Professional Left Podcast Episode 995: The Politics of Pronouns

“ Time moves in one direction, memory in another.“  -- William Gibson, writer

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 994: An Epidemic of Recycled Lies

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.“  -- probably not Mark Twain

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 993: Fools In a Burning House

"Never argue with stupid people, because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."  --  Mark Twain

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A Tale Told by an Idiot...

...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Since the topic everywhere today is the 2-hour shit-stain of a State of the Union delivered on Tuesday night by the decomposing remains of the Dear Leader, I feel sort of obliged to talk about the subject.

However, since I took one for the team by watching the whole, grotesque spectacle (and the godawful pre-freakshow pundit vamping, and the excellent post-SOTU response from Virginia's new governor, Abigail Spanberger) in order to be able to speak intelligently on the matter on both The Bob Cesca Show and The Bradcast, I don't feel particularly in the mood to spelunk into that particular midden pile again.

Let us all agree that the bard nailed Trump's SOTU tour de farce 420 years ago with these lines from Macbeth, because Trump is indeed:

a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. 

And his 2-hour long crime against democracy and rhetoric was indeed:

a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

However, since my duty is to inform as well as entertain, let us together venture once again into the forbidden zone of the Before Time and see if we can find the seedlings of what grew into the monstrous, democracy-killing strangler plant that was on display for all to see on Tuesday night.

Yes, it has been more than a minute since the events of the Fake Tea Party's alternative State of the Union which they held off delivering for an hour so the actual Republican party could deliver it's own terrible alternative State of the Union, which followed President Obama's State of the Union on Jan 26, 2011.

What's of interest to me about that night is that I would wager that not one in a hundred of you politics nerds can remember a single word of Paul Ryan's (remember Paul Ryan!) official GOP rebuttal, other than, perhaps, a general and correct impression that while the zombie-eyed granny starver  (h/t brother Charlie Pierce) acknowledged that Obama had walked into a "severe fiscal and economic situation", the balance of Ryan's speech was spent scolding Obama for not dealing with the worst economic catastrophe in 74 years using the only tools in the Republican's bag.

And what tools are those?

If you guessed massive budget cuts, plus a strong suggestion that taxes were too darn high, give yourself a round of applause.

It was weak and dull and forgettable, and honestly he only reason I remember it at all is that "Economic Situation" was the name I DJed under during the late 1980s.

However, I'd also wager that a whole lot of you do remember at least part of Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann staring past the camera for six straight minutes while  delivering some batshit Tea Party nonsense in her aggressively cheerful robot Jesus voice.   

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle were not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting.  ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  Under George W. they were never like this.  

She even had this giant graph behind her showing how much better Bush was than Obama at the jobs thing.  And people remember it because it was something oddball.  Something new.   From The Guardian, January 26, 2011.

Michele Bachmann's state of the union response reveals state of US right

Tea Party leader made surprise intervention after official Republican reaction to Barack Obama's address

A televised attack on Barack Obama's state of the union address by one of the Tea Party's leading lights broke with convention last night and showed just how fractured rightwing opposition has become in the US.

Michele Bachmann, leader of the rightwing movement and a congresswoman from Minnesota, made a surprise intervention after the official Republican response to Obama's second state of the union speech, from congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Bachmann attacked "a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy", and used a graph to illustrate that while there had been " unacceptably high" deficits under the Bush administration, these had now "exploded".

She followed a call for a new "miracle" with a reference to the US's 1945 victory at Iwo Jima and the famous picture of soldiers raising the US flag, which she said symbolized "all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor".

Bachmann, who is seen as a possible presidential contender in 2012, said she was not seeking to compete with official Republican remarks – her response was made for activists from the Tea Party Express but screened live by CNN – but her approach differed from the more conciliatory remarks made by Ryan...

Bachmann was already under fire for her views on US history, particularly as revealed at a recent Tea Party event in Iowa, when she said the founding fathers "worked tirelessly" to abolish slavery. 

Republicans had insisted before Obama's address that they were not worried by a Tea Party view getting airtime. Michael Steel, spokesman for the House of Representatives' Republican speaker, John Boehner, had said in an email: "Whether it is through a press release, Twitter, the internet, on television, radio, via Facebook, or by other means, virtually every member of Congress will share their thoughts on the president's state of the union."

