Back in 1981, television viewers would, from time to time, see these ads for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.
Thirty years ago -- shockingly -- this sort of thing was perfectly respectable. Unenlightened as we were, we didn't once think we were being indoctrinated by leftist union goons.
Worse, if one came from a blue-collar background, chances were that the Old Man belonged to one of these socialist-front outfits. I know, it's shocking. Lots of people smoked then, too.
Now, thanks to tea-party edjumacashun outreach and Mr. Glenn Beck and Mr. Rush Limbaugh, we know socialists when we see 'em, and we take appropriate action.
And you won't see these commercials on the tube anymore. In fact, you won't see the ILGWUanymore, either.
"You talk to relatives and friends who aren't from here and the first thing they ask you -- they give you that special look -- is, 'Are y'all going to be OK?'
There's no bigger mojo in this perilous, unforgiving jungle of job hunting than a college degree.
In an economy like this, a degree from a respected institution of higher learning can mean the difference between a safe haven among civilized, productive people . . . and sitting in a big pot amid hungry cannibals, wondering "Is this water getting hot, or is it just my nerves?"
No, you can't overstate the importance of a college diploma. Take this one, for example (above).
No, take this one.
Listen, it takes four years and a lot of money -- money you likely don't have, not these days -- to get that piece of paper that tells super-picky employers "Me am smart. Me can does job!"And in a world where nobody knows what tomorrow may bring . . . in a world where you need to grab an elusive position while the grabbing's good, you don't have four years to putz around getting "educated."
Well, friend, I can help.
For the low, low price of $2,500 -- less than the cost of one year at a cut-rate public institution of higher learning -- you can bean official 1984 graduate of Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.
Upon receipt of an envelope stuffed with cash, or a U.S. Postal Service money order (no checks, please), I will send you this bachelor of arts degree in journalism from Louisiana's flagship university. A journalism degreewill open to you the doors of a lucrative profession.
Or, if you prefer, this authentic LSU diploma also is an excellent entrée to graduate studies or law school.
And you can be more than yourself not in four years, but in just the time it takes the mailman to bring me your payment, then deliver to you your official Louisiana higher-ed diploma. (One caveat -- it will be immensely helpful if you can pass for a 49-year-old man. The degree is from 1984, after all.)
I KNOW . . . I know. Right about now, you're thinking, "Favog, this is fraud!"
Well, of course it is, you twerp! This degree is from LSU, which is (DUH!) located in Louisiana, and fraud is how things work down there.
For instance, Louisiana voters every four years elect the most plausible-seeming crook out of a field of several crooks, and then the newly-elected crook fraudulently pretends to govern, and the citizens fraudulently pretend to care.
Each year, the fraudster-in-chief brings his plan for not governing before a bunch of less-accomplished frauds (this is called the Legislature), and they pretend to deliberate over shyster pieces of legislation, then sell their votes to the highest bidders, and it all eventually results in the fraud of a governor signing the fraudulent legislation into a joke of a "law." Then things really get screwed up.
There's a method to this madness, and it is this: You can't run on a platform of "fixing" things unless things first have been rendered completely FUBAR. It's like the water cycle, only government. It's a very "green" process, actually.
Now, under this "government" thing in Louisiana, politicians pretend to set up institutions of elementary, secondary and higher education. Of course, none of them educate anybody worth a damn -- that would screw up everything. Remember, in the economy of government-by-fraud, a little education is dangerous . . . and a lot is g**damned catastrophic, you bloody fool!
Besides, education is among those things that must be "fixed," so politicians can run for office on a platform of lying to voters lying about wanting "fixes" about actually "fixing" them.
Did you get all that?
SO, don't think of purchasing a used degree from me as "fraud," per se. Think of it instead as obtaining a perfectly valid college degree the same way LSU student athletes do. Or legislators' brothers-in-law. One or the other.
It's just the "Louisiana way."
One caveat, however. Act quickly, because the perceived worth of this genuine 1984 LSU journalism BA is likely to decrease markedly next summer. That is due to the havoc unfortunate economic circumstances are playing with the state's official Ponzi scheme, which in some states is referred to as "the budget."
This disruption -- bravely papered over for several years through truly heroic fraudulence on the part of Gov. Bobby Jindal and legislators -- most likely will mean debilitating budget cuts, thus rendering plausible deniability impossible if some suspicious potential employer were to wave a newspaper in your face, screaming "That LSU degree of yours ain't worth s***!"
But that's why I'm letting this authentic LSU diploma -- complete with a leatherette case at no additional charge -- go for just $2,500, a full 75 percent off the regular price. You still get a real college degree, with a good eight to 10 months to parlay it into a decent job.
