Romney? Really?

This is not — really — a joke. So Mitt Romney walks into a the offices of a GOP phone bank. To rally the troops, you see. The place is crowded with volunteers furiously dialing up voters to prevent what appears to be the certain overturn of the Wisconsin-like anti-collective bargaining legislation rammed into law by Ohio’s new and now deeply unpopular (54% disapproval) governor.

The standard move in these situations is for the candidate to make — at least one — call himself. For the cameras. “Hi, Mrs. Lebowski? This is Mitt Romney. No, really, Mitt Romney. Yes, yes, ‘the guy who looks like he turned your dad down for a loan’, that Mitt Romney’. But no. Not only doesn’t Romney dial-up an Ohio citizen and urge them to support their Republican governor and his aggressive, 21st century union-busting, anti-middle class Republican legislation … Romney doesn’t even endorse what everyone in the room is working so hard to save.

From the CNN story:

Romney expressed generic support for Kasich’s efforts to curtail union rights, but he would not say whether he supports or opposes the specific measures.

“I am not speaking about the particular ballot issues,” Romney said, only after repeated questions from reporters. “Those are up to the people of Ohio. But I certainly support the efforts of the governor to reign in the scale of government. I am not terribly familiar with the two ballot initiatives. But I am certainly supportive of the Republican Party’s efforts here.”

If you’re like me you say, “Well, that’s classic Romney. The guy gives shameless, naked pandering another even worse name. He’s been on five sides of every issue you can think of.” Democrats love the guy for precisely this kind of completely craven and predictable waffling. In addition to the deliciously ripe story of his career as essentially a corporate raider, many times eviscerating American companies and requiring hundreds of middle-class lay-offs in exchange for his own fast profit, Romney is the kind of competition that manufacturers his own oppo-research and attack ads. And, more to my point here, the modern conservative “intelligentsia”, a crowd heavily self-invested in rigid-sounding, ersatz-populist dogmas and total victory-without-compromise is well aware of it. Hence his 25% polling … behind … Herman Cain, a guy who hasn’t even bothered to assemble a full function campaign apparatus.

And ladies and gentlemen, Mitt Romney is where he is today, among the leaders for the Republican nomination, because he is regarded as “the most electable of those running”. Of all of the cartoonish characters on the GOP candidate menu, Romney is the default candidate because he seems the guy with the best chance of beating Barack Obama …. which could still happen. Even the heretofore commonly accepted icons of conservative thought — people like George Will and John Podhoretz — have gone public with very serious doubts about Romney and the rest of the cast.

Said Will Sunday: “Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate. Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the Tea Party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.”

Earlier last week Podhoretz, in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post wrote of the entire GOP field, “Memo to the Republican field: You’re running for president. Of the United States. Of America. Start acting like it. Stop proposing nonsense tax plans that won’t work. Stop making ridiculous attention-getting ads that might be minimally acceptable if you were running for county supervisor in Oklahoma. Stop saying you’re going to build a US-Mexico border fence you know perfectly well you’re not going to build. Give the GOP electorate and the American people some credit. This country is in terrible shape. They know it. You know it. They want solutions. You’re providing comedy.”

Podhoretz may have been referring less to Romney and more to completely bogus, ego-acts like we’ve seen from Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, “candidates” in name only with, in many cases, not even the pretense of hiring staff and operating a legitimate campaign, but Mitt comes awfully close to comedy.

But, without ascribing any undo legitimacy to the Tea Party’s intellectual foundation, what fascinates me most at this moment is watching to see how that crowd, so pleased with their moral/intellectual purity, and the more mainstream Republican faction that has enabled the obstructionist mayhem the Tea Party has leveled on this economy rationalizes Mitt Romney as their standard-bearer. True, he is not Obama. But for every time Romney has said something supportive of the Tea Party’s take-no-prisoners jihad against common sense and social decency he is also on record saying precisely the opposite.

Were the Tea Party truly rooted in the “principles” they’re constantly professing to fight to their (and our) death for, Mitt Romney would be an absolute anathema, exactly the untrustworthy, self-aggrandizing empty suit they couldn’t possibly trust in good conscience.

More to the point, true Tea Party revolutionaries would have no honorable course of action other than to launch a third party candidacy behind a bona fide flag bearing warrior spirit like … Ron Paul or Bachmann?

