"Check It Out" for Tuesday, February 17th
Marty Kaplan at Huffington Post offers an analysis of the media and its reporting of the stimulus bill: stenography versus news judgment...
"If the job of the press were to help the public understand what's really important, and to distinguish propaganda from facts, then Republican attempts to sink the bill by defining it as liberal pork would have gone nowhere...
"When reporting is reconceived as stenography, there's no place in news for news judgment. The Republicans know this. If we trash it, they will come -- that's the GOP's formula for gaming the Beltway press corps...
"I'm not saying that the Democrats were blameless during this debate. Calling it a stimulus bill instead of a jobs bill was lame-brained, and a measure of how easy it is to be co-opted by technocratic insider culture...
"And don't get me started on the Brigadoon of bipartisanship. House Republicans united in lockstep and in martyrdom: Senate Republicans rejected out of hand the core idea of creating jobs through public spending and instead united on a trickle-down tax cut of $2.5 trillion over 10 years, as though George W. Bush had won a third term...
"Still, whatever Obama did wrong, it was no reason for the media to go gaga for grandstanding Republican demagoguery...
"Political coverage, especially on cable, has become a branch of theater criticism. What counts isn't the merits of the case; what's appraised is the mastery of stagecraft. This is what politics has come to mean: not the apportionment of power, but the snow job of show biz."
In these hard economic times, even white collar professionals are losing their jobs.
Steve Lopez at the LATimes writes about a laid-off lawyer who says attorneys are losing their jobs in droves.
" 'I can't get a job anywhere.'
"I've been getting a lot of e-mails that start like that. This one was from Ellie Trope of Mid-City in Los Angeles, near La Brea, who lost her job more than a year ago. She wrote me after reading my column two weeks ago about the endless mob scene at the employment office in Van Nuys.
"Trope, 43, is an attorney with 15 years of experience, and she said lawyers are losing their jobs in droves.
"When people in banking and the mortgage industry were getting the heave-ho, it came as no surprise. In fact, on Friday I spoke to a banking executive with 20,000 employees under him who got fired in December after 21 years on the job. But I would have thought anyone with a law degree would be able to talk their way out of a layoff, file for an injunction, whatever.
"Not so. Trope told me it's gotten much worse of late, and when I made some phone calls and checked on the Internet, I found that law firms in California and throughout the nation have been handing out pink slips by the dozens and the hundreds.
"She never lived lavishly, she said, but she and her husband were overextended on the mortgage and private school for the kids.
"Trope thinks back on how her grandmother, who lived through the Depression, always slipped sugar packets into her purse when she left a restaurant. Now Trope understands, and though she knows she'll never be hungry, she wonders how she'll continue to pay for health insurance and whether the house she and her estranged husband own can be saved from foreclosure."
Robert Naiman at CommonDreams writes that the key obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace is the relationship between the US and Israel.
"It is well-known outside the United States that a key obstacle, if not the key obstacle, to Israeli/Palestinian peace is the relationship between Israel and the United States. To say that the U.S. "supports Israel" severely misstates the problem: the key problem is the perception and the reality that the U.S. almost unfailingly protects the Israeli government from the negative consequences of anti-Palestinian policies, such as the recent military assault on Gaza, so that while rhetorically the U.S. is committed to peace, in practice the incentives that have been created and maintained by U.S. policy have had the effect of constantly pushing the Israeli government towards more confrontation with the Palestinians, rather than towards accommodation. Just as a Wall Street banker who expects a U.S. government bailout will take dangerous risks since he is protected from the potential negative consequences of those risks, so Israeli government leaders, faced with choices between "risks for peace" and "risks for war" will tend to choose "risks for war" since the U.S. government is perceived to provide a blanket insurance policy against "risks for war" while no such insurance is perceived to exist for "risks for peace."
"The key immediate question then for people in the United States concerned about Israeli-Palestinian peace is altering the character of the insurance policy. Just as Washington must demand policy changes in exchange for insuring Wall Street banks, so Washington must demand policy changes in exchange for insuring Israeli government policies. In either case, the failure to demand policy changes spreads systemic risk, since the insurance effectively makes the failed policies into policies of the U.S. government."
David Macaray at Counterpunch writes about why the US needs labor unions.
"As Detroit’s multi-millionaire executives continue to mix it up with the struggling UAW, arguing over how to resuscitate a dying and woefully mis-managed industry without totally annihilating the wages and benefits the union spent 60 years fighting to get, the Obama administration agonizes over what to do next.
"When the conversation turns to the topic of unions, it’s discouraging to hear people praise organized labor’s historical role in reshaping American society—more or less “inventing” the middle-class—and then, in the same breath, declare that unions are, at best, anachronisms, or, at worst, unwieldy obstacles to economic progress.
"Many of the same folks who glowingly acknowledge labor’s contributions—equal pay for women, abolishing child labor, the 8-hour day, the 5-day week, overtime premiums, paid vacation, sick pay, pensions, maternity leave, mandatory safety programs, and company-paid health insurance—will sigh and announce that, alas, we don’t really need unions any more.
"Presumably, because we now have all those goodies, they’re unable to think their way to the next level. And that next level yields two truths: (1) Relations between Labor (those who work) and Management (those who pay for work) will always be adversarial; and (2) because Management possesses the lion’s share of the wealth, resources, power, education, prestige and government patronage, Labor’s only hope lies in organizing.
"With the post-New Deal federal government having demonstrated that it is slavishly accommodating to Corporate America (despite the occasional crumb thrown labor’s way), it should be apparent even to those who are uncomfortable with “collectivism” that the only entity capable of taking on Big Business is Big Labor. The choice for working people is either accepting “genteel poverty,” or joining together and rising up.
"Corporations are predictable. They hate paying taxes; they hate paying wages (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent millions lobbying against raising the minimum wage, which, even today, at $6.55, is pitifully low); they hate unions; and they more or less hate the federal government, which they view as an impediment—until they need bailouts or regulations to stifle their competitors.
"Given the direction of the country, shouldn’t labor unions be seen not only as relevant, but as absolutely vital? Without the unions propping up wages and benefits, who would do it? Arguably, without unions, the U.S. would become a glorified post-industrial oligarchy."
And Christopher Hayes at The Nation (via AlterNet) writes about the Blue Dog Dems and their clout including background and analysis.
"I've spent the past few months trying to sort out why the Blue Dogs get so much attention. The best I can tell, there are two main reasons. One has to do with the organizational mechanics of the Blue Dog caucus, which is more unified and cohesive than any other in the House. The other has to do with the ongoing Beltway love affair with "fiscal conservatism."
"While the Progressive Caucus is larger and more integrated into the House leadership, the Blue Dogs are arguably more effective. This is partly because of the drawbacks of size: the bigger you are, the harder it is to achieve consensus, and as a result Progressive Caucus members rarely take positions en masse. Blue Dogs, on the other hand, have limited their membership to 25 percent of the House Democratic caucus and take official positions on bills only if they have the support of two-thirds of their members.
"This allows the Blue Dogs to operate more like a junior parliamentary coalition partner than the loose federation that is the Progressive Caucus.
"Where Blue Dogs have perhaps been most effective is in helping Republicans pass legislation and blocking or diluting progressive legislation.
"...in Washington, the perception of power is indistinguishable from actual power. And if the Blue Dogs don't have much of the latter, they have the former in spades."
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