Marc Cooper's Blog, page 3

"Job Creators" As Psychopaths

Having grown up on the Left, I am acutely aware how certain misleading lingo can become reified and cemented into socially acceptable discourse.  Get a room full of radicals together and they will blithely substitute the word, "Imperialism," for the more common nouns of United States.  Example: "Imperialism has intervened in Afghanistan because it wants to build an oil pipeline."

Well, nostalgic Marxist-Leninists have nothing on conservative ideological zealots who have now locked in the term of "job creator" to replace the more accurate terms of  "the filthy rich."  Turn on the tube or the radio and you can now hear this obscene term bandied about dozens of times a day and always in the same context: "Oh, heavens, we can't tax the Job Creators!"

The Job Creators? Here I thought the big economic lesson we were taught by the Ginrichoids and Reaganites over the last three decades is that only pussy liberals worry about maintaining jobs and that Real Men, the Smart and Hairy Alpha CEO's, had as their principal task defending the stockholders.  Isn't that what the last 30 years of globalization, de-industrialization and mergers and acquisitions have as their underlying basis?

Weren't the really admired CEO's were those who knew how to takeover, dismantle and strip the competition?  Wasn't it some sort of great honor when this or that corporate management "shed" excess jobs and pushed up stock prices?  Isn't it the corporate class that has fought tooth and nail to oppose minimum wage increases for all those jobs they supposedly created?  Where have all these "job creators" been as literally millions of middle-class jobs got exported (by them) overseas?

You have got to be kidding. Not to go all Marxist on you, but value in commodities is actually created by the labor invested in them, not by the fluid movement of capital.  If private sector chieftans are now to be crowned as "job creators" in the public discourse, shouldn't ordinary workers now be recognized as "wealth creators?"  How do conservatives THINK the wealthy get rich in the first place? Adam Smith understood this long before Karl Marx. They get rich by extracting the value produced by the labor of others….that's what we call profit (and/or exploitation).

Let's toss in some ad hominem while we're at it.  I have interviewed a LOT of corporate managers and bigwigs in my life and I have met  almost none whose first priority is creating jobs. Their first priority is usually getting richer and usually by any means necessary. The most successful are disproportionately highly-driven, ambitious, greedy and rather ruthless ego-maniacs.

One wonderful case study of a once hallowed "Job Creator" is found in John Ronson's book, "The Psycopath Test." Check out this excerpt from a recent NPR review of the book.

Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world's ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.

"Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you're four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor's office," journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Ronson is the author of a new book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. The titular test is called the PCL-R. Invented by Hare, it's a checklist of characteristics common to psychopaths: things like glib and superficial charm, grandiosity, manipulative behavior and lack of remorse.

Picture a psychopath and you might think of Norman Bates. But Ronson says successful businessmen can also score high on the checklist. While researching his book, Ronson visited the Florida home of Al Dunlap — known as "Chainsaw Al" — who as CEO of appliance maker Sunbeam was notorious for his gleeful fondness for firing people and shutting down factories.

"So I turned up at his house, and it was full of sculptures of predatory animals," Ronson says. "And he immediately started to talk about how he believed in the predatory spirit, which was word for word what Bob Hare writes about in the checklist: Look out for their belief in the predatory spirit."

But Dunlap managed to turn the psychopath test on its head, Ronson says.

"He admitted to many, many items on the checklist, but redefined them as leadership positives," he says. "So 'manipulation' was another way of saying 'leadership.' 'Grandiose sense of self worth' — which would have been a hard one for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself — was, you know, 'You've got to like yourself if you're going to be a success.'"

Job Creator! Get that man a tax break.

P.S. Is it an accident that America's most iconic "Job Creator" has burnished his fame by shouting "You're Fired!" not "You're Hired!"?

 

 

The Stupidity of Conventional Beltway Reporting

This article on the politics of the debt crisis in Politico tells you everything that is wrong, everything that is blind, everything that is STUPID about conventional Beltway reporting. Glenn Thrush is no dummy and there is some authentically good reporting here. And at least one of the premises of the piece should be admired: the attempt to separate fact from fiction in the "debate" no taking place over U.S. debt default.

