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I promise I will try to stop moving the blog now.

Go home, morons

The persecution of the poor continues with employers now accusing the unemployed of being too stupid (or let’s be generous and say “inexperienced”) to be find jobs with decent salaries. (h/t)

Here in this suburb of Cleveland, supervisors at Ben Venue Laboratories, a contract drug maker for pharmaceutical companies, have reviewed 3,600 job applications this year and found only 47 people to hire at $13 to $15 an hour, or about $31,000 a year.

As Atrios points out, it never occurs to the good people at Ben Venue Labs that they’re not paying enough to attract skilled workers, or that maybe they should provide on-site training to attract new talent.

It’s become a commonplace line of attack to hear right-wing loons like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle place the onus of unemployment on the unemployed, and of course this has been the territory of Conservatism for years: it’s your fault you’re unemployed. Intellectual giants like Rush Limbaugh constantly say things like unemployment benefits “do nothing but incentivize people not to find work.”

The danger in this kind of talk is that these attacks help to stigmatize the unemployed. Call them worthless leaches long enough, and that mentality bleeds past the parameters of Loonyville, and enters the workforce. Employers grow resentful that workers aren’t arriving to the office already trained and ready to go.

The wealthy universities observe these employer demands, and tailor curriculum to match the pace of industry, but those who can’t buy access to the highest echelons of education are left out in the cold. Where once they could make up ground with on-site training, now they’re told they’re too stupid and under-trained for employment, thanks so much for the interest, best of luck to you in the future, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Of course, the private sector didn’t always work this way. There used to be this thing called cooperative education, which combined classroom-based education with practical work experience. Basically, co-ops provided academic credit for structured job experience, so young people could smoothly make the school-to-work transition. Huge corporations like GM used this model, which helped them attract new talent because human beings don’t usually exit the womb understanding how to construct automobiles.

I’ve been writing a lot about this demonization of the poor and unemployed, including how some employers now conduct credit score checks during the hiring process, and Senator Orrin Hatch proposed an amendment that would demand mandatory drug tests for welfare and unemployment beneficiaries. Congress recently joined in on the class-bashing when they nixed unemployment benefits for over 1 million laid-off workers.

And of course, some employers don’t even consider the resumes of unemployed people. Yes, you read that correctly. In order to find employment, that means you already must possess a job, and are looking to upgrade, or something. But if you’ve been let go from a prior occupation, you’re shit out of luck.

When I posted a link to the above story, I was contacted on Twitter by a rather proud right-wing employer, who mimicked the sentiment that he doesn’t even consider the resumes of unemployed people. If everyone adopts this attitude, soon we’ll be pining for the days when unemployment was “only 10 percent.”

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Photojournalist C.S. Muncy at Grand Isle, Lousiana. (Photo by C.S. Muncy)

Yesterday, I contacted a friend of mine, C.S. Muncy, who is a photojournalist currently raising all kinds of hell down in southern Louisiana.

C.S.’s original goal was to gain access to some of the areas being guarded by BP contractors and deemed “off limits” to reporters, but yesterday he, along with Save Our Shores‘s Judson Parker, made an unexpected discovery.

They believe that BP has been dumping sand on the beaches in order to cover up oil. You can view some video Judson shot of the beach over here.

I called C.S. to ask him about the alleged cover-up.

AK: Is it true that BP has been covering some of the oil on the beach with sand?

CM: Yeah. Yeah, this is interesting…We went down onto the beaches, and we started inspecting them. There were tar balls, tar residue, and there was some oil on the beach. Apparently, the day before there was a lot of tar balls, and BP was working in the area pretty heavily, and we started noticing there was a different consistency in the sand.

Closer to shore, there was this grainy, very rough shell-filled sand, and then you could see almost like a border where it just spilled over onto the beach sand, which is a very fine-grained sand. And it looked as if it was dumped. I mean, you could dig a few inches down, and you could see that it was a different type of sand beneath that, you know, without all the shell and grit, and what not. It looked very much like that. Our first assumption was, yeah, that they were dumping sand to cover up the tar balls.

