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ineffable beauty, unspeakable evil, etc

Author: timmuky

Behold the beauty of crony capitalism

By timmukyPosted on Posted in corporatism, corruption, politicsTagged , , , , , No Comments on Behold the beauty of crony capitalism


In the Times, Julie Creswell’s A Digital Shift on Health Data Swells Profits in an Industry is about as good a case study in contemporary public/corporate sausage-making as you’re likely to find. Her story paints a vivid, if highly dispiriting, picture of the interplay between policy, lobbying and corporate profits (or profiteering).

I am always amazed at how cheaply our elected officials sell for. I am tempted to use a euphemism for prostitution here, but really that would be demeaning a profession where people actually work for their money. Typically these days, campaign contributions in the six-figure range can return profit boosts to lucky (generous) corporate donors on the order of half a billion dollars (or more) in increased sales.

Briefly, one thread of Creswell’s excellent article. Glenn Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, a leader in electronic records technology for hospitals, gets a gig as health technology adviser to the Obama campaign. He visits the White House at least seven times after Obama takes office. Between 2008 and 2012, he personally makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Obama, as well as to Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee chair, and Jay Rockefeller, head of the Commerce Committee.

Coincidentally (or not), in 2009, “legislation to promote the use of electronic records was signed into law as part of President Obama’s economic stimulus bill.” Coincidentally (or not) Allscripts’ “annual sales have more than doubled from $548 million in 2009 to an estimated $1.44 billion last year, partly reflecting daring acquisitions made on the bet that the legislation would be a boon for the industry.”

Although much of Creswell’s focus is on the current administration, the electronic records Gold Rush got its start when President Bush called for digitizing national health records in his 2004 State of the Union address.

“After that, every technology C.E.O. wanting a piece of health care would have visited me every day if I had let them,” said David Brailer, whom President Bush appointed as the nation’s first health information czar.

Would it surprise you to learn this has been something of a jackpot for execs of electronic records firms? Cerner co-founder Neal L. Patterson has pulled down more than $21 million in total compensation and now has a billion-dollar stake in the company.

Creswell doesn’t report Tullman’s payday. In fact, she writes that he was forced out in what she describes as a “power struggle”–and that he has moved on to greener pastures.

He is now at a company he co-founded that focuses on solar energy — another area that, after Obama administration and Congress expanded government incentives in the 2009 stimulus bill, has been swept by a gold-rush mentality, too.  

Get it? Greener pastures?

Barking Mad, Mad About Bark

By timmukyPosted on Posted in UncategorizedTagged , , , No Comments on Barking Mad, Mad About Bark

Well, this was just a beautiful story to start the day.

“My math teacher just stripped naked during class and was arrested! Go MSU!” one student wrote on Reddit, posting a blurry cell phone snap of a nude man sitting in the school hallway.

“Halfway through class he started screaming at us, swearing left and right….. He then started slamming his hands on the window and pressing his face against it, still screaming. Eventually he walked out and down the hallway to the end, all while screaming. He then then came back into the classroom and took off his clothes, except for his socks.”

From a story about a professor gone barking mad, to a nation absolutely mad about bark.

I loved this story in the Times about “National Firewood Night,” a twelve-hour program broadcast on Norway’s national television network. The show spent four hours featuring people cutting and stacking wood, then twelve hours watching a single fire burning in a wood stove in Bergen.

A full twenty percent of the population tuned in, and many weighed in on the unseen fire-tender’s technique.

“We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired the broadcast. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.”

He explained, “One thing that really divides Norway is bark.”

I would probably categorize myself as something of a wood dork. We use firewood as the primary heat source for our farmhouse, and I am of course the primary (only) chain-sawer, splitter, stacker and stove stoker. So for me this is absolutely fascinating stuff.

I could not figure out the embed code in Norwegian, so this link to a (truncated, alas) fireplace video will have to do. Also, here is one of the regular episodes of the show.

2012: The Year in YOLO

By timmukyPosted on Posted in country music, music, pop, rocknrollTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments on 2012: The Year in YOLO

I gave in this year to pop music and am not at all ashamed to admit my “best songs of 2012 (The Big List)” features a number of songs that are unapologetically pop and (to my ears at least) awfully good.

Maybe it’s having young kids who listen to the radio All The Time, maybe it’s because there’s an unusual quantity of good pop songs out there, maybe this is just another manifestation of my own contrariness. But I find myself wondering again and again: What’s Not to Like?

So, yes! yes! to Taylor and Carly Rae and P!nk and Xtina and Psy and Pitbull and Adam Levine and Kelly and Ke$ha and on the country side, that Little Big Town is pretty freaking catchy. I never thought I would like a song so good that name-checks Coors, but there you go. Perhaps I have been living in the South for too long.

