Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Not all heroes wear capes.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Let there be snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Bark louder, little dog.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

“They not like us!” (that’s for sure!)

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

I was promised a recession.

You are here: Home / Books / Monday Morning Open Thread

Monday Morning Open Thread

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one percenter voting booth handelsman
(Walt Handelsman via GoComics.com)

Anybody up for a Book Chat? Jill LePore, in the New Yorker, reviews Senator Elizabeth Warren’s upcoming autobiography:

… Warren’s book was originally called “Rigged,” a reference to her contention that the American political system places power in the hands of plutocrats and bankers at the expense of ordinary, middle-class Americans. “Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor,” Warren writes. “Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.”

“A Fighting Chance” is in many ways heir to a book published a century ago. “Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It,” by Louis Brandeis, appeared in the spring of 1914. Brandeis believed that the country was being run by plutocrats and, especially, by investment bankers, who, by combining, consolidating, and aggregating the functions of banks, trusts, and corporations, controlled both the nation’s credit and the majority of its resources—including the railroads—and yet had not the least accountability to the public or any sense that the functions they had adopted were essentially those of a public utility. “The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others,” Brandeis wrote. “The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold.”…

Warren is concerned not with saving but with borrowing, not with monopoly but with debt. Since the nineteen-eighties, many Progressive-era and New Deal reforms have been repealed, including a cap on interest rates and a wall, erected in 1933, separating commercial and savings banking from investment banking. In the second gilded age, the fetters that bind the people were forged first from the people’s own credit cards and then from their mortgages. Credit-card companies lured borrowers in with “teaser rates.” Rates of consumer bankruptcy skyrocketed. Eying the profits made by credit-card companies, mortgage companies began selling an entirely new inventory of “mortgage products,” with low down payments, ballooning rates, and prepayment penalties. Home prices shot up, and then they collapsed. “When the housing market sank,” Warren writes, “so did America’s middle class.”…

In 2008, Warren joined a five-person congressional-oversight panel whose creation was mandated by the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout. She found that thrilling and maddening, too. In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: “They don’t criticize other insiders.” That’s about when Warren went on the Jon Stewart show, and you get the sense that, over that dinner, she decided to run for office…

Warren is also smart enough to use the conventions of political biography, old and new, to insist on the existence of a relationship between caring for other people and caring about politics. Her brief is really about the abandonment of children, not by women who go to school or to work but by legislatures and courts that have allowed the nation’s social & economic policies to be made by corporations and bankers. Writing about her children and grandchildren—rocking that baby—is more than the place where Warren leaves Brandeis behind. It’s an argument about where our real debts lie.

***********
What’s on the agenda for the start of another week?

Reader Interactions

60Comments

  1. 1.

    NotMax

    Recipe for curried veggie cakes is all worked out to my satisfaction, and feeling confident enough to not bother testing it before making a batch for a dinner this coming Saturday. Just have to remember to buy cheesecloth, something I almost never have laying around.

    Is it too early for Easter humor?

    The first joke here remains a real hoot.

  3. 3.

    OzarkHillbilly

    From the “You Can’t Make this Shit Up” file: Federal rangers face off against armed protesters in Nevada ‘range war’

    “The morning began with hundreds of protesters joined in prayer, singing and in recitation of the pledge of allegiance. By the afternoon it had escalated into a militant standoff with federal rangers, who would surrender citing “grave concern” for public safety.”

    At the center of the dispute is one particular wingnut who thinks paying grazing fees for the use of land that isn’t his (it’s federal land managed by BLM) is tyranny, the heel of the jackbooted thug. The stupid. It hurts.

  4. 4.

    Schlemizel

    Hockey season is officially over and it was a very good one, both men & women finished 2nd in the nation which is nothing to be ashamed of. Took in a D-I fastpitch game over the weekend and it was the most mistake filled game I have seen since 12U. The cold windy conditions may have some affect but I have never seen a game at this level where with so many mistakes. Final was 13-9 and if you watch much fastpitch you know that is not normal.

    I am going back to work today despite my let eye still not being clear. I go back to the OD on Wed and hope that she will tell me this is going to return to normal. Its a bit much even for a schlemizel

  5. 5.

    Schlemizel

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    They have created a cover story too – they claim BLM wants the land for a Chinese solar energy project. Thats like a wingnut trifecta right there by itself.