I, meantime, can recoup something out of the thing while there's still some value left. In Louisiana, we call this "Everybody wins!"
You do a little somethin' for me, and I do a little somethin' for you. It's a system that works . . . if you don't worry too much about the meaning of "works."
But, once again, act now. Sooner or later, Gov. Jindal will return to the Gret Stet from his 49-state "GOP: Fool for Me" concert tour, the legislature will convene . . . and LSU will turn into a pumpkin at 12:01 a.m., July 1, 2011.
NOW THAT'Sjust between you and me (wink). It won't reallybe Louisiana State Community College until the carpetbagger feds make 'em change the name because of damn-Yankee "truth in advertising" laws.
So buy today! Remember, "what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
It's clear that the Great Recession battered those on the bottom most heavily, adding 6 million people to the ranks of the officially poor, defined as just $22,000 in annual income for a family of four. Forty-four million Americans -- one in seven citizens -- are now living below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty 51 years ago. Shamefully, that figure includes one in five children, more than one in four African Americans or Latinos, and over 51 percent of female-headed families with children under 6.
These numbers are bad enough. But dig deeper -- as Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman has been doing for nearly 50 years in his battle against poverty -- and the story told by these figures is even more staggering.
Edelman points out that 19 million people are now living in "extreme poverty," which is under 50 percent of the poverty line, or $11,000 for a family of four. "That means over 43 percent of the poor are extremely poor," said Edelman, who served as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) and in the Clinton administration before resigning in protest over welfare reform that shredded the safety net. "That's over 6 percent of the population, and that figure has just been climbing up and up."
(snip)
Beyond what Congress can do immediately, it's clear that America needs a broader movement to create a more just and higher-wage economy. Edelman and other advocates say that we will need to push to make it easier for people to join labor unions through an Employee Free Choice Act or at least reduce legal barriers to organizing. The minimum wage should also be indexed to half the average wage.
"But you're still going to have a gap," said Edelman. "And you essentially have to invent some new idea of a wage supplement that starts from the premise that the so-called good jobs went away a long time ago and we've become a nation of low-wage work."
That's why 100 million people are struggling to make ends meet on less than $44,000 per year.
This devastating economic reality has the potential to create new political alliances -- and shape a 21st-century anti-poverty movement. Such a movement is urgently needed because the voices of the poor, of workers and of those struggling to get by are barely heard in the halls of power these days. Anti-poverty groups and advocates with ideas for a more equitable economy are often marginalized within even Democratic Party policy circles that seem hard-wired to reject them.
We know what needs to be done to reduce poverty. The question is who will fight that fight? And who will listen?
SOMEBODY HAS to do something about this, and the leftist journalist wants to know whom that will be.
Well, obviously not the leftists -- and note I don't use "leftist" as a perjorative; I tend to be one on many issues. That's because leftists like vanden Heuvel, back in 1972, blew up the broad-based, left-of-center Democratic coalition in favor of a purer, narrower radical coalition dedicated not to eliminating poverty and advancing social justice, but instead to promoting the sexual revolution and smashing the influence of social conservatives in the party.
That gave us a Democratic Party unable to beg, borrow or buy the kind of presidential and congressional clout it enjoyed before the "revolution." It gave us one contentious term for Jimmy Carter, while also giving us the reality of Reagan Democrats. Not to mention Ronald Reagan himself.
The libertine left also gave us the religious right.
And Bill Clinton surviving for two terms only by governing as a just-right-of-moderate Republican would have -- by gutting welfare (which vexes the left so) and giving Wall Street slicksters the keys to the candy store.
As we well know, this has led us to the fine mess we enjoy now, including those exploding rates of extreme poverty, as well as an anything-goes social and familial landscape of such chaos that it scarcely can deal with flush times, much less the Great Recession.
Thus, after much deliberation, more observation and ample aggravation, this New Deal-loving, old-time Catholic lefty has something to say to Ms. vanden Heuvel and her fellow secular, upper-crust, boutique lefties about the river they're crying on behalf of the impoverished abstractions they probably never encounter concretely:
What we need is an Academy Award for Best Internet Mash-Up Video of Cartoon Clips Adapted to Make Fun of Talk-Show Goobers Who Really Have It Coming.
If we had such an Oscar -- and the sad fact that we don't is some sort of indictment on American society -- it would go to this one. "This one" is called Right Wing Radio Duck, and it hits Glenn Beck and the perpetually pissed peeps of the tea-party movement where they live.
Oh, and it's funny as hell, too.