You know, when I first said that…to me, it sounded conspiratorial – more so than I usually think. But then, soon after, we were stopped by some local sheriffs - actually, scratch that, they weren’t local sheriff – they were working for the local sheriff, but these guys were bussed in from… (C.S. asks Judson if he remembers where they were bussed in from) …from Jefferson Parish – from way up north – he was a city guy, and there were two of them that stopped us, and they weren’t unpleasant about it – they weren’t mean – but we could hear them talking on the radio, and their job was to run us off. So they told us, no more pictures – at least no more pictures of them. In fact, they stopped me from going out onto the beach a little bit further, and taking more pictures. But, you know, we got to talking with the guy, one of them, and he said, ‘Yeah, they came here, and just dumped a bunch of sand on the beach.’ They were just shoveling it on.

We could see the erosion and where the tar still was, and there was a total separate point from where the sand was dumped on.

Update: Shannyn Moore has more on the cover-up (along with some photos from C.S.) here.

Update 2: If you would like to support C.S.’s work, you can send him cash through PayPal to OilSpillStory@gmail.com – Click the link here.

Update 3: Karen Dalton Beninato posted a photo taken on Monday of a dump truck at Grand Isle. A commenter has raised the possibility that it is not a dump truck pictured in the photo KDB posted (it may be a truck used to transport heavy items). I wrote her and raised this possibility, and she said she’s contacted BP to verify if it is indeed a dump truck, or not. She could have gotten a closer look, but BP has a “65-foot rule” for all journalists, so the photo had to be taken from afar.

Correction: An earlier version of this article linked to saveourshores.org, which is a separate group in California. Judson Parker is a representative from www.sosfla.org.

One of you, buy this t-shirt for Tony Hayward

I’ve been wondering when someone was going to ask this extremely obvious question. Regular readers of my blogs (particularly at my old T/S one) know that I’ve been following this story with much enthusiasm.

..Okay, some might say “psychotic devotion.”

But Anderson Cooper, bless his little, silver Vanderbilt-spawned head, finally interviewed someone capable of putting two and two together: Fred McCallister, an investment banker with Allegiance Capital Corporation, who is going to be testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee today.

ANDERSON COOPER: Fred McCallister joins us now.

Fred, why do you think that BP would prefer to use dispersants over skimmers?

FRED MCCALLISTER, VICE PRESIDENT, ALLEGIANCE CAPITAL CORPORATION: Anderson, thank you for having me on tonight.

The issue that BP is facing right now is whether to use what’s practices that are normal around the world, which is to try to cause the oil to come to the surface, and then deploy the right amount of equipment and the right type of equipment to gather that oil up and get it out of the Gulf.

Using the dispersants allows the oil to stay under the surface, and this accomplishes several purposes. It allows the — it makes it a lot more difficult to quantify the amount of oil that’s coming out, which has a direct impact on damages and royalties that have to be paid.

It keeps it out of sight and out of mind. And it allows BP to amortize the cost of the cleanup over several years, 10 to 15 years, because some of this oil is going to biodegrade, but a lot of that oil is going to roll up on the beaches for 10 or 15 years.

And if they can amortize that over 10 or 15 years,as opposed to dealing with that over the next 15 months, that’s a much better financial position for BP to be in.

COOPER: Well, let’s be clear, though. The EPA has sanctioned the use of dispersants on the spill. Dispersants are generally less harmful, they say, and toxic than the oil itself. But you say it’s really about BP’s financial interests?

MCCALLISTER: Well, it’s about — well, in terms of environmental impact, it’s about getting the oil to the surface and getting it out of the water. That’s the best solution, bar none.

And I understand that the EPA has sanctioned the use of these dispersants, but I also believe that BP is in control of this situation. And they’re doing what’s in the best interest of BP and their shareholders.

No one wants BP to fail, trust me. I don’t want BP to fail. It’s in the best interests of the country and everybody in the Gulf region. I happen to be from that region. I have family there. I have property there. I want BP to succeed.

COOPER: But do you have any direct evidence, though, that what you’re saying, what you believe is true is actually true? I mean, do you have any evidence that BP is basically using these dispersants to keep the oil from not coming to the surface for financial motives, and not using these skimmers?

MCCALLISTER: I — I have been working on this project of trying to get these skimmers into the Gulf for over a month now.

