so offended by the image of two naked breasts gracing the front foyer that he spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to buy draperies to cover up the immodesty of the "Spirit of Justice."
Well, Bush may be gone but moral prudes aren't.
Last week -- in the throes of a series of snow events -- one Rahway, New Jersey family took to the snow, as they often do, and sculpted some art. Most of us are just talented enough to build a snowman, but not these guys.
A year ago in January, they built a snow sculpture in the image of newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama. This year they went for something more classical: the famous Venus deMilo.
Ah... but while Venus may be classic, she's also nude. And she drew visitors... .... and attention.
Not all the attention was good, however.
Among the visitors was a patrolman dispatched to the Conneran household after Rahway police received an anonymous complaint "of a naked snow woman," said Sgt. Dominick Sforza.
She sure was, the family gleefully agreed.
"Curvaceous, bodacious and booty-licious," said Elisa Gonzalez, a court reporter who built the snow goddess with her daughter, Maria Conneran, 21 and son, Jack Shearing, 12.
You can probably guess the rest. Yes.... our buxom SNOW sculpture had to wear a bikini top and bottom.
I mean,does this look ridiculous or what?
I swear.... I sometimes don't know what to make of my countrymen.
I'm tempted to build a snowman using a carrot for ... well, you know what... just to see how long it takes for someone to take umbrage and report it to police.
I mean, I suppose I could then just adorn him with a really big jockstrap, dontcha think?
The latest official Federal job statistics get released on Friday. A story reported today on the radio program "Marketplace" addressed what those numbers might look like. Specifically, they were mulling over the latest unemployment numbers released the payroll-contracting company ADP.
ADP, the company that does a whole lot of payroll paperwork for American companies, reported this morning that the economy only lost 20,000 jobs last month -- better than expected.
Both the host and the guest -- invited to comment on why losing another 20,000 jobs wasn't so bad -- used the term "jobless recovery."
Jobless recovery.
Wow. That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
The guest, Don Peck of "The Atlantic" then went on to explain just how drastic the unemployment situation really is.
It's quite deep. It's about 10 million jobs deep.*
In fact that's the number that would be required to get us back to the 5 percent unemployment rate that we had before this recession began. That's a huge hole.
Even if you assume very robust growth, you still need about two years to get back to the level we had before the recession.
Some "recovery."
Of course, when Wall Street insiders talk about recovery, they don't mean those guys who have real jobs. They mean the Dow Jones average or the S&P 500... ... you know, stuff that makes them money.
Frankly, they couldn't care less about a 48-year-old blue collar construction worker who may never get a real job again in his working lifetime.
I wanted to start screaming at my radio, but that's not why. Here's what I wanted to rant about:
Instead of calling this the Bush Depression -- which it is -- journalistic wits have taken to calling this the "mancession;" the recession of men losing their jobs.
... it's an awfully tough time. I mean there are six unemployed people for every job opening in the U.S. right now.
And over time, this has been called the mancession, but that's really just an acceleration of a long-term trend.
Men in their prime working age have their lowest participation in the labor market today since 1948. Marketplace Radio 3 March 2010
In case you didn't catch that, let me remind you of that middle sentence. The "mancession" is really just an acceleration of a long-term trend.
Yes indeedie. A long-term trend that started in 1980 and accelerated like some Toyota with a faulty gas pedal under Bush/Clinton.
When Ronald Reagan decided that the economy needed a boost, he went with a host of neocon economists (many of whom hung around to serve later under Bush and Clinton and Bush) who advocated a policy of "trickle down."
Trickle down economics is just a clever way of saying "give money to the rich guys and some table scraps might fall to those peons who aren't at the table." The rich got tax breaks and union guys got busted.
In a true case of irony, though, the real whammer of jobs leaving the country came when Clinton came along and pushed "free trade." Free trade is another of those clever euphemisms for a policy of "anything goes" in the hopes that sending a furniture-making job in North Carolina to Indonesia or an electronics fabrication plant in Ohio to China would trigger worldwide prosperity and we'd all be swimming in money.
Well, except for those bastards in North Carolina and Ohio.
Before the Reagan era, men had plenty of job opportunities and they didn't need MBA's or PhD's to do them.
Men worked on farms and as fishermen, the built bridges and skyscrapers made of steel made in plants other men worked at. Men ran railroads, built cars and televisions and Lazy-Boy recliners, produced free-range cattle and chickens and milk products one small farm at a time. Men constructed homes and hotels and industrial parks, built airliners and buses and bulldozers...
... there were lots of jobs for men who didn't have advanced degrees and could make a decent living doing it.
Not now. Those steel jobs are now in China, the electronics fabrication jobs in Malaysia, furniture in Indonesia and, well, if a job could be exported it was.
One by one, those jobs that men did were exported, leaving mostly "women" jobs behind: cleaning motel rooms, keeping the books, answering phones, waitressing.
About the only jobs left for men were construction and some transportation. Men were still driving trucks and flying planes and building homes, but that's about it.
Then came the "mancession" and those construction jobs evaporated faster than a snowball in a Tucson heatwave.
Ask me if I'm surprised that the unemployment rate is well over 18%. Ask me if I'm surprised the lion's share of the unemployed are men. Don't ask because I said this day was coming and I wasn't happy about it then and I'm even unhappier about it now.
Jobless recovery indeed.
This is no recovery. This is no mancession. This is the consequence of allowing "trickle down" and "free trade" neocon economic thinking to strip my country of jobs men do.
Those fatcats on Wall Street may be back to wheeling and dealing in a cloud of speculative vapor, but without an economic base even that won't last.
No, this is not a recovery. This is a jobless depression created by those who have already taken their bonuses and left the rest of us hanging out to dry.
How anybody could vote for another neocon nitwit again is beyond me.... but they will. They'll use issues like gay marriage and abortion rights to get people to vote against their own self-interest yet again.... ... and those poor bastards who vote for them will be left to fight over table scraps awhile longer.
And they'll make us feel better about it because they'll call it a "jobless recovery."
Posts
i grew up in a communistic country and live for more than two decades in capitalism - the common experience of both of them - if you don't belong to the upper class (however defined) you're nothing
reading Marx can still be interesting but my Prophets are Orwell and Huxley ("the Island" !!!)
btw. in Europe it 's quite usual in the menatime to talk about the "postdemocratical age"
Posted 23 hours ago