Not everyone was understanding, however. Columnist Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post said: "Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008. She ended her speech, delivered distractingly while looking off-camera, by saying, 'We the people …' Yeah, we the people want to know what that response was all about.

Please not for future reference those last two paragraphs, because what we were seeing – and what many of us were warning about – was MAGA Republicanism in its adolescent state.  

By this point it was already fully nuts and drunk on absurd conspiracy theories.  And when Jonathan Capehart said that Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008, that wasn’t the half of it.  She didn’t just ignore the Great Recession:  she pretended it never happened.  

During her speech she had a giant graph behind her “proving” to the bigots and imbeciles how much better Bush was than Obama at the whole jobs thing.  The X-axis represented years, and the Y-axis represented the unemployment rate.

Except the X-axis only showed every other year.  2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 and so on.

And in her thoroughly whitewashed and rewritten Tea Party version extremely recent history through which the whole world had lived, inn 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate under Bush was very low, but just a few months after Obama took office, the rate jumped way, way up!  

Clearly Obama is destroying America!  Period.  Full stop.  

Well Jeez oh Pete, does anyone out there in our studio audience remember anything else besides Barack Obama being terrible that might have happened on Bush’s watch – say, around December of 2007– that might have accounted for this sudden spike in the unemployment numbers.

From Federal Reserve History:

The Great Recession – December 2007-June 2009

Lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, this economic downturn was the longest since World War II.

The Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, which makes it the longest recession since World War II. Beyond its duration, the Great Recession was notably severe in several respects. Real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 4.3 percent from its peak in 2007Q4 to its trough in 2009Q2, the largest decline in the postwar era (based on data as of October 2013). The unemployment rate, which was 5 percent in December 2007, rose to 9.5 percent in June 2009, and peaked at 10 percent in October 2009.

The financial effects of the Great Recession were similarly outsized: Home prices fell approximately 30 percent, on average, from their mid-2006 peak to mid-2009, while the S&P 500 index fell 57 percent from its October 2007 peak to its trough in March 2009. The net worth of US households and nonprofit organizations fell from a peak of approximately $69 trillion in 2007 to a trough of $55 trillion in 2009.

As the financial crisis and recession deepened, measures intended to revive economic growth were implemented on a global basis. The United States, like many other nations, enacted fiscal stimulus programs that used different combinations of government spending and tax cuts. These programs included the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. 

Oh yeah.  That's right.  On Bush's watch, the entire world economy imploded and it was only thanks to the massive (if maddeningly imperfect and inadequate) recovery assistance rendered by the Obama administration that the world was saved from a second Great Depression, and the permanent collapse of, among other things, the United States auto industry.

There were and are literally hundreds of articles on the Great Recession at the fingertips of anyone who gave a damn about the truth.  For example:

The New York Times “The Recession’s Hidden Victims”: Stories about homeowners who lost their homes and how families coped with foreclosure.

Los Angeles Times “Lives on Hold”:  A multi-part series following individuals who lost jobs and struggled to rebuild their lives.

NPR “A Decade Later, the Great Recession’s Human Costs Linger":  Audio stories and written accounts of people still feeling the effects years later.

The Atlantic:  “The Lost Decade: What the Great Recession Did to American Families”: A deep look at how long-term unemployment reshaped communities and family structures.

ProPublica “In the Shadow of the Recession”: First-person, in-depth reporting on people dealing with medical debt, housing instability, and job loss.

These are stories about real families who were evicted or forced to downsize after losing income.  Real workers who lost not just jobs, but their careers and their identity.  Young adults delaying homeownership, marriage, or kids. Communities devastated by factory closures and foreclosures.   The long-term damage done to people' mental health and sense of financial insecurity.

But all of this Michele Bachmann just hand-waved away.  Instead, in her Tea Party Republican version of history, unemployment was all Obama’s fault.  

Then Bachmann pitched a fit over all the money Obama is just throwing away for no good reason.  

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle was not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  

Under George W. they were never like this.  

This is from her speech that night.

And what did we buy with all that money?  A leaner, more efficient government?  No.  We bought a bureaucracy that tells us which lightbulbs to buy and put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's healthcare bill. 

Obamacare mandates and penalties may even force many job creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether.   Unless, of course, you're one of the more than 222 privileged companies or "unions" that's already received a waiver under Obamacare.

In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world's finest health care might be forced to rely on government run coverage.  And that could have a devastating effect on our national debt for even generations to come.  