Jonathan McIntosh, to be succinct, is a freakin' genius. Here's part of how he describes Right Wing Radio Duck's plot:
Donald’s life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.
WATCH.Now.
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is contained in the video's 7:46 of searing social criticism from Rebellious Pixels.
Has Glenn Beck attacked McIntosh as a "socialist" yet?
If what René Descartes said is true -- "I think, therefore I am" -- does it follow that morons are an endangered species?
If so, say goodbye to Louisiana which, during tough times, will give away the fiscal farm to land an iron- and steel mill as it systematically starves higher education and research.
The latest blow to what passes for intellectual capital in the state came Wednesday, when we found out what it would mean to LSU if it cut $12 million less than what state budget officials asked it to plan for. What it would mean is carnage.
Job carnage.
Academic carnage.
Student carnage.
Enrollment carnage.
And, ultimately, economic carnage for Baton Rouge and the rest of Louisiana. YOU KNOW what, though? Any state that sows the kind of carnage on its flagship university described in this Advocate story today deserves every bad thing it will reap:
LSU would axe nearly 700 employees and lose close to 8,000 students if forced to cut about $62 million from the flagship campus’ coffers next year, according to an LSU estimate.
The hypothetical budget cuts released late Wednesday are part of a state-mandated, budget-cutting exercise of higher education and other state agencies in preparation for the loss of federal stimulus dollars and some state revenues next summer.
The $62 million represents about 32 percent — reduced from 38 percent by the state — of state general funds and stimulus dollars going to the flagship LSU campus.
Higher education statewide would lose nearly $437 million.
“It would be a catastrophic impact,” LSU Chancellor Michael Martin said. “The (academic) core would be seriously harmed.”
In July, LSU released a budget scenario featuring $45.8 million in cuts and the loss of more than 260 jobs.
The additional $17 million cut in the latest scenario almost all comes directly out of classrooms and the faculty ranks, increasing the amount of lost jobs all the way up to 690, nearly 630 of which are currently filled.
About half of the hypothetical layoffs would be faculty.
AT THIS RATE, we need to start calling Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal by his given name, Piyush. As in "Piyush the state right off a cliff, gubna!" LSU's student paper, The Daily Reveillecontinues the tale of a state's intellectual deleveraging:
If the scenario becomes reality, then 154,299 undergraduate credit hours and 31,506 graduate credit hours will be eliminated.
Chancellor Michael Martin said he doesn’t know the likelihood of the cuts materializing because the projections were created at request of the state.
“If it actually came to pass, it would be catastrophic,” Martin said. “The very conversations we’re having will do some harm because the conversation causes people to look for other jobs elsewhere.”
Among Wednesday’s predictions, the University did not specify what faculty and departments would suffer, but it did announce general material effects.
“Roughly 50 degrees will be lost, impacting approximately 8,000 students, almost one-third of degree programs,” according to reduction descriptions prepared by the Budget Crisis Committee. “Diversity in career opportunities will be severely limited; campus buildings will be closed.”
Martin said residence halls, dining halls, classrooms and labs would be closed because fewer faculty and students require fewer facilities. Martin did not mention any specific buildings.
The Level Three description also indicated revenue from grants, contracts and tuition will suffer from the cuts, and a reduction in the student population will have a “dramatic impact on the viability of auxiliary units such as athletics, residence halls and the Student Union.”
Martin said the budget cuts will have a cyclical effect, and the University hasn’t even looked into the future effects of losing so many faculty and students.
“How many hamburgers wouldn’t be sold, how many gas stations wouldn’t sell?” Martin asked. “Just start thinking about the multiplier effect of that number of jobs lost and the spending in the community. This will reverberate not just in this campus, but across the community and the state.”
Martin said the effects among degree programs will be severe. While some students will simply change their majors if their degrees are cut, many students will transfer or not come to the University, Martin said.
“No matter how you cut this, you’re going to be forcing upon the students an education of lesser value,” Martin said. “A university has to have a certain breadth, hence the term university and not ‘monoversity.’ It will not only be a much narrower institution, it will be a much more mediocre one.”
"MUCH more mediocre?" Why, that sounds right up Louisiana's alley!
Because if it follows that stupid is as stupid does, then the Gret Stet will keep Piyushing until it's the most mediocre of 'em all.And when you're good at bad, that ain't good.
Once again, the first episode of Mad Men explains everything. Or at least many things.
Take the new marketing campaign of my college alma mater, Louisiana State University.
