Blog Archive: December, 2007

A pretty reliable gauge of Establishment fear is how far away from factual reality its chief spokesmen stray at election time. With economic populism now driving both the Democratic and Republican presidential contests, professional political pontificators in Washington are attacking candidates for being crazed and angry - when in fact their own rhetoric shows it is the pundits who are the angriest of all. An uprising is on - one against the hostile takeover of our government by Big Money interests. And inside the walls of the Washington palace, the elite are freaking out. read more »

More »»

Joe Klein - who Glenn Greenwald has shown to be one of the most irresponsible journalists in contemporary American history - lays another egg:

"NAFTA has been a wash, creating as many jobs as have been lost."

According to government data, NAFTA has cost America at least 1 million jobs. This is not new information - but it still never ceases to amaze me that a high-paid journalist at any publication is allowed to simply lie without as much as a nod to the actual facts. But then, I guess Joe has neither the time nor the journalistic background to figure out who's right: the desperate bourgeois-pleasing Clintonites whispering in his ear, or the actual hard data that comprise those pesky things called facts.

More »»

This New York Times story is very telling about just how tied to Big Money the Republican Party Establishment really is — and how worried that Establishment is about its old tricks being exposed for the fraud they really are: read more »

More »»

You may have heard by now that the New York Times' contribution to the Great Liberal Media Conspiracy in 2008 will be to hire William Kristol as a columnist.

Fascinating, since just this past October 14 on Fox he said that the Times giving the naming of the third Congressional Medal of Honor winner in the war on terror "about one one-thousandth of the coverage of the Nobel peace prize" was an example of "something sick about our culture." (Actually, the Times would go on to memorialize the posthumous honoree in a nearly three thousand word piece.)

As a friend of mine points out, conservatives should think of this the way Lenin described capitalists: as willing to sell you the rope you use to hang them with.

In the Times, exploiting the house rule that columnists are not subject to correction or editorial control, Kristol will be able to do what he does best—mainline imperialist lies into the public conversation—with the "liberal" Times imprimateur—syndicated, also, in hundreds of smaller papers around the country.

More »»

My local paper in Western Mass., the Daily Hampshire Gazette (sub. req'd), today reported on the strain being put upon area food banks.

Food banks across Massachusetts, already hobbled by state and federal budget cuts, are struggling to meet the increasing demands of a faltering economy beset by the mortgage debacle and higher food and energy costs. read more »

More »»

Big Con friend Greg Anrig, the very best chronicler of the institutional roots of today's conservatives failures, had a good article a couple of weeks ago about the Food and Drug Administration.

Here's the thesis:

Charting the phases of the FDA's decline lays bare the responsibility borne by movement conservatism. read more »

More »»

Religious right edition...

DALLAS, Texas (CNN) -- If you turn to the Bible -- Isaiah Chapter 35, Verse 8 -- you will see a passage that in part says, "A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness."

Churchgoers in six states have held prayer sessions along the side of Interstate 35.

Now, is it possible that this "highway" mentioned in Chapter 35 is actually Interstate 35 that runs through six U.S. states, from southern Texas to northern Minnesota? Some Christians have faith that is indeed the case.

More »»

I'm in Jersey with my in-laws for the holidays, and TV here has been playing a neatly bullying commercial for buttons, magnets, and bumper stickers you can buy reading, "It's OK To Say 'Merry Christmas' To Me!" This particular battlement in the War on the War on Christmas is being manned by the service organization Catholic Daughters of America (or more precisely, as this military supply site specifies, the "Pope John Paul II Court of Catholic Daughters of America"). The commercial caps off the smug sanctimony—those oppressive liberals want to drive Christmas and Christians from the land, but at least you can stand in the gap!-by offering the products in lots of ten.

It's a perfect encapsulation of a certain strain of American conservatism: the discourse through which dominant groups loudly and defiantly announce their own supposed marginalization, then trumpet their own stalwart courage in refusing to be cowed. read more »

More »»

Two posts down, I wrote about George Bush's little Christmas present to the American people and the Arab world: professional hustler James Glassman, who invented a new genre of "opinion journalism" in which corporations pay to have their opinions represented, and who Bush named to head public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East.

That inspired this comment from one of you loyal readers:

Am I the only one whose threshold for outrage has been raised so high by modern conservatism that I feel the urge to do little more than shrug at this story? Honestly, if Bush started publicly announcing that he had created the Thousand Year Reich and that he was heretofore to be called The Fuhrer, it would just make me shake my head."

I know the feeling.

After all, I didn't even include two of the more damning pieces details about Glassman and the various insults against truth and decency his appointment represents. Today I correct the slight. Merry Christmas!

More »»

I've written a lot about what I have called The Great Education Myth - the fallacy put forward by people like billionaire Tom Friedman that says all workers have to do is get more education and their economic problems are solved. U.S. News and World Report is the latest to debunk this myth:

"Even college grads might want to consider blue-collar careers. Last year, because U.S. News readers tend to be college educated, we included only careers that typically require at least a bachelor's degree. This year we've added four careers that don't. Why? More and more students are graduating from college at the same time that employers are offshoring more professional jobs. So, many holders of a bachelor's degree are having trouble finding jobs that require college-graduate skills."

What U.S. News and World Report doesn't say is the effect of all this on wages. The offshoring of professional jobs is one of the factors driving wages down. So while education is certainly a good thing, we see that it is not a panacea in an economy rigged by "free trade" policies that create an economic race to the bottom.

More »»