As I’ve said before, the Tea Party movement is rooted far more in long-standing cultural and social issue grudges than middle-class economic “populism”. But that makes support for an on-again-off-again whenever-opportune social liberal like Mitt Romney all the more preposterous … and comical.

Taking the Mask Off The Regulatory Boogeyman

...and he regulates too.

“Supply side economics.” “Trickle down economics.” “Voodoo economics.” Call it what you may, but the theory is that if you put more money into the hands of the wealthiest Americans, they will be empowered to create jobs to the benefit of the rest of us.

Since Ronald Reagan started marketing this theory, America has doubled down on it. Literally. As we saw this week, over the last three decades we have more than doubled the income share of the top 1% of Americans, recently rebranded “Job Creators.”

So, how’s supply siding going for us? Despite the fact that we have armed the Job Creators with massive infusions of new resources – exactly what the supply siders said we must do – the Job Creators obviously aren’t creating jobs.

Given that embarrassing reality, the new explanation served up by the Job Creators and their political allies is that regulations are just too darn burdensome to allow the Job Creators to work their job creation magic.

For instance, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) had me choking on my Cheerios this morning during this NPR interview:

NPR reporter Ari Shapiro: …we asked Ryan why that wealth isn’t translating into new jobs.

Ryan: I have toured over 200 business in my congressional district asking this very question, and I get the same answer these days. Uncertainty on taxes, uncertainty on regulations… Over 4,200 regulations are coming out of the federal government this year. Over 3,500 came out of the federal government last year. So to me businesses need to have some degree of certainty if they’re going to plan or take a risk.

If the Packer’s underachieve this weekend, or there is inclement weather in Janesville, expect Representative Ryan to blame it on the regulations in our midst.

Just as with the claims about the wonders of supply side economics, the mainstream news media has not sufficiently questioned the “regulations kill business” claims. They usually report the “jobs kills business” claim as if they are noting that “the sun rose over the horizon this morning.” Self-evident.

But if reporters looked at the industries that have been the subject of the most regulations in recent times, health care and energy, they would see that they have among the highest earnings per share in the S&P 500.

If reporters asked Bruce Bartlett – conservative economic guru to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jack Kemp and Ron Paul – he would tell them that there is “no hard evidence” to support the claim that regulations are the principal factor holding back the economy.

If reporters asked economists about the regulatory environment, they would learn that 80% of economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics rated the regulatory environment for business and the overall economy as “good.”

To be fair, the Wall Street Journal did survey economists about the principal factor holding back the economy, and learned that 65% said “lack of demand,” not government policy. But the Journal then proceeded to continue skapegoating regulations in their subsequent reporting and editorializing.

Finally, if reporters checked Bureau of Labor statistics, they would see that employers say that less than 00.03% of mass layoffs in the most recent quarter were due to government regulations or intervention. The number one reason, according to employers, was “lack of demand.”

Lack of demand. Not lack of resources in the hands of the wealthy few. Not too much regulation. Lack of demand from the people whose income is stagnating compared to the Job Creators.

The evidence completely discredits the de rigueur skapegoating of regulation. This evidence argues for a long overdue end to the failed trickle down experiment, and a move to demand side stimulation, policies that put more money into the pockets of consumers who buy stuff and less money into the pockets of wealthy people who can afford to horde cash.

It also argues for better reporting of economic evidence.

– Loveland

Bummer Sticker

Is that all you got?

Bumper stickers are supposed to carry the ultimate crystallization of a political campaign’s message. That’s why the arrival of my Barack Obama bumper sticker in the mail caused me to worry anew about whether Obama’s messaging operation is up to the difficult task ahead of it.

The bumper sticker that I got in the mail in recognition of my modest contribution to the Obama campaign simply read “2012,” with the swooshy “O” logo and website url. That’s it.

To me, that says the Obama communications team is not sure what to say to motivate swing voters. Because simply stating the election year does absolutely no framing, messaging, or motivating.

This is a team that used to be pretty darn good at bumper sticker messaging. “Hope,” “Change,” “Yes, We Can.”

Now their message is reduced to a “hold the date” reminder. Really gets the old adrenalin flowing.

Granted, messaging is much easier when you are a challenger running in a discontented country than an incumbent running in a discontented country. Therefore, it stands to reason that messaging was easier for Obama then than now.

