The fields have turned brown and more Floridians than ever are ready to pack up the the horse they rode in on and skedaddle.
It’s that darned economy, dontcha know? The elephant in the room, though, is this sobering truth: Florida has been selling off its future to sustain its gold-digging present for a good long while now.
In the early days, the state refused to institute an income tax in an effort to attract wealthy retirees who could move their millions south and help fuel the original land booms. Elnuestros would never argue that sunshine and beaches and golf and fishing and Mickey Mouse don’t contribute to the Florida economy, but he would suggest that all the hospitality and tourism businesses in the whole state won’t keep the new residents the state attracted at the rate of 9,000 or so per day in milk and honey.
Only one industry did that, and its name was development. From highway construction to mining fill to building docks, seawalls and pool enclosures, the state’s economic engine churned and groaned and spit out the bucks. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate lawyers, realtors, speculators, developers, strip-mall kings, patio-furniture magnates, septic-tank installers and unemployed carpenters, electricians and plumbers from the dying Midwest glommed onto the easy money like it was going out of style.
And it was. And now it has.
The service industry that grew up to support those new homes is struggling. People can’t write those big checks for pool cleaning and landscaping anymore. Nowhere was that more evident than walking through the Seagate community a while back. Some of those lawns looked like they belonged in Naples Park.
Gone are the days when hotel busboys and valet attendants could flip houses and make thousands “on the side.”
Is there still money in Florida? Oh yeah. But the people living in the giant mansions along Gordon Drive in Naples aren’t digging into their Lily Pulitzer Madras golf shorts to find an extra tax dollar or two. The City of Naples is probably going to stop sponsoring the Swamp Buggy Parade because a town that can block off its main drag to show off its residents’ collection of Ferraris, Maseratis and Lambos can still be too poor to let the natives strut their big-wheeled stuff once a year. City employees are being axed in the town that brags of having more Rolls-Royces and more golf courses per capita than any other city in the nation.
The service industry for that crowd –– dentists who do implants, surgeons who sculpt boobs, boat captains and personal trainers and Gulfstream pilots –– is getting by. But the construction workers who bought homes in Golden Gate Estates and figured there’d always be enough work to pay for the pool and the spa and the flat-panel teevee and the kid’s trip to Europe for her 15th birthday are finding jobs hard to come by. And with gasoline nosing toward $4 a gallon, they’re beginning to rethink the wisdom of buying that big-ass Dodge Ram Hemi given how far east they have to drive to get back to the McMansion at night.
“The public is very wearisome of the slow economic recovery, and the high frustration level of Floridians is impacting their opinion of government at every level,” Dr. Susan A. MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida, told Leadership Florida’s annual Sunshine State Survey and Elnuestros doesn’t doubt that she’s right.
Like a joyful tourist who’s set his picnic blanket down on a fire ant hill, and is now slapping and moaning and whimpering in reaction to an attack he has no clue how to defend against, the wage-earning Floridian is being battered by a perfect storm of economic factors. But they aren’t necessarily temporary, and there’s nothing to suggest that things will ever “get better” in the sense that building cycles have in the past.
The housing bubble that fueled Florida’s Build at All Costs economy over the past 30 years hasn’t burst. It has exploded, and among the casualties of the blast were millions of dollars in wealth. Vaporized. Gone. Poof. Not coming back.
People who are underwater on their homes aren’t going to be loading the U-Haul for the trip back to Ohio because they can’t get a third of what they paid for their house. Foreclosures in Florida continue to be off the charts, especially in “working class” and “Middle Class Retiree” areas like Golden Gate Estates and Lehigh Acres.
All those hurting people came here knowing about the Sunshine Tax. But nobody told them that sunshine and palm trees and beaches aren’t worth diddly when you’re landlocked in a CBS tomb 30 miles from the Gulf with nothing in the fridge and an empty gas tank and a stack of unpaid bills and your credit cards maxed out.
