A Magical Place
The Maroun family, who owns the admittedly pretty amazing train station here in Detroit, says they don’t want to tear it down:
“The depot is kind of a magical place. And what my family and I have decided is that to tear it down right now, we think, would be gutless, so we’re going to put some real money into it to preserve it.”
Yea, we can tell it’s a magical place by its resemblance to THE GATES OF FUCKING MORDOR.
For the love of men and halflings alike, just destroy it already. Nothing about being a Detroiter irritates me quite like white people from the suburbs who demand the city not tear down the giant rotting carcasses of dead buildings that litter the city. Buildings that they don’t have to look at from Troy and Birmingham of course, except from the safety of the interwebs.
The power of mockery
From FP mag:
The rebels may not be winning but they’re successfully mocking Libya’s leader — Uncle Curly — with flair. A look at the graffiti of the Libyan revolution.
Yay!! We tek der jeeebs!!!
To America,
This is the way it works. You vote for free-market, anti-union, anti-tax, anti-safety net ideologues, and you eventually “create jobs” by becoming a poor, low-wage labor pool, like Mexico, for companies from countries that did not gut their unions and safety nets, like Sweden.
Laborers in Swedwood plants in Sweden produce bookcases and tables similar to those manufactured in Danville. The big difference is that the Europeans enjoy a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and a government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation. Full-time employees in Danville start at $8 an hour with 12 vacation days — eight of them on dates determined by the company.
What’s more, as many as one-third of the workers at the Danville plant have been drawn from local temporary-staffing agencies. These workers receive even lower wages and no benefits, employees said.
Swedwood’s Steen said the company is reducing the number of temps, but she acknowledged the pay gap between factories in Europe and the U.S. “That is related to the standard of living and general conditions in the different countries,” Steen said.
That’s right America, we are now Sweden’s Mexico.
Carry on.
Actually, he had several dreams
Most of us know Martin Luther King through the March on Washington, and his brilliant “I Have a Dream” speech. True enough, those were both ground-shaking achievements. His inoffensive words of love and moderation reach out to us through black-and-white footage and crackly audio and present an image of an American Ghandi, a saintly preacher of peace. But he was not this. He was much better.
I learned about Martin Luther King during my days in the Detroit Public School system, where the hagiography was boundless. I was fortunate to have also learned about other great Black Americans, some of whom remain personal heroes of mine to this day such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. We reenacted their lives in school plays and sang songs about them. What I did not learn, however, was the richness of King’s legacy and the tragic reality of how much he had yet to accomplish on the day he was murdered.
He was young. 39 years old on the day he died; 34 when he led the march on Washington. The year he died, he had decided to engage in an ambitious “phase 2” of the civil rights movement – a multiracial mass movement for the economic enfranchisement of America’s 40 million poor people. He had come to believe that economic inequality and racism were two heads of the same necrotic hydra, and that its victims included poor whites, latinos and women as well as blacks. On the day he was killed, he was in the process of planning a second march – the “Poor People’s March” on Washington. This was to usher in a massive wave of civil disobedience, a multi-racial coalition of equality advocates who would demand that the US Government pass an “economic bill of rights” and end the Vietnam war.
“Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.” – SCLC address, 1967
And, from the same address:
“I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about Where do we go from here, that we honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, Who owns the oil? You begin to ask the question, Who owns the iron ore? You begin to ask the question, Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water? These are questions that must be asked.
Now, don’t think that you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism.
What I’m saying to you this morning is that communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”
Many of King’s ideas were radical for their day but seem obvious and universally accepted today. However, I think it’s important to recognize that before he died, he had come to accept some truths that even today are considered extreme. Among the ideas he espoused as part of the economic bill of rights, was a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans. Today, despite Glenn Beck’s revolting imitations, King would be considered a socialist, a radical, class-warfare waging malcontent. Perhaps this is because King was gunned down in 1968, at the age of 39, before he had a change to change America more than he already had. Tragic.
Someone espousing King’s later ideas about economic socialism today would be treated contemptuously not only by the right, but by the Democrats as well. Yet, in an era of bank bailouts, a war in Afghanistan that will soon eclipse its 10-year mark, mass joblessness, foreclosures, and looming austerity policies that will seek to extract even more resources from the lowest income Americans in order to protect the wealth of those at the top, King’s “radical” message of economic justice and equality remains more urgent now than it was in 1968.
What is wrong with progressives lately?
Why do we have so many progressives out there now who are so thirsty to give a grand “fuck you” to the GOP, the banks, the insurance companies, the rich (or, more correctly, the singular entity of which all 4 are arms) that they’re willing to make the unemployed pay the bill for it?
The problem with Bush’s tax cuts for the rich is that they helped to create a long term structural deficit problem. And to be sure, the long term structural deficit is a problem, but it’s not our urgent problem.