The university -- and I assume we can still call it a university for now -- has taken grievous budget hits over the past 20 months or so as Louisiana continues to slash its bloated budget . . . in all the places it cannot afford to slash. As it turns out, the $42 million in cuts is just a warm-up for the $75 million butchering the state demands it outline by today.
And now, with all this going on, LSU is trying to figure out how to sell a shell of its former self . . . which, frankly, already was puny compared to many state universities around the country. They're calling it "Love purple, live gold."
In other words, university leaders are rolling out a new ad campaign designed not only to use purple prose to spray paint a dessicated turd gold, but also convince prospective students all over America to take a big bite out of what just might hurt their post-collegiate prospects. NO, REALLY. After reading this story in The Daily Reveille, the LSU student newspaper, I'm thinking they better have found someone as sharp as Don Draper to sell a suspecting public the academic equivalent of cancer sticks:
People often associate budget cuts with the University, but administrators are looking to create a new, hopeful image to brand the University: “Love purple, live gold.”
Herb Vincent, University associate vice chancellor for University Relations and senior associate athletic director, said the campaign was focused on the color gold, which represents excellence, achievement and prestige.
“Purple, passion — we love what we do, and we’re excited about research. Band is excited about sporting events,” said Jewel Hampton, University art director, who coordinated task force efforts for the campaign. “Gold is about hitting the gold standard of excellence. It’s more focused on presenting who we are to prospective students.”
In such a difficult economic time, Vincent said it’s difficult but necessary to brand the University with a new image now.
“The campaign is mostly about who LSU is and trying to define LSU based on the community that makes up this University,” Hampton said. “In that sense, the challenge we have in communicating for LSU every day is this private market of 16- to 20-year-old prospective students.”
Chancellor Michael Martin said it’s an ideal time to brand the University with a new message.
“People are trapped with old images and old phrases,” Martin said. “[The new campaign] is to recognize the place is always changing.”
Martin said once people mull over “love purple, live gold,” they’ll reflect on what it means to them.
“To me, if you embrace and invest yourself here, you’ll live better as a result of it,” Martin said. “Invest in a great education experience, and every part of life will be enriched.”
"AND YOU KNOW what happiness is? Happiness is . . . a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing, it's OK."
Things is bad bad in da Gret Stet of Loosiana, cher.
Dey so bad don't nobody know what ta do, baby!
An' one uh da congressmens say evuhbody laughin' at Loosiana. He say things has gots to change, 'cause da stet can't be goin' on like dis.
Mais no, he serious as a heart attack, cher. Lissen. . . .
"Ninety thousand of our citizens have left Louisiana in the last three years trying to find jobs and opportunities somewhere else."
As long as the oil-patch jobs were there, it was easier to tolerate children getting a substandard education, he said. Foul air and dirty water could be ignored as long as the oil money kept rolling in, added the congressman.
But he said the state could no longer put up with the chicanery and behind-the-scenes dealing of its politicians.
"When the oil fields were booming and we were all making money and we were all prospering, we might have been able to tolerate some of the kinds of images we created in our political institutions," he said.
DON'T BE LOOKING for that article in your morning paper. It won't be there.
The story is true. The congressman was Billy Tauzin. The date of the newspaper containing the Associated Press piece . . . Dec. 5, 1986. It was the State-Times in Baton Rouge, which ceased publishing in 1991.
Here's how the AP story ended almost 24 years ago:
Tauzin said the severity of the crisis means the state is ready to change.
"People are desperate," Tauzin said. "We're desperate enough now that we might think some new thoughts.
YEAH, LOUISIANA. How'd that work out for you?
Tauzin's fatal fallacy was in not realizing that in order to think new thoughts, you first have to think at all. And a quarter-century later, virtually nothing has changed in the Gret Stet.
The only change after the oil bust of the 1980s was that, in 1991, Louisiana had "changed" enough to almost elect a Nazi as governor. It dodged a bullet by electing Edwin Edwards -- who now is an involuntary "houseguest" of the federal government -- to yet another term.
Then, in 2005, Katrina came, and New Orleans almost disappeared forever . . . but not before exposing exactly how bad things had gotten on any number of fronts. Talk about a clarion call for "change."
Yet politicians from Slidell to Shreveport are still answering to that standard introduction Tauzin so fretted over in 1986 when it was put to him as banquet humor -- "Will the defendant please rise?"
And Louisiana children still receive inadequate educations, in many cases inside facilities unfit for animals.
And Louisiana people are still some of the poorest anywhere in the United States.
And "Cancer Alley" is still there between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
And long stretches of the coast are now fouled, thanks to a different kind of "oil boom."
And Louisianians -- scores and scores of them -- are still leaving in search of something better.
