Bad American

I just launched some beer through my nose. Jill is on CNN right now commenting on Nader!!!!

Oh yeah, she announced it. Duh, I can read.

She’s as nice on the air as she in her blog. I would have said “Nader can kiss my ass.”

And she’s right on McCain.

The other blogger that is on with Jill has his blog here: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.

He did a good job too.

Chuck D and Flavor Flav would be his dream ticket.

And no way is Clinton ever going to be VP on Obama’s ticket. The other guy (Michael Goldfarb) was right on that.

Fun fun - the anchor wants to get the three of them back again - hopefully with more time next time!

The Pain Dealer ran Harrop’s column today

I can’t find a bio on Froma but this is from her own webpage:

Starting at Reuters Ltd., Harrop quickly moved from clerk to financial writer. She later became a business editor at the New York Times News Service. Harrop has written for such diverse publications as The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar and Institutional Investor. Her columns appear in several book anthologies.

Having a little experience in journalism, I feel reasonably confident when I say that its fairly rare for someone to move quickly from clerk to financial writer without some behind the scenes connections.

Be that as it may, she’s listed as a ‘liberal’ in the Creators’ Syndicate stable. But the system has many paid shills on both sides of our Punch and Judy political system and when someone writes articles such as these, pardon me for being cynical.

Harrop certainly knows what her masters want to read:

May I suggest a “time out” on bashing free trade with our Canadian and Mexican neighbors? Life would be awfully easy if NAFTA were the problem. All you’d have to do is pull out.

Sounds easy, eh? But Froma dear, you know the same people who put is in this NAFTA mess would be the same people who would have to pull us out. And you know why they won’t do that, don’t you? But you won’t write about that, will you?

The evidence points to NAFTA being mostly good for the countries involved. And if American factory workers want to see where their jobs have gone, they’d do better to look east than south. Labor may be cheaper in Mexico, but it’s cheaper still in Asia. Chinese workers make about a quarter of what their Mexican counterparts earn.

Good for whom? Not the American workers or are you willing to write that with a straight face, Froma? And does it really matter where those jobs went? It matters not to the people in my extended families and friends who used to make America’s steel. They’re just as screwed because their jobs went to Asia instead of Mexico.

And they went there because it was all part of the plutocrats plan to destroy the American Middle Class - the last impediment to creating a worldwide slave labor camp where all manufacturing jobs would be reduced to pittance wages solely for the benefit of international investors NOT for the millions of Americans who can’t live a Middle Class existence on those wages.

But who gives a shit about those people, eh Freda? You have a pretty nice job at the Providence Journal, don’t you? You got yours, right?

NAFTA knockers who fear sounding anti-Mexican often argue that free trade has been bad for Mexico, as well. They offer vivid examples, such as the peasant farmers protesting the end of tariffs on U.S. corn. Corn production is easily mechanized and relies on abundant water. That gives U.S. farmers a competitive advantage.

But NAFTA has opened the enormous U.S. market to Mexican avocado growers — who now call their fruit “green gold.” For avocados and other produce that requires picking by hand and therefore much farm labor, Mexicans have an advantage. In fact, Mexican farm exports to the United States and Canada have tripled since 1994.

Earth to Freda: we don’t care about Mexican workers. Let their own government create jobs for them. Perhaps you’d like to spend a week in Youngstown near where I live and sit down and have a face to face coffee with the flesh and blood victims of the economic theories you seem to be defending.

That might make you uncomfortable, though. Better to hang out in the Projo newsroom with the rest of your white collar buddies.

Revisiting NAFTA won’t fix what hurts the Ohio River Valley. A better approach would be universal health coverage that protects laid-off workers from total economic meltdown. A more vigorous program for job retraining would also help. And yes, Democrats are right to denounce tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

Thanks for throwing us a bone from Providence. I need to ask you though: how are we going to pay for this universal health coverage if the tax base of people who used to work a union wage keeps shrinking?

I’d love to ask Hillary Clinton the same thing. All she wants to do (and Obama too) is pour more money into the gaping maw of the health insurance industry. Canadian style single payer would be the best system for everyone. But that would be SOCIALISM!!! And only large American companies get socialism, not ordinary people. So Froma won’t advocate for it because she might not have a job the day after writing a column like that.

And you know, I’ve been hearing this job retraining song and dance bullshit for 20+ years now. Guess what - it doesn’t work. You know why? Employers have a choice between hiring college educated trust fund babies like Froma and ‘retrained’ (retreaded) former line workers. Guess which ones they go for every time?

Of course there’s plenty of jobs at McDonalds. Just keep telling people who used to make America’s steel and raise entire families on those jobs that there’s no loss of dignity in working burger jobs.

Just keep telling them that. And keep pumping out the Prozac.

None of this needed to happen. This government could have set directed economic policy that would have protected American manufacturing jobs and therefore kept our manufacturing base intact. You know what happens when you lose that base? I’ll give you a clue: without imports from Asia, the US military can’t shoot, communicate or move.

