Obama: Love me, I’m a liberal

Phil Ochs has been dead for decades, but he has Barack Obama's number

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

– Phil Ochs, 1966

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Here’s Robert Reich, feigning bewilderment over yet another Barack Obama cave-in:

The Obama administration is proposing to lower corporate taxes from the current 35 percent to 28 percent for most companies and to 25 percent for manufacturers.

The move is supposed to be “revenue neutral” – meaning the Administration is also proposing to close assorted corporate tax loopholes to offset the lost revenues. One such loophole allows corporations to park their earnings overseas where taxes are lower.

Why isn’t the White House just proposing to close the loopholes without reducing overall corporate tax rates? That would generate more tax revenue that could be used for, say, public schools.

It’s not as if corporations are hurting. Quite the contrary. American companies are booking higher profits than ever. They’re sitting on $2 trillion of cash they don’t know what to do with…

The Republican presidential hopefuls are stooges or wingnuts, but that’s not enough of an advantage for Obama. He wants everyone to love him, the 99 percent and the other one percent. He will close loopholes AND reduce corporate tax rates.

I wish Reich would drop the rhetorical niceties. Every time Obama panders, backtracks, or makes a major concession to Republicans without even negotiating, Reich says he doesn’t get it. What is there to get? How much longer are Reich and other Democratic commentators — real Democrats — going to pretend to be stunned by this spineless purveyor of false hope and empty promises? Right up till the election, no doubt.

Ash Wednesday blues

A butcher friend of mine on Ninth Street said hello today, and I couldn’t help but notice the thin black cross on his forehead. I realized this was the first day of Lent and the cross was ash rubbed into his skin by a priest. “Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” Such a neatly drawn cross. Back in the day, the priests used to do much sloppier work, unsightly smudges that bore no resemblance to crosses.

Then I thought of the Christian custom of giving up something pleasurable for Lent, a tradition that honors Jesus’ 40 days and nights of fasting in the desert. And I remembered why, even as a good Catholic boy, I thought there was something morbid about Christianity’s insistence on self-denial and the pursuit of suffering, as if life doesn’t already hand us all the suffering we can handle, and often more.

Listen to Muddy Waters’ music. It’s clear he knew most people don’t have to “give something up” to understand what suffering is. Look at his face. Can a priest teach you more than Muddy can? Not unless you’re tone-deaf and blind.

Footnote: Little Walter makes the lowly harmonica sound as powerful as a pipe organ in a cathedral.

Serfin’ USA (the new feudalism)

Did Cameron Diaz go under the knife? Will the stars of Hangover 3 score big pay increases? These are the questions that try journalists’ souls.

Meanwhile, in another world, in a piece called “Is Market Capitalism Dead?,” Columbia Prof. Thomas B. Edsall focuses on questions of far less import to brain-dead Americans:

Are large segments of the American workforce — millions of people — at a structural disadvantage in the face of global competition, technological advance and ever more sophisticated forms of automation? Is this situation permanent?

Will the share of profits from improving corporate productivity flowing to capital and to high-earning C.E.O.s continue to grow, while the income of wage earners stagnates and their share of profits declines?

Has the surging wealth and income of the top one percent and of the top 0.1 percent reached a tipping point at which the political leverage of the very affluent decisively outweighs the influence of the electorate at large?

Is it possible that in the United States and Europe, democratic free market capitalism is no longer capable of providing broadly shared benefits to a solid majority of workers?

Read the piece and you’ll see Edsall is reluctantly answering “yes” to all of his questions, although he notes the situation isn’t nearly as bleak in northern Europe. Barring some act of God, or social upheaval that results in something akin to revolution, the numbers indicate that the 99 percent in the USA are screwed.

Edsall makes a bleak but polite-sounding statement in the last paragraph:

The debate over the workings of democracy, the market, technology and globalization remains unresolved. The political system instinctively avoids this debate, despite its salience and centrality, because the political costs of engagement are likely to substantially outweigh any potential gains.

In other words, expect only doubletalk from politicians, because they know honesty would cost them ties to their sugar daddies, and their jobs. Expect pious lies and outright lunacy from Republican presidential candidates, and pretty words masking brutal realities from Obama.

Perhaps more so than at any time in our history, the situation cries out for a third-party candidate who will speak the truths that the corporate media and almost all politicians ignore. How do I campaign for this candidate? Did I miss something?

My birthday in outer space

John Glenn on Feb. 20, 1962

I love the past, which doesn’t exist/until I summon it, or make it up,/and I love how you believe/and certify me by your belief,/whoever you are, a fiction too,/held together by what? Personality?/Voice…?

from Loves, by Stephen Dunn

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My mother and I must have taken the #11 trolley to Center City and walked five blocks to the department store at Eighth and Market. I remember a row of TV sets in the store, each repeatedly showing a clip of a rocket lifting off, so that viewers could see the launch at Cape Canaveral had gone well. Walter Cronkite’s soothing TV voice provided further assurance that astronaut John Glenn was far above the atmosphere in his space capsule, single-handedly winning the space race against the Russians. This was in 1962.

Customers watched the multiple images of the ascending rocket. I could tell by Cronkite’s tone that Glenn was a hero. He circled the Earth not once but three times, in five hours. On TV, Glenn’s voyage seemed remote and undramatic, not at all like the sci-fi movie voyages I loved. But I knew his was a great feat, because it was taking place on my birthday, February 20.

