As Goes Janesville is a movie that is coming out this year.

As Goes Janesville follows the story of how the community of Janesville, Wisconsin recovers and reinvents itself after the loss of its century-old General Motors plant. The film will premiere in the summer of 2012 and is supported by The MacArthur Foundation, ITVS and the Sheldon and Marianne Lubar Family Foundation. Stay tuned for more details.

I saw an overlay in the video in my previous post Governor Scott Walker’s ‘divide and conquer’ strategy for union busting. In tiny letters it mentioned the web site and movie that I am highlighting here.  I am glad my curiosity made me follow up.

At one point in the trailer to the movie where one person was saying that it was all for the best, it instantly brought to mind the book, The Shock Doctrine.  Administer a big enough shock to a populace, and they will accept almost any conditions as a remedy if it means any kind of a job at all.  Seems to be working quite well.

I wonder how plainly the Republican’s have to speak before the union members recognize that politicians like Scott Walker are not their friends.

Documentary filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein videotaped this conversation in which Gov. Scott Walker says he would use “divide and conquer” as a strategy against unions. Video courtesy of Brad Lichtenstein

I have heard rumors that the postal workers in Massachusetts favor Scott Brown over Elizabeth Warren. I wonder if these postal workers are aware that part of the reason for layoffs in the Postal Service was the unusual demand put on them by Congress to prefund their retiree health care plan to the tune of $11 billion. No other public or private retiree health care plan has such an onerous requirement.

Maybe Brown has convinced the postal workers that he is their friend because of a recently floated plan that would give an $11 billion cash infusion to the Postal Service. Like this is a subsidy instead of restitution from the people who stole the money in the first place.

Wait, you haven’t seen the half of it. Go to the web site that you see in the above video, As Goes Janesville.

Nation Of Change is selling the video, Hot Coffee,  to raise money.

Seinfeld mocked it. Letterman ranked it in his top ten list. And more than fifteen years later, its infamy continues. Everyone knows the McDonald’s coffee case. It has been routinely cited as an example of how citizens have taken advantage of America’s legal system, but is that a fair rendition of the facts? Hot Coffee reveals what really happened to Stella Liebeck, the Albuquerque woman who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s, while exploring how and why the case garnered so much media attention, who funded the effort and to what end. After seeing this film, you will decide who really profited from spilling hot coffee.

If you look at the comments on YouTube, you see most people are not convinced by the trailer that McDonald’s was wrong.

To form an enlightened opinion yourself, I provide you with a balanced presentation of Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants from WikiPedia.

After reading WikiPedia, you may or may not agree that this is another example of something I noted in a previous post – once the media gets a story wrong, they just won’t let go of it. The previous post to which I refer is Lukewarm US Support of Chinese Dissident – My Donkey.

The trailer doesn’t explain it, but the summary of the movie above does seem to hint that there is an explanation of what is the driving force behind all of the media telling you just one side of the story (and it is [almost] always the same side).

The lesson to be learned is that when you hear a news story that promotes only one side of a story, you need to be very skeptical. You have to wonder who is benefiting from this one sided approach, and why would the news outlet be so sloppy as to not report the other side? This is something that always comes to my mind when I hear or read news stories like this. It does not matter to me which one side is being promoted and which one side is left out. A one sided story is always suspect.

As for whether or not I practice what I preach on this blog, I refer you to the Introduction where I say:

This is my blog for commenting on politics.

I make no pretense about balance on this blog. If you want balance, read another blog.

Actblue is requesting you to Help air this TV ad & recall Scott Walker.

Perhaps it is because the Wisconsin Democratic Party just settled on their candidate to challenge Scott Walker, but I would have expected a bigger lead for the Democrat by now.

It is also hard to imagine that Wisconsin voters need a reminder of why they signed on for a recall, but every little bit helps.

It would also help the whole country if Wisconsin would reconsider sending Paul Ryan back to the House of Representatives. I think their politicians have caused enough mischief to last a generation.

I knew I would read about this eventually.  The Boston Globe has the story Fenway voice Beane dies while driving.

Golfers from nearby Hemlock Ridge Golf Course called police at 12:39 p.m. to alert them to the crash, according to Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early.

