Monday Reads: Left Behind

Good Morning!

No!  I haven’t turned into a whacko who thinks that we’ll all be raptured up!  I’m talking about all of us who have been left behind by the current economy!  The first thing I read this morning is this post at Salon where one of the children of an AOL employee was blamed for lower IRA contributions by the company.  CEO Tim Armstrong is the very model of a modern psychopath CEO of a large, publicly held corporation.  Don’t blame his salary for the need to cut costs!  Blame distressed babies!!!

Meet one of the “distressed babies” whose parents needed their health insurance when a pregnancy went very wrong.  I feel so close to this story since my Emily and I got through a challenging time too.  However, these poor parents had no warning and things went very wrong very quickly and at a very difficult point in the pregnancy.  Why aren’t I hearing anything from those hysterical pro-lifers about this story?

Late last week, Tim Armstrong, the chief executive officer of AOL, landed himself in a media firestorm when he held a town hall with employees to explain why he was paring their retirement benefits. After initially blaming Obamacare for driving up the company’s health care costs, he pointed the finger at an unlikely target: babies.

Specifically, my baby.

“Two things that happened in 2012,” Armstrong said. “We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.”
Armstrong exposed the most searing experience of our lives for an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.

Within hours, that quote was all over the Internet. On Friday, Armstrong’s logic was the subject of lengthy discussions on CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets. Mothers’ advocates scolded him for gross insensitivity. Lawyers debated whether he had violated his employees’ privacy. Health care experts noted that his accounting of these “million-dollar babies” seemed, at best, fuzzy.

Plenty of smart, witty people took to Twitter to express their outrage—or mock outrage. The phrase “distressed babies” became practically an inside joke, as in, “How many distressed babies does AOL pay this guy?” A few AOL employees made cracks like this: “I swear I didn’t have any babies in 2012. Don’t hate me for messing up your 401(k).”

For the record: It was me. I don’t work for AOL; my husband does. One of those “distressed babies” was our daughter. We pay our premiums for a family health plan through AOL, which is why we had coverage on the morning  I woke up in acute pain, only five months into what had been a completely smooth pregnancy.

Yes.  Today I have been thinking about what kind of country we’re leaving to the babies.  Will they be considered valuable human beings who are part of a community or interchangeable parts in a big ol’ machine made to enrich the one percenters?

“People—from a business point of view—are machines that do things. And now they can not only physically but intellectually be replicated with technologies”

That’s a quote from Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio that disgraced my copy of Business Week last week. I’m a bit confused by his interview because it sounds like he’s never had an economics course in his life, let alone studied the impact of treating employees like something more than cogs in his personal wealth machine.

The peak year for the minimum wage was 1968, when its purchasing power was nearly $9.40 in 2013 dollars, as shown in the accompanying chart. Since then, the erosion caused by inflation has obviously overwhelmed the increases by Congress. Even a boost to $10.10 an hour by 2016 (also adjusted to 2013 dollars) would lift the minimum to just above its real value in 1968. So while it is better than no increase, it is hardly a raise.

The situation is worse when the minimum wage is compared with the average wages of typical American workers, the ones with production and nonsupervisory jobs in the private sector. From the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when one full-time, full-year minimum wage job could keep a family of two above the poverty line, the minimum equaled about half of the average wage. Today, it has fallen to one-third; to restore it to half would require nearly $11 an hour, a better goal than $10.10.

The problem is that the average wage, recently $20.39 an hour, has also stagnated over the past several decades, despite higher overall education levels for typical workers and despite big increases in labor productivity. People are working harder and churning out more goods and services, but there’s no sign of that in their paychecks. If the average wage had kept pace with those productivity gains, it would be about $36 an hour today, and the minimum wage, at half the average, would be about $18.

That is not to suggest that the hourly minimum wage could be catapulted from $7.25 to $18. A minimum of $18 would be untenable with the average hovering in the low $20s. But it does confirm that impersonal market forces are not the only, or even the primary, reason for widespread wage stagnation. Flawed policies and changing corporate norms are also to blame, because they have allowed the benefits of productivity gains to flow increasingly to profits, shareholder returns and executive pay, instead of workers’ wages.

DOES IT KILL JOBS? The minimum wage is one of the most thoroughly researched issues in economics. Studies in the last 20 years have been especially informative, as economists have been able to compare states that raised the wage above the federal level with those that did not.

The weight of the evidence shows that increases in the minimum wage have lifted pay without hurting employment, a point that was driven home in a recent letter to Mr. Obama and congressional leaders, signed by more than 600 economists, among them Nobel laureates and past presidents of the American Economic Association.

That economic conclusion dovetails with a recent comprehensive study, which found that minimum wage increases resulted in “strong earnings effects” — that is, higher pay — “and no employment effects” — that is, zero job loss.

So, why is it that politicians of the GOP ilk think that providing basics to people will make them “lazy”?  I just don’t get it.  Everything that I learned about workers from both my practical experience as a daughter to a small business owner and from my university classes is that secure and happy workers are productive workers.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) on Sunday suggested that President Barack Obama’s health care law would make some people so lazy that they didn’t want to work at all.

