Middle Class Is Un-American

The New Yorker reports on the arrogant, thieving, high-Tory mindset of today's Republican Party, and their Orwellian attempts at corrupting the meaning of plain English - emphasis mine:

On the floor of the Senate this week, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican Minority Whip, criticized President Barack Obama for talking about the middle class. The mere phrase “middle class” — that most anodyne of demographic terms, the category to which half of all Americans polled identify, and into which Mitt Romney is always trying to shoehorn very, very wealthy people like himself — emerged, in Kyl’s evocation, as some kind of crazy-lefty bumper-sticker slogan. By alluding to “what he calls ‘the middle class,’ ” Kyl said, as though Obama had come up with the phrase, the President was “pitting these Americans” against the wealthy, “spreading economic resentment, and weaken[ing] American values and ideals.” Kyl went on: “We don’t need the current American President touring the country and defining every American’s values and status based on a class system that he’s made up. I don’t think there’s anything called middle-class values. I just think the whole discussion of class is wrong. It’s not what we do in America.”

Increasingly, it isn’t. Not if we’re in office or running for office, and especially not if we’re Republicans. America perpetuates a class system — and an income-inequality gap growing faster than that of most other countries — but American politicians try not to speak of it, because if they do, they get slimed. “What you could do for me,” President Obama told a group of Presidential historians in May, 2011, “is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality without being accused of class warfare.” A year later, it takes even less to attract that particular charge, even as it takes more rhetorical chutzpah to get around the reality.

It’s remarkable how far to the right the acceptable political discourse about the haves and have-nots has shifted — or perhaps it’s just moved into the realm of denial. In the not-so-distant political past, it was considered reasonable for Republicans to allude to inequality and even vow to try to remedy it. In an excellent recent article in Rolling Stone about the contemporary Republican party’s extreme attachment to tax cuts for the rich, Tim Dickinson quotes a 1985 speech by Ronald Reagan, a speech that somebody — maybe Kyl — would surely be calling “class warfare” talk until he heard who’d made it. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” Reagan vowed, adding that they “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10% of his salary—and that’s crazy." . . .

Pre-emptive Paranoia

An excerpt of what Adam Gopnik writes today at the New Yorker News Desk:

Obviously, this was a big storm with a lot of water and wind in it; if things broke the wrong way, it could do a great deal of harm to a lot of people—and, just as obviously, the politicians had made an intelligent decision not to get caught with their raincoats down this time. (See Katrina.) But the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about—was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. “It hasn’t even started, and the city is already Atlantis,” one of the back seat riders announced.

That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia. The real purpose not to get you to do anything, but to get you so scared that all you can do is keep the television, or radio, on. This is obvious, and yet there is something truly helpful, really instructive, about experiencing it again after a month of absence and silence. Two things that ought to be apparent all the time become briefly clear to you again. First, that the media, television particularly, are amplifying devices in which tiny kernels of information become vast, terrifying structures of speculation. The news business is one in which a minimum of news is really given the business.

And second, that the reasons for this are essentially non-ideological; frightened people need news for reassurance, and want to get a more heightened experience by being frightened still more, and the business the people supplying the fright are in (which we’re in too, of course) is not really that of dispensing information but of assembling enough listeners or readers, preferably still caught in that same spirit of credulous attentiveness, to offer to advertisers or keep subscribing. Sirius radio makes this clear in a backward way because it “blacks out” the commercials on the TV stuff they broadcast, not having been paid for them. Right in the middle of being terrified, everything stops and you’re bored stiff for a few minutes—and it occurs to you, as if for the first time, that those few minutes, when a commercial is being shown on CNN or MSNBC, are actually the whole point of the exercise. . . .

Obama's Last Stand

Seems like the President is finally taking the gloves off over healthcare reform, and it's about damn time if you ask me.  Kenneth T. Walsh reports in U.S. News and World Report:

President Obama has begun his last stand on healthcare. "Every idea has been put on the table," he said last week. "Every argument has been made. Everything to say about healthcare has been said, and just about everybody has said it. I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on healthcare reform."

Obama has taken a year to reach this point. He has long argued that without massive change, the public will face higher premiums, the government will amass more debt, and tens of millions of Americans won't have any health insurance at all. What is new, White House officials say, is the president's acknowledgment that he needs to get a bill passed now or nothing will be done anytime soon. He also has accepted the idea that there probably will be no Republican support so he will have to win passage with only Democratic votes. . . .