  6. 6.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @OzarkHillbilly: Saw stuff about that over the weekend. When I first saw “Bundy Ranch”, I read it as “Bunny Ranch”. I was wondering what the girls there did to get the BLM upset.

  8. 8.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Friday morning, the two sidekicks subbing for Glenn Beck said, after supporting the rancher the day before, that the rancher was actually in the wrong because he hadn’t been paying grazing fees. I can’t wait to hear how they pivot off that today.

  9. 9.

    Botsplainer

    What’s particularly galling about oligarchs is just how much return they get from investing in buying legislators – they get a helluvalot of bang for very little buck.

  10. 10.

    MikeJ

    @OzarkHillbilly: One would think that honest people who pay taxes and buy tags for their cars and other ranchers who pay their grazing fees would be howling to lock this loon up. He’s a deadbeat freeloader and if he doesn’t pay everybody else has to pay more.

  14. 14.

    Mustang Bobby

    As for the agenda of the day, I have been invited to a seder tonight. I will be one of the shabbus goys, complete with my Quaker hat which substitutes for my yarmulke. The family that has invited me and some other friends are known far and wide for their culinary skills, so I expect to have a bit of a brisket hangover tomorrow.

  16. 16.

    JPL

    @Mustang Bobby: Ronald Reagan the president signed it but not St. Ronny, so it’s okay.

    A known klan leader killed three people in Kansas city. He was a known terrorist and where is the uproar over the FBI missing the warning signs. .

  17. 17.

    Iowa Old Lady

    We spent the weekend in Chicagoland for our son’s birthday, and I was not on the internet. Nor did I see a single news show. No offense, but coming back is depressing.

  18. 18.

    mai naem

    I know this is a very negative take on this but I believe we need to get used to the idea that the US during the period of 1945-1980 was an anomaly and the US before ~1938 and after ~2000 is more the norm.

    Also too, the cartoon would have made a further point if the left side polling booth had brown people with a long waiting line visible.

  20. 20.

    gene108

    @Botsplainer:

    What’s particularly galling about oligarchs is just how much return they get from investing in buying legislators – they get a helluvalot of bang for very little buck.

    Our politicians are cheap whores. If they really cared to make money from their positions of power, though, we’d end up like Russia, where the politicians get a cut of industry profits.

    In this case, cheap whore politicians is probably the best outcome in the current climate, where the Supreme Court wants to allow the rich to buy government.

  22. 22.

    Baud

    @gene108:

    Our politicians are cheap whores. If they really cared to make money from their positions of power, though, we’d end up like Russia, where the politicians get a cut of industry profits.

    To build on that point, while in office, most of our politicians aren’t seeking money for personal gain. They’re seeking money to win reelection (or to support their allies’ reelection). Once they leave office, of course, many of them go work for industry for good money.

  23. 23.

    raven

    @Mustang Bobby: My first seder was in Vietnam. I was taken by a good buddy who ended up helping me manipulate the system, get accepted to the University of Illinois and get home 30 days early! My grandfather grew up in the ghetto in Chicago and actually spoke some Yiddish. It wasn’t until I met my friend in the Nam that I discovered the nicknames and stories gramps told had a Jewish flavor.

  24. 24.

    big ole hound

    Game of Thrones super evil kid King Geoffrey is dead. Yesss. Now for the rest of the 1%.

  27. 27.

    C.V. Danes

    … Warren’s book was originally called “Rigged,” a reference to her contention that the American political system places power in the hands of plutocrats and bankers at the expense of ordinary, middle-class Americans.

    That would pretty much be the textbook definition of oligarchy, which some believe to be a degenerative form of aristocracy. Since many of the super rich are now there by birth, I think the lines are fairly blurred.

    Also, as the first Gilded Age ended in a “big D” depression, so will the second. The current “small D” depression was just a dry run.

  29. 29.

    NotMax

    @C.V. Danes

    Which provides a good opportunity to link to Sen. Sanders, from late March.

    …to my mind, the issue that we have got to focus on as a Congress, the issue that we have got to focus on as American people is: What kind of nation do we wish to live in? Do we want to live in a nation where a handful of billionaires own a significant amount of the wealth in this country while the middle class has less and less, where families can’t afford to send their kids to college or get decent child care for their little ones, where people are reaching the age of 65 with virtually nothing in the bank in order to provide a dignified retirement? Is that the country we want to live in? Or do we want to see the middle class grow, and have a more equitable distribution of wealth and income, a fairer tax system, where the millionaires and billionaires and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes?
     