Last week, Republicans used a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that said 2.3 million less hours would be worked after the Affordable Care Act was implemented to claim that the law was destroying jobs.

A Washington Postfact check, however, pointed out that access to health care meant that people would no longer be forced to work if their only reason for working was to receive insurance benefits.

But on Sunday, Blunt stuck to the Republican talking point, saying that providing health care “can’t be a good idea” if it allowed people who were only working for health insurance benefits to leave the workforce.

“I think any law you pass that discourages people from working can’t be a good idea,” the Missouri Republican asserted. “Why would we wanna do that? Why would we think that’s a good thing? How does that allow people to prepare for the time when they don’t work?”

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), who also appeared on Fox News Sunday, was ready with an answer.

“They’re in employment solely because they get health benefits,” Cardin explained. “This is a voluntary choice.”

Again, and anecdotally, my cousin Betsy is a breast cancer survivor.  She is also a small business owner and designer.  She can’t get individual health care.  Her 67 year old husband cannot retire until she gets Medicare which is a few years away.  That is, Al couldn’t retire until now.  Betsy cannot be refused health insurance any more.  Betsy is nearing medicare age, but what about all those babies that can now be covered by the Affordable Health Care Act?  Is Blunt suggesting that babies are lazy?

And what about this child who was trapped in the hell realm of standardized testing. Actually, what’s worse is that his caring teacher’s job depended on him successfully taking tests that were irrelevant and difficult for  him because his scores could mean her job.  This is the no child left behind morass initiated by the W Bush administration,  In a sad update, this child died on Thursday while being harassed to live up to his future as a cog in the wheel.

Eleven-year-old Ethan Rediske has been in hospice care for the past month and is likely nearing the last days of his life. Yet, it appears Florida school officials aren’t convinced he should be able to opt out of an upcoming standardized test.

Florida requires all students in the state to take a version of Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). While a recent law allows some special education studentsfacing exceptional circumstances to be exempt from these tests, getting approval isn’t easy.

Although Ethan, who was born with cerebral palsy and has severe brain damage, was already waived from taking these tests, his family is being required to go through “a multi-layered process” to prove he should still be exempt from the standardized testing, the Orlando Sentinel notes.

The Rediskes could ignore exemption requirements, but if they do not go through the proper channels, Ethan’s special education teacher, Jennifer Rose, will likely be penalized — something the family does not want to happen. (As the report notes, in Florida, teacher evaluation scores and pay are tied to standardized test scores.)

“Jennifer is the greatest example of what a dedicated teacher should be,” Ethan’s mother, Andrea, recently wrote in an e-mail to an Orange County School Board member, according to the Washington Post.

The email notes that although the teacher has communicated that Ethan is in hospice care, she has been required to fill out reports on his progress. “This madness has got to stop,” the mom’s message concludes.

Last year, before Florida passed a law allowing children in extraordinary circumstances to opt out of standardized testing, Ethan was required to take a version of the FCAT. At the time, his mother spoke out about the physical strain this was putting on her son.

“Each question can take up to 10 to 15 minutes just to do one question. So he’s spending hours in his wheelchair and he has severely compromised lungs,” Andrea told local outlet Bay News 9 at the time.

She also said the test’s questions weren’t relevant for her son.

“They’re asking him questions about the way a peach tastes, and he’s fed through a tube in his stomach, and he will never taste a peach. They ask him about shoes and staplers and alarm clocks and school buses. Ethan doesn’t interact with any of those things,” she told the outlet.

Instead of caring for our children and our future, we’d much rather slut slam the mother and deny her access to food, family planning, and abortion services. We’d also rather punish the children instead of provide them with a chance to rise above their birth circumstances. Why is it always the mother–not the sperm donor–and the child that are punished?

That argument ignores a troubling truth: Single-parent families are not the same in the United States as elsewhere. Simply put, unmarried parents here are more likely to enter into parenthood in ways guaranteed to create turmoil in their children’s lives. The typical American single mother is younger than her counterpart in other developed nations. She is also more likely to live in a community where single motherhood is the norm rather than an alternative life choice.

The sociologist Kathryn Edin has shown that unlike their more educated peers, these younger, low-income women tend to stop using contraception several weeks or months after starting a sexual relationship. The pregnancy — not lasting affection and mutual decision-making — that often follows is the impetus for announcing that they are a couple. Unsurprisingly, by the time the thrill of sleepless nights and colicky days has worn off, two relative strangers who have drifted into becoming parents together notice they’re just not that into each other. Hence, the high breakup rates among low-income couples: Only a third of unmarried parents are still together by the time their children reach age 5.

Also complicating low-income single parenthood in America is what the experts call “multipartner fertility.” Both divorced and never-married Americans are more likely to repartner and start “second families” than Europeans, but the trend is far more common among unmarried parents. According to data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study at Princeton and Columbia Universities, over 60 percent of low-income babies will have at least one half sibling when they are born; by the time they are 5, the proportion will have climbed to over 70 percent.

