It turns out that the old HR aphorism, “This company’s greatest asset is its people,” actually means something. [...]From naked capitalism, crossposted from his own blog.
I suspect that the real members of the MI [musical instrument] community will see each other again, sorta like when you’re putting together bands in the same town. Hey, everybody always needs a bassist. You know, unless you’re an MBA who never cared for the biz in the first place, in which case, all good – maybe PetSmart is hiring execs?
In a post-civil rights movement society where equality and freedom for all is our publicly-avowed ethic, White identity is unmoored from its founding logic. Yet no coherent mass White identity has emerged to take its place. Perhaps more than ever before, we don't know how to understand a society where two things at once are true: Whiteness is advantaged, and millions of White people live in poverty and despair.Jesse Curtis, walk on, addressing Trump's appeal. It's pretty disturbing, so keep that in mind.
There are nineteen million poor White Americans, the census bureau estimates. Yet our popular media and cultural narratives have no room for them. We can't even talk about them. Poor Whites are "working class" or "blue collar." They are not poor. Why? Because to be poor is to contradict the basic narrative of Whiteness.
What these dissenting voices are pointing out, in their own 21st century version of “parrhesia,” is that the relationship between guns, masculinity, whiteness, democracy and notions of “freedom” constitutes a very particular and specific form of privilege that is usually denied to other groups in the United States.Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable, concerning the media coverage of gun violence with respect to race.
4. Speaking of, at this point, someone could discover Donald Trump's secret strangled hooker burial ground and his followers wouldn't give a flying fuck. He could be caught in bed with a dead boy, a live girl, and half a sheep, and he'd still get at least 35% of primary voters. If you ever thought that Trump would go away quickly, you were an idiot. If you still think that Trump will burn out at some point, you're an even bigger fucking idiot. Trump has already taken out the seaside villages, and he's on his way to Tokyo. Your puny conventional weapons will have no effect.
The full political might of Florida's IOUs was on display in December, when a deceptive campaign, funded by the state's electric utilities, crushed a citizen-led effort to open Florida to solar competition through the 2016 ballot. "When your opponents have no ethical foundation, have unlimited resources and are willing to say and do anything to defeat you," says Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which led the pro-solar effort, "it's a tough hurdle to overcome."Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, by way of skippy.
There is not a single word in this response relating to race and racism in Western Europe or anything remotely closely to it. Instead, Johnson proposes to bait with race, and then switch to class. He swaps “labor conditions and daily lives of working people” in for “victims of white supremacy” and prays that the reader does not notice. Indeed, one might just as easily note that the advance of indoor plumbing, germ theory, and electricity have improved “the labor conditions and daily lives of working people,” and this would be no closer to actual engagement.
This pattern—strident rhetoric divorced from knowable fact—marks Johnson’s argument. Reparations, he tells us, do not emerge from the “felt needs of the majority of blacks,” a claim that is hard to square with the fact that a majority of blacks support reparations. Instead, he argues, the claim for reparations emerges from a cabal of “anti-racist liberals” and “black elites” seeking to make a “territorial-identitarian claim for power.” In fact, the reparations movement runs the gamut from the victims of Jon Burge, to those targeted by North Carolina’s eugenics campaign, to those targeted by the same campaign in Virginia, to those targeted by “Massive Resistance” in the same state, to the descendants of those devastated by the Tulsa pogrom. Are the black people of Tulsa who suffered aerial bombing at the hands of their own government“black elites” in pursuit of “territorial-identitarian claim?” Or are they something far simpler—people who were robbed and believe they deserve to be compensated?
With that said, I concluded that the next-best step was to back John Conyers’s H.R. 40 bill, which proposed to study slavery and its legacy, and to determine whether reparations were feasible. This seemed intelligent, given that is the exact same path taken by one of the more successful reparations efforts—those awarded to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. It was also actionable—a bill in Congress that could serve as a rallying point—as opposed to merely rhetorical. Finally, although studies certainly end up in the dust-bin of history all the time, without some sort of official document tallying up the specific costs of some three centuries of injury, it seems relatively useless to argue for a plan for payment.