But how about at least trying to frame the overall election choice?

Or a bookend set:

Obama’s army of talented message gurus can do better than these lame directional examples, and better than “2012.” Yes they can.

– Loveland

Occupy Arden Hills!

The high likelihood that Zygi Wilf’s dream of a taxpayer-funded stadium will go to the legislature next month amid still-growing protests against the immunities of gilded wealth is almost … almost … enough for me to feel sympathy for the guy. I interviewed him last summer for a magazine piece and — major news flash here — the development around his Arden Hills plan is everything. Zygi, who by the way does have a sense of humor and occasional flashes a side other than the highly disciplined business automaton, is first, second, third and probably fourth through twentieth a developer. After that he’s a football fan.

Wilf owns the Vikings because falling in with the loony Reggie Fowler scheme gave him access to assurances that the state’s political leaders — if that’s what you dare call Tim Pawlenty — would throw their weight behind something for the Vikings once the Twins had their deal done. Shockingly, Pawlenty kept spooning out the bullshit even as he left office, dropping the stadium ball (and everything else) in the next guy’s lap.

The next guy, Mark Dayton, may not be the slickest operator around. But like any politician with a head for the twists of history he knows with some certainty that no matter how much caterwauling and venom ricochets around prior to the deal getting done, the guy in office at the time the damned thing is built is a hero among the sports hagiographers — crusty old sports columnists, radio jocks with hundreds of hours to burn and fat cat sources to fellate with at least intermittent enthusiasm — when the gates open and the gawking public takes their $150 seats.

But this is 2011, and nothing at all like 2006. Five years post-bubble, as we see now in virtually every city of the western world, people, some maybe even pro football fans, are demonstrating that they are not only hip to the fixed game if casino-style financialization and the client-employee relationship between Wall St. and DC, but they’ve had enough of it. Damn it, and thank you.

So here’s Zygi, as I say, a pleasant enough guy who followed in his Holocaust-survivor father’s footsteps (the old man is still alive and sharp) and built quite a nice business for himself. He was thinking he’d do a bit more business in Minnesota by throwing up some shops and hotels around this football team he happens to own. Having done his savvy developer homework prior to buying in to the Vikings Wilf had every reason to believe that his Minnesota adventure would go down pretty much like every other owner’s (save a notable few), with the local fan base rallying/shaming their politicians into jacking up common rube taxes to have something as pretty from the Good Year blimp as they have in Denver and Dallas and Phoenix.

But no. Instead, Zygi has to figure out a way for an oddball DFL governor to lead the pro-tax charge … in the face of a $5 billion deficit that wasn’t really resolved last year, another deficit projected for this year, and while surrounded by Tea Party anti-tax zealots who might normally consent to a small-ish tax on the rabble if it meant protecting the plutocrats probably won’t dare pull anything like that in an election year, what with this “Occupy” crap going on and their approval ratings already in the toilet.

I loved the bit the other day from the state’s GOP leadership, demanding that Dayton guarantee X-number of DFL pro-tax votes to give the Republicans cover in exchange for them voting pro-tax. Christ. But you gotta give ’em points for their craven candor.

Dayton’s argument will of course be that a billion-dollar stadium is a hell of a lot jobs when the construction industry is in a depression. But the obvious — and certain to very loud rejoinder to that argument — is that there is no end of heavy-duty infrastructure work that needs to be done around the metro, if not the state, that would put the same crews to work and return far greater value to the broader public — small businesses, big businesses and private citizens — than (another) football stadium. Moreover, where the anti-tax zealots are forever shrieking that the government doesn’t have the assets to fund … schools, roads, bridges, you name it … the Vikings have an entity with ample resources to — at the very least — loan them the cash to build the stadium. And by that I mean of course the NFL. (One of their former Goldman Sachs suits was in town earlier this week pressuring Dayton to, you know, move the ball up the field, taxpayer-wise.)

It would of course be a terrible precedent, a fabulously profitable sports league, underwriting capital investments in its network of teams. But I suspect the NFL’s credit rating is better than Minnesota’s, and what with TV networks willing to pay virtually any figure the league lays down when it comes time for their next TV contract, collateral would hardly be a problem.