For those whose tastes are so refined, they simply can’t abide listening to things enjoyed by the rabble (you know who you are) I have made a slightly condensed playlist that cuts out the pop mega-hits. It’s still a good list.

But I felt I had to go ahead and choose my favorite songs of the year. Hell is other people’s playlists, a wise person once said, so here, for better or worse, a dozen or so good tunes from YOLO Year of Our Lord 2012.

Ke$sha haters can suck it. This is an instant classic. It makes me wish that she would have made Warrior more along the lines of her original (stated) intent: more sleazy 70s rock, more guitars, less pop, fewer synths. As the man in A Hard Day’s Night said, perhaps this is “an early clue to the new direction.” I can only hope. “Sweet-ass mullet,” ftw.

The Youtube vid for “Everything is Embarrassing” has just surpassed a million hits, so this treads perilously close to Too Mainstream, but  the timelessness* of this song  can’t be denied.
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*or perhaps perfect evocation of 90s production values

Apparently I am a sucker for songs with “Everything” in the title. Hard to separate the song from the beautiful video.  Old School in the best sense.

A duet teaming a young rappper born and raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and Kurtis Blow, the Bronx.  I love this. Why isn’t this getting ten million hits on Youtube??

Pure pop confection that sounds even more ethereal in Japanese for some reason.

Feisty, sexy, funny–three things you really don’t expect from mainstream country these days.

Seems like this song has been around for more than a year. Never get tired of it, though.

The reissue of “Pearl” came out in 2012, in case you wonder why this song makes the list. Janis’ crazy cackle shows she knew she blew the take right at the beginning. But on and on it goes, and the world is better for it. The ad libs are absolutely priceless. Amy Adams to star as Janis in a movie coming soon? Don’t quite know how I feel about that.

My son’s gang posts videos of their trampoline tricks online. His friend used a Brother Ali song in one. Instead of getting a cease-and-desist from a company lawyer, he got a “cool, bro” from Brother Ali himself. That prejudices me in the man’s favor but this entire album is great. Angry, political, intensely human.

In awe of this entire thing. Sixteen definitely ain’t enough. “How’s he God if he lets Lucifer let loose on us?”

As though someone discovered a cassette featuring Gram Parsons gigging with the Dead, circa American Beauty.

The most YOLO song of a YOLO year.

Bonjour Man for Preznit!

By timmukyPosted on Posted in neoliberalism, politicsNo Comments on Bonjour Man for Preznit!

A nagging question for marginal bloggers (such as I): Why Do This At All? A corollary query: what the hell does a dude living in the sticks, who has chicken shit on his boots, who drives a ’95 Camry Wagon (with pride, I might add), know about politics? And (questioning myself again here, but echoing a persistent line of my dad’s, rest his soul), What Makes You So Smart? There are EXPERTS out there, and you act like they are always wrong and you are right. Do you think you know more than George Stephanopoulos?

And at no time do I feel more like I’m just being a jerk than this week, as many of my friends and peers are basking in the glow of the truly impressive pageant that was the inauguration. Quibbling about Obama’s ongoing wars, kill lists, drone attacks and secrecy obsessions; his imprisoning whistleblowers; his Austerity Lite–why complain about this? Now is NOT the right time. (It never is ….)

Yes, him!

And I … I … just sigh, and wish we had a president who looked more like the French model from the State Farm commercial, someone lacking the kind of charisma that obscures the actual policies….. Obama is for liberals what Reagan was for conservative middle Americans a generation earlier, a smooth operator who can elide, obscure, prevaricate, misrepresent, flat-out lie to you in a speech, and yet you just watch and say, “What a soothing way of speaking this man has.”

So … I have not given up on this, yet can’t think of any new ways to say what I think, or what I wonder. A two (and only two)-party system is pretty much the same thing as a one-party system. No one ever ran on the neoliberal ticket, yet that is all we have to choose from. How did we get here? How do we get out?

Countering the mythologies of debt, the deficit, and everything

By timmukyPosted on Posted in economy, neoliberalismTagged , , No Comments on Countering the mythologies of debt, the deficit, and everything

The United States is broke. The deficits we are creating will leave our grandchildren impoverished, and horror of horrors, in hock to the Chinese! The United States must manage its finances the way any family pays its bills. On the path we are on, we are destined to turn out like Greece.

If you agree with any of the above statements, congratulations. You are in step with current conventional wisdom on the economy. Unfortunately, you are also wrong. As Matthew Stoller pointed out a year or so ago, “The U.S. government prints dollars — it can no more run out of dollars than a bowling alley can run out of strikes.” Why, then, the commonly accepted misunderstandings? It’s a long story.