    And then from the political point of view, which is equally important, do we want to have a nation in which the concept is one person, one vote, that we’re all equal, that you have as much say about what happens in government as anybody else? Or do we want to have a political system where a handful of billionaires can sit around the room and say, “OK. Put $100 million into that state. Let’s put $50 million into that state”? Where a handful of billionaires will determine who gets elected president, who gets elected senator, who gets elected governor, and have members of Congress go crawling up to these billionaires: “What do you need, Mr. Billionaire? How do I get the hundreds of millions of dollars you can give me.?” Is that really what American democracy is supposed to be about?. video

  30. 30.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @gene108: Randy McNally, when interviewed years later about Operation Rocky Top, was shocked at how small the first bribe they dropped off in his office was. Cheap whore is right.

  32. 32.

    C.V. Danes

    @NotMax: Sanders nailed it for the most part, but the rich have always had much more political power than everyone else. It just wasn’t that much of an issue because for decades after the Great Depression their world and our world were pretty much the same, so our interests were largely parallel. The problem now is that their wealth has grown and concentrated to the point that they live in a world totally different from ours, with a totally difference set of interests, and they have nearly limitless wealth to distort the process as they see fit. This has never ended well before, and it will not end well now.

  33. 33.

    Rob in CT

    It was so nice visiting my parents this weekend, and being subjected (briefly, thankfully) to Fox “News.” They had a panel on tax reform, and of course they led with Steve Forbes, who (shocker!) wants a flat tax. This was of course treated as obviously a great idea, and then there was some more about how millionares pay so much in taxes so why would anyone want them to pay more and on and on.

    Forbes, of course, was born rich. As was his father.

    Meritocracy!

  34. 34.

    raven

    @C.V. Danes:

    Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure
    The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
    And there’s a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong
    You see, you hear these funny voices
    In the Tower of Song

  35. 35.

    GRANDPA john

    TO@Baud: To paraphrase Twain,

    there are many politicians in Washington that are willing to do for a million dollars, things that they should not do for less than 2 million dollars

  36. 36.

    ruemara

    I will try not to be as toxic as this Bundy Ranch story makes me feel. When MOVE occupied a building in Philadelphia, they were bombed, killing men, women & children. A bunch of fat, lunatic right wing asshole committing treason, are lauded by neocons because the president is black, so they don’t have to listen to the law. And the media either celebrate, or pretend that there’s some merit to his argument. Fucking white men. Which is odd to me, since that is also a large demographic of my friends and fellow liberals. It’s infuriating.

    I also fully start my new job, & I’m already feeling overwhelmed + underpaid. They’ve been sending things to review since Friday.

  37. 37.

    another Holocene human

    Thanks for posting that Brandeis quote. I’m kind of incredulous to have learned so little about the man when I was an undergrad at Deis. Sounds like he was the original bankster hater.

  39. 39.

    another Holocene human

    @ruemara: They were afraid of another Ruby Ridge. Time to put these criminals away like Al Capone.

    Charge that shit to their taxes. Charge them for criminal damage to federal land. Once they’re in prison, seize and auction herd for restitution.

    Unless these laws are unenforceable. And that’s unacceptable. Those lands belong to all of us.

  40. 40.

    raven

    @ruemara:

    Bundy claims he has no objection to paying a fee for his livestock’s use of public pasture, but he will only agree to pay such fees to Clark County, Nevada, an entity that neither possesses nor asserts any legal claim to the land in dispute. Argues Bundy:
    “My forefathers have been up and down the Virgin Valley ever since 1877. All these rights I claim have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage and the water. I have been here longer.
    The unhouseled spirits of Native Americans and African slaves, robbed and murdered by the uncountable millions, could not be reached for comment

    Read more at http://wonkette.com/546372/bundy-ranch-insurgents-physically-fight-federal-agents-in-dispute-over-cows-video#SSsdxsI4WMb0u0Rw.99

  41. 41.

    another Holocene human

    @JPL: Time to occupy media.

    Five stations in Orlando and they all want to show live hot sexy arraignment action of some brown dude who admitted killing cute little white toddler with car.