Everybody in Europe, where standard practice is to raise the oil and to collect it, is scratching their heads and, quite honestly, laughing at what’s happening in the Gulf. This is — and I have educated myself over the last month, as I have gone through this process of trying to get these skimmers here, because it seems self- evident that these skimmers were needed.

People like Billy Nungesser down there are using makeshift equipment. And so I began to educate myself. And what I have learned is that everybody is looking at us and wondering why we’re allowing this to happen.

And, as a businessman, the only answer I could come up with is, what are the motivations for not dealing with this issue head-on, raising the oil, and collecting it with the skimmers? And the only answer is the financial interest of BP.

I don’t — I don’t see any other reason that it should be handled the way that it’s handled.

COOPER: I mean, the other alternative could be, A, that they believe in the dispersants or don’t believe in the skimmers, or, B, that they’re simply incompetent or just not doing a very good job.

MCCALLISTER: Well, Anderson, it’s a grand experiment on an unprecedented scale.

And, unfortunately, I don’t know that we’re going — you and I are going to know the results of this experiment until we get 20 years down the road. I think we know what the result would be if we put an armada of vehicles — vessels out there and gathered the oil off the surface and took it out of the Gulf.

We know what would result from that. We don’t know what’s going to result from emulsifying this oil into the Gulf, what’s happening under the surface to the marine life, and what the long-term effects are going to be.

COOPER: Yes.

Well, I should point out, as we always do, we invited BP to be on the program tonight to defend themselves, basically, and show their side of the story. They declined that. In particular, in response to this, they said they wouldn’t have any response to your allegations.

Mr. McCallister, I appreciate you being on with us tonight. Our invitation stands, as always, to BP to come on.

MCCALLISTER: Thank you.

Makes sense. Part of what cost Exxon some fairly serious PR damage (though they were ultimately able to skirt paying many of the claims by stretching out legal battles in court,) was the photographic evidence of the Valdez disaster. Sinking the oil with toxic chemicals will surely inflict irreparable damage on the ecosystem, but it saves BP having to come up with excuses for why those endangered pelicans were “asking for it” after they wash up on the beaches, coated in oil.

Cooper playing the EPA card is sort of an eye roll moment. Yeah, the EPA sanctioned the dispersants, but the EPA also first politely asked BP to stop using them, and when BP told them to fuck off, they dutifully sat down in the back seat with hands neatly folded in laps.

Make no mistake, BP has been running this show. As Mac McClelland reported, the company has been disseminating propaganda to government officials, who continue to mindlessly parrot the information without bothering to independently verify it. BP tells the Coast Guard the top kill worked, so the Coast Guard tells everyone else it worked. Except, it didn’t really work, but nevermind. At least Mr. I Want My Life Back is happy and back to yachting.

Then there’s this:

Tuesday, Lt. Commander J.R. Hoeft of the United States Navy sent out an official Deepwater Horizon Response email to members of the media and other interested parties. Hoeft is the online communications coordinator of the unified area command who called me several weeks ago, when I first encountered BP roadblocks to press access, to explain that he didn’t know “why those practices are in place” and assure me that the United States government was in charge of the whole oil-spill show, “holding BP’s feet to the fire,” in accordance with the rules of government oversight of corporate cleanup dictated by Congress after Exxon Valdez. I find Hoeft to be extremely charming and helpful and so didn’t hesitate to ring his bell, which he immediately picked up, to ask for the breakdown of his email’s stat that there are “24,000 personnel responding” to the spill. Are those workers BP is paying? Or does that also include, like, Audubon volunteers coordinating bird cleanup?

Hoeft didn’t know off the top of his head, he said, but “I’ll get that for you—with one caveat.” The caveat is that the numbers in that email are BP’s numbers, and the United States government doesn’t actually know, so Lt. Commander Hoeft and I will have to wait until BP turns around the request for information.

What the what? So… no one except Mac McClelland has ever asked BP to verify its information…like, ever?

The oil giant just spouts bullshit (along with crude,) and the government repeats it in between the EPA making weak sauce demands before BP ultimately spits in their eyes. And now we’re supposed to trust the EPA, who says the dispersants aren’t that toxic. According to whom? Is the EPA even using their own data, or BP’s info?

