Cross-posted from Media Matters…

It is not insulting Fox News host Greg Gutfeld to say he doesn’t know much about the subjects he jokes and chats about for a living. He draws pleasure from saying so himself, over and over again, in a thousand repetitive ways.

Like the network he works for, Gutfeld’s shtick is premised on the loud embrace of a pugilistic, media-bubbled conservatism. Gutfeld considered the late Andrew Breitbart a close friend and inspiration, and indeed represents what might be called the Breitbartian wing of the Fox News spectrum: he revels in media war for its own sake, prefers pop culture to political history, and spends his time buried in a trough of Twitter feeds and feuds. His new book, The Joy of Hate, reads like an extended riff on the author’s admission to being just an oversexed, Internet-and-TV addicted former lad-mag editor, who not all that long ago was teaching “old people how to do sit-ups on cruise ships,” and whose idea of journalistic legwork is using the search box at FoxNews.com.

Gutfeld’s winding road to right-wing punditry began as a student at UC-Berkeley during the 1980s. There he developed hatred for the left rooted in splenetic tendencies and cultural resentments more than any engagement with campus protest. Thirty years later, Gutfeld still doesn’t know anything about the era he says forged his political identity. In The Joy of Hate, he shrugs off the debate over Reagan’s Central America policies by calling it a bunch of “stupid crap” about which he says he’d “be lying if I told you I had a clue.” This is just one of many similar asides, and after a while you start to wonder if it’s part of an act when he jokes about not knowing the major combatants of World War II. Such self-denigrating honesty might not fortify Gutfeld’s qualifications as an ascendant pundit, but it should at least have given his book a sole endearing quality. But it doesn’t. The host of Fox News’ The Five and Red Eye (and sometimes sub for Bill O’Reilly) isn’t really being self-deprecating. He’s bragging.

Which makes Gutfeld’s book worthy of note when paired with the question: What does it say about the future of conservatism that Fox News keeps expanding the role of a man-child with so little interest in or knowledge about politics?

When pundits like Gutfeld don’t have much to say, but want to sell some books, they pilgrimage to the corpse of “political correctness,” which the right entombed after the success of Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought To Be launched the conservative publishing boom 20 years ago. The twist distinguishing Gutfeld’s paint-by-the-numbers entry from so many other titles in the Crown Forum back catalogue is homoerotic or gay-themed humor, a staple of Gutfeld’s on-air personae since he joined Fox in 2007 as the host of Red Eye, following a career in publishing spanning The American Spectator, Men’s Health, Prevention, Stuff, and the British edition of Maxim. Last year, he became a co-host of The Five, the fact-challenged panel show that replaced Glenn Beck’s vacated 5 p.m. slot.

Like so many have before, Gutfeld argues in his book that America is “under attack” by a liberal “tolerati” that has acquired tyrannical powers to police the boundaries of acceptable speech. He quickly stretches the point into farcical tolerance determinism. The tolerati (led by Media Matters, which he terms “the ventriloquist” while “the liberal media is the dummy”) dictates a “fetishized tolerance [that] is at the root of every single major political conflict we’re experiencing now – from terrorism to climate change, from birth control to the left’s weird indifference to large-scale, destructive evil.” His proposed solution is as simple as it is self-serving: more jerks like Greg Gutfeld. “We need to be jerks, smart intolerant jerks,” writes the Fox News star. “We need the idiocy of open-mindedness with happy judgmentalism.”

Gutfeld’s book is a crash course in Jerk Studies, a collection of conversational riffs and rants on America’s “poop stars” and “vagina demagogues.” Together they explain why, if you hold The Joy of Hate to your ear like a conch, you will hear not the ocean, but the sound of a particular brand of wiseass white entitlement accelerating its long slide down the wrong side of history.

It’s fitting that Gutfeld’s book hit stores the week after a presidential election understood to signal an historic realignment of electoral power away from the GOP’s white male base. The timing should give pause to Gutfeld’s boosters with a role in crafting conservative movement strategy. The Red Eye host’s book is unlikely to broaden the right’s appeal with young women or minorities. The former don’t have much use for Gutfeld’s habit of using scare quotes around the phrase “women’s health issue,” or his belief that “if you can’t afford [birth control pills], then clearly you are too lazy and stupid to have sex.” Blacks and Latinos, meanwhile, are unlikely to nod along to Gutfeld’s assessment that “the only people hurt by racism these days are the racists.”

But conservative political comedy is a fallow field, and some on the right insist Gutfeld can succeed where so many others have failed. In a recent Daily Caller article, former Bush administration official David Cohen described Gutfeld as “a uniquely gifted ambassador for the conservative cause” with a “style that can resonate not only with younger folks, but with others who have not traditionally welcomed the conservative message.” Gutfeld, Cohen argues, is a crossover hit waiting to happen, a secret weapon capable of closing the humor gap with the left and shifting the cultural balance of power rightward.

Gutfeld “is as hip to pop culture as they come [and] uses his hipness and humor as weapons to fight back on our behalf,” writes Cohen. “In eschewing ‘coolness’ as it’s defined by the guardians of our popular culture, Gutfeld makes it cool to be conservative. … [His] greatest upside lies in his potential to cross over. A lot of Republican leaders have been moping around after the election, trying to figure out how to communicate our values to young voters and others who went for Obama. They could learn something by watching Red Eye. Evidently, the brass at Fox News shares my assessment.”

And evidently the brass at Fox News doesn’t understand the new America. “You can tell your kids day and night to be good people,” writes Gutfeld in the Joy of Hate, “but you’re up against some serious competition: Lady Gaga [and] hip hop.” Is this the voice of a free-market Jon Stewart – or David Cohen’s great-grandmother? Even on major social issues, the self-proclaimed libertarian Gutfeld sounds like yesterday’s man. While trying to joke his way out of a coherent position on gay marriage, he ends up sounding like Rick Santorum. “If I’m running a business,” he writes, “I don’t want to pay for your dog’s health insurance, even if he is your spouse. So that’s where my tolerance ends.”

It’s also pretty close to the place Gutfeld’s youth appeal faulters. If conservatives want to better connect to young people, here’s some advice: cultivate personalities who don’t fill their books by writing that students protesting tuition hikes should feel lucky to be pepper-sprayed; or that consensus climate science is a “pile of crap”; or that the basic problem with American democracy is that “we have too many friggin’ voices trying to make themselves heard.”

The right is delusional if it thinks it can replicate the success of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with Gutfeldian rightwing “irreverence.” One of the reasons people are drawn to the Comedy Central shows aside from the jokes is they don’t trust other news sources, and Fox News especially. Whatever tweaks Gutfeld may make to his formula in the future, he seems constitutionally (and institutionally) incapable of the basic fact checking, let alone the kind of serious research that goes into the best bits on the Daily Show. Gutfeld’s book continues into print his televised talent as a happy vehicle for blatant disinformation — on basic environmental issues, on major labor disputes, on the economic benefits of oil infrastructure. Leaving aside the content of his politics and the question of whether he’s actually funny, this explains why Gutfeld will forever struggle with the demo, and will remain just another target for more popular comedic pundits.

At least Gutfeld’s publisher understands this. Crown put together a book tour that takes Gutfeld mostly through the deep red states of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. The only California stop is at the Reagan library. The biggest signing in Florida will take place at the Villages, an ultraconservative retirement community north of Orlando where the elderly members get around on golf carts.

Gutfeld does have fans in blue parts of the country, here and there, a number of whom contributed back jacket blurbs to the Joy of Hate. The District-dwelling Jonah Goldberg, who shares a publisher with Gutfeld, hails the book as “brilliant.” Manhattan resident Ann Coulter calls it the work of a “genius.” The L.A.-based Fox contributor Dennis Miller compares the book favorably to the works of Voltaire.

It is apparently in the spirit of Voltaire that Gutfeld reviews the professional arc of a shock jock named Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, whose broadcasting career nosedived in 1999 when he followed a Lauryn Hill song by saying, “And they wonder why we drag them behind trucks,” a reference to the previous year’s gruesome and racially inspired murder of James Byrd. Gutfeld assures readers he’s not defending the Greaseman or his joke. He’s merely highlighting the case to prove the media’s unfair double standard: Jokes by liberals about the Pope are given a pass, while jokes by conservatives about modern lynchings get you fired. At least that seems to be Gutfeld’s argument, until he starts talking about Tracht’s firing as proof that “awful blatant racism” isn’t really a problem anymore. After all, the guy lost his job, right? The canning of a DJ is, in Gutfeld’s boy-in-the-media-bubble view, a more significant fact in assessing the persistence of racism than the murder of James Byrd (or, more recently, James Anderson). It is a conclusion that follows naturally from Breitbart’s Warholian-Maoistdictum that “politics is downstream from pop culture.”

The key to Greg Gutfeld is found not far from here, in his adolescent obsession with a hierarchy of “cool” and his not-so-secret yearning for approval by whatever Olympian culture committee he imagines designates such things. He claims that he and his conservative friends are so rebellious and so cool they’re beyond needing acceptance, but the transparency of this pose becomes clear in the chapters devoted to the subject, which are also the book’s most personal. “The longer I live,” he huffs, “the more I’m convinced the world is just one big high school, with the cool kids always targeting the uncool.” There is no more sullen or bitter kid at Tolerati High than Greg Gutfeld, who writes: “The entertainment industry hates the uncool (read: the right) so much that if a maniacal leader arose from the left to announce he would send the uncool to ‘how to be cool’ camps, no one in a band would raise an objection.”

In an attempt to show the injustice and backwardness of the liberal-dominated cool hierarchy, Gutfeld namedrops right-wing musicians like Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground and Billy Zoom of X. These guys are really cool – they understand “it’s more daring to be traditional than subvert tradition.” In any case, Gutfeld runs out of right-wing musician names fast, and soon resorts to talking about the time he had beers with Johnny Rotten and was happily surprised to learn that while Rotten loves Obama, he hates hippies, just like Gutfeld does. Punks don’t like hippies – who knew?

The biggest reveal in Gutfeld’s ruminations on cool is a fawning section on his friend and Vice magazine co-founder, Gavin McInnes. Gutfeld is very impressed by McInnes’ hipster credentials in music, fashion, and publishing. But what really impresses Gutfeld is the way McInnes refuses to bow before the tolerati. Around the time people began seeing McInnes as part of a long tradition of punk/hipster racism, he sold his stake in Vice and was basically never heard from again. These days he blogs at Taki’s Magazine alongside tolerati casualties Pat Buchanan and John Derbyshire. (Ever wondered where those two ended up?) Taki’scontributor’s list also includes McIness’ friend Jim Goad, who surprisingly does not appear in The Joy of Hate. In a popular post at Taki’s, Goad recently listed ten reasons not to assassinate Barack Obama, among them number five: “Legions of unkempt, ill-mannered, malodorous, blue-gummed, and yellow-eyed ‘urban’ ‘people’ would likely burn cities to the ground from coast to coast.”

Everything in The Joy of Hate suggests that Gutfeld would love to free his inner jerk like this. But don’t expect him to sit down at Taki’s cool-conservative-kid table anytime soon. The Taki’s roster is a warning to those who want to keep their well-paid perches in major media. However much Gutfeld may chafe against the invisible strictures he says are placed around his commentary (and America’s soul) he is an unlikely candidate for media martyrdom before his next contract negotiation. Behind all of Gutfeld’s jokes about his intellectual laziness and not caring what anyone thinks is a professional savvy that understands there’s no money in fully bearing your inner jerk on national television, even at Red Eye‘s time slot of 3 a.m. “Is making money bad?” he asks toward the end of the book while setting match to an unrecognizable straw man version of the Occupy protests. No, he concludes, it is not bad, and also a money system is better than a barter system. Gutfeld then gets back to his biting analysis of the debate between a corporation and its critics. “One makes money. The other makes noise,” he writes. “So yeah, they are the same – except one really sucks.”

Gutfeld is almost certainly right that he will never be a cool icon of popular culture. But it isn’t because he’s conservative. It’s because he’s a jerk.

This article is cross-posted from In These Times

On September 13, two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof penned an op-ed titled “Students Over Unions” bashing the Chicago Teachers Union’s current strike. Kristof writes,

I’d be sympathetic if the union focused solely on higher compensation. Teachers need to be much better paid to attract the best college graduates to the nation’s worst schools. But, instead, the Chicago union seems to be using its political capital primarily to protect weak performers.

Ironically, when Kristof started off at the Times in the 1980s, he was protected by similar job-security provisions as a member of the Newspaper Guild of New York. When Kristof become a columnist for the paper, he ceased being a union member. Now that Kristof is a star, union members say that he has given them the cold shoulder when they have asked for help in restoring pensions to the foreign overseas employees who have very likely helped Kristof in his reporting.

In January, the New York Times froze the pensions of its non-U.S.-citizen overseas employees, many of whom work in dangerous hotspots as translators and fixers. The move greatly upset New York Times reporters, especially with two recent deaths of foreign employees: the 2009 killing of reporter Sultan Munadi (a former Times interpreter) in Afghanistan while he was trying to protect a Times reporter, and of Times translator Khalid W. Hassan outside of Baghdad in 2007.

More than 600 New York Times employees condemned the pension freeze in an open letter to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, last December. “Our foreign citizen employees in overseas bureaus have just had their pensions frozen with only a week’s warning. Some of these people have risked their lives so that we can do our jobs,” read the letter. “A couple have even lost them. Many have spent their entire careers at the Times—indeed, some have letters from your father explaining the pension system—and deserve better treatment.”

One union member says he wrote to Kristof–who has won two Pulitzers for his overseas reporting and surely worked with New York Times’ foreign employees–and asked him to sign the letter. He says Kristof ignored him.

“I was one of the several authors of the letter. At the time, I wrote individually to all the columnists [except Krugman] asking them to consider signing it. Because some had been foreign correspondents and had depended on those people who were being unilaterally screwed out of their pensions and who had no union protection, I hoped they would step forward,” says New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil. “But not one signed. Not one even answered my note. Since then, I’ve hoped that at least one or two would weigh in on our struggle here. But nothing. Silence.”

Nicholas Kristof did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Currently, the New York Times is locked in an ugly contract struggle with the union that Kristof once belonged to, the Newspaper Guild of New York. The reporters at the New York Times have worked without a contract for nearly a year and a half, since their previous contract expired on March 31, 2011. (Full disclosure: I am an associate member of the Newspaper Guild (TNG-CWA).)

As the contract battle heats up at the New York Times, union leaders such as O’Meara are hoping more star reporters and columnists speak up. He fears that the New York Times is going to seek an impasse in bargaining with the National Labor Relations Board in order to unilaterally impose a concessionary contract on unionized reporters.

“People think they are stars and don’t need a union. Unfortunately, what happens is there is a change in management and their star dims a bit, and they do need a union,” says Bill O’Meara. “It’s a real shame.”

Life’s good at the top!

As someone who attempted to organize reporters myself as part of the Newspaper Guild, I can tell you that solidarity can be difficult to find in reporters whose job security comes from their byline and not their union clout. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon for star reporters or columnists to stay out of union struggles, feeling that their jobs are protected by the power of their brands. Reporters as popular as Kristof, who has over 1 million Twitter followers, are the least likely to suffer a pay cut or a layoff, as the New York Times could ill afford to lose them.

But other Times reporters may face a tougher situation.

“I think it is going to come to a head in the next month,” says O’Meara. “The struggle is going to get very difficult. Various things are going to happen. Nobody is ruling out a strike. Obviously we want to avoid it and get a contract.”

This article is cross-posted from In These Times

Mike Elk is an eXiled comrade and a staff writer at In These Times. Read his labor reporting…

On Monday, September 10, the Chicago Teachers Union—the oldest teachers union in America—went on strike. Teachers are striking for better pay, smaller class sizes and more job security. They are striking against school privatizations, teaching to standardized testing and the general “corporate reform agenda” of Chicago city officials.  The list of enemies aligned against the teachers is long and intimidating: Billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, Charles Koch, Art Pope, Rahm Emanuel, President Obama and . . . Steven Levitt. Yes, Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economist and author of the wildly successful book Freakonomics.

Levitt might come off as just a harmless and off-beat academic—a sort of Wes Anderson pop-economics guru who studies whacky stuff like why drug dealers live with their moms. But underneath that quirky facade, Levitt is a dyed-in-the-wool Milton Friedman neoliberal from the same “Chicago Boys” network that brought you the “shock doctrine.” When he isn’t pursing research into borderline eugenicist policies or studying the benefits of privatized prison labor on GDP, he’s hard at work doing his part helping the oligarchy put unionized Chicago school teachers up against the wall.

Specifically, Levitt has worked with Chicago’s notorious union-buster Arne Duncan, who was the CEO of Chicago public schools until Obama tapped Duncan to be the U.S. Education Secretary in 2008. Duncan has been credited with doing more than anyone else to help bring the neoliberal nightmare to Chicago’s impoverished and mostly nonwhite public schools, funneling public funds to dysfunctional private voucher schools, terrorizing unionized teachers, closing schools and turning public education into feeder tube for the prison-industrial complex. And Levitt, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago, was right there along with Duncan.

