KPFA Radio 94.1FM presents:

THOMAS FRANK

“Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Resurgence of the American Right”

Hosted by Richard Wolinsky

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 – 7:30 pm

Berkeley Hillside Club

2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley, CA

$12 advance tickets: brownpapertickets.com :: 800-838-3006

or: Pegasus Books (3 locations), Mrs. Dalloway’s, Moe’s Books,

Walde Pond, DIESEL, A Bookstore, in SF – Modern Times Bookstore ($15 door)

From the bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? – a stunningly insightful and sardonic look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has incurred the inchoate wrath of tea party conservatism.

Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change, but when Thomas Frank se out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession’s victims and that society’s traditional winners be given even grander shares.

The American Right, apparently moribund after the election of 2008, was peculiarly
reinvigorated by the arrival of serious hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system (as the Occupy Movement insisted) but that we reaffirm our commitment to its worst excesses. Republicans in Congress embarked on a grim strategy of total opposition to the liberal state.

In Pity the Bilionaire Thomas Frank, the wily chronicler of American paradox, examines the bizarre mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he provides the first full diagnosis of our dangerous cultural malady.

“No one fools Thomas Frank, who is the sharpest, funniest, most intellectually voracious political commentator on the scene…he has written a brilliant expose of the most breathtaking ruse in American political history…”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Pity the Billionaire? Hell. Pity us all.”

— James K. Galbraith

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Here’s  a post from a friend, with lots of on-links, as to what the heck the SOPA/PIP uproar is about. And actions to take.  In fact, if you go to Wikipedia today to do some research you will be stopped and asked to put in your zip-code which will lead to your Senator and Congress person’s names and contact points:  Get On It!

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As reported by Nick Bunkley in the NY Times business pages

New Gas Economy Rules Generate Wide Support

The proposed new standards call for automakers to increase the average, unadjusted fuel-economy rating of their vehicles to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, up from about 27 miles per gallon today. Because of the way testing is done, the 2025 requirement correlates to a window-sticker rating of about 36 miles per gallon, according to the automotive information Web site Edmunds.com, or roughly what Toyota’s tiny new Scion iQ car achieves today.

Now if the algae biofuel development reported by NPR today, and here at triplepundit, prove-out, the future will take a turn for the promising….

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The sheer number of signatures being filed – nearly as many as the total votes cast for Walker in November 2010, and almost twice as (many as) those needed to trigger a recall election – ensure the election will be held, said officials with the state Democratic Party and United Wisconsin, the group that launched the Walker recall.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

from NPR

Even FOX has to spit out a few nice quotes:

“This is a really proud moment for us…it’s not a party, this has been a really serious movement,” Lori Compas, the recall petition leader, said.

“I can’t believe we did it, but we did it! We got all the signatures,” Dave Solstice, a petition drive volunteer, said. “Now we just need people to vote when it’s on the ballot”

The group says it has collected double the 540,208 signatures required to force a recall — one-quarter of the general election vote that put Walker into office. Even though some of the signatures are expected to be invalidated and discarded, Wisconsin Democrats have the comfort of a surplus in their second effort in the past year to drive a recall effort.  

Read more:

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South Carolina may be the putative heart of the Tea Party [see below] but it has a stand-up crowd, too.  On the annual celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr, crowds turned out to denounce the new laws in the state — and elsewhere– requiring photo-id to cast a ballot.

For most of 13 years in South Carolina, the attention at the NAACP’s annual rally has been on the Confederate flag that still waves outside the State House. But yesterday, the civil rights group shifted the focus to laws requiring voters to show photo identification before they can cast ballots, which the group and many other critics say is especially discriminatory toward African-Americans and the poor.

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“This has been quite a faith-testing year. We have seen the greatest attack on voting rights since segregation,’’ said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The shift in tactics was also noted by the keynote speaker at the Columbia rally, US Attorney General Eric Holder.

Last month, Holder said the Justice Department was committed to fighting any laws that keep people from the ballot box. He told the crowd he was keenly aware he could not have become the nation’s first African-American attorney general without the blood shed by King and other civil rights pioneers.

