Those zany, madcap Orwellian Republicans are at it again with legislation known by the acronym, “J.O.B.S.,”  that is to say, the “Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits and Services Act of 2011. ” You have to hand it to these guys, they are shameless.

What this bill will do is give governors in states like, say, Florida… Michigan… Ohio and Wisconsin (shudders) more “flexibility” over how funds are spent for EUC (emergency unemployment compensation) and EB (extended benefits) safety net programs. This, er, “flexibility” would allow states to do other things with the federal monies previously allocated to go to directly to unemployed workers once their initial state jobless benefits period of 26 weeks has expired. Things like paying for state job search bureaus, paying off the debt many states already owe to federal unemployment trust funds and, you know, other things.

One guess what GOP stormtroopers governors like WI’s Scott Walker, Florida’s Rick Scott, Michigan’s Rick Snyder or Ohio’s John Kasich would do given that “flexibility”...? Sorry, all you lazy unemployed people, but it’s their fiscal responsibility to fuck you over.

After all, WWRRD? (What would Ronald Reagan do?)

From The Hill:

Rep. John Larson (Conn.), the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said that with unemployment still soaring at 9 percent, the bill represents “an assault” on the millions of Americans who rely on that safety net.

“It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to throw them out in the cold and not have them be able to pay their taxes, buy their food, pay their rent,” Larson told reporters in the Capitol. “When we peel away the veneer of what the proposal is — aka ‘We’re going to reduce the deficit’ — really what we find here is an ending of the social compact between the people and their government.”

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) also took a shot at the proposal this week, questioning how the potential erosion of unemployment benefits will create jobs.

“They are referring to one of their bills on unemployment — to end benefits for long-term unemployment, taking away the assistance to 4 million people who are going to run out of unemployment benefits — they are calling that the JOBS Act,” Hoyer said Tuesday. “I am very interested to see how eliminating unemployment insurance is going to be a jobs bill.”

If the so-called “JOBS Act” is passed, states will be able to cut off benefit checks long before the full 99 weeks have expired. But this isn’t just about screwing over the poor, because the farcically named “JOBS Act” has the potential to eliminate up to $40 billion dollars in economic activity (jobless benefits, like food stamps have a multiplier effect as they are spent on groceries and so forth and taxed as well), As the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out, this could mean a loss of over 322,000 JOBS.

Why are these people smiling? Fom left, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan, Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, Hillary Clinton, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner at the 2011 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., Monday, May 9.

 
A guest editorial courtesy of our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog:

In a classic Marxist set-up, Capital is free to exploit labor because labor is in surplus.

The fundamental dynamics of the U.S.-China trade partnership—certainly the biggest economic story of this generation—boil down to “capital exploits labor.” I am well aware that this sort of quasi-Marxist analysis is supposed to be passe in the era where young nerds can start billion-dollar enterprises in a garage or dorm room. Capitalism is a priori “win-win,” as all those workers in China are getting ahead while our youth launch $50 million IPOs of social networking Web 2.0 companies.

But if you scrape away the high-gloss propaganda and myth-making, then the fundamental dynamic is definitely Marxist: American capital jettisoned American labor as a costly hassle in favor of cheap, no-hassle Chinese labor.

Since Capital’s best buddy in the whole world is the Central State and its proxies, i.e. the Federal Reserve, then the Central State and the central bank (the Fed) smoothed over the exploitation and furthered the consumer economy by inflating a credit-housing bubble. Since 60% of American households own a home, this enabled the increasingly impoverished “middle class” to borrow trillions of dollars in “free” money that could be spent—surprise!—on the new imports from China that filled the shelves of big box global retailers everywhere.

Allow me to illustrate this dynamic by deconstructing two recent stories in the Mainstream Financial Media: ‘Superjobs’: Why You Work More, Enjoy It Less Businesses expect a lot more out of their employees these days…

Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru: Operational innovations at restaurants like Taco Bell rival those at any factory in the world.