Levitt, together with other University of Chicago economists, was given access to the city’s public school system and turned it into a neoliberal R&D lab for high-tech union-busting.

Teacher bashers Steven Levitt and Arne Duncan

Under the guise of objective economic science, Levitt helped develop various ways to weaponize standardized testing and use it to bully and intimidate unionized teachers. Among them was a statistical method that allowed the anti-union school bureaucracy to catch and fire public-school teachers who supposedly cheated on standardized tests. Firing and terrorizing public-school teachers was clearly a point of pride for Levitt, and he took personal credit and boasted about sacking at least a dozen teachers, gloating in his book Freakonomics that, as a result of his method, “Chicago Public School system began to fire its cheating teachers. The evidence was only strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned.”

Most recently, Levitt has been experimenting with a new way of making life miserable for underpaid public school teachers: an experimental program that provides teachers with a cash bonus up front at the beginning of an academic year and then forces teachers to give the money back if their students fail to test above a certain threshold. Cash-strapped teachers are horrified, wondering how they will be able to give back the money if their students didn’t test well:

For one school year, the research project by heavyweight economists from the University of Chicago and Harvard University — including the author of the best-seller Freakonomics — turned nine elementary schools in Chicago Heights School District 170 into a teacher testing ground of a behavioral phenomenon called “loss aversion.’’

Of course, neither Levitt nor any other school “reformer” would ever think that we should hold Wall Street fraudsters to the same standard of accountability. So while the financial-management class pays itself record bonuses for record failure, teachers are being tested for their ability to respond to “loss aversion.” Just how much impoverishment, financial degradation and abuse will teachers take before they are willing to lie, cheat and steal their way into keeping that $4,000 “bonus”? What will they do if they have to pay it back? Will they take a loan? What if they are ineligible? Will they sell a kidney or liver on the black market?

Levitt would definitely approve of the latter. After all, his economic hero and mentor Gary Becker is a huge fan of setting up a free-market for human organs. The free market always finds a solution!

Despite his extremist anti-worker ideology, Levitt isn’t published by Cato or the American Enterprise Institute. He’s better than that: he’s been blessed with a Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website and Freakonomics segment on public radio’s Marketplace. The New York Times has of course officially come out against the Chicago teachers strike.

Levitt shows just how hard Chicago teachers have it. They aren’t just fighting Chicago’s city officials such as Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but are doing battle with the entire corrupt intellectual apparatus of the United States.

Want to know more? Check out Steven Levitt’s S.H.A.M.E. profile.

***

Yasha Levine is co-founder the S.H.A.M.E. Project and author of The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell.

Click the cover, buy the book!

To celebrate today’s announcement that Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan will in a few months’ time be a heartbeat from the presidency—and to honor this special moment, marking the final syphilitic pus-spasms of America’s decline and fall–we are reposting for your edification Mark Ames’ 2010 article about the man behind the Rand: Ayn Rand’s unrequited adoration of a notorious serial killer, William Edward Hickman. Yes, Vice President-to-be Paul Ryan owes his entire “moral” worldview to a lowly groupie of serial killers, a 1920′s prototype of today’s “Joker” wannabees. Yes folks, in a few months’ time Americans will finally be able to stand up and declare: “We are all serial-killer groupies now.” 

There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people go frothing batshit angry at the suggestion that maybe health care coverage should be extended to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it; or when they froth at the mouth in ecstasy at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of their population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who plays Charlie to the American right-wing’s Manson Family. Read on and you’ll see why.

One reason why most countries don’t find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” that Rand promoted in her more famous books — ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, Rep. Paul Ryan, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate “entitlement programs” increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked “Atlas Shrugged” as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after The Bible.

His time has finally come

So what, and who, was Ayn Rand for and against? The best way to get to the bottom of it is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten by Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.”

(The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s favorite book — he even makes his clerks learn it, much as Vice President-to-be Paul Ryan tried making his interns read Rand.)

I’ll get to where Rand picked up her silly Superman blather from later — but first, let’s meet William Edward Hickman, the “genuinely beautiful soul” and inspiration to Ayn Rand. What you will read below — the real story, details included, of what made Hickman a “Superman” in Ayn Rand’s eyes — is rather gory reading, even if you’re a longtime fan of true crime “Death Porn” — so prepare yourself. Because you should read this to give Rand’s ideas their proper context, and to repeat this over and over until all of America understands what made this fucked-up Russian nerd’s mind tick, because Rand’s influence over the very people leading the fight to kill social programs, and her ideological influence on so many powerful bankers, regulators and businessmen who brought the financial markets crashing down, means that it’s suicide to ignore her, no matter how dumb, silly or beneath you her books and ideas are.

Rand fell for William Edward Hickman in the late 1920s, as the shocking story of Hickman’s crime started to grip the nation. His crime, trial and case was a non-stop headline grabber for months; the OJ Simpson of his day. Ayn Rand joined the herd of Hickman groupies, and there were lots of them at the time—much like metalhead serial killer groupies today, the types who write letters to imprisoned serial killers. That’s Ayn Rand. Here, for example, is an old newspaper clipping showing how common it was for the growing legions of reactionary waffendweebs of the late 1920′s to sign up for the William Edward Hickman Fan Club:

Is serial killer William Edward Hickman (left) opening one of  Ayn Rand’s fangirl letters?

Hickman, who was only 19 when he was arrested for murder, was the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and grandmother. His schoolmates said that as a kid Hickman liked to strangle cats and snap the necks of chickens for fun — most of the kids thought he was a budding maniac, though the adults gave him good marks for behavior, a typical sign of sociopathic cunning. He enrolled in college but quickly dropped out, and quickly turned to violent crime largely driven by the thrill and arrogance typical of sociopaths: in a brief and wild crime spree that grew increasingly violent, Hickman knocked over dozens of gas stations and drug stores across the Midwest and west to California. Along the way it’s believed he strangled a girl in Milwaukee, and killed his crime partner’s grandfather in Pasadena, tossing his body over a bridge after taking his money. Hickman’s partner later told police that Hickman told him how much he’d like to kill and dismember a victim someday — and that day did come for Hickman.

One afternoon, Hickman drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High school in Los Angeles, and told administrators that he’d come to pick up “the Parker girl” — her father, Perry Parker, was a prominent banker. Hickman didn’t know the girl’s first name, so when he was asked which of the two Parker twins — Hickman answered, “the younger daughter.” And then he corrected himself: “The smaller one.” The school administrator fetched young Marion, and brought her out to Hickman. No one suspected his motive; Marion obediently followed Hickman to his car as she was told, where he promptly kidnapped her. He wrote a ransom note to Marion’s father, demanding $1,500 for her return, promising that the girl would be left unharmed. Marion was terrified into passivity — she even waited in the car for Hickman when he went to mail his letter to her father. Hickman’s extreme narcissism comes through in his ransom letters, as he refers to himself as a “master mind [sic]” and “not a common crook.” Hickman signed his letters “The Fox” because he admired his own cunning: “Fox is my name, very sly you know.” And then he threatened: “Get this straight. Your daughter’s life hangs by a thread.”

Photo of Marion (also spelled “Marian”) Parker

Hickman and the girl’s father exchanged letters over the next few days as they arranged the terms of the ransom, while Marion obediently followed her captor’s demands. She never tried to escape the hotel where he kept her; Hickman even took her to a movie, and she never screamed for help. She remained quiet and still as told when Hickman tied her to the chair — he didn’t even bother gagging her because there was no need to, right up to the gruesome end.

Suitcase containing some of Marion Parker’s remains and blood-soaked towels

Hickman’s last ransom note to Marion’s father is where this story reaches its disturbing apex: Hickman fills the letter with hurt anger over her father’s suggestion that Hickman might deceive him, and “ask you for your $1500 for a lifeless mass of flesh I am base and low but won’t stoop to that depth.” What Hickman didn’t say was that as he wrote the letter, Marion was already several chopped-up lifeless masses of flesh. Why taunt the father? Why feign outrage? This sort of bizarre taunting was all part of the serial killer’s thrill, maximizing the sadistic pleasure he got from knowing that he was deceiving the father before the father even knew what happened to his daughter. But this was nothing compared to the thrill Hickman got from murdering the helpless 12-year-old Marion Parker. Here is an old newspaper description of the murder, taken from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 27, 1927:

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he continued, “and I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marian. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead. Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Another newspaper account dryly explained what Hickman did next:

Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father.

Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Marion’s head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive–he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she’d appear to be awake and alive. When Marion’s father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Marion’s head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Marion’s head and torso out of the car, and that’s when the father ran up and saw his daughter–and screamed.

Marion Parker’s discarded limbs

This is the “amazing picture” Ayn Rand — guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing — admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.”

Other people don’t exist for Ayn, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante’s bastardized Nietzsche — but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined “Behavioralism Gets The Blame,” a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounce the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas that Hickman and others latch onto as a defense:

“Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman’s original rebellion against society…” the article begins.

Rand denounced the hanging as, “The mob’s murderous desire to revenge its hurt vanity against the man who dared to be alone.”

The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers’ dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. Which aptly fits the description of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for “Supermen” like Hickman. Rand’s philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books:The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even “moral cannibalism” to use her words. To her, those who aren’t like-minded sociopaths are “parasites” and “lice” and “looters.”

But with Rand, there’s something more pathological at work. She’s out to make the world more sociopath-friendly so that people like Ayn and her hero William Hickman can reach their full potential, not held back by the morality of the “weak,” whom Rand despised.

Atlas Shrugging: Paul Ryan’s guru never forgave “the parasites” for hanging her first John Galt hero

That’s what makes it so creepy how Rand and her followers clearly get off on hating and bashing those they perceived as weak–Rand and her followers have a kind of fetish for classifying weaker, poorer people as “parasites” and “lice” who need to swept away. This is exactly the sort of sadism, bashing the helpless for kicks, that Rand’s hero Hickman would have appreciated. What’s really unsettling is that even former Central Bank chief Alan Greenspan, whose relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1957New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends:

Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

Alan Greenspan

As much as Ayn Rand detested human “parasites,” there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her Supermen – the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: “If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite.”

The Russian Bag Lady Who Blew Paul Ryan’s Mind

And yet Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and declare, with pride, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.” Indeed. Except that Ayn Rand also despised democracy, as she declared: “Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom.”

“Collectivism” is another one of those Randian epithets popular among her followers. Here for example is another Republican member of Congress, the one with the freaky thousand-yard-stare, Michelle Bachman, parroting the Ayn Rand ideological line, to explain her reasoning for wanting to kill social programs:

“As much as the collectivist says to each according to his ability to each according to his need, that’s not how mankind is wired. They want to make the best possible deal for themselves.”

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Baggers dividing up the world between “producers” and “collectivism,” just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie. When you hear them threaten to “Go John Galt,” hide your daughters and tell them not to talk to any strangers — or Tea Party Republicans. And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and brag about their plans to slash them for “moral” reasons, just remember Ayn’s morality and who inspired her.

William Edward Hickman’s wet dream come true

Too many critics of Ayn Rand would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, hackneyed, lame, embarrassing–”Nietzsche for sorority girls” was how I used to dismiss her. I did that with the Christian Right, like a lot of people who didn’t want to take on something as big, bland and impervious as them. Too many of us focused elsewhere–until it was too late and the Christian fundamentalist crazies took over America. So this time I’m paying more attention–late as usual, but maybe there’s still time to head off the worst that’s yet to come–because Rand’s name keeps foaming out of the mouths of the Teabagger crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington. Ayn Rand is the guru, and they are the “Rand Family” followers carrying out her vision. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere.

This article first appeared in Alternet.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Calling yourself a libertarian today is a lot like wearing a mullet back in the nineteen eighties. It sends a clear signal: business up front, party in the back.

You know, those guys who call themselves “socially liberal but fiscally conservative”? Yeah. It’s for them.

Today, the ruling class knows that they’ve lost the culture wars. And unlike with our parents, they can’t count on weeping eagles and the stars ‘n bars to get us to fall in line. So libertarianism is their last ditch effort to ensure a succession to the throne.

Republicans freak you out but think the Democrats are wimps? You must be a libertarian! Want to sound smart and thoughtful in front of your boss without alienating your “socially liberal” buds? Just say the L-word, pass the coke and everyone’s happy!

Just look at how they play it up as the “cool” alternative to traditional conservatism. It’s pathetic. George Will wore the bowtie. But Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie wears an ironic D.A.R.E. t-shirt. And don’t forget the rest of his all-black wardrobe, complete with leather jacket. What a totally with-it badass.

***

With such a bleak economic forecast for the Millennials, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that our elites want to make “libertarianism” shorthand for “political disaffection.” Now there’s a demographic with some growth potential. And it’s inspired a lot of poorly-sourced, speculative babble about how “the kids have all gone Galt,” almost always through the personal anecdotes of young white men.

A couple of months ago, after Harvard released a poll on the political views of Millennials, libertarians took to the internet to tell the world how the youth of America was little more than a giant anarcho-capitalist sleeper cell–ready to overthrow the state and privatize the air supply at a moment’s notice. So I took a look at the poll numbers. And you know what? It’s utter horseshit.

Right off the bat, we’re told that 79% of Millennials don’t consider themselves politically-engaged at all so, uh, keep that in mind.

Much is made of the fact that less than half of the survey respondents thought the government should provide free health care to those who can’t afford it. What they don’t mention is that that number (44 percent) is twice the percentage who say they stand against (22 percent) such “hand outs.” Nearly a third didn’t think one way or the other.

Then we hear that the poll proves kids don’t care about climate change. But they don’t mention that slightly more Millennials wanted the government to do more on that front than they’re doing now–even if it hurt economic growth. Nearly half, you guessed it, “neither agree nor disagree.” (Come on kids, Rock the Vote!)

More Millennials identify as liberals than conservatives. Hardly any of them (10 percent) support the libertarian-embraced Tea Party. About three-quarters say they despise congressional Republicans.

Nearly two-thirds voted for Obama in 2008. Slightly over half approve of him now. Nearly three-quarters of Millennials hate congressional Republicans. 55% trust in the U.S. military, one of the largest state-socialist programs in the entire world, also responsible for, you know, those wars that libertarians supposedly hate.

Over a quarter put their faith in the federal government all or most of the time, and 55% “some of the time.” Only 17% answered “never.” And despite all their supposed Ron Paul love, they trust the “globalist” United Nations even more than they do the feds.

A little nibble here with only 36% approving of Obama’s handling of the budget deficit, but then again, that’s actually better than his rating on the deficit with Americans of all ages. Plus, worrying about the budget deficit is how dumb people have tried to sound smart since the days of FDR. And most people are dumb.

And when we finally get down to a hypothetical libertarian match-up between Obama and Ron Paul—41 percent pick Obama and only 27 percent pick Paul.

Oh, but the kiddies are cool with gay marriage and tired of bombing brown people overseas? No shit. That just makes them normal people living in the 21st century. I’m for single-payer health care and can’t stand Barney Frank. Does that mean I sip the Kool-Aid at the Lyndon LaRouche compound?

None of this should be too surprising. For almost two decades, roughly two-thirds of the American public have supported what we’d call a moderate European welfare state—putting the average U.S. citizen significantly to the left of the Democratic party, a center/center-right organization saddled, much to their dismay, with a perpetually-disappointed center-left constituency.

But hey, our ruling class would shit a brick if any of that wealth redistribution stuff happened over here. Which is why “this is a center-right nation” has been a favorite Fox News talking point for over ten years. It’s only now—after Occupy Wall Street forced their hand—that the media is finally willing to admit that it might be bullshit.

But libertarianism? Our ruling class is totally fine with that. Smoke your reefer and sodomize whomever you please, just keep your mouth shut and hand over your Social Security account.

***

Never trust a hippietarian

I get the appeal. The state’s been sticking it to working folks for decades. It seems almost unimaginable that Big Government could ever be run by us and not the One Percent.

But child labor laws, the Civil Rights act, federal income tax, minimum wage laws, Social Security, Medicare, food safety—libertarians have accused all of them as infringements upon the free market that would lead to economic ruin. And over and over again, they’ve been proven wrong. Life goes on—a little less gruesomely—and society prospers.

“There is no such thing as a free-market,” economist Ha-Joon Chang has said repeatedly. “A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.”

In other words, markets are social institutions, just as much under the thumb of politics and government as everything else. Which means they’re subject to democratic pressures, as they should be.

And what you “earn” from said markets? Chang: “All our wages are, at root, politically determined.” Despite what Ron Paul’s trolls might have you believe, gold Krugerrands don’t spray out your asshole every time you type up a spreadsheet or pour a Grande mochachino for your next customer.

Capitalism has always been a product of Big Government. Ever since the railroads of the nineteenth century, to Silicon Valley, Big Pharma and the banks, the Nanny State has been there all along, passing subsidies and tax breaks, and eating the costs the private sector doesn’t want.

