There are many goals I would like to surpass this year, but I’m making only a single resolution: To read deeply instead of reading widely. I take my inspiration here from Henry David Thoreau who encourages me to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

Over the next 12 months I will not buy, borrow from the library or obtain in any other manner any new books. I ordered yesterday a copy of the Library of America’s Moby Dick from Mac’s Backs and that will be my only fiction reading for the year. I chose Moby Dick for a number of reasons. First, because my friend, poet and fellow writer Sherry Chandler recommended it last month when I asked my friends to suggest a single title that I could spend all year reading and rereading. Sherry wrote:

I’ve been thinking about this question, off and on, since you made the post. Beyond the obvious — but still legitimate answers (Shakespeare, Chaucer) — I think that I could spend a year reading Moby Dick. Harold Bloom says it’s not a novel but a prose epic

Second, because it is an iconic novel that I have not really read (I skimmed Melville’s work in college and listened to his words as an audio book) and I feel diminished for not having done so.

Third, I’m struggling to write a 19th century novel and reading one of the best of that genre will help me to root my prose.

Fourth, and finally, Moby Dick has to have the best known opening line and one of the best opening paragraphs in all literature.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

I went to sea once myself and over the next 366 days, 2012 is a leap year, I will sit myself down after dinner each evening with a good mug of tea and digest both my meal and Melville’s words for a pleasant hour.

Tim Russo writes:

Occupy The Fucking New Year already (and you know who you are)

I used to try on New Year’s Eve. You know, spend a lot of money, dress up in finery, do the countdown in a room full of strangers also in finery. I could probably pinpoint when that stopped being fun if I tried, but that’d be too depressing. Maybe tonite I’ll try again, because 2011 doesn’t feel wasted for once.

Spend a lifetime professionally in Democratic Party politics, and you run into a lot of leftier than thou types. Being a campaign guy, a strategist technician paid to win elections, I would chastise their lack of pragmatism, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, always wore it as a badge of honor. Yeah, you might be right about the world, I’d say, but it doesn’t help win this seat, or that one. Leftier than thou exits in a huff…stage left, of course.

“There’s gonna be a revolution some day,” we’d always decide though, over a keg at a law school party, or the cabernet and camembert on the way up the ladder. Someday, people will wake up. Maybe it’ll happen this year. 1990. 1992. 1994. 1996. 1998.

Or 2000. Oh yeah, Bush v. Gore. That was a high water mark for New Year’s Eve armchair revolutionaries. Then came 2002, 2004, 2006. Dark years all. Then 2008. Was Barack Obama the revolution? Turns out no. Leftier than thou Continue Reading »

Jonronson writes:

This is the story of one cut. Back in October 2010 George Osborne announced £95 billion in cuts to public services, saying he’d leave it to councils to choose what to shut down. Inevitably most of the casualties ended up being unrenowned places, unlikely to stir up much protest – drop-in centers in housing estates, inner-city park rangers, community theatres, etc. I wanted to write about just one of them, about the ripples created by a single closure. I made my selection quite randomly. I chose a place called Youthreach. I didn’t know much about them, only that they offered weekly counseling sessions to young people, aged 11–25, in Greenwich, South East London.

April 8th 2011.

Today is the day the Youthreach counselors learn their fate. They knew the council was slashing their funding, but they hoped it might be by 40%, and maybe they could solicit donations from local businesses. But in fact they’re being cut by 100%. £118,000 a year. So it’s over.

“How long before you close?” I ask them.

“Eleven weeks,” says Maria Day, their director. “We’ve been here 25 years and in eleven weeks it’ll be gone.”

We’re sitting in the staff-room, which is nice and brightly decorated. Youthreach is a unit in a row of shops on Delacourt Road.

“What do you think will happen to the kids?” I ask.

“We’re not mind readers,” says one of the therapists, a little sharply, from across the room. “We’re not fortune tellers.”