But the money boyz on Wall Street didn’t give a damn about that or those millions now desperately hoping to hit the lottery so they might live out the rest of their lives with a little dignity.

The sight of closed American factories — those broken windows and weed-covered parking lots — sickens the soul. The inescapable reality, though, is that the jobs that were going were going, if not to the Caribbean and Latin America, then to Asia. Wouldn’t it be in America’s interests to help our neighbors get the work?

Can I say this as delicately as possible? Fuck you Froma. Again, come to Youngstown and the Mon Valley or Pittsburgh. Your ’soul’ really cant be adequately sickened from your well lit newsroom in Providence. You really need to come down and look in the eyes of these people who have callouses on their hands you and your kind will never know and you need to explain to them why a lifetime of work in building this country didn’t amount to a pile of shit when all was said and done.

Fuck the neighbors. These are MY people.

Well my daddy worked the furnaces
Kept ‘em hotter than hell
I come home from ‘Nam worked my way to scarfer
A job that’d suit the devil as well
Taconite coke and limestone
Fed my children and make my pay
Them smokestacks reachin’ like the arms of God
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay

From the Monongahela valley
To the Mesabi iron range
To the coal mines of Appalachia
The story’s always the same
Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world’s changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

– Bruce Springsteen

First, let me state this.

One of the biggest problems with the Pain Dealer is that there are NO COLUMNISTS THAT WRITE FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE.

Notice, I didn’t say write “about,” I said “write FOR.”

Unless you think the audience that Dick Feagler writes his touching tributes to an America long dead is ‘typical.’

The PD long ago ceased to be a newspaper that sympathized with ordinary people struggling. True, occasionally they will write about such people and, to be fair, Phillip Morris will write an occasional “woe is he” article about one of our economic system’s victims but its clear from the overall tenor of the PD that the audience they write for are white, well to do and living in Bay Village.

The people of Cleveland, the poor and the struggling middle class, are props, not anyone they really give a damn about.

Now on to Schultz’s column

Cindy McCain. We’re supposed to feel sorry for her. According to her ‘political wife in arms’ Connie Schultz.

She has been a steadfast presence in her husband’s campaign, and there’s been plenty of speculation as to why. Notions of love or devotion ring hollow to those who dismiss her as a much younger wife meant to telegraph his vigor. He needs her, the pundits say, as if that isn’t true about most marriages.

Her sleek sophistication is a constant target, even if how she looks has nothing to do with what she says. Last week, she took an apparent swipe at Michelle Obama by declaring that she has “always been proud of America,” prompting this anonymous post on the popular liberal blog, Daily Kos:

“I really don’t care if McCain’s trophy wife is proud of her country. She is just another GOP Stepford Wife …. Whoopie for anorexic-looking Cindy McCain in her red $5,000 Yves St. Laurent power suit, with her triple string of cultured pearls, her bleached blond hair and her shiny new face-lift…”

The writer called himself “Mr. Populist,” which means he’s not only clueless, but hellbent on giving the rest of us liberals a bad name.

Bzzzzz. Thanks for playing Connie, but I think “Mr. Populist” has it exactly right.

But you can’t relate. You CAN relate to Cindy McCain’s “sleek sophistication.” That you can relate to because, apparently, you emulate Cindy McCain. You want to be as polished and hip and sleek and sophisticated as your higher echelon income will allow you to be. That matters. What people on the street think don’t matter, since they don’t have the breeding and education of Cindy and Connie.

See to her, guys like “Mr. Populist” aren’t “real liberals” since they can’t relate to their economic masters who decide what is proper liberal behavior.

And you don’t diss your social superiors. Cindy McCain may be a troglodyte Republican conservative Stepford Wife but Connie will always take her side because they are sisters within their social class. That trumps ‘ideology.’

No Connie, don’t expect people like me and the people in my little town who are struggling to make ends meet to sympathize with you and Cindy McCain. You live in a world so far above ours we sprain our necks looking up at you.

Maybe once or twice you and Cindy and the rest of you political Barbie dolls could look down at us for a change.

You might get a clue then.

Just came over NBC’s Meet the Press: Nader will run for President again.

This can only hurt the Democrat who gets the nomination.  I can understand Nader’s possible animosity towards Hillary Clinton but what about Barack Obama? What major problems does Nader have with Obama?

Its a shame we can’t tie this guy to a tree for the next eight months. This is past the point of ambition to the point of delusion. Where is Pat Paulsen when you need him?

Oh yeah, he’s dead.  I guess Nader gets to be the punch line in this era.

But its a punch line that could put John McCain in the White House in a tight race. And the last thing any Democratic nominee needs is to have to answer to Nader and McCain. Should Clinton or Obama simply pretend he doesn’t exist?

Perhaps he’ll be regarded as a joke in the media now. We’ve heard his tired song and dance too many times before.