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The National Holiday

I posted something about this on the new other place, but a far more elegant rumination was made available by Mr. Pierce. The last graph:

We are all children of the civil-rights movement, whether we want to be or not, whether we are its direct descendants or whether we were adopted into it through the profound changes that movement wrought in the definition of what an American is. We are all children of the civil-rights movement, and this weekend is our national holiday. There is nothing mysterious about that. We make ourselves mysteries to each other because the cost of knowing our solution may be too ugly to bear.

Read the whole thing, because this cannot be hammered enough – and we can be too nice about it. Good thing Johnson decided not to be. But you can see it did not get in the way of his eloquence, which arrives in tact even today.

Democrats and most other decent people (see Venn diagram) are just too damn passive about all the racist crap hardening the arteries of our culture. Enough. It’s killing us and needs to be called out – there is no benefit of the doubt to give to people who poke around with euphemism about ‘other’ people. And there’s barely any euphemism, it’s not even offered with any delicacy any longer – check any group of headlines from the Republican primaries. The nature of this bypass surgery needs the courage of King and the brutal honesty and arm-twisting of Johnson. Celebrate by looking the haters in the eye and not looking away. They already know that you know, and are merely counting on you to let it go. How about taking a break from that?

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U.S.A., Inc

The corporatization of American politics continues unabated, of course, except it has achieved hyperspace warp speed from the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. Enter Romney, who I guess is supposed to be the lobbyists’ dream candidate. But do they really want to succeed raising the barriers to entry and eliminate their competition? Eliminate corporate taxes and regulations? Do they believe that’s going to create a healthy economy where their companies will flourish? Wait – they don’t care about those things? What do they care about?

The ever-expanding role of lobbyists in politics is a major victory for corporate America. Overwhelmingly, the companies and trade associations that dominate top-dollar lobbyists’ clientele are seeking to protect their own legislated competitive advantages, including special tax breaks, favorable procurement rules and government regulations that prevent new challengers from entering the marketplace.

Republicans should be acutely aware of the dangers posed by the lobbying community. When insurgents led by Newt Gingrich took over the House after the 1994 election, they were determined to open markets, allow free enterprise to flourish and rid the legal and regulatory system of competitive favoritism.

In practice, just the opposite took place. Gingrich, and especially Tom DeLay, ceded enormous power to Washington lobbyists in what they called the K Street Project. Loyal lobbyists were rewarded with earmarks, leadership support for special amendments and the delegated authority to write legislative provisions.

Shortly before he became House whip in 1995, DeLay created Project Relief, a legislated moratorium on new regulations. He appointed Bruce Gates, a lobbyist for the National-American Wholesale Grocers’ Association, to run the project and Gordon Gooch, a petrochemical lobbyist, to write the first draft of the bill. The bill was then modified by Paul C. Smith, an automobile industry lobbyist, and by Peter Molinaro, a lobbyist for Union Carbide.

That was a remains a real question.

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Rich morons: still morons

This has been ably dispatched here, here and elsewhere, but you still may have missed it. Lou-weeeze:

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot Inc. (HD) co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

If successful businesspeople don’t go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, “they deserve what they’re going to get,” said Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at “shaping the national agenda,” according to the group’s website. He said he isn’t worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

So… who’s the imbecile? This is not even being tone deaf – I think they’re just dumb. Why would you ever feel it necessary to go on the war path about this? You’re tough enough to create all those jobs and bank all that dough but you can’t take criticism for being rapacious windbags and now must be called petulant, too? This is a gross extrapolation of the argument that people making $400K are barely getting by – and also that more money you make, the harder you work. Neither of these things is remotely true. Krugman’s right: get rich enough to surround yourself with sycophants and no one will tell you you’re being an asshole.

Camel through the eye of a needle and all – the real moral is: We all really need close friends.

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Awe… M’art

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With all of its localized shenanigans, it’s important to take a step back and see what big-picture Big Box looks like:

The brand-new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the small northwest Arkansas city of Bentonville is the creation of Alice Walton, the daughter of the late Sam Walton, who founded Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), the largest retailer in the world.

Alice Walton, who is worth about $21 billion, has achieved her dream of building a top-tier museum that unabashedly celebrates American art in the American heartland. Crystal Bridges, in many ways, is an aesthetic success.

It’s also a moral tragedy, very much like the corporation that provided Walton with the money to build a billion-dollar art museum during a terrifying recession. The museum is a compelling symbol of the chasm between the richest Americans and everyone else. In 2007, according to the labor economist Sylvia Allegretto, the six Walton family members on the Forbes 400 had a net worth equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. The Waltons are now collectively worth about $93 billion,according to Forbes.

Touche, monsieur. But what say you of the art?