So whenever a libertarian says that capitalism is at odds with the state, laugh at him. It’s like saying that the NFL is “at war” with football fields. To be a libertarian is to say that God or the universe marked up that field, squirted out the pigskins from the bowels of the earth and handed down the playbooks from Mt. Sinai.

***

When a Red like me wants to argue for something like universal health care or free college tuition, we can point to dozens of wealthy democratic societies doing just that. The Stalinist left is nothing more than a faint memory. But where are the libertarian Utopias?

General Pinochet’s Chile was a longtime favorite. But seeing as how it relied on a fascist coup—with a big assist from Nixon and Kissinger—Chile’s lost a bit of that Cold War luster. So these days, for the slightly more with-it libertarian, we get Singapore as the model of choice.

Hey, isn’t that where the Facebook guy lives these days? That’s pretty “hip”!

Ah, Singapore: a city-state near the very top in the world when it comes to “number of police” and “execution rate” per capita. It’s a charming little one-party state where soft-core pornography is outlawed, labor rights are almost nonexistent and gay sex is banned. Expect a caning if you break a window. And death for a baggie of cocaine.

But hey: no capital gains tax! (Freedom!)

Singapore: Libertarian Paradise

It’s not like any of this will make it through the glassy eyes of the true-believers. Ludwig von Mises, another libertarian pin-up boy, wrote in 1927 that, “Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization.”

Lately, Ron Paul’s economic advisor has been claiming that Communist Party-ruled China has a freer market than the U.S.’s.

***

So let’s talk a little about this freedom they’re always going on about. Or, to paraphrase Lenin, the libertarian’s ultimate nemesis: freedom for who to do what?

Most American adults spend about half their waking hours at a job. And during that time, libertarians do not give a flying fuck about your liberty. Instead, they condone the most brutal of tyrannies all in the name of a private employer’s freedom.

Racial discrimination, verbal abuse, random drug testing, body-searches, sexual harassment, illegal termination, email monitoring, union busting, even withholding piss-breaks–ask any libertarian how they feel about workplace unfreedom and they’ll tell you: “Hey man, if you don’t like it, you have the freedom to get another job.” If folks are hiring. But with four-and-a-half applicants for every job, they’re probably not.

Here’s another thing libertarians always forget to mention: a free-market capitalist society has never and by definition can never lead to full-employment. It has to be made to by—you guessed it—the Nanny State. Free market capitalism actually requires a huge mass of the unemployed—it’s not just a side effect.

And make no mistake: corporate America loves a high unemployment rate.

When most everyone has a job, workers are less likely to take shit. They do nutty things like join unions, demand better wages and refuse to work off-the-clock. They start to stand up to real power: not to the EPA, and not the King of England, but to their bosses.

But with a real unemployment rate close to 20 percent, that ain’t happening. Well, fuck. Better sign up for that Big Government welfare state they’re always whining about. Hey, don’t worry. You could always sell a little crack and turn a few tricks. Libertarians totally support that.

After all, that’s your freedom, dude!

***

Libertarianism isn’t some cutting-edge political philosophy that somehow transcends the traditional “left to right” spectrum. It’s a radical, hard-right economic doctrine promoted by wealthy people who always end up backing Republican candidates, no matter how often they talk about civil liberties, ending the wars and legalizing pot. Funny how that works.

It’s the “third way” for a society in which turning against capitalism or even taking your foot off the pedal is not an option. Thanks to our shitty constitution and the most violent labor history in the West, we never even got a social-democratic party like the rest of the developed world.

So what do we get? The libertarian line: “No, no: the problem isn’t that we’re too capitalist. It’s that we’re not capitalist enough!”

Genius.

At a time in which our society has never been more interdependent in every possible way, libertarians think they’re John fucking Wayne looking out over his ranch with an Apache scalp in his belt, or John fucking Galt doing…whatever it is he does. (Collect vintage desk toys from the Sharper Image?)

Their whole ideology is like a big game of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s all make-believe, except for the chain-mail–they brought that from home. Elves, dwarves and fair maidens for capital. Even with the supposedly “good ones”—anti-war libertarians—we’re still talking about people who think Medicare’s going to lead to Stalinism.

So my advice is to call them out.

Ask them what their beef really is with the welfare state. First, they’ll talk about the deficit and say we just can’t afford entitlement programs. Well, that’s obviously a joke, so move on. Then they’ll say that it gives the government tyrannical power. Okay. Let me know when the Danes open a Guantánamo Bay in Greenland.

Here’s the real reason libertarians hate the idea. The welfare state is a check against servility towards the rich. A strong welfare state would give us the power to say Fuck You to our bosses—this is the power to say “I’m gonna work odd jobs for twenty hours a week while I work on my driftwood sculptures and play keyboards in my chillwave band. And I’ll still be able to go to the doctor and make rent.”

Sounds like freedom to me.

Connor Kilpatrick is the managing editor of Jacobin magazine.

Would you like to know more? Read “Thirty More Years of Hell” and “Silent Majority Millennials” by Connor Kilpatrick.

This article is cross-posted from Naked Capitalism

This article is cross-posted from Naked Capitalism

Yves Smith runs the brilliant financial blog Naked Capitalism, and she’s the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.

Would you like to know more? Click the cover and buy Yves’ book!

This article is cross-posted from In These Times…

For the last two years, I have covered union busting efforts by Honeywell, their close connections to President Obama and how federal agencies have assisted Honeywell in three different labor struggles since Obama came to power.  In particular, I covered a 14-month lockout at Honeywell uranium plant in Metropolis, Illinois, where Honeywell cheated on tests for replacement workers, who later caused several releases of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. Instead of their picket line with the striking workers as he promised to do during his campaign, Obama decided to fly with top Democratic donor and Honeywell CEO David Cote to India while the lockout was still going on. (Today, Obama and Cote will appear at Honeywell’s Minneapolis facility for an event on the economy).

Recently, on May 10, at around 2 p.m., managers walked into Honeywell’s uranium conversion plant in Metropolis, Ill., and told workers—both union and nonunion—they had to leave the plant immediately. Multiple workers present say a manager told them the sudden dismissal was because the company had to investigate “sabotage” of plant equipment. Honeywell has since allowed non-union contractors and salaried employees and managers back into the plant to operate it as the company’s investigation continues, but still hasn’t allowed the full unionized workforce to return.

Then on May 14, according to United Steelworkers Local 7-669 President Stephen Lech, an engineer—manning a post typically manned by a union employee—caused a release of highly toxic radioactive UF6 gas for over seven minutes. Contrary to company policy, no alarms were sounded informing the community of the release of this deadly gas. Fortunately, no one was hurt by the accidental release of UF6 gas. Yet another leak of the same gas occurred at the Metropolis plant yesterday, although again it appears that workers fortunately escaped serious injury.

I had attempted to get Honeywell to comment on the matter, but as the company has done throughout the two years I have covered their union-busting, they refused to answer the question. Earlier in May, Plant Manager Larry Smith hung up the phone on me when I contacted him.  So when I heard Honeywell CEO Dave Cote would be talking at a forum on “Revitalizing America: Encouraging Entrepreneurship,” hosted by Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), I decided to go ask him a few questions about Honeywell’s various labor disputes.

Yesterday morning, I showed up at the event in the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building’s Visitor Center where Cote was speaking. I identified myself as a reporter for In These Times and gave my card to a Republican House staffer, who then handed me a media badge for the event.  It was one of the most bizarre events I have ever covered, as if those secret meetings between congressman and CEOs that union guys always talk about actually existed.

The assembly included lobbyists, corporate executes and GOP congressmen, talking about how they were going to push for deregulation and lower taxes. Even Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-Mich.) showed up to brag about how he was working with the Heritage Foundation to find ways to lower corporate taxes. Clarke was met with wild applause from the suit-clad room.

Cote spoke for about 15 minutes on how he was able to make Honeywell a successful company through “innovation,” and said he could make it more successful if corporate taxes were lowered even further. When it was time for questions for the panelists, I stood up and was called upon. I began to ask Cote about the uranium release caused by a non-union engineer working a job performed by a union worker. Cote began to frown and looked annoyed with my question. Immediately, I started getting dirty stares and smirks from the room of assembled corporate lobbyists and allies. The moderator of the panel interrupted me to say “Sir if I can interrupt. This is to hear from entrepreneurs”.

Within a few seconds, Nicolas D. Muzin, a senior adviser for Rep. Scott, grabbed me and attempted to physically remove me from the room. I informed Muzin that I had never been treated like this as a reporter.

Later, Rep. Scott, who is the sponsor of a bill to deny food stamps to the families of workers on strike, very politely took me aside in the hallway. Rep. Scott explained that after the panel there would be some time where I could ask the panelists some questions. After the panel ended, I went up to Cote and told him “I want to talk you about Metropolis, Illinois.” Cote immediately ran out a fire exit with an entourage of people following him. An unidentified man who was with Cote blocked the fire exit and shoved me as I attempted to walk through it. I informed him that this was an illegal to block a fire exit like this.

I saw another fire exit that was nearby and ran through it to find Honeywell CEO David Cote in a room behind the set of doors. Upon seeing me, Cote and his entourage immediately began to run away and quickly exited through another set of doors. I attempted to follow Cote through that set of doors, but was blocked by the same unidentified man and another man, whose nametag identified him as Honeywell External Communications Director Rob Ferris.

Ferris barricaded me in the room for several minutes and atferwards had the Capitol Police detain me. They released me after 10 minutes when they realized I had done nothing more than try to follow a CEO down a hallway. Indeed, Capitol Police asked me if I wanted to press charges against Ferris for false imprisonment for barricading me into the room, but I declined.

President Obama is doing an event with Honeywell CEO Dave Cote today in Minneapolis if any reporters want to ask about this incident. A better question might be why has Honeywell been able to use the federal government to attempt to bust unions in three different major labor disputes. Either way, try to make sure you’re in a room with multiple exits.

Editor’s note: After siccing his goons on Mike Elk, Dave Cote met President Obama in Minneapolis, where the two bold leaders toured a Honeywell factory and laughed at the workers.

“Tell me again how much do you get paid? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Seal of the President of the United States sponsored by Honeywell International…

Cross-posted from In These Times…

“Dave Cote is feeling the beat. He takes a sip of Mountain Dew and bobs his head in time to the throbbing bass of Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life.” So begins a Fortune magazine profile titled “How Dave Cote Got Honeywell’s Groove Back.”

As someone who has covered Honeywell’s unionbusting—especially at an Illinois uranium processing plant—for the last two years, I found the long profile by Fortune Senior Editor-at-Large Shawn Tully fascinating. Tully was granted the type of access to Honeywell CEO David Cote and his closest friends and business advisors that reporters like myself, who focus not on profits but on how businesses treat workers, would love to have.

Tully’s profile is filled with entertaining stories about Cote. It talks about how he grew up the son of a mechanic and played the accordion as a child. It chronicles how, as a low-level GE auditor, Cote was found and mentored by CEO Jack Welch, who was impressed by Cote because of his “refusal to bad-mouth his superiors” and later recommended him to head Honeywell about 10 years ago. Now, Tully writes:

Honeywell (HON) ranks as a top performer among the diversified industrials, starting with how it has rewarded shareholders. Since the start of 2003, Honeywell’s stock has surged from $24 to $60. Investors have reaped a total return, including dividends, of 215%. That puts Honeywell in second place among industrial conglomerates…

And why exactly have Honeywell investors done so well? In large part because Cote has sytematically reduced the company’s “labor costs,” i.e, how much it pays workers. Tully writes:

Cote saw that labor costs for everything from aircraft power generators to fire alarms were far higher than those of competitors—a situation he couldn’t abide. He added an extra dimension to create what’s now the revered Honeywell Operating System, or HOS. Cote demanded that his troops replicate Toyota’s manufacturing practices—in Cote’s mind, the best in the world. He dispatched 70 managers to Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Ky., to master techniques for speeding output with the leanest workforce possible.

The rewards have been spectacular. Since 2002, Honeywell has increased its headcount just 21%, vs. an increase in sales of 72%. By keeping fixed costs like labor relatively flat, Cote generates “operating leverage” that magnifies brisk revenue growth into outsize earnings. …

But Tully doesn’t interview a single union Honeywell worker that has been involved in one of the company’s numerous concessionary union contract struggles since Cote took over. Instead, he talks to Cote’s friend Vernon Jordon, super lobbyist and Bill Clinton adviser, who criticizes Cote for wearing jeans to business meetings, and his next door neighbor Jim Cramer, the former hedge fund manager and host of CNBC show Mad Money.

There is a brief quote from a former GE worker who disliked Cote’s approach to unions when Cote ran GE’s appliance division during the mid-1990s, but there is no interview with a current Honeywell worker. Tully doesn’t even note that Honeywell, the top corporate PAC donor to the Democratic Party in 2010, has pushed for concessions in three different strikes or lockouts since President  Obama took office. (I explored connections between Honeywell and the federal government last year in a story titled “Is the Federal Government Helping to Bust Unions?”)

Curious as to why workers and tumultuous ongoing labor struggles are so absent from a 3,000-word profile, I e-mailed Tully, saying I wanted to talk to him about Honeywell’s relations with unions. Tully responded: “Mike, I don’t know anything about Honeywell’s labor relations.”

Fortune Senior Editor-at-Large Shawn Tully practicing his CEO suck-up smile…Work those cheek muscles, Tully! Work em!

This statement reveals what is wrong with so much journalism right now. Business reporters suck up to CEOs like Honeywell’s Dave Cote, and in exchange they get access and entertaining stories for long celebratory profile articles. What’s missing is any description of exactly how Honeywell lowered its labor costs—locking out workers, concessionary bargaining, driving down wages and benefits. Instead, readers walk away from the article with a vision of Cote and Honeywell akin to Steve Jobs and Apple. The piece details Cote’s eccentric management process as key to turning around the company:

Every few months, Cote sets aside a day to sit alone in his office reflecting on Big Ideas. He turns up the iTunes and doesn’t take phone calls. It was during these solitary sessions that he decided to concentrate on the three grand themes of energy efficiency, energy conservation, and safety.

Sure, what Honeywell makes isn’t as sexy as iMacs and iPhones, but at least Cote is wearing jeans to work and having monthly iTunes shuffle sessions in his office to creatively meditate on how his company can continue to take on the world. Just as with coverage of Jobs and Apple (at least until Foxconn scandals broke), Tully focuses on genius CEOs instead of detailing how they use the oldest trick in the corporate book to increase profits: exploit workers.

Cross-posted from In These Times…

Mike Elk previously wrote: The Problem With Matthew Yglesias and Jane Hamsher Unplugged (And Unhinged): Dare To Criticize Hamsher’s Appalling Labor Record, And This Is What You’ll Get

This article is cross-posted from Naked Capitalism…

Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.

But bear in mind that we can’t hold Davidson solely responsible for his latest assault on common sense, decency, and most important accuracy. It was the editors of the Sunday Magazine that not only decided to showcase an interview with Mitt Romney’s uber wealthy former partner Edward Conard (“The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy“) but to give it a full 6 pages (per my browser) and put it on the magazine cover. Conard says his new career is to “make his case for a new, decidedly pro-investor way to think about the economy.” And what follows is half-baked, largely inaccurate, unabashed propaganda.

Now admittedly, Davidson as interlocutor gets to have it both ways. He presents Conard’s arguments pretty much straight up for the first half of the piece, and treats them and Conard with a good deal of respect (well, save Conard’s view of the crisis, that is was a run on sound banks which is utterly batshit, and Davidson does pause to intimate that). For instance, after pointing out that Conard is heretofore best known in the wider world as being a mystery Romney funder at the center of a pending scandal that went poof when Conard outed himself, Davidson suggests he might be media wary. But no, this is how Davidson described his first meeting:

Over lunch with editors from The Times Magazine, Conard proved the exact opposite. He looks like a benign middle-aged guy until he starts making an argument. At which point, Conard stares into your eyes and talks with intense force, punctuated by the occasional profanity, in full paragraphs. He delighted in arguing over corporate-bond rates and Chinese central-bank policy, among other arcane minutiae. It also became clear that he had exhaustively thought through the role of the superrich in our economy, and he wasn’t afraid to share those opinions.

This introduction to Conard as a real person segues into an overview of Conard as an icon of successful risk-taking (a theme in Conard’s book, due out next month, which this story also has the unfortunate effect of promoting): born into a middle class family, rising through consulting firm Bain to become partner, leapfrogging to M&A boutique Wasserstein Perella, taking a pay cut to go for greater upside by returning to the Bain fold, but this time at private equity firm Bain Capital.

Aside from the description of Conard’s devoid-of-reality take on the crisis, Davidson uncritically recites his views in the first half of the story and then only, all too politely, as no doubt fits in a world where men like Conard deserve deference, questions his ideas towards the end.

