There’s probably a lot of you that thought the way I did for most of my life, until recently, that something about your circumstances insulated you from the ravages of Galtism and McCarthyism. To quote Don Corleone, you found paradise in America, had a good trade, made a good living. The police protected you; and there were courts of law.
After what happened today, at NPR and in Wisconsin, I hope no one believe that now. I know I don’t.
Consider this an open thread.
Brian H
Amazing streaming of WI Capitol. UpTake is citizen journalism. Donate:
http://www.livestream.com/theuptake
Brian H
streaming video. FYWP.
Brian H
Maddow had this bizarre video about how the vote went down today. Unreal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Xa0wacMDM
General Stuck
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
It takes a lot noise to wake up democrats, and to drag them away from their beloved circular firing squads, so we shall see.
BGinCHI
When will Public Enemy make a comeback?
Odie Hugh Manatee
When it comes to this shit the Republicans are pulling, trickle down will happen everywhere.
Then it’ll turn into a downpour. But at least they will be able to finally claim that trickle down works.
I’m repairing a computer for another winger California prison guard tonight. I can’t wait to ask him how he will feel when it happens to him.
Davis X. Machina
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
He’s probably part of the problem. As the robber baron Jay Gould put it, “I can always hire half the working class to shoot the other half.”
Punchy
New breed of GOP gov — impervious to polling, unwilling to negotiate. Gotta believe this gameplan is repeated across at least 40 states. G’bye unions.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Davis X. Machina:
Yes, the Cali prison guard union is very powerful and a lot of people are pissed off at the pay and benefits packages they have built with that power. One of my guard customers retired after 30 years with them and he’s making more than he did while he was working.
Yes, more than while he was working with none of the expenses of having to work. Fucking platinum medical benefits too.
I have to go do some at home service for another guard this weekend. This one is a proud redneck from Georgia who moved here because the pay sucked at home.
The Republicans they love are going to destroy us.
kdaug
On the trigger. With these guys behind me.
Bob Loblaw
Oh dear god, you make it sound like we just had our version of a Kristallnacht type dealie.
Indiana Republicans achieved the same public sector union busting result by executive order six years ago without any opposition, they didn’t even have to bother with any legislative imprimatur.
The Supreme Court subverted the ability of the state of Florida to hold a legitimate recount all of eleven years ago. And then that Bush administration thing happened.
Sheesh, what a bunch of johnny-come-latelies. You just realized that the modern GOP might just have a different conception of the limits of power and influence in this country than you do?
But yeah, I guess you’re crusades against David Brooks and The Atlantic and Firedoglake are looking a bit silly right about now…
Bob Loblaw
Oh dear god, you make it sound like we just had our version of a Kristallnacht type dealie.
Indiana Republicans achieved the same public sector union busting result by executive order six years ago without any opposition, they didn’t even have to bother with any legislative imprimatur.
The Supreme Court subverted the ability of the state of Florida to hold a legitimate recount all of eleven years ago. And then that Bush administration thing happened.
Sheesh, what a bunch of johnny-come-latelies. You just realized that the modern GOP might just have a different conception of the limits of power and influence in this country than you do?
But yeah, I guess you’re crusades against David Brooks and The Atlantic and Firedoglake are looking a bit silly right about now…
Zam
Don’t worry about our shit. We ran the progressive reforms and we sure as hell will take care of this shit. Walker confused a lot of people with his 250,000 jobs bulshit, despite that being more than we needed. All we ask is everyone get their ass work up and bring progressivism back to us all.
Steeplejack
@kdaug:
Uh, those guys may not be “with you” so much to be “on the trigger” as to get the treats that they seem to think you will be dispensing. Just sayin’.
kdaug
@kdaug: Oh, and don’t be fooled. The 100lb Golden’s by far the more aggressive of the two.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Bob Loblaw:
Fuck you are tiresome.
Oh, and it’s “your crusades”, not “you’re crusades”.
You’re welcome!
Zam
@Bob Loblaw: You misunderstand how badass the Wisconsin public is. If we can deliver an ultimate defeat to the repubs in 2012 on this issue we can move back on to the real issues that effect us all.
kdaug
@Steeplejack: Hey, I had to hold the rawhide to get the picture.
But come the Guns of Brixton? Those dogs got my back.
FormerSwingVoter
When does the general strike start?