Problem is, that dang "View From Nowhere," as Jay Rosen puts it, pollutes the whole damn thing.

I readily concede Thrush's rather obvious point i.e. that both Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this event to their respective benefit. There MIGHT even be a symmetry to who is spinning more (though I seriously doubt it).  So to read Thrush's piece you are being asked to conclude that this is basically some sort of partisan, political fight for electoral advantage and that because both sides are more or less or equally dishonest there is NO moral dimension to the fight.

To assert otherwise, in the asinine logic of assumed impartiality and the hypocritical ethic of "neutrality," might mean that Rush would actually tell you what is really happening and who is and who is not morally culpable.

Legislation often has a moral or –  more often– an immoral foundational basis. Every great legislative battle is infused with justice or injustice. Take two extremes as examples. The Civil Rights Act and the vote to authorize war in Iraq.  In both cases, as true in the fight  over default, both parties took advantage of these measures in whichever ways that could for partisan ends.  That did not mean that passage of the Civil Rights Act was a great moment of justice and, likewise, the authorization for war in Iraq was a great moment of national hubris and shame.

The default issue has a sharp moral dimension — one completely missing from Thrush's sum-up of myths versus realities. He simply ignores the greatest reality of them all.

The entire nation is being held hostage by a group of Tea Party-driven know-nothings who seem more than willing to walk us all off the cliff. Period.

That reality trumps all the other he said/she saids that pepper the Politico piece.

Raising the debt ceiling has never been the matter of any debate and has been an automatic necessity that has been quietly carried out scores of times in recent history.  The Republican Right, this time around, has seized on the issue, strapping dynamite onto their chests, and threatening to push the button if benefits to to the poor are not cut and handouts to the wealthiest are somehow curtailed. Sorry, but this a textbook example of gross immorality.

This is not to give Obama and the Democrats a blank check to play politics. But, I think we sort of expect that from both sides at every possible moment.

We need to be focused on the underlying issue. And that issue is that if the Republicans don't act with some modicum of decency and common sense by sometime Sunday afternoon, we will see the Asian markets open with a very loud boom.

 

Still Here

To those of you who have inquired… I am still here.  Just swamped with a summer project and some other stuff.  Health is fine. Spirits are high. Life is good.  Will be back blogging sometime in a week or two.  Thanks to all who have asked.

The Cock Shot

This was inevitable, at least to those who were not living in denial.  So Anthony Weiner was sending out explicit pix of his weenie to women who were NOT asking to see the member's member. And this while his wife is pregnant.

Any of you who argued that his "personal life" doesn't matter now ready to reconsider?

The man is sick.

Democratic Weenies

Looks like the Anthony Weiner show has aroused me from my blog slumber. Thanks, Tony!

Look, I don't this think has much to do in any sense with the greater good of the nation. And I have no idea whatsoever to what degree Weiner is emotionally unstable.  Maybe he's just a bit randy and careless. Or maybe he's a friggin' pervert.

Either way, the guy has to resign.  The rank arrogance of coming out, kissing Breitbart's ass, and standing there for 40 minutes saying he accepts all responsibility but…but…he's staying in office, is just immeasurable.

What's his crime? Perhaps none. What's his transgression? Flat-out lying to the press, the public, his constituents and his staff for a solid week.  This type of deception is just not acceptable from a public official. At a minimum, he has now made himself and his party a ripe target for distracting and damaging attacks during the current election cycle. The right thing to do is to step down and take a few lessons in digital privacy.

Now, is Weiner the worst element in Congress? Not by a long shot. Lies and deception are common currency on Capitol Hill and there are many, many others who deserve a lot more scorn than he's currently reaping.

Too bad. He still has to go.