Dear Christ, please don’t let it be BP’s famously outdated data. I’m pretty sure some of their contingency plans still involve horse buggies and penny-farthings.

Tea Party sweetheart, Sharron Angle, specifically said citizens are “spoiled” by jobless benefits, and the US should cut unemployment benefits in order to motivate people to find work. Because – as we all know – unemployed people are just too lazy to toil, and there are millions of jobs in some secret industry sector only teabaggers know about, waiting for capable employees to fill them.

No matter how loudly Krugman tries to tell these idiots that cuts are the very worst possible thing they could do right now — what does he know? He only won a Nobel Prize in economics – Republicans refuse to listen. Actually, the world doesn’t seem to be listening, either.

As Europe’s major economies focus on belt-tightening, they are following the path of Ireland. But the once thriving nation is struggling, with no sign of a rapid turnaround in sight.

Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations.

“When our public finance situation blew wide open, the dominant consideration was ensuring that there was international investor confidence in Ireland so we could continue to borrow,” said Alan Barrett, chief economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute of Ireland. “A lot of the argument was, ‘Let’s get this over with quickly.’ ”

Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession.

But these are desperate times, and desperate times call for austerity measures, right? If the US doesn’t cut spending, awful things will happen. Fire will rain from the heavens! Cerberus will emerge from Hades to eat the weak!

Or not.

Here’s a shocking chart from the Congressional Budget Office’s latest long term budget outlook showing that unless Congress acts decisively, our debt situation will be totally fine:

The (more or less) flat line is what happens under current law. O..kay. So why the big hurry to totally cripple welfare programs?

Well, for starters, the rich have always hated and resented these benefits, and during times of panic and crisis, they use the chaos as an opportunity to gut social programs. And the simple reason they do this is to make more money. If less tax dollars have to go toward feeding poor people, then they get to hoard more of their wealth.

It seems like a crazy level of nefarious viciousness, but that really is the short version of why they do it. Many delude themselves while doing this by saying out loud that rich people simply work harder, or unemployed people are too picky when looking for jobs, but that callous indifference is a thin shell resting atop a core of classist hostility.

Jonathan Schwarz has written an excellent piece about the assassination of the welfare programs, and the nature of the entire economic system. (via)

[M]uch of the world’s elite understand exactly what they’re doing: i.e., use the economic catastrophe they themselves created as a pretext to kill the welfare state they’ve despised for 65 years. Nonetheless, a significant chunk of them actually believe they’re doing the right thing for everyone.

How is this possible? The best explanation I’ve seen appears in a 1994 book by John Ralston Saul called The Doubter’s Companion. It’s a kind of dictionary—the whole book is just him defining and discussing a bunch of words. And one thing he defines is “debt, unsustainable levels of.” Everything you need to understand about our current attempt to obliterate ourselves can be found within it. His most important point is that money is not real. Yet somehow we’ve decided it’s a great idea to stop feeding real food to real people and cease educating real children in order to demonstrate fealty to an abstract concept.

Read the full list, but here are a couple of highlights:

A nation cannot make debts sustainable by cutting costs. Cuts may produce marginal savings, but savings are not cash flow. This is another example of the alchemist’s temptation…

Civilizations which become obsessed by sustaining unsustainable debt-loads have forgotten the basic nature of money. Money is not real. It is a conscious agreement on measuring abstract value. Unhealthy societies often become mesmerized by money and treat it as if it were something concrete. The effect is to destroy the currency’s practical value.

Citizens have grown so accustomed to playing by the elite’s rules that it’s sometimes difficult to remember that rich people wrote the playbook, and rigged the rules in their favor so they always win, even if they’re the ones who wreck the economy. They get to play dangerous games with taxpayer money, and then when their mad little experiments blow up in their faces, they use taxpayer money to bail themselves out. Oh, and then they get fat bonuses. It’s a totally awesome system, as long as the poor people never realize they get screwed in the game.

These corporate welfare programs: corporate tax breaks, bailouts, the Bush tax cuts, etc. never face the chopping blocks during austerity talks, of course. The cuts only come from the bottom – from the poor and unemployed.

Americans have been awaiting the shiny new financial regulation bill to come out of Congress, and it seems some people were genuinely surprised when Democrats capitulated to Scott Brown, and dropped $19 billion in taxes from the banks.