There’s a cold silence. One of the volunteer counselors explains that many of them had, as children, been helped by places like Youthreach, and now their chance to do the same for others is being snatched away from them.

“We can’t pass them onto anyone,” says Maria. “There’s only one counselor at Family Action. And they mainly just take sexual abuse cases. It’s really narrow.”

Maria says she’ll put the word around, inviting the kids to contact me once the place closes so I can document their post-Youthreach lives.

Kids like Alicia:

I arrange to meet Alicia at the Starbucks near the Cutty Sark, Greenwich. I spot her right away. We order. I get a muffin. She has herb tea.

Alicia was a classic Youthreach person in that she was very sick but just okay enough – measurably okay enough – to not qualify for help from the NHS. It started a year ago, she says. Before that everything was perfectly normal. But then she split up from her boyfriend of five years.

“I was a bit depressed,” she says. ”I didn’t eat a lot. I noticed I’d lost weight and I liked it. So I started going to the gym every day. I’d run to the gym, spend an hour there, and run back. I remember eating half an apple, and I was completely bloated, I couldn’t eat any more.”

“You were 20 then?” I ask.

“Yes, I’m 21 now,” she says. “I started throwing up. I had panic attacks. I lost my fertility. I felt really angry when people told me how thin I was. I thought they were just trying to get me fat. I was, ‘How dare they?’ I got down to five-and-a-half stone, nearly five stone.” [1 stone = 14 pounds, 5 1/2 stones = 77 pounds. JH]

Which was when her mother convinced her to see her GP.

“They did some blood tests,” she says. “They came back on the borderline of okay. I wasn’t so bad that I was nearly dying, so they said they wouldn’t do anything about it unless I went to an institute and internalized myself.”

I finished reading Chavs: The Demonization Of The Working Class by Owen Jones yesterday. I’ll be writing more about the book I first discovered on Working-Class Perspectives later, but just now I have to say the book perfectly framed this story for me and gave me the context to grasp how a society dumps its children in the dustbin this way.

Here are just two reasons why.

0957: How Republicans punish rich people

Tim Russo writes:

Civil disobedience in the Occupy Wall Street movement is more than just a tool. It’s the message, a credible claim that in a democracy, rules written and enforced through monetary purchase by the 1% against the 99% are illegitimate on their face. That illegitimacy is far deeper if you take it beyond the moral damnation of money-based systemic rules in favor of the 1%, all the way down to the personal level of individuals in law enforcement….namely, the cops.

Cops have been a reliable voting bloc for the 1% – by heavy majorities they vote Republican, take marching orders from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, decry organized labor as thugs, proclaim that government cannot create jobs, protect endless tax cuts for the 1%, adhere to the strictest fundamentalist Christianism imaginable, are hard core members of the NRA….the works. Yes, there are exceptions, but if you boiled down Continue Reading »

Matt Taibbi writes:

Do people hate [J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon] just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.

Just look at how banks like Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” countries like Greece and Italy mask their debt problems for years by selling a similar series of swaps to those governments. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs (who were also major purveyors of those swap deals) to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, banks like Chase and Goldman knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Edward Willet writes:

’Twas the nocturnal time of the preceding day
To the day we call Christmas (which is, by the way,
Just a modern twist on the eons-old fight
To use feast and fire to end winter’s night).
And all through our dwelling (a.k.a. the house),
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
(Mus musculus—really a terrible pest,
But even a pest needs a bit of a rest.)
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there
(Though that old-fashioned chimney’s so energy-poor
That next year I’m making him use the front door!). Continue Reading »

Nick Hanauer on being really, really rich:

“I reject the idea that I am advocating higher taxes for myself and other wealthy people because I’m a good person or because I love you,” Hanauer tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “Let me just be very clear: I do not love you. I value you as a potential customer, and we have rigged the economic system in a way to destroy my customer base.”

The top income tax rate in America is 35 percent. If you earn $380,000 or more a year, that is, in theory, what you pay in federal income taxes. Many taxpayers in this category do, in fact, pay that rate, but some do not.