But even with this unduly respectful treatment, the picture that emerges is stunning. Conard is in fact a living, walking homo economicus. If he were written up in a novel, he’d be treated as a ridiculous parody. He treats finding a mate like a shopping exercise, and recommends a sampling phase prior to a selection phase. He thinks philanthropy is bad and money should go only to investments:

During one conversation, he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.”

And, not surprisingly, Conar denies that rent seeking occurs any place other than despotic third world countries.

But it isn’t simply that the overly polite questioning of Conard’s utilitarian world view is too mild and comes too late. It is that Davidson happily recites things that are simply untrue. And to make matters worse, if my readership is any indicator, many people don’t get past the first page or two of this piece before deciding they’ve read plenty and so get a full dose of claptrap before tuning out.

This is what a risk-takin’ job creator looks like…

The article is chock full of blatant falsehoods. Let’s start with Conard’s personal Big Lie: that he is a risk taker and risk taking is good. All you have to do is look at his career to see that it contradicts both claims. He sees himself as a risk taker because…hold your breath…he went to Harvard Business School rather than going to law school! I graduated from HBS the year before Conard, and was accepted by both top law schools and business schools. Anyone with an operating brain cell will tell you that the fancy grad school route, particularly back then, when tuitions were vastly lower, was a risk averse strategy. You get good grades, show up for job interviews wearing a decent suit and exhibit at least adequate social skills, and you are guaranteed a well paid job.

And of the career choices of a newly minted MBA in the early 1980s, the big consulting firms were the least risky path on offer. Unlike Wall Street, where even first year pay had a meaningful bonus component, consulting firms pay high salaries. And they hysterical thing is he repeatedly rags on lawyers as prototypical people who “don’t maximize their wealth creating potential.” Yet he went on a path exactly like that. Consulting firms take fees, like law firms, and have explicitly modeled their pay and promotion structures on law firms’. He then went to Wasserstein (another firm which takes fees, albeit largely dependent on whether deals get done), which was already an established powerhouse, hence pretty much nada in the way of financial downside in joining them. And partners in private equity firms do not take risk either. PE firms get 2% of the funds under management and 20% of the upside. Partners may but are not required to invest along side the limited partners.

Conard has absolutely no clue about what entrepreneurship is about. Experts on entrepreneurship, like Amar Bhide, who has done considerable research into Inck 500 companies and entrepreneurship generally, have found that the top performers have founders who have very high ambitions and are good at minimizing risk.

Another Big Lie that Davidson promotes is Conard’s claim that the sort of investing he did at Bain Capital and that wealthy people do generally. Earth to base, academic studies have shown that PE fund returns are due to financial engineering and application of leverage. They don’t nurture companies. Anyone who has been in an PE investee company will tell you they are aggressive cost-cutters and investment minimizers. Anything to boost cash flow and facilitate a flip at a higher price to a corporate buyer or public shareholders goes. Ex angel investors or long-term owners of private companies who reinvest their profits, the investments of the uber wealthy are in established companies, the overwhelming majority of the time in secondary trading of securities (which means they are simply cashing out other investors rather than providing growth capital). And for public businesses, the biggest source of investment funds is retained earnings, second is debt financing, and the occasional stock sale is a distant third.

Davidson says things that are factually incorrect in parroting Conard’s argument (and notice how he depicts it as cogent):

Conard, however, has laid out a tightly argued case for just how much consumers actually benefit from the wealthy. Take computers, for example. A small number of innovators and investors may have earned disproportionate billions as the I.T. industry grew, but they got that money by competing to constantly improve their products and simultaneously lower prices. Their work has helped everyone get a lot more value. Cheap, improved computing helps us do our jobs more effectively and, often, earn more money. Countless other industries (travel, telecom, entertainment) use that computing power to lower their prices and enhance their products. This generally makes life more efficient and helps the economy grow.

First, it’s clear Conard never heard of Moore’s law as the driver of falling computing costs.

Second, investors had comparatively little to do with the growth and success of the computing industry (and in general this is true. Bhide has found that only 1/4 of the Inc 500 companies were venture capital funded). If you look at the PC revolution (which was when the real falls in price and growth in reach of computers took place), the drivers were geek tinkerers and hobbyists who all wanted to create a new Hewlett Packard. HP was founded in 1939 and it grew into a dominant Silicon Valley player in the 1950s and 1960s, when top Federal marginal income tax rates were over 90% in the later 1950 and over 70% in the 1960s. Silicon Valley came into being thanks to the work of engineers who clearly were not motivated by dreams of becoming Filthy Rich, since it was pretty much impossible back then.

If you look at the iconic companies of the 1980s tech revolution, few had venture capital or wealthy individuals as backers. Apple funded itself off of purchase orders. Software firms like Microsoft and Oracle didn’t need meaningful seed money. Cisco didn’t take VC until shortly before its IPO so as to get a better multiple.

Third, the internet was created by the Federal government (remember them?). Unix, still the most robust computing platform, was funded by heavily regulated and highly profitable monopoly AT&T, not by wealthy investors. These are also important parts of the tech infrastructure.

We also have stuff like this:

There is a huge mechanism constantly trying to seek out and support these new ideas — entrepreneurs, multinationals and, crucially for Conard, investment firms and hedge funds and everyone down to individual bond traders…In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them.

This is how bad things have gotten, that Davidson and Conard dare suggest that the discovery and solving of production problems for penicillin had anything to do with homo economicusgrasping for the brass ring. Don’t New York Times fact checkers know how to use Wikipedia?

[Alexander] Fleming finally abandoned penicillin, and not long after he did, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford took up researching and mass-producing it, with funds from the U.S. and British governments. They started mass production after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. When D-Day arrived, they had made enough penicillin to treat all the wounded Allied forces.

So penicillin was the product of a persistent but unsuccessful effort of a brilliant researcher (Fleming was highly regarded even before the potential of his penicillin discovery was realized), carried forward by researchers at Oxford (risk averse academics!) funded by the government (horrors!) who made the critical production breakthroughs.

And the iPhone was very much a product of Steve Jobs’ vision, and Steve Jobs flies in the face of the World According to Mr. 0.1%. Consider this diatribe:

What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life.

Conard must not believe in art of any kind. Can’t a rich guy like him see the need of art educated adults, if nothing else, to help curate his collection, to inform the aesthetics of architects and city planners? And the decorators I know are plenty entrepreneurial, far more so than “never took a real risk” Conard.

In addition, Conard apparently does not read newspapers and has not heard that unemployment is really high these days. He clearly labors under the delusion that anyone not working is a dilettante. I’d hazard that at least some of these Starbucks denizens are underemployed and go there to get out of the house (yours truly also did a lot of work on ECONNED at Starbucks for similar reasons).

Most important, Steve Jobs, the capitalist’s wet dream, did everything Conard rails against: took art courses, didn’t graduate from college, followed his inner muse (doing drugs, spending a year in India).

But the key to Conard is in that last section. He doesn’t revere risk taking. He reveres competition and numbing overwork. Davidson close to the end picks up on that:

The world Conard describes too often feels grim and soulless, one in which art and romance and the nonremunerative satisfactions of a simpler life are invisible. And that, I realized, really is Conard’s world. “God didn’t create the universe so that talented people would be happy,” he said. “It’s not beautiful. It’s hard work. It’s responsibility and deadlines, working till 11 o’clock at night when you want to watch your baby and be with your wife. It’s not serenity and beauty.”

His vision is the logical outcome of the belief system of early industrialists, who needed to justify their exploitation of formerly self sufficient farmers. Per Yasha Levine:

English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?…

Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.

Levine quotes a book by Michael Perleman, The Invention of Capitalism, which cites numerous tracts bewailing the idleness of the lower orders (notice this was never perceived to be a problem prior to the Industrial Revolution). For instance:

Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.

So Conard celebrates competitiveness, when he managed to find his way onto the low-risk elite path when it was less crowded than today. And high income disparity serves that end. If you lose your economic perch, unlike in more equal societies, you are almost certain to lose most of your putative friends. If you can’t socialize at their level, over time you disappear from their set (and that’s before you factor in the possibility of serious budget problems). Yet as you peel the layers back, despite his confidence that the world would work better if it was mashed into his template, it sounds utterly miserable.

Just because someone has an internally consistent world view does not make it accurate. Fans of slavery, alchemy, the Inquisition, trial by combat, and Ptolemaic astronomy all had logical looking arguments supporting their now discredited views. Conard at first seems to yet another evangelist of a hopelessly flawed and dangerous orthodoxy, and the more he speaks, the more he seems to be deeply imbalanced, so intensely invested in his distorted personal mythology that he is driven to make the world at large reflect it back. It would be far better for Davidson and the New York Times to treat people like Conard as epitomes of deep-seated cultural pathologies, rather than promote them.

Update: In a misrepresentation I missed (hat tip Lynn Parramore), Davidson cites Dean Baker as supporting Conard’s views. Baker objects:

At one point, the piece cites me as saying that for each dollar earned by investors (corporations), the rest of society gets five dollars.

This should not sound surprising. This is simply the division of national income between capital and labor. The after-tax capital share of corporate income is roughly one-sixth of total income. This means that if GDP increases by $1 billion, then capital will typically get around $160 million, with the rest going to labor and corporate taxes.

Note that this does not mean that investors are responsible for this $1 billion increase in output. Their actions contributed to the growth of output in the same way as did the actions of workers and the government. The misleading part of the picture is Conard’s implication that if not for the heroic investor, none of this wealth would have been created.

In standard economic theory if one investor had not put money to use, then another one would have have. The difference in output would have been trivial.

This article is cross-posted from Naked Capitalism…

There’s a new Boomer vs. Millennial piece over at Esquire making its way across the intertubes. If you hadn’t noticed, wringing one’s hands about Baby Boomers gorging themselves on the syrupy sweet hopes and dreams of the young’ns is the newest game in town. And though I’ve had my say on the topic, you just know shit’s getting real when the cologne-scented glossies chime in.

But Stephen Marche’s Esquire essay, “The War Against Youth,” left me feeling queasy, and by the end of it, I was ready to commit seppuku over a dog-eared copy of Das Kapital. So please excuse me while I indulge in a little Maoist self-criticism.

Marche’s essay hit all the same notes I hit. He even used the same David Frum quote. (Hi, Stephen!) And yes, he wants you to know that he stands firmly with the young and righteous Millennials. So how is it that his conclusions are straight out of a Wall Street Journal editorial? It was like being forced to watch my doppelgänger hack up an innocent: I didn’t do it, but jesus—except for the whole fiendish-grin and no-pupils thing, that looks a hell of a lot like me swinging that axe.

I hate to say it because after all Boomer-hatin’ really is fun and slightly cheerier than regular down-in-the-mouth anti-capitalism, but Marche’s “The War Against Youth” validates every single hostility the no-bullshit Left holds towards anything that smacks of generational politics. And it shows you just why you gotta be careful before you take aim at the gray-hairs.

Not because of any squeamishness about youthful Red terrors or blood trails across the suburban sunbelt. Actually, the wealthy are more than happy to root for us. They’re eager to sick the Millennials on the Boomers. But not because they want us to have any of the Boomers’ goodies: welfare state, living wages, pensions, health insurance, etc. Instead, they wanna engender the same kind of puritanical, reactionary mindset in Millennials that the ruling class used to quash the young radicals nearly a half century ago.

Just as the Nixonites resented the radicals for their free love and refusal to maim and be maimed on the Mekong, the capitalist class in 2012 wants us to hate the Boomers for their Social Security checks. That’s right: the ruling class wants to mold Millennials into their very own Silent Majority.

Let’s get back to Marche’s “The War Against Youth.” It starts off fine. If you weren’t paying attention, you might even miss it. He hits all the basics. Big mean Boomers sucking up all the cash, leaving the kiddies with scraps. We’ve seen it all before: college debt, slave-labor internships, foregoing a mortgage in the ‘burbs, etc.

Stephen Marche: Millennial hackburglar

But you won’t find a word about mass incarceration, food insecurity, or military enlistment. That’s your first clue. Because none of those miseries apply to the progeny of the ruling classes. Hey, the wealthy worry about their pups too. Isn’t that the whole point of Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow’s new show: the indignities of a 21st century economy under which even the rich kids suffer?

But here’s where Marche really tears off the mask:

“[I]t’s clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young.”

“Greek-style?” He really tipped his hand there. Here’s some advice: if you hear someone utter the phrase “Greek-style socialism,” take a swing. Preferably with some aluminum in your grip. You’ll be doing us all a favor. And “socialism for the old”? You mean living wages and meagre retirement pensions? Those lazy, back-haired bastards! I guess the post-austerity sport of dumpster-diving for rats or Athens moms giving handjobs for sandwiches really is just the New Frugality–lessons in good ol’ Protestant thriftiness that’ll knock some sense back into those swarthy Mediterraneans.

It’s the kind of bloodthirsty terminology that’s been burbling up out of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages for decades. And it’s the same exact strategy employed by The Economist over a century and a half ago during the Irish Potato famine, when limeys marched all the food right off the island, spitting on all the skeletal bodies in the way for being undisciplined in the ways of the free market.

The message from the Anglo-American Lords of Finance then and now is clear: Greeks and Irishmen are just a tad too “other” to be spared. Wealth trickles through their slack and careless hands. Might as well send the P.I.G.S. off to the slaughterhouse. They’re western, maybe, but not quite white enough. I mean, they’re some kind of Papists, right?

Iceland, though—man, those elves got a raw deal!

And of course, no piece of austerity propaganda is complete without a bald-faced lie about the pittance known as Social Security. Marche calls the program “the biggest boondoggle of all” and says “the fund will run out in 2036.” A lie. A lie best taken apart by economist Dean Baker, who was all over Marche’s bullshit numbers just a couple of days after “The War Against Youth” went live. Needless to say Marche also fails to mention that the Social Security tax is capped after the first $110,100 of income, which means that a billionaire shitstain like Peter Thiel pays the same amount of cash into the system as a Nurse Practitioner.

Marche shows his true colors again a little later when he starts wringing his hands about “crony capitalism.” Crony capitalism! A term endlessly test-marketed and trotted out by Sarah Palin and the rest of the GOP all in order to spare the good name of our virginal free market. It’s the “union thug” of the 21st century. But I don’t think it’s gonna work. “Crony capitalism” sounds too appealing. Who needs “cold, impersonal” capitalism, when you can split a six-pack with your crony? How about “wingman capitalism”? Cronies for life, bro.

***

I’m not saying Marche is some kind of a deep-cover right-winger. Last summer, Esquire published his bootlicking study of the president entitled–I shit you not–”How Can We Not Love Obama?” Here’s a sampling:

“Reagan was able to call upon the classic American mythology of frontiersmen and astronauts and movie stars; Obama has accessed a much wider narrative matrix: He’s mixed and matched Jay-Z with geek with Hawaiian with Kansan with product of Middle America with product of a broken home with local Chicago churchgoer with internationally renowned memoirist with assassin…We can finally see who he is, we can finally understand the reality: In 2011, it is possible to be a levelheaded, warmhearted, cold-blooded killer who can crack a joke and write a book for his daughters…Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.  We love Obama — even those who claim to despise him — because deep in our hearts and all over our lives, we’re the same way.”

Marche is merely the perfect example of how eager American liberals are to accommodate the ideology of the ruling class, “austerity” being all the rage these days. It’s nothing new. Liberals have always been useful servants. And they’ve been following their spiritual masters in the Democratic Party over the free market cliff for decades, even now as they squeeze out a few about inequality. Hey, they’ll always have a pet project.

But liberals aren’t just surrendering to all this debt-mongering bullshit, they’re chipping in like the good little poodles they are. They’re more than happy to cheer on the Millennials. Not for anything like socialism but for more austerity.

Let’s not forget that it was two card-carrying liberals—investment banker and temporary dictator of New York City Felix G. Rohatyn and class-warrior emeritus Paul Volcker—who helped launch the neoliberal revolution that gutted wages and sent corporate profits soaring. But Occupy Wall Street and generational politics gives these balanced-budget liberals the perfect narrative to try and squeeze in their austerity-love while ostensibly remaining on the side of the cosmopolitan, the young and the attractive.

If you were to ask them straight up, they’d tell you they were on your side. And in a fucked-up way, they’re telling you the truth. They’ll say they’re in this thing for the future–the youth of America. To them, it’s the old folks that are suckin’ the socialist teat and bankrupting the country.

Generational politics allows the ruling class to dress up our economic catastrophe as simply an ‘imbalance’ between two generations of wage-earners. And once they’ve spun that tale, then they can go in and clean everyone out in the name of fiscal and intergenerational harmony.

And it’s not just the liberals. Even the GOP indulges in Millennial concern-trolling, though you won’t see them shed a crocodile tear for Occupy—unlike their Democratic peers they never made it with a hippie. But most every week, turn on C-SPAN and you can hear some House Republican screeching about how “entitlements” shackle our grandchildren with debt. So they, too, are “on our side.”