But that makes perfect sense. Yes, the huge financial institutions have to make a few meager compromises because they brought the world to the brink of destruction, so they made concessions here and there. For example, most derivative trading now has to be publicly traded…except some of it that can still be dealt OTC, which is insane considering this toxic stuff sent the US spiraling into a depression, but again – the rich play by a separate set of rules.

For the most part, Wall Street has returned to business as usual, and the job market is flourishing once again for the banksters. Goldman Sachs just admitted to lying and now confesses it used its own money to bet against the US housing market, but no one seems to care. After all, politicians have food stamp programs to cut!

The wealthy are so rarely subjected to the rule of law that journalists (good journalists I might add – journalists I read all the time, and really like) seem amazed and genuinely pleased that watered down stuff like ratings agency reform, SEC and systemic risk regulation, survived at all. But no CEOs or hedge fund managers have gone to jail, and the system that brought the US economy to its knees is pretty much still in place.

Not only that, now that this crisis has happened, the austerity hawks are using the opportunity to gut the only thing that prevented a full-blown societal collapse — the welfare state. Look, you can keep knocking the little guy off his tightrope as long as there’s a net beneath him, but if you remove that net, it’s simply murder.

The first truth bomb was dropped by Chuck during the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings when he informed the unwashed mouth-breathers in the audience that God — not the Constitution — gives Americans the right to bear arms.

If anyone can tell me why this doesn’t violate the separation of church and state, I’ll give you a shiny new nickel — or bullet — or however our creator likes to settle bartering exchanges.

Image from fatamerican.tv

Then, there’s crazy, crazy Sharron Angle. Sometimes I imagine the lone, sane Republican standing somewhere in a wheat field, holding a gently swaying leash as he stares off into the distance vacantly, wondering if he’s made a hasty decision in allowing the Reno neophyte to scamper into the world on her own.

Unlike Rand Paul, Sharron just can’t hide the crazy, and she’s not savvy enough to pass off the delusional stuff spewing from her mouth as “being mavericky.” She’s been unable to shed her extremist past, and continues to promote debunked conspiracy theories about the abortion-breast cancer non-connection.  Now, she’s dropped another turd.

Here is Sharron talking to Bill Manders on his radio show.

MANDERS: Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

ANGLE: Not in my book.

MANDERS: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?

ANGLE: You know, I’m a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

You see, rape is just part of God’s majestic plan, ya’ll. Along with genocide and famine.

I’ve been trying to think of the liberal equivalent of this crazy bullshit, and I keep coming up empty. Maybe Obama musing aloud about punching Alan Greenspan across the face before using him as a human shield as he takes all of Wall Street to siege in order to seize corporate assets, and then redistribute the cash to millions of unemployed people?

Maaaybe that’s the left-wing version of Republicans saying God approves of guns and rape. Except, if a liberal said something batshit insane like that, they’d get impeached. When the GOP say this stuff out loud, the media treats it as a “serious comment.” The press furrow their brows and take copious notes, pretending they aren’t a bunch of stenographers for a lunatic in a tailored suit.

Of course, I’m sure I think this stuff because I’m a godless heathen, but I find it hard to believe devout Christians are cool with Angle and Grassley saying this stuff about their religion. I don’t remember Jesus saying anything about the need to pack heat, or it being acceptable to look the other way when encountering a sexual assault because God sees the long game, and the girl’s little mind can’t appreciate the sunny side of a rape.

Photo from Reuters

To anyone who watched the G20 circus, the headline isn’t much of a hyperbolic stretch. Here was a country, which spent nearly $1 billion on security measures — greater than any summit’s security budget in the history of the world — and yet footage of burning police cars and shattered store windows played on loop throughout the week on Canadian television.

Where were the cops? How were a handful of fringe protesters able to create this — admittedly limited — havoc?

Naomi Klein proposes an interesting explanation. The state and cops had received widespread criticism for the tremendous amount of cash being dumped into security for this single event (78 percent of Canadians believed that the cost was unjustified,) and when some anarchists lit up their police car, they may have decided to take a long lunch break just to teach everyone a lesson.

