The Invisible Counterpoint

  2013 is the year many Americans discovered the crisis of the working poor. It turns out it’s also the crisis of the welfare poor. That’s tough for us: Americans notoriously hate welfare, unless it’s called something else and/or benefits us personally. We think it’s for slackers and moochers and people who won’t pull their weight. So we’re not sure how to handle the fact that a quarter of people who have jobs today make so little money that they also receive some form of public assistance , or welfare – a proportion that’s much higher in some of the fastest growing sectors of the workforce. Or that 60 percent of able-bodied adult food-stamp recipients are employed. (“Poverty nation,” Joan Walsh, Salon.com) - - - - - DanielGree There are two aspects that have come together.  One is punitive Calvinism which I have been writing about for years. The other is the lefts denigration of work. There was a time when work working for fast food places was smeared not beca...

Goldfield's book has been well-reviewed, because if it's sympathetic to Southern whites, it depicts the savagery of slavery and post-war white terrorism with unflinching and gut-wrenching clarity. (Literally. The book's tales of slaves' abuse and Southern white post-war savagery will make you sick.) Still, this Civil War history challenges the absolutism of the "Northerners were heroes, and Southerners were vicious, violent racists" school of history. He exposes and excoriates Southern whites' violence against black people before and after the war. But he also links the war to the pro-business evangelical Protestant crusade to eradicate native American Indians, Mexicans, Irish and German Catholic immigrants, and an emerging class of landless Northern laborers – anyone who stood in the way of their vision of clean, hard-working, business-friendly American progress. And he counts the South as a victim of that Northern evangelical crusade. Southerners were ...

Melissa Harris-Perry and Adam Serwer wrote majestic takedowns of Cornel West's vicious and deeply personal rant against President Obama published this week, so I didn't think I had to. But there's one thing missing in the torrent of reaction to West I've seen this week: a recognition that maybe this is the way identity politics had to end, not with a bang but a whine. Dizzying racial and personal insults have come from all directions, and they're beginning to lose their meaning. Much has been made of the personal pique that animated West's attack on the president: How dare the bellhop at West's hotel Inaugural Weekend wind up with tickets to the event itself when West didn't? How could Obama stop returning his calls? West's animus was impossible to miss, and it clearly drove the awful, ad hominem anger of West's invective. The most tragic thing, to me, about West's meltdown was the way he tried to frame it as a universalist defense o...

Talk about snakebit: Peggy Noonan chose Friday to publish a column writing off President Obama off as an unlucky president, comparing him to Jimmy Carter, just when his presidency has a little spring back in its step. Its title is luscious: " A Snakebit President : Americans want leaders on whom the sun shines." The sun seemed to shine on Obama this week. It's true his Tuesday night speech wasn't his best, but that's because it lacked the news he was able to reveal Wednesday: That BP had agreed to create a $20 billion escrow fund to compensate the victims of its Gulf oil disaster, to have it administered by the tough Kenneth Feinberg of the 9/11 fund, and also to put off paying shareholder dividends through the end of the year. And on Thursday, Obama got relief from the harsh, unnatural media glare in the wake of the disaster, which had landed upon him in the absence of any other visible hero or villain in the mess, when Tony Hayward testified before the Hou...

Only today, the Associated Press revealed that a Kasich operative advised a state pension fund executive on how to minimize Lehman's role in the fund's losses when talking to reporters. So Kasich was understandably a little sensitive about the issue, accused me of a "smear" and complained that I was "picking on" him. He also advised me to read his book "so you can learn how to control yourself." Yikes! It's called "Hardball," sir. Also, in the "things I wish I'd said" department: TPM reported in January that Kasich was warning his fellow Republicans that the Tea Party movement was so angry, they would "hang" Republicans "from the nearest tree" if they didn't endorse their far-right agenda. That doesn't make them sound like the reasonable folks Kasich was describing today. (Joan Walsh, “John Kasich, Lehman Brothers populist!,” Salon, 16 June 2010) sacrifice Kasich got to speak most...

