Robert Reich has a book to sell movie to promote:
… Put simply, most people are on a downward escalator. Although jobs are slowly returning, pay is not. Most jobs created since the start of the recovery, in 2009, pay less than the jobs that were lost during the Great Recession. This means many people are working harder than ever, but still getting nowhere. They’re increasingly pessimistic about their chances of ever doing better.
As their wages and benefits shrink, though, they see corporate executives and Wall Street bankers doing far better than ever before. And they are keenly aware of bailouts and special subsidies for agribusinesses, pharma, oil and gas, military contractors, finance and every other well-connected industry.
Political scientists have noted a high correlation between inequality and polarization. But economic class isn’t the only dividing line in America. Many working-class voters are heartland Republicans, while many of America’s superrich are coastal Democrats. The real division is between those who believe the game is rigged against them and those who believe they have a decent shot.
Losers of rigged games can become very angry, as history has revealed repeatedly. In America, the populist wings of both parties have become more vocal in recent years — the difference being that the populist right blames government more than it does big corporations while the populist left blames big corporations more than government.
Widening inequality thereby ignites what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics.”….
***********
What’s on the agenda in your neck of the woods tonight?
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I’d have sex with Robert Reich.
ranchandsyrup
Watchin’ the Donkeys win, I hope, and making spring rolls.
Pics of our daughter’s first day at dance class. She loved it.
burnspbesq
Popping popcorn in anticipation of the stuff hitting the fan when Greenie goes orangupoop over the news that a former FBI agent was prosecuted for leaking information about a bomb plot to the AP. never mind that the guy pled guilty, right? The very idea of prosecuting leakers has a chilling effect on Greenie’s ability to make a living, so it cannot stand.
askew
What’s up for tonight? I am looking forward to the season premiere of The Voice, though I am bummed that Christina and Cee-Lo. It’s the only reality show I watch. Seems like a perfect activity for a Monday night.
ruemara
charging ahead with a big project for a big name-for free, ugh. And I have an interview Friday with teh ebil tax guvmint. I suppose they want the best designed tax bills ever. Your CA tax sheets will now be in mauve, with debossments and headers in papyrus plus simoncini garamond body copy. You’re welcome.
WereBear
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Is that a plan or a preference?
burnspbesq
@ranchandsyrup:
I was there about 14 years ago, and we ended up with a dance major. You’re going to see some strange and disturbing behavior when she starts going to competitions, but just roll with it.
Mustang Bobby
Going to my writers’ group to enthrall them with Chapter 18 of my novel-in-progress tonight and plotting how to drag my governor, Rick Scott, into the sunlight and see if he hisses.
askew
@burnspbesq:
Ugh, we’ve had a nice couple of weeks free from Greenwald and co’s hysterical cries of Obama’s a fascist. I was hoping that we’d get at least a month free from their whining especially with the the more important debt ceiling and CR crisis to deal with. Lord knows the emoprog group can’t focus on more than 1 outrage at a time.
TG Chicago
Listening to All Things Considered on NPR. The newsreader meant to refer to an “Obamacare-killing” bill, but he said that the House sent an “Obama-killing” bill to the Senate.
Surprised the dead-enders in the House never thought of that.
ranchandsyrup
@burnspbesq: Thx for the advice, Burnsy. I’m pretty much up for her becoming anything, except a Liverpool fan. But I keed. I keed.
Regnad Kcin
I’d have sex w Richard Hofstadter
SiubhanDuinne
@ranchandsyrup: Oh FSM, she is adorable!!
Ballet and cute little girls. What’s not to love?
burnspbesq
@ruemara:
The CA Franchise Tax Board? Think. About. Your. Immortal. Soul. Which you are about to sell. Those folks really are the worst of the worst.
ranchandsyrup
@SiubhanDuinne: Thank you kindly. :) I’m horribly biased but I agree.
dmsilev
I’m having far too much fun reading all of the news reports that basically set out just how much everyone in DC hates Ted Cruz. The latest is that, per TPM, Yertle the Turtle, excuse me Senate Minority Leader McConnell just announced that he won’t support Cruz’s “filibuster the continuing resolution” plan. I’m sure that even as we speak, Erick Erickson is rallying the faithful to mail slugs or out-of-date Twinkies or something to McConnell’s office.
ruemara
@burnspbesq: No not them, I think. And frankly, my mortal body would like to sleep in a real bed, be able to pay my rent without skipping meals and buy some sneakers. I think my immortal soul will be fine if I get it.
