Mar
06

The Devil You Know

The Devil You know

I haven’t been completely disappointed by the GOP primary circus these past several months.

In the fall, things seemed so promising. We had the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry still in the race–with Sarah Palin not yet totally out of it. But Ms. Palin proved no more than a chimera (go figure), and the other three, along with Mister 999–Herman Cain–each disappeared after one hot minute under the kleig lights of honest-to-goodness fact-checking and reasonably clear-eyed analysis that sometimes infects media coverage in a major political campaign.

So we’ve been left for months with just Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney trying to muster a challenge to Barack Obama from the disparate yearnings of, as Hendrick Hertzberg recently put it in the New Yorker,

[the] excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, à la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global-warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolaters, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists

who make up the Republican “base” today.

Read more…

Jan
18

Congress Ponders Nerve Gas Solution to Gnat Problem

Some would just as soon have us return to Plato's Cave.

Prominent destinations on the Internet–including Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist–went varying shades of “dark” Wednesday in a loosely coordinated effort to raise awareness of two bills currently making their way through the United States’ notorious “Do-Nothing Congress.” SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are bills being considered in the House of Representatives and Senate (respectively) to address the contagion of copyright infringement apparently fostered by a free and open Internet.

However, as Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute points out in a somewhat exhaustive analysis, the “problem” of copyright infringement seems hardly the kind of thing to rouse somnambulant legislators from a general stupor.

Part of the problem here, as Glenn Greenwald makes evisceratingly clear, is that people like former senator Christopher Dodd–who vowed when he retired from the business of legislating in 2010 to eschew the filthy lucre of the so-called “revolving door” between congress and the world of high-stakes lobbyists–has been elbowing his old pals in Washington in his new role as Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), one of the loudest voices moaning about lost profits and stifled creativity supposedly attributable to Internet piracy.

Read more…

Jun
13

Chart of the Day – The Lonesome Death of the American Worker

Labor's shrinking piece of the pie.

The chart above tells you just about everything you need to know about where we’ve been and where we’re going – as far as the U.S. economy is concerned, anyway.

The red line depicts American workers’ share of the national income pie, dating all the way back to 1947. As the boom and bust (or growth and retraction, if you must) nature of our capitalist economy worked its rhythmic gyrations over the years, Labor’s piece of the American Pie grew larger in good times, smaller in bad ones – but for the most part tended to recover to a baseline high of around 109 once the economy was good and cranking.

Read more…

Go to top