montanamaven

I’m happily wending my way through Tom Geoghegan’s wonderfully entertaining and maddening book “Were You Born On the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help Us Get a Life.” Filled with great stats and facts, Geoghegan shows us why Germans are richer and happier than we are.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone blasts CBS’s foreign correspondent Lara Logan for criticizing Michael Hastings for reporting on General McChrystal’s truth telling on the sucky war in Afghanistan. Doesn’t Hastings know he’s supposed to play along and support the troops and keep quiet?

Naomi Klein author of “The Shock Doctrine” reports in from the meeting of the G20 and she actually uses the phrase “new world order”. The G20 was concocted by none other than Larry Summers and his Canadian counterpoint in 1999. The G20 nations want the people to pay for the sins of the bankers and government officials responsible for the crisis.

The cranky mean spirited Co Chair of the Fiscal Commission, Alan Simpson, is out to dismantle Social Security. The commission is considering fixes like raising the age you can get your full benefits to 70 years. If they had forward thinking non neo-liberal thinkers on the commission,they would be proposing opposite solutions like a payroll tax holiday or lowering the retirement age.

New decade and it is the same old flim flam going on with new buzz phrases. Back in the 1980s during merger mania, Carl C. Icahn said of layoffs “that the layoffs that do occur are really getting rid of the fat that is not productive for society.”

Jane Smiley wrote a reaction to Paul Krugman last September called “Other Economists in the Room”. This past week some of “the other economists” met in D.C. to counter the latest assault of the false prophets of finance. For those of us who studied drama and English, it is no surprise that the free market economists who have dominated our discussion about money and economics just don’t get it.

On the “Chris Matthews Show” on Sunday, Washington “reporter” and novelist David Ignatius said that Admiral Mullen “let it leak” on their trip to Afghanistan that Iran was supplying arms to the Taliban.
“Scary”, said Chris. Is this like the WMD scare that Judith Miller worked in the NY Times?

Today David Cay Johnston reports that a 1986 Tax law mentioned by the software engineer who piloted his plane into the IRS office was one of the reasons why he did it. Turns out that the day before he flew the plane into the building, the Obama administration asked for a crackdown on this law.

Naomi Klein’s first book “No Logo” is every bit as brilliant and well written as “The Shock Doctrine”. The substitution of real products made in America for companies “that own little but sell much” is a philosophy that slithered out of places like U of Chicago and has taken firm nesting in the Democratic Leadership Council which runs the party of FDR. Instead of old “lumpy object purveyors” who represent people who shower after work, the New Democrats are a sleek brand that is not a labor party but like Tony Blair’s New Labour is “not the Labour Party but a labour scented party.”

Liberals who I like from Mark Thompson on Sirius Left to Les Leopold invoke FDR and the idea that he told activists to “make him do it”. Ergo, it is our responsibility to push Obama. It smacks of a variation on the “personal responsibility” meme of Bill Cosby and shifts the attention away from the Obama administration. We are in completely different times and Obama is no FDR. Now what?