@ranchandsyrup: EEeeek! She’s a niblet. Prepare for a long happy love affair with danskin. Besides, dance is good for everything.
burnspbesq
@ranchandsyrup:
Hannibal Suarez will be back in the lineup for their Capital One Cup match against ManU on Wednesday.
Yatsuno
@burnspbesq: It’s twue. They make my agency look like pikers
Roger Moore
@ruemara:
Mine will be electronic, in whichever style the tax software company chooses to use. Not that artfully designed tax forms are anything to sneeze at.
ranchandsyrup
@burnspbesq: LOL Hannibal Suarez. OM NOM NOM on delicious eastern european defenders.
I’m surprised that the top 5 all have a loss this early. Should be an interesting campaign. Here’s to hoping that your squad and Spurs make it into the top 4.
Betty Cracker
Steve at No More Mr. Nice Blog has some pretty spot-on criticism of Reich’s take, namely that it’s not just or even primarily inequality that results in political paranoia but rather propaganda that leads people who are actually winning the rigged game to believe in their own victimhood. Worth a read.
Fort Geek
Having wasted a day in wakefulness (and padding out the time working on a CAD drawing of my shed), I think it’s about time for a nap.
chopper
@ruemara:
long as brown’s suede-denim secret police don’t come for me over it, i’ll be fine.
Another Holocene Human
OT: did I hallucinate that thread a page back where infrequent commenters jumped in to slutshame Miley Cyrus and call her “out of control” even though she has yet to get in a custody battle with a babydaddy, get arrested for DUI, or get tossed out of parties for being a coked up aggressive pain. Oh wait, nobody mentioned old Hotel Abroad, so apparently getting arrested for drunk driving repeatedly while super rich is not a “cry for help”, however, getting tons of publicity when your new single drops is a sign that you are having an emotional meltdown. Yeah–all the way to the fucking bank.
And to the numbnuts that called Miley Cyrus a syphilitic whore, you do know that British age of consent laws were passed because of the exploitation of poor working class girls who had limited employment prospects and whose bodies were used in the perennial superstition that raping a virgin will cure venereal disease? In short, fuck you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hftGJbPXo2w
Crossbones Girl
Another Holocene Human
@dmsilev: They’re only comfortable when they have a common enemy to rally against.
Another Holocene Human
@ruemara: I love Garamond but Papyrus, ugh. I guess it’s a government RFP and they won’t pony up for a better font?
///
The Moar You Know
I am begging my wife to leave. We can. We’re barely young enough – the clock runs out on that in about three years – and we have VERY in-demand skills. I want out of this country, the handwriting is on the wall so that even the blind can read it. And I’m not making the argument properly to her, because she seems to think we’ll be OK if we stay. She’s not stupid and she’s very, very aware of what’s going on, but something is not connecting and I don’t know what.
I know selling all your shit and the house and leaving is scary as fuck. But this is a “Germany late 1930s” situation as far as I can see, and the options for those who stayed were pretty bleak. Of course, a lot of them stayed. And if she won’t leave I won’t either – I made that promise and will stick to it – but my life’s ambition was not to be in the top 20% of the populace of a shithole third-world country, and that’s where we are going to be, folks. Hell, it’s where most of this nation already is.
Another Holocene Human
@burnspbesq: Popping popcorn in anticipation of the stuff hitting the fan when Greenie goes orangupoop over the news that a former FBI agent was prosecuted for leaking information about a bomb plot to the AP.
Linky, bitte?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
Gah! Some guy named Rich Hollenberg just popped up on the NFL Network and since I’m watching without sound I thought they were interviewing Glenn Greenwald for a moment. I almost threw something at the TV and Buffalo Wild Wings would have been unhappy about that.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
Is there such a thing? I thought they had an infinite shelf life.
ranchandsyrup
@ruemara: Thank you Ruemara, both for the kind words about our dancer and the CA tax form updates. :) No comic sans?