All of this would be of merely passing interest if it weren’t for the evidence that this kind of domestic churn is really bad news for kids. The more “transitions” experienced by a child — the arrival of a stepparent, a parental boyfriend or girlfriend, or a step- or half sibling — the more children are likely to have either emotional or academic problems, or both. (My own research indicates that boys, especially, suffer from these transitions.)

Part of the problem is that a nonresident father tends to fade out of his children’s lives if there’s a new man in his ex’s house or if he has children with a new partner. For logistical, emotional and financial reasons, his loyalty to his previous children slackens once he has a child with a new girlfriend or wife. Nor is it likely, from the overlooked child’s point of view, that a mother’s new boyfriend or husband can fill the gap. There’s substantial research showing thatstepfathers are sometimes worse than none at all.

These realities help explain the meager results of government marriage promotion programs. It doesn’t make much sense to encourage, much less pressure, a couple with no shared history, interests or deep affection to marry. At any rate, given the prevalence of multipartner fertility it’s not clear, as one scholar asked in a paper, “who should marry whom.”

But those same realities raise serious doubts about the accept-and-prop-up response to single-parent families. Increasing government largess could actually incentivize, or at least enable, parental choices that everyone admits are damaging to kids. The United States aside, scholars have found a connection between the size of a welfare state and rates of both nonmarital births and divorce. Even if you believe that enlarging the infrastructure of support for single-parent families shows compassion for today’s children, it’s not at all obvious that it shows much concern for tomorrow’s.

Most surprising, given the likely feminist sympathies of liberal advocates for single mothers, is their fatalism toward men. While it’s a safe bet that most in this camp wouldn’t hesitate to scold married “bastards on the couch” for not pulling their weight at home, they seem more than willing to write off unmarried fathers. Not only does this merely accept the personal loss suffered by millions of children living without their fathers; it also virtually guarantees a permanent gender gap — single mothers are inevitably competing in the labor market with one hand tied behind their backs — and entrenched inequality.

If you believe the teachings of the majority religion in this country, then we will be judged by how we treat the least among us.  May I suggest that those folks should be very afraid?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday: Keep on Keeping On

Good Morning!

Republican politics has gotten so disgusting that it’s difficult to believe we live in a civilized country any more.  The extreme, angry right wing has completely taken over the party and the result is not pretty.  Here’s proof!

Those were the strong sentiments that some conservatives expressed on Twitter this week after prominent women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke announced that she might seek a California congressional seat (she’s decided to run for the state Senate, instead).

That news caused the misogynists on Twitter to go absolutely bonkers. They fired a volley of nasty, sexists tweets at Fluke, who testified before Congress in 2012 in support of requiring all insurance polices to cover contraceptive services. You may recall that this fairly mainstream position prompted Rush Limbaugh to call Fluke a “slut” on his national radio show.

As the crazed reaction to Fluke’s news demonstrated, political slut shamingcontinues unabated. It is any wonder so many talented women reject politics as a profession? They know they’ll be called “whore” and “slut” simply for offering themselves as candidates. That’s a kind of sexually charged abuse almost never directed at male politicians.

Here is a taste of the ugly tweets about Fluke, with some sexist tweets aimed at other female politicians tossed in for good measure.

Read ‘em and weep.

It looks like we may have a Hillary/Paul Ryan presidential race.

On the substantive side, Ryan sure seems like he’s setting himself up for a run. There’s his steady series of “unheralded” anti-poverty outreach trips that always manage to be just heralded enough to get sympathetic press coverage. He brokered a budget deal with Patty Murray that was businesslike and low-drama but didn’t alienate the tea party crowd too badly. Today, in a hearing about the CBO’s report on Obamacare, he acknowledged that the report didn’t say that employers would be cutting jobs—points for intellectual honesty!—while also calling Obamacare a “poverty trap”—points for demagoguery! This is all stuff that seems very delicately calculated to stay in the good graces of the tea party base while building up plenty of policy substance cred that will keep him attractive to moderate voters.

What is it about journalists that think any one that talks across the aisle–even if it is to make an unconscionable deal–is worthy of consideration? Paul Ryan and his cronies create an environment where this happens.

An 11-year-old boy attempted suicide late last month and remains in critical condition in North Carolina.

Michael Morones, who was reportedly teased immensely by schoolmates for his love of “My Little Pony,” may have possible brain damage and currently needs a tube in his throat as a result of the suicide attempt.

“He’s the kid that never walks. He dances everywhere,” Morones’ mother, Tiffany Morones-Suttle, told reporters. “He’s so full of energy. He’s always on the move… We won’t know for months how much is going to heal. It could even be years before we find out what potential for healing he has.”

“My Little Pony” is a television and film series historically marketed towards young girls, but with an enthusiastically dedicated male fan base on a global level. Called “Bronies,” these teenage and adult male fans of the show have their own community and culture, thanks largely to the Internet and social media. The wide-spread influence of “Brony” culture has inspired massive conventions and meet-ups both in the United States and abroad.