For two years, president Obama made promises just like the ones we heard him make this evening.    Yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices,  and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing! 

For those of you who were there at the time and paying attention this should cause a shudder of recognition at all that it foreshadowed.  

Then all the golden oldies came a'tumblin' out.  

Gotta gut the "job destroying" EPA.  

Pass a balanced budget amendment.  

Drill baby drill! 

Get rid of some unspecified number of "regulations" which may cost our economy one hundred million dollars.  

And Obama should repeal Obamacare immediately and support "free market solutions". 

Tort reform! 

Allow suckers to buy crap insurance out of the back of a van!

Kick out all the big spending scum! 

And this is just the beginning, because we swept to power in the midterms!

The Alert Reader will have noticed by now how neatly Michele Bachmann's "Obama ruined everything and Bush was awesome" lies from 15 years ago prefigure Trump's "Biden ruined everything and I was awesome" lies in his speech on Tuesday. 

And going back to the 2011 Guardian article, the Alert Reader may have also noticed how Michael Steel’s blasé attitude towards the Fake Tea Party prefigured the downfall of the Conservative elite.   

All the pieces that would grow at lightning speed into a full-grown fascist threat to American democracy led by a corrupt, lying sociopath were there.  All you needed to do was look.  The pre-MAGA Republican willingness to repeat big stupid, easily-debunked lies.  Demonizing Democrats as nearly destroying the country.  Casting themselves as the lone saviors of the republic.   And establishment Republicans like Steel not taking the internal threat seriously.  

So for our recently-former Republican Never Trump "allies" who definitely read his little blog o' mine, I'll leave you with these wise words from Peter Clemenza:

Burn The Lifeboats

In Case You Were Wondering

Why this "recovery" feels more like the sixth, pitiless year of your own, personal Great Depression...

It's because it is.

From The New York Times:

...

No recovery in incomes for most groups

The most basic measure of financial well-being is how much money people make and how much that money can buy. Many measures, such as per capita personal income, have risen in recent years, even after adjusting for inflation.

But this survey gives us a richer view of how incomes of people in different groups were affected. It is rather depressing.

Incomes rose nicely in the 2010 to 2013 time frame for the top 10 percent of earners (who had a median income of $230,000 last year). They rose slightly, by 0.7 percent, for the 80th to 90th percentile of earners (median of $122,000). But real incomes fell for every other group of earners.

Separate people by age or education, and the same basic pattern applies. Those with a college degree have done fine, but anything less than that and incomes have fallen. Both young adult households (those headed by someone under 35) and those households headed by someone over 75 have seen steep income declines in that same period.

This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.

...

And that rustling you hear out there in the tall grass?

That's the sound of the people whose policies nuked the economy and who have spent the last six years relentlessly committing every act of sabotage within their power in order to cripple the recovery and demolish the legacy of one man preparing to sweep back into control over the entire Legislative branch so they can finish the job.

But why dwell on such unpleasantness when there are so many different ways to discuss which pantsuit Hillary Clinton will probably be wearing when she debates Mitt Romney in Chuck Todd's 2016 Political Fantasy League? (h/t Alert Reader "Steve")

The Plague Doctor Will See You Now

Unemployment as Pandemic

From Kevin Drum at "Mother Jones":

The Invisible Jobless
...

Obviously there are lots of differences between the Great Depression and our current economic morass. But one of them was indeed the press: in the 30s, the typical newspaper writer was a modestly paid high school graduate, closer to being a blue-collar worker than a member of the middle class. Big syndicated columnists like Walter Lippman were pretty well off, but they were the exception more than the rule.

Today it's just the opposite. Punditry is dominated almost exclusively, both in print and on the air, by the rich and the upper middle class. And there's just no way around it: even if you're trying hard, it's close to impossible for someone living a comfortable life to really feel the desolation and helplessness of unemployment and economic distress when they've never really experienced it themselves and live in a social circle where it's rarely a serious problem either.

The long-term unemployed don't vote much, they aren't organized, and in electoral numbers there aren't that many of them. All true. But thanks to a political and media class that's mostly pretty well off, they're also largely invisible. Writing about them is more like an anthropological exercise than a simple description of your friends and neighbors. And it's one reason that we're doing so little to help them.