"The United States Congress owes the American people a final up or down vote on healthcare," he said. "It's time to make a decision. The time for talk is over. We need to see where people stand. And we need all of you to help us win that vote. So I need you to knock on doors. Talk to you neighbors. Pick up the phone. When you hear an argument by the water cooler and somebody is saying this or that about it, say, 'No, no, no, no--hold on a second.' And we need you to make your voices heard all the way in Washington, D.C."

He added: "They need to hear your voices because right now the Washington echo chamber is in full throttle. It is as deafening as it's ever been. And as we come to that final vote, that echo chamber is telling members of Congress, wait, think about the politics instead of thinking about doing the right thing."

And in a speech at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania, the President ripped the insurance companies for being the greedy bloodsucking bastards they are - those are my words, here are Obama's:

"Every year, insurance companies deny more people coverage because they have a preexisting condition. Every year, they drop more people's coverage when they're sick and need it most. Every year, they raise premiums higher and higher."

"These insurance companies have made a calculation," Obama said. "Listen to this, the other day, there was a conference call organized by Goldman Sachs; you know Goldman Sachs," he said to laughter.

He continued, "An insurance broker told Wall Street investors that insurance companies know they will lose customers if they keep raising premiums. But since there's so little competition in the insurance industry, they're okay with people being priced out of health insurance because they'll still make more by raising premiums on the customers they have. And they will keep doing this for as long as they can get away with it."

In his remarks, Obama cited the move last month by Anthem Blue Cross in California to raise rates by nearly 40 percent. He also mentioned his home state of Illinois where, he said, rates are going up by as much as 60 percent.

"So how much higher do premiums have to rise until we do something about it? How many more Americans have to lose their health insurance?" Obama said. "How many more businesses have to drop coverage? How many more years can the federal budget handle the crushing costs of Medicare and Medicaid? When is the right time for health insurance reform?"

I well recall when my best friend Tommy was dying of AIDS back twenty years ago, and how he had to argue, beg, and plead with the insurance company over the phone from his hospital bed to please approve this drug or that procedure, every single new thing the doctor ordered: the insurance company put him through flaming hell at his weakest, most vulnerable time.

And I could go on to talk about other friends and relatives, but the bottom line is this: it's simply immoral to be making a profit out of people's illness and injuries, period. And all that has to stop. Now.

Pigged Out!

Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:

The entertainment Web site TMZ broke the story Tuesday that Northern Trust of Chicago, which got $1.5 billion in bailout money and then laid off 450 workers, flew hundreds of clients and employees to Los Angeles last week and treated them to four days of posh hotel rooms, salmon and filet mignon dinners, music concerts, a PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club with Mercedes shuttle rides and Tiffany swag bags.

“A rep from the PGA told us Northern Trust wrote one big, fat check in order to sponsor the event,” TMZ reported.

Northern No Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton on Wednesday with a concert by Chicago (at a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday for another big dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire, and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset Strip on Saturday (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow. . . .

It asserted that it earned an operating net income of $641 million last year and acted as though it did Americans a favor by taking federal cash.

I would ask Northern No Trust: If you’re totally solvent, why are you taking my tax dollars? If you’re not totally solvent, why are you giving my tax dollars to Sheryl Crow?

Coming in a moment when skeptical and angry Americans watched A.I.G., Citigroup, General Motors and Chrysler — firms that had already been given a federal steroid injection — get back in line for more billions, the golf scandal was just one more sign that the bailed-out rich are different from you and me: their appetites are unquenchable and their culture is uneducable.

President Obama served them notice on Tuesday night in his Congressional address, saying: “This time, C.E.O.’s won’t be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over.”

But will they notice?

What I say: Why is no one marching in the streets over this ginormous waste of your money and mine? Why is there no Join the Impact kind of grassroots movement to protest and fight this outrageous abuse, this gaming the system by the obscenely rich corporations and individuals? Why is no one raising a ruckus over this bullshit?

People out in California have been shutting down hotels and restaurants because somebody gave a hundred bucks, or maybe a thousand, to pro-Prop 8. I say, that's stupid.

THIS is much more worthy of protests and demonstrations - but where the hell is everybody, hmm?

Whiner Alert: Crash Survivors Not Happy

As Joe.My.God. reports, some survivors of that miraculous US Airways splash-landing on the Hudson are bitching and moaning that they didn't get enough swag for surviving. The airline sent each passenger a check for five grand, plus free first-class upgrades for a year.

But was that enough to satisfy everyone? Oh no baby, we deserve more!

What they deserve is a swift kick in the ass. Jeezus. Sometimes I think I want to get even further away from civilization than I am out here on the prairie, ya know?