Jeffrey Collins: Boston Globe

...more at SF Chronicle....

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Matt Bai in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine set the scene for the upcoming South Carolina Republican primaries:

The Tea Party’s Not-So-Civil war

“I don’t know a single Tea Party person,” [Karen Martin,] said, slowly drawing out her words, “who does not despise Mitt Romney to the very core of their being.” I searched her face for levity or compassion, but found neither.

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The problem is that [Tea Party partisans have] had a hard time settling on any obvious alternative to Romney, in a way that might transform the primary into a clear, binary choice. After a startling finish in Iowa, Rick Santorum seemed likely to steal significant votes from rivals like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul and to fill the smallish void left by Michele Bachmann. But even as Santorum moved to consolidate conservative support, Tea Party organizers remained largely splintered among the rival campaigns. Their most influential leader, DeMint, declined to throw his support one way or the other. Haley, meanwhile, decided to endorse Romney in mid-December, a tactical decision that mostly drew derision from her Tea Party followers.

After months of confusion and bickering over whom to support, a kind of unraveling has occurred at the upper reaches of the movement, in some cases causing friendships to fray and giving rise to charges and countercharges on Facebook. Officers have resigned. Angry statements have been issued. Reputations have been damaged.

Read all for a look at the Tea Party and South Carolina you probably haven’t had….

Then for on the ground proof we have this:

Santorum accuses Romney of playing ‘dirty politics’ 

Discord in G.O.P. as Conservatives Air Differences

…evangelical leaders, intent on blocking Mr. Romney’s path to the nomination, showed new divisions after having appeared on Saturday to settle on Mr. Santorum as their conservative choice. Four conservative Christian leaders who attended a meeting of evangelicals in Texas asserted their independence on Monday, issuing a statement that said, “Many there were and still are for Newt Gingrich.”

Newt Gingrich and the Art of Racial Politics

And, in a move that Charrington, head of the thought police in Orwell’s 1984 could only envy, Jon Huntsman declared his support for Romney after trying to erase history:

Mr. Huntsman’s campaign, which struggled to raise money for expensive television ads, put many of his harshest attacks against Mr. Romney into clever and biting online videos that he posted to his campaign’s Web site and a corresponding YouTube channel.

Those videos (and a few television commercials) are now mostly gone, quickly yanked from public view as Mr. Huntsman prepares for an 11 a.m. endorsement of Mr. Romney.

There was “Backflip,” a video that highlighted what Mr. Huntsman called Mr. Romney’s flip-flopping on issues like abortion, gun rights and Ohio’s proposal to curb bargaining rights for unions.

Gone.

There was the one that accused Mr. Romney of being a “pretzel candidate.” It used clips of Mr. Romney saying one thing, and then seeming to say another — over and over again.

And the one that accused Mr. Romney of being a “perfectly lubricated weather vane” because of his many changes on issues.

Frank Bruni in the NY Times has more on Huntsman, who fell off the high-road he had vowed to stay on, pretty quickly.

[In his withdrawal speech] he said that the remaining candidate “best equipped to defeat Barack Obama” was Mitt Romney — and endorsed him. Just last week, Romney was so “detached from the problems that Americans are facing,” according to Huntsman, that he was “completely unelectable.”

He remarked on the country’s need for “bold and principled leadership.” Note the “principled” part. And remember, as Huntsman tries to make you forget, that videos on his Web site and his YouTube channel variously labeled Romney a “pretzel candidate,” an expert at the “backflip” and, most florid of all, “a perfectly lubricated weather vane.” That’s one slippery inconstancy metaphor.

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“Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is an opportunity to learn from his strategic thinking and mastery of rhetoric.

“Consider King’s powerful words about the civil rights struggle, which echo today in the climate battle:

We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’

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Joe Romm of the indispensable blog ClimateProgress has a new book coming out

I have a dream that progressives will some day have the winning words to match their vital ideas.  After two decades of research and writing and rewriting, I will finally be publishing my book on rhetoric this summer!