    Nobody questioning white woman’s parenting for sending kids to non suv proof cheap preschool the way they blamed that black woman in Atlanta/Macon for crossing the street. Hmm.

  43. 43.

    Gene108

    @raven:

    There is a very scary undercurrent of crazy in this country. Bundy seems to be a less virulent strain, which is sad because what he is saying is folks can make up their own laws to suit themselves and he apparently has a lot of supporters.

  47. 47.

    Mnemosyne

    @ruemara:

    I would say that the feds learned their lesson, but they learned it from Waco, so I’m still not sure it applies to black and brown folks.

    Good luck on your first day. Take a deep breath and realize that they don’t expect you know to everything right away, especially when it comes to their specific procedures. Taking copious notes always looks good. :-)

  48. 48.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Reagan convinced the asshole racists that since liberals wanted to help blacks and rein in rich assholes, the rich were on their side. Like guns, like education, like health care, like just about everything in American politics, the changing power levels and zealotry of the racists assholes – or ‘conservatives’ – have defined that struggle since the 80s.

    I wouldn’t have believed any of this, but the Obama presidency has been too plain a demonstration.

  49. 49.

    scav

    @ruemara: sorry, but look here for another weird counter-example: Man Angry Over Tax On Soda Pulls Out Submachine Gun. Already held without bail, so guess. What’s in the water about taxes all of a sudden?

    [omit for now and guessing] didn’t want to pay the 22-cent tax on his $1.79 two-liter of Pepsi on Saturday afternoon, Chicago Police said.
    So he allegedly pulled a blue-steel Intratec .22-caliber submachine gun out of his Gucci satchel inside the convenience store in the 4000 block of West Madison Street where they tried to make him pay it — and he threatened to kill everyone there, a prosecutor said.
    This “is my neighborhood, I’m tax exempt!” he would later allegedly tell the cops, the Sun-Times is reporting. “Man, you know what, I’ll keep it real. I had to put them in their place.”

    A bit interesting in the larger context, all in all.

  50. 50.

    Chris

    @Rob in CT:

    Millionaires pay “much” in taxes because thanks to thirty years of policies favoring them at the expense of everyone else, they’re the only place there’s any money left.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @scav:

    This is going to sound like a silly thing to say but, in that part of town, the guy didn’t have a Gucci bag. More like a “Gucchi” bag, or whatever tiny flaw the fake bags include so they can claim it’s not really a counterfeit.

    Also, I’m surprised the NRA hasn’t attempted to challenge Illinois’ gun laws that say that every person who owns a handgun has to have a license from the state. They’ll probably send a lawyer to defend him since that’s one of the things he’s charged with (not having a state license for the gun).

  52. 52.

    JustRuss

    they claim BLM wants the land for a Chinese solar energy project.

    Pikers. How hard could it have been to work Solyndra into that meme?

  53. 53.

    scav

    @Mnemosyne: Is going to be interesting to see how actively the NRA and anti-taxers rush to his defense. Also indeed interesting that GuccHe? is apparently the new macho gear.

  54. 54.

    rikyrah

    @ruemara:

    will try not to be as toxic as this Bundy Ranch story makes me feel. When MOVE occupied a building in Philadelphia, they were bombed, killing men, women & children. A bunch of fat, lunatic right wing asshole committing treason, are lauded by neocons because the president is black, so they don’t have to listen to the law.

    Should have taken them mofos out…one by one.

  57. 57.

    Chris

    @Baud:

    Yes, but it’s not just about reelection. The 1%ers’ support buys them the kind of safety net that means that even if they don’t get reelected, the fraternity will see to it that they have a nice and cushy job somewhere (as you say, that’s where the good money is). Maybe they’ll run for office again, maybe not, but in either case they’re taken care of.

    The whole problem with the wingnut welfare circuit is that it creates a system where they’re more afraid of pissing off the big donors than the voters.

  58. 58.

    satby

    @mai naem:

    Also too, the cartoon would have made a further point if the left side polling booth had brown people with a long waiting line visible.

    Nah, see disenfranchising POC by making the lines to vote uncomfortably long is a feature and wouldn’t have made an additional point at all. Showing “real Ammurkans” as disadvantaged by the ability of the rich to purchase a few politicians is the only way to get through to that crowd. Empathy-challenged as they are.

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