Just as a footnote: long before the Twitter scandal broke, I had my eye on him. Weiner has become something of a "progressive" darling because of his Type A personality, his frequent appearances on MSNBC and his very witty swipes at his partisan foes. In reality, Weiner is about as "progressive" as a man in the moon. He's a protege of the ultra-slimy Chuck Schumer and he's hardly the populist champion he pretends to be.

Indeed, Weiner is a Clintonite hack who is little more than a grandstander. My bud Tim took him apart way back in the summer, when he was cleverly joining forces with the Tea Party over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.

Please don't check your voter reg card before you decide how to react to this sordid episode.

Hochul Wins – Ryan Radioactive

If my memory serves me right it was just about a year and half ago that the Chattering Class ruled Scott Btown's victory as proof-positive that the tide was turning against the Obama administration and that Republicans were resurgent. The Tea Party was brewing and bubbling and Brown presaged a "correction" after the 2008 Democratic victory.

OK. There was only one little wrinkle in this narrative. The Republican Party had been pretty much washed away with Katrina in 2005. It's pretty damn difficult for something to be reborn in the afterlife.  Once your head is cut off, yes, there can always be a few involuntary jerks (no pun intended) but that's different than actual rebirth,

So here we are 18 months or so later and Democrat Kathy Kochul stages an upset victory in the very red NY 26th congressional district.  And she didn't win because the third party joker spoiled it for the Republicans. No. You can place the blame where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of Rep, Paul Ryan and the House Republican zombies who unanimously endorsed a budget that would trash the single most popular universal entitlement program in America — Medicare.

The press baptized Ryan as a "grown-up" — presumably for having the courage to make Granny pay an extra eight grand year while his insurance company contributors and other millionaires got a renewed tax cut.

You can call it grown-up if you wish.

I call it plain stupid.

Stupidity born of ideological zealotry, of course.  You know, like in the Soviet Union when central planners actually believed they knew how many millions of pairs of blue Oxfords to manufacture in one year.

That Ryan budget has become downright radioactive.  And a few, I repeat, a few GOP Senators (including Brown) are now running from it. Mark my words: the overwhelming majority of the Republican senators (s0mewhere north of 42 or 45) are still gonna vote for it! Why? Because, Virginia, as I told you, the Republican Party died about 5 years ago and the surviving walking dead are, well, brain-dead.

They have no program. Only an ideology. And you can ask Breshnev, that's rarely enough to get you through.

No accident that Hochul wins more or less the same time that the Republican Field of presidential candidates is collapsing before the campaign even gets underway. The other supposed "grown-ups" like Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour have decided not to run, precisely, because they know they would likely get their asses handed to them by Obama.  That leaves Mr. Nobody Pawlenty, Tiffany-backed Newt Gingrich, the Godfather Pizza guy who didn't know what the Palestinian right-to-return meant, and –waiting in the wings– the absolutely unelectable Mitt Romney (architect of Obamacare!).

None of this is to glorify the Democrats nor even to remotely suggest that they have much of a pulse either.  But as we say around the poker table, you can't beat nothin' with nothin'.

The Democrats might be as much as narcoleptic but they do have Obama. And last time I looked, his numbers were floating above the 50% mark and were no less than soaring above his possible Republican rivals.

Ahh, but you say, with unemployment so high and the economy sputtering, he's an easy mark.  That's true, in theory.  The Democrats have a pretty weak hand. Indeed, the best they can show is Ace high. A single Ace in their hand. Obama.

But that beats the Jokers the GOP is holding.

On the conservative radio talk shows today I kept hearing the name Jeb Bush being desperately called out.

Bring'em on.

That's just what America is clamoring for. Another Bush!

Unearthing Chile's Secrets

Allende's corpse. September 11, 1973.

Almost 40 years after his death, the body of former Chilean President Salvador Allende was exhumed today under judicial order of a new forensic investigation.  What scant coverage of this event exists mostly misses the point. This is NOT primarily about determining whether he was killed or whether he committed suicide moments before he was sure to be killed.

The bigger question in play is whether the 1973 coup was some sort of act of abstract "political violence" or whether it was a criminal enterprise.  Another 725 cases are also being examined and a number of aging officials of the dictatorship are facing the prospects of spending their golden years in prison.