THIS BEGS a rather obvious question. Exactly how desperate is desperate enough that Louisiana might think some new thoughts?
And God save Angus X, wherever he might be after his unfortunate loss in the British national elections this spring. An old friend was musing about the present doings of Land Is Power -- the party annual meeting is coming up Saturday at an Edinburgh cafe -- so I wandered over to the website of Angus X and the landless peasants . . . and found an amazing video.
No, really. That's it above -- The Story of Stuff. Please watch it.
WHEN I was watching this amazing presentation by Annie Leonard, I thought "This is pure Catholic social-justice kind of stuff here. I'll bet Glenn Beck hates it."And sure enough. . . .
Gosh, I feel so dumb now. The conservative ubercapitalists quickly reassured me by saying market efficiency and ongoing miniaturization will solve many of the problems of the sustainability and disposal of our abundant stuff.
Besides, we have a whole planet to be mined. We've barely scratched the surface. Why, if we mine deep enough -- through the earth's crust and well into the mantle, which we could do as technology advances -- we could have all the raw materials we need to make more and more stuff.
This little fact -- in addition to making Glenn Beck even crazier than usual -- also is likely to dismay one of the film's producers, the Tides Foundation, which believes we can best care for the poor and powerless of the world by helping them abort their poor and powerless offspring.
Sigh . . . in a fallen world, nobody bats 1.000. Well, at least fetuses are biodegradable, right?
WE NOW return you to Angus X, who remains not safe for work . . . or the kids. But kind of spot on, nevertheless.
Watched the video about planning for $74 million more in cuts to LSU?
Good. Now see this, which ran in Friday's edition of The Advocate:
Continued state budget cuts to education will soon make Louisiana resemble a Third World country, college leaders said Thursday.
The leaders made the comments at a League of Women Voters of Baton Rouge sponsored event, which focused on the long-term impacts of budget cuts on higher education.
State college officials talked about unity in the face of funding reductions and political interference.
“When times are good, invest in higher education,” LSU Chancellor Michael Martin said. “When times are bad, redouble those efforts.
“We are very much at risk of turning the higher education system in this state into one that serves a Third World country, not a First World,” Martin continued.
Higher education has suffered more than $270 million in budget cuts the past 20 months because of reduced state revenues. The ongoing fear of college officials is the so-called “cliff” year next summer when $290 million in federal stimulus dollars keeping colleges afloat will dry up.
“It won’t be recoverable in any of our lifetimes,” Martin said of the potential impact of the “cliff.”
ONCE AGAIN, we see a bunch of academics peering into the maw of abject hopelessness and still trying to look on the bright side.
No, that's not meant to be snarky. See, they think Louisiana is going to become Third World. As in "isn't there yet."
If you want to learn about modern life -- especially postmodern life -- look at your smart phone.
Because if your life . . . er, your smart phone, is anything like the deal one Omaha man got, congratulations! You're a officially a member of a club born when Eve bought the serpent's line about that apple.
For two days in late July, Monty Poland searched Omaha for something that didn't exist.
Poland, 39, had just purchased a new smart phone from Sprint, the HTC Evo. The handset, purchased at a discount with a new contract, cost Poland $275, excluding a $100 mail-in rebate.
It was loaded with features, including bundles of applications, the latest version of Google's Android operating system, a touch screen, dual cameras and wireless Internet that could be channeled to make the phone a wireless hot-spot.
Poland discovered those just fine. What he couldn't find was a place to use a feature Evo has that few other smart phones possess: the ability to connect to Sprint's 4G wireless network.
He tried to access the network from many places. At his home near 72nd and Giles Streets? Nope. In downtown Omaha? No way. At the La Vista Sprint store where he purchased the device? Not even there.
That's because even though Sprint proclaims Evo's 4G capabilities on in-store signage, the company's website and in commercials, 4G service isn't available anywhere in Nebraska or Iowa.
The term 4G stands for “fourth generation,” meaning the latest and fastest version of digital mobile functionality. It is superior to 2G, which was introduced in the early 1990s, and to 3G, which dates to around 2002.
Having the latest and most reliable technology is key to companies' profitability, because smart phone customers are hungry for faster mobile Internet connections to stream video, download applications, or “apps,” and browse the web. Mobile phone companies engage in heated battles to reach pacts with network providers while investing billions in the updated networks.
But in the end, all the whiz-bang features need to work.
“It's like buying a laptop computer with supersonic speed, but the local Internet provider doesn't offer supersonic Internet connections,” Poland said. “Why spend the extra dough to buy something you can't use?”