Another Holocene Human
@Betty Cracker: Nope, I think Reich is correct, more correct that Mr Nice Blog admits. There’s plenty of evidence that widening inequality is a first order contributor to over societal violence and other Bad Things per sociology (teen pregnancy, infant mortality). This income inequality can be mitigated by social programs, so for example New York State has less violence than predicted by strict income inequality, but the state engages in a lot of common projects and resource redistribution which blunts the edge of the inequality. (Plus, NYC fudges their homicide figures.)
Of course there are convinced wingnuts but a lot of them ARE in a precarious position. After all, they are grabbing more than they put in, theyknow it, and so they develop elaborate rationalizations for why they should continue to be welfare recipients. For example it’s jaw-droppingly clear how damaging exurban housing development is to the finances of cities and counties yet you will find all the shills to this day screaming about why their exurban way of life is great and that they really DO deserve to have everybody else bankrupt themselves to preserve that lifestyle.
The wingnuts are so convinced because they absolutely have something to lose and in a shrinking pie situation they know that others will see what they have and seek to reduce it because times are tough. Thus, they try to preemptively take away what little the poor and dependent have in order to preserve their privileges. Even if they take a cut later, they maintain their relative position in society.
Tough times heighten social status anxiety and wingers have that going in spades. It’s what drives them. (Racism and Greed are manifestations of this, ultimately, primal fear.)
Another Holocene Human
@The Moar You Know: My wife wouldn’t leave either, back when we had the chance several years ago. It is tough to lose your friendship network and family and sometimes that is so valuable that going to another place isn’t going to be better.
I dunno about Germany in the 1930s–I just don’t see that. But YMMV.
Trollhattan
@burnspbesq:
Being a grudging soccer dad I find myself wishing she’d stuck with ballet, so I could at least be imprisoned indoors on those 105-degree afternoons.
ruemara
@Another Holocene Human: Nah, the design work is for a big tech names public advocacy group and has no Papyrus involved. I’m just coming up with Worst Designer EVER scenarios to cover for the fact that I’d really like to get this job and I have no idea how you “test” for design. Besides instinctive hatred of comic sans. and Mistral. And mauve.
askew
@The Moar You Know:
If this is the argument you are using with your wife, I can see why she isn’t buying it. That’s some crazy talk right there. It’s not like Germany in the last 1930s. Lordy.
srv
Tonight, I’m going to try to watch BB if I can move after an hour with the trainer.
This is at a trainer’s gym, so all 1 on 1. Last week, I got flustered with everyone else joking around with their trainers – “WTF, how do all these other people have the energy to chat with _their_ trainers?”
“They’re paying for a friend, you’re paying me to make you work hard”
gogol's wife
@ranchandsyrup:
She belongs on Cute Overload!
Trollhattan
@gogol’s wife:
You are NOT kidding! Of course, the critter backpack really pulls the outfit together.
kindness
I like Robert Reich. He always does a good job of explaining his side in simple terms. A good man. Too bad Obama didn’t want him for anything.
Amir Khalid
@burnspbesq:
To avoid further trouble on that front, Liverpool should make him play in a hockey goalkeeper’s mask. And maybe wheel him out onto the pitch on a dolly.
SiubhanDuinne
@Fort Geek: Geez. I slammed wide awake about 3:00 a.m. and was not able to get back to sleep at all. I even exchanged emails with Anne Laurie, who was also awake at that hour. And I’m retired, it’s not like I have any big reason to sabotage myself with nosleep. The fuh?
patrick II
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
When Robert Reich was secretary of labor he appeared on the old Bill Maher show on ABC. A young and beautiful Pamela Anderson was also a guest. She flirted with him outrageously — and he stuttered and turned a bright red. I was amused by one of the most politically powerful men in the country at the time being like a blushing 8th grader from the attention of a pretty girl.
Anyhow, the thing about Reich that has always struck me, in addition to his insightful take on economics, is that he seems to be such an essentially decent guy, and it is this essential decency that often stands in contrast to the conservatives he is asked to argue with on talk shows that shines through for me every bit as much as his sound economic arguments.