My co-author Peter Kornbluh and I try to make the point about what's really at stake in our piece in today's Los Angeles Times.

Read it here.

True Lies

What do you see as the most pressing problem in the inner city today?

The parenting problem. A lot of minorities have such a problem with the single-parent situation. The parents are the single most important influence on a child, followed by education and the peer group. The number of single parents in the U.S. has quadrupled since the '60s, and there has also been an increase in violence and school shootings. All that stuff has increased largely because of a lack of parenting, and many households only have one biological parent — so many of them are fatherless. It really creates a big problem…

I see it firsthand in my family. If I am away on a film for three weeks, even though I come home every weekend, you can see the kids getting out of control. One person cannot create the discipline and the guidance and helping with homework. When I am at home, Maria and I drive the kids to school together; we pick them up together; we take them to dancing, soccer, horseback riding lessons. It takes a lot of effort. If you are not on top of the situation, the kids lose confidence in you.

I think the situation with single parenting [in minority groups] is disastrous. The statistic is that 64 percent of blacks are with one parent, while with whites, it's like 26 percent. With Hispanics, it's maybe 35 percent. It's gone up so much since the '60s. In the '60s, among minorities, only about 20 percent had single parents. — Arnold Schwarzenegger, Salon.com 2001

—- +—

It's nothing short of journalistic malpractice when a paper mounts a last-minute attack that can make or break one of the most important elections in California history. The Times looked even more biased by giving two different reasons for publishing its gruesome article at the last minute. – Jill Stewart, Deputy Editor, L.A. Weekly 2003, in accusing the Times of bias in running its stories on Arnold's groping of seven women on the eve of the recall election.

Apparently, the Times and Stewart both missed the real story!

Also, do Austrians count as a "minority group?"

…

Dirty Old Man

Poor Mr. Strauss-Kahn.  The dirty old man who has been heading up the IMF seems to have gotten his dongle caught in a wringer and instead of being the next President of France he seems headed for being the plate du jour in some New York state pen.

There's much one can say about the repercussions his arrest and detention might have just as the IMF delves deeper into the European debt crisis. I'll leave that to the business writers.

I'm more interested in his person.

As a journalist, you soon learn it's the little things that give away the big story.  I am fascinated that this creep got caught while staying in a $3,000 a night hotel in Manhattan. Excuse me, but who the fug does he think he is? He's supposed to be the symbol of world economic responsibility. HaHaHa.

As we all know, the IMF is notorious for imposing what are politely called "structural adjustment" programs on any country, especially of the Third World variety, that it can get its hands on.  This high-falutin' terminology always boils down to the same simple and crude formula: slash social spending, roll back government subsidies and balance the books on the backs of the poor while transferring wealth upward.  Raise the bus and gas fares to pay off the foreign debt to the G-8.

You'd think that a guy in charge of dishing out this bitter medicine would have the basic decency of not openly flaunting his own regal privilege and might limit himself to, say, a nice $500 a night suite at the Park Lane. Given NYC hotel rates, that seems at least somewhere in the cushy above-the-hoi-polloi ballpark.

But three G's a night? You gotta be kidding.

Here is a man contemptuous of women, contemptuous of the poor and probably fairly contemptuous of himself.

The nice part is that his lodging arrangements have now been radically downgraded. Held without bail, Mr. Strauss-Kahn is now locked up in a cell in the crowded and notorious Rikers Island prison.

It's not that bad. He and the 11,000 other inmates there do have access to room service. I doubt, however, that Mr. Strauss-Kahn will find the cuisine quite to his liking.

Tough.

Newtron Bomb

I wasn't sure if I was having an nightmare or was just suffering a hangover from some discouraging poker play late Saturday night, but I awoke Sunday morn to see a zombie actually talking on network TV! There was newly announced presidential candidate Newt Gingrich yammering away on Meet The Press (as if he had not passed away around 1998)  and it made me want to crawl right back beneath the covers.