After two frustrating days, Poland revisited the Sprint store and asked a manager why the 4G connection wasn't working.
Poland learned that 4G wasn't available in the Midlands. In fact, it is available in only 48 U.S. markets, of which the closest is Kansas City, near Sprint's national headquarters in Overland Park, Kan.
OVERPROMISING -- and, alternatively, getting suckered -- is what we do as children of the first consumers, who believed Satan when he advertised that "your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."
I'll bet the scaly SOB stiffed 'em on the 4G service, too.
The thing is, we never learn.
Never.
Ever.
In fact, our entire Western economy is built upon the fact of our permanent placement in planetary special ed. Let's just say it's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Men World.
AND THE hell of it -- literally -- is illustrated by what Monty Poland did when Sprint offered him a full refund: He turned it down.
Which explains why America's churches are so empty come Sunday.
The fatal flaw of the tea party movement -- OK, the most fundamental of its myriad fatal flaws-- is that it long ago got what it now clamors for.
And that's what's killing us all. Check that. Not all.
The rich, they're doing fine, despite everything. It's the fast-disappearing middle class and the poor taking it in the shorts.
Despite all the angry rhetoric from the tea-party delusionals, despite all the laissez-faire rhetoric and faux solidarity with "real Americans" coming from millionaire hucksters such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the real problem here, alas, is not that Barack Hussein Obama is a socialist working hard to turn the United States into a people's republic.
No, the real problem is that America is becoming less socialist every day -- that the sort of laissez-faire, free-market social Darwinism that lets the rich man grow ever richer, unfettered by the "socialist nanny state," has been wildly successful at redistributing wealth away from the poor and middle class and into the hands of Corporate America and the wealthy.
What the tea-party marionettes clamor for -- the magical shot of "freedom" that supposedly will cure all our ails -- is just more of what we've had for decades, decades during which the American middle-class family has been beaten into a vegetative state.
If you're not familiar with Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and current chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, stop right now and watch the above video. Want to know what the hell happened to you (and the economic world around you) over the last 40 years? This will explain it all.
Warren tells you how the middle class has come to the brink of extinction, why both you and the missus are busting your butts and still living paycheck-to-paycheck, and why you're just a layoff -- or a serious illness -- away from oblivion.
IN THE VIDEO, she tells you all this on Mar. 8, 2007. A year and a half before the crash.
Things haven't improved since:
THE MSNBC INTERVIEW followed publication of this column of hers last December in The Huffington Post. Read on, if you've guts enough:
Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.
Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.
The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.
But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.
To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases -- but it hasn't been enough to save them. Today's families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer.
Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington. They were left to go on their own, working harder, squeezing nickels, and taking care of themselves. But their economic boats have been taking on water for years, and now the crisis has swamped millions of middle class families.
The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.
AND THE CURE for this is supposed to be less regulation? Less government? Fewer taxes on the wealthy? Removing the last of society's unraveling safety nets?
Fighting "socialism" is the answer here? For the love of God, send us a real socialist, not some too-cool, dispassionate poseur like Barack Obama.
You know, like Franklin Roosevelt. Or Harry Truman. Or Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Hell, even Richard Nixon.
By tea-party/Limbaugh/Beck standards, all these presidents were raving Bolsheviks. And under their political tutelage, we still had a middle class. We still had hope for America's future.
And now?
During Warren's 2007 lecture at the University of California-Berkeley, she explains that according to Gallup, most people in 1970 judged that it required a high-school diploma and hard work to launch a young person into the middle class. But by 2002, Gallup reported, twice as many Americans thought the moon landing was faked -- staged on a Hollywood sound stage -- as thought that someone could make it into a middle-class life with just 12 years of schooling.
From the presentation:
"The difference is -- when you look at middle-class families -- if you needed 12 years back in 1970? The taxpayer paid for it. You got it all for free. All you had to do was show up . . . live there and show up.
By the year 2000, if you need a college diploma, you pay for it yourself.
Sure Berkeley and other state-supported schools? I guess that means you guys aren't paying any tuition? [Laughter]
Room, board, books, right? It's not very much -- I guess you borrowed maybe a dollar or two in order to do this?
But notice what that means. It means the launch -- what parents have to do to get that next generation into the middle class -- has shifted from being something that everybody pays for to something that only the families with children are paying for.
WITH THE ADVENT of what is an almost-mandatory two years of preschool for toddlers, Warren noted that -- in little more than a generation -- we've gone from a shot at a middle-class life requiring 12 years of free education to requiring 18 years of schooling, one-third of which parents are on the hook for.
Now imagine what it's like to be poor in America today . . . because we of the former middle class may all be there soon enough.