The first piece describes in clinical fashion how U.S. capital is ruthlessly exploiting labor, demanding more work for little to no additional pay. The underlying dynamic here is purely Marxist: capital encourages over-supply of labor, which then drives the value of labor down. Competition for the few jobs available makes desperate wage-earners willing to put up with exploitation and insecurity because the options of escaping the cycle of centralized Corporate value extraction are insecure and risky.

Global Corporate America fosters a surplus of labor in the U.S. via three mechanisms:

1. Vast illegal immigration which keeps labor costs down in low-skill corporate workhouses such as slaughterhouses, fast-food outlets, etc.

2. H1-B visas for high-tech workers (now falling out of favor as those positions are better filled directly in India and China).

3. Ship production, software coding and back-office functions to China, and to a lesser degree, to India and elsewhere in east Asia.

The unemployment rate among PhDs is roughly 50%. So much for “winning” by becoming ever more educated. The number of slots in academia is shrinking, and the total number of research positions is relatively inelastic. For more on academia’s “plantation economy,” please read Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education (The Nation).

With labor in surplus, capital is free to demand whatever it needs to boost all-important profits. The propaganda machines in HR (human resources) spray-paint slogans everywhere (“you’re really really valuable to us, Super-Duper Team Member!”) but everyone knows the reality: everybody is dispensible, and everyone but the CIO at a hot startup a few months from an IPO is a corporate serf a paycheck away from being booted out of the castle into abject poverty.

As a result of this exploitation—known as “wage abritrage”—corporate profits (which boost the wealth of the top 10% who owns the vast majority of stocks and mutual funds) are extremely plump and juicy:
 

 
In the second piece, BusinessWeek breathlessly assures us that we have thousands of highly efficient factories running 24/7 in the U.S.—fast food outlets. Yes, all 6,000 Taco Bells are miniature factories pumping out “product” in vast quantities. The fast food “industry” revenues are $168 billion a year, and the workers, we’re told, are paid $1.25 above minimum wage—woo-hoo, love you, Corporate America!—which means that the full-time employee makes $16,500 a year.

$16K a year doesn’t go very far in urban America, but there is no pressure on Corporate America to raise wages.

I realize that I am an outsider, and biased against global corporate power regardless of the nominal country of origin (down with Canal+!), but I still found it noteworthy that BusinessWeek could run thousands of words of glowing praise for the profitable efficiency of the fast food “industry” without noting that it isn’t an industry at all—it’s just a consumerist fantasy (fast and cheap meals that require no effort or discipline) that produces “food” of low value that pushes the consumer into ill-health with overloads of salt, sugar, and low-grade fat.

70% of the fast “food” served is via the drive-through window, which suggests that an overworked, stressed out, focused on getting through the next two hours American is opting to shut the kids up and stave off hunger by pulling into the drive-through lane and loading up on a “meal” that they know is bad for them but they have no time to make a real meal at home (or so they’ve been brainwashed by thousands of hours of adverts).

If Taco Bell is the “manufacturer/factory of the New America,” then I think we need a peaceful revolution, and soon. The toadies and sycophants of the financial media are pleased to worship 1) CEOs 2) profits 3) efficiencies 4) globalized “growth” as long as its owned by global corporations and of course, everyone’s favorite, 5) innovation, because “innovation” drives profits!

Elsewhere in the latest issue, BusinessWeek breathlessly cooed over digital game company Electronic Arts latest “innovation,” which was selling a digital parrot for $10 a pop that sits on your digital warrior’s shoulder.

Excuse me while I raise my glass to American “innovation.” If pumping out fast food garbage (hello, 60% obesity rates, is there any connection?) is the new American “factory” and “innovation” is selling kids with access to Mom’s credit card a $10 digital parrot (and what does the parrot say? “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out, brawk!”) for their hyper-violent fantasy wargame, then this nation is well and truly doomed.

To reap a fat profit, you need to sell the stuff being imported from the American-owned factories in China. Since wages have been flat for decades, that posed a problem, as consumers were tapped out. Never fear, capital’s best buddy rode to the rescue, inflating a stupendous credit-housing bubble that enabled the working stiff to speculate “like the big boys” with free money and limitless leverage, all supported by lies (liar loans) and the misrepresentation of risk.

