Why Are These Business Leaders So Dumb?

"Even in the constrained-Trump scenarios business elites like to posit, the calculation they’ve made is extremely stupid, drawn up in a bubble of magical thinking where critical reasoning of any kind is discouraged. They discount the many hazy ways Trump’s fondness for corruption and lawlessness might dampen the country’s wealth-creating potential. How valuable is it to foreign investors that the U.S. has had a relatively robust and stable rule of law. How shaken will they be if Trump pardons the insurrectionists, then further abuses the pardon power to legalize crooked right-wing cronyism?"

Why Are These Business Leaders So Dumb? Brain Buetler Off Message

And this is Buetler bending over backwards trying to make the mild case in a way that won't offend Billionaire's "delicate sensibilities" but will anyway, I'm afraid. Still, singing my song for sure. Supporting Repugs on economics, at this point, just magnifies the narrow-interest myopia of corporate elites and the blind bigotry of dying Whitemanistan. They promote self-dealing rich corruption and hoarding and accelerate the now going on 50 year class war against workers, whatever their ethnicity, and the environment. It's Billionaire economics, blinded to anything but their own bottom line; utterly oblivious to building and sustaining general prosperity and economic opportunity. 

"The Right Stuff," Robert Calvert (1974)

The space rock Roky Erickson and the best of the four Hawkwind vocalists-- I know, low bar-- in their classic years; 1970-1975. From a solo album called Captain Lockheed & The Starfighters. The cracked actor Captain schtick is "The Right Stuff" and Calvert's best stuff. Very proto-'70s punk rock. And an indelible vocal stylist, if eccentric and more than a little erratic. Eno produced a couple solo albums with him. Calvert also wrote poetry and short science fiction. Johnny Rotten says he was an early influence. The Don Quixote of space rock. 

Punk Rock Tuesday.   

RIP Bill Walton, 1952-2024

Extra weird when your peer age group, or big brother age group anyway, start passing. All the Walton highlights I saw on ESPN this evening were late in his career when he played a supporting role for the Celtics. Before that, when he was still just a big hippie kid, he led the Portland Trail Blazers to their first and only NBA Championship in 1977. 

I wanted to attend the deciding game that year. I'd already been to an earlier playoff game, where the crowd energy was incredible, a first for me and not like anything I'd experienced before. But the final game landed on my high school graduation day. I actually remember wavering about going to the game instead but tradition, or my parents, more like it, won out. At our grad ceremony many of us were packing radios and a cheer broke out as we were marching into the stadium. The Blazers beat the 76ers! It remains about the only thing I remember from that day. 

Walton played like an all-time great NBA big man his first four seasons in Portland before injuries seriously limited his career. He came out of UCLA, which was dominant in college hoops in those days. He had one of those John Wooden bank shots. Textbook footwork. And, above all, he was a great team player and a special passer. Watching Walton snare a rebound and whip an outlet pass to a streaking Blazer, Lionel Hollins, Bobby Gross, Johnny Davis, etc, already near or past half court was a thing of beauty. Showtime before the '80s Lakers. 

My closest brush with Walton, though, had come a couple years before, maybe 1975, one of my very first concerts, Commander Cody and the His Lost Planet Airmen and New Riders of the Purple Sage, at the old Paramount Theater in Portland. It was in the basement bathroom, the reefer smoke thick as fog, but there he was in all his long bushy red hair and headband Grateful Dead hippie glory, two or three urinals down, no one else around. I gushed "Big Bill Walton!" or something like that because I was startled, and excitable like that, and probably high as a kite. Walton chuckled, issued me a friendly 'hey,' and sauntered out, like a giant wizard amongst us silly Hobbits of the Shire. 

How Grump and MAGA Increase Political Violence

How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics, NY Times

Here's a story primarily about the alarming increase in political violence and threats of political violence spearheaded by Trump and his violent fascist MAGA minions but you'd never know that by the headline or sub-heading or by the bothsidesing gestures sprinkled throughout. 

It's a simple story, really. We're experiencing a shocking uptick in political violence or threats of political violence nearly all coming from Trump and the conservative right. If you don't want more political violence then don't vote for Trump or a Republican until he is gone and they, as a party, return to the human family and American democracy and condemn and reject political violence of any kind. But, instead, here we have a story that screams out for such an angle but still actually does everything it can in framing the story so as to obscure such a take. 

It's a problem with corporate and mainstream media. And a problem made worse by the fact most Americans never make it past the headlines. Here are some of the salient facts buried in the story: 

Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, refused to rule out violence if he were to lose in November. “It always depends on the fairness of the election,” he said in an interview late last month.