Pissed about the way things turned out, upset with the “government” they see as the enemy, and flailing at enemies real and imagined, those frustrated Floridians administered their own coup de grace in November by electing as governor a shady health-care executive who pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times to avoid being prosecuted for his firm’s theft of millions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare.
The new governor is determined to “fix” the state’s economy by eliminating taxes for corporations, moving utility bills from corporate users onto residents, and gutting the unemployment system. He’s going to privatize prisons and schools, lay off 6,700 state employees and gut the only agency that ever stood in the way of turning the entire state into a strip mall.
Floridians aren’t just pessimistic and frustrated. They’re blind with their rage. They’ve smacked themselves right upside the head and they’re hurting too bad now to even feel it.
Yet.
Monday, February 14, 2011
No entiende 'Elnacho'
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2011/feb/14/immigation-laws-illegal-florida-arizona/?comments_id=953765
Elnuestros weighs in on the latest installment of the Naples Daily News’ immigration series and gets called more names than you can believe, including “anchor baby” and “Elnacho.”
Read the utterances of a high class crowd commenting at the link above, then come back for the background.
Wal-Mart paid giant fines for hiring illegal immigrants to fluff and buff their stores at night. The company hired coyotes, I mean labor contractors, who in turn put the illegals to work with their brooms and mops and nobody was the wiser. Nobody hates Wal-Mart for doing it, or getting caught. It was just a bottom-line business decision, the kind that trumps ideology or principle any day (or night) of the week.
Same thing goes for Florida’s agriculture industry. All those shiny plastic green tomatoes would rot in the fields if it weren’t for an unlimited supply of third-world labor to come and pack them off to the gas chambers for “ripening.” Same with strawberries, citrus, you name it.
The sugar growers around Lake Okeechobee went even further, back before mechanized harvesting was introduced. They got special immigration permission to bring Jamaicans in to cut the cane because not even Mexicans would do THAT work. When the crop was in, the Jamaicans were sent home. Everybody was happy, except the Caribbean cane growers who couldn’t make money because the US government subsidized the price of domestic sugar and imposed tariffs on imports.
Pick another industry. Say hospitality, with its demand for the kind of workers (not American, of course) who are satisfied to live 10 to a room on a busboy’s pay. How about landscaping, or roofing? Don’t you love seeing those good ol’ boys driving around in their humongous Dodge Ram In-Your-Face-Attitude Pickem-up Trucks, making sure their “workers” are doing what they’re being paid, cash under the table, to do?
How about meat-packing. Green Bay used to be a capital for that. Chicago, too. You know the Robert Frost poem, right? Now the packing plants are scattered around the Midwest, manned by immigrants who, once again, can afford to work there because they don’t have those distinctly American Middle Class biases against the living conditions they tolerate in order to afford such jobs. Vicious little circle, right. And the Immigrant Haters accuse them of “stealing” jobs Americans would love to have.
I got news for you, all you chicos and chicas out there. Americans never wanted those jobs for the wages being paid. That’s why the immigrants were trucked in to begin with.
Now, of course, we don’t blame the big industries who need all that wage-busting labor. Now that the Middle Class is on the ropes and job security is as tenuous as the pipe dream of retirement and Mr. and Mrs. Average American are realizing that globalization means importing Third World living conditions to their neighborhood, too, they need someone to blame.
That’s where the immigrant comes in. Just like that rascally black man served to keep Southern crackers distracted from the reality of the lousy pay and conditions those unrepentant Sons of the Confederacy offered in the New South, the Mexican and Guatemalan today give them a scapegoat they can understand without knowing diddly about the impact of NAFTA on Central American agriculture or the role of Congress is making outsourcing the new American Tradition.
Elnuestros weighs in on the latest installment of the Naples Daily News’ immigration series and gets called more names than you can believe, including “anchor baby” and “Elnacho.”
Read the utterances of a high class crowd commenting at the link above, then come back for the background.