***

This is where our era’s brand of puritanical liberalism–with all its moralism about consumer culture and finger-waving about greed and excess–clears a path for this con. Just another variation on the same Protestant theme. So you can understand why overlords like Pete Peterson want you to see the Boomers as living the life on your dime. Not so that you’ll demand the same and more, but to convince you that healthcare on-demand and a decent retirement are luxuries no one should have–except for the wealthy, of course.

That’s why we need to take a stand against the hairshirt left, the Chris Hedges of the country that try to veer us off course with all their self-flagellation about consumerism. Fuck asceticism. iPads and flat-screens for all! Hell, Marx would agree.

As readers of The eXile know, there’s nothing more American than hating others for enjoying themselves. It’s just more of that Protestant backwash that’s soaked this country into a marsh of petit-bourgeois wannabes. Along the coasts or in between, you’ll hear all that guff about freeloaders, decadence and indulgence on both the Right (“Welfare queens”) and the Left (the anti-consumerism crusades).

Hey, I’m glad these folks were around back in the 1850s. We gotta hand it to the Protestant penny pinchers: they knew how to carve up Confederates like no one else. And of course that whole industrial revolution thing. Let’s give credit where credit’s due. Public schools, R&D, libraries, trains, electrification: all good things. But that crew wore out their welcome a hundred years ago.

Just open up any page in Eric Foner’s classic on the origins of GOP ideology and cringe: back then, the good guys sounded just like Paul Ryan, preaching the glories of private property and fretting about “class warfare” brewing in the cities. It’s no wonder it’s Karl Rove’s favorite book. Drop him in an 1850s Massachusetts mill town and the little piggy’s a progressive. The only difference between now and then is, well, everything. Everything except the rhetoric.

As James Livingston’s work has revealed, saving and private investment hasn’t done shit for this economy since 1919. Its consumption and government spending that’s been doing the trick for nearly a hundred years. And yet we’re still shoveling pig iron for Andrew Carnegie and begging for scraps.

This is the 21st century. With just a few keystrokes, millions of us could finally go see a doctor, buy groceries, or enroll at the local university. But no, we’re told, it’s not that simple. Thing is, it is that simple. If it weren’t for the “honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” crowd, we could’ve long ago whittled down the workweek to twenty-hours. The only thing left standing in the way is a religion that’s long since fled the chapel and settled into the cubicle.

Even the Swedes–equal parts social democratic and Lutheran–based their welfare state on everyone working. Anything to avoid the dreaded welfare queen. This called for the creation of a vast bureaucracy–”active labor market programs”– that ended up costing them more than if they’d just mailed out unemployment checks.

***

Look, I know it’s hard. South Park and the Daily Show have convinced a good number of Millennials that doing something as declarative as talking about Big Bushy Bearded shit like, say, “labor and capital” is to invite ridicule. After all, zealotry is for losers, right? Sorry. There’s no getting around it. Buy a Cliffs Notes or something.

As much fun as it is to kick around the Boomers, we gotta move past it. Generational politics is a dead-end. Fuck it, someone slap the shit out of me if I ever say the word “Millennial’ after this. Because once we’ve set up this economic collapse as nothing more than generational warfare, we’re already lost–we’ve created a narrative which the wealthy can easily co-opt and spin for their own fiendish ends.

So keep your eyes on the prize, Millennials: it’s capitalism that’s the problem. Not the grey-hairs.

Would you like to know more? Read “Thirty More Years Of Hell” and “Conscience of a Radical: Corey Robin’s ‘The Reactionary Mind’” by Connor Kilpatrick.

A few months back I had a long conversation with Freke Vuijst, a journalist from the lefty Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, about the history of the Koch clan—specifically, we talked about what I learned during my trip to Quanah, Texas, the shit-kicker corporate railroad town where granddaddy Harry Koch dropped anchor in 1891 and started a family that eventually spawned the two most powerful oligarchs of our time, Charles and David Koch. Freke was working on a story about the pre-USA origins of the Koch family back in the family’s native Netherlands, using Dutch archive material, and she and I compared notes…

A lot of what she found matched and confirmed what I’d dug up in Austin and Quanah. Grandpa Harry Koch, who emigrated from Holland in 1888, did indeed come from a solidly upper-class background. Harry’s grandfather (that would be Charles Koch’s great-great-grandfather), who was originally from Germany, settled “penniless” in a small coastal town in northwest Holland called Workum. Fortunes changed big-time after great-great-grandpa Koch conveniently married the mayor’s daughter. His new father-in-law wasn’t just the town mayor, he also owned a shipping business that ran sailboats between Workum and Amsterdam, as well as a linseed oil mill and other businesses in town.

Naturally, great-great-grandaddy Koch wormed his way into his new in-laws’ family business, and inherited it in due time.

In other words, the family secret is to marry rich, sponge and absorb, and leave the homilies about “hard work” and “free markets” to the suckers.

“The young German was a big strapping fellow with plenty of ability and character,” wrote Harry Koch in a short autobiographical sketch I dug up in the Texas State Archives in Austin. “Before long he married the daughter of his employer and took charge of the business.”

Koch patriarch—”penniless”—pulled himself up by his rich wife’s bra straps…

Yep, folks. This is how America’s most powerful job creators got their start. But it’s not how they tell it in their inverted rewrite of their own history.

Charles Koch may be the man responsible for creating the libertarian movement, but in so many ways, he’s a lot like neoliberal hack Thomas Friedman, a first generation rich-wife-sponger. As some readers might recall, despite all the free-market cant that Thomas Friedman has puked out over the years, his own success is all due to his wife, Ann Bucksbaum, the billionaire heiress to a shopping mall/real estate empire.

Just imagine: a few generations from now, the Friedman clan might also produce a couple of innovative billionaire-garchs like Charles and David Koch who’ll help steer America into the 22nd century. Now that is the American Dream!

Anne & husband hanger-on Thomas Friedman at the White House

Freke Vuijst’s research also yielded a couple of new insights into the Koch family’s beginnings:

• For instance, I didn’t know that the bulk of the Dutch came to the US in a big immigration wave lasting from the 1850s to WWI, and that most of them were regressive evangelicals who were fleeing church reforms, as well as an economic depression back home.
• But Harry Koch was not part of the religious migration, nor did he come to America because of economic destitution. According to Freke, there was nothing that indicated the Koch family was particularly religious, and the evidence shows that Harry Koch came from a well-to-do family and had an education and plenty of economic opportunities back home. . . . If it wasn’t religion or desperation, then what brought Harry to America? Freke Vuijst couldn’t nail down the exact reason, and I think my initial reading of the situation still stands: Harry Koch came to America as a minor businessman backed by Dutch railroad money.
• But Freke Vuijst was able to uncover a possible motivating factor for Harry’s migration to the Free Land: his evil stepmother. Harry’s mom died when he was 9, and his father, who was a doctor in Workum, remarried a much younger woman (the daughter of a banker) and had 7 more kids. From his writings it is clear that Harry didn’t have a very good relationship with his stepmom. Freke thinks that Harry’s move to America might have been spurred by this antagonism: “Just think about that–America could have been spared the Koch brothers if it hadn’t been for a wicked stepmother. The Brothers Grimm had it right: wicked stepmothers have consequences.” Hey, she said it, folks, not me!

Anyway, her article came out last month. Check it out. It’s worth a read…

Here’s a direct link to the Dutch version. And here’s an image cap of the Google bot translation version, which isn’t half bad . . .

And here’s the original investigation I did for the Texas Observer into the origins of the Koch family:

This summer I traveled to Quanah, the dusty North Texas railroad town that Harry Koch called home, to find out more about the life of the man who spawned the two most powerful oligarchs of our time…

CHARLES AND DAVID KOCH are the most powerful right-wing billionaires of our time. They have spent hundreds of millions bankrolling a broad attack against Social Security, organized labor, financial regulations, environmental protection and public education. The brothers plan to funnel at least $200 million to elect right-wing, anti-government Republicans in 2012, according to Politico. They seem hell-bent on dragging America back to the dark days of unregulated capitalism. The history of their grandfather in Texas may help explain why. Because, apparently, it runs in the family.

Little has been written about Harry Koch. He’s the least-known member of the Koch family. What has not been reported is that the Koch family has been marching under the same laissez-faire banner for the past three generations, ever since Harry emigrated to America in 1888, settled in a North Texas railroad town and became an aggressive newspaper publisher and booster. He shamelessly shilled for railroad and banking interests, amassing his wealth by helping big business fight organized labor and squelch reforms.

Much of the Koch brothers’ ideology can be found in Harry Koch’s newspaper editorials of nearly a century ago. Take, for instance, the Kochs’ current fight against Social Security. Harry Koch took part in a multi-year right-wing propaganda campaign to shoot down New Deal programs. Grandfather and grandsons employ eerily familiar talking points to bash government pension and welfare programs.

“No political system can possibly guarantee either a national economic security or an individual standard of living. Government can guarantee no man a job or a livelihood,” Harry Koch wrote on February 1, 1935, nine months before Charles Koch was born.

Fast-forward 75 years and you can see Charles Koch using the same lines of attack in his company’s newsletter: “government actions … stifle economic growth and job creation, which in turn will significantly reduce the standard of living of American families.”

This summer I traveled to Quanah, the dusty North Texas railroad town that Harry Koch called home, to find out more about the life of the man who spawned the two most powerful oligarchs of our time. After spending days hunkered over newspaper archives and rifling through a century’s worth of county records in the town’s tiny courthouse, I began to see a picture emerge of a man who spent his life learning how to use newspapers and media for ideological manipulation and as a platform for pro-business agendas. As I strained to read the battered microfilm, I was constantly surprised at the degree to which Harry’s views—on everything from the economy to the role of government in a democratic society—have been passed on nearly unchanged through two generations, and are now being pushed by Charles and David Koch.

HARRY KOCH WAS BORN in Holland in 1867 to a wealthy German-Dutch family of merchants, farmers and doctors. After apprenticing to a newspaper publisher, he decided to seek his fortune in America. At 21, he set off on a steamer and arrived in New York on Dec. 5, 1888. He spent his first few years in America working for various Dutch newspapers in Chicago, New Orleans, Grand Rapids and Austin until, in 1891, he finally settled down in Quanah, a town that the railroad had established just a few years before. Harry always remained curiously vague and evasive about why he decided to stake his claim in a remote North Texas town, but there is no real mystery to it: he came because of the railroads.

In the second half of the 19th century, America was in the grip of a massive railroad boom. Boosted by eager investors, lucrative subsidies and free land, railroads sprung up connecting every corner of the United States without much thought for demand or necessity. America’s rail mileage quadrupled from 1870 to 1900, with enough track laid down by the end of the century to stretch from New York to San Francisco 66 times.

In those wild early days of the railroad age, real estate speculation was a central plank of the business plan. The U.S. government had given vast stretches of public land to railroad companies, and the companies needed to sell that land to settlers to create customers and pay off debts. And that meant railroads were in constant need of local publishers to promote the countless railroad towns that had been planned and parceled by the railroad companies across the country, with the aim of luring enough gullible settlers with wildly exaggerated stories of fertile soil and prosperity to trigger real estate booms—all so that railroad insiders could make easy money offloading overpriced dirt lots on the hapless settlers.

Read the rest here…

A man shot himself on April 4th in the very center of Athens. He is the latest in hundreds of suicides during and because of the crisis. Dimitris Christoulas chose the place (Syntagma Square) and the time (rush hour) to pass his message. Many have called Christoulas “the Greek Bouazizi“. Christoulas’ message was handwritten on the note below.

Here’s a translation of it:

The collaborationist Tsolakoglou [see note below —eXiled] government has annihilated my ability for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone (without any state sponsoring) paid for 35 years.

Since my advanced age does not allow me a way of a dynamic reaction (although if a fellow Greek was to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be the second after him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.

I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945 (Piazza Loreto in Milan).

Note: Georgios Tsolakoglou was a Greek military officer who became the first Prime Minister of the Greek collaborationist government during the Axis Occupation in 1941-1942.

Kostas Kallergis is freelance journalist from Athens who runs the blog When the Crisis Hits the Fan…

This article was first published at ConsortiumNews.com

I was working on an article about last month’s rampage massacre in Afghanistan that left 17 villagers dead, when news hit of this past Monday’s massacre at an Oakland, California, religious college, leaving seven dead. In both cases, the shooters survived and face a possible death penalty — which is rare: Usually these rampage killings end with self-inflicted bullet in the mouth.

These “going postal” rampage killings like the one that just took place at the Oikos University campus so often and with such relentless rhythm, a lot of people might easily assume that these mass-shootings at American schools and workplaces have always been with us.

It’s not true, of course — as I wrote in my book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion — it’s an exclusively American phenomenon specific to our time. The first post office rampage killing took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Reagan Revolution’s war on the American worker.

Those post office massacres quickly migrated into private workplace massacres by the end of the 1980s, where they’ve become a regular rhythmic staple of our murder culture ever since – and from the adult workplace, the massacres migrated to our schools.

We’ve had mass-killings before; and every now and then, you’ll read about a rampage killing in some other country. But only in America, and only since the mid-1980s, do American employees attack their own workplaces and offices, and middle-class students attack their own schools, with such consistency, year after year.

It was only after the crash in 2008 that some Americans began to accept the obvious: That the cruelty, predation and concentration of wealth and power introduced by the Reagan Revolution sparked a new type of murder that has more in common with insurgency violence or rebellious peasant violence than, say, the psychopathology of a serial murder.

Like so many school rampage killers, last Monday’s alleged murderer, One L. Goh, was reportedly bullied and mistreated at his nursing school program at the small Korean Christian nursing program he enrolled in. Bullying also was blamed for the high school rampage killing a few weeks ago in suburban Cleveland that left three students dead and five wounded.

The gruesome details about the way Goh is said to have lined up and executed his victims, the way he apparently singled out women, make it hard not to caricature him as a monster, a demonic psychopath — and yet, without excusing Goh’s killings, one should try to make sense of what happened to him, the downward-trending bleakness, the slow water-torture of low-five-figure debts, the broken marriage, the $23,000 tax bill owed to the IRS.

Losing Hope

In the Naughts, One L. Goh helped run a construction company. But construction collapsed as an industry in 2006-7; and unless you were Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo, you’d have nothing to show for the few good years.

In late 2007, Goh moved into the Yorkview Apartments complex in Hayes, Virginia — a bleak, prefab looking structure in a rural corner of Virginia. By the following summer, One L. Goh found himself unable to cover his $575 rent payment two months in a row. He was evicted; and on the same day that they they evicted him, creditors took his car.

The future rampage-murderer took it all stoically, even politely, according to one of Goh’s apartment complex neighbors, Thomas Lumpkin: “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”

Here is how his neighbor described the scene of One L. Goh’s last day at the Yorkshire Apartments:

Lumpkin said he recalled the day when Goh was evicted and his Nissan pickup was repossessed. Goh left by cab that day.

“He was always neat, wore nice clothes,” Lumpkin recalled. “You would never expect it out of him. He just don’t seem like that type of person.”

So he lost his car the same day he was evicted from his apartment in bumfuck, Virginia—and he took it all stoically as he cabbed away to god knows where.

I tried to imagine what that cab ride felt like for One L. Goh, a pudgy 40-something Korean-American dweeb, stewing with resentment, in his nice neat clothes. How far did he go in that cab — and where to?

The Yorkshire Apartments parking lot

Eventually he wound up with his father on the West Coast. One L. Goh’s father lives in an Oakland housing project for senior citizens run by a Christian non-profit. Goh found work in a San Mateo warehouse; he moonlighted as a mover. Anything to get back on his feet.

It’s not a good place to be if you’re a middle-aged failure: San Francisco has so much obscene wealth, and smug beauty — to be a fat 40-something nerd working with your father in a grocery store in Daly City, in the shadow of San Francisco, is some kind of Hell, a Hell for failures.

Goh, who was born Su Nam Ko, had lived in the shadow of his more successful, celebrated war hero brother, Su Wan Ko. In 2002, he changed his name from birth name, Su Nam Ko, to One L. Goh, stating that he did “not like my current name because it sounds like a girl’s name.”

And then last year, Goh’s brother, an Iraq War veteran and Special Forces hero, died in a freak car accident when his Toyota slammed head-on at 70 mph into a “multi-ton” boulder lying on a Virginia road. The photos of the accident scene look almost unreal, almost staged.

The freak accident that killed One L. Goh’s war hero brother

The news of the brother’s death destroyed One L. Goh’s mother: She died within months of her son’s funeral.

This is the backdrop to Goh’s fateful decision to pull himself out of a years-long rut, and to start a new career for himself as a nurse. It may have been the shock of the back-to-back deaths in the family — or maybe it was his father who encouraged him, or the experience of living with his father in a building for the elderly.

Whatever the case, his widower father supported his son with a $6,000 loan to pay for the vocational nursing school tuition. But after a few months, One L. Goh was out of the program, bitter and vengeful, dead set on murder; and his father was out $6,000, thanks to his son’s bad bet.