Wall Street reaped tens of billions in profits originating and packaging the debt loaded onto the middle class debt donkeys—not just mortgages, but auto loans, student loans and even credit card debt.

But now, at long last, capital’s doting partner, the Federal Reserve, has run into a spot of bother: the only way to keep profits rising is to crash the dollar, and doing that has squeezed the purchasing power of the debt donkeys. By exporting inflation to China and the rest of the world, the Fed has engineered massive profits for U.S. corporations (when profits earned overseas are stated in dollars, presto, a 10% increase) but it has also forced China into raising prices and fueled an oil and import-driven inflation in the U.S. which has caused millions of insolvent households living paycheck to paycheck to cut back on their consumption.

China has its own problems, namely runaway domestic inflation (thanks, Federal Reserve) and finding places to dump its excess dollars. It was a wonderfully beneficial trade for awhile: we print paper money, and you give us tangible goods for the paper. Thank you very much, and we can offer you some terrific low-yield Treasuries to recycle your growing stash of dollars.

The Fed’s inflation games are sinking the value of the dollar, and the Chinese are not amused. They are trying to buy tangible resources with their ocean of depreciating dollars, and even sinking to buying Spanish debt.

They have another problem: as capital’s return in China slips, it will exit China just as fast as it exited the U.S.

There is a grand irony in that dynamic: a supposedly Communist country trying to run a central-command quasi-capitalist economy will find that Marx had a point after all. Not that the leadership is at risk themselves; the ChiCom offspring already have homes in Vancouver B.C. and Los Angeles and citizenship/green cards, and the family fortune is safely invested in Switzerland and North America.

The “story” is that the Chinese consumer is about to step up spending, and as a result, “you gotta be in China to profit from all the trillions in new consumer spending.” The reality is that the Chinese middle class is already spending like drunken sailors and their 900 million rural compatriots already own TVs and other cheap consumer goods.

The reality is that Capital has already skimmed the big, fat easy profits, and it’s looking elsewhere as labor costs and pesky regulations rise in China. The truth is American and European corporations have already earned out their investments in China, and shipping the factories from China to Vietnam is not much different than crating the factory up in the U.S. and shipping it to China.

There is a theory that the Fed’s “master plan” is to sink the dollar to the point that the low-income states in the U.S. will be the lowest-cost manufacturing base in the world.

At $16,500 a year for full-time workers pushed to maximum production, they might be getting close.

The above essay was written by Charles Hugh Smith and is cross-posted from Of Two Minds

 
Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer, where 140 million people shop each week, is not seeing much of a recovery for the U.S. economy. The low-price behemoth has now seen seven straight quarterly declines in sales figures. According to the company’s CEO, it’s because their customers—who let’s face it ARE America—are simply too damned broke to buy much anymore. From CNN/Money:

Wal-Mart’s core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and the retail giant is worried, CEO Mike Duke said Wednesday.

“We’re seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure,” Duke said at an event in New York. “There’s no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact.”

Wal-Mart shoppers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, typically shop in bulk at the beginning of the month when their paychecks come in.

Lately, they’re “running out of money” at a faster clip, he said.

“Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year,” Duke said. “This end-of-month [purchases] cycle is growing to be a concern.

I must say that I’m far more inclined to trust Wal-Mart’s sales figures as a barometer of the economy’s health than the suspect reports put out by the government. They’re a public company, they can’t get away with lying with impunity the same way Uncle Sam can…

Doesn’t this make you wonder: How much more do the working class and the poor still have left to lose before things start to get really, really hot for Republican politicians? Even online loans have become a resort to many struggling to make ends meet. Imagine that you are the parent of a handicapped child, you can’t find work, you have no health insurance, first fuel and now FOOD is out of your reach? The people who are making decisions to reward billionaire racists like Donald Trump with tax cuts while your family suffers, well, they do have street addresses…

Normally, I am not one for violence, but this position is—how shall I put it—evolving. As the Republican pols around the country continue to cut the social safety nets that allow our society to rise above the barbaric, I sure hope to see the sight of hungry, angry mobs showing up with pitchforks and torches at their homes for a lil’ chat.