So, we have liberals arguing against this deal on the grounds that tax cuts for the rich are just plain bad and unfair, to which I’d say, yes, they are, but they fall into the category of all the other unfair things that are not super-important NOW.
An offshoot of this argument is that this long-term deficit will eventually be used to whittle away at Social Security or Medicare. Maybe…but you know what can also be used to kill SS and Medicare? A shitty economy that isn’t taking in enough revenue.
Our urgent problem is short-term economic performance. Raising taxes on the top 2% doesn’t help that…that’s why I’m not sure they have become more of a concern for the left than the stimulative measures in the compromise – like the unemployment extension. We need stimulus, stimulus, stimulus. I have no idea why the left would want to make these tax cuts for the rich their touchstone now when other things are so much more immediately important.
Let’s look at the numbers (bear with my back-of-envelope math here). The total bill is around $900B. Out of that, $120B is from a 2-year extension of the tax cuts for Americans making more than $250K. This leaves $780B (about the size of Obama’s 2009 stimulus package) that is pretty much all going to Americans who make under $250K annually, including a $60B unemployment extension that will go to the very most desperate Americans.
Why exactly is this deal so horrific? Why has this become the rallying point? Progressives now generally accept that what we need more than anything is more stimulus and that deficit-cutting austerity measures are counter productive. Yea, getting rid of the big giveaway to the rich in our tax code would be nice, but is it so important that we should tolerate a $780B anti-stimulus just to get it? No!
This, as Obama mentioned, hearkens back to the public option debate where you had the Jane Hamshire type lefties crying “Kill the Bill” because it wasn’t hard enough on insurance companies. It wasn’t, of course, but it did establish a massive regime of subsidies for the lower HALF of Americans to make sure health insurance was within their reach. Nevertheless, it was more important for many on the left to fuck their enemies than it was to help the poor and working class.
I see the same dynamic here. The real vigor in the base is to hurt the GOP or the wealthy, not to offer any meaningful help to people who desperately need help now. Is this what Obama’s base has become? Some wild, lefty version of the Tea Party, full of incoherent resentment and confused frustration? If so, that’s sad, and it’s no wonder that he’s been a bit bitchy with them lately. I’m sure that on some level there is a genuine belief here that beating the GOP, health insurance companies, Wall St., investment banks and the top 2% with a baseball bat is exactly what the lower classes need in order to finally start to get ahead and reforge the promise of America that has been stolen from them. I’m sympathetic to that view, but for one thing it’s a bit underpants-gnomey to me
STEP 1: Fuck the greedy rich assholes who stole the middle class
STEP 2: ???
STEP 3: Middle class returns
…and for another thing, it doesn’t acknowledge the urgency in getting real help to people like the ones I’m living around here in Michigan who have lost their jobs, homes, cars, savings, retirement, and are having a hard time feeding their families NOW.
I drink for the children
I was a recipient of Christmas gifts from Goodfellows when I was a kid, so since it looks like I will have a pretty slow holiday season and I’m sure there is record need, I decided to volunteer this year. Sadly, when I called I was told by the fire chief that the program had been so scaled back this year that there was nothing for volunteers to even do. The fire dept collects donations and the fire fighters’ wives buy the gifts. They cancelled the paper sale and aren’t going door to door. There is no way for me to volunteer.
The one thing they are doing, however, is a fundraiser in downtown Ferndale this Saturday. Area bars will be collecting donations and having some kind of event celebrating the end of prohibition (it will the the 77th anniversary of the 21st amendment).
So Saturday night, I will literally be drinking for the children. If you’re so inclined, come down, donate a little, and I’ll buy you a drink. The bars that are participating are Buffalo Wild Wings, Danny’s, Dino’s, Ferndale Elks Club, Grasshopper Pub, Howe’s Bayou, New Way Bar, Post Bar, Rosie O Grady’s, Sneakers, SOHO, and Tony’s Sports Bar.
I’ll be at SOHO from around 9 until 1am, but I’ll gladly crawl over to your pub of choice if you send me an email, a facebook message, or a direct tweet.
Someone must have told them about his little maneuver at the battle of Tanaab
Lando Calrissian Young, 24, was arrested Monday by state police troopers in connection with the Jan. 3, 2006, shooting of Jordan Crampton.
What Capitalist Medicine Looks Like
From the NYT, an article about how GlaxoSmithKline ghost-authored a medical textbook for two researchers.
The Economic Argument
Be Careful, Juan Williams
I’d just like to point out to Juan Williams that in 2001, 2977 Americans were murdered by Muslim terrorists…but according to FBI crime stats, another 5521 were murdered by black people.
That’s just for 2001. Add up the last decade or so, and you’re about twenty-five times more likely to be murdered by a person who looks black than one who looks Muslim.
So, Juan Williams ought to be extremely careful about framing the debate this way, unless he’s ready to explain to people why “the reality” justifies all of us feeling very nervous about being in the same room with Juan Williams.
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