“[My Little Pony] teaches the most basic moral values to a lot of complex thoughts,” Shannon Suttle, the boy’s stepfather, told reporters.

“Michael was upset because the kids were calling him gay for liking a girls’ TV show,” ChicagoNow.com reports Suttle said. “His mom and I, well, we told him that it didn’t matter what other people think. It only matters what he thinks.”

According to Morones’ parents, the bullying hasn’t stopped even after their son’s suicide attempt. On Sunday bullies reportedly left hurtful comments about Morones on a “generally supportive website.”

So, we got a ton of  extended agricultural subsidies, but we can’t get extended unemployment benefits and we’re going to starve children in this country.

The Senate failed to move forward on a three-month extension of assistance for the long-term unemployed on Thursday, leaving it unlikely that Congress would approve the measure soon while undercutting a key aspect of President Obama’s economic recovery plan.

Fifty-nine senators, including four Republicans, voted to advance the legislation, falling one vote short of the 60 needed to break a Republican filibuster effort.

Republicans and Democrats, many from the nation’s most economically depressed states, had been trying to reach a solution that would allow people who have exhausted their unemployment insurance to continue receiving benefits as long as the government offset the $6 billion cost.

Ultimately, how to pay for the program proved too big a hurdle for senators to overcome.

“We’ve given them everything they wanted. Paid for,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, flashing his irritation at Republicans who blocked the bill.

He said Democrats would keep pushing to extend the benefits, which expired at the end of last year, cutting off more than 1.3 million Americans. That number has since grown to more than 1.7 million.

Democrats hope to turn the issue into an election-year cudgel and have accused Republicans of ignoring people who are out of work. Republicans have balked at that as political smoke.

“We know it’s a political game,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah. “We know they’d like to bring it up every three months and bash Republicans with it.”

Monday Reads: Red Sky Morning

Good Morning!

I’ve been having a pretty good laugh at the debacle that is about to be the Sochi Olympics and the sudden resurgence of the “Communists under the bed” meme. If ever there was an example of capitalism gone very wrong it’s today Russia.  But, let’s take a little bit of a look at how the really scary thing is imaginary Marxism.

I’ve written some about how prescient Marx actually has been about much of our modern conundrums.    If you take the time to read Marx, it’s a little difficult to figure out where folks like Mao or Stalin got their version of Marx.  They are more typical of their country’s culture than they are Marxist philosophy. But then, enough of that, let’s bask in a little cold war nostalgia. Here’s a Rolling Stone Magazine article on how Marx was Right before we dive in to right wing hysteria.

The inherently chaotic, crisis-prone nature of capitalism was a key part of Marx’s writings. He argued that the relentless drive for profits would lead companies to mechanize their workplaces, producing more and more goods while squeezing workers’ wages until they could no longer purchase the products they created. Sure enough, modern historical events from the Great Depression to the dot-com bubble can be traced back to what Marx termed “fictitious capital” – financial instruments like stocks and credit-default swaps. We produce and produce until there is simply no one left to purchase our goods, no new markets, no new debts. The cycle is still playing out before our eyes: Broadly speaking, it’s what made the housing market crash in 2008. Decades of deepening inequality reduced incomes, which led more and more Americans to take on debt. When there were no subprime borrows left to scheme, the whole façade fell apart, just as Marx knew it would.

We have many anti intellectual red-baiters these days. There’s “Rush Limbaugh accusing Pope Francis of promoting “pure Marxism” to a Washington Times writer claiming that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is an “unrepentant Marxist”.” The problem is that very few people really understand the Marxist critiques and study of capitalism let alone those of Lenin and the early Bolsheviks.  I was also surprised to see this headline as obit in The Economist :Bolshie with a banjo.  For some, the paranoia never ends when the rich feel threatened.

 It was wrong to blacklist singers in the 1950s, but that did not excuse Mr Seeger’s lifelong embrace of communism and blindness to its horrors, they said. “My gosh, it sure is a book-reading country,” Mr Seeger gushed to a Russian interviewer during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1965. It took decades for him to acknowledge that Stalin was “a supremely cruel misleader”. In 2007 he wrote a letter responding to an article titled “Time for Pete Seeger to Repent” in the New York Sun, and admitted, “I think you’re right—I should have asked to see the gulags.” He remained a communist, though “with a small ‘c’.” He never did quite “Turn, Turn, Turn”.

Oh, for Pete’s sake!  (Pun intended) If these ninnies haven’t figured out that some of the things that uber capitalistic countries have done are pretty horrific by now, I doubt some ever will. Look!  Over there!!!  Stalin!!!  Gulags!  Guantanamo!  Oh, wait!  That’s ours.  Moving right along .  Here’s one you might have missed from those folks that want to sell the third world some baby formula over breast milk.  Yes, let’s just cut to the chase about what should and should not be a public resource or good.