We don't know what we don't know about what BP has done to the Gulf of Mexico . . . and all the fish in the sea.
And the Angel of Oily Death is happy to keep it that way.
When you're suspected of criminal acts, and surely liable for God knows how much civilly, you'd just as soon the Almighty be the only one Who knows the full extent of what you've done.
I suspect that's why BP . . . British Petroleum . . . the Angel of Oily Death . . . Those Lousy Rotten Capitalist-Pig Bastards -- whatever the hell you wish to call that destroyer of worlds -- is balking at paying for long-term testing of Gulf seafood.
THIS LITTLE THING is merely crucial in determining whether or not your oyster po-boy is going to send you to an early grave, or whether you're getting a heapin' helpin' of petroleum and Corexit with that shrimp etoufée or crab au gratin. New Orleans' WWL television reports:
State Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham says so far, BP is refusing to commit the dollars.
"BP has been slower and slower in responding to us and seems to be dragging their feet in making a commitment to fund the studies that we're going to need to ensure that this multi-billion dollar industry is viable in Louisiana," said Barham.
BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles says the company is still considering the seafood testing plan.
"Some of those requests went quite far out in time," said Suttles. "They were looking at up to 20 years. At this point in the response, it just isn't appropriate to actually look that far out."
Suttles suggests that the state look at paying for the program with money BP has already pledged to the oil spill recovery effort.
"The gulf research initiative, the $500 million we have made available to do long term impact assessments here in the gulf," said Suttles.
Secretary Barham says if BP doesn't voluntarily agree to the long term seafood testing plan, there are both criminal and civil remedies the state can use in an attempt to force BP to pay up.
It may be more and more difficult to talk to BP," said Barham. "It may be their attorneys that we're talking to."
IT'S ALL ABOUT confidence. It's about whether people are confident that Gulf seafood won't hurt them. It's about whether the Gulf fishing industry will survive or not.
But, hey! The well's no longer gushing! BP figures it's not their problem -- at least not until the law tells them it is.
And the "small people," fishermen and consumers alike, get drilled again.
It's a Tony Hayward world out there, and the soon-to-be-ex-BP CEO's monumental solipsism and tone deafness obviously is catching.
The Obama clan has it now, probably transmitted from Mr. Let 'Em Eat Oil to the president when he "kicked" Hayward's ass at that White House confab a while back. And then Barack gave it to Michelle who, while eschewing yachting after killing the Gulf of Mexico, did settle on a high-dollar Spanish fiesta while the American economy burns, the Gulf states smother and the ordinary Joe languishes. OF COURSE, robber barons and the diffident rich always have behaved so, even throughout American history. But when the First Family starts behaving like Marie Antoinette amid hard times, widespread austerity and spreading decay, you just may find you've become a banana republic.
And even the Australians, a world away, are noticing. Look at this in The Age from Sydney:
As the U.S. economy endures high unemployment and a jittery stock market, President Barack Obama has preached sacrifice and fiscal discipline. But the pictures coming out of a sun-splashed Spanish resort may be sending a different message.
First lady Michelle Obama is in the midst of a five-day trip to a luxury resort along with a handful of friends, her younger daughter, aides and Secret Service. Her office said the Obamas would pay for personal expenses, but would not reveal the taxpayer cost for the government employees.
Elected officials -- Democrats and Republicans -- were reluctant to weigh in, not wanting to appear critical of the President's wife. But the trip provided fodder for television news shows, talk-show hosts and bloggers. Critics portrayed the foreign getaway as tone-deaf to the deep economic anxiety back home. Every first family takes vacations: the criticism aimed at Mrs Obama is that she chose to visit a foreign country rather than remain in the US and support its fragile economy.
Just last month, Mrs Obama flew to the Florida panhandle, a tourist draw hit hard by the oil spill crisis, and delivered the message that for parents "looking for things to do with their kids this summer … this is a wonderful place to visit."
The opulence of the European trip also has drawn scrutiny. Mr Obama has urged frugality in lean economic times. He once cautioned that families saving money for college shouldn't "blow a bunch of cash in Vegas."
AT LEAST in Vegas, there's the slimmest of chances you might hit it big, though. When you're dealing with Washington, politics and the public's bankroll, not so much.
Because while money still talks (in this case, en Español), Obama's bullshit has just taken a walk.
They heard me singing and they told me to stop Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock These days my life, I feel it has no purpose But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
'Cause on the surface the city lights shine They're calling at me, come and find your kind Sometimes I wonder if the World's so small That we can never get away from the sprawl Living in the sprawl Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains And there's no end in sight I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
-- Arcade Fire, Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Once upon a time, Grand Isle, La., was your average, everyday, sleepy Gulf Coast fishing mecca and tourist trap.