If unemployment was the pet cause of powerful men and women, or a plague sweeping through America's toniest suburbs striking down nannies, neighbors, lawn care professionals and colleagues, we would never hear the end of it.

There'd be a ribbon for it by now, and telethons, as well as wall-to-wall walk-, bike- , saunter- and skate-a-thons.

The cashiers at the local Safeway, Piggly Wiggly and Whole Foods would ask you if you'd like to contribute to curing unemployment each and every time you went in for pickles or Tampons or buttermilk, because their managers would make asking that question every single time part of their quarterly review.

CEOs would compete with each other to out-extort their workers for pledges to end the blight of joblessness in America.

Teevee ad guilt-bombs about the unemployed would play during every fucking commercial break on every station (sure you can turn down the sad, sad Sarah McLaughlin music, but the jobless will still be there, staring piteously into your greedy soul.)

Big, blunt pop-up ads begging for money would impede your access to Glenn Greenwald and Michele Malkin and porn if unemployment were a pandemic, and yet that is exactly what it is fast morphing into: an economic plague which, like all of history's really great plagues, is being quickly invested with its own set of pseudo-religious myths and rituals.

Chronic American unemployment has become a form of civic retrovirus which attacks your fiscal immune system, leaving you vulnerable to a whole host of other maladies from which you were previously safe but which can now reach right into your life and destroy you.

As with a plague, modern American unemployment comes swiftly, arbitrarily and without warning. As with a plague, it can strike anywhere, but often strikes in clusters. As with a plague, it travels along identifiable vectors...right up until it doesn’t.

As with a plague, even if you recover from it, you are permanently and deeply changed by it

As with a plague, moralizers tell the unemployed that their situation is the result of bad habits or moral failings.

As with a plague, zealots reject any attempt at palliative intervention or cure as secular meddling in God's Great and Wrathful Plan to punish the economic sins of “Those People”.

As with a plague, its sufferers are shunned by a public that prefers instead to hide from scary reminders of their own vulnerability.

As with a plague,

unemployment comes with special symbols

with which the doors of the afflicted are marked.

And as with a plague, calm and sensible methods of containment and control quickly become overwhelmed by the terror of the mob and the demagogues who feed on their fear.

God have mercy on us poor, silly monkeys.

Recession America Style: Tom Waits Friday Edition

(Brazenly stole from Batocchio)

Reader Esteev writes:

...
Similarly to SteveFromUpNorth, I am a 27 year old male with nothing more than entry level experience who visits your site for it's insight and hilarity that helps cope with a freaky future.

About a month ago I was fired. I worked for the Catholic church. While raised Catholic, I do not practice religion of any kind -- if anything, I despise it. But, I was unemployed for a year and had to take something in my field. Anyway, they got rid of me on a technicality -- I didn't attend some nonsensical Men's Conference. Oh, and not surprisingly, the man who got me the job (a family friend) was forced out 2 weeks before, but I'm suuuure that had nothing to do with me. It really was a blessing, pun intended, because I was miserable.

Zoom to the present day and I am back doing what I did during the summer throughout college: painting, fixing, maintaining and delivering boats and I've never been happier. I was lucky enough to have kept in contact with my old boss and he was happy to bring me back.

While I have never been happier, and have a farmer's tan even George Washington Carver would be impressed with, I too am nervous about the future. While in my late-20s, living at home, working in a boat yard, I've come to realize that the world is tilted in such a way that no matter what I do I'll probably just end up painting some rich guy's boat.
...

The value of happiness in one's work is not to be underestimated.

And for those who prefer their Tom Waits served musically, a little medicine I use to periodically kick my own imp of self-pity in the teeth.

Because however bad one's particular circumstances may seem at the moment, its nothing compared to:

Pregnant women and
Vietnam vets, I say
Beggin' on the freeway
Bout as hard as it gets

Recession American Style, Ctd.

I don't think I've listened to the Windy Geriatric Network since my dad drove my brother and me to get cheap haircuts two towns over (Sitting up high on a board weathered by a million squirming little-boys...yellowing "Archie" comics...fly paper holding the fossils of tiny Paleozoic creatures...one 'a them top-hat wearing, nodding drunk-sippy birds with an ass-full of blue gin. Good times...) but I do know that it is a vast, venerable and powerful money-making Private Sector engine which you would think would have figured out how not to fall prey to the letting-dumb-fucks-run-the-place-into-the-ground syndrome.