MikeJ
@kindness: I’m old enough to remember when Robert Reich was the devil incarnate because of all the awful things he did while working for the horrible worsethanReaganHeSoldUsOutUnderTheBus Clinton administration.
Tommy
@Another Holocene Human: You go on Miley Cyrus. I am old enough to be her father. I can’t name a song she has done. I don’t like her performances. But you know what I was doing (as a dude) at her age? Well not “nice” things. I was just not rich, on TV, or a smart phone with a pic of me doing it in everybody’s hands.
If you don’t want to buy her music don’t buy her music, it is that simple. You don’t have to belittle and dog pile on her 24/7.
PurpleGirl
@ranchandsyrup: Adorable. Is she taking tap dancing? (Her shoes look like tap shoes.)
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
As somebody whose grandfather actually left Germany in the 1930s, let me say go fuck yourself and your overblown sense of how terrible things are. Maybe job prospects in the USA aren’t so hot, and there’s a serious risk of things going backward. That’s a far cry from actual genocide, which is what people were fleeing in 1930s Germany.
SiubhanDuinne
@The Moar You Know:
I am much too old, alas, and don’t have sufficient resources to buy myself some sweet Permanent Residency elsewhere. I normally say I love this country, but in truth, the country I love hasn’t been around for about 32 years (do the math). It is very depressing.
ranchandsyrup
@PurpleGirl: Tap and ballet. :)
@gogol’s wife: Thanks!
Splitting Image
I dunno about that. Shrinking inequality seems to have done a good job igniting it too. The Klan was created in response to an attempt to narrow the economic gap between certain racial groups, and the John Birch Society arose for the same reason a hundred years later. Also look at how some men have reacted to pay equity over the years. Ditto marriage equality and expressions of homophobia.
Fort Geek
@Another Holocene Human: Could be worse.
Could be Comic.
kindness
@MikeJ: Well yea so am I but I always like Reich. Clinton’s triangulation? No. Might have been good political functionality for some issues but not every issue. Reich didn’t run the show, just the Department of Labor and even then stuff like NAFTA came in from on high and it wasn’t like he had approval/disapproval powers when he obviously didn’t. So yea, still like him. He’s one of the few repeating characters that NPR uses that makes me happy. The rest might as well be ChuckTodd#909 debating ChuckTodd #9.
Waldo
@kindness: Same here. Not on par with Krugman, but not half bad either.
Tommy
@ranchandsyrup: Wonderful pics. I will just note that just about the best thing my parents ever did for me, and not dance classes I realize, was enroll me in a gymnastics class when I was about her age. Did it for years and years and when I played other “cool male” sports what I learned there helped me a lot.
Balance at the top of the list. Felxibility a close second.
I don’t have any children but my brother and his wife are thinking of dance classes for there four year old Katie. Only had swimming lessons to this point, she seems to love beyond words.
Churchlady
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: His wife would object. Moreover, why? He did more to kill off unions than anyone but Reagan. He has no interest in industrial expansion, he’s got no answers (really LISTEN to him and then figure out what he offered other than platitudes) and can speak more smoothly and say less than any person in America. Hope the sex is good. His policies aren’t.
PIGL
@Another Holocene Human: Thanks for this. Agree 100%
PIGL
@Roger Moore: El Salvador in the 60s would be a better analogy. If you don’t see the death squads armed and ready to go just around the corner, you need to open your eyes. They will be unleashed with unprecedented ferocity the moment there is any serious threat to the political dominance of the 0.01%.
ranchandsyrup
@Tommy: Thanks for sharing your experiences with gym. It’s next on the list for us.
On another note: Atlas Shrugged moviemakers start a kickstarter for Part II and show an irrational lack of self awareness.
lamh36
Don’t know why, but Um im watching this Rock of Ages Musical movie with Tom Cruise and some other people. Ummm what is this bullshit and why cant I stop watching it???
I need an intervention.