When we first drove by the scene yesterday, the ambulance was just pulling away.  As I travelled back and forth by the golf course on various errands throughout the day, I noticed accident reconstruction police at the scene for hours.  When I saw the WHDH satellite news truck, I figured that it had to be something serious.  I mentioned to Sharon that it was probably a fatal accident that drew such attention.

I don’t usually pay much attention to the sports section of the newspaper, but for some reason this morning I took a look at it.  I don’t even know why I read the story with this headline.  Although maybe my subconscious picked up on the “dies while driving” part of the headline.

Truth Out has the article Austerity vs. Keynesian “Growth” vs. Economic Democracy.

Keynesianism (expansionary state economic intervention) never was capitalists’ preferred policy for capitalism’s recurring recessions and depressions. Their Plan A was government borrowing to bail out major financial and other corporations followed by “austerity policies.” Austerity repays the costs of bailouts by siphoning money away from (cutting) government jobs and services. Only when anti-capitalist movements threaten from below, as in the 1930s, do anxious capitalists abandon Plan A and shift to Plan B – eventually formalized as Keynesianism. Via government spending, Keynesian policies claim credit for jobs and income “growth” and aim to keep political control away from anti-capitalist forces. Keynesianism’s dependence on radicals’ pressure from below explains its strength in the 1930s versus its weakness today.

More such rhetoric like this is needed to scare the 1% into adopting plan B.

Capitalism has its internal contradictions as pointed out in this article.  Socialism or “Democratic Capitalism” also has internal contradictions.

Any ism that tries to boil down human nature into a simple explanation is bound to have internal contradictions.  However, if the best we can manage is to go from one extreme to another, we may have to accept that this is part of human nature, too.

I don’t know if the author of the above article, Richard D Wolff Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, meant it as I have taken it, but that does not matter.  The article is still useful no matter how he intended it.

I have been saying since it happened that the fall of Communism would let loose all restraints on Capitalism.  This would eventually lead to the rise of some system to counter the bad effects of unrestrained Capitalism.  Too bad the Capitalists cannot see the obvious and put some restraints on themselves.  Has there ever been an example in history where people saw looming disaster and took action to head it off?

The Rock Hill Herald has this Commentary: President Obama won’t be ‘swift-boated’ on Bin Laden’s death by James Werrell.

President Barack Obama is determined not to get swift-boated. He’s not going to let Republicans turn one of the crowning achievements of his first term into a negative.

That should be lesson number one for any Democratic candidate.  Lesson number two should be that you can take an opponent’s main selling point and turn it into a negative.  For instance, Mitt Romney’s “business experience” of buying up companies, draining them of all their assets, and then letting them stick it to their creditors and employees by going bankrupt, is not how we want this country’s President to operate.

Sure it would be great for some of the wealthy 1% to drain this country of all its assets – privatize all government operations by selling them off at fire sale prices to the lowest bidder, drain all the money promised to Social Security and Medicare payees, and then let the bones of our economic infrastructure bleach in the parched territory of underfunded infrastructure investment – but I don’t think this is what an aware voter really wants.

The Boston Globe produced an almost balanced story for once in its article, Dems hit Brown on student loan vote, fundraising.

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown joined other Senate Republicans Tuesday to derail a Democratic bill aimed at keeping interest rates on federal college loans from doubling July 1, prompting criticism from Democrats in his home state who said he was hurting middle-class families.
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Tuesday’s vote was 52-45 in favor of starting debate on the Democratic legislation — eight votes shy of the 60 needed to move the bill forward.

College kids are drowning in debt while Scott Brown is following the Republican party line and will not allow a debate on the Democrats proposal for keeping college loan rates at their current level. It’s not whether or not he is for or against the Democrat’s proposal. He does not even want to allow debate on it.

Brown claims he would prefer a bipartisan solution, but he does not want to hold a debate so as to arrive at one.

How many times does Brown have to slap the voters of Massachusetts in the face before they get the point that he doesn’t really care for them that much?

The Massachusetts Republican and the state’s Democratic Party also traded jabs over his fundraising efforts in New York City and his call for his chief Democratic rival, Elizabeth Warren, to release law school applications and personnel files from the universities where she’s taught.
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In calling for Warren to release her law school applications and university personnel files, Brown said he wanted to settle questions about her claims of Native American ancestry.