The point is to get people to question, not to recruit them into a religion. Citizens are not sheep. They do not need shepherds, and even if they did I would be poorly qualified. I have thought quite deeply about the problem of racism in American society. I have thought somewhat deeply about inequality and the social safety net. I have though only modestly about foreign policy and the environment. And I haven’t thought much at all about net neutrality. I voted for the first time in 2008, following years of skepticism about electoral politics. Whatever. The point is that this is not the record of someone who should be telling other citizens how to vote.
But the foundation for his claim upon the White House was that he knew how to get good things done because he was experienced and prepared.
But many Republicans and not a few Democrats these days not only don’t seem to think a would-be president needs to have experience or to have prepared for the office, they see experience and signs of thoughtful preparation as disqualifications.
Preparing? That’s for losers.
Experience? Just another way of saying you’ve been compromised and corrupted by Wall Street, the Washington establishment, and your husband.
Let’s remember that “ranchers” are being used as a proxy for every person or company that wants to get its hands on free government land. Despite being relatively big deals at the local level, there really isn’t enough money in ranching to get the kind of legislative support they receive. That money comes from extraction industries like mining and oil drillers and fracking companies, that stand to make billions if they can get the feds to give up its ownership of millions of acres of western land. It would not surprise me if some people hang on to unprofitable ranches solely for the value of the minerals and water beneath the ground in anticipation of the day when a republican administration lets them buy the land for pennies on the dollar. The ranchers are only the most photogenic of the groups that want to hoover up federal land, mining and other extraction industries don’t get the same kind of nostalgic preferential treatment from the public.
Let's be honest here about the presidency of either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter which one is "pragmatic" or "progressive" or "progressive progressive" or "pragmatically progressive." It matters about as much as a flea fart in a tornado. Because, see, neither of them is getting shit past a Congress that has at least one house controlled by Republicans. Hillary Clinton ain't gonna wiggle her nose and cause the obstructionist fucknuts to all of a sudden "want to get things done." Bernie Sanders ain't gonna wave a magic staff and cause "revolution" to overtake the hearts of the very assholes who have done everything in their power to halt the moderate-left agenda of President Obama. The Republicans ain't gonna compromise with any Democrat in the White House. It ain't in their nature.Unfortunately, I can't vote for "just the good parts" and I won't be expending enthusiasm on this race until absolutely necessary; besides, I'd like to get Jill Stein into the mix.
The owner class. What they want, he told Rennie, was cheap domestic labor. Servants. To maintain a pool of workers desperate enough to bow and scrape and tug their forelocks for practically nothing the owners needed that there be little or no attractive alternatives. Whatever other work was out there had to pay worse and humiliate and degrade you more. So it was in the owners’ interests to keep wages down everywhere and in every industry and line of work and to make sure that what jobs there were, even at low pay and with sorry conditions, were few and far between. This would make sure the servants would be grateful to have their jobs and desperate to keep them.
That’s one of the reasons the owners hate unions, said Old Man Rennie. Unions get workers good pay, safe working conditions, and respect. But it’s also why they hate government spending that alleviates poverty and creates jobs: it gives the servant class an alternative to being servants, because why would anyone plow a mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day if there was any better choice?
The so-called "economic recovery" has essentially been a jobless one; the jobs that have been "created" are lower in wages, and include part-time jobs and temporary positions. Pensions have gone the way of the Dodo bird. But with the TPP, the job losses would exceed the job losses from NAFTA. And Congress will be cutting 700 million out of Medicare to pay for job "re-training." Retraining? To work where? As what, burger flippers at McDonalds? Somehow I don't see Corporate America suddenly going on a domestic hiring binge! Especially when they can outsource their work to the third world, and not have to deal with those pesky safety and environmental standards.
I can’t break out my Magic Markers™ for the Sanders v. Clinton debate last Thursday because there’s not enough time in the world. So I want to look at three seemingly distinct topics: corruption, health care, and what the smart people who ride the Acela call “theories of change.” For each topic, I will compare and contrast Sanders and Clinton; and I’ll weave the three topics together at the end.I should have seen that earlier.