Fort Geek
@SiubhanDuinne: I wander between weeks of sleeping 3-4 hours, being awake until I’m tired again, 3-4 hours of sleep, etc. to 15-20 hours of sleep and a few hours’ waking. I never know which one it’ll be. One upside of being “medically retired” is that there’s no real schedule to worry about. That’s probably also a downside (and I might ponder that…after the nap).
burnspbesq
@Another Holocene Human:
Jawohl.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/24/us/fbi-ex-agent-pleads-guilty-in-leak-to-ap.html?_r=0
burnspbesq
@burnspbesq:
ETA: Sehr interessant. Dies ist der Fall, in dem AP-Reporter Telefon Datensätze wurden vorgeladen.
Tommy
@ranchandsyrup: Gymnastics rocks.
As to Atlas Shrugged I don’t know what to say. I am not rich, but make a good living. My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have been. Not really liberal. I do not recall a single time they thought “those with less should fend for themselves.”
I recall cleaning out my grandfather’s medical office with my dad when he passed away. A small town rural doctor for 50+ years. We came across this file cabinet will all these short-hand code under names.
I asked what it was. He told me that when people couldn’t afford his services they offered to pay him as he could, he would NEVER not provide service.
He then asked if I recall folks comes over with fried chicken or an apple pie in the holidays (when I was over) and I was told as a kid they were uncles or something.
That was respect to them, but they were paying him back.
I don’t think this system works, that I pay you an apple pie for heart surgery, but it shows folks tried.
Davis X. Machina
@PIGL:
In other words, not in our lifetime.
There is no instance in recorded history of the peasants storming the chateau with a pitchfork in one hand and a remote in the other. We can produce bread and circuses of previously-unimaginable quality, and in industrial quantity.
Add to that the divide-and-conquer possibilities of a country as fissiparous, on religious and racial lines, as the US, and I’m sure the .01% sleep very soundly at night.
In the 1930’s, with U6 pushing 50%, and U3 over 25%, we had no revolution. Neither did any of the other advanced North Atlantic democracies, with the sole exception of Germany. (Italy had already flipped, in the 20’s and Spain was virtually a third-world country at the time.)
The level of immiseration required to trigger fundamental change isn’t even close to being at hand.
ranchandsyrup
@Tommy: Yr grandfather and the rest of the Tommy clan sounds like good people. Cheers.
burnspbesq
@Amir Khalid:
Brendan Rogers actually said that Suarez is “champing at the bit” to get back in action. I kid you not. The video is at espnfc.com.
Move over Yogi Berra, the sports world has a new Master of Malaprop.
Redshirt
@Davis X. Machina: I don’t know man. When have politics been this insane? When has a political party given up the responsibility to govern and instead engaged in obstruction? When has a small minority of crazy people been so heavily armed?
There’s a lot of new dimensions to our current situation, due to technology. I’m concerned, greatly, about armed wingnuts getting organized into local squads. They’re out there on the fringe already, and they’ve been there since Clinton. They’ve grown greatly in number during Obama’s Admin. It’s not an unrealistic fear.
Emma
@Another Holocene Human: Thanks. I skipped that one myself. Though it seems interesting that people who jump to scream at Republicans when they engage in slut-shaming aren’t above it themselves.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Churchlady: Just shut up. I don’t say anything about you fucking that purity chicken over and over.
Baud
@Davis X. Machina:
Not even if we had more bully pulpit?
Felonius Monk
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Pictures or it didn’t happen.
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
Uh, no, it’s not anywhere close to that, unless Kristallnacht already happened and I just kinda missed it.
Seriously, get a grip. Read up on some history — it may actually make you feel better since we are nowhere even close to 1930s Germany. Let me know when we’re at $320 USD to 1 Euro.
Roger Moore
@Felonius Monk:
Considering the quantities of brain bleach you’ll need after those pictures, I don’t think you’re going to believe it happened one way or the other.
Biscuits
Daughter is off to college, our first. Between texts of encouragement to her, Im giving a top to bottom cleaning of her room (she’s ok with it). All I can say is EeGads! The dirt that accumulates in a teenage room! It is a wonder.
Yatsuno
@Davis X. Machina:
I have nothing to say here other than your usage of this word made me squee.
ranchandsyrup
@Biscuits: Congrats. Gotta be rough seeing one leave the nest.