The current Chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, the largest producer of food products in the world, believes that the answer to global water issues is privatization. This statement is on record from the wonderful company that has peddled junk food in the Amazon, has invested money to thwart the labeling of GMO-filled products, has a disturbing health and ethics record for its infant formula, and has deployed a cyber army to monitor Internet criticism and shape discussions in social media.
This is apparently the company we should trust to manage our water, despite the record of large bottling companies like Nestlé having a track record of creating shortages:

Large multinational beverage companies are usually given water-well privileges (and even tax breaks) over citizens because they create jobs, which is apparently more important to the local governments than water rights to other taxpaying citizens. These companies such as Coca Cola and Nestlé (which bottles suburban Michigan well-water and calls it Poland Spring) suck up millions of gallons of water, leaving the public to suffer with any shortages. (source)

But Chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, believes that “access to water is not a public right.” Nor is it a human right. So if privatization is the answer, is this the company in which the public should place its trust?

Here is just one example, among many, of his company’s concern for the public thus far:

In the small Pakistani community of Bhati Dilwan, a former village councilor says children are being sickened by filthy water. Who’s to blame? He says it’s bottled water-maker Nestlé, which dug a deep well that is depriving locals of potable water. “The water is not only very dirty, but the water level sank from 100 to 300 to 400 feet,” Dilwan says. (source)

Why? Because if the community had fresh water piped in, it would deprive Nestlé of its lucrative market in water bottled under the Pure Life brand.

Of course, there will be a big demand here eventually given increasing drought conditions and the poisoning of drinking water by fracking and oil spills and leaks.  Of course, Russia is much better under capitalism cum gangster rule.  How did this country get the Olympics any way?   Capitalist Russia is no picnic and the Olympics are a story of crony capitalism.

And yet, rather than heralding a shining new post-Soviet resurgence, the Olympics will come closer to a familiar pattern in Russian history: the latest in a series of over-the-top, outrageously expensive projects undertaken at heavy cost to the populace in a questionable attempt to leapfrog Western countries.

Make no mistake about it, these Russian Games are Putin’s personal project to shore up power. They will be the most expensive Olympics ever, at more than $50 billion, almost four times the amount proposed in 2007.

The questionable decision to stage the winter events in a subtropical city created some of the unnecessarily expensive obstacles, but perhaps not as many as another typically Russian development: a staggering amount of corruption.

Several of the companies chosen to remake Sochi for the Olympics are owned or co-owned by Arkady Rotenberg, a childhood friend of Putin. News reports and Russian watchdogs say Rotenberg’s Sochi contracts alone are worth more than $7 billion, which rivals the entire cost for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games. The owner of another firm charged with building the ski jump was also a vice president of the Russian Olympic Committee. The company’s work was so shoddy, it had to be redone several times as its cost ballooned. Finally, Putin himself fired the committee official.

While Russia is trying to move beyond the cult of Stalin by enduring the cult of Putin, we’ve got an entire new breed of right winger just eager to pin the Marxist label on every lapel.   The Tea Party seems as paranoid as the John Birch Society of the 1950s.  Just last week, we saw a tweet by GOP Texas Republic labeling President Obama Kommandant in Chief.

First-term Texas Republican Randy Weber took to Twitter Tuesday night to call Barack Obama “a socialistic dictator” just before the President arrived in the Capitol for the State of the Union.

Weber, who was elected in 2012 to the seat vacated by Ron Paul on Texas’s Gulf Coast, tweeted On floor of house waitin on “Kommandant-In-Chef” [sic]… the Socialistic dictator who’s been feeding US a line or is it “A-Lying?”

Similar weirdness surrounds the new mayor of NYC.  Comrade Mayor? 

“Comrade” is the right title for the new mayor. De Blasio is an unrepentant Marxist, though he does not like to use that term. De Blasio is the guy who was cheering for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s while real Americans were trying to free that nation from Marxist tyranny. De Blasio is the comrade who showed his solidarity with communism in 1991 by taking his honeymoon to Cuba.

Yes, while much of the world was being liberated from communist oppression, De Blasio did his part to support communism by going on a honeymoon in communist Cuba. Any bets on whether he tried to visit political prisoners in Castro’s jails?

De Blasio is starting off his reign as dictator of New York by dictating.

He is dictating a group of people out of their jobs. These are the iconic horse drawn carriages in New York. De Blasio doesn’t like them and has claimed that somehow it is “inhumane.” A few days ago at a press conference he said, “We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period.”

That is it. Comrade De Blasio has spoken. New York doesn’t need a legislative body like the city counsel. They have a dictator now. Of course, Michael Bloomberg, the outgoing Mayor had his own delusions of dictatorial grandeur too.

So, this is my my hypothesis.  We’ve suddenly seen an increase in discussions about income inequality and how billionaires and huge corporations have gotten huge subsidies, tax breaks, and political power.  Is what we’re seeing basically a red scare made so that we’ll back off their over the top rent seeking and greed?

Did any of you manage to watch Bill O’Reilly right wing meme himself through an interview with the President yesterday?