Wal-Mart paid giant fines for hiring illegal immigrants to fluff and buff their stores at night. The company hired coyotes, I mean labor contractors, who in turn put the illegals to work with their brooms and mops and nobody was the wiser. Nobody hates Wal-Mart for doing it, or getting caught. It was just a bottom-line business decision, the kind that trumps ideology or principle any day (or night) of the week.
Same thing goes for Florida’s agriculture industry. All those shiny plastic green tomatoes would rot in the fields if it weren’t for an unlimited supply of third-world labor to come and pack them off to the gas chambers for “ripening.” Same with strawberries, citrus, you name it.
The sugar growers around Lake Okeechobee went even further, back before mechanized harvesting was introduced. They got special immigration permission to bring Jamaicans in to cut the cane because not even Mexicans would do THAT work. When the crop was in, the Jamaicans were sent home. Everybody was happy, except the Caribbean cane growers who couldn’t make money because the US government subsidized the price of domestic sugar and imposed tariffs on imports.
Pick another industry. Say hospitality, with its demand for the kind of workers (not American, of course) who are satisfied to live 10 to a room on a busboy’s pay. How about landscaping, or roofing? Don’t you love seeing those good ol’ boys driving around in their humongous Dodge Ram In-Your-Face-Attitude Pickem-up Trucks, making sure their “workers” are doing what they’re being paid, cash under the table, to do?
How about meat-packing. Green Bay used to be a capital for that. Chicago, too. You know the Robert Frost poem, right? Now the packing plants are scattered around the Midwest, manned by immigrants who, once again, can afford to work there because they don’t have those distinctly American Middle Class biases against the living conditions they tolerate in order to afford such jobs. Vicious little circle, right. And the Immigrant Haters accuse them of “stealing” jobs Americans would love to have.
I got news for you, all you chicos and chicas out there. Americans never wanted those jobs for the wages being paid. That’s why the immigrants were trucked in to begin with.
Now, of course, we don’t blame the big industries who need all that wage-busting labor. Now that the Middle Class is on the ropes and job security is as tenuous as the pipe dream of retirement and Mr. and Mrs. Average American are realizing that globalization means importing Third World living conditions to their neighborhood, too, they need someone to blame.
That’s where the immigrant comes in. Just like that rascally black man served to keep Southern crackers distracted from the reality of the lousy pay and conditions those unrepentant Sons of the Confederacy offered in the New South, the Mexican and Guatemalan today give them a scapegoat they can understand without knowing diddly about the impact of NAFTA on Central American agriculture or the role of Congress is making outsourcing the new American Tradition.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Is there some blame to share here?
The St. Pete Times reports that the former owner of something called the Academy of Dreams represented herself as the owner of something called the Sago Palm Educational Academy in a request for grant money to teach water conservation techniques. The whole story is here: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/tampa-woman-accused-of-fraud-in-grant-application-to-teach-water/1129476
There apparently is no Sago Palm Educational Academy, and the Academy of Dreams apparently no longer exists, which qualified the former owner for a visit from the law, which charged her with grand theft, scheme to defraud, communications fraud and criminal use of personal identification information.
Her offense: Succeeding in persuading someone at the Southwest Florida Water Management District to stroke her a check for $8,000 last month.
Now I’m not going to defend this former owner, or even applaud her creativity. I am, however, going to suggest that before we send her off to the pokey, we investigate the bright light or lights at Swiftmud who signed off on her application and presumably put it in the pile that went to another bright light for final approval and the cash prize.
The Times reported that the same former owner was charged with similar offenses in May when it was discovered that the state Department of Education had given her more than $300,000 she wasn’t entitled to.
Elnuestros is reminded of that old public service commercial designed to thwart juvenile delinquency and car thefts, the one that suggested we “Don’t Help a Good Boy Go Bad” by leaving our keys in our unlocked cars, and threatened us with charges of contributing to delinquency if we did.
Shouldn’t the bureaucrats who were too overburdened to do the most cursory investigation of her applications be held to a similar standard?