What do they expect them to do, just roll over and die?

Previously on Dangerous Minds
Mad Max in American: Our Republican Future?

 
A guest editorial courtesy of our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith. This essay is cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog. Buy his book, Survival+

The guilty are powerful and free, the innocent burdened and oppressed: that is injustice.

There is a fundamental injustice that is poisoning the soul of the nation, and if it is not openly addressed then the nation will face the explosive consequences of institutionalized injustice.

Simply put, it is this: those responsible for the nation’s financial crisis and its catastrophic after-effects are not paying for the consequences of their actions—it is the innocent, those who were not responsible, who are paying the price.

You can call it whatever you want: the Anarchy of the Super-Rich (as per Paul Farrell), the Financial Power Elite, the financial Oligarchy, Plutocracy or Corporatocracy, or the unprecedented concentration of financial wealth and political power in a financialized post-industrial economy. Whatever you call it, we all know this class of financiers and its minions got away with high financial crimes.

Do the crime, do the time—unless it’s “white-collar” financial crime on a vast scale. Then you might pay a wrist-slap fine (a few million dollars from your treasure of embezzled hundreds of millions) and then you’re free to go on your merry way.

The after-effects are not just the losses which can be totalled on a calculator: the really catastrophic losses are to the foundations of democracy and the economy. Democracy has been subverted—oh please, spare us the happy-story propaganda about “reform” and “the system worked”—and the economy has been incentivized to favor poisonously addictive financialization and the shadow institutions of corruption, fraud, embezzlement, favoritism, collusion and misrepresentation of risk. This might be summarized as the protection of vested interests, engineered and overseen by the partnership of the ever more intrusive Central State and the nation’s Financial Power Elite.

The Central State, designed to protect the citizenry from an oppressive monarchy or Elite, now protects this Elite from the citizenry. That is how thoroughly the injustice has been institutionalized.

There is a second part to this fundamental injustice: look who will pay for the bailouts, guarantees and the interest on the borrowed trillions. Not the banks and bankers, to be sure. Who will pay? Those who the Central State can easily tap: taxpayers who earn most of their income from wages, and those politically weak players dependent on government payments.

Now that the bills of the bailout are coming due, the State isn’t going after GE for more taxes. Heavens no—if you try that, the Panzer Division of GE’s tax avoidance army would overrun you. No, the politically easy thing to do is raise taxes on wage earners and trim entitlements, because all the government needs to do is send down the orders and it is done: the taxes are withheld and the bennies trimmed.

To go after the Power Elite is just too difficult. They have the tax attorneys, the lobbyists, the campaign fundraisers, and all the rest.

The U.S. is just a third world kleptocracy on an Imperial scale. I explored the parallels with the Roman Empire in Survival+: the Elites increasingly avoided military service and taxation, the bedrock of Roman power, while the taxes on the middle class rose to such heights that this productive class was basically driven into serfdom. The bottom layer of State dependents was placated and made complicit with bread and circuses—yes, Rome had a vast “welfare state” and much of Rome’s population received free bread to keep them quiet and pliant.

That is of course a road to ruin: let the Elite plunder at will, protected by the Imperial Central State, tax the productive class to fund the armed forces and free bread, and then buy off the lower class with bread and circuses.

The only successful model of reconciliation and justice we have is the “truth commissions” in other post-oppression autocratic kleptocracies. In countries that were deeply divided and poisoned by institutionalized injustice and exploitation, the healing process requires a public, transparent “truth commission” in which the guilty are brought forth to confess their sins against the innocent and face the consequences of their actions.

If a society cannot rouse itself to cleanse the fundamental injustice at the heart of its institutions, then it is effectively choosing self-destruction.

So far, the U.S. is pursuing the Roman Imperial model with an institutional zeal unmatched since Rome’s fall.