Look, Newt is nuts. Period. Full Stop. The night before I had heard him while driving late at night on C-SPAN radio making an address to a pack of fellow Georgia right-wingers as he called for abolition of the NLRB, the EPA, the SEC, the progressive income tax, any and all capital gains tax, the inheritance tax, repeal of new regs on the financial industry, as he blew the race-laced dog whistle and said America had to choose becoming Texas or, um, Detroit and as he called Barack Obama the "greatest food stamp president in American history." I tuned in too late, apparently, to catch his plug for the restoration of generalized child labor.

It's an impossible task to keep up with the firehose flow of idiotic and inflammatory comments from this guy. Some people have tried, but there's just no way to keep pace with a philandering jerk who one day says we are falling into paganism and the next warns that the secular gay-fascist machine is overtaking good old Americanism — and all this while he's dumping yet one more wife for a younger gal pal.

More astounding than the crap that flows from this guy's mouth is the absolutely dishonest and deferential treatment he gets from the beltway Newsosaurs. It's in a case like Newt the Fruit where the "objective" View From Nowhere press model reveals its utter bankruptcy. This phony ethic prevents reporters and pundits from simply telling the truth: Newt Gingrich is a pol whose career busted out more than a decade ago, who had to resign his leadership post in political and personal disgrace, that he's a world-class hypocrite in his "personal values," that he holds what are clearly extremist views, that he openly and cynically race-baits, that he is the author of several AWFUL pseudo-historical books, that he, in fact, has NO great ideas, that he is not a valued or recognized intellectual, and that his chances of winning a general presidential election against Barack Obama are about 25 million to 1 (which is why I will be supporting him as the GOP nominee– for which he is about a 100 to 1 shot).

If a reporter said that on national TV he or she would simply be telling the TRUTH. Isn't that we are supposed to do?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Instead, on the fart-sniffer Meet The Press roundtable this morning, I had to hear Helene Cooper from The New York Times, the horrific Mark Halperin, David Gregory from NBC and columnist Peggy Noonan (Bitch from Hell),  actually go through the acrobatics of taking this guy seriously and hemming and hawing about what he's really about and what his real chances are.  What is the point of this sort of insulting charade? Do these pundits think anyone takes them more seriously because they just can't come out say that The Deranged Guy in the corner is really The Deranged Guy in the corner?? The equally derganged Noonan went so far as to speculate that 18-20 year old voters might be attracted to Newt because he's "new" to them! So would a resurrected Warren B. Harding be "new" but I doubt he'd have any more appeal than Newt will among young voters. What is Noonan smoking?

There is one interesting aspect to the Newt boomlet this week.  It shows you just how far the political center of the country as a whole and of the GOP in particular has shifted to the Right. As far back as 15 years ago, Newt was seen as the far fringe of his own party.  But with the likes of Paul Ryan, the Cheneys,  Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Rev. Huckabee and GodKnowsWhoElse stinking up the stage, all of a sudden the rotting cadaver of Gingrich is dug up and celebrated as a Great Mind.

Houston, we have a problem.

P.S. While we're on the subject of media deference….. squeezed in between the barrage of geriatric Big Pharma drug ads tonight, I caught a few minutes of Katrie Couric's 60 Minutes profile of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.  He seems an interesting guy but unfortunately the piece ended abruptly as Katie mysteriously disappeared up Gates' rear end. Another rescue mission for SEAL Team 6?

P.P.S. Confession:  Peggy Noonan's treacly, self-serving memoir as Ronald Reagan's covert brain, "What I Saw At The Revolution," is the only book in my life that I ever burned.  It was sometime in the early 90′s and I was reading it on a winter night in my living room in an easy chair next to a crackling fire.  I remember vaguely, her ending the book on some platitudinous gibberish about Jesus Christ and, reflecting on this woman's role in writing the cover speeches for Reagan's massive murders in Central America and his beating up on the poor, I finished the last sentence, snapped the paperback closed and tossed it without a second thought into the flames.  I'd do it again.