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
We're gonna fix things when the market turns around. Really.
I'm not sure how a city stuffed with the like of the houses on hubristic display in Port Royal and along the beaches can, with a straight face, plead poverty when it comes to protecting what few natural resources it can still claim.
Shamelessness is as good an explanation as any.
But we have two issues before us, masquerading disingenuously as one, according to Eric Staats of the Naples Daily News, whose sad tale is of a city struggling to make ends meet and forced to ignore its messy freshwater lakes in order to put its energy and limited resources into . . . what exactly?
Basically into continuing to ignore Naples Bay is what I get from reading his story.
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/oct/05/city-plan-change-naples-bay-cleanup-lake-pollution/
The city's lakes are unquestionably an aesthetic resource for those who live near them, and it's understandable that those who look out for those issues – property value, reputation, charm and beauty – closest to a realtor's heart would be upset about abandoning plans to make them preen like something on Fantasy Island. But they function mainly as stormwater collectors. They are not, most of them anyway, natural waterways. They are holes in the ground left when fill needed to raise building levels was removed. Due to the enthusiastic application of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides in pursuit of picture-perfect lawns over the years, they no doubt have been transformed into devilishly toxic lagoons. The green crown of algae they wear befits their less-than-regal status.
The city's egregious decision to conflate the cosmetic and aesthetic concerns that characterize the "health" of the former borrow pits with the very real and very critical threat to the health of Naples Bay was just sad. Stripping them apart is a sane and defensible, although hardly popular, remedy for helping a 'hood of multimillion-dollar homes get through hard times.
The significant threats to Naples Bay, and its deterioration as a functioning estuary capable of rejuvenating the area's marine life – shrimp, oysters, snook and untold millions of squiggly little things no one worries about (much like, say, the enzymes one's healthy glands produce) until they're gone – was ably documented in 1979. 1979. Thirty-one years ago.
Anyone interested in reviewing that hopeful but ultimately sorry chapter in the city's history can check the archives at http://elnuestros.blogspot.com/2010/03/well-if-all-youre-doing-is-flushing.html
To hear John Sorey, who might be a thoroughly decent and well-intended man (I don't know him) today utter such a vacuous comment as "It was trying to be more realistic. . . " is, again, just sad. He sits on the board that continues to flood the bay with fresh water that is fully as harmful as massive quantities of fresh water injected into a human vein would be.
If the problem can't be fixed without destroying Golden Gate as we know it, he should be honest enough to say that. Asking for more time to afford a solution during the bleak darkness following the greatest real estate boom many of us are likely to witness here is, again, just sad.
Shamelessness is as good an explanation as any.
But we have two issues before us, masquerading disingenuously as one, according to Eric Staats of the Naples Daily News, whose sad tale is of a city struggling to make ends meet and forced to ignore its messy freshwater lakes in order to put its energy and limited resources into . . . what exactly?
Basically into continuing to ignore Naples Bay is what I get from reading his story.
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/oct/05/city-plan-change-naples-bay-cleanup-lake-pollution/
The city's lakes are unquestionably an aesthetic resource for those who live near them, and it's understandable that those who look out for those issues – property value, reputation, charm and beauty – closest to a realtor's heart would be upset about abandoning plans to make them preen like something on Fantasy Island. But they function mainly as stormwater collectors. They are not, most of them anyway, natural waterways. They are holes in the ground left when fill needed to raise building levels was removed. Due to the enthusiastic application of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides in pursuit of picture-perfect lawns over the years, they no doubt have been transformed into devilishly toxic lagoons. The green crown of algae they wear befits their less-than-regal status.
The city's egregious decision to conflate the cosmetic and aesthetic concerns that characterize the "health" of the former borrow pits with the very real and very critical threat to the health of Naples Bay was just sad. Stripping them apart is a sane and defensible, although hardly popular, remedy for helping a 'hood of multimillion-dollar homes get through hard times.
