Michael Moore inspires a new Cassandra

Michael Moore does it again! His film Capitalism: A Love Story has inspired a new Cassandra, Matt Taibbi.

We're not thinking about how to fix our lives, in other words, but how to fix the movie about our lives.

In other words, we fiddle while New Rome burns.

People forget that the first Rome had centuries of missed chances and ignored warnings before it crashed. New Rome has only had a few decades to miss chances ...

Even just looking at the historical context provided by Moore’s own movies, the progression is kind of scary. Back when Moore made Roger and Me, he was describing how blue-collar workers could no longer could find jobs to support themselves. In Bowling for Columbine he talked about the workfare programs we cooked up to keep those ex-employed blue collar workers alive, how brutal and inhumane those programs can be.

In Capitalism: A Love Story we’re now talking about how the compensation for professional jobs we used to consider upper-middle class, like the job of airline pilot, have dropped below subsistence level. This is a portrait of a society steaming toward a feudal structure.

He then shows that the mechanisms we’re supposed to appeal to to correct these problems — the combination of public awareness (i.e. the media) and the elected government (i.e. congress) — have been almost completely corrupted. We have a media that doesn’t pay attention to the fact that airline pilots are giving plasma in order to buy groceries. Even after deadly crashes, they don’t focus on the real causes.

... and ignore warnings.

It’s natural for Michael Moore to behave like someone who thinks he’s taking on the world alone. Because he is, sort of. If we want him to stop behaving like this, it’s kind of on us to do something about it. At some point we’re going to have to make a commitment to giving up our escapist entertainments for a while while we fix our actual lives. I’m as guilty as everyone else, spending half my time watching movies and sports. putting off my problems until later. If we all did less of that, my guess is that we might start thinking less like movie and TV critics, and more like citizens — at which point the flaws in Moore’s movies won’t seem so bad at all. We might not even notice them.

Time's coming to an end, New Romeos!

Scientists are the new Cassandras...

... and evidence of climate change happening now (instead of in some dire future) is the new "delusional ravings of cranks."

So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of red skies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel. They'll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.

. . .

In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn't. Why not?

Can we eat fa(s)t food and still be healthy?

This is the question Michael Pollan wants you to ask:

TO listen to President Obama's speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter.

So why is it that no one on either side of the aisle has proposed the most common-sense, cost-saving (partial) solution - which would save the country billions of $$$ and almost immediately result in changes in the way fa(s)t food is manufactured? End the farm subsidies.

Stop paying farmers to grow tobacco or corn (processed into corn syrup) or sugar beets (processed into sugar) or wheat (fed to cows and pigs and chickens) or - actually, nearly all the farm subsidy money is used to grow things that make us fat and let McDonalds and Burger King and Wendy's and all the rest manufacture super-cheap fa(s)t food!

Enter the Ticktockman

Years ago, Harlan Ellison put out two collections of his essays on "the glass teat." They were so truthful Spiro Agnew (who used to be the most harmful Vice President until Dick Cheney came along) had the first volume pulled from stores. Watch Harlan tell the story about why Spiro and Dick (the Tricky one, not the mean one) were so afraid of him.

Hate to break it to you, but...

... Ralph Nader may have been right about Obama being a faux liberal.

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or "extraordinary rendition," restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party.

Yes - as we saw with the Sotomayor selection and are seeing now with the health care hysteria, the Democrats propose centrist solutions and the "bad cop" Republicans scream loudly and hysterically and hope no one notices that the Democrats's "changes" are identical to the ones the Republicans proposed - and voted for - just a few short years before.

Political hatred has happened before and will happen again

You can't really call someone a Cassandra for predicting that political hatred will result in bloodshed.
You also can't call them a Cassandra for claiming that the resulting death will now stop political hatred. It might quiet it for a while, but hater/killers never die.

A GM President to please everyone

Here's someone President Obama can appoint to run GM during its restructuring. He has all the right qualifications. For example:

1. He's not a government bureaucrat -- and, as we know, Americans are terrified of the gummit bureaucrats telling us how to live. (We much prefer corporations running our lives!)


2. He has proven success in his field. He was the first documentarian to make a profit off the genre.


3. He has a plan to restructure GM already, so we won't need to waste weeks or months waiting for the new guy to come up with a plan.


4. The executives and workers already know him.

Yes, Michael Moore. 20 years ago he exposed the failures of GM. He was ignored and derided. Every prediction he made came true. Now he has a plan for GM's recovery. Will America finally listen?