I can’t remember why my mother was shopping, but on the floor where the toys were she told me to choose a present for myself. I picked a half-dozen plastic figurines shaped like astronauts — spacemen, I called them, wearing little helmets and spacesuits. At home that evening there was a birthday cake for me, and I planted my spacemen feet-first in the vanilla icing on top of the cake, and pretended the cake was the moon.

Along with most people, I figured Glenn or one of his space buddies would soon land on the moon, just as JFK had promised. After the moon, they’d go to Mars and beyond. I decided to become a spaceman. A few years later, America did land spacemen on the moon, but those landings marked the end of an era, not the beginning. We Earthlings couldn’t afford to visit other worlds, we were spending too much money destroying this one.

I considered other lines of work — archaeologist, deep-sea diver, bartender — and many years later settled on fiction writer, which is to say I became a sort of spaceman, exploring the gulf between dreams and realities, intentions and results, earthbound but always on the verge of becoming lost in space.

Footnote: John Glenn is 90 years old and still going strong, 50 years after his brief but grand voyage.

GOP gets medieval on our ass

Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction

My two favorite Catholics recently weighed in regarding American bishops opposed to the use of contraceptives. First comedian Stephen Colbert warned that American Catholic women who are unopposed — i.e., the majority of those who are sexually active — are “cock-blocking the Almighty.” Then Garry Wills, a veteran journalist who is also a historian and classical scholar, wrote a reminder that what the bishops think of contraception is irrelevant to Catholics and doubly irrelevant to the rest of the population:

Contraception is not even a religious matter. Nowhere in Scripture or the Creed is it forbidden…

…Catholics who do not accept the [bishops'] phony argument over contraception are said to be “going against the teachings of their church.” That is nonsense. They are their church. The Second Vatican Council defines the church as “the people of God.” Thinking that the pope is the church is a relic of the days when a monarch was said to be his realm. The king was “Denmark.” Catholics have long realized that their own grasp of certain things, especially sex, has a validity that is lost on the celibate male hierarchy. This is particularly true where celibacy is concerned…

I’m guessing the only reason Wills wrote the piece was to remind non-Catholics that the “nice smiley fanatic” Rick Santorum speaks not for the vast majority of Catholics, but rather for a contingent of yahoo Christians who want to “get medieval” on our ass, to paraphrase Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction.

It’s a pretty sad commentary on American culture that the medieval contingent still wields so much power in one of our major political parties.

Update: Those who say 98 percent of Catholic women have uses contraceptives didn’t look closely enough at the survey they cited. I deleted that figure from my first paragraph because the survey results actually refer to Catholic women between the ages of 15 and 45 who have ever been sexually active. The vast majority of these women have used contraceptives.

The evil-of-two-lessers argument

Do progressives need reminding that the current crop of Republicans are intent on scuttling New Deal legislation and pushing the country further to the right than Mussolini’s Italy?

Of course not, but this doesn’t stop “centrists” from scolding those of us who can’t stomach Barack Obama’s refusal to fight on our behalf. Yes, we’re appalled that Paul Ryan and company are trying to rip down the social safety net and reduce workers to virtual serfdom, but we’re even more appalled that Obama, instead of launching a spirited counterattack on these borderline fascists, has repeatedly given ground without firing a shot.

Bill Boyarsky of Truthdig recently conceded that Obama has disappointed “many supporters”:

He let the Republicans push him around for too long. While the nation is slowly recovering from the recession, the Obama stimulus was too small. He gave away too much to Wall Street in the Dodd-Frank financial industry regulatory legislation… But looking at his accomplishments in the face of the recession and a reluctant Congress, he’s done pretty well.

What a great gulf exists between centrist Democrats and those who think Obama and his friends have betrayed the principles that distinguish Dems from Republicans. Declaring that Obama has done “pretty well” compared to what a Republican would have done is like saying, “Obama’s not that good, but a Republican would have been downright evil. Is that what you progressives would prefer?”

Boyarsky defends Obama by pointing to the latter healthcare reform bill, which many progressives think is a disaster, because it strengthens the corrupt insurance companies at the heart of poor healthcare in America. He mentions that Obama saved GM and Chrysler, but not that wages and benefits for workers at those companies were drastically slashed, or that Obama has done nothing to strengthen or even defend labor unions.

No one in recent years has done more than Obama to encourage the suspicion that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties. Boyarsky’s pathetic arguments do nothing but reinforce this suspicion.

Thou shalt not cock-block the Lord

Stephen Colbert recently explained the theological underpinnings of the Church’s opposition to contraception, and warned birth control users that their sin is a grave one:

The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God. You see, to Catholics, sex isn’t two drunk strangers getting their freak on at closing time. It is the mystical union of two people inspired to create new physical life while God adds a soul in a divine and ineffably beautiful three-way. So, when you use contraception, you are not only sinning, you are cock-blocking the Almighty.

Watch the video here.

Footnote: I can picture Stephen at the grade school I attended, Most Blessed Sacrament, before contraception ended the baby boom. Sister Mary Mastodon would beat have him over the head with the Baltimore catechism, then hung him by his heels out a third-story window until he repented. And so what if he fell, there were three thousand other kids to babysit.