The significant threats to Naples Bay, and its deterioration as a functioning estuary capable of rejuvenating the area's marine life – shrimp, oysters, snook and untold millions of squiggly little things no one worries about (much like, say, the enzymes one's healthy glands produce) until they're gone – was ably documented in 1979. 1979. Thirty-one years ago.
Anyone interested in reviewing that hopeful but ultimately sorry chapter in the city's history can check the archives at http://elnuestros.blogspot.com/2010/03/well-if-all-youre-doing-is-flushing.html
To hear John Sorey, who might be a thoroughly decent and well-intended man (I don't know him) today utter such a vacuous comment as "It was trying to be more realistic. . . " is, again, just sad. He sits on the board that continues to flood the bay with fresh water that is fully as harmful as massive quantities of fresh water injected into a human vein would be.
If the problem can't be fixed without destroying Golden Gate as we know it, he should be honest enough to say that. Asking for more time to afford a solution during the bleak darkness following the greatest real estate boom many of us are likely to witness here is, again, just sad.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Editing done right
I can't imagine how many hours the producer of this video spent acquiring the footage and cutting it together. See the author's explanation below the clip.
rebelliouspixels | October 02, 2010
This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed using dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald's life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.
• English captions are now working in case you're not fluent in duck-speak
This transformative remix work constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. "Right Wing Radio Duck" by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License - permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
• Please link back to my website: http://www.rebelliouspixels.com
• Learn about fair-use at the Center for Social Media:http://centerforsocialmedia.org
• Learn about transformative works at the OTW: http://transformativeworks.org
• Useful Media Matters archive of Glenn Beck clips: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Jonathan McIntosh
http://www.rebelliouspixels.com
Where have you gone, Judith Miller?
Katharine Q. Seelye, who is to the Times' election coverage what Judith Miller was to that paper's cheerleading for George Bush's invasion of Iraq, bursts forth on the front page today with the kind of vapid thumb-sucker we expect from an honorary member of what David Foster Wallace, in his coverage of John McCain's 2000 Republican primary campaign, called the Twelve Monkeys.
They are, and this I know to be true because I once worked with some of them:
Well, you get the idea. They are the eminently serious people who manage the nation's discourse on all things political, and their "objectivity" is their most treasured asset because it allows them to exist in a universe where nothing, literally, matters because no matter how rotten the situation becomes they will go home to their trust funds and their Hallmark Movie family gatherings at the holidays and continue to turn up their noses at anything that doesn't fit their definition of reasonable, balanced and appropriate. It is this determination to be "even-minded" that produced the greatest assault on the Power of the Press we have witnessed in this lifetime, namely the Obsession with False Equivalencies that creates an environment in which it not only is entertaining to see David Gregory hamming it up on stage with Karl Rove, a black-hearted scoundrel who would no doubt seek to outlaw the press if he ever loses the knack of getting that mean old watchdog to roll over and get its tummy rubbed, but gives us tripe of the flavor Seelye today provides.
Some background is in order. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote an informative and typically engaging article about the Republican Party's efforts to infiltrate and co-opt the Tea Party movement, which was veering dangerously close to the cliff when it came to saying things like "throw ALL the bums out." The Tea Party's favorite in Delaware, a state that we mercifully don't much have to acknowledge, is a grifter named Christine O'Donnell, who lies about her academic achievements, doesn't pay her taxes, mismanages her finances in spectacular form, and apparently screwed and drank her way through several years of attempted college before finding the Lord and dedicating her life to speaking out against self-gratification.
It was natural then that in a universe that gives us Bristol Palin as the poster girl for Just Saying No to premarital sex, our gal in Delaware would attract the attention of Bristol's mother, aka Bible Spice, Caribou Barbie, etc., who anointed her the Chosen won. And guess what? She won the Republican primary over a mainstream opponent who by all accounts has never once taken a public stand on masturbation, or had a witch doctor at his church drive off the demons that kept him from using -- with a clear conscience -- his elected position to enrich himself. Nor has he admitted, as O'Donnell has, "dabbling" in witchcraft.