Ignition to a Massacre

What set Goh off? Why did he leave the nursing school so early? Most reports say he was teased by his classmates for his age, 43, and his accent. Which is odd, considering most of the students are foreigners and Koreans.

(Another Korean-American rampage-killer was teased over his voice:  Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui. As another Virginia Tech student told reporters back in 2007, “As soon as [Cho] started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China.’”)

Goh enrolled in what must have been one of the very worst nursing programs in the entire state of California: the vocational nursing program at Oikos University, a fundamentalist Korean-American Christian school in Oakland.

The school’s nursing program is accredited, which is important of course if you want your for-profit school program to make money. To comply with the accreditation, Oikos U. had provide a “2010 Performance Sheet”summing up its students’ performances both on the national nursing exam and, once licensed, in the job market.

The “performance” is abysmal, to the point where you almost wonder if it’s even statistically possible to fail as spectacularly as Oikos University’s nursing students. Of the programs 28 graduates from the Spring 2010 – 2011 term, only 11 of those 28 managed to pass the national nursing exam. That’s a 39 percent pass rate, almost unheard of.

Oikos University ad promises: “Dreams Do Come True”

According to a spokesman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, it makes Oikos among the state’s very worst programs — the average success rate for graduates of other programs is 75 percent. (An Oakland Tribune article puts Oikos U’s exam pass rate at 41 percent of students who took the test, but the actual Performance Sheet gives a lower 29 percent pass figure — either way, both are awful).

Oikos University failed to prepare its students for the test, and it failed those who passed when they turned to the job market. According to the same Performance Sheet, of the school’s 11 students who passed the exam, eight found paying jobs as nurses, with salaries ranging as low as $5,000 per year to the one lucky top salary earner who earned up to $35,000. That’s in the Bay Area, the most expensive region in America.

In sum: One L. Goh could not have chosen a worse nursing program to pin his personal hopes on. This nursing program was all but guaranteed to fail him.

Fundamentalist Mission

One thing Oikos University does fairly convincingly is fundamentalist evangelical Christianity for Korean-Americans. Students at Oikos U. are required to attend regular church services; the pious language of evangelical Christianity frames everything.

The school’s president, Rev. Jongkin Kim, says his goal is “to foster spiritual Christian leaders who abide by God’s intentions and to expand God’s nation through them.” Under the university’s “Our Vision” it reads:

“The vision of Oikos University is to educate emerging Christian leaders to transform and bless the world at every level – from the church and local community levels to the realm of world entire.”

And then there’s the reality, revealed in a lawsuit filed last month by a former staffer of Oikos University named Jong Cha, who says the school cheated her out of $75,000 in salary and expenses, and stiffed her on a $10,000 loan that she personally gave to the Christian college in 2008.

Viewed from this angle, One L. Goh might have come to the conclusion at some point that he’d taken scarce funds from his poor old widower father, and handed it over to religious hucksters running the Golden State’s worst nursing program.

One thing to keep in mind here: It’s easy to see why Oikos University introduced a nursing vocational program. If you get it accredited, these nursing programs are guaranteed cash-cows. Most of the big for-profit education predators like Kaplan Inc. (which subsidizes the Washington Post) are in on the vocational nursing for-profit gig.

You can charge students insane tuitions, hire hacks as teachers, pocket the difference, and dump the unpaid loans on the government in exchange for 100 cents on the dollar.

The Reverend who founded Oikos University certainly understood this — his good friend told the New York Times that Rev. Kim “had established the nursing school to support the school’s department of religion.” The cash must have rolled in quickly, because within a year after launching its nursing program, Oikos doubled its size — meaning doubling revenues.

And yet even with all those new revenues coming in, the school couldn’t figure out a way to raise its graduates’ test results out of the failure category. The school appears to have stiffed one of its top staffers out of her pay and her loan, suggesting, in the words of the Oakland Tribune, “that the school may have fallen on hard times.”

The bleak Oikos University “campus”: Like a converted warehouse

I wonder if this is what set off One L. Goh a few months after he enrolled — the realization that he’d been fleeced, that he enrolled in the wrong program on his father’s money.  The year 2011 had already taken his brother and his mother.

A Dashed Last Hope

There is something in between the lines that suggests his plan to become a nurse, worked out with his father’s assistance a kind of desperate last attempt to turn everything around in the proverbial One Bold Swoop.

He would do something practical, and morally good, helping the elderly, people like his father — and earn a steady income that would allow him, at last, some dignity and some chance to start paying off his debts.

It was as though Goh pinned everything on this plan to reinvent himself as a nurse — and according to all our cultural propaganda, all the Hollywood movies and newspaper bromides, Goh would be rewarded for undertaking this self-transformation. It was guaranteed to change everything. As the Oikos U. ad promised, “Dreams Do Come True.”

And for a brief while last year, Goh’s mood was transformed, he really did think he had a great future ahead of him. One of Goh’s former employers at a food warehouse described Goh as “upbeat” when he ran into him last year in Oakland — a change from the usually quiet, sullen Goh he’d known.

This new “upbeat” One L. Goh boasted to his former employer “about how he had returned to school to become a nurse and help elderly people.”

The idea that you can reinvent yourself, that your fate is in your own hands, that you have the power inside of you to make yourself a winner (and if you fail, it’s all your own fault) — this may be America’s most toxic cultural snake-oil. And yet it never fails to find takers.

Of course, nothing changed — except that Goh had been conned out of his dad’s money. As his former employer put it:

“Not many people go back to school at that age. He was trying something new and it wasn’t working.”

It didn’t take long for him to figure it out. Just a few months after enrolling, One L. Goh dropped out of the Oikos University program. When he dropped out of the program, he asked them to refund his father’s $6,000 that he paid for tuition. He was denied. He fought with the administrators, but they didn’t budge. This was what made him snap.

The administrator, whom Goh fought with for his tuition refund and whom he came to kill that day, has now come forward. Her name is Ellen Cervellon. She was gone on the day of the massacre because she also teaches nursing to students at California State University at East Bay.

Ellen Cervellan: The face of “Real America”

Now she will have to wonder, why didn’t she just approve the refund to a desperate man? What if she had approved it? Her argument was that he’d already spent several months in the program. According to a friend of Ellen Cervellon’s, Linda Music, she even denied Goh his last reasonable request, to prorate the refund.

As Matthai Kuruvila reported at SFGate.com, Goh had asked Ellen Cervellon for a full refund of his tuition and when he was denied suggested prorating the tuition refund. Cervellon said no, Music said.

That meant he threw his father’s money away: He had nothing to show for the $6,000 given to the university; he would never be able to pay his father back; and he would never be able to borrow a sum like that from him again. That was it, the final act. The jig was up for him.

Lack of Empathy

Why? Why couldn’t Cervellon meet this desperate failure half-way? What was in it for Cervellon? What’s with the Ayn Randian lack of empathy in this country among the non-oligarchy caste?

Cervellon seems to be asking herself this same question: “In talking to several of the students and faculty who were there, I think he was looking for me. I have that weight on my shoulders and I don’t know what to do with it,”

School officials have been painting a portrait of One L. Goh as a psycho and a freak, using phrases like “behavioral problems” and calling him “angry” and “paranoid.” There must be truth to that; nice, normal people in a healthy state of mind don’t rampage-massacre others.

But the intended target, Ellen Cervellon, disputes that: “He was never forced out, he showed no behavioral problems, and he was never asked to leave the program. He decided on his own to leave the program.”

The depressingly familiar dead-end life that One L. Goh found himself in — surrounded by petty scams as revealed in the ex-staffer’s lawsuit and the bleak performance of the school’s graduates, combined with the back-to-back deaths of two family members — could make a lot of sane people desperate and enraged and suicidal. Not to mention the larger context of an inequality-ravaged America where opportunity and dignity are scarcer and scarcer.

On top of all this, as he complained often, students at the nursing program wouldn’t talk to him. That could be traumatizing even under better circumstances, but under his conditions, being mocked and ignored by fellow fundamentalist Christians for being an aging loser, would be devastating.

One of Goh’s teachers continued criticizing Goh even after the massacre: “I always advised him, ‘You go to school to learn, not to make friends.’”

More great advice from the Oikos University folks.

After quitting the nursing program, One L. Goh spent the last few months working with his father at the Daly City supermarket. He was back at square one: A failure, swindled, condemned to work in a shitty job beside his struggling father whom he’d let down.

You might say that One L. Goh snapped because for once, he saw things as they really were, stripped of hope, stripped of fantasies about self-improvement or self-transformation.

He failed at everything; he was one of those faceless, anonymous losers. But there was one thing he could still excel at, something that could get him attention, something that this country perversely celebrates: mass murder in a blaze of anti-glory.  So long as you’re ready to make that transformation-of-character into a death row inmate, that option is always available here.

Last Monday, according to police accounts, One L. Goh armed himself with a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol and showed up at the Oikos school for his final act. But the plan failed from the start: The administrator he was after was gone. So the target became the entire setting, Oikos University, as it so often happens in these “going postal” rampage killings.

There’s a section on the Oikos University website about the 11 beliefs that the University holds to — they call it their “Doctrinal Statement” and it’s the last belief, Number 11, that sums up the malevolence of it all:

“We believe in the existence of a personal, malevolent being called Satan who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom the place of eternal punishment was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”

Would you like to know more? Read “Revenge of the Nerd: What the Media Won’t Tell You About The Rampage Killer Who Attacked A Pittsburgh Aerobics Class” and “Alabama Murder Mystery Solved: The Shocking Story Of How A Chicken-Slaughtering Billionaire Plundered Rural America” by Mark Ames. Also read Ames’ previous Consortium News piece, “The One Percent’s Doctrine For The Rest Of Us: We Are Not Human Beings, But Livestock Whose Meat They Extract As ‘Rent’”.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

—Arthur Young; 1771

Our popular economic wisdom says that capitalism equals freedom and free societies, right? Well, if you ever suspected that the logic is full of shit, then I’d recommend checking a book called The Invention of Capitalism, written by an economic historian named Michael Perelmen, who’s been exiled to Chico State, a redneck college in rural California, for his lack of freemarket friendliness. And Perelman has been putting his time in exile to damn good use, digging deep into the works and correspondence of Adam Smith and his contemporaries to write a history of the creation of capitalism that goes beyond superficial The Wealth of Nations fairy tale and straight to the source, allowing you to read the early capitalists, economists, philosophers, clergymen and statesmen in their own words. And it ain’t pretty.

One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists, who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.

Francis Hutcheson, from whom Adam Smith learned all about the virtue of natural liberty, wrote: ”it is the one great design of civil laws to strengthen by political sanctions the several laws of nature. … The populace needs to be taught, and engaged by laws, into the best methods of managing their own affairs and exercising mechanic art.”

Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!

Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.

“The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of the people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy,” writes Perelman. “In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx, or at least his translators, labeled this expropriation of the masses as ‘‘primitive accumulation.’’

Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land—from the enactment of so-called Game Laws that prohibited peasants from hunting, to the destruction of the peasant productivity by fencing the commons into smaller lots—but by far the most interesting parts of the book are where you get to read Adam Smith’s proto-capitalist colleagues complaining and whining about how peasants are too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited, and trying to figure out how to force them to accept a life of wage slavery.

This pamphlet from the time captures the general attitude towards successful, self-sufficient peasant farmers:

The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion in- creases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.

While another pamphleteer wrote:

Nor can I conceive a greater curse upon a body of people, than to be thrown upon a spot of land, where the productions for subsistence and food were, in great measure, spontaneous, and the climate required or admitted little care for raiment or covering.

John Bellers, a Quaker “philanthropist” and economic thinker saw independent peasants as a hindrance to his plan of forcing poor people into prison-factories, where they would live, work and produce a profit of 45% for aristocratic owners:

“Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.”

Daniel Defoe, the novelist and trader, noted that in the Scottish Highlands “people were extremely well furnished with provisions. … venison exceedingly plentiful, and at all seasons, young or old, which they kill with their guns whenever they find it.’’

To Thomas Pennant, a botanist, this self-sufficiency was ruining a perfectly good peasant population:

“The manners of the native Highlanders may be expressed in these words: indolent to a high degree, unless roused to war, or any animating amusement.”

If having a full belly and productive land was the problem, then the solution to whipping these lazy bums into shape was obvious: kick ‘em off the land and let em starve.

Arthur Young, a popular writer and economic thinker respected by John Stuart Mill, wrote in 1771: “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” Sir William Temple, a politician and Jonathan Swift’s boss, agreed, and suggested that food be taxed as much as possible to prevent the working class from a life of “sloth and debauchery.”

Temple also advocated putting four-year-old kids to work in the factories, writing ‘‘for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.’’ Some thought that four was already too old. According to Perelmen, “John Locke, often seen as a philosopher of liberty, called for the commencement of work at the ripe age of three.” Child labor also excited Defoe, who was joyed at the prospect that “children after four or five years of age…could every one earn their own bread.’’ But that’s getting off topic…

Happy Faces of Productivity…

Even David Hume, that great humanist, hailed poverty and hunger as positive experiences for the lower classes, and even blamed the “poverty” of France on its good weather and fertile soil:

“‘Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better.”

Reverend Joseph Townsend believed that restricting food was the way to go:

“[Direct] legal constraint [to labor] . . . is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, . . . whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . . Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.”

Patrick Colquhoun, a merchant who set up England’s first private “preventative police“ force to prevent dock workers from supplementing their meager wages with stolen goods, provided what may be the most lucid explanation of how hunger and poverty correlate to productivity and wealth creation:

Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

Colquhoun’s summary is so on the money, it has to be repeated. Because what was true for English peasants is still just as true for us:

“Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

***

Yasha Levine is a  founding editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

Want to know more recovered history? Read Yasha Levine’s investigation into the life of Harry Koch, the man who spawned Charles and David Koch, the two most powerful oligarchs of our time: The Birth of the Koch Clan: It All Started In a Little Texas Town Called Quanah

A little over a year ago, while researching the Confederacy’s economy, I stumbled across this unnerving graph charting the value of America’s “stock of slaves” in the last decades before the Civil War.

This graph tells the real story behind the South’s secession: the value of the South’s “slave stock”—the property of the ruling class — soared as secession approached, reaching an almost 90-degree angle in those final years before Harper’s Ferry. The South’s ruling class seceded to protect their riches, period:

From afar, if you didn’t know that human “slave stock” was the asset being charted, you could easily mistake this graph, and its parabolic trajectory, for one of the many destructive asset bubbles this country has suffered right up through our own time.

Up close, this graph drips greed, mass murder and shame — it strips away the historical revisionism that falsely ascribed the South’s “cause” to an almost selfless, tragically romantic attachment to “tradition” and “culture”; it gives lie to the myth that slave owners kept their slaves to the detriment of their own bottom line.

Like the worst wars and the worst of history’s villains, the Confederacy’s one percenters seceded and fought in order to continue profiting from their most valuable investment properties — their human slave stock.

The graph comes from a grim working paper, “Capitalists Without Capital”, written in the late 1980s by a UC Berkeley economist, Richard Sutch, and a UC Riverside historian, Robert Ransom.

As they showed, slavery produced huge profits for southerners who invested in slave capital — to the detriment of all other portfolio investments, as the value of slaves soared in the mid-19^th century. By that time, by far the largest cotton-growing states’ wealth was in slave stock, not in real estate or other investments.

The slave trade was outlawed in 1808; but the slave population quadrupled from 1 million in 1800 to 4 million in 1860 — encouraged by slaveowners who “bred” their human stock, thereby multiplying their profits as the value of each slave rose.

Slavery is often portrayed by revisionist historians as somehow antithetical to market capitalism; in reality, slavery was a winning portfolio investment, the very incarnation of just how evil “free-market” capitalism can be. As the authors write:

“If slaves … were an investment included in the asset portfolio of the planter/entrepreneur, they helped satisfy the owner’s demand for wealth. But unlike most other forms of capital, which depreciate with time, the stock of slaves appreciated. Thus, the growth of the slave population continuously increased the stock of wealth.”

What makes this graph so disturbing for us in 2012 is what it suggests about today’s “1 percent” — and how they view the rest of us. It gives form to the brutal crackdown on the Occupy protests — and suggests darker things to come as we try to free ourselves from their vision of civilization, and our place in it.

Contrast that with this McKinsey report put out a few years ago by the director of the consulting group’s New York office. Titled “The New Metrics of Corporate Performance: Profit Per Employee”, the report argues that the best performing firms in our increasingly financialized era are those companies that have learned to squeeze ever-larger profits out of each employee — and not by the more traditional “return on investment” metric.

The McKinsey report looked at the world’s 30 largest companies between 1995 and 2005, and found that their return on human capital more than doubled, from an average of $35,000 profit per employee to $83,000, leading to this rather frank and nauseating conclusion:

“If a company’s capital intensity doesn’t increase, profit per employee is a pretty good proxy for the return on intangibles. The hallmark of financial performance in today’s digital age is an expanded ability to earn ‘rents’ from intangibles. Profit per employee is one measure of those rents. If a company boosts its profit per employee without increasing its capital intensity, management will increase its rents.”