Snyder needs to be impeached* and federal** [footnotes in original] and state dollars need to get to Flint, not just for the short term but the long-term (that’s the problem with brain damage). Less obviously, the state-appointed dictator who controlled Flint (aka ’emergency manager’) while the mass poisoning occurred also needs to be removed from his new job of…running Detroit’s public schools.
And the next time, a subset of technobrat pundits complain about there being too much democracy at the local level [cough Yglesias cough], the one word response is “Flint”.
The reason the Pentagon is playing such a dirty game with Congress on funding the neo-fascist elements in Ukraine is not hard to deduce. Neo-Nazi militias, like the Azov Battalion, are the most dedicated and fierce killers, driven by racial bloodlust and unmoored to civilized thinking or conduct. Azov and their comrades are anxious to get into the fight and spill blood whereas many other Ukrainians are doing everything they can to avoid the war in the east.Let's not even mention the mujaheddin and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the '80s. Mmmmmkay?
What the Obama Administration will soon learn, as the government in Kiev knows now, is that the rabid dog you release on your enemy can just as easily bite your own hand. Empowering the neo-fascist militias today may lay the groundwork for another coup tomorrow.
Does a nation that stands in line for a new smartphone when it comes out sound like a country that is aching for a revolution? When you walk down the street, for every person who’s handing out fliers calling for people to rise up against injustice, there are 100 who don’t see them because they’re staring at their smartphone and listening to Justin Bieber on their way home to turn on the TV to find out what happened to the Kardashians today.
Bernie people, especially the PUBs and pro lefties, who dream of “revolution” because they’ve talked themselves into being pissed off about things they don’t even understand, are doing far more to hold back the progressive movement than to move it forward. If you want things to change, wishing for it will never work. It never has worked and it can’t work. Moving this country to the left is amazingly easy, but you’re doing it wrong. Giving people hope and asking them to vote is how you move a society and a nation forward, not by trying to piss people off and hoping that more people will react. It’s been more than 40 years; how much longer will you continue to do this type of thing before you figure out that change doesn’t happen that way?
Create a political will and we can have anything we want.
We are seriously entering territory here where we should not go. When a leading candidate for his party's nomination starts calling for the crowd to "knock the crap" out of someone, well, I think you get the idea.Guess who.
Many conservative pundits and politicians are acting as though they are not complicit in Trump's rise. But the party has been playing with fire for years. Look at the last two presidential election cycles. The jovial ignorance of Herman Cain. The routinized lying of Michele Bachmann. The cultural resentment and white identity politics of Sarah Palin. All of these unqualified figures were beloved by evangelicals in their moment, and tolerated by party elites. Trump launches a campaign of their greatest hits, and now the party suddenly realizes the downside?Drifty:
[...]
I believe Trump's demagoguery will pass and there will be a better and more responsible conservatism in the nation's future. But that might not begin until we face the fact that Trump is not a weed in the garden of contemporary conservatism. He is its fruit.
My point being, it was all there from the very beginning. The eliminationist rhetoric and loathing of uppity women (and minorities.) The unswerving certainty that nearly-omnipotent Damn Dirty Hippie Commies were tirelessly plotting to enslave and destroy us all. Faith in a potato bug named Frank Luntz. Eternal hostility to the idea of moderation and compromise. Unshakable, dogmatic belief in an Imaginary Librul Media Conspiracy. Absolute conviction that every word they heard vomiting out of Hate Radio was the unvarnished truth.
I have three simple thoughts that it seems to me ought to help inform our vote. You might come up with a different list, but I'm increasingly struck by the extent to which our political system runs on the values of self-interest, nationalism, and incumbent wealth. I emphasize these three factors not for their comprehensiveness, but for the dearth of attention paid to them. Because these issues cut across partisan boundaries and structure the very terms of political debate, they are often overlooked. Too often, we rush into partisan debate without realizing that the mainstream positions of both parties are troubling.
The liberal church committed suicide when it severed itself from radicalism. Radical Christians led the abolitionist movement, were active in the Anti-Imperialist League, participated in the bloody labor wars, fought for women’s suffrage, formulated the Social Gospel—which included a huge effort to carry out prison reform and provide education to prisoners—and were engines in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Norman Thomas, a longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, was a Presbyterian minister.