On the day after the primary win, Karl Rove, who is presently supervising a MAJOR behind-the-scenes effort to hand the Democrats their hats in next month's midterm elections, made unkind statements about Sarah's selection. From Politico:
Taibbi focuses his analysis on the Republican mainstream's efforts to rein in Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, who defeated the establishment candidate in a state that thinks, apparently, that Social Security is a socialist plot and that Medicare should be cut except, as Paul has noted, when it has an effect on the money he makes practicing medicine.
His message is condensed in the following excerpt from an article I would love to see discussed on the evening news shows, or maybe even referenced in the kind of thumb-suckers the Times runs:
You and I both know good and damn well that Katharine Q. Seeleye, whatever else she might have done to prepare for her front-page feature on the "softening" of Rand Paul's message, was aware of Matt Taibbi's story. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that her very assignment was predicated on the publicity surrounding the Rolling Stone article. Nothing in Seelye's piece would give anyone a clue that she didn't think the whole thing up by herself, just by being a careful observer of Dr. Paul on the campaign trail and a careful collector of obscure accounts of his previous statements.
What is more unforgivable is that she casts her story in a completely different light than Taibbi has previously shown us. We are surely witnessing the Tea Party being devoured by one of the great political strategists of our age, dressed up like a populist so it can ride to the rescue of the billionaires who are pouring millions – hat tip to the Supreme Court for its continued efforts to make corporations just regular citizens like the unemployed and soon to be laid-off and otherwise prosperous among us – into campaigns to elect stooges that will help those powerful interests continue their dismantling of the Middle Class in America.
But saying something like that would be too extreme for the Twelve Monkeys. So they just give us nice, dull, complacent, balanced coverage like this:
They are, and this I know to be true because I once worked with some of them:
"so totally identical in dress and demeanor as to be almost surreal – twelve immaculate and wrinkle-free navy-blue blazers, half-Windsored ties, pleated chinos, oxforcloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100 percent buttoned at collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus a uniform of self-seriousness that reminds you of every overachieving dweeb you ever wanted to kick the ass of in school. The Twelve Monkeys never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack, and always cut to the front of every . . . "
Well, you get the idea. They are the eminently serious people who manage the nation's discourse on all things political, and their "objectivity" is their most treasured asset because it allows them to exist in a universe where nothing, literally, matters because no matter how rotten the situation becomes they will go home to their trust funds and their Hallmark Movie family gatherings at the holidays and continue to turn up their noses at anything that doesn't fit their definition of reasonable, balanced and appropriate. It is this determination to be "even-minded" that produced the greatest assault on the Power of the Press we have witnessed in this lifetime, namely the Obsession with False Equivalencies that creates an environment in which it not only is entertaining to see David Gregory hamming it up on stage with Karl Rove, a black-hearted scoundrel who would no doubt seek to outlaw the press if he ever loses the knack of getting that mean old watchdog to roll over and get its tummy rubbed, but gives us tripe of the flavor Seelye today provides.
Some background is in order. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote an informative and typically engaging article about the Republican Party's efforts to infiltrate and co-opt the Tea Party movement, which was veering dangerously close to the cliff when it came to saying things like "throw ALL the bums out." The Tea Party's favorite in Delaware, a state that we mercifully don't much have to acknowledge, is a grifter named Christine O'Donnell, who lies about her academic achievements, doesn't pay her taxes, mismanages her finances in spectacular form, and apparently screwed and drank her way through several years of attempted college before finding the Lord and dedicating her life to speaking out against self-gratification.
It was natural then that in a universe that gives us Bristol Palin as the poster girl for Just Saying No to premarital sex, our gal in Delaware would attract the attention of Bristol's mother, aka Bible Spice, Caribou Barbie, etc., who anointed her the Chosen won. And guess what? She won the Republican primary over a mainstream opponent who by all accounts has never once taken a public stand on masturbation, or had a witch doctor at his church drive off the demons that kept him from using -- with a clear conscience -- his elected position to enrich himself. Nor has he admitted, as O'Donnell has, "dabbling" in witchcraft.