Baud
@Yatsuno:
IIRC, he teaches Latin. Those folks have the vocab.
Biscuits
@ranchandsyrup:
I was very good at keeping it together in front of her, but am now very weepy. Amazing how one can be simultaneously proud and so sad.
ranchandsyrup
@Biscuits: Don’t blame you at all. :)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mnemosyne: surely you remember when Hindenberg came out in support of same sex marriage
Biscuits
@ranchandsyrup:
Thanks ;)
Davis X. Machina
@Redshirt:
Since forever. Violence is as American as apple pie. The anomaly is the time coinciding to when most of us have been alive.
Violet
@The Moar You Know:
If you believe that “most of this nation” is a “shithole third-world country” you are seriously misguided. How many of our cities have something like the Kibera slums outside Nairobi? Or any of the slums near Tegucigalpa, Honduras? Or even a favela in Rio? How common is it for people to grow up in this country without running water or electricity, the way people in rural China do?
Maybe we will become that way or maybe we won’t, but to say we’re there now is egregious exaggeration.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Note, though, that the Weimar hyperinflation wasn’t the trigger for the Nazi takeover. Their economy actually bounced back from the inflation fairly well. It was the Great Depression- and the failure of the government to do anything effective about it- that triggered the Nazi takeover. You’d think that the modern Eurozone central bankers would take that history to heart and do something about the miserable state of the European economy, but apparently not.
Ben Franklin
“We’re a war-like people”
@Davis X. Machina:
@Davis X. Machina: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77dDZOwt20E
jl
@ruemara:
” Your CA tax sheets will now be in mauve, with debossments and headers in papyrus plus simoncini garamond body copy. You’re welcome. ”
Thanks. CAN”T WAIT!
(Some hand intaglio engraved doohickies would be nice too. Maybe some engraved monsters next to sections with most abused deductions).
Edit: It’d be fun to tie it all up with sealing wax and some ribbons too.
Belafon
@Biscuits: we had the same with my oldest son.
jl
@Mnemosyne: hyperinflation was early 1920s, which was solved. The misery of the worldwide great depression set the stage for the Nazis.
” Let me know when we’re at $320 USD to 1 Euro” Me to, U.S. Export boom!.Get into U.S. manufacturing.
Redshirt
@Davis X. Machina: @Davis X. Machina: Riots are not hit squads. Unrest is not hit squads. I’m specifically afraid of hit squads. Maybe that makes me paranoid. But I think all it would take is a certain type of crisis and a call to arms. These heavily armed wingnuts would gladly shed blood if they felt empowered to do so.
shelly
According to Homer Simpson, after ten years the cream filling turns into liquor.
*****
Read somewhere that the original filling was banana cream. Umm, that sounds tasty.
Glidwrith
@Redshirt: Yes, the armed wingnuts are out there – and for every armed squad is your friendly FBI infiltrator keeping an eye on them. Have you noticed that EVERY time in the last few years any group above one person that crosses the line is snapped up by the Feds before they manage to kill anyone?
I also believe that every last of those nutjob groups knows, KNOWS, that if one of their own starts advocating direct violence that that person is in fact a Fed. So, they are kept in check, they get to keep having their fantasies of igniting a race war and if any of them so much as step out of line the Feds will stomp them so hard, they’ll be a bootprint in the ground.
Litlebritdifrnt
@The Moar You Know:
I am going home to England in November, I just know when I get there and see the nice middle class life that my sister enjoys on pretty much CNA wages is going to make it really really tempting to just stay. If it wasn’t for the pets I would basically say fuck it.
raven
The bohdi is home from the vet. The xrays showed a cervical disc problem, not lumbar like the princess. He goes in the crate for a week with meds and limited activity. He’ll most likely be OK but I am really going to have to limit his ball chasing from here on out.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Violet:
I would say that any country that has a chain of stores who’s entire business model is selling people stuff for parties (ie Party Suppliers) and who are successful at it while paying wages to people who could never afford to throw such a party, is a country that has got its priorities wrong.
JPL
@raven: I had a golden that was identified with bad hips at one. The choices at the time, were steroids or no walks. I started crying because without exercise, he’d die at an early age. He lived until he seventeen. Sunny never had steroids and only buffered aspirin when in pain.
ruemara
@jl: I’ll throw that into the interview.