I know the Kurt Zellers and Amy Kochs of the world profess to be confused by this OccupyWall Street/Minnesota/Duluth/Berlin/London nuttiness. “Why do they hate the job creators”? But wait and see what happens in St. Paul if this stadium tax thing looks like it has legs.

9-9-9: Simply Trickle Down

Simplicity is the foundation of many a great sales pitch: “$5 foot longs.” “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” “99 cents tacos on Taco Tuesday.” “Buck beer night.” Pitches that state their value proposition concisely, specifically, and memorably are powerful in both the retail and political marketplace. And at first blush, Herman Cain, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, looks to have himself an awesome presidential pitch strategy in “9-9-9.”

Under Cain’s “9-9-9” proposal, a big chunk of the federal tax code would be replaced with a flat 9% federal income tax, a new 9% federal sales tax and a 9% federal corporate tax. Like many great sales pitches, Herman’s husksterism is elegantly simple, digestible, understandable, symetrical and memorable. Moreover, “9-9-9” has the all the appeal of an IED planted alongside the IRS headquarters, a popular proposition among just about all taxpayers, particularly GOP activists.

Politically speaking, “9-9-9” just flat out sells. Almost overnight, it has made Cain — who also has swell ideas about electrocuting Mexicans and banning government service based on religious affiliation — a GOP presidential front-runner.

But at some point, even wildly popular political pitches get dissected by journalists and opponents. When that happens, I’m not convinced that the Niner Designer will survive the economic vivisection.

Tax experts such as a former chief-of-staff of the non-partisan congressional Joint Tax Committee, are now finding that “9-9-9” represents a tax increase for every household earning under $120,000/year. A family of four earning about $90,000/year would pay about $5,000 more annually. (In Cain currency, that’s roughly 417 one-topping medium-sized pizzas per year.) At the same time, under “9-9-9,” billiaonaire Warren Buffet last year would have paid no income tax.

In fact, a President Cain with a “9-9-9” in place would probably redistribute more of old Joe the Plumber’s wealth than any President in American history. The trickle down economics imbedded in Cain’s “9-9-9” might make even old Arthur Laffer blush.

So sure, simple sells, and right now simplicity is raising Cain. But will it sell long enough to make Citizen Cain our next President? Nein, nein, nein.

– Loveland

The Truth Smells

A Fox News commentator the other day said of the Occupy Wall Street protesters — “They smell.”

The New York Times on Saturday quoted a hedge-fund manager calling the protesters “a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” Another bank exec was quoted: “It’s not a middle-class uprising. It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this.”

In the Sixties, protesters for Civil Rights, Women’s Rights and an end to the Vietnam War were called all kinds of derogatory names. Communist was the most-common, all-purpose epithet. “Dirty hippie” was one I heard protesting in Florida against Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in 1968. Women’s Rights protesters were “dykes” or worse. Black protesters had the worst names, along with bricks and bottles and bullets, flung at them. All of us were bums, unAmerican, worthless.

So marginalizing the Other 99 Percent protesters by calling them unemployed smelly bums is an old trick of the status quosters. Demean them with language. They’re beneath you. Beneath contempt. They wouldn’t look right in the obscenely expensive Manhattan restaurants the Wall Street pirates frequent. They’re not our kind dear.

The wealthy have always looked down on the rabble. Built fortifications of contemptuous slurs to block out the unsophisticated words conveying the unvarnished truth.

As Ellen Mrja pointed out in the previous post, those most hurt by this rich-rigged economy aren’t just the kids. It’s all ages. And in a photo essay in today’s New York Times, five people or groups are shown. Of course this is no scientific survey, but it’s a slice of the protesters on Wall Street — one is a WWII vet, one a teacher, one a retired teacher, one a homeless young man, and one photo has no indication of employment. None of these people is a bum. None should be dismissed with foul names. All should be listened to. They are America.

In 1972, on Christmas Eve, my father joined my brother Michael and me at the Capitol in St. Paul to protest the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam. Michael and I had been against that endless war for years, and had protested some and argued a lot with our dad and mom at the dinner table. My dad, of the World War II generation, had trusted the government and supported the war. Until it wouldn’t end. When dad joined us in the snow, I wanted to call over the TV cameras and say “look, a vice president of General Mills, an adult, not a fuzzy kid. Can you dismiss him?”