So, what happened on Saturday, when you saw those burning cop cars and windows breaking, was what I can only describe as a cop strike. Essentially, they were just letting it happen. And people were watching this, not understanding why, for hours, the same police car was just allowed to burn. I mean, these guys had just bought themselves a brand new water cannon, and yet they couldn’t seem to find themselves a fire extinguisher.

Now, while that was happening, media outlets were getting press statements. And I’ll just read you one. This is from the Toronto Police Department: “All you have to do is turn on the TV and see what’s happening now. Police cars are getting torched, buildings are being vandalized, people are getting beat up, and [so] the so-called ‘intimidating’ police presence is essential to restoring order.” In other words, the police were playing public relations, overtly. They were saying, “OK, you’re telling us our price tag was too high. We’re getting in political trouble for our outrageous demands. So now we’re going to show you this huge threat that we’re up against.” And so, we have a police commissioner named Julian Fantino, who’s now started to talk about activists as organized crime. He says it’s not enough to call them thugs, they’re organized criminals. So, what’s dangerous here is that in order to justify their own unjustifiable actions, they need to overinflate a threat.

Here, Klein clearly explains how the state justifies its own actions by exaggerating a threat (as she points out, Canada is used to seeing more violence during hockey riots – during one such riot, sixteen cop cars were set on fire).

Any rational person should be able to understand that the “problem” of protesters is fully manageable, and a “black bloc” of anarchists (some of who are real, and some of who may be agent provocateurs) does not justify spending $1 trillion during a global recession.

Okay, so if the police weren’t using all that money to protect stores, or even their own vehicles, what were they doing?

Oh, right. This:

Peaceful G20 protest at Queen & Spadina from Meghann Millard on Vimeo.

And this:

And this:

Deaf restaurant kitchen worker Emomotimi Azorbo was granted bail Saturday after being charged the previous day with assaulting Toronto Police at a downtown G20 protest.

Friends claim he was not a demonstrator.

Azorbo, 30, stumbled into several bicycles after getting into a shoving match with officers at a bicycle barrier set up to stop the progress of yelling, screaming marchers.

…

“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Gary Malkowski, advisor to the president of the Canadian Hearing Society, said in an interview.

…

Malkowski said Azorbo was crossing the intersection to buy a bottle of water at a variety store and could not understand police orders.

He is charged with three counts of assaulting police plus resisting arrest.

So I guess Canadian citizens can take comfort in the knowledge that they collectively shelled out $1 billion to ensure the world’s elite could dine in peace, and not be bothered by protesters singing their nation’s anthem, quizzical journalists, or deaf people.

Of course, this plainly obvious truth is obscured by a media that refuses to call right-wing legislating “activism,” but consistently labels center-to-left-wing judges and nominees as radical extremists, who should be feared and condemned.

I missed the Kagan hearings this morning, but from what I’m gathering it was pretty much a high tech lynching of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Seriously. Evidently, he was one of those “activist” judges (and a community organizer too, I’m sure)and I think we all know what he was agitating for, don’t we?

Meanwhile, she is an “out of the mainstream” elitist, weirdo (lesbian, NY Jew) who worked for a you-know-what and liked it. Ever since Beauregard Sessions ascended to the ranking Republican position on the Judiciary Committee whatever uhm … subtlety the Republican strategy once had has evaporated into crude dogwhistling.

Right. See, Marshall was a lunatic leftist extremist, but Scalia and Thomas are ideologically consistent.

Marshall supported individual rights, including a woman’s right to determine the fate of her body, and opposed the death penalty – all hallmarks of an unhinged, unserious liberal. Yet, Clarence Thomas, the judge most inclined to strike down Congressional laws, and the guy who wanted to throw out Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as an unconstitutional intrusion on states’ rights, is a hero worthy of mainstream praise.

This double standard was on display recently in the recent Sotomayor confirmation hearings. The now-judge was portrayed by Republicans as a bleeding heart liberal, who would almost certainly seize Wall Street’s assets and redistribute the wealth because – ya’ know – she grew up poor. It’s called “identity politics” AKA “You’re not a white man, and we’re freaked out by that.”