O’Reilly began by asking about the ACA website. Obama said, “Now we got the website up and running.” O’Reilly disagreed because of a poll that says that Americans don’t think it is working. O’Reilly wanted Kathleen Sebielus fired. The Fox News host tried to get Obama to admit that his biggest mistake was saying that if you like your insurance you can keep it. The president wouldn’t bite.

Bill-O then turned to Benghazi. (This interview is nothing more than a 2014 Republican campaign ad.) Obama said, “Understand that by definition, anybody who is attacking our compound is an act of terror.” O’Reilly then tried to play the Susan Rice card, and he claimed that he was just a confused American. Obama accused Republicans of creating a political agenda over protecting Americans. O’Reilly got hammered when he asked if it was a terror attack. O’Reilly used the patented Fox News folks believe line, and the president replied, Folks believe it, because you are telling them that.

O’Reilly tried to grill Obama on the bogus IRS scandal, and royally flopped. On the IRS, O’Reilly used the Fox News line, “some people are saying.” Obama said things like the IRS keep resurfacing because Fox News keeps promoting them. Obama said there were boneheaded decisions, but not a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.

Bill O’Reilly broke out the fundamental transformation of America line via a viewer letter, and Obama said, “I don’t think it is necessary to fundamentally transform America.”

Fox News tried to use the Super Bowl interview as a partisan vehicle to attack the president. This was a totally different interview from the last time these two men sat down at the Super Bowl.

The president seemed to catch on very quickly to what their intentions were a blasted Fox News twice for dredging up dumb conspiracy theories that have no basis in truth.

I guess it was only a matter of time before the John Birch side of the party brought us back to their original paranoia. 

You’ll notice I’ve peppered today’s post with Soviet Era Propaganda Art.  Our propaganda art form is Fox News and similar media outlets and it sees its fruition in Tea Party politicians.  The misunderstanding of Marx’s writings is about as real as the memes around Benghazi and the Affordable Health Care Act.  Eventually, however, conspiracy theories will out but never truly die.  Here’s speculation that the granddaddy of all John Birchy, red baiting,  modern propaganda rags may be sunk by a defamation law suit.

There’s a debate going on over whether The National Review can survive a defamation lawsuit brought by climate scientist Michael Mann, which was greenlighted last week by a D.C. Superior Court judge after multiple attempts to have the case thrown out.

Mann sued writers at National Review and the conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2012 for calling his global warming research fraudulent and comparing him to “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” adding that “instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.”

How much longer can propaganda outfits survive?  Can they outlast, say, the USSR?  One of my favorite recent reads is Frank Rich on the daddy of all current propaganda outlets Fox News. Rich started with the annual Fox News coverage of the so-called War on Christmas but moved on to point out the dying demographics behind their fans.  The Channel can’t survive the America to Come.  The younger generation that doesn’t hate or fear gays and lesbians, is more likely to be multiracial or nonwhite, and much more attuned to climate change.

Fox News is a right-wing propaganda machine and at times (if not this one) a racist enterprise (witness, among other examples, its fruitless effort to drum up a “New Black Panther Party” scandal over some 95 segments in the summer of 2010). But O’Reilly was half-right. Kelly’s inane remark was harmless and unworthy of headlines. Without the left’s overreaction, there wouldn’t have been any pseudo “national firestorm.”

Still, O’Reilly’s summation was predicated on an erroneous underlying assumption that few bother to question: In truth, Fox News has been defeated on the media battlefield—and on the political battlefield as well. Even the 73-year-old wizard of Fox, Roger Ailes, now in full Lear-raging-on-the-heath mode as ­portrayed in my colleague Gabriel ­Sherman’s definitive new biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, seems to sense the waning of his power. The only people who seem not to know or accept Fox’s decline, besides its own audience, are ­liberals, including Barack Obama, whose White House mounted a short-lived, pointless freeze-out of Fox News in 2009, and who convinced himself that the network has shaved five points off his approval rating.

Ailes would like the president and everyone else to keep believing he has that clout. But these days Fox News is the loudest voice in the room only in the sense that a bawling baby is the loudest voice in the room. In being so easily bullied by Fox’s childish provocations, the left gives the network the attention on which it thrives and hands it power that it otherwise has lost. As the post-Obama era approaches, the energy spent combating Ailes might be better devoted to real political battles against more powerful adversaries—not to mention questioning the ideological slant of legitimate news operations like, say, 60 Minutes, which has recently given airtime to a fraudulent account of the murders at Benghazi and to acredulous puff piece on the NSA’s domestic surveillance.

The most interesting news about Fox News is that for some years now it has been damaging the right far more than the left. As a pair of political analysts wrote at Reuters last year, “When the mainstream media reigned supreme, between 1952 and 1988, Republicans won seven out of the ten presidential elections,” but since 1992, when “conservative media began to flourish” (first with Rush Limbaugh’s ascendancy, then with Fox), Democrats have won the popular vote five out of six times. You’d think they’d be well advised to leave Fox News to its own devices so that it can continue to shoot its own party in the foot.