But many of the paintings in Crystal Bridges hang in eloquent rebuke to the values of the company that has made the Waltons so very wealthy. Three paintings, in particular, struck me as especially pointed commentaries on the perverse values of Sam Walton’s heirs.

The first was Asher B. Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” one of the greatest paintings to emerge from the Hudson River School. It celebrates the friendship of the painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant, who are portrayed standing in an enchanted Catskill gorge.

“Kindred Spirits,” bought by the Walton foundation in 2005 from the New York Public Library for an estimated $35 million, is, in the words of the critic Rebecca Solnit, a tribute to “friendship freely given, including a sense of friendship, even passion, for the American landscape itself.”

It’s really worth re-acquainting oneself with the Saint-Just, Cardinal de Rohan and Charlotte Corday.

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Pocket Change

It’s funny, and not ha-ha, but so many people (and you’re related to at least a few of them) spend so much time keeping up with stock market numbers, rises and falls in the Dow, the price of gold other such particularly ridiculous prisms through which to see the world that when you hear/read someone talking sensibly about the the absurd way this “system” is treated and treats itself it can be, well, refreshing.

A federal judge angrily blocked Citigroup’s proposed $285 million settlement over the sale of toxic mortgage debt, excoriating the top U.S. market regulator over how it reaches corporate fraud settlements.

…

Rakoff called the Citigroup accord too lenient, noting that the bank was charged only with negligence, neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing, and could avoid reimbursing investors for more than $700 million of losses. Private investors cannot bring securities claims based on negligence.

“If the allegations of the complaint are true, this is a very good deal for Citigroup; and, even if they are untrue, it is a mild and modest cost of doing business,” the judge wrote.

The judge basically told the SEC and Citigroup to shove it, interrupting one of the very commonplace, move-along, nothing-to-see-here disgraces taking up valuable time in courthouses across the country. The settlement without any admission of guilt is one of the more nefarious innovations to ever come along, allowing companies to pay their way out of crimes, prep the memory hole and begin the process again as soon as possible. It’s all too cozy, and no one seems to notice anymore. There are no business reporters who take the side of anything but corporations and business. It’s amazing but even a judge paying attention realized that the wash was still dirty after this rinse cycle and decided to plop the whole load back in the machine, hopefully this time with some bleach.  They still continue to call the aggrieved parties ‘investors’ as though it’s somehow the ultimate distinction. It’s really just a description of people who deserve to be ruled by corporations.

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Birth(day) of Liberty

the 125th Anniversaire of the Statue of Liberty. Stunning photos on its construction at TPM.

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Try to imagine Republicans allowing let this to be installed, or these ideas to be given a physical presence in the form of a beacon for the world’s oppressed people, today. Much less allowing such a gift from France.

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Schemes inside of Schemes

On #OWS, plus for when he word-whips Little Tommy Freidman (age 9), Taibbi is a national treasure:

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn’t feel sorry for people who’ve been foreclosed upon, because it’s they’re own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”

This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy.” In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.

Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they’ve scored bailouts. It doesn’t matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the “emerging markets”) or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.

The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes.

The LTCM fiasco was particularly egregious, even and especially at the time. Stomach-turning levels of under-believability, as this 1998 article from Harper’s illustrates. And we just carried on.

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Ring of Fire

Some ingredients to the cake and the walk we took to fetch it. All at one low, low price. In the depraved sense of the word:

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

But not an occupation.

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The Language Problem

InteRESTin’, as the boy says:

VandeHei and Allen are careful to avoid attributing any kind of ideological substance to their proposed candidates. Instead, they describe them with empty signifiers like “authentic outsider”, “a combination of money, accomplishment and celebrity”, “a strong leader [voters] can truly believe in”, and “someone who breaks free from the tired right-versus-left constraint on modern politics”. But that doesn’t mean there’s no ideological agenda here. There is, and it leaks through in their profile of erstwhile Deficit Commissioner Erskine Bowles: “The most depressing reality of modern governance is this: The current system seems incapable of dealing with our debt addiction before it becomes a crippling crisis.”

It’s hardly worth pointing out anymore that there is, in fact, no debt crisis; on the contrary, sensible observers are wondering why the government is bothering to collect revenues at all, when the cost of borrowing is hitting zero. By now, everyone who cares has realized that fear-mongering about the debt and the deficit is a trick used opportunistically by those who want to reorient government around their particular priorities. And the priorities of the deficit scolds, judging by the work of creatures like Pete Peterson, are to dismantle what’s left of the welfare state and transfer even more money to the already wealthy. Ranting about the deficit is merely a means to this end, if it facilitates goals such as the elimination of Social Security and Medicare.

Isn’t it now? Read the rest of this for a good run-down on why, and for as long as they can, OWS should hold out on saying exactly what it is they want. Hint: words fail. At least the ones we’re used to using.