Mnemosyne
@Bob Loblaw:
Tough talk from a guy who didn’t know until last night that fascism was an actual political movement and not a synonym for “authoritarian.”
Bob Loblaw
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Merry hat a lid tell lam who’s fleas wasp wide wits know.
kdaug
@kdaug: Also, normally a Clash purist, but I actually like this version better.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Bob Loblaw:
Clearest statement I have ever seen you make here.
Congratulations.
Josh
Wait, what’s wrong with harshing on David Brooks? The liberal blogosphere kinda began with a press critic (Atrios), and most of the liberal young people today get their news from a press critic (Jon Stewart). It’s not a bad way to raise consciousness.
hilts
Doug,
I appreciate your ability to seamlessly weave together the Clash’s Guns of Brixton, The Godfather, and the nonsense that took place today.
If you have and others are souring on NPR, it’s time to check out Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, Free Speech Radio News, Consortium News, GritTV with Laura Flanders, the member organizations of the Media Consortium, and the member stations of Pacifica Radio.
Mother Jones published an article over 20 years ago lamenting the declining quality of news coverage provided by NPR.
hilts
Doug,
I appreciate your ability to seamlessly weave together the Clash’s Guns of Brixton, The Godfather, and the nonsense that took place today.
If you and others are souring on NPR, it’s time to check out Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, Free Speech Radio News, Consortium News, GritTV with Laura Flanders, the member organizations of the Media Consortium, and the member stations of Pacifica Radio.
Mother Jones published an article over 20 years ago lamenting the declining quality of news coverage provided by NPR.
Doug Hill
@hilts:
Thanks, do you have links for the MJ articles on NPR? I have seen others mention them but haven’t tracked them down yet.
kdaug
@Bob Lowblow: You’re a highly entertaining man. Please, sir, may we have some more?
Yutsano
@Bob Loblaw: How erudite and mature.
Steeplejack
@kdaug:
As long as the guns of Brixton come with treatskis. Make sure you’re packin’ and they know it.
Steeplejack
@kdaug:
Trippy. Reminds me of this.
asiangrrlMN
@kdaug: Damn, but I needed to see those two sweeties again. Thanks.
@Yutsano: Hi, hon. How you be?
DougJ, not me. Never really bought into the whole American dream thing.
hilts
@Doug Hill:
Unfortunately, I don’t have a link to the Mother Jones article, but as I noted it was published a very, very long time ago – at least 20, maybe even 25 years ago. I don’t have access to Nexis, Factiva, or Dialog. If you have access to one of these services, it might be possible to retrieve the article.
Finding any article, dating back over 20 years ago, for free on the Internet is damn near impossible.
Nexis, Factiva, and Dialog aren’t guarantees either for articles this old, but it’s worth a shot if you want the article badly enough.
The last resort is finding a university library that has issues of Mother Jones dating back 20-25 years ago.
Hypusine
It’s useful to regard what’s happening as any other power grab by elites, except that our relative wealth – yielding for instance cheap calories, free entertainment and other excess capacities to buffer any discomfort and enable “circular firing squad” diversions – facilitates the transfer of that power. Falling bombs and the ensuing actually-struggling-to-survive happen elsewhere. The key is to make sure there’s a sense of “enough” to preclude triggering survival-level clarity about what is happening while invoking a siege mentality on what resources are available.
justawriter
Nope. Pretty much figured out by the time Reagan was gearing up the culture war when I was approaching 21 that I was pretty much gonna be screwed, and not in a good, consensual way.
Fuck I’m old.
kdaug
@Steeplejack: Daddy’s always packin’.
Hypusine
I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all a Great Master Plan. Surely it isn’t. Just that this is how it played out in our American experiment, and therefore informs the current political dynamic.
Alison
@hilts: Actually, MoJo is on Google Books from the inaugural issue through the year 2000 – see here http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:03628841?rview=1&source=gbs_navlinks_s
kdaug
@Steeplejack: Yeah. Interesting how songs can be transmuted with acoustics and a female singer.
Vodkam
I’ve been lurking around BJ for a while but I’m basically new. I live in lovely Detroit MI and used to work in the auto industry as an industrial safety supply salesman to American Axle (AAM). I watched UAW Local 235 agree to a 33% wage reduction to end the 08 strike only to have AAM ship all their jobs to Mexico in early 09, and promptly lost my job because my main client ceased to exist. It’s a pretty standard story for anyone who’s worked in the orbit of the auto industry in the last few years.