Bill O was exceedingly rude to the President above all other stupid questions. He interrupted the President 48 times.  But, I can tell you exactly what the outrage of the day will be all day today at Fox.  It will be a simple Coca Cola commercial where Americans sing “America the Beautiful” in languages other than English. This got added to the outrage of the multiracial couple in the Cheerios ad.

Who knew a Coke commercial could cause such an uproar?

Coca-Cola aired a Super Bowl commercial titled “It’s Beautiful,” with a simple premise: scenes from American life (families, pool parties, road trips, what have you) with “America the Beautiful” playing in the background. The twist? The patriotic tune was sung in different languages.

The Right is continually frightened by people, ideas, and things they refuse to actually learn about.  You want a good laugh?  Check out the number of tweeters that actually thought “America the Beautiful” was the National Anthem.

It’s no wonder they still don’t understand Marx and they still don’t get nearly anything else.  If they only spent as much time reading books as they did on the bread and circuses stuff we might actually have a functioning democracy today.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday Reads

Good Morning!

There are some strange things afoot! Harry Waxman may retire and Sandra Fluke may run for his seat!

Sandra Fluke, who became an instant celebrity when she was denied the opportunity to testify at a hearing on Obamacare’s contraception requirements, is “strongly considering” a bid for Rep. Henry Waxman’s congressional seat, according to KPCC, a Southern California radio station.

“I’m flattered that I’m being discussed as a potential candidate,” she told the station. “A number of folks I respect very deeply have reached out today and encouraged me to run. I am strongly considering running.”

There are few chances the Democratic Party will take the house so much of their focus will be on making sure they control the Senate.

If you step back from 2014, and look ahead to the next few election cycles—including 2016—it’s easy to see that this is the right choice. For Senate Democrats, this year’s map—where they’re defending seats in red states like North Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana—is their toughest in recent memory. If economic conditions worsen, or if turnout drops substantially, the party could easily lose its control of the Senate, all but ending the potential for Democratic action on domestic policy.

This makes holding the Senate a huge priority—it’s a necessary step if Democrats want to finish Obama’s presidency with success and accomplishment. What’s more, it’ll pay dividends in the next election cycle; if this year’s is a bad map for Democrats, then 2016’s is just as bad for Republicans, who will have to defend blue state Republicans during a presidential election year, where turnout is high and the electorate is more diverse.

In other words, if Democrats can keep the Senate for two more years, then—for the first time since 2008—they’re suddenly in striking distance of a filibuster-proof majority, with the potential for pick-ups in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, and—most optimistically—Georgia.

The RNC is going to boycott MSNBC.  ROFLMAO.

In the aftermath of a Twitter firestorm, the Republican National Committee is shunning MSNBC.

RNC chairman Reince Priebus said in a memo Thursday that he’s demanding an apology from MSNBC president Phil Griffin after a tweet from the liberal cable news channel’s accountgenerated a furor among conservatives.

The since-deleted tweet referred to a Super Bowl ad from Cheerios that portrays a biracial family.

“Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family,” the tweet read.

MSNBC later apologized.

“Until [Griffin] takes internal corrective action and personally apologizes—not just to the RNC but to all right-of-center Americans—I’m banning all RNC staff from appearing on, associating with, or booking any RNC surrogates on MSNBC,” Priebus said in the memo.

This is the ad that freaked out the right wing. It’s a really cute ad with a black father and white mother.  I’ve seen the ad even though I never connected it with the Superbowl.  

Cheerios’ interracial family is returning on one of television’s biggest stages.

The cereal’s first-ever Super Bowl ad brings back the household that drew both praise and prejudice last spring for depicting a black father, white mother and their biracial daughter, Gracie. In the new spot, dad uses Cheerios to explain to Gracie that a new baby is on the way. The conversation takes a very charming turn, but you’ll have to watch (above) to find out what happens.

“The big game provided another opportunity to tell another story about family love,” Cheerios representative Camille Gibson told The New York Times.

Last spring, when the brand introduced the family in the original ad, social media erupted with compliments but also such bigoted vitriol that the commercial’s YouTube posting blocked comments.

Despite the negative feedback, the ad may have inspired others to take a more inclusive stance in their commercials. Dusting product Swiffer, for example, recentlydebuted a spot featuring the Rukavinas, a real mixed-race family. The husband in the ad says he’s better at cleaning the house, but he admits the chore has become more difficult since losing his arm.

I haven’t bought Cheerios since the girls were toddlers but I may reconsider after reading about this kerfuffle.

So, here’s a good headline from the Daily Beast: Why Antics by Several Republicans Suggest the Party Needs Therapy,

Before I reveal the doctor’s diagnosis, let’s take a quick look at just some of the recent antics by several Republican elected officials.

On Tuesday, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) threatened to injure, and arguably even kill, NY1 reporter Michael Scotto, who asked a question about a federal investigation into Grimm’s 2010 campaign. In response to this question, Grimm stormed out of the interview. Moments later, he returned and angrily told the reporter, “Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony.” Keep in mind that Grimm is a former Marine and an ex-FBI agent, so his threats must be taken seriously. (Of course, this type of behavior may make Grimm a good match for VP with Chris Christie in 2016.)