These radicals generally were not embraced by the church hierarchy, which served as a bulwark of the establishment, but they kept the church vital and prophetic. They made it relevant and important to the oppressed, the poor and to workingmen and -women. Radicals were and are its hope.
"Look, Barack Obama has done incredible damage to the United States over the last seven years," young Marco said.
Which damage is that, exactly?
Would it be the "damage" that got nearly 18 million more Americans access to health insurance?
Or is it the "damage" inflicted while the President ended two unnecessary wars?
It's awful how much "damage" has been wrought by bringing down the unemployment rate to 5 percent instead of Mitt Romney's projected 6 percent. Cluck, cluck.
Oh, I know! Perhaps he meant the "damage" caused as a result of Wall Street's greed and subsequent meltdown. Oh, wait. That happened under President Bush's watch, and was attributable to Republican policies passed while President Bill Clinton was in office. While they impeached, they stole.
13. He’s re-enforcing (the correct) stereotypes of conservatives.(I have to assume the parenthetical remark above is editorial comment.)
“Trump’s brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right. According to conventional caricature, conservatives are selfish, greedy, materialistic, bullying, misogynistic, angry, and intolerant. They are, we’re told, privileged and pampered elitists who revel in the advantages of inherited wealth while displaying only cruel contempt for the less fortunate and the less powerful… Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.”
—Michael Medved, national radio show host
"Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."(There was no such guideline on the Democratic side, not that it would have mattered.)
Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?
Reparations for harms done to a people because of their race, ethnicity, religion or other markers of difference are not bizarre or unusual justice claims. They have firm standing under international law as has been seen with survivors of the Holocaust, in some limited cases with First Nations peoples in the United States and other countries, Japanese Americans during World War II, and victims of political violence in Latin America, Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere,
While public opinion research is clear that white Americans are extremely hostile to reparations for slavery in the case of African-Americans, many white Americans actually support the idea of reparations in the abstract.
This episode has been way overblown by right-wing media, and here's why: We have a political party, the GOP, and its mouthpiece, Fox 'News,' who are rooting for any example of failure or embarrassment to our own country simply because they are not the current political party in charge. Therefore, any slight anomaly that occurs, no matter how small, will be blown completely out of proportion. You'd think these self-professed patriots would know how to at least appear to be good citizens, but we know their modus operandi. Their thinking resembles a middle school child, upset at losing, who won't let anyone play because he's taking his ball and going home.
Notice anything missing from this rant? Like gladness and relief that our sailors were released unharmed? Where’s that love for our men and women in uniform that [Sean] Hannity flaunts when it's convenient?
I’ll tell you where it is, subsumed by Hannity's lust for war with Iran. From a guy who never spent one minute putting his own flabby fanny on the line for this country. [Emphasis added.]
Meanwhile, the Great Chickenhawk attacked the Obama administration’s diplomacy – as if safe and sound sailors were some kind of bad outcome.
Hannity should be ashamed of himself.
Everyone tells me they don't know how I'm still standing. I'd love to believe that I'm stronger than most people, but the truth is that I'm no different from anyone else. When life keeps hitting you, you bounce back because you don't have a choice. If you don't think you could, it's because you haven't been hit hard enough yet.
I'm lucky. I've been able to keep my job and work remotely. A year ago I received a promotion and transfer to a new group where my manager is in Germany, where they don't believe in working 80 hour weeks. So my work/life balance has been somewhat better, and now will be even better because I won't be sitting in northern NJ traffic every day. My two little boy kitties, Eli and Sam, were great in the car and have adjusted beautifully to their new home. My sister has welcomed me into her circle and I am signing up for Meetup groups. It is the fresh start that just could not have happened in New Jersey, in a house too full of memories, too many of them about sadness and depression. Mr. B is now free of the emotional burdens that plagued him here and it is time for a young family to move into that house, now dressed up all pretty with a new kitchen, a nice deck, and a completely remodeled upstairs, and make better memories there.
My weekdays will be spent in my home office that gets the morning sun through the trees in my front yard. When the weather gets nice, I can sit and drink iced tea on my screened porch, or take my laptop outside onto the patio. I am about 20 minutes or less from anything I might want to do. My neighbors are friendly, and I have no doubts that I'll be happy here.
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