A few commenters on the open threads tonight have laid it out that the cycle goes Republicans fuck things up for a few years and the Dems get a few months to push back until they blow off the progressives and then the public votes the GOP back in, rinse, repeat ad infinitum. What’s happened in Wisconson and Michigan today is seriously fucking scary. The GOP is hell bent on destroying not only unions, they’re set on shredding every possible advancement made by working people since the last gilded age. It’s gotten so bad that it’s not just a slow erosion of our rights anymore, it’s us or them time now. Class war. For the first time in my life, I feel completely fucking hopeless about the future of this country. It seems like the cons have already delivered the thousand tiny cuts and now they just have to wait for us to bleed out. It seems like they’ve already won. That’s the message I get from Wisconsin.
So my question is this: What the fuck are we going to do? Seriously, what are we going to do?
hilts
@Alison:
That’s great news! Glad they were able to resolve the copyright issues.
Steeplejack
@kdaug:
Words to live by.
hilts
This is a real headline
Julianne Moore to Play Sarah Palin in HBO’s ‘Game Change’
h/t http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/julianne-moore-play-sarah-palin-166040
Mark S.
Another day, another Bobo review:
Please kill me.
Matt Mangels
Anyone see Bobo on The Colbert Report? Apparently picking furniture is one of the hardest things a person can do…
piratedan
the silly thing is, if these guys were polished pols, they could have done all of this fucking of the good people of Wisconsin and gone through the motions and quite possibly not have stirred up the shitstorm that they have created. They had the votes… they could have simply sat back in their chairs, let the debate continue and voted the same way that they did already. Yeah, it might have taken a few more weeks but the legislative outcomes would have been the same. I think these guys are simply as inept as the Nixon White House, except that they have less control of the public passing of information and their sugar daddies are nefarious libertarian invisible-handers that choose to adorn themselves with paint and employ PR types who will spout any lie as long as there is cash to be made.
If they want to play rough, I’d love to see our President act in the way that his opponents always accuse him of, send in the black helicopters and end the authoritarian wet dream by nationalizing Koch Industries and the banks as a matter of national interest and then declare the Arizona state lege in open rebellion and suspend habeus corpus and arrest all of those legislators that voted to nullify federal authority over the state.
I mean after all, if they can flout the letter of the law in the name of a fiscal and legal crisis, why can’t our guys do the same?
Jebediah
@kdaug:
lovely pups
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Hi hon. If we marries fer real I demand you establish Taiwanese citizenship.
DPirate
@Zam: Obama/Biden 2012? Yes we won’t! Also, do you really mean to say that the wisconsin thing is good because democrats get to campaign on it and then try to reverse it once elected? Seems crazy to me.
I say public unions are a perversion of the labor movement, and while public servants do merit protections against exploitation, their situation is not comparable to that facing private labor and they are not to be afforded the same rights. Their working conditions and remuneration ought to be set by the legislature.
Jrod the Cookie Thief
@DPirate: The two situations are very comparable. Actually, they’re exactly the same in every important respect.
In other words, you’re full of shit.
Paula
@Mnemosyne:
Really?
hahahahahaha
Well, to be fair, someone had a nice overview of Italian fascism — something I’ve never had to think about before, so it wasn’t an entirely useless flame war.
Mwangangi
@BGinCHI: Hours later… Check out Immortal Technique.
cokane
@DPirate: I guess people forget that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered while trying to help public employees in Memphis win fair wages and treatment. The idea that public unions are perverse, when governments have shown throughout history to be very abusive to their own employees is fucking absurd.
b-psycho
@piratedan: Maybe because they’re not really your guys?
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
@Vodkam:
What are we going to do?
In a proper world, we’d greet David Koch’s limo with molotov cocktails wherever he goes. Find out where he lives and run pickets in front of his estates and offices. Show up at his charity gigs and disrupt them, shouting his name. Make sure that he’d need to hire food testers to check every meal for poison.
In short, we’d be making sure that he couldn’t show his inheritor face in public. And if there were more folks to go around, we’d make sure that the Hunts, DeVos family and Ahmanson were similarly treated.
kay
@Brian H:
It is amazing, because the conservative senate leader wants to deny the minority leader in the lower chamber the opportunity to get his objection in the record.