Apparently Scott Brown thinks the people of Massachusetts can be distracted from the life and death issues that affect their lives to concentrate on whether or not Elizabeth Warren should have mentioned her Native American heritage or should have kept it a secret.

I guess the Republicans think they can still stick it to the Native American population and get away with it. It would serve them right if they were all banned from the Native American owned casinos.

My grand parents told me of their flight from Russia in the early 1900s to the safety of the United States. With their frequent bedtime stories of their travails in coming to this country and getting a family started, and their descriptions of bringing their parents to this country, too, I believe that I have a Russian-Jewish heritage.

My granddaughter never got to meet my grandparents, so is she to assume that the stories about our Russian-Jewish heritage should be treated as so much fiction unless I can produce solid evidence of that heritage?

What should my granddaughter make of her Native American heritage that she inherited through my wife? After all, all she will ever know about it is what Sharon’s great-grandfather wrote in his brief autobiography.  Should we keep this a secret for fear of offending Scott Brown?

The Daily Beast article Chen Guangcheng’s Blind Injustice provides more details about the controversy possibly being manufactured by the US press as discussed in my previous post Lukewarm US Support of Chinese Dissident – My Donkey.

In The Daily Beast article, one of the paragraph that touches on the issue states:

After six intense days of negotiations, a deal was struck. Chen and his family would stay in China but relocate to the coastal city of Tianjin, where he could study law—something I knew he’d always dreamed of—and authorities would leave him alone. Chen emerged from the embassy, smiling, in a wheelchair. Photographers captured him hugging burly U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and holding hands with Ambassador Gary Locke. Clinton, who had just arrived in Beijing for the talks, praised the deal as one reflecting “his choices and our values.” Later, though, after things started to unravel, Chen told me that he “felt pressured to leave the embassy.” (A senior U.S. official denied that any pressure had been exerted and said Americans had begun to make contingencies for a “long-term occupancy,” discussing precedents such as the case of Hungarian Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, a political prisoner during the Stalinist era who sought and was granted asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest and lived there for 15 years.)

You might interpret this paragraph as giving some support to the attitude taken by The Boston Globe.  At least The Daily Beast article gives you some context as to what the US officials are saying that might give you pause in  accepting the Globe’s take.  Still the article uses the snippet of a quote “felt pressured to leave the embassy” without explicitly stating where Chen felt the pressure was coming from.  Why can’t anybody specifically say that Chen felt pressured by US officials, if, in fact, that is what he thought?

Are people reporting this story using carefully selected words from conversations with Chen in order to give us a clear picture of the subtle meaning, or are they using these carefully chosen words to obscure the meaning?  I do not purport to know the answer to this question, yet.  We may never know the truth beyond a reasonable doubt.

Soon the doubt will fade in people’s minds, and they will begin to think that they know for sure what happened.  This brings me back to one of my favorite quotes:

Mark Twain
“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.”

The article posted on the CBS News web site, Analysis: Mitt Romney gaining little from secret meetings with voters, talks about a heretofore little known aspect of the Romney campaign.

Mitt Romney has been running a vast focus group for months. He says that almost every day during his campaign he has secretly sat down with three or four families who are being hurt by Obama’s economy to learn what their lives are like.

If Romney actually starts the conversation by asking a question like, “How have you been hurt by the Obama economy?”, then you know he is not actually looking for information.  When a supposed poll asks you a leading question like this, then it is called a push poll.  The push comes from the idea that the poll is really trying to push an idea onto you rather than trying to pull an answer from you.

Be that as it may, if we go along with the premise of the article that the purpose of these interviews is actually to find answers to questions, my response to the article was:

Romney does not seem to give any indication of understanding how the policies of the previous administrations put these people into the financial mess that they are in.

He doesn’t explain how bringing back these same policies is now going to cure the problems that they initially created.

The press does not seem to know how to put these questions to Romney. You would think they would be curious to know the answers. The readers certainly would like to know the answers even if the reporters don’t seem to have an ounce of curiosity.

When interviewing a progressive candidate, the press seems to be quite happy to phrase a “question” of the form “You opposition says [put in your favorite ridiculous accusation], how do you respond to that?”

In talking to Romney, I never hear them ask, “Your opponent says that the exact policies you are promoting are the ones that caused the current economic recession, how do you respond to that?”