Insult the protesters all you want, greedheads. It won’t make them go away. And it won’t make the truths they speak less true. Americans may finally be realizing who’s picking their pockets. And they’re pissed. If some are aromatic because they have the guts to camp out in the park for their beliefs and can’t get up to the showers in your private bathrooms in your lovely executive offices, well, General Washington’s troops at Valley Forge were pretty ripe too. So were the Freedom Riders. And the brave people in Tahrir Square.

God bless them every one.

BTW, hedgefundhog, remind me. What’s wrong with sex drugs & rock ‘n’ roll again?

— Bruce Benidt
(photo from rollingstone.com)

OWS: These Kids Are Not All Right

Those who view Occupy Wall Street protesters as nothing more than simpering, petulant children just don’t get it.

They’re adults we marginalize with the sobriquet “kids”. And these kids are not all right.

Take a look at this graph illustrating unemployment for those aged 15-24 in 15 industrialized nations, (cf. 2008 to Q1 2011):

The chart is not provided by some liberal site but by the staid The Economist.

Or see the depressing round-up of unemployment surveys for youth in the Middle East and Africa from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com. It’s obvious the rage that finally propelled young people into Middle Eastern streets in the fall of 2010 and into the “Arab Spring” earlier this year was economic as well as political. What difference does it make if the foot on your throat is wearing a fascist boot or squared-toe Berluti?

The situation has become so serious, it’s now being likened to a ‘time bomb’:

While the details differ from one nation to the next, the common element is failure—not just of young people to find a place in society, but of society itself to harness the energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm of the next generation. Here’s what makes it extra-worrisome: The world is aging. In many countries the young are being crushed by a gerontocracy of older workers who appear determined to cling to the better jobs as long as possible and then, when they do retire, demand impossibly rich private and public pensions that the younger generation will be forced to shoulder.

In short, the fissure between young and old is deepening. “The older generations have eaten the future of the younger ones,” former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato told Corriere della Sera. In Britain, Employment Minister Chris Grayling has called chronic unemployment a “ticking time bomb.” Jeffrey A. Joerres, chief executive officer of Manpower (MAN), a temporary-services firm with offices in 82 countries and territories, adds, “Youth unemployment will clearly be the epidemic of this next decade unless we get on it right away. You can’t throw in the towel on this.”

Closer to home, economic demographers say the huge increase in the number of Minnesotans in their 50s and 60s who will be retiring will create an unsustainable situation; we’ll be siphoning the state budget off for entitlements and programs for health and aging while economic growth through 2020 will be half of what it was. Barring a miracle, we’re unlikely to see a growth in revenue again. Attempts to discuss tax increases will continue to be protested by tea-types who, nonetheless, are happy to line up for their state aid.

I don’t believe there’s a disconnect between members of this younger generation and their own parents and grandparents; they wouldn’t want to deny their elders any social benefits.

However, the young feel no loyalty to the noblesse oblige or the mystical market to which so many others swear allegiance.

And now I’m one of those gerontological messer-uppers who’ll soon need Social Security much more than social networking. But in my heart, I’m a closet protester, someone born to root for the underdog, who believes in comforting the afflicted but also afflicting the comfortable (with credit to Finley Peter Dunne) when necessary.

The current demonstrations remind me this nation was founded on protest and that no good idea since has been sanctified except through protest. They also call to mind the hyperbolic but thrilling end to the popular film “‘V’ for Vendetta.” Shortly before his death at the hands of a totalitarian police force, V instructs his protege: “Governments should be afraid of their people.”

It appears neither our government – nor our corporations – are there yet.

SPOILER VIDEO of “‘V’ for Vendetta.”

Ahh..the 80s

©

©Gerard Whyte

As for Our Confederacy of Louts …

After roughly a month of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and week or so of OccupyMinnesota, there is one thing we can conclude with certainty. And that is that the Tea Party movement truly has nothing … whatsoever … to do with correcting economic malfeasance. Judging by the reactions of Tea Party Express spokes people and the stable/ward of GOP candidates cravenly pandering to the Republican party’s new core, the Tea Party movement has fully acknowledged that the “populist” Tea Party movement is exactly what we always assumed it was — namely, the conservative fringe’s latest manifestation of the Culture Wars with no focused, much less any sincere interest in attacking or addressing the root causes of American middle class frustration.