It takes the minority leader four tries but he gets it all in there. Good job!
Cermet
@Hypusine: What, bread and circus? (Read Micky D’s via subsidized corn and NFL gladiators…I mean fool’s ball.) Imperial Romans could talk lesions from our ruling corrupt and fascist elite.
Cermet
@DPirate: You are truly the definition of an idiot – someone who is incapable of learning – State workers have no labor rights but what is granted by a legislature? I thought people like you only existed as cartoons characters made by Disney since few rethug’s indeed exist who’s mental level would enable even fox news to be a step up in their intellectual learning. Ok, not an idiot because reguardless, you are reading posts here but you must not be playing with a full deck.
batgirl
@Alison: Thanks Alison. Doug, if you follow Alison’s link the article, “Has success spoiled NPR?” is in the June-July 1987 issue.
chopper
@Vodkam:
beats me. between 4-5$ gas, wild food prices, declining oil and fresh water access and massive outsourcing most of the middle class in this country won’t know what hit them. the next 10 years are going to be very, very ugly.
it’s good that the middle class is starting to lose that feeling of security that kept them fat and happy for so long. cause it’s all going bye-bye.
celticdragonchick
@kdaug:
Second that.
celticdragonchick
@Vodkam:
We fight and we keep fighting. It is us or them at this point, and damned if I will be driven from this country without taking some of those bastards down.
Nylund
“something about your circumstances insulated you from the ravages of Galtism and McCarthyism.”
When I first became a professor, nearly every colleague I know went out of their way to hide their political views while in a classroom. There was no way one could discern a bias one way or the other (even I didn’t know there views). Everything was prevented as objectively as possible. I say “nearly” everyone because we do have one Ron Paul / gold bug colleague that fills his lectures with phrases like, “those evil marxist democrats.” (For some reason, wingnuts don’t have to be objective.) I had one student, a very good student, who I chatted with frequently. He was the head of the young Republican club. I asked him if he felt like professors had a liberal bias. His answer was, “Its really hard to tell just based on what they say in the classroom, but we have people who do background checks on all of them and see who they’ve worked for and what party they’ve made contributions to in the past, so we’ve already identified most of the ones with bias.”
So “bias” had nothing to do with what was said in the classroom. “Bias” was a state-of-being that could be determined with a thorough background check. And mind you, it was a group of UNDERGRADS that were doing this. 18 year old kids.
It never occurred to me that some 18 year old taking my course was going to pour through political donation documents searching for my name in order to determine if I was one of those evil “liberals” in academia. But they do. That scares me. It also scares me that many of these undergrads have since graduated and are out running things in the real world.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Paula: You folks make it tough on those of us in EST. We miss lots of good stuff in real time and have to catch it when we see the references like yours.
Paul in KY
@Vodkam: I don’t know, Vodkam.
Tim
NPR can fuck off and die.
I wrote them off eight years ago when they joined the cheerleading for the Iraq War.
And those two cloying announcers, Meeeeechelle Norris and Melissa Nasal Block, who somehow took over ATC, with their precious, fake, affected voice modulations and twee, fake giggling were the last straw.
I take pleasure in seeing NPR self destruct. They tried to play the right wing game and deserve what they get.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I might actually have to do that.
mark
@Tim: exactly. The idea that NPR is somehow liberal is not supported by evidence.
numbskull
@BGinCHI: Uh, The Clash you mean?
Mike Kay (Ding-Dong-Broder's Dead)
I wouldn’t lump NPR with Wisconsin.
NPR sucks. It beyond hilarious that the right constantly targets NPR, when they’re nothing more than concerned trolls serving the conservative DC conventional wisdom.
Paula
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Well, I clearly didn’t read the whole thread either, but I didn’t get the impression from the few posts that I did read that there’s anything worth going out of your way to find in there.
Just wait until the next War on Terror flame war, which I’m sure will be happening again in a few days.
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
I think I’ve figured out what the Kochs are up to.
No one here doubts that WI/MI/OH/etc are all part of an overall strategy, orchestrated by the Kochs and others in and about the GOP. So… why?
