Real Misery Index

The economy realistically:

Bookforum: Stories about the financial crisis.

A new study just released on the current income gap: obscene beyond Reagan's wildest dreams.

But, at least Obama's out there explaining patiently how he doesn't plan to kill yer grandma.

Vermont Pride

Bernie Sanders:

Howard Dean:

...and Patrick Leahy

The facts are that over 72% of Americans want a government-run public choice for health care. You know, like something approaching what the rest of the developed world takes for granted (and we could easily have without higher taxes–just by revoking some of the latest welfare handouts for this country's blight of obscenely rich assholes).

self-healing chop blocks

Now's the time to buy! Everything's ON SALE until this Friday morning, when I take it with me to Vermont. Otherwise accepting orders for late August/early September...

The legacy of Geithner and Summers, thus far...

Glenn Greenwald has the details on why they should be fired immediately by Obama.

Or for those unable to read (fist via Matt Taibbi):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Pyramid Economy
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

"new atheism"

For those following the debate: here's a popular argument more practical than either Terry Eagleton or Karen Armstrong.

Update: And here is Chris Knight. Finally, an actual philosopher. Thank God. Via.

"The President's Surveillance Plan"

Revealed to include a whole lot more than illegal wiretapping...

Or how to dump a story on a Friday. And in other potentially exciting news... Update, a whole week later: Digby on the embarrassment of the CIA finding "inspiration" in the TV show, "24."

US Health Insurance Cartel: Follow the Money

Adding to the list of people who don't want you to see how Michael Moore's film, "Sicko" "hits the nail on the head" according to US insurance insiders.

The Washington Post: Lawmakers Reveal Health-Care Investments:

Almost 30 key lawmakers helping draft landmark health-care legislation have financial holdings in the industry, totaling nearly $11 million worth of personal investments in a sector that could be dramatically reshaped by this summer's debate.
...and freshman Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), who holds at least $180,000 in investments in more than 20 health-care companies...

The Washington Post: Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying:

The nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress....The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records.

Huffington Post launches "Lobby Blog."

Update: Hell yah.

UpdateII: Huffpo has more.

We want..we want...HEALTH CARE!

Wendell Potter, former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA (which provides health insurance to nearly 70 percent of the Fortune 100 companies) admits that, in fact, "Sicko" "hit the nail on the head" and told the real truth about how much better people in other countries have it when it comes to their health care...

...disinformation and attacks on Michael and the film were extensive and well-planned. Their job was to stop the movie from reaching a wide audience (and, more importantly, from having the widespread political impact the industry feared "Sicko" would have).

Watch the full Bill Moyers story here and especially here.

Kay Hagan and other cowardly, incoherent Blue Dogs attempt vaguely to conceal wildly unpopular selling-out to the health insurance cartel, update

Courtesy of Digby, here.

I can't afford health care. Apparently an industry/cartel with record prices and profits can still afford to buy politicians. I campaigned hard for Kay Hagan but I will campaign even harder to replace her with any-goddamn-one if she doesn't do the right thing here and support a public option. Here is her contact info.

Spalted Maple, Book-Matched

End grain, with 3/4 juice groove and side handles. 25" by 21" by 2". $285.







GreenRiverWoods.etsy.com

...also

willfully deaf ears

Incredible.

Obama still doesn't get it, needs to do more for the economy than cross the ultimate line with Goldman Sachs. Now.

speaking of Facebook...

For those infantile Narcissistic Personality Disorder types for whom actually speaking is an awkward affair:

"But in a statement posted on Palin's Facebook account, she suggested that she had bigger plans and a national agenda she planned to push after she resigns at the end of the month.

"I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint," she said.

Palin also cast herself as a victim and blasted the media, calling the response to her announcement "predictable" and out of touch.

"How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country," the statement said. "And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make."

Palin's personal spokeswoman, Meghan Stapleton, confirmed to The Associated Press that the Facebook posting was written by the governor."

...Pretending to run for President (on Facebook!) being at this point Palin's only way to defend her dignity ("the world is literally her oyster!"), the only friendly medium through which to vaguely spin her quitting in terms of anything but pure selfish avoidance, were that even possible...or as Maureen Dowd says this morning: "Sarah wanted everyone to know that she’s not having fun and people are being mean to her and she doesn’t feel like finishing her first term as governor."
Practical minds can only hope she stays out of prison long enough to pursue those "bigger plans."

sad songs

Worth the listening...(via)

Less sad: A Supposedly Fun Blog, which points to this old interview with David Foster Wallace:


He was on the show a year earlier as well:

Matt Taibbi strikes again: "The Great American Bubble Machine"

Oh, I'm a huge fan of this guy's investigative journalism, this time "on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression." (Cue emphatically vague, prosaic protests from the PR wing of Goldman Sachs.) Especially as at times he seems like the only one who is effectively doing this: translating our reality of in all but name only criminally-organized economic-apartheid/financier dictatorship to a popular audience, and with proper pathos of indignation. Taibbi may not have been possible without the likes of Chomsky, but he sure does a better job keeping us awake. (Needless to say, part of this work is holding otherwise sympathetic but obviously worn-down, increasingly platitudinous critics-become-automatons to a higher standard, which Taibbi also does pretty well.)

His conclusions are especially disturbing:

The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege.

[...]

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Update: Strangely, TPM would rather talk about Mark Sanford.
Update II: Even more strangely, Rolling Stone, for whatever reason, apparently neglected to post the article online for over a month, until just a day before the "environmental"/carbon tax/let's make Golman Sachs even richer even more easily/Cap-and-Trade bill passed....

walnut, cherry end grain chopping block

Priced significantly better than these folks. (Plus I give artist, teacher and farmer discounts. Talk to me about my sliding scale for non-hedge-funders.)

custom cherry bed tray

Grain-matched and with walnut through spline:






Why my father (an English professor of 40 years) owned a tape measure with his initials on it is unclear to me.

MTR

Change the lobbies can easily believe in defeating, so far...

From nothing less than The Wall Street Journal (via the one who has the entire summary thus far):

If world-class lobbying could win a Stanley Cup, the credit-ratings caucus would be skating a victory lap this week. The Obama plan for financial re-regulation leaves unscathed this favored class of businesses whose fingerprints are all over the credit meltdown.

Update: NPR has begun this potentially very interesting project (via Digby), turning their cameras on the other faces in the rooms where "change" happens. More of this in the name of full spectacular truth, please.

Zizek on Iran

Copyright-free (via):

Will the Cart Above the Precipice Fall Down?
Slavoj Zizek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.