Frankly, I’m astonished it took until September of 2011, three entire years after the Great Derivatives Meltdown of September 2008 to see people in the streets demanding legal action against Wall Street, which of course is shorthand for the calculated, heavily-lobbied, institutional system wherein middle class assets are legally looted by those with full and unimpeded access to political power. Given the spectacular nature of the collapse, with very little confusion over the “who”, “why” and “how”, I would have expected riots on Wall Street in the spring of ’09. But no. Instead, the Tea Party, ostensibly outraged over taxpayer bail-outs of too big to fail giant banks (and the possibility of bail outs of other homeowners) bought in — wholly and utterly — to the counter theory sold by establishment Republican politicians and media leaders that the Crash of ’08 was the consequence of liberal meddling with free markets (the Barney Frank/Fannie Mae canard) and pandering to no-goods (most of them minorities) who had no business owning property.

Here’s Bryan Shroyer of theteaparty.net: “The motivation between Occupy Wall Street and the motivation from the tea party are completely different. From their signs, speeches, and websites, they want to continue this push of America down this road of increased government involvement and increased socialism. The tea party is simply a collection of patriots from across the nation who want to get our country back to its capitalist roots.”

And this from the Tea Party Patriots website: ” ‘For two years now, tea partiers have stood firmly on principle and helped shape the political debate in this country. They believe in time-honored American values, principles and systems including the freedom to innovate and employ people to implement and distribute one’s ideas to the public. They believe freedom from government allows entrepreneurs to try new things, see what works and discard what doesn’t. By contrast, those occupying Wall Street and other cities, when they are intelligible, want less of what made America great and more of what is damaging to America: a bigger, more powerful government to come in and take care of them so they don’t have to work like the rest of us who pay our bills.”

And this from Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express via a piece in The Guardian: “Kremer, who lives in Atlanta Georgia but spends much of her time travelling across America with the Tea Party Express battle bus, accepts that there is a shared anger at the core of both phenomenon: disapproval of the way the banks were allowed to get away with it after the 2008 financial melt-down. But she thinks the OWS organisers are going after the wrong target. ‘This isn’t Wall Street’s fault. It’s Washington’s fault – and that’s where they should focus their efforts’.

She is also scathing about the loose political aims of the protesters. ‘You’ve got to be realistic in your demands and efficient in how you set about achieving them. Holding rallies doesn’t do anything other than attract people to the movement. “The question is what do you do then? How do direct all that support and energy towards action, towards influencing legislation’?

Or .. opposing legislation … in the case of Tea Party leaders and politicians, as they continue to obstruct and dilute any form of serious financial regulation and oversight.

It strikes me as a monumental waste of time trying to figure out how anyone, much less someone capable enough to lead a national protest movement looks at the Crash of ’08 and absolves the giant banks, hedge funds and AIG from complicity, and instead focuses the full force of their fury on … a guy who wasn’t even in office at the time. But then the allure of a sinecure and status — underwritten by personalities integral to Wall St. function — always has away of re-directing antipathies.

The real question that continues to fascinate me is this: What is the best tactical response to what I prefer to call our Confederacy of Louts? This latest outbreak, the Tea Party, is more virulent than the John Birchers of the 1960s and the mega-church evangelicals of the late ’90s. Their demographics (largely white, aged, dis-enfranchised) and underlying antipathies are nearly identical. But today’s “movement” is a far more serious threat to middle-class retrenchment than ever before. Left unchallenged they have the clear and present potential to deliver the fate of the American middle class into the hands of our corrupt system of mega-finance and political cronyism for decades to come.

The Merriam Webster definition of “lout” is “an awkward, brutish person”. And for my purposes here, that’s close. But in terms of rhetoric the messaging, while brutish is often slick and compelling. “Awkward” in terms of factual accuracy and intellectual honesty, to be sure. But “compelling” in terms of eliciting the intended response. Which usually involves an appeal to the more loutish aspects of human nature. By example, I give you most any cities’ most popular morning drive radio show: A carnival of loutishness banking a small fortune for a one of a handful of major media conglomerates by routinely pilloring anything too “nuancy”, sensitive to minority interests, and “liberal”. Then you move on to the usual suspects of
political talk radio, FoxNews and on and on.

“Loutish” pretty well describes it, and liberals don’t do “loutish” very well. They/we don’t have much of a stomach for aggressive, middle-class, middle-brow messaging. It all seems so … boorish.

In Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt’s classic essay, “On Bullshit”, he makes the point that out-right liars, because they respect the truth enough not to speak it, are actually less dangerous than bullshitters, who may or may not speak the truth but really don’t care one way or another, since their only intention is to, in effect, close the sale. I don’t doubt for a second that there are some diabolically clever minds pushing and nudging and encouraging the Tea Party movement. They would be the liars. The face of it though, the crowd allegedly inspired to action by the Wall St. meltdown of ’08 and now throwing up a protective cordon around our “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” is, we can now say with complete certainty, a portrait of vaporous, loutish bullshit. It is raw say-anything know nothing-ism in pursuit of personal gain (media personalities, Sarah Palin, etc.) and settling age-old social grudges against … well, uppity minorities and “elites” however they define them.

The point being the liberal counter message — which now has a viable vehicle in the Occupy Wall St. demonstrations — has to convince the middle class, in middle class language and imagery, that the refortification of the middle class is its primary concern, and that the Republican party of 2011 is the Tea Party and the Tea Party is nothing but a collection of credulous chumps, loutish bullshitters, playing foot soldiers for the same forces that corrupted our financial and gridlocked our political systems.

We’ve lived through The Attack of the Louts. It’s way past time to attack back.

Crowd-Sourcing a Research Project

OK, Rowdies, I need some creative juice for a research project I’m working on.

Last week, I went to an interesting lecture by Michael Chorost, an author and speaker on science and technology.  Mr. Chorost has written two books, one detailing his experience with a cochlear implant and the other, just out, on the interaction between people and technology and how that exchange is becoming more intimate. The lecture was sponsored by the local PRSA chapter as the first of its John Beardsley lecture series.

One of the interesting ideas Mr. Chorost threw out was that Twitter is the beginning of a global nervous system, at least in the sense of conveying emotions.  When the Arab Spring took hold, for example, the emotions of those tweeting their experiences from Tahrir Square and elsewhere reverberated around the world.

Of particular interest to me, given my endless fascination with “bad things” was the notion that the first news of a sudden event – an earthquake, an explosion, a plane crash, etc. – will travel almost instantly around the world via Twitter not in the form of specific news – “a plane has just crashed” – but in the form of a more emotional “WTF was that?” sort of Tweet.  I’ve seen this anecdotally – the first news of the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottadad compound was a series of Tweets from a neighbor wondering what was causing all the noise in the middle of the night – but Mr. Chorost’s lecture got me wondering if it would be possible to somehow track such sentiments in realtime and to alert us when there’s a spike in such comments.  This might only give you a couple extra minutes heads up, but in some situations, a couple minutes is a huge advantage.

Thus was born over the last couple of days my first efforts at the “WTF Index.” All rights reserved.

The WTFI is trying to track first notice of incidents by scanning the Twitterverse in more or less realtime for the occurrence of certain terms that would be most likely to be Tweeted in the moments immediately following an adverse event. I’m looking less for specifics words than I am for expressions of surprise, fear, shock, etc.  My assumption is that in such situations, most people won’t immediately know the specifics but they will report “huge explosion” or “bright light in the sky” or simply “Whoa” or “WTF?”

There are a couple of challenges with this.

First is finding the right tool.  The volume of global Tweets per second is staggering – at peak times it can pass 8,000 (as it did for the globally significant event of…wait for it…Beyonce’s pregnancy) – which creates  issues of both bandwidth and processing.  The best place to do something like this would be from inside Twitter itself, but since they’re not likely to offer me a job anytime soon (“Hey, Biz…I’m @jmaustin just in case you’re looking) I have to make do with the tools at hand.  For me, that means Tweetdeck and a collection of search terms.

And that’s where I need your help.

So far I’m tracking:

• Whoa
• “what was that”
• “what the hell”
• uh-oh
• “huge explosion”
• “huge noise”
• “light in the sky”

And, of course…

• WTF
• “what the fuck”

Needless to say, these terms produce a huge number of false positives in the sense that most posts that end up in the net are variations on “WTF…no peach yogurt AGAIN???”  There are also way too many hits per minute – between 25 and 125 in my observation so far – to scan each one. Accordingly, I’m just looking at the total number of Tweets that fit the search terms and using that number to look for moments when the Tweeting activity deviates sharply upward from the normal background noise levels.  I haven’t seen it yet (no global disasters since Thursday shockingly) but my expectation is that I’d see a spike when something happened.