Apparently you would be wrong.

From this interview with WGN's recently-fired talk show host Steve Cochran:

Q. Let me get this straight: WGN just fired its most talented, youngest and most versatile full-time host. I don’t get it.

A. I don’t know that I get it either. One answer may be politics, but I believe it was largely because I spoke out about what I was witnessing. I didn’t like what they were doing to the radio station and let them know that with regularity. They want people who will never ask questions and just do as they are told.

It’s also likely to be a decision from the man behind the curtain. [Tribune Co. CEO] Randy Michaels is making programming decisions and has wanted to bring in his guys for as long as he has been in charge. That’s why the new guy from WLW [in Cincinnati] was hired and why they wanted Bill Cunningham, too.

The “young-ing up” of the demos is the funniest argument I’ve heard. I was the youngest guy in the prime-time lineup. John Williams is just a year older than me at 50. The rest of the staff is 55-plus — and sounds older than that.

Q. How long have you known this was coming?

A. That is a bit unclear, but I certainly feel I was on top of the hit list for standing up for what I felt was right. This was not about change. Change is appropriate and needed in the evolution of any company. I certainly represented change when I was hired 10 years ago. The difference here is that there seemed to be no consideration for building on what worked. Instead, it was about tearing things down and the almost daily drill of insulting and threatening memos, and a sense of a total lack of respect for anyone who was here before the Zell invasion.

When I turned down the morning show, I’m certain it was not if but when they would pull the plug. The reason it took a year and a half is because the show consistently made money.

Meanwhile, the statements made from the inside about WGN were ridiculous
...

And who was Steve Cochran?

For most of his time on the air there, Cochran, 49, had been regarded as the future of the station. By all accounts, the seasoned radio veteran was being groomed as the successor to WGN’s 40-year line of top-rated morning hosts — from Wally Phillips to Bob Collins to Spike O’Dell. But as the Sam Zell era at Tribune Co. unfolded, Cochran suddenly found himself on the outs with new management (and most notably with WGN program director Kevin “Pig Virus” Metheny).

Cochran’s fate was all but sealed when he was signed to just a four-month contract extension earlier this year and demoted from afternoon drive to a two-hour midday shift. For many listeners already disgusted by changes in the station’s lineup and attitude, his ouster may have been the last straw.
...

The key to keeping your job in these parlous times is to figure out what your organization actually produces and then to plant yourself as deeply into the production process as possible.

Mr. Cochran though his organization "produced" sound decisions and listener-pleasing entertainment.

Clearly he was wrong.

Recession American Style

Blogger litbrit writes:

...Our business has slowed to a halt, after we'd already plowed what we had in the bank into our new project, an organic and hydroponic farm powered by alternative fuels (wind and solar), once the wholesale ornamental plant business ground to a quiet halt thanks to the commercial real estate sector grinding to a far more spectacular and explosive halt in 2008. We figured, people will always need to eat. And they will. But it's taken all we've got, I'm down to the last dregs of my retirement money--my beloved's has long since evaporated--and we are crossing all functioning fingers and toes that a Clean Energy grant we recently applied for comes through. Thereafter, I don't know what we'll do. I really don't.

I never gave that much thought to what life would be like when I turned fifty--later this year, I'll do exactly that--but if I'm honest, I'll admit to a hazy, sun-soaked vision of myself sitting in my lush garden, relaxing at last as my children would be well past the diaper stage and able to make their own PB&J's; I'd be halfway through writing my novel, my car wouldn't be making weird, expensive-sounding noises--it might even be one of those snazzy electric cars!--and worrying myself sick at night would be a dim memory of what things were like when the children were little and always coming down with something.

Instead, I'm looking three months down the road to the dread date, and I can't envision anything at all--it's like trying to read a distant cluster of unlit road signs while peering through the dense fog at dawn. Or else sunset.

Our beaches offer little comfort: it's much too hot this summer--even for Florida--and the breezes seem to sputter and choke before they reach us. Besides, with every passing week, those vast clots of tar creep further southward. Seaside is ruined; our escape grounds will be next.
...

The Two Commandments ™, Ctd.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Chairman of Goldman Sachs.

-- F.W. Nietzsche, Chief Process Improvement Visioneer,
"Overman, Overman & Zarathustra"

Almost exactly one year ago, this was the national mood:


Remember?