On the day after the primary win, Karl Rove, who is presently supervising a MAJOR behind-the-scenes effort to hand the Democrats their hats in next month's midterm elections, made unkind statements about Sarah's selection. From Politico:
"Karl Rove sounded a depressing tone for Republicans late Tuesday night, warning that surprise Delaware GOP Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell has said “nutty things” and has ruined the party’s chances of winning the seat.
“I’ve met her. I wasn’t frankly impressed by her abilities as a candidate,” Rove said during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “One thing that O’Donnell is now going to have to answer in the general election that she didn't in the primary is her own checkered background.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42205.html#ixzz11OVNCxzcBut a couple of phone calls set Karl on the right path, and he stopped dissing the person who could deliver a Senate majority to his side. A similar think happened in Kentucky.
Taibbi focuses his analysis on the Republican mainstream's efforts to rein in Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul, who defeated the establishment candidate in a state that thinks, apparently, that Social Security is a socialist plot and that Medicare should be cut except, as Paul has noted, when it has an effect on the money he makes practicing medicine.
His message is condensed in the following excerpt from an article I would love to see discussed on the evening news shows, or maybe even referenced in the kind of thumb-suckers the Times runs:
"In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake."It's that refusal to reference, or even acknowledge the existence of, that so frustrates your faithful, nearly frothing, correspondent.
You and I both know good and damn well that Katharine Q. Seeleye, whatever else she might have done to prepare for her front-page feature on the "softening" of Rand Paul's message, was aware of Matt Taibbi's story. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that her very assignment was predicated on the publicity surrounding the Rolling Stone article. Nothing in Seelye's piece would give anyone a clue that she didn't think the whole thing up by herself, just by being a careful observer of Dr. Paul on the campaign trail and a careful collector of obscure accounts of his previous statements.
What is more unforgivable is that she casts her story in a completely different light than Taibbi has previously shown us. We are surely witnessing the Tea Party being devoured by one of the great political strategists of our age, dressed up like a populist so it can ride to the rescue of the billionaires who are pouring millions – hat tip to the Supreme Court for its continued efforts to make corporations just regular citizens like the unemployed and soon to be laid-off and otherwise prosperous among us – into campaigns to elect stooges that will help those powerful interests continue their dismantling of the Middle Class in America.
But saying something like that would be too extreme for the Twelve Monkeys. So they just give us nice, dull, complacent, balanced coverage like this:
"But Mr. DeMint’s smile may have vanished by morning. During a nationally televised debate on Fox News Sunday, Mr. Paul said that if he were elected to the Senate, he would support Senator Mitch McConnell, also from Kentucky, to keep his job as Republican leader.
Pressed to say whether he would choose him over Mr. DeMint, Mr. Paul said that he would vote for whomever Republicans chose as their leader and that he assumed it would be Mr. McConnell.
It was one more sign that no matter how devoted Mr. Paul is to Tea Party principles, he may be forced to yield periodically to some realities of the old-school politics that he denounces.