Extracting rent from “employees” as a business strategy: This is supposed to be the language of feudalism, not modern advanced capitalism — and yet this is the cutting edge in 21^st century capitalist thinking, unashamed and unvarnished:

“One way to improve a company’s profit per employee is simply to shed low-profit employees. But if they generate profit greater than the cost of the capital used to support their work, shedding them actually reduces the creation of wealth.”

As with slave stock in a Southern investor’s portfolio, the McKinsey report argues that as a corporation learns to successfully extract rent from its employees, the more employees it extracts rent from, the greater its aggregate profits.

The new metrics: How much “rent” can be extracted from employees, not investments

To compare “the 99 percent” to African slaves would be crude; but the mindset of “the 1 percent” then, as now, is eerily consistent. They view the rest of us not as human beings with rights, but as livestock whose meat is “rent” to be extracted.

This is the language of plutocratic capitalism, a brutal system totally incompatible with democracy and antithetical to republican government and civilization. It is the language of misery, and misery is what “the 1 percent” is promising “the 99 percent” for years to come, in ever-greater doses.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

This article was first published at TheNation.com

If there’s one thing that distinguishes Ron Paul from the rest of the GOP field, it’s his principled stand against American empire and his ardent defense of individual liberties. [1] Paul’s opposition to wars, bloated defense budgets and government espionage of US citizens has made him a hero among some young conservatives. His seemingly rock-solid principles and radicalism has even drawn some on the left; unlike even left-wing Democrats, Paul has said he wants to abolish both the CIA and the FBI to protect individual “liberty.”

So it should come as a shock and disappointment to his followers that Ron Paul’s single largest donor—his Sheldon Adelson, as it were—founded a controversial defense contractor, Palantir Technologies, that profits from government espionage work for the CIA, FBI and other agencies, and which last year was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting American political opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders. (Palantir takes its name from the mystic stones used by characters in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to spy on each other.)

According to recently filed FEC disclosure documents, Ron Paul’s Super PAC has received nearly all of its money from a single source, billionaire Peter Thiel. So far, Thiel has contributed $2.6 million [2] to Ron Paul’s Super PAC, Endorse Liberty [3], providing 76 percent of the Super PAC’s total [2] intake.

Thiel, a self-described libertarian and opponent of democracy [4] who made his fortune as the founder of PayPal, launched Palantir in 2004 to profit from what the Wall Street Journal described [5]as “the government spy-services marketplace.” The CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, was brought in to back up Thiel as one of Palantir’s first outside investors. Today, Palantir’s valuation isreported [6] to be in the billions.

Palantir slide for proposal to attack WikiLeaks on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce

A recent Businessweek profile [7] explained how Palantir makes its money—and why Ron Paul’s followers should be bothered:

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’”

Read the rest of this article at TheNation.com by clicking here.

It’s from September 10, 2009. Enjoy:



“I wouldn’t want to be twenty-years-old now. I fear for what’s coming.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, 2003

Generational analysis is bullshit. Or so I’m told. Fit for netroots liberals and horoscope clippers, maybe. And to be fair, it’s mostly thinktank types who’ve been profiting off that whole Millennials Rising genre. One of the authors of that book is a former writing partner of Pete G. Peterson’s, the octogenarian billionaire who has spent the last couple of decades trying to kick over the Social Security ladder before us young’ns can scamper up and collect. Most of it reads like a debriefing after a recon mission—you can feel them sizing us up, drawing up blueprints for the generational counterrevolution that we’re living through right now.

So if you want to screech about the trappings of generational politics and the careless demonization of everyone born in a twenty-year stretch in one particular country, fine. I hear you. But this piece isn’t for you. You’re okay.

This is for my fellow Millennial. The one who gets his or her rocks off to visions of a glorious Boomer-hegemonic extinction, like those old claymation movies of dinosaurs getting nuked by meteor-fire. This is for those of you who, like me, need a vision of that mighty Boomer Brontosaurus keelin’ over for good—and the furry little dino-eating Repenomamuses scurrying across all the corpses to claim the planet once and for all.

Take a hit of that glorious vision, friends. It’s okay to get a little excited. Just as long as we keep in mind that the Brontosaurus, we now know, was nothing more than a big paleontologist fuck up–the misassembled and amalgamated remains of other great lizards. Yet it remains a useful word for ancient, gigantic beasts with acorn-sized brains and a penchant for mindlessly crushing everything in its wake.

***

A Pew poll from a few weeks back asked Americans how they felt about capitalism versus socialism. The results said all you need to know about how much longer we’re going to have to wade through this misery. You guessed it: until the Boomers finally croak.

For maybe the first time in modern history, we now have a generation that actually has warmer feelings about socialism than it does capitalism: 49% to 46%. And a few days later, amid a multi-billion dollar war on public sector workers, another poll was released demonstrating that a whopping 69% of Millennials think teachers are underpaid (compared to 56% for Americans of all ages).

Boomer technocrats long ago conceded that Millennials skew to the left on social and cultural issues, but have tried to muddy the waters when it comes to the economy–hence the “libertarian” con. But now, the verdict is in and it’s undeniable. Journalist Doug Henwood thinks “this may be the most left-thinking younger generation in modern history.”

Sure, polls have shown a general ambivalence on the part of the American public towards the free market for some time now. The 50-64 crew isn’t that much keener on capitalism—53% approve—but with 68% holding negative views on socialism, they’ve proven that they can still pop a Red-baiting boner with the best of them. It’s the Millennials who are the first to open their arms towards a left-wing alternative.

How could that even happen over here? I first heard the “s”-word from by my sixth grade history teacher—this was in the early days of Yeltsin. She said socialism is when you have to wait in line for hours just for a Happy Meal. (We had a visiting student from Russia—Elena—who solemnly confirmed the horror to us all.) According to most of our political discourse, “socialism” means either compact fluorescent lightbulbs or massive corporate-welfare checks. But considering the long saturation of Cold War propaganda in this country, I’d like to think it’s enough that the utterance of the word doesn’t send them into an anti-commie tizzy.

But maybe it’s not. Now that the student loan bubble has swollen past the trillion dollar marker as of last year, we have the president of the University of California system nodding approvingly at a proposal—drawn up by a liberal grassroots organization no less—to replace the tuition system with a 5% tax on all wages for 20 years after graduation. So de facto debt servitude is replaced by old school indentured servitude.

And yet the usually spot-on Hamilton Nolan of Gawker—a dyed-in-the-wool Millennial in every sense—is enthused about the proposal, which he calls, approvingly, “socialism.” Apparently, going back to the tuition-free heydays of CUNY and the University of California system—when those universities were among the most prestigious in the world—is completely off the table. But I can hardly blame him. With so many of us hammered down by six-figure student loan debt, actual indentured servitude that ends before our first colonoscopy sounds like Scandinavian social democracy. But that’s not even the worst of it. Read the fine print: it’s 5% of wages, income from “investments” is excluded. Tax the poor wage-slave, spare the wealthy rentier. Americans still can’t see the play even with Buffett rubbing his secretary’s tax return in our faces.

Whereas the average state tuition in the early 1980s ran around $8k (in 2008 dollars) for four years, most Millennials are forced into the mid-five-figures range for a second rate public university education. (Pell Grants—when the Boomers were attending college—covered 77% of the cost for a four-year public university. For us, the figure is 35%.) And it’s a servitude from which we can never escape. Forget bankruptcy. Default on a student loan and the government will garnish your wages until they get it all back, plus interest. They can even go after your social security money, off limits for all other debts.

The actual cost of universal free higher education is more than manageable—out-of-pocket costs are around 1% of GDP. That’s a relatively tiny pinprick from the federal budget that could transform higher education overnight into a truly public good. And yet the US government is already spending tens of billions of dollars on higher education. But they’re not using it to pay our tuition. They’re using it just to prop up our heinous student loan system—through tax deductions and credits, inflating the cost for all. They’re bending over backwards just to fuck us and collect.

Mike Konczal sees this as just another sign of a “submerged state”—the unholy fertilizer that keeps the American libertarian discourse in full bloom. None of the “welfare,” but all of the “state.” And it explains everything from how the government subsidizes mortgages to our health care system. A submerged state, according to political scientist Suzanne Mettler, is what you get when a government refuses to distribute funds and services directly to individuals and families, and instead uses tax breaks or payments to private companies all in order to hide the hand of government and exaggerate the role of the market.

But for this, blame not the Boomer, but his overrated progenitor. It’s the generation that made capitalism work so well for so many—the Band of Brothers—who are the real culprits here. The New Deal electorate and the Great Society coalition. Sure, the ruling class reactionaries hated FDR’s reforms, but as Michael Harrington pointed out, “these same reactionaries benefited from the changes that the New Deal introduced far more than did the workers and the poor who actively struggled for them.”

“After the Great Society program in the 1960s,” says Leo Panitch, “left-wing Democrats, rather than calling for more public housing to rebuild America’s cities instead called for the banks to lend money to poor black communities…one of the effects of winning those demands was a channeling of those communities more deeply into the structures of finance, the most dynamic sector of neoliberal capitalism.”

The Boomers grew up under a capitalism that had to be hammered and shaped into respectability over a thirty year period. But for us, we’re left staring at the monstrosity in its natural state. With a quarter-century’s worth of quasi social-democratic reforms either neutralized or withered away, and with no more credit to hose us down, we’re able to see the beast for what it truly is.

While a liberal looks upon the New Deal and Great Society generation as a pantheon of benevolent patriarchs, I see a bunch of technocrats who slapped together a crude simulacrum of social democracy and called it “free-enterprise.” Just as in the submerged state of 2012, they did their best to make the government’s hand all but invisible, all the while using the machinery of the Cold War to purge labor radicals—McCarthyism’s real target—leaving us helpless after the onslaught began. They then told their children—the Boomers—to scorn these dirty Reds, and to thank good ol’ American capitalism for the chicken in every pot.

So by the time Reagan had gone to war against “the state,” the children of labor union households and GI Bill dads didn’t know any better. The ruling class walked away from a relatively informal compact which they honored only while it worked for them. Instead of handing out raises, they just started pocketing all the profits for themselves. And so began nearly four decades of stagnating wages.

Unlike the nations of Western Europe, American workers failed to get a good deal of the social democratic compact written into law, which means it was all the easier to dismantle over here. Not necessarily the case elsewhere. The labor policies and institutions that rose up in the 1930s in places like Scandinavia “were the result of conscious theory rather than the political improvisation of the New Deal,” says Harrington. So much for pragmatism over ideology.

As Cornell historian Jefferson Cowie put it, “the biggest social democratic achievements in American history were an aberration.” The Boomers inherited the largesse of World War II, but without the laws, social traditions, and institutional structures to keep the bourgeoisie from gobbling it all up. “The benefits of the welfare state become one more fact of life for those who did not have to struggle for them, something to be exploited for convenience,” as Harrington put it.

***

But student loans are just one prong in the Boomer phalanx—and maybe the least ghoulish. Even if they can’t rope us into the student scam and even if they fail to turn us into dutiful little low-wage baristas and register-jockeys, they can always sick the multi-trillion-dollar U.S. Security State on us.

There are the wars, of course—now pretty much the only way for a good many of us to get a debt-free education. And if you make it through Afghanistan without the “signature wound”—shredded genitals and two legs blown off, on the rise as of last year—you have PTSD, suicidal despair, and drug addiction to look forward to. Or maybe even a shoot-out with the cops—a fate that seems to be growing more and more common among Millennial combat veterans.

Then there’s the ever-popular Drug War, always trolling for some fresh blood. The Millennials are, after all, the least white generation in U.S. history, making us perfect fodder for the country’s ongoing race war. The Boomers didn’t start it, but they’re the ones who amped it up and tried to make us like it—the ones who sent D.A.R.E. officers into our schools and told us to rat out our pals. As The Wire’s David Simon has pointed out, it was Clinton—the first Boomer president—that passed some of the most draconian “anti-crime” laws. Even business in the for-profit juvenile prisons sector is a-boomin’. Same goes for our expanding network of privatized immigration detention centers—a direct beneficiary of the Tea Party campaign for a brutal crackdown on “illegals.”

My soon-to-be father-in-law likes to tell us stories about how he and his brothers used to outrun the local West Virginia cops—gunning it Dukes of Hazzard style—how they’d get dragged into courtrooms where the judges would give ‘em a stern talking to before sending them back to mama for a spanking. But the mass murders at Columbine unleashed a White Terror that put an end to whatever was left of that America. Whereas post-Stalinist Russia saw the release of dozens of classic Gulag memoirs, I expect our very own Kolyma Tales out of a rustbelt juvey hall within the next couple decades.

Much of the Patriot Act itself was comprised of legislation creeping around the halls of powers well before 9/11, much of it written with the burgeoning “anti-globalization” movement in mind and especially “ecoterrorists”—a name for Millennials who take issue with carcinogenic drinking water and the Mengele-like torture of animals. Throw a brick through the window of a fur store, and you can be charged with violating the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006. And if they nab you for that, you’re lucky if you don’t end up in a “Communication Management Unit”—no mail, no visits, no talking.

The fact is that being arrested is pretty much a rite of passage today—or the end-of-the-line for your hopes and dreams if you happen to be a darker shade of pale. In 1967, 22% of Americans could expect to be arrested before they hit 23 years of age. Today, it’s 30.2%.

And now, with the spread of broadband Internet, Boomers have opened up a new front: The decade-long crusade on filesharing. No more coddling us with “Don’t Copy that Floppy!”. Take the case of Hana Beshara, proprietor of the dearly departed link sharing video website NinjaVideo. SWATed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stormed into her home last year and now—just a couple of weeks ago—she was sentenced to 22 months in prison and fined over $200,000 in restitution to her “victim,” the Motion Picture Association of America. Or there’s Aaron Swartz of Reddit, charged with the crime of attempting to create a database of academic papers and reports—largely the work of unpaid graduate student labor in the first place. He faces up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million. Or Joel Tenenbaum, the kid who’s being sued for $4.5 million for sharing a handful of Nirvana mp3s. Remember that video of Texas Judge William Adams viciously beating his teenaged daughter? He claimed that it was her Internet downloads that set him off. Just a little “discipline,” he said, after “she was caught stealing.”

Which is why I love the Tea Party so much. They don’t dick around about any of this. It’s a full-scale generational war they’re after. Sociologist Theda Skocpol’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism devotes a good chunk to understanding the generational warrior inherent in Tea Party politics. Skocpol refers to the clash as “the ‘grey’ versus ‘brown’ divide.” Grey meaning the old white people who dominate all of our political and economic institutions, and brown meaning the young, most racially diverse generation in the history of this country: ours.

Grey versus brown is “a tension that superimposes divisions by age and experience, income, and ethnicity…the Tea Party is very much a reaction by older white conservative Americans who resent and fear what they think might be the political accompaniments of a nation transformed by rising younger cohorts with different experiences, values, and social characteristics.”

Fittingly, the Tea Partiers have chosen the Ryan Budget as their very own spiritual lodestar—the Port Huron Statement of the old, white and reactionary. The Ryan Budget—and the GOP campaign around it—divides the American populace into “those who are 55 or older now, and those who are younger.” Meaning Boomers will receive Medicare and Social Security checks unchanged, whereas Millennials get the axe—despite the fact that many of us have been paying into these programs for the past 15 years. Let the record show that it was they who fired the first shot.

We’re not even the first ones to fall into their cross-hairs. They lined up their own moms and dads for “assisted-obsolescence” decades ago. Overrated though they were, the New Deal and Great Society electorates had little faith in laissez-faire. For a prissy Ruling Class Boomer like Grover Norquist, their extinction over the past fifteen years has been a most joyous occasion, as Grover told a reporter in 2004:

“We’ve had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952…That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die…their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations…one-size-fits-all labor law, one-size-fits-all Social Security. We will all work until we’re 65 and have the same pension. You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American.”

***

It’s not like Millennials are better people or anything. No, actually, fuck that. We are better people on the whole—we play well with others. But that’s one thing I do worry about: we’re all too nice. That’s the problem with the goody-two-shoes nature common to so many Millennials, especially the ones out in the streets. We’re just not mean enough.

Boomers know how to get mean. But we just can’t do it. This is how creeps like Jon Stewart and Obama manage to make in-roads with us. Remember that shot of the Iranian revolutionaries with the captured and bloodied riot cop? And they protected him from everyone else? Admirable, brave, and—tactically speaking—probably the right decision. But a dangerous omen, I fear.

All of the hippies who skulked off into the world of children’s programming to ride out the counterrevolution have cursed us with both our potential salvation (respect for the commons) and our ultimate weakness (pacifist nonsense). Who would deny that Obamaism was the canniest of Boomer plots to dope Millennials with that perfect cocktail of lefty-flirtation, racial inclusiveness, and pathological congeniality? It wouldn’t surprise me if the DNC had brought in old Sesame Street writers to help deconstruct our brains.