@Litlebritdifrnt: 1 third of the family went over there. I’m having a hard time not begging for some unseemly charity to get established over the pond in the UK. It seems to have a brighter prospect than here. But I’m forever hopeful.
schrodinger's cat
The right wing was pretty paranoid during the Clinton era too, and those were economic boom times. How does Reich explain that?
schrodinger's cat
@Violet: Word! People who say this have never been set foot in an actual third world country.
liberal
@JPL:
Wow. That’s old for a golden.
Violet
@Litlebritdifrnt: Sure, priorities are wrong. No arguments here. But those people working at those poor wages still probably have electricity and running water. They have a roof over their heads, not cardboard. We are way out of whack as a society, but we are still not a “shithole third world country.”
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Haven’t the rules on bringing pets to the UK loosened up in recent years? Some friends who moved to the UK for awhile were able to bring their dog with proof of rabies vaccination from a certified vet. I don’t think the dog had to do quarantine like was required before.
Litlebritdifrnt
@schrodinger’s cat:
I would also point out that the majority of the people screaming “USA USA USA” and calling the United States the greatest country in the world have never stepped outside of the US. Damn most of them have never stepped out of their state. They say that travel broadens the mind, and in this case it would do a bunch of Americans the world of good to leave the confines of the US and see what life is like in other countries, you know, countries where women get paid maternity leave and don’t go bankrupt having a baby.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Violet:
Yes they have, if it were just the two dogs I could handle it. However, I have eight cats, and I can imagine that the flights alone for them would be prohibitive. I am not about to abandon them, most of them were abandoned on my doorstep and I am not about to drop them off at the kill shelter and hope for the best.
schrodinger's cat
@Litlebritdifrnt: I don’t disagree.
schrodinger's cat
I have a simpler theory, the Republicans and their acolytes get paranoid every time there is a Democrat in the White House. The dire macroeconomic situation is just the icing on the cake.
Citizen_X
@PIGL:
I have opened my eyes and seen those people…
And laughed and laughed and laughed, till I fell down and peed myself. Those fat old retarded dittohead asswipes couldn’t organize a coup at a kindergarten. If they ever try anything, just slap them and grab their guns (GUN GRABBER!), then chase them till they keel over with a coronary. They’re not even worth wasting ammo.
JPL
Watching Republicans turn against Ted Cruz is interesting. Hopefully, they continue to eat their own.
jl
@JPL: Looks like McConnell is spinning like a top to look like he did something while burying the whole Cruz nonsense in time to avoid a shutdown, or at least keep it as short as possible.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@jl: So countdown to Bevin declaring himself a Ted Cruz Republican?
jl
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Madison (communist) writing in National Gazette, 1792: Fashion
” The extremity of the evil must be in the case before us, where the absolute necessaries depend on the caprices of fancy, and the caprice of a single fancy directs the fashion of the community. Here the dependence sinks to the lowest point of servility. … Twenty thousand persons are to get or go without their bread, as a wanton youth, may fancy to wear his shoes with or without straps, or to fasten his straps with strings or with buckles. Can any despotism be more cruel than a situation, in which the existence of thousands depends on one will, and that will on the most slight and fickle of all motives, a mere whim of the imagination. ”
http://www.constitution.org/jm/17920322_fashion.txt
Madison, of course, went in Johnny Cash black, because he was an outlaw!
JPL
@jl: It is interesting to see. Maybe the anti-Cruz is being pushed by the Bushes. According to the GQ article, Cruz worked for the Bush campaign in 2000 and they pretty much put him in menial jobs after the election.
Chris
@Redshirt:
Worrying about specific examples from history is kind of blinding oneself to the real problems right in front of our face, IMO.
Specifically: am I worried about wingnuts forming their own SA/Battalion 3-16/Death Eater type organizations? No, not as much as I am about simple “lone wolf” types. That’s the type that’s impossible for the FBI to monitor, and that’s where all the major right wing terrorist attacks in recent history have come from, including the big one at Oklahoma City. Oh, and those things have a political effect too, just like organized terrorism. There were a few Arizona Republicans who resigned right after the Giffords shooting, at least one of them saying that it was because he didn’t want to “take a bullet for anyone.”