If you are Republican and you want to save your party, you may actually need to stage a massive intervention at the next RNC convention.

The day before, Rep. Trey Radel (R-FL) resignedfrom Congress after his recent guilty plea to cocaine possession. Radel, who has sought counseling, had been arrested for buying drugs from an undercover DEA agent.

Of course, we can’t forget Gov. Christie and Bridgegate, which also implicates numerous New Jersey Republicans. And, as I wrote this week, we have seen a gaggle of random self-destructive comments by GOP officials since December, from Mike Huckabee’s remarks about women’s libidos to Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) advocating discrimination against gay Americans.

So what did Dr. Foehl conclude? Well, he noted that “the Republicans have a masochistic relationship with the media,” and they keep repeating the very “thing that brings them pain.” From a clinical point of view, Dr. Foehl opined, this behavior would be labeled as a “self-defeating personality disorder.”

Why do so many Republicans do this, you ask? Dr. Foehl explained that certain people thrive on “negative attention,” adding that “they have learned that the way to connect to other people is through their suffering, through doing just the thing that will bring them ridicule or pain.” (Sounds like Doc just described Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert, and Michele Bachmann.)

Is there any hope for the Republicans? Well, Dr. Foehl offered a guarded prognosis. He explained that this condition is “very difficult to treat” because many become attached to just the kinds of painful relationships that keep them in trouble.” He concluded ominously: “In short, they are help-rejecting.”

The weirdness continues: Anti-Choice Groups Launch National Boycott Of Girl Scout Cookies For ‘Endorsing’ Wendy Davis

Toward the end of December, Girl Scout USA’s official Twitter account tweeted out a Huffington Post story about the inspiring individuals who should be considered to be 2013′s “women of the year.” The article included figures like Beyonce, Malala Yousafzai, and Wendy Davis — and the organization asked its followers who else should be added to the list of “incredible ladies.” That was enough for anti-choice activists to call for a national boycott of the organization’s popular cookies, claiming the Girl Scouts have endorsed “pro-abortion politician Wendy Davis.”

“We’re asking you to boycott Girl Scout cookies in 2014,” reads a new site dedicated to the boycott, explaining that Davis should not be lifted up as a “worthy role model for our children.” The same accusation is being leveled against the group in regards to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who was included in a different news article about influential U.S. women that the Girl Scouts shared on its Facebook page.

The controversy has been building for several weeks. At the beginning of this month, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly hosted a panel discussion about the organization’s tweet. Panelists suggested that sharing any material related to Davis violates the Girl Scouts’ policy to remain uninvolved in politics.

I’m personally leading a social media campaign for every one to buy as many cookies as possible from Girl Scouts.  I should disclose that I have been a Girl Scout, a Girl Scout Leader, and the mother of Girl Scouts for some time.
So, here’s something really frightening.

The US Air Force said Thursday that 92 nuclear missile officers are now implicated in a widening scandal over cheating on exams as officials cited “systemic problems” in the force.

In the latest setback for the troubled nuclear mission, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said she returned from a visit to missile bases believing the cheating was part of a broader morale problem among launch officers.

“As the investigation has moved forward, we can now report there is a total of 92 crew members that have been identified as having some level of involvement,” James told a news conference.

“That means either participating in the cheating or knowing something about it and not standing up and reporting it,” she said.

Two weeks ago, officials said 34 officers were implicated at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana.

The latest tally of 92 launch officers ensnared by the scandal represents about half of the total 190-member officer corps of the Montana base, and nearly 20 percent of the roughly 500 officers who run the missile force.

The mounting scandal, as well as other embarrassing incidents, have prompted commanders to put a hold on any promotions of senior officers in the nuclear mission, a defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

“They’re reviewing all of those (proposed promotions),” the official said.

While acknowledging serious questions about the working climate and leadership of the nuclear force, James reiterated the Pentagon’s stance that the destructive weapons were in safe, competent hands.

BB mentioned this but I thought I’d throw my 2 cents in too about the 50th anniversary of Dr. Strangelove. 

“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” was released 50 years ago this week. The film is regarded as a cinematic masterpiece today (AFI ranked it No. 39 in its 10th anniversary Top 100 in 2007), but in February 1964, Times film editor Philip K. Scheuer didn’t find much to like. I’m partial to the deadpan of the subheadline: “Kubrick’s ‘Satire’ Tells All About End of World, Ha Ha.” But this is a great line too:”… a publicist at Columbia, which is distributing the picture, assured me it would be my ‘cup of tea.’ After suffering through two screenings of ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ I would sooner drink hemlock.”Scheuer issues no spoiler alerts while giving away the ending and laments that “[a]ll members of our armed forces are pictured as either utterly unscrupulous or just plain stupid.”

And then he makes a point that is rather jarring to a reader in today’s era of the antihero.

I have to admit to being completely exhausted this week. So, I will rely on you to share your reading and blogging list today!!