But mostly our decency stems from the fact that we’ve all been muzzled and defanged by student debt, slave wages and mass unemployment. Unlike our parents, we’ll never even get the chance to gobble up our own children and leave them with the tab. So let’s stick to the Marxian materialist route: the Boomers are a generation soaked with the spoils of war–the biggest war in human history, from which only the USA walked away relatively unscathed. They were always going to be total shits.

And in that respect, we should pity the Boomer. They’re like the frog soaking in the pot of slowly-warming water. They can barely feel it. As Mark Schmitt put it:

“A baby born in 1956 would have graduated from high school in about 1974, from college in 1978 or so. Look at almost any historical chart of the American economy, and you see two sharp breaks in the 1970s. First, in 1974, household incomes, which had been rising since World War II, flattened. Real wages started to stagnate. The poverty rate stopped falling. Health insurance coverage stopped rising. Those trends have continued ever since.

Second, a little later in the decade, around the time today’s 55-year-olds graduated from college (if they did—fewer than 30 percent have a four-year degree), inequality began its sharp rise, and the share of national income going to the bottom 40 percent began to fall. Productivity and wages, which had tended to keep pace, began to diverge, meaning that workers began seeing little of the benefits of their own productivity gains. The number of jobs in manufacturing peaked and began to drop sharply…If there was ever going to be a generational war in this country, that high school class of ’74 would be its Mason-Dixon line.”

Which is why, psychologically, this Great Depression of ours can never hurt us like it hurts them. I see it all the time: the unemployed Boomer thinks himself a loser. He’s spent his life watching his peers accumulate wealth and power. Now he feels like the rug has been pulled from under him. Something has gone terribly wrong. When he files for food-stamps, he feels exactly what the Ruling Class wants him to feel: shame and personal failing.

Whereas a Millennial shrugs and swipes the SNAP card at the farmer’s market for a quart of fresh cider and a pomegranate muffin. Why should she feel guilty? Even if she grew up in one of our country’s bourgeoisier enclaves, she could point to a handful of peers who graduated top-of-the-class, worked hard, played by the rules, but live with mom and dad. And despite all that guff about how we’re all lazy freeloaders, most of her friends probably have two or three jobs, each one barely hovering over the minimum wage. Few among them have managed to nab that most beautiful of American luxuries: health insurance coverage. For her, it’s taken for granted that capitalism is unfair–that hard work, socially beneficial skills, and playing by the rules guarantees nothing.

We Millennials have all the same ludicrous delusions of grandeur as our parents, but now, we’re ready to shuck capitalist gospel out the window. The Boomers call us spoiled, and ask us to do more with less, telling us to tamper our dreams. But the best thing we Americans have going for us is our entitlement, sans the free-market faith.

Look at Japan. They’ve been in something like a depression for twenty years. But where’s their Occupy? Instead, they have a new word—hikikomori—to describe the phenomenon of young men who refuse to leave their bedrooms, and the shame-ridden parents who try to keep it all under wraps. These kids did what a generation must never do: they’ve internalized the judgment of the free-market, a horrible and depressing process currently playing out among the Boomer unemployed over here as they head into Year IV of this hell.

Boomers felt it was their destiny to get rich—that if they just put in the hours, wealth would rain down from the heavens. And they could look to their peers for confirmation. From around 1820 to 1970, mom and dad could tell junior that life, for him, really would be better. That’s 150 years of rising wages. That’s a hell of a stretch—a success that no other country could claim. The Boomers stewed in those juices just long enough to believe all that free-market bullshit, even as they were yanking the rug out from under each other.

Way back in 1892, Friedrich Engels knew that success was the real curse of the USA. And that a powerful, anti-capitalist left could never take off in this country until the game stopped paying out: “Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America.”

Sound familiar? That’s what Occupy is for most of us—a guttural roar that capitalism will not do. The Boomers are right that it all smacks of entitlement. We are entitled. The world, and this country in particular, is awash in capital. With the billions floating in and out of this city every day, it’s amazing that you can walk around Manhattan and not end up with at least a grand worth of cash sifting around in your shoes like beach sand. The big lie is that the coffers are empty and budgets must be balanced. What a fucking joke. American workers have spent hundreds of years building this country and amassing this wealth, and it’s about time we claimed the vast majority of it.

***

But batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while. Conservative apostate David Frum recently characterized the contemporary GOP’s platform as “a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boomer generation.” Which is pretty much the Democrats’ platform too. They just have better table manners.

We’ll be spending the rest of our formative years diving for cover from their collective Death Rattle. Thirty years from now, even if we walk away with all of our soft tissue intact, John Roberts will probably still be Chief Justice.

Boomers know what they’ve wrought. Climate change? Don’t believe the polls. They know it’s happening. Yeah, if you confront one of them, he might put up a denialist front for a couple of minutes. But keep pelting him and it all crumbles, giving way to “well, it’s too late.” Translated: “I’ll be on, or near, my deathbed when the shit really hits the fan. You, youngster, will be hauling your family across the country George Romero style, scavenging for orphans to sell off as catamites to the warlord chieftains.”

But as they begin their transition from their autumnal years of denial to the sad introspection of their wintry decades, I’m starting to think that they know something has gone wrong–a mutation of some kind. Since the Boomers’ adolescence in the 1960s and 70s, they’ve undergone a metamorphosis not unlike Jeff Goldblum’s in The Fly. In the teleportation pod on the left, party-hearty Jimmy Buffett. But in the pod on the right, hidden from view, a tiny little Grover Norquist, buzzing around in the corners. Zap! The DNA passes from pod left to pod right, fusing the two specimens. A few seconds later and the journey is complete. Out steps the mutated Boomer–an entirely new creation.

At first, they’re strong. They can kill, fuck, and maim whomever they please. They always get what they want. But after a while, the rot begins. One morning, they find a powerful, but hideous mutant staring back at them in the mirror—with a knack for crawling up the walls and vomiting acid upon its enemies. And, most importantly, ready to leech a little lifeforce from their own unborn child stirring in Geena Davis’s womb, all for just a few more years of power.

Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has spent the past few years chronicling this ghastly mutation step-by-step—unraveling the seemingly incongruous strands and the hideous parentage of Boomer ideology. Their embrace of American libertarianism—with all of its absurdities, vulgarities and utopianism—was the final cry for help.

Like Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly slowly lifting the shotgun to its temple, the Boomers are ready for us to assert Millennial hegemony and put them out of their collective misery. Trust me, it’s the humane thing to do.

Connor Kilpatrick is a Senior Writer for Jacobin; this article was first published in Jacobin magazine. Check out Jacobin’s website here.

Would you like to know more? Read Connor Kilpatrick’s “Conscience of a Radical: Corey Robin’s ‘The Reactionary Mind.’”

The Oakland Police Department went on another massive tear this weekend. On Saturday, they used rubber bullets, pepper flash-bang grenades, tear gas and batons to violently crush an attempt by Occupy activists to take over a vacant convention center in downtown Oakland and turn it into a community center/local Occupy HQ. Scores of people were injured, including a 19-year-old woman rushed to the hospital and treated for internal bleeding after a cop thrashed her kidneys with his truncheon. Yesterday, I got second-hand info that a man was shot in the face with a rubber bullet, and had his tooth/teeth knocked out. Using the same sort of kettling techniques extensively employed by the NYPD to trap and net protesters like fish, the OPD arrested over 400 people.

The sheer number of arrests, the brutal overreaction, only shows just how paranoid the 1%ers are getting. The Occupy protesters must be something right if they’re provoking such a heavy-handed disproportionate response merely for hanging out. Someone should remind them that the 1st Amendment explicitly guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble“…

That number—400 arrests in Oakland—is about double the number of people detained by the LAPD (myself included) in their raid on the Occupy LA encampment on November 30. Just like in LA, Oakland police targeted journalists for harassment and arrest.

According to Free Press’ Josh Stearns—who has been doing the important work of keeping a tally of all the journalists arrested while covering the Occupy Movement—at least 6 reporters were rounded up and jailed in Oakland. That’s despite the fact that many of those arrested were accredited with the city of Oakland.

This kind of brutal intimidation of the press–something we usually associate with tinpot Third World dictatorships– is a major reason why Journalists Without Borders recently ranked America #47 in press freedom.

I’m going to write more about America’s growing war on press freedoms; but for now I want to share some amazing and scary video clips from the January 28 attack on Occupy Oakland in case you haven’t seen these—some of this looks like a remake of the archival footage we’ve all seen of California Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1969 mobilization of the National Guard to stomp student protesters on the UC Berkeley campus, which happens to be located just five miles from last weekend’s police crackdown in downtown Oakland…

What’s worse, among some people, it’s becoming increasingly respectable to call for more police-state crackdowns and violations of the First Amendment. Like this rightwing columnist for the Chronicle who’s already calling on Governor Jerry Brown to mobilize the National Guard for an assault on Occupy Oakland—and I’m sure there are plenty more wine-sniffing fascists just itching to see these protests get crushed with real, leaden firepower.

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Want to know more? Read Yasha Levine’s account of LAPD’s appalling treatment of detained Occupy LA protesters…His other Occupy LA coverage…And LA Weekly’s writeup of his arrest.

Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com.

This article is cross-posted from In These Times.

Earlier this week, I got into a little Twitter battle with Matthew Yglesias after the prominent blogger tweeted out “”EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”

That statement flies in the face of my own reporting showing that the decisions of individual CEOs to lay off workers and lower wages have a very real effect on economy-wide employment. If one CEO sees that he or she can crush a union and get away with lower wages, or force workers to be more productive by laying off other workers, other CEOs in the same industry will see it as a symbol that they can get away with that behavior themselves.

I typically don’t bother getting into fights with bloggers. But the hiring of wonky bloggers  likeYglesias—Slate hired him as its “business and economics correspondent“ last November—is a labor issue that not only affects the industry in which I work, but also the quality of journalism that is crucial to the lives of workers. Yglesias is a trend-setting blogger who The New York Times labeled as one of the “New Brat Pack,” whose ability to produce massive amounts of content could lead to the downsizing of news organizations through the elimination of traditional reporters who produce less content.

At a time when many seasoned reporters are being laid off by publications—like four veteran writers and editors who were laid off in August a few months before Yglesias was hired at Slate—mainstream news publications are turning to wonky bloggers like Ygelsias and fellow Brat Packer Ezra Klein (of The Washington Post) to turn out massive amounts of content and generate traffic. These bloggers can turn out 6-12 posts a day while traditional reporters, who take the time to go out in the field and interview people affected by the subject of their stories, can typically only turn out 3-4 stories a week. The result is that workers’ voices are often excluded in the rush to produce quick blog content.

For instance, take a piece Yglesias wrote this week about attacks on Mitt Romney and private equity firms. These firms often get rich by using companies like credit cards, pumping them up with debt before (sometimes) liquidating companies in bankruptcies and laying off workers, as I covered in the case of Armstrong World Industry lockout. (For more on how private equity firms saddle companies with debt and often lead to massive layoffs and wage cuts, see this excellent New York Times feature by Julie Creswell,  “Profits for Buyout Firms as Company Debt Soared” and the accompaning video titled “Flipped: How Private Equity Dealmakers Can Win While Their Companies Lose.”

Yglesias wrote on Twitter about the piece, “Romney and Bain didn’t do anything wrong, but we still might not want an asshole in the White House.” He expands:

The art of the leveraged buyout and the private equity restructuring is, needless to say, different in many ways from the art of innovation. But they don’t differ in their destructive potential. And while layoffs and closures are devastating to families and households, restructuring troubled firms are often the best way to preserve jobs and shareholder value in the long run.

Yglesias does not provide any examples of how the so-called “destructive potential” of private equity firms leads to a company being successful over the long run. Unlike  Creswell, Ygelsias does not interview economic experts or workers with varying or opposing views of the effects of private equity firm-ordered layoffs.

While they work at mainstream media outlets, wonk bloggers like Yglesias and Klein aren’t held to the same standards as the reporters working for the same outlets. Yet many young Americans view them as trusted sources of where to get news.

Quite possibly the most unconvincing liberal-elite attempt at populism in the history of the Republic

Like Klein, Yglesias has written on a wide range of healthcare, economic and foreign issues, despite not having done in-depth field reporting on these topics. Their stories are often centered on the debates of the day between other journalists and policy elites, and they don’t talk to workers or the general public.

Take, for instance, one of Yglesias’ recent posts “Blame Ikea and H&M for Inequality,” where—again, without interviewing anyone, he writes about the success of Ikea and H&M, saying:

Under the circumstances, it’s obvious that the income gap between the CEO of H&M and the average Swedish worker is going to grow. But that doesn’t mean that the CEO’s income growth has come at the expense of middle class Swedes. On the contrary, it’s come at the expense of the owners and managers of rival retailers around the world….What’s true of H&M, of course, is also true of Ikea.

Apparently the growth of a company like H&M or Ikea could not have come through exploiting workers, a notion my In These Times colleague Josh Eidelson explored in a piece whose headline says it all: “Union Victory at Virginia IKEA Plant: Resistance Grows Against Race-to-Bottom Wages.”

Or take another post by Yglesias titled “Bus Drivers Should Be Paid What It Costs to Hire Competent Bus Drivers.” He writes, “It’s extremely difficult to have excellent public services if the debate is polarized between people who want to reduce spending in order to cut taxes, and people who want to view the bus system as a jobs program for bus drivers. When a city is having trouble attracting qualified applicants for bus driver jobs, that’s a sign that the wage is too damn low.”

Yglesias did not interview bus drivers about how much they make, like Daniel Massey of Crain’s New York Business did for a story about the upcoming contract negotiations for New York City transit workers. Instead he suggests that perhaps bus drivers’ wages should be lowered if qualified applicants can be paid to work at a lower wage.

The other “Iglesias”

Yglesias declined to comment on whether or not he would apply the same wage logic to his own salary. He also refused a more in-depth interview for this piece.

But his salary is relevant here, since traditional news publications are turning to bloggers like him to produce content. Bloggers with personalized brands and large Twitter followings (Yglesias has nearly 35,000 followers) are attractive to publications because they bring in a guaranteed audience. In addition, they are also cheaper to employ than traditional reporters, per the ratio of content they produce. Bloggers like Yglesias can turn out 6-12 blogs a day in some cases.

By constantly turning out content, these bloggers generate a lot of traffic. But it’s worth asking if the quality of their analysis is the same as professional journalism. This is not to say bloggers cannot provide valuable analysis. Yves Smith, who worked for nearly two decades in the finance industry has an excellent blog at Naked Capitalism, Marcy Wheeler, who worked for years in the auto industry, has an excellent blog at Emptywheel, and labor history professor Erik Loomis writes Lawyers, Guns and Money, a must-read blog on labor history and its applications for unions today. But these people, unlike Yglesias, have years of experience and are writing for their own sites, not mainstream news organizations.

I should note that I started off as a labor blogger who often wrote stories without interviewing workers or presenting contrasting opinions fairly. But under the mentorship of old-school reporters like The Nation’s William Greider, I realized this type of writing did a  deep disservice to workers. I began to realize that the more you learn as a journalist, the more you realize how much you do not know. Quite often, the best journalism presents all sides to complex questions and problems without trying to definitely answer those questions—such journalism lets people speak for themselves, and in doing so lets readers answer questions for themselves.

As mainstream news organizations keep hiring bloggers instead of reporters, and readers of my generation (I’m 25) increasingly turn to people like Yglesias to get news, it’s  important to ask if these news organizations are endangering journalism’s mission to serve the public interest by presenting a full range of voices affected by a story—in particular, the voices of workers. If we really want to understand the problems of today’s economy, shouldn’t we let workers speak for themselves?

Mike Elk is an In These Times Staff Writer and a regular contributor to the labor blog Working In These Times. He can be reached at mike at inthesetimes dot com.

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Help us unmask corrupt shills and corporate trolls…

A recent spate of corrupt hack-shill attacks on Team eXiled has prompted us to decide to make an immediate launch of a new project: a no-holds barred campaign to identify and expose corrupt shills and corporate trolls among political journalists and bloggers in the US.

The outpouring from readers in light of our recent exposes of people like Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Joshua Foust, Adam Serwer, Megan McArdle, David Weigel, Jane Hamsher, Malcolm Gladwell and many others has been fantastic — we know you’ve got our back. We’ll need it.

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Our computers are bulging with files on corrupt publications, bloggers and journalists, and it’s time to get it all out in the open. We’re going to launch a separate website, and a slick corporate troll tracking platform to do it.

We will go after the usual pro-corporate/business bloggers posing under the fake ideology of libertarianism and the utterly corrupted religious and right-wing media. But most importantly, we are going to expose the wolves in the progressive henhouse. The blogosphere has a very short memory, allowing blog pundits to hide from their past shilling campaigns. But not anymore…

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