No more. BP changed that in a heartbeat.
Or . . . could it be that the BPocalypse -- this stress-inducing gumbo of lawyers, guns and money (and a big, big oil spill) -- merely has broken down inhibitions enough, just like extreme stress or extreme drink can do to people, so that now it's just more of what it already was beneath a carefully constructed facade?
This is the kind of question we'll be pondering all across the Gulf for a long, long time as klepto-capitalism rides the waves, crying "Havoc!"
IF YOU'VE NOT been regularly reading the oil-spill dispatches of Mother Jones' Mac McClelland already, now would be a good time to start:
I hear about the race riot at Daddy's Money almost as soon as I arrive on Grand Isle, Louisiana. My friend and I are going to the bar tonight to catch the "female oil wrestling" oil-spill cleanup workers have been packing in to see on Saturday nights. When we stop by the office of the island's biggest seafood distributor, he tells us that two days ago a bunch of black guys and a bunch of white guys got into a big fight at the bar. It spilled out all over the street and had to be broken up by a ton of cops.
According to the Census, 1,541 people live in this slow Southern resort town. An estimated 2.9 of them are black. That was before the spill. The seafood guy gestures in the direction of the floating barracks being built on barges in the bay to house the lower-skilled cleanup workers, and says that people think the barracks will keep those workers—who are mostly black—from "jumping off" onto dry land and causing trouble.
That night, dozens of men in race-segregated packs crowd around to watch strippers dance around and then tussle inside the bouncy inflatable ring set up inside Daddy's Money. Female oil wrestlers need, obviously, to be oiled. Plastic cups full of baby oil are being auctioned off, along with the right to rub their contents all over one of the thong-bikinied gals. "I hope there's no dispersant in that oil!" someone quips. The bidding before the first match starts at $10; it ends pretty quickly when some kid offers $100.
"He outbid me!" the guy next to me yells. His name is Cortez. He bid $80. He has dollar bills tucked all the way around under the brim of his hat, and piles of them in his fist. He has spent $200 of his $1,000 paycheck already tonight. "I am coming here every Saturday from now on," he says. He gestures expansively at the scene—writhing women; hollering, money-throwing men. "Sponsored by BP!" he yells, laughing, then throws his arms around me and grabs my ass.
Upstairs, on the open-air deck, the supervisors and professional contractors drink. One comes over to talk; he calls me a Yankee when I don't get that when he says "animals" he means black guys. Another tells us about the crime-prone "monkeys." I have already stopped counting how many times I've heard the n-word on Grand Isle today.
THE LONGER I live away from Louisiana, the more I think I'd consider it a badge of honor to be called a Yankee by some good ol' boy.
That said, chances are, Grand Isle -- and the rest of the eroding, subsiding Louisiana coast -- will sink into the toxic sea before the spill-induced societal Armageddon has run its course there, giving way to the everyday, ordinary Louisiana pathologies that have proven so resistant to enlightenment.
"We'll be here as long as oil keeps washing up," the contractor says.
"So..." I laugh sort of helplessly. "A year?"
"Three years..." he says. "Five years..."
"Hopefully forever," the guy next to him says. "I need this job if I can't work offshore anymore." Last week, the emcee that accompanies the oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, "Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!" The workers -— part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots -- the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered.
THE HUMAN CONDITION can be an ugly thing. And leave it to a titty bar in some oil-soiled backwater of a too-poor, too-ignorant and too-hateful Southern state to "kick it up a notch."
All the eco-activists did was shut down your London petrol stations for a day, as we learn here from MSNBC:
As BP CEO Tony Hayward resigned under a cloud Tuesday, thousands of British motorists got an unexpected reminder of the oil spill that's wreaked havoc in the Gulf of Mexico.
Protesters with the environmental group Greenpeace said they shut off fuel supplies at 46 BP gas stations across London just in time for the morning rush-hour. Small teams of activists used a standard shut-off switch to stop the flow of fuel oil at the targeted stations. The switches were then removed to prevent most BP outlets in the capital from opening.
And to ensure there was no chance of drivers buying gas, demonstrators in fluorescent vests and helmets locked green metal fences around some sites.
"What BP needs to do is not just change CEOs it needs to actually come up with a new strategy," Greenpeace U.K.’s chief executive John Sauven said at one of the shuttered stations in Camden, north London.
ACTUALLY, poetic justice would have involved blowing those stations up and filling your headquarters building with crude oil.
