Jennifer Michael Hecht writes:

The challenge of life is to be present for it while it is happening, in this moment, to be aware of it in a way that is both wide in perspective and deep in understanding. If you pester priests to know about a second life after this one, I must ask if you are using this one. Whoever is spending this life walking back and forth from the computer to the refrigerator, it is worth wondering how many thousands of years of this would be enough. This life is enough, if you are here for it. The people worried about death are the ones not truly living. They are the ones who know in their hearts that they need more time.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The ACLU said last night that the bill contains “harmful provisions that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world” and added: “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage his legacy.” Human Rights Watch said that Obama’s decision “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad” and that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

Both groups pointed out that this is the first time indefinite detention has been enshrined in law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when — as the ACLU put it — “President Truman had the courage to veto” the Internal Security Act of 1950 on the ground that it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights” and then watched Congress override the veto.

Via Mano Singham…

Sherry Chandler writes:

I dreamed I was taking clothes down from the line on a windy day and a sweat suit blown into my body by the wind wrapped its arms and legs around me like a child and held on. I carried it indoors and laid it on a narrow cot. The thing begged me to let it go, saying it would never really be Bob Dylan.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Will somebody please notice that our state, county and local governments are stuffing the craw of big businesses – you know the 1 percent – with tons of free money.

We’re providing holiday gifts to all kinds of private businesses.

It hardly gets noticed. The press never keeps an eye on this sleaze. Hey, it’s only our tax money.

The new welfare culture demands that the dole is for those who have more than enough already while those who have nothing or less can swim for themselves.

Is this anywhere near fair?

When our local schools are dying from lack of financial support. The word is also out that half our population is now either poor or low income and so many are finding the street their new un-foreclosed homes. I don’t know what the difference is between poor or low income. Maybe they mean impoverished and people just plain old Continue Reading »

Make Everything OK…

Hear the details in Part II…

Via Mano Singham…

No, I don’t think so, but this editorial from my hometown newspaper tries to make the point. Every strike always creates hardships for working and middle class people in the same way that sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea created hardships for the 99 Percent in those countries. You can’t challenge the One Percent without causing pain and sufferring to those who serve them, directly and indirectly. President Barack Hussein Obama caught flack from the private jet industry for attacking those who disdain from flying first class in favor of their private planes because the makers of those planes hire working-class people to build them.

Are hard-working dock workers on the West Coast not part of the “99 percent”? Are consumers in that region too rich to worry about higher prices resulting from delays in goods being shipped to stores?

Apparently, that’s how “Occupy Wall Street” protesters in California, Oregon and Washington feel. While claiming to be acting only against the wealthiest 1 percent in our country, they shut down several docks in those states this week. Some carried weapons to the dockyards, apparently in anticipation some dockyard workers wouldn’t stop unloading ships voluntarily.

When it began, the Occupy movement allegedly was a pacifistic attempt merely to call attention to injustices in the U.S. economy. It has morphed into something very different, including violent confrontations with police in several cities.

In fact, the movement has become an end in itself – an excuse to use force, not reasoned arguments in pursuit of a goal.

At one point, millions of Americans agreed in principle with the Occupiers. That is changing – and those in the movement have no one to blame but themselves.

Changing? Really? Says who?

I’ll be writing a reply later this morning. What do you think I should say?

1018: Wait, so who exactly are the job creators?

Nate Harris understood…

Do you know where your grandmother’s recipe box is hidden?

This is what rationed health care looks like.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Discovering Autism. Rates of autism have exploded over the last 20 years. In exploring the phenomenon and its repercussions, Los Angeles Times staff writer Alan Zarembo interviewed dozens of clinicians, researchers, parents and educators and reviewed scores of scientific studies. Zarembo, along with Doug Smith and Sandra Poindexter of the Times data team, also analyzed autism rates and public spending on autism in California.

Part 1: Autism boom: an epidemic of disease or of discovery?

Part 2: Warrior parents fare best in securing autism services

Part 3: Families cling to hope of autism ‘recovery’

Part 4: Autism hidden in plain sight

The allocation of tax dollars based on emotions and fear of litigation is wrong, in all cases. People who need care don’t get the help they need because scarce dollars are siphoned off by people who don’t need care or who need care less. Only in crisis situations do we consider the principles of triage.

Only in a society motivated by the interests of that society, and not that of the individual, can we begin to bring justice to health care. As long as the system goes out the window when the issue involves yourself, or someone you love, we cannot expect justice to prevail. We don’t let victims of crimes or their families determine criminal justice for obvious reasons: vengance is not a good justice principle, why can’t we make that idea more universal?

Paul Campos writes:

Legal scholarship is produced under pseudo-academic conditions that form a fertile breeding ground for (very heavily footnoted) bullshit. Consider how legal academic publication almost always takes place. People who generally possess no formal academic training beyond what they received in law school (that is, none) write “law review articles.” In the vast majority of cases, these articles consist of “doctrinal analysis,” i.e., treating appellate court opinions (see (2) supra) as texts that deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms. We are already, in other words, knee-deep in bullshit.