As for one percenters worried about keeping the country under their thumb? I don’t see why they’d bother to go and get their own Central America style illegal enforcers, when the OWS protests showed that regular old-fashioned police departments can break up a protest in full view of the public with little to no consequences for them no matter how violent they get.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JPL: Keeping the runway clear just in case Jebbie stops Hamletting? I keep hearing how brilliant Cruz is– Chris Hayes just said he saw Cruz argue in front of the supreme court and was blown away. hard for me to believe he actually thinks he can be president, and why would he want to be Jim DeMint?
PIGL
@Citizen_X: I was thinking more of the police. You’ve seen them, have you? You think they’ll stop with pepper spraying the smelly hippies on Wall Street? All it will take is the merest beginnings of effective organisation against the established order, and people will start disappearing, and the the bodies will start piling up in odd corners.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: I hope he feels better soon.
Redshirt
@Chris: In current conditions.
Add a crisis of a certain type (Domestic terrorism), and a charismatic Republican calling “patriots” to arms, and I can see, not predict, how fascism will rise in the USA. It may not be in the next 3 years, or the next 11 (Allah willing if a Dem wins the Presidency for the next two terms), but it’s right there on the periphery. Waiting to be called.
Suffern ACE
@Chris: agreed. The problem with liberals as they are currently construed is that there isn’t a violent wing of any note to be called upon. Not that such a wing wouldn’t be immediately suppressed by democrats and republicans. But if push comes to shove, the right has actual wanna be militias that can be turned to actual militias without much provocation.
schrodinger's cat
Open thread needs kitteh.
Chris
@Suffern ACE:
Not so much a “problem.” Armed wings have never done us much good anyway. Didn’t help at Blair Mountain or any of those other labor clashes a hundred years ago, and it would help even less in the age of drones and “black helicopters.”
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: I think with rest he’ll be ok. He’s 9 and he has been hell on wheels for the ball, we need to slow down.
hueyplong
I re-read Hofstadter’s book last weekend, and am surprised that Reich would tie the GOP’s current emphasis on the paranoid style to economic hard times. Hofstadter emphasized the right wing’s use of status politics during relatively prosperous times.
Best I can tell, the GOP has employed what Hofstadter called the paranoid style on a fairly continuous basis for decades. What Democratic president have they failed to demonize, regardless of economic conditions?
The thing I found comforting about reading Hofstadter was the realization that these a-holes have always been a-holes, and the main difference now seems limited to the fact that they have a national tv network from which to whip up animosity without fear of contraction by some annoying “reporter” with a microphone.
master c
@Another Holocene Human: papyrus is a shit show.
different-church-lady
They shoot
horsesRaiders, don’t they?Ksmiami
@Redshirt: hmm the years leading up to the civil war were not really a picnic … It sometimes just feels worse because media and technology amplifies the crazy.. But Americans in general like order and material goods and we are a way diverse lot… Hard to corral or put labels on.
Chris
@hueyplong:
Yes. It’s fashionable to credit the devastation of the Civil War and the aftermath with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, for example… But the truth is that the Klan was already totally dominant before the Civil War (so dominant that it didn’t need a secret society, uniforms, or even the name “Ku Klux Klan;” it was just… society). If anything the causality goes the other way around; “the Klan” (before it was actually called that) initiated the war that destroyed their own world and brought all that ruin onto themselves.
I’ve mentioned this before, but IMO it’s pretty hard to determine what the hard right is mad about at any given moment, given that the things that make them mad are invariably things that don’t actually… exist. Death panels and birth certificates, nowadays. The Council of the Elders of Zion, back in the day. Etc…
gogol's wife
@raven:
I hope he feels better soon.
liberal
@Citizen_X:
Yeah, that’s my impression whenever I see videos of those guys.
cvstoner
There’s a difference? I thought big corporations were the government.
brantl
It an[‘t paranoia if they are out to get you. And the rich pricks are.
Jebediah
@chopper:
Don’t worry; it’s your uncool niece they’re after.