[Doesn't this obviously, again, violate the Insurrection Clause of the 14th amd?]

But experts describe this moment as particularly volatile, thanks in great part to social media platforms that can amplify anonymous outrage, spread misinformation and conspiracy theories and turn a little-known public employee into a target.

No politician has harnessed the ferocious power of those platforms like Mr. Trump. The former president has long used personal attacks as a strategy to intimidate his adversaries. As he campaigns to return to the White House, he has turned that tactic on the judges and prosecutors involved in his various legal cases, all of whom have subsequently been threatened.

[And so he should be muzzled and/or locked up and his prosecutions expedited, NOT delayed!]

Research does show, however, that recent acts of political violence are more likely to be carried out by perpetrators aligned with right-wing causes and beliefs.

[No kidding?!]

Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah who is retiring at the end of this year, told a biographer that some G.O.P. lawmakers voted not to impeach and convict Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 attack because they were afraid for their safety if they crossed his supporters. Mr. Romney did not identify the legislators by name and declined an interview for this article.

[Nazi stuff, face it.]

Election officials — from secretaries of state to poll workers — have faced hostility and abuse after Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, leading to resignations and difficulty recruiting and retaining staff members and volunteers. Such threats “endanger our democracy itself,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said this week.

[What Garland said.]

"Private Life," Grace Jones (1980)

This is peak disco, in its way. I like the original but Jones' disco Dominatrix gives the song an anthemic kick. Sly & Robbie are crucial too. After they burned disco records in 1979 at a White Sox baseball game in Chicago and disco was canceled by Top 40, Jones, like everybody else, had to market their music as something other than disco but Jones' cold and bitchy vocal performance here is pure disco. Make no mistake, Grace Jones' was an original Disco Diva, and a slave to the rhythm for life. The video looks like a screen test for a James Bond movie, too campy by half but I remember her being okay in A View To Kill. As good as Dylan in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; or Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, anyway. Pop stars have set a low bar so far but seem to do best in films when they just try to have fun. Apparently, serious acting is hard to do. In my memory Jones has a sly robotic humor, not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies. Grace Jones is an iconic figure in pop culture and a product of '70s disco. Thank God It's Disco Friday.      

FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024)

 An exciting teaser for the new Road Warrior movie, Justin Chang, in the NY-er:

“Fury Road” appeared more than two years before #MeToo took hold in the entertainment industry, and its decrying of sexual violence now feels uncannily prescient for Hollywood. So does the figure of Furiosa herself, who, unlike some of the regulation Strong Female Characters that have since rolled off the studios’ comic-book-movie assembly lines, never seemed like a cynical bid for representational cred. She reads like a character who had to exist and who may, in fact, have always existed, just waiting for the right story—and the right actress—to break her loose."

Rough Beast: Slouching Towards Dictatorship

Excerpt from intro to Greg Olear's new book Rough Beast: Slouching Towards Dictatorship: 

Donald Trump’s term in office can be summed up in four words: pandemic, protest, impeachment, and insurrection. He left the White House with 392,428 Americans dead of a plague he exacerbated; with Washington recovering from a coup attempt he instigated; with the economy teetering towards recession; with our standing around the world at its lowest point in a century; and with the U.S. an additional $8 trillion in debt. He had, by far, the lowest average presidential approval rating since Gallop started keeping track in 1938, and was widely reviled abroad. Four of the five largest protests in the history of the country happened on his watch. He was impeached twice. He could have been impeached a third time, in 2019, after the release of the Mueller Report—which, contrary to what Trump and the mendacious Bill Barr told us, did not exonerate him. Even his much-ballyhooed campaign promises fell flat: He failed to build the wall, and he failed to drain the swamp. He did, however, watch a lot of television and play a lot of golf.

In the various presidential surveys taken since Donald left office, historians have consistently ranked Trump dead last, behind even the contemptible white supremacist Andrew Johnson and the hapless James Buchanan. This is not recency bias. By any metric, Trump was a catastrophic failure: corrupt, sociopathic, cruel, venal, disruptive, artless, dumb, and pathologically inept—a terrible president and an even worse human being. He threw paper towels at hurricane victims! He called veterans of our armed forces “suckers and losers!” He invited the Taliban to Camp David! He banked $2.4 billion in emoluments during his four years in office! He characterized the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as “very fine people!” He nominated an(other) alleged sexual assailant to the Supreme Court! He sat on his ass watching TV as his besiegers stormed the Capitol! He humped a flag! And that’s just off the top of my head.