But it gets worse. Who is doing the evaluating of the supposed cogency of this analysis? Law students, that’s who. So people who, incredibly enough, are even more ignorant than law professors about the actual legal system are charged with undertaking the equivalent of academic peer review for the purposes of legal scholarship. That contemporary research universities tolerate this charade can best be explained by examining the average law school’s balance sheet, which will reveal that a nice chunk of the revenue generated by the school’s operations is mulcted* by central administrators in an example of what medieval Vikings called “raiding,” but contemporary academic bureaucrats refer to as “cross-subsidization.”

Who would understand bullshit better than a philosophy professor from Princeton University?

*I learned a new word this morning: mulct — fine or penalty; the loan shark usually imposed a mulct of an additional 20% on overdue payments.

In his The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell makes the case that income alone cannot, at least in England, define class. In Chapter Eight he writes:

You notice that I define it in terms of money, because that is always the quickest way of making yourself understood. Nevertheless, the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a jerrybuilt modern bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts. Hence the fact that the upper-middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as L300 a year–to incomes, that is, much lower than those of merely middle-class people with no social pretensions. Probably there are countries where you can predict a man’s opinions from his income, but it is never quite safe to do so in England; you have always got to take his traditions into consideration as well. A naval officer and his grocer very likely have the same income, but they are not equivalent persons and they would only be on the same side in very large issues such as a war or a general strike–possibly not even then.

I remembered this this morning because I was reading The Diversity of the White Working Class by Jack Metzgar and came across this:

In their new study Teixeira and Halpin break down the projected 2012 electorate into three parts: People of color (blacks, Latinos, Asians & self-identified “others” of all classes), The white middle class (whites with at least a bachelor’s degree) and The white working class (whites without a bachelor’s degree)

It seems to me that Metzgar makes the same argument for America in 2008 that Orwell made for England in 1937: income is a poor predictor of Class.

Setting aside that Teixeria and Halpin lump all people of color into one category, regardless of income or education, does a bachelor’s degree truly define membership in the Middle Class? Going further, can where that degree is obtained define the higher strata?

Class in a classless America intrigues me. You?

Alan Grayson writes:

So what does all this mean? Here are some short observations:

(1) In the case of TARP, at least The People’s representatives got a vote. In the case of the Fed’s bailouts, which were roughly 20 times as substantial, there was never any vote. Unelected functionaries, with all sorts of ties to Wall Street, handed out trillions of dollars to Wall Street. That’s now how a democracy should function, or even can function.

(2) The notion that this was all without risk, just because the Fed can keep printing money, is both laughable and cryable (if that were a word). Leaving aside the example of Germany’s hyperinflation in 1923, we have the more recent examples of Iceland (75% of GNP gone when the central bank took over three failed banks) and Ireland (100% of GNP gone when the central bank tried to rescue property firms).

(3) In the same way that American troops cannot act as police officers for the world, our central bank cannot act as piggy bank for the world. If the European Central Bank wants to bail out UBS, fine. But there is no reason why our money should be involved in that.

(4) For the Fed to pick and choose among aid recipients, and then pick and choose who takes a “haircut” and who doesn’t, is both corporate welfare and socialism. The Fed is a central bank, not a barber shop.

(5) The main, if not the sole, qualification for getting help from the Fed was to have lost huge amounts of money. The Fed bailouts rewarded failure, and penalized success. (If you don’t believe me, ask Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan.) The Fed helped the losers to squander and destroy even more capital.

(6) During all the time that the Fed was stuffing money into the pockets of failed banks, many Americans couldn’t borrow a dime for a home, a car, or anything else. If the Fed had extended $26 trillion in credit to the American people instead of Wall Street, would there be 24 million Americans today who can’t find a full-time job?

And here’s what bothers me most about all this: it can happen again. I’ve called the GAO report a bailout autopsy. But it’s an autopsy of the undead.

My favoriets are nos. 3 and 6.

Of course, there are apologists for the Fed, like Robert Samuelson. Here’s how I understand Samuelson’s argument.

Capitalists are wild and crazy guys and they are going to do really stupid stuff that could cause the end of civilization as we know it, but we’re a free country so the best we can do is pour trillions of tax dollars down these frat boys’ financial black holes and hope that we don’t all end up selling apples (not the computers) on street corners.

Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada predicts an age of deleveraging ahead.

In our largest trading partner, households are undergoing a long process of balance-sheet repair. Partly as a consequence, American demand for Canadian exports is $30 billion lower than normal.

In Europe, a renewed crisis is underway. An increasing number of countries are being forced to pay unsustainable rates on their borrowings. With a vicious deleveraging process taking hold in its banking sector, the euro area is sinking into recession. Given ties of trade, finance and confidence, the rest of the world is beginning to feel the effects.

Most fundamentally, current events mark a rupture. Advanced economies have steadily increased leverage for decades. That era is now decisively over. The direction may be clear, but the magnitude and abruptness of the process are not. It could be long and orderly or it could be sharp and chaotic. How we manage it will do much to determine our relative prosperity.

My take? We don’t have jobs because the One Percent don’t have enough money, we don’t have jobs because the 99 Percent doesn’t have discretionary income as a result of the 1 Percent’s gambling hangover on Wall Street.

Ohio landlord disputes finding that ‘White Only’ sign at pool discriminated against black girl…

Of course it was all about the hair…

Americans Elect can only be the brain child of the one percent bent on fixing yet another election. Of course the whole funding/decision process is about as transparent as the dump the GOP wannabes running against Willard Romney take during each televised carnival sideshow debate.