There are two pressing reasons that I find Obama's current stasis so worrisome. One is that we're at a dangerous time, given the world economy, and on the right, Obama's election has worsened a 20-year pattern of Republican obstruction and destruction (and it's got an undercurrent of hate and demonization that can't be denied.) At the same time, Obama has an incredible moment to articulate what Democratic leadership stands for: Improving the lives of ordinary Americans, protecting the country from the unbridled, deregulated dangerous corporate excess, and moving boldly on problems, like climate change, that require boldness and leadership. Between the BP oil disaster and the near-collapse of the world economy thanks to the finance industry – both have in common a corporate arrogance that big risks to make big money were worth taking, no matter the impact on the rest of us – Obama has the perfect context for laying out why government matters, and why Democrats run ...

Is that the Tea Party philosophy at work: "Accidents happen," people die, and private industry should be left alone, not even criticized, when they do? I'm getting a little weary of people insisting journalists must pay homage to the Tea Party as a great infusion of political energy, and not call them racist, and examine their ideas with respect. As I've stated before, it is pretty clear from polling that the Tea Party is just another name for the traditional Republican base -- older, whiter, heavier on males and angrier than the rest of the country. Aside from their costumes and protests, I don't think they're that revolutionary or newsworthy. But OK, I'm willing to respect them. Respect means asking them what they'd do if they were in government, reporting on what they say, and letting the world know. (Joan Walsh, “Taking the Tea Party seriously,” Salon, 21 May 2010) The movement would hurt people, which is what we want, and why it is (accepte...

The former vice president is just taking a cheap shot here that aids his overall goal: Delegitimizing this president, and he's been doing it from day one. Cheney has emerged as the leader of the Republican Party, and some of his recent obnoxiousness seems at least partly directed at his old boss, President Bush, who by contrast has acted the way former U.S. chief executives traditionally do: Keeping quiet and respectful. Cheney's still angry that Bush wouldn't pardon his buddy Scooter Libby and that he began to put some limits on torture and interrogation. So he's aiming at two presidents with his belligerence. But I wonder where it stops. Clearly Cheney's aiming to take over the Republican party and bring about a neocon restoration. I'm blown away by the immediate disrespect and political posturing by people like Cheney, Sen. Jim DeMint and Rep. Pete Hoekstra have shown the president at a time of real threat. (Oh, and Pete Hoekstra: I think raising money to f...

fox news Moderator: "Before we begin the debate, do we agree that you both believe the other to have blood on their hands, that is, to be responsible for murder, and so rightly should be jailed if not recipient of more just deserts, kept away from humanity, forcibly and forever, and most certainly not debated with?" And the debate wasn't civil. Must have been all O'Reilly's fault. - - - - - Further: Dr. Paul McHugh very much sounds like a dangerous human being devoted to defending perpetrators and causing further pain to victims, but the Sotomayor debate primed many of us to once again see credentials as everything. Sotomayor was first in her class at Princeton, so, Right, shut the hell up. Dr. Paul McHugh was some big-wig at John Hopkins University, so Left, shut the hell up. Paul McHugh could have been first in his class at Princeton and be otherwise massively credentialed, and we still need to be amidst an environment where the very fact that he work...

Lloyd, research does nothing if one is the mood to imagine someone a certain
way. Everything you're saying about Obama's mother could lead to different
conclusions, though. She could have woken up at 4 o'clock every morning in
order help her son become the person he wants to be, but how many mothers
devote themselves to their kids primarily out of their own self-assessment
needs, out of a desire to fashion for themselves their preferred son? Every
hockey mom in Canada wakes up at 4 in the morning ostensibly for their
children, and how many of these kids end up living out their mother's
dreams -- of course, not all, but many, many, many. You write of her
"abandonment by her spouse and [of how she] had to work." Come on, Lloyd,
you're the one who always talks about how put-upon mothers are hardly the
ones to look to for great nurturance. And why narrate it as of her being
"abandoned." You know this type of narrative plays to our desire to protect...