The big tizzy over Sotomayor was that she would obviously ooze “empathy” at poor people since she too bears the shameful mark of an undesirable, a pretty damn stupid assumption considering The Very Serious Samuel Alito said the following at his confirmation hearing:

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Judge Samuel Alito’s Nomination to the Supreme Court

U.S. SENATOR TOM COBURN (R-OK): Can you comment just about Sam Alito, and what he cares about, and let us see a little bit of your heart and what’s important to you in life?

ALITO: Senator, I tried to in my opening statement, I tried to provide a little picture of who I am as a human being and how my background and my experiences have shaped me and brought me to this point.

ALITO: I don’t come from an affluent background or a privileged background. My parents were both quite poor when they were growing up.

And I know about their experiences and I didn’t experience those things. I don’t take credit for anything that they did or anything that they overcame.

But I think that children learn a lot from their parents and they learn from what the parents say. But I think they learn a lot more from what the parents do and from what they take from the stories of their parents lives.

And that’s why I went into that in my opening statement. Because when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position.

And so it’s my job to apply the law. It’s not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result.

But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, “You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.”

When I have cases involving children, I can’t help but think of my own children and think about my children being treated in the way that children may be treated in the case that’s before me.

And that goes down the line. When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account. When I have a case involving someone who’s been subjected to discrimination because of disability, I have to think of people who I’ve known and admire very greatly who’ve had disabilities, and I’ve watched them struggle to overcome the barriers that society puts up often just because it doesn’t think of what it’s doing — the barriers that it puts up to them.

So those are some of the experiences that have shaped me as a person.

COBURN: Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I think I’ll yield back the balance of my time at this time, and if I have additional questions, get them in the next round.

SPECTER: Thank you very much, Senator Coburn.

Careful, or you might step in some of that empathy Alito keeps squirting everywhere. Except, when Conservatives cry about their grandparents, it’s called having a big heart, or caring about the American spirit, or some other bullshit you’d read on a greeting card.

Now, the same fake concern over “identity politics” is happening again. Is Kagan a secret, radical, butch lesbian, who will make eunuchs of Republican men while they sleep, and then parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, victoriously pumping her fistfuls of balls above her head? Probably not, but let’s spend a week pretending she will, so nothing productive can get accomplished!

What makes this political theater particularly annoying is that there’s plenty to criticize Kagan about. Greenwald put together a comprehensive list over here. She lacks a judicial record, and even a clear academic writing record. She’s been silent on the Constitutional controversies of the past decade, though she did step up to defend some of the more radical Bush-era approaches to executive power.

She’s also yet another ivy league, handpicked elitist, and yes, she happens to be a woman, but it’s not like she went to a — ready the fainting couch — state school. These days, the greater controversy would be a poor candidate. A rich woman can still fight her way into the political arena, but a poor person can’t afford the fees to get their mug in front of the cameras.

Like I said – LOTS to criticize there. But the conversation always disintegrates into a screaming match about who’s more of an ideologue. As I wrote back in the midst of the “Wise Latina” hysteria when old white men were literally crossing their legs to shield their testicles from the fiery Latina prospect:

All judges are activists, even when they claim to be “strict Constitutionalists” like Scalia. Even a justice that claims to strictly adhere to the word of the original law must occasionally creatively interpret the arcane language of the Constitution as Scalia did in District of Columbia v Heller. (He said self defense is a “central” constitutional right that requires the ownership of guns (specifically handguns) be permitted so that it can be fully exercised. Crowbarring “handguns” into the definition of “right to bear arms” might have opened up Scalia to accusations of being a “right-wing activist,” but luckily, he avoided such inconveniences.) Whenever interpretation occurs during rulings, justices rely on their past experiences, ideologies, biases, prejudices, and yes — the most dreaded of human qualities — empathy.

All nine justices are — in their own ways — activists, and today five pro-gun activists beat the four gun control activists. Yes, Kagan is an activist, just like Sotomayor, Alito, and Thomas are all activists. It’s just that the right-wing activists get shit done, and the left-wing activists constantly try to convince the louder bullies that they’re playing by the correct set of rules.

The official logo from http://www.americaspeaks.org/

Pete Peterson and his merry band of thieves recently rolled out the hilariously titled “America Speaks” propaganda tour, which was designed to brainwash citizens into voting against their own interests by supporting Social Security privatization.