I just spent a couple of unproductive hours trying to explain my conversion to the ideas behind Modern Monetary Theory, and I realize it’s pretty pointless to do so. Better to link to a few places where MMT’s leading proponents make their case. The video above offers a pretty good summary, for starters.

And of course there is the entire New Economic Perspectives blog. The concepts can be heavy sledding for someone like me, who admits to being slightly illiterate macroeconomics-wise. The discussion can quickly get too complex or too contemptuous of opposing, establishment points of view.

Stephanie Kelton, the Deficit Owl, is for me the best preacher of the MMT gospel. She’s poised, polished, articulate, and frequently funny. Also capable of reducing complex concepts to layman’s (or laywoman’s?) terms. Here is a transcript of her appearance on Harry Shearer’s excellent Le Show, and here’s a link to the podcast itself.

Last weekend Dr. Kelton was a guest on Up W/Chris Hayes discussing “the magic coin.”

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Next, apparently, according to Kelton’s twitter feed, she’s “[g]oing on Oprah to declare truths about money/debt/deficit.” I THINK she’s joking, but wouldn’t it be nice….

In spite of the prevailing moralizing mythologies, deficits are not an indication of a nation going down the road to ruin. Too many people have accepted the argument that austerity is the only solution to the manufactured deficit crisis, that the “tough choices” we face means full employment just isn’t possible, that entitlements are out of control. The trillion-dollar coin idea may be dead (for the time being), but it brought into the mainstream a more sophisticated understanding about the nature of money, how it’s created, and what it’s for. I’m hoping the genie is out of the bottle.

Additional bonus: What is it About Money that Scares the Bejesus Out of People? is a carefully curated, and more than mildly amusing,set of twitter responses to the #mintthecoin hashtag, proof that ignorance of a subject is no obstacle to impassioned tweeting about it.

Short life, fully lived

By timmukyPosted on Posted in civil liberties, corporatism, corruption, ineffable beauty, neoliberalism, piracy, politics, priorities, remembrance, rule of lawTagged , No Comments on Short life, fully lived

I don’t think I’m alone in being only vaguely aware of who Aaron Swartz was, and for that I am more than a little ashamed.

Nor am I the only one who woke up to the news of his suicide Saturday morning and spent the rest of the weekend reading up on his many causes and splendid accomplishments. What a life!

His passing is doubly tragic, first for its untimely arrival, and second for the shameful fact that our government was so keen to persecute and incarcerate a bona fide genius whose crime, if it could be said to be a crime at all, was something along the order of seriousness of a prank.

But, as Matthew Stoller opines below, we are living in a world where qualities that should be valued are instead stigmatized, even persecuted.

Aaron suffered from depression, but that is not why he died. Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought – openness, justice, curiosity – are values these institutions now oppose. In previous generations, people like Aaron would have been treasured and recognized as the remarkable gifts they are. We do not live in a world like that today. And Aaron would be the first to point out, if he could observe the discussion happening now, that the pressure he felt from the an oppressive government is felt by millions of people, every year. I’m glad his family have not let the justice system off the hook, and have not allowed this suicide to be medicalized, or the fault of one prosecutor. What happened to Aaron is not isolated to Aaron, but is the flip side of the corruption he hated.

As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako – who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.

This morning Marcy Wheeler also noticed the strange and disturbing fact that the Secret Service shoved aside MIT and Cambridge police investigating into Swartz’s downloading of scholarly articles. She could not completely account for why, nor could anyone commenting on her post, but it offers further confirmation, if any were needed, that hounding a young idealistic activist was a top priority with someone high up in the Federal hierarchy. I’ll be interested to see what comes of this loose thread…..

Over at boingboing there is a substantial and growing archive of remembrances of Swartz.

Bipartisanship! Whistleblowers go to jail, torturers live comfortably in retirement

By timmukyPosted on Posted in civil liberties, tortureTagged , No Comments on Bipartisanship! Whistleblowers go to jail, torturers live comfortably in retirement

Kiriakou is expected to plead guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) for “outing” a torturer. “Outing” is quotes because the charge is not that Kiriakou’s actions resulted in a public disclosure of the name, but that through a Kevin Bacon-style chain of causation, GITMO torture victims learned the name of one of their possible torturers. Regardless, how does outing a torturer hurt the national security of the U.S.? It’s like arguing that outing a Nazi guarding a concentration camp would hurt the national security of Germany…..