We have never had a monster like this in the White House. No one comes close. That the country managed to survive four years of Trump suggests that Otto von Bismarck was on to something when he remarked that God seems to have a special providence for the United States of America. With Donald, we dodged a big orange bullet.

In a word, we were spared.

And yet as I write this, Donald John Trump is the presumptive nominee of one of our two major political parties. Only two individuals have a legitimate chance at winning the White House in November—I’ll talk about the myth of third parties and the perils of voting for the nihilistic likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Chapter 9—and Trump is one of them. And he’s not just that political party’s nominee. Donald Trump has subverted the entire GOP, purged it of the disloyal, and taken total command. He installed his daughter-in-law—Lara Trump, desecrator of Tom Petty’s memory and wife of Eric Trump (Donald’s son who ripped off his own cancer charity)— as co-chair at the RNC, and changed the organization’s rules there so that the lion’s share of donations will be used to cover his mounting legal bills. As I explore further in Chapter 8, the conventional, old-school Republicans of yesteryear have either retired, lost, died, or kissed the ring. Don’t be fooled by the cute elephant logo. Whatever the branding, this is no longer the Party of Lincoln. There is no GOP anymore, only MAGA. It is an entire party built around a demagogue with dictatorial ambitions.

If the polls are to believed, that demagogue has a coin flip’s chance of retaking the White House. Like, this might actually happen! People in my family are going to vote for him. People in your family are probably going to vote for him, too. And if, God forbid, he succeeds, there are—as I explain in Chapter 7—a rabid battalion of religious zealots, Christian nationalists, and reactionary monarchists poised to make so many drastic changes to the country so quickly that the United States won’t be recognizable by the Fourth of July 2025. The threat is real. The situation is dire.

This isn’t me, a known “TRUMP HATER,” trying to frame the narrative to make Donald look bad. All of what I’m saying here is objectively true, as this book will make abundantly clear. As the kids say: #Facts.

The Business World Position on Bidenomics

 J. Bradford DeLong, Economist at Berkeley, prolific blogger, email bombs the "Financial Times" with economic realities (and maybe veiled charges of political cowardice), anyway, making the best mainstream economics case for Bidenomics I've come across. Very wonky, I don't know half of this stuff, but still interesting peak into business world, "Financial Times," taking a position on Bidenomics, basically, and the debate around that position. 

Brad DeLong Grasping Reality

Still, notably, not a peep about the corporate price gouging in recent inflation. 

And, full disclosure, while DeLong is a good source on economic history readings I found Slouching Towards Utopia frustrating. On the one hand, it was a super interesting take on overcoming scarcity in modern economic history; he has this thing for the modern corporation born in the late 19th c. But, on the other, the book was weirdly oblivious to other ongoing corrosive effects of unfettered capitalism like, for instance, climate change. And, most annoying, he includes reference to my favorite economic historian, Karl Polanyi, which I'm always looking for and actually appreciate, but then makes Polanyi a mawkish foil for his own fanboy worship of Hayek and his "collectivist nightmare" as economic's "genius."

Also, should probably be noted that DeLong worked in Clinton admin, second only to Reagan admin, in designing and implementing the macro economic architecture of the Neoliberal corporate order, now significantly, and alarmingly, turning fascist.    

For Crying out Loud, Cheetolini and MAGA are Traitors to the Country!

Doubt this long list could be exhaustive but feels like some reminders are in order. At this point it should be generally recognized that Trump and MAGA are a non-stop crime spree and general desecration of democracy and the Constitution. 

But, and this is the biggest echo with Timothy Ryback's recent book about the final rise of Hitler, the conservative right, or much of it, doesn't like Trump, knows he is a violent bigot, knows he is a self-dealing financial fraud, but they talk themselves into believing they can manage this clown to their own benefit and fear more Dem reforms, taxes and regulations, in short, more Bidenomics (even though their economic record is better than any Repug admin in over half a century), as the greater threat. 

The potential for a violent fascist catastrophe in this developing scenario is terrifying! 

And the mainstream media, as corporate toadies, are so numb and addicted to Grump's outrage click-bait power that his worst offenses are overlooked and thereby dismissed and burnished, by conservatives, again, as so much political courage, he's standing up against the liberal establishment (trying to bring him down), fighting for his gun-toting white Christian Nationalist salt-of-the-earth constituents-- instead of, in fact, spearheading an unprecedented and lawless assault on democracy and our national independence and law and order and women's rights and the environment and, basically, just about anything else protecting the basic rights of common Americans. 