This also occurred last month, when Mr. McConnell set up a fund-raiser in Washington for Mr. Paul with several Republican senators who, like Mr. McConnell, had supported the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008; during the primary, Mr. Paul said he would not accept donations from anyone who had done so."And trust that their readers wouldn't be caught dead reading a DFH rag like Rolling Stone to get the real picture.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Those poor Tea Baggers
A thousand, which, according to the Tea Partiers in attendance, is a typo and should have read 10,000 -- at least -- angry white people who ARE NOT RACISTS but love them some funny Kenyan-style images of Obama in a grass skirt with a bone through his nose, although never admitting such things in public -- gathered on a street corner in Naples, Florida, across from a shopping center that has an ACTUAL bookstore (where, one presumes, the less informed among the horde might find information that would help them avoid the kind of painful public display of ignorance they seem to believe is guaranteed by the Constitution, or at least the Federalist papers) and proceeded to wave signs that prove they love America and wish the Mexicans and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi would just give it back to them. They then shared their comments with the intrepid reporters of the Naples Daily News, who displayed most of the acumen we have been conditioned to expect and transcribed their remarks without, apparently, any effort to question the speakers about such things as their standing to formulate policy or, even, understand why the Founding Fathers even bothered to create a freakin' government in the first place when they could have just dealt out the money and turned everyone loose to play Monopoly -- except it wasn't, invented yet, but it could have been if the liberals and politically correct types like Jefferson and Madison hadn't kept Alexander Hamilton (a real bastard who went all Reaction Formation about his tawdry family history and set about proving his Better Than Thou status by favoring the Haves over Jefferson's simple-minded farmers) from inventing Wall Street right off the bat.
Well, you can read all about it here.
Goofy 20-somethings waving their conservatism around, but mercifully allowed to avoid the part of the test where they actually, you know, explain what that means and how they incorporate their "conservatism" into their daily lives in an age when Saint Ronny of the Borax Commercial would find himself drawn and quartered, defeated in the primaries, and subject to Ann Coulter's (remember her?) most caustic putdowns were he to show up in what passes for a gathering of Real Americans as defined by an Australian media mogul whose fortune was made by printing pictures of tits in his tabloids but who managed to get himself named a Real American by none other than that Republican in Act Only Bill Clinton, for whom your faithful scribe shares with many of the folks holding signs a similar distaste although for different reasons and none involving cigars or mantraps wearing blue dresses.
Listening to Tea Partiers discuss the mechanics of government, the origins of the nation and the intent of the Founding Fathers is like listening to kindergarten students discuss the musical merits of Miles Davis or John Coltrane.
Before one criticizes, one must understand. A little more time studying civics and political science might have helped. A little more time with something besides Glenn and Sean would help today.
But the Tea Party isn't about solutions. It's a temper tantrum thrown by the willingly uninformed, aimed at the things that make them uncomfortable, dedicated to restoring an America that never was, and financed by ultraconservative individuals and corporations who stand to benefit from the breakdown of participatory democracy guaranteed by the dissolution of an informed electorate.
The Tea Party represents the last gasps of those seeking to restore America's "frontier," when a man was able to stalk across the mountains and kill enough savages to secure a new homestead because he could smell the smoke from a new neighbor's cookfire. It represents the frustration and immobility and impotence of wage-earners and hard workers whose dreams for the future and plans for their children have been co-opted by the mechanics of global finance they cannot begin to comprehend. Their reaction in the face of all this gobsmacking is to make fun of the smart kids, find scapegoats, and fill their carts at China-dependent Wal-Mart while decrying the collapse of their own nation's economy.
They watched their retirement funds vanish as Wall Street played fast and loose with no intervention from government, but think scrapping Social Security and giving the money to the same con men represents "financial freedom."
There really are too many issues to name, but nearly every one can be explained by citing a total and abject ignorance of the mechanics of governing, corporate policies, global trade, and the messy and impractical nature of a true democracy. There is, also, a willful disregard of the true nature of humans, and the consequent necessity of some form of government to prevent such nightmares as Somalia or Haiti. Add the misguided notion to inject Jesus Christ in a curiously unrecognizable, and positively Old Testament version, into public affairs with no apparent recognition of what religion has done for the "nations" of Iran and Afghanistan and you have a thoroughly discordant mess.
Sure they're unhappy. The world is slipping out from under them, and they blame the easy targets. A gay congressman caused the housing bubble, all evidence to the contrary. A black president created the federal deficit, again in opposition to the facts. A pushy woman -- Pelosi's real sin -- makes Congress unworkable.
Poor unhappy tea-partiers. If I were that Russian lady, I think I'd take my teabag necklace and go home where things are just peachy now that the mobsters from Moscow are showing the world how capitalism ought to run.
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