The only person to be criminal[ly] prosecuted, and now likely jailed, as a result of the Bush-era torture regime is John Kiriakou, who refused to participate in torture, helped expose the program, and said on national television that torture was wrong.

—Jesselyn Radack

Major changes in the kinds of people we are stuffing down holes

By timmukyPosted on Posted in civil liberties, rule of law, terrorismTagged , 1 Comment on Major changes in the kinds of people we are stuffing down holes

UPDATED  BELOW: October 19, 2012

I continue to be drawn to the headline “MAYBERRY UNDER SEIGE: Ramped-up debate security gives Danville new look, feel,”   both for its innovative spelling and for the beautiful euphemism for scary-ass security state theatrics. “A lot of people feel like they’re in prison a little bit.” But whatevs…. I just love that.

For the record, almost nobody got in the least bit worked up about the lockdown that came with the VP Debate circus. To most everyone but me, it’s part of a New Normal. A far more typical reaction was to describe close brushes with power, touching the hems of the garments of the great men of politics, or even of MSNBC. “Biden gave me the thumbs up from his limo. You can’t see it, but he did. He waved and gave me the thumbs up.” “OMG Chris Matthews!”

But the prison-worthy lockdown? The locals took it without batting an eye.

And speaking of the New Normal: Americans have gotten a bit jaded about bad things the government does to people that would have been unthinkable prior to the terror attacks of 2001. Still, many would be surprised by recent developments.

Sticking human beings down holes, or into cages–for years, decades, without charge and with no hope of due process–well, that’s just the egg-breaking component of this particular omelette. We’re safer now, don’t you know. Keep telling yourself that.

Until recently, the kinds of people our government snatches and sticks down holes have been nearly exclusively Islamist, or at least Muslim, or at least  in some way sympathetic to terrorist groups, or at least sympathetic to groups that are trying to kick an occupying army out of their homeland, or at least let themselves be talked into a cockeyed plot by a paid FBI informant, or at least have a name that sounds sort of Muslim?

But … who saw this coming? The deafening silence that greeted the post-911 civil liberties transgressions has emboldened the government to, ah, cut a corner here and there when it comes to incarcerating and/or intimidating, young American kids (I would say native Americans but that would be, you know, wrong). Anarchists, environmental extremists, as the government would have it, or even … terrorists. Or activists, as they might describe themselves.

People like Leah-Lynn Plante, the 24-year-old woman from Portland in the photo above, who is currently in federal prison, without being charged (habeus corpus: sooooo pre-911) and could remain locked up for 18 months, for keeping silent before a grand jury convened to intimidating her into talking about her associates in the anarchist movement.

Writes Natasha Lennard in Truthout:

Along with two others in the Pacific Northwest, Plante was remanded into federal custody for her refusal to provide a grand jury testimony regarding activists in the region. Matt Duran and Kteeo Olejnik were jailed in previous weeks for, like Plante, refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. All three are now being held in U.S. federal prison, not because they are being punished for crime, but, as the National Lawyers Guild’s executive director Heidi Boghosian told me earlier this year, “to coerce cooperation.”

Writing for Truth-Out in August about the Northwest grand juries and those resisting cooperation, I noted that grand juries “are among the blackest boxes in the federal judiciary system.” The closed-door procedures are rare instances in which an individual loses the right to remain silent. As was the case with the Northwest grand juries resistors, the grand jury can grant a subpoenaed individual personal immunity; Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination are therefore protected, but silence is not. In these instances, refusal to speak can be considered civil contempt. Non-cooperators can be jailed for the 18-month length of the grand jury.

Look at her. Am I being naive here? This girl is in federal prison???? She could be my daughter or the daughter of any of my friends, peers, college classmates. Is she guilty of some treacherous crime? No, not at all. She is not charged with any crime.

Will Potter author of Green Is the New Red, an account of “how animal rights and environmental activists are being targeted as ‘eco-terrorists’, and what that means for our safety and freedom,” writes:

Grand juries have historically been used against radical social movements as a tool to intimidate and to gather information. When activists enter a grand jury proceeding, they check their rights at the door. They are asked about what they believe, what their friends believe, who they associate with, what kinds of activism they support. If they choose to assert their First Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights by refusing to speak about their political beliefs and political associations, they can be imprisoned.

In the New Normal, idealistic young Americans–not just scary foreigners–can be dropped down a hole, without charge, for 18 months for refusing to rat out their friends.

Just another facet of that “new look, feel.”

——————————

Update: Leah-Lynn Plante has apparently been released, according to this post at firedoglake, which links to a statement on the Free Leah Website, which begins

First and foremost, do not panic.