Given the new brazen, scorched-earth approach, it can’t just be about the profit motive anymore. We can cynically snark at each other about the voter’s short memories, but these politicians are no longer acting like “normal” politicians. They honestly don’t seem to care about the long game.
Which, to me, implies that they believe there is no “long game” at all.
As I’ve said before, as energy moguls, the Kochs absolutely must know that the resources are dwindling. But destroying the middle class (and essentially subjugating the labor class– soon to be slaves in all but name and title) will reduce overall resource consumption.
Seriously: The downshifting of the US economy isn’t an unforeseen side effect. It’s the goal of the entire project. Make the dwindling resources last a little longer. Resources that the Kochs have conveniently acquired control over. Reduce worker’s rights. And in MI they will apparently even get the powers they need to deconstruct the state itself, should they deem that necessary.
BTW, PIMCO announced yesterday that it’s dumping all “government debt” (ie Treasuries) from its portfolio. Reading the financial press, the “govt bonds are not safe” meme is being rolled out all over the place, right on schedule– so prepare for higher interest rates. Much, much higher interest rates.
I don’t think this is a coincidence: Upping rates quickly now delivers a delicious (for them) one-two sucker punch: Simultaneously defunding the US govt (by making it harder to borrow money), and extracting what little wealth remains in the small business/upper middle class sectors. And doing this via instruments such as PIMCO assures that Bernanke can’t do much about it without firing up the printing presses (which he probably won’t do: and the resulting inflation achieves their aim almost as effectively, anyway).
This isn’t a war, for them– war presupposes an opponent that one recognizes as human. For them, it’s Harvest time. And we’re the wheat.
Maybe I’m nuts. Shit, hopefully I’m nuts. But I see no other analysis that fits all the facts I have.
I suggest a reframing of what the stakes are, exactly, and pretty damned quick. The fact that the WI thugs and those like them are also taking away folk’s legal options for peaceful resistance, one by one, isn’t a particularly good sign, either.
twiffer
@DPirate: when people say this:
their situation is not comparable to that facing private labor and they are not to be afforded the same rights.
Cain
@Vodkam:
Start by turning off your goddam tv and network news. THose fuckers didn’t cover jack shit in WIsconsin. It’s a very simple and ultimately saves you money and your piece of mind. Start with defunding those spreading aiding and abetting republican themes. Anything that defunds the washington press. Knock them down. You don’t need a revolution, you just need to start turning things off. Use the power of your purse. Your galtian overlords still need your money.. enough bitching about coverage..
I suggest we do a 3 day 24 hour news block. THen make it 7, and then keep going. It will scare the living shit out of NBC and GE and whoever else. That’s how you start. The whole goddam country needs to turn into one fucking union.
cain
DonkeyKong
Enlist in the war my brother, Enlist in the war.
McJulie
@Vodkam: What do we do? It’s the right question, with no obvious answer. But, when I look at progressive movements of the past, one thing they seem to have in common is that they had a lot of people who were willing to put absolutely everything on the line, and there was always some head busting before it was over.
We’re hamstrung by our current media, which at some point got the brilliant idea that if they didn’t report on protests and unrest and marches, it was like they didn’t happen at all.
But then, young people don’t get their information from traditional media sources in quite the same way.
I think maybe we need both a carrot and a stick. The stick: the oligarchy needs to be a little worried for their own precious necks. They cave only when they truly start to fear that the alternative is revolution. So if you’re just bursting with anger all the time and you can’t stand other liberal types telling you to calm down, don’t calm down. Just direct your anger in a more productive direction.
The carrot: make our world look like more fun than their world. Make the ordinary person want to be a part of us and not them. Our world has clean air and high speed rail and good jobs with benefits and puppies and happy children and microbrew beer and all the good stuff. What does their world have? Hatred, fear, and more hatred. Not everybody really likes that sort of thing, deep down, but it can be hard to give up an existing narrative. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance first.
mclaren
@FormerSwingVoter:
As soon as “Dancing With the Stars” is over!
Barb (formerly Gex)
I never, ever had that feeling. But I’m not male. I’m not white. I’m not straight. And I don’t believe in God. I am damn near the bottom of the totem pole of “real” America’s hierarchy, to the point that I have received “why don’t you move to some other country” emails from acquaintances. I pretty much knew the elite didn’t give a fuck about me.
Harvey Danger’s “Cream and Bastards”