Yeah, every time there's a layoff where I work, we are counseled to "keep our heads down, keep, going and do our best." Fast on the heels of this announcement is the re-org announcements in which highly paid managers, many layers removed from reality, declared themselves to be "excited" about the opportunities, challanges, and changes coming our way.
This "excitement" is a rituallistically invoked emotion, which testifies to the fact that those who are still on board, must surely be enjoying the ride. It outdoes in vulgarity and baseness anything that could bubble up on the lips of the most syphillitic whore.
But yes, they do love their whoredom. (Pace Kell, I'm speaking of real whores.) Speaking of which, their kids, whose childhood is being burned up justifying mummy's and daddy's privileges, will make some interesting future hippies (or concentration camp commanders.)
Joanna
Carl Remick wrote:
> [Thomas Frank was the NY Times' "Guest Columnist" for August. In his
> concluding column below, he offers this valediction: "Everything I
> have written about in this space points to the same conclusion:
> Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again."}
>
> September 1, 2006
> Guest Columnist
>
> Rendezvous With Oblivion
>
> By THOMAS FRANK
>
> Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in
> Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well
> have been describing the failure of liberalism: the center-lefts
> inability to comprehend the current political situation or to draw
> upon what is most vital in its own history.
>
> What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a
> broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market
> economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default
> social condition, and, enthroned as the nations necessary vice, an
> institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80
> years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war
> to Christianize the Philippines.
>
> Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these
> conditions. Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism
> and you can find everything you need to derail the conservative
> juggernaut. But dont expect liberal leaders in Washington to use
> those things. They are
New Democrats
now, enlightened and
> entrepreneurial and barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let
> alone muster the strength to deliver some Rooseveltian stemwinder
> against
economic royalists.
>
> Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the
> typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against
> gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer that is, when
> theyre not gushing about the glory of it all at Davos is not
> confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the
> free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of
> the situation and to try to understand how we might retrain or
> re-educate ourselves so we will fit in better next time.
>
> This last point was a priority for the Clinton administration. But in
>
The Disposable American,
a disturbing history of job security, Louis
> Uchitelle points out that the New Democrats emphasis on retraining
> (as opposed to broader solutions that Old Democrats used to favor) is
> merely a kinder version of the 19th-century view of unemployment, in
> which economic dislocation always boils down to the fitness of the
> unemployed person himself.
>
> Or take the
inevitability
of recent economic changes, a word that
> the centrist liberals of the Washington school like to pair with
>
globalization.
We are told to regard the free-trade
deals that
> have hammered the working class almost as acts of nature. As the
> economist Dean Baker points out, however, we could just as easily have
> crafted
free-trade
agreements that protected manufacturing while
> exposing professions like law, journalism and even medicine to ruinous
> foreign competition, losing nothing in quality but saving consumers
> far more than Nafta did.
>
> When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington a
> place where lawyers outnumber machinists 27 to 1 and where five
> suburban counties rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation the
> fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign
> of the
knowledge workers
seems noble.
>
> Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The
> latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has
> increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data
> tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with
> inflation is that more family members are working.
>
> Everything I have written about in this space points to the same
> conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues
> again. But they wont on their own. So pressure must come from
> traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the
> much-vilified bloggers. Liberalism also needs strong, well-funded
> institutions fighting the rhetorical battle. Laying out policy
> objectives is all well and good, but the reason the right has
> prevailed is its army of journalists and public intellectuals. Moving
> the economic debate to the right are dozens if not hundreds of
> well-funded Washington think tanks, lobbying outfits and news media
> outlets. Pushing the other way are perhaps 10.
>
> The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present
> course, gaming out each election with political science and a little
> triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the
> middle-class republic fade.
>
> <http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/opinion/01frank.html?hp>
>
> Carl
>
>
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