Leah wanted for us to express these points to you with this news:

  • She is extremely traumatized and experienced a lot of very, very bad things,  but she is alive. The state of her mental health is also very bad.
  • She asks that people do not jump to wild conclusions about her release because they do not apply.
  • She spent her whole time in SHU / Administrative Detention (solitary confinement) and was told that that is where she would stay for the duration of her incarceration, up to 18 months. She was classified as “different” from Matt and Kteeo.

I’m hoping that she is indeed free,  but the preliminary details of her incarceration temper any urge to celebrate.

There is a good deal of good background info on her case in this excellent Kevin Gosztola piece from last Friday, which I hadn’t consulted before writing my post.

While all the bright people on Twitter were beating Romney’s “binders” gaffe into a pulp, this case has brought to light a new willingness on the part of the state to (ab)use grand juries to intimidate people with alternative ideas. Which seems a much bigger deal than Romney’s misstatements or his argument with Obama over who loves coal more.

I can’t listen to this song again….

By timmukyPosted on Posted in politicsNo Comments on I can’t listen to this song again….

This week the Vice Presidential Debate is coming to my neck of the woods. I could go to watch  on a large screen with throngs of people who have submitted to humiliating security measures, and maybe hang out for the Marshall Tucker Band (well, one original member and some other guys), but in general, I prefer sifting through debates by reading snarky real-time tweets and perusing the manuscript at my leisure. To listen to any politician posture, prevaricate, lie and use hypercoached self-conscious hand gestures in real-time, well, it calls to mind the line from Adventureland:

Hey, do you have an ice-pick I can jam into my ears?

I can’t listen to this song again

Three days after its initial posting, this article on the front page of the local paper’s Web site STILL carries the headline “MAYBERRY UNDER SEIGE: Ramped-up debate security gives Danville new look, feel.”

Well, that’s one way of putting it, and that’s one way to spell siege, for that matter. Does anybody notice these things but me?

A local resident “said it’s been a bit disconcerting to watch as ‘Centre [College, the host of the Debate] is starting to look like an armed camp.'”

“A lot of people are concerned about road closures and things like that, and maybe feel like they’re in prison a little bit,” quoth the local chief of police.

It’s all about the new look and feel….

I don’t want to be totally tedious and continue to write about our choices, or lack thereof, in the upcoming national elections. To summarize: yes, Romney is one of those politicians who will say absolutely anything for a short-term advantage, and I would be incredibly sad to see him in the Oval Office.

But it is also true that in most important respects, Obama offers a slightly more incremental version of Romney’s lunacy, and shares in the collective delusion in Washington that the first thing to “fix” in a near Depression is the deficit, and that the only way to do that is to cut back “entitlements” because in an era when the rich have NEVER HAD IT SO GOOOD, it still pisses the very rich off that the parasitic 97 percent feels entitled to reassurance that they won’t starve to death.

“I’m not going to SLASH social security. Just tweak it. Does that make the cat food taste better?”

As regards the deficit, I liked this tweet from Matt Stoller: “Re deficit, the US government can no more run out of dollars than a bowling alley can run out of strikes.”

Oh, and I should mention this excellent piece by Kevin Baker, written in the wake of Obama’s nonperformance in the first presidential debate. Yes, writes Baker, there will be excuses offered,

Yet all of these personalized, psychological apologetics merely underscore the essential disconnect between the leadership of the Democratic party and its base. The leadership is now filled almost exclusively with careerists, who have no real goals they want to accomplish beyond their own advancement, and who actively don’t want to pursue any of the liberal ideas they pretend to support.

They don’t sound like they believe what they’re saying . . . because they don’t believe what they’re saying.

Neither does Mitt Romney, but he was able to put on a convincing act last night, visibly gaining confidence and command with each sally. By the end of the night, he seemed to have channeled not only Ronald Reagan’s genial manner and poise but even his voice.

Romney and his advisers displayed a sleight-of-hand beyond anything I thought them capable of. In Romney’s reach back toward the center in the debate, he had to lie almost incessantly, breezily denying most of the things he has been advocating in almost two years of campaigning.

So, until the first Tuesday in November, I will try not to post anything new about politics. I encourage all to follow the esteemed voices on my blogroll, and vote for the candidate of your choice. Or not. Do what you gotta do.

And WASSUP?, something I wrote a while back, is pretty much where I’m coming from, still. Oh, yes, we do have a choice, provided we accept what the parties agree upon:

War(s)
Austerity
Surveillance
Secrecy
Underemployment
Prisons

I would only add that there are a few important things I missed, and they are covered ably by Bruce Dixon in The Top 15 Things Romney and Obama Agree On.

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