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Although Amazon, the enormous on-line retailer, has said it will begin collecting sales taxes and returning them to the state of purchase, thereby moving off my absolutely-do-not shop here list, it remains on my only-use-in-an-emergency box.

Quite simply, it is a threat to all the small retail outlets we need for a vibrant economic and inter-related community. It is by its size, and it is by its practices.  Lately it has offered to undercut the price of any book anywhere if the shopper will provide proof — easy enough these days with cameras and bar-code scanners.

Stephanie Clifford in the NY Times Business Section on January 16 takes stock of this threat and what some are doing to counter it.

Harold Pollack used to spend $1,000 a year on Amazon, but this fall started buying from small online retailers instead. The prices are higher, but Dr. Pollack says he now has a clear conscience.

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Giant e-commerce companies like Amazon are acting increasingly like their big-box brethren as they extinguish small competitors with discounted prices, free shipping and easy-to-use apps. Big online retailers had a 19 percent jump in revenue over the holidays versus 2010, while at smaller online retailers growth was just 7 percent.

The little sites are fighting back with some tactics of their own, like preventing price comparisons or offering freebies that an anonymous large site can’t. And in a new twist, they are also exploiting the sympathies of shoppers like Dr. Pollack by encouraging customers to think of them as the digital version of a mom-and-pop shop facing off against Walmart: If you can’t shop close to home, at least shop small.

I recommend the article to you.

I encourage you to shop locally whenever possible, and to shop at alternatives to Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the like.

I have my wish-lists at Powell’s in Portland, at Alibris and ABEBooks.  I’ve had experience with all of them.  Never had a failed delivery.  All the — mostly used– books are in good condition.  No reason at all not to have an account and look there first.  Amazon does do one think none other others do, and that’s offer some pages to skim through before purchase.  Google Books does that with many, and anyway, reading the Table of Contents and a random page or two does not obligate you to buy.

Give these others a try.  You’ll feel better

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This is the complete movie, made on behalf of Newt Gingrich, holding Mitt Romney up to the light.

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The mighty reformer Rick Santorum turns out to have greatly enjoyed the cozy earmarks for donations trade during his time in the Senate.

A review of some of his earmarks, viewed alongside his political donations, suggests that the river of federal money Mr. Santorum helped direct to Pennsylvania paid off handsomely in the form of campaign cash.

Earmarks, long a hallmark of a pay-to-play culture in Washington, have become largely taboo among lawmakers of both parties. But that element of Mr. Santorum’s record has mostly gone unexplored, in part because transparency rules governing earmarks did not go into effect until after he left office.

In just one piece of legislation, the defense appropriations bill for the 2006 fiscal year, Mr. Santorum helped secure $124 million in federal financing for 54 earmarks, according to a tally by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. In that year’s election cycle, Mr. Santorum’s Senate campaign committee and his “leadership PAC” took in more than $200,000 in contributions from people associated with the companies that benefited or their lobbyists, an analysis of campaign finance records by The New York Times shows.

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Timothy Egan takes a look at the fire breathing Tea Partiers and finds them as duplicitous/confused as the people they claim to hate…

…polls in key primary states show that people who describe themselves as Tea Party members support Mitt Romney,Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

Each of the front-runners, in obvious ways, represents what the Tea Party hates. Romney, as is well known, is the founding father of Obamacare — the law requiring people to get health insurance, pioneered by him in Massachusetts. He supported the huge bailout of Wall Street, which passed all that downside capitalistic risk on to the rest of us. Hooray for the socialist from Bain Capital!

After 30 years at the fetid waters of power, Gingrich, of course, is the ultimate Washington insider, and he took $1.6 million from government-sponsored Freddie Mac, which Tea Partiers blame for the housing collapse.

And Santorum, during his 16 years in Congress, never met an earmark he could not support, from a bilingual health care studies program at a college in his home state to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. Critics of big spending say he has requested more than $1 billion in earmarks during his time at the trough.

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Paul Krugman honors Martin Luther King, Jr

…if King could see America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck.

Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system.

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