Health lunacy: Adorno helps out
[This was originally part of this radio commentary, but I’ve posted it separately here.] And now a bit more Pacifica arcana, though that’s only the taking-off point. WBAI, the New York station where this program ran for 15 years until the interim program director decided to cut its frequency, has brought back health guru Gary Null to do a daily noontime show. Null was fired several years ago because of a personality conflict with an earlier program director. He really made the phones ring at pledging time, and his departure was financially damaging… Read More
Pacifica death watch (cont.): Gary Null edition
Why care? Perhaps the wider world does not share my interest in the internal goings-on at Pacifica. I do have a personal interest. I grew up listening to WBAI and it helped make me who I am, for what that’s worth. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was an exciting and lively thing that showed a kid growing up in the intellectual wasteland of suburban New Jersey that there was a fascinating world out there. It not only featured radical politics (of all kinds—the coverage of the early gay movement was… Read More
KPFA morning show: off
The idiots and maniacs who are now running Pacifica have decided to lay off the entire staff of the excellent KPFA Morning Show and to take it off the air: BREAKING: Pacifica management lays off entire staff of Morning Show | KPFA Worker. The show is the station’s most popular, and its best fundraiser. But its quality comes at a price: much of the staff actually earns a salary, with benefits. KPFA faces serious budget problems, but the union has proposed a way to deal with them. It looks like a faction of… Read More
The meaning of the election
You heard it here first (well maybe it was somewhere else, but I missed it): yesterday’s “historic wave” was of the same lasting significance as the “historic wave” of 2008—none. Or, more exactly, it’s another instance of the eternal recurrence of American politics, another iteration of the status quo. A country that’s rotting from the head, poisoned by alienation, plutocracy, and an aversion to thinking, careens from one idiocy to another, with the winning side celebrating its momentary triumph, and then it all goes sour in a few months. Engels nailed it long… Read More
Why we love Dems (cont.)
Because they try so hard to “keep the stakeholders in the room”—even when they deserve a stake in the heart! Tom Daschle tells Wonk Room about how the public option—weak tea in the first place—was too much for the industry, so they snuffed it: I don’t think it was taken off the table completely. It was taken off the table as a result of the understanding that people had with the hospital association, with the insurance (AHIP), and others. I mean I think that part of the whole effort was based on a… Read More
Strike wave!
There are many ways to measure the death of organized labor as a social force in the U.S. Here’s what might be the most objective one: the virtual disappearance of labor’s ultimate weapon, the strike. The graph above shows the annual number of major strikes, as tallied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The front page for all their strike/lockout stats is here: Work Stoppages Home Page.) The figure for 2010 annualizes what we’ve experienced so far this year. The little uptick, from a total of 5 in 2009 to 20 in 2010,… Read More
The CBO’s deep, unappreciated gloom
In this article from LBO #128 (yes, it’s posted quickly to the web, but that doesn’t happen often, so you really should subscribe if you don’t), I talk about the lust that some people—within Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the world of punditry—have for getting the federal deficit down. Contrary to this I argued that this is really the wrong time to start thinking about that—we still need the short-term kick of deficit spending to help get the economy off the mat, and then over the longer term we need to… Read More
Misquoted by a(n alleged) spy!
Weird story about the alleged Russian spy network—it’s a long road from working on behalf of “The Internationale” to working for the land of Gazprom. And from a personal POV, it’s odder still that one of the spies misquoted me! In this article, Vicky Pelaez attributed a rather incredible accounting of the productivity of federal prison labor to me—though I never wrote these things and am skeptical that they are actually true: According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID… Read More
Recessions & politics (cont.)
Hans Peter Grüner has posted the paper that he and Markus Brückner wrote about the electoral effects of economic recessions to his website: here. It makes eminent psychological sense that a crisis might lead people toward conservative responses—a feeling of impending scarcity encourages selfishness, not generosity. It’s been ages since I read Erik Erikson, but as I recall the identity crisis, it leads the sufferer back to remembered moments of security and happiness, not toward an uncertain transformative future. That helps explain why immigrants are so often the target in an economic crisis:… Read More
Recessions: better for right than left
For a long time, I’ve been critical of the left-wing penchant for economic crisis. Many radicals have fantasized that a serious recession—or depression—would lead to mass radicalization, as scales simultaneously fell from millions of pairs of eyes and the imperative of transcending capitalism became self-evidently obvious. I’ve long thought that was nonsense, and now there’s empirical support for my position. In his column today, Paul Krugman cites research by Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner showing that recessions boost the vote for extreme right-wing and nationalist parties. As Krugman argues, this helps… Read More
Remarkable winning streak
So the trading desks of four big investment banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase—made money every working day last quarter, a 63-day streak. Goldman never made less than $25 million a day, and over $100 million on 35 days. There is no way that anyone could do this just by being clever—it’s mathematically impossible. There’s too much short-term randomness even in strongly trending markets. And they’re probably not just making it up, Bernie Madoff-style. How are they doing it? Maybe Congress, if it’s interested in more than grandstanding to… Read More
Frontiers of moral reasoning
Asked by Sen. Tester if Goldman had done anything “wrong” in selling CDOs, Goldman’s Sparks evades the question, saying that wrong “conveys some qualitative sense of doing something inappropriate.” They just made some business decisions that look bad in retrospect.
Perceptions
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner—a Dem polling firm run by a former Marxist, so it always asks good questions with a strong class angle—reports that public perceptions of the U.S. economy are improving significantly, but with no political impact yet: http://www.citizenopinion.com/wp-content/files/co04152010-ectrack-FINAL.pdf
LBO News from Doug Henwood 