Embedded institutional injustice has a price, a price which rises with every passing day of propaganda and prevarication. Some day the bill will come due and a terrible price paid in full. For those in power, the only concern is that it not be today or tomorrow.

Below, Charles Hugh Smith discusses his book Survival +
 

 
This is a guest editorial from Dangerous Minds reader Em, expanding on some pointed commentary he’s made elsewhere on this blog. Em—who’ll keep his last name to himself, thank you very much—works in the financial industry:

We knew we were in trouble when our small private police force left town Tuesday morning. “We’re paid to handle petty crime, not fight a war…we’re outta here!” On the Arizona news and via twitter feeds we knew they were coming: The countless horde of the permanently unemployed, moving northward in a vast caravan consisting of thousands, or some said tens of thousands, raising a cloud of sandy dust that could be spotted for days prior to their arrival. And when they came they’d usually stay a while, knowing that Federal forces were already stretched to the max elsewhere, fighting other well-armed hoards all the way from Sacramento to Pittsburgh. Some of the larger suburbs tried to put up a token resistence, setting up their own laughable Maginot lines that were quickly overrun. This in fact had no practical effect aside from arousing the hoarde to go into a sort of locust mode of raping and pillaging, eventually followed by a mass burning of the town, forcing the survivors to join the hoarde or be left to sit in the burned-out rubble.

Me, I saw this coming. I told them we should pay the protection fee to The Family, which is probably the only Syndicate operating in the part of the country with the guns and trained troops to stop the hordes. But the other townsfolk said that the price they were charging was much too high, higher even that what we used to pay in taxes in the old days. And besides, they said, once you let in The Family, they pretty much take over. Although they do provide some badly needed social services (such as schooling and simple medicine), they end up training the teenagers to join up and become one of them, helping expand their network of gun running and hard drugs. Of course, they sold guns to the hordes in many parts of the country, which worked out well for them because they were the only ones who could stop them. And if a town didn’t pay, then it became a damned good lesson for the other former suburbs in the area. But it’s not like there’s much left of the US government: For all intents and purposes, the Family is the government in this part of the country.

What if most basic services in a society become unavailable to the vast majority of people and are only available to a privileged few? More than that, what if the gap between those that have access to resources and services and those that do not becomes wide enough that no one can cross it? What if everyone realizes that this is the case and, abandoning the old system, align themselves with whatever is available that can provide them and their families to basics such as safety, medical care and basic education? This is, in fact, what we’ve seen in countries from Afghanistan, but could it happen in the United States?

In the May Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Steiglitz writes about “Of the 1% by the 1% for the 1%”. One fact he points out is that the upper 1% of the most wealthy Americans now own 40% of the wealth. If that number appears shocking, it should. It’s an indication that a vast separation has occurred. This vast separation is not merely in terms of who has what stuff right now. It’s not merely a static picture. What it really means, as Steiglitz discusses in the article, is that the vast majority of Americans now no longer have access to the tools necessary for them to create new wealth and thus gain access to basic services. What it also means is that those who control the resources will continue to do so so in order to accumulate more resources, without regard for leaving the bridge to socio-economic mobility open. Instead, what we see through right-wing politics and pseudo-economics is that the tiny fraction of the wealthiest people are utilizing that wealth so as to burn the few remaining bridges and remove basic services from the hands of the so-called ‘have nots’ (which will soon be practically all of the remaining 99%).

In olden times a little lopsided wealth distribution wasn’t necesarily a bad thing: If everyone is getting wealthier, the theory goes, then the upper class will continue to expand as it becomes populated with more people who have crossed the bridge from the middle class. This group may also become wealthier, but in such a context (ie, of a healthy economy that is expanding without incurring additional debt), this is arguably a good thing and it is, perhaps, one of the few valid points emanating from the right in times past.

But that argument no longer holds in the US. Although the housing bubble made it seem as if the standard of living was rising, it was in reality just treading water while the Fed was artificially juicing up the economy through a few very limited channels while putting everyone into debt. While we borrowed and flipped houses and borrowed and flipped again, big business was busy selling the real