So…I’d love the Crowd’s ideas on what to add to the list of search terms.  If something unexpected happened right now in your vicinity and your first instinct was to reach for your Twitter client, what would you Tweet?

Thanks!

– Austin

Palin Pulls Plug on Prexy Push…

I’m sure the Daily News and the Post will come up with better headlines, but the “below-the-fold” news this evening is that Mrs. Palin has apparently shut the door on a presidential bid in 2012.

Duh…

Ever since her walk-away from her tiresome duties as Alaska’s governor, I’ve always thought that Mrs. Palin is too clever by half to fall into a situation where she might be held accountable for her words and where she might have to use something other than Twitter and Sean Hannity to communicate with.  She’s also done the math – a campaign would mean millions in lost opportunity costs and for what?  A job with an annual salary that probably doesn’t cover her yearly spend on leather wear.   And, about the only thing that could make the current Republican field look presidential is for Ms. Palin to be on the podium with them.  Next to her, Michelle Bachmann looks like an accomplished legislator, Herman Cain is a statesman and Ron Paul is…no, Ron Paul would still come off as crazy Uncle Stu.

But, have no fear.  We’ll still have Ms. Palin with us through the election season.  You can count on her to pop up on Fox and at motorcycle rallies and any other place that’s photogenic and well-covered whenever a Republican candidate strays from the bullgoose lunacy of the Tea Party’s platform.  Dropping the “g” off of every present-tense verb in sight, Ms. Palin will sally forth from her Escalade, her Harley or her snow-machine to decry the takin’ and the spendin’ and the taxin’ and to stand up for the keepin’, protectin’ and honorin’ that all real Americans value. Her handler will collect the check and – woosh – pop-up Sarah will be back inside the cocoon.  Hell, she’ll probably moderate the next debate now.

But, a Palin candidacy would have been fun to watch.

– Austin

 

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

If you’re reading this posting, say a little thanks to Steve Jobs and wish him well on the next leg of the journey.  As much as anyone of in the last 25 years, Mr. Jobs helped create, promote and define how we use computing devices of every sort.  Less of an inventor or engineer, Jobs’ genius lay in the areas of promotion and salesmanship and in obsessive focus on elegant design and a simple interface.  He didn’t invent the mouse, the graphical user interface, multimedia PCs, digital music players, cell phones, tablets or online stores, but he promoted them and refined them relentlessly to match his ideas of what such devices should be.

Mr. Jobs was reportedly no easy guy to work for or even hang around with, but his obsessive nature made Apple products among the most thought-out, deliberate objects any of us ever encountered.  There are stories without end of him stopping or even killing project over things like buttons that made the “wrong sound” when clicked, an inelegant design inside a component that no one would ever see and so on.  To a rare degree in a company so big and with such a broad product line, everything with an Apple logo reflected the design and functional sensibilities of Mr. Jobs.

This is not to say Mr. Jobs never missed.  People who only know him for the last decade – the iPod era – know him for the successes he’s had in music, in phones, in tablets, in on-line stores, but those of us who’ve been around the block a few more times remember when he was basically forced out of the company because of his unwillingness to compromise in even the smallest of details.  We remember the Newton and the Next and have – for decades – cursed Apple products for things like one-button mice and no forward delete keys simply because Mr. Jobs decided we didn’t need them.  Even in the last decade, there’s been a few clinkers (using Ping anyone?  Apple TV?).  It is, however, a testament to the power of a determined, forceful personality and what a person like that can accomplish.  It’s probably a good thing he never fixated on politics.

I will miss Mr. Jobs and not just because he ran a company that makes cool things I use.  I’ll miss him because he embodied his company’s slogan:

“Think Different.”

We could use more of that in all walks of life these days.

– Austin

Romney Rally Anthem

Don’t be angry. Don’t be sad.
And don’t sit cryin’ over good times you’ve had.
There’s a girl right next to you.
And she’s just waitin’ for something to do.

And there’s a rose in the fisted glove.
And the eagle flies with the dove.
And if you can’t be with the one you love,
honey, love the one you’re with.

Love the one you’re with.
Love the one you’re with.
Love the one you’re with.

– Stephen Stills