For crying out loud, Grump and MAGA are traitors to the country and obvious assets to Putin!

So, as a reminder: 

Why is the Guy Who Told Us to Drink Bleach a Step Away from Being President, Thom Hartmann   

Americans are dumbfounded. How is it that half this nations’ voters are on the verge of returning to office a guy who:

— Began his life of crime busted for writing “C” for “Colored” on Black rental applicants’ forms,
— Mismanaged the Covid crisis so badly America had the developed world’s highest mortality rate with at least a half-million unnecessary deaths,
— Is credibly accused of sexual assault by more than twenty women (one 14 years old) and found by a jury — twice— to have raped one of them,
— Forcibly tore nursing babies from the arms of their mothers with almost a thousand of those children still missing,
— Solicited a billion-dollar bribe just this month and illegally took over $7 million (that we know of: the real number is almost certainly a multiple of that) from foreign governments while in office (Senator Robert Menendez was a slacker),
— Praised Nazis who marched chanting “Jews will not replace us!” as “very fine people,”
— Conspired with militia leaders to storm the US Capitol, leading to the death of 5 civilians and 3 police officers,
— Regularly quotes Hitler’s vicious, racist rhetoric referring to human beings as “scum” and “vermin” while claiming people of color “poison the blood of our nation,”
— Stole national security secrets and repeatedly lied to the FBI when we tried to recover them,
— Abandoned our Kurdish allies to Putin, leading to their mass slaughter by Russian troops and warplanes,
— Gave to Russia at least one spy we know of in an Oval Office meeting with that country’s foreign minister and US ambassador,
— Did his best to destroy NATO and hand Ukraine to Putin,
— Negotiated a deal to build an office/apartment building in Moscow that was to be executed a week after he took office and lied to the American people about it,
— Knowingly lied to the nation for almost four full years about having lost the last election,
— Called our fallen soldiers buried at Normandy and Arlington “suckers” and “losers” and ridiculed John McCain and every other American POW,
— Gutted the EPA and sold off public lands to drilling and mining interests who were greasing his party’s palms,
— Proudly packed the Supreme Court with people he hand-selected to end women’s right to abortion,
— Repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, using federal property for campaign and political activities,
— Is currently violating the Logan Act by interfering in President Biden’s foreign policy efforts,
— Praised the world’s worst dictators while trash-talking our democratic allies,
— Holds rallies in which he curses, using words that can’t be broadcast on TV or radio,
— Threatened the Georgia secretary of state with jail if he wouldn’t help overturn the 2020 election,
— Facilitated his son-in-law extracting two billion dollars from a murderous dictator,
— Gave billionaires a two-trillion-dollar tax cut that’s being paid for by raising taxes on working class people for the next few years,
— Promises he’ll be a dictator from his first day in office and will bring about a “Unified Reich,”
— Said he’ll imprison or destroy the media and those who criticize him, using language last attributed to Hitler,
— Slept with a porn star and a Playboy bunny in the months after his less-than-two-years-married trophy wife gave birth to his son and then paid them both to hush it up so he could get elected,
— Convinced China to give his daughter millions worth of trademarks while accusing his opponent’s son of corruption for taking a routine payment for being on the board of a foreign natural gas company,
— Used explicit Nazi iconography to label his political opponents,
— Tried to extort a foreign leader to manufacture dirt on his political opponent while withholding military aid to that nation as it was under attack by Russia,
— Collaborated with Putin to get elected and, when the FBI tried to investigate it, engaged in at least 10 documented felony obstructions of justice,
— Trash talks America’s criminal justice system, insisting he’s the victim of “racist” Black and Hispanic prosecutors and judges,
— Committed multiple campaign finance crimes,
— Convinced about half of Americans the country’s in a recession when in fact we’re in better economic shape than any time since World War II,
— Engaged in and was convicted for both tax and insurance fraud,
— Got multiple deferments to avoid the Vietnam War because he bought a X-ray of somebody else’s bone spurs from a corrupt doctor,
— Stole from a children’s cancer charity,
— Repeatedly joked about the assault and murder attempt of Paul Pelosi, implicitly encouraging his followers to commit more violence against Democrats,
— Was found liable for running a fraudulent university,
— Tried to get his own vice president assassinated, and, among other things,
— Stole millions from his siblings and relatives and then pissed it all away by being an incompetent playboy businessman, having to declare bankruptcy six times.

Any one of these things would have destroyed a normal politician. Two or more would consign him or her to permanent political purgatory.