Peterson wants to do this because he owns Blackstone Group, which has a subsidiary called Blackrock Financial, the firm that would — surprise! — be in charge of handling your privatized Social Security dollars, and that rerouting process could earn Peterson hundreds of billions of dollars.

The tour should be called “Peterson and Company Speak,” because it is their financial interests — not the interests of the American people — that are represented in this tour. One of Peterson’s lackeys, David Walker, is also involved in the “national discussion.” Walker is the man who openly pined for the return of debtors’ prisons, which already exist in six states, but apparently aren’t harsh enough punishment for being poor in David’s world.

If this ridiculously transparent tour actually represented Americans’ concerns, the focus would be on job creation. Numerous polls indicate that Americans’ primary concern is unemployment – not the deficit.

According to a new Pew Research poll, 23 percent cited the federal budget deficit as their top concern. By contrast, a substantial 41 percent put jobs at the top of the list.

CBS/NYT (pdf)

Economy/Jobs: 40
Oil Spill in Gulf: 13
Health Care: 5
Budget Deficit/Nat’l Debt: 5
War/Iraq/Afghanistan: 3
Immigration: 3
Moral Values/Family Values: 2
Misc. Foreign Affairs: 2
Misc. Government Issues: 2
Politicians/Government: 2
Other: 20
DK/NA: 3

NBC/WSJ

“Please tell me which one of these items you think should be the top priority for the federal government.” “Job creation and economic growth” won with 35%. “The deficit and government spending” got 20%.

FOX (pdf)

“Economy and jobs” 47%, “deficit, spending” only 15%.

And the list goes on…

If this was the “America Speaks” tour, the central focus of the meet-ups would be job creation and stimulus spending. I highly recommend reading Dday’s review of the hapless meeting he attended to understand the span of the chasm between the “America Speaks” and “Peterson Speaks” parties. (emphasis mine)

The entire event was absolutely designed to create a panic about the deficit among the participants. Slickly produced scare videos talking about the dire straits of the budget were prevalent. Multiple charts and graphs without precise numbers or percentages were handed out. Speakers discussed how “most Americans are concerned about the deficits and debt,” and how we cannot grow our way out of the problem. The current state of the economy, which needs an increase in aggregate demand, mostly in the form of government spending, to avoid a relapse into recession, got a short mention at the beginning of the discussion, an inclusion which seemed forced and tacked-on. Overall, there was about 15 minutes of discussion of the current economic problems, and 5 hours on the deficit. Organizers stressed that their solutions are designed to kick in after the country hits recovery, but the compounded effect of stressing deficits over and over is undeniable. There was no slick video about the need for economic recovery, put it that way.

…

During the discussions about the long-term budget challenges, there was a greater tendency from the participants to place a greater burden for deficit reduction on those with the ability and capacity to do so. Among the anti-corporate sentiment, someone mentioned that Exxon paid $0 in federal taxes last year. During the scare film about the budget, a few people screamed “Wrong!” when it was suggested that defense makes up 20% of the total budget (that doesn’t include spending on wars). Lastly, people thought that the wealthy weren’t paying their fair share for the commons. Someone mentioned the carried interest loophole, allowing money managers to treat their income as capital gains instead of income, drastically lowering their tax rate. One of those money managers is Pete Peterson, the funder of America Speaks.

UPDATE: The propaganda may have wound up being too subtle. Via the America Speaks twitter feed, the top three options at the meetings selected by the participants were: raising the limit on taxable earnings in Social Security, a 5% tax increase on people making over $1 million dollars a year, a carbon tax, and a tax on financial transactions. Whoops!

Whoops, indeed. Peterson shelled out $1 billion to brainwash these people, and he couldn’t even get them to agree that old people are leeches who deserve to be condemned by society. How embarassing!

So it seems Americans are concerned with job creation, and judging by the America Speaks tour thus far, they also think rich people aren’t paying their fair share, carbon should be taxed, and the fat cats on Wall Street should be taxed for all their cleverly complex financial transactions that earned them oodles of cash whilst tanking the economy for everyone else.

You know what? This really IS turning into the America Speaks tour! I just don’t think this is what Petey and his pillagers had in mind.

Check to see if the America Speaks tour is coming to a city near you.