The richest of us, billionaires, derive the bulk of their wealth from stock appreciation. Their income strategies often reap hundreds of millions of dollars from those valuable shares in ways the IRS doesn’t always classify as taxable income.

Bloomberg reporter Jesse Drucker recently found out that, for the most part, the richest people in America pay nothing close to 35 percent.

“Larry Paige or [Sergey] Brin at Google, these are men who are extremely wealthy,” Drucker says. “They get salaries of a dollar a year.”

That’s because the wealthiest Americans make their money from money; from stocks and investments. And from a tax perspective there are huge advantages to that.

The next time someone tells you they favor a flat tax — as I do — ask them just exactly what would you tax? (Broadly, I would tax the difference between your net worth on 1 January and 31 December of the current tax year.)

Via Mano Singham…

From my hometown newspaper this morning:

A spill of fracking wastewater in Monroe County has residents there concerned about whether officials there are prepared to handle the coming boom, as more and more contractors access shale formations deep underground.

Ohio Department of Transportation officials said a truck hauling wastewater from the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, spilled part of its load Thursday along two state roads in Monroe County.

Terrill Wickham, ODOT clerk at the Monroe County garage, said the spill involved about four miles along Ohio 537 and about six miles on Ohio 260 near Marr, and was reported around 7 a.m. to the Ohio Highway Patrol after a motorist indicated there were some slick areas on at least one of the roads.

“We thought it was going to be much worse than it was,” he said. “We were afraid it was oil but it was mostly salt water and a few spots with a muddy slurry.”

Wickham said 20 tons of sand was poured over the affected roads to soak up the mixture and provide better traction in some areas that were slick.

He said there were no immediate environmental concerns that he was made aware of.

12-year-old Deborah Partin understands…

Ian Welsh did not care for Christopher Hitchens because of Hitchens’ post-9/11 conversion to (or at least public love affair with) neoconservatism. Following Hitchens’ death last week, Walsh wrote a post calling out those writing glowing obituaries for Hitchens. In response to Welsh, reader jcpan wrote:

Shit, Ian, if you made any attempt to qualify your nearly universal generalizations, I’d STFU. You know, like limiting it to college-educated people who know who the fuck Hitchens is or neoliberals who’ve consciously sold out.

But hardworking folks who’ve been screwed over since birth, who don’t have the coin for weekends in Vegas or international travel, lacking the leisure-class opportunities that professionals like you and I have? Blaming them for their condition is lazy, insulting and ignorant. Better yet, it alienates the folks you should (if you honestly gave a fuck) be trying to reach. But far be it from me or anyone else to suggest you rethink your own polemic. I should just “clap louder” right? Nothing to come between you and your longed-for moment of collapse.

To which Welsh responds:

Let me respond to the idea that Americans are not responsible for what is happening to America, especially poorer Americans.

No. Sorry, but no. Sure, their guilt isn’t as great as that of the liberal class, or the financiers, or various other folks, but they are still responsible. It was a democracy. There were ways to stop it from getting to this. In a democracy, the PEOPLE are held responsible. Yes, there were forces working to stop it from being a democracy, but they voted for people like Reagan and the members of Congress, and so on. Whether you think the 2000 or 2004 elections were stolen (yes on the first, maybe on the second) they let it get to the point where it could be stolen. They didn’t riot in 2000. They reelected George Bush after everyone knew he was torturing scum.

I’m not letting them off the hook. Sorry.

The pathetic attempts of Americans to pretend they’re good people and don’t deserve what’s happening to them are just that, pathetic. Yeah, some of them are good, but not enough. It’s just that simple.

Take some goddamn responsibility.

I get Welsh’s point, and to a degree, I have to agree with it, but I also see a bit of Gene Marxism there. No legally responsible citizen gets a pass, but upon those of us with greater abilities and resources lies the heavier responsibility.