It was the shattering, nation-crippling End of Days for Empire of the Supermen; those Masters of the Universe, who had promised...

...in exchange for unchecked power and no supervision, like Rumplestiltskin, they would forever to spin shitty strip malls and abandoned corn cribs into gold, because what with working 65 hours a week, raising kids an keeping up with Gray's Anatomy, we were busy enough -- too busy, really -- to pay close enough attention to the incomprehensibly complex domains of foreign or fiscal policy.

...and who instead very nearly destroyed the world.

And near the center of this civilization-threatening feculent hurricane were men like John A. Thain, an "irresistibly textbook example of the bastard love child of obscene excess and arrogant entitlement":

Creep of the Week -- John A. Thain

...
Thain's behavior has been so cartoonish as to suggest he's a soulless concoction of Marvel Comics. A Wall Street villain: Thain - the bond-shark who spends more on a commode to festoon his office than most Americans earn in a year!

Even James Post, a management professor at Boston University, suggested that Thain was more of an avatar than a human when talking to the AP about him and other Wall Street CEOs who spent $18 billion on year-end bonuses after getting $350 billion in taxpayer dollars to bailout their failing financial companies, "Thain is a symbol of the species. It's a breed that I think is going to have to change its habits, at least for a time."
...

Almost one year ago -- after the markets collapsed and his grotesque excesses stopped being treated as cute by the media and starting being treated as obscene -- Thain was finally kicked to the curb.

Albeit with a 24-carat gold boot:

Former Merrill CEO Thain resigns from BofA
Executive under fire for spending $1.22 million on an office remodel

updated 11:04 a.m. CT, Fri., Jan. 23, 2009

NEW YORK - John Thain resigned under pressure from Bank of America on Thursday after reports he rushed out billions of dollars in bonuses to Merrill Lynch employees in his final days as CEO there, while the brokerage was suffering huge losses and just before Bank of America took it over.

The bonuses were paid before Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill became final on Jan. 1, and while Bank of America was privately telling the government that Merrill was losing so much money that the deal might fall through unless it could get more federal bailout money.
...

Coincidentally, almost exactly one year ago, Corrupt Ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich

lost his job for being a sociopath and a crook, while at the same time I lost mine because...uh, well, frankly, for no reason anyone has ever explained to me. After nearly a decade of exemplary work and glowing reviews, my job ended with a lotta shrugs, a lotta embarrassed glances at the ceiling, and a lotta sentences that began with, "You just gotta understand that, um, stuff...y'know...just...sorta...happens."

So, one year later, in the depths of the worst economic catastrophe in 70 years, how are we poor under-employed bastard doing?

Me? Not great, but could be worse. No one is shooting at me, and I'm going broke slowly enough to be able to enjoy the ride (This is not a fund-raising pitch [that will be coming very soon]; just me using my own strangely-synchronous circumstances as a handy data point.)

The sociapathic crook who used to run my state? Well, on the upside, indictment-wise, I'm doing 100% better than Milorad. On the downside, no one has yet offered me a ridiculously sweet book deal, hooked me up with a lovely gig on WLS radio, invited me to make the rounds of the nation's talk shows, or offered me a massive payday for appearing on a crappy reality teevee show.

And the rapacious, amoral greedhead who helped to nearly nuke the global economy back to the Age of Barter and Beads? (From NPR):

John Thain, Symbol Of Wall St Excess, Back On Top

By Frank James

John Thain, the controversial former head of Merrill Lynch who helped make that company's acquisition by Bank of America happen but was forced out soon afterwards, has been named chief executive of CIT.

Thain became a symbol of Wall Street's excesses because of his demand, later dropped, for a $10 million bonus in 2008 during a time when Merrill was imploding. Then there was his rushing through of about $4 billion in bonuses to Merrill executives before the completion Bank of America's completion of the Merrill acquisition at a time when Merrill was booking huge losses.

And as if that weren't enough, Thain really stepped into it with the $1.2 million refurbishing of his offices, including a $35,000 commode, a fancy word for a toilet. Thain later apologized for what he called a lapse in judgment.
...

All of which leaves me asking the same, old question: How did Hunter Thompson's famous observation on the state of the music business --

"...a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs."

-- become and everyday, workaday American reality?

And arriving at the same, sad answer: the Two Commandments ™, my friends.

1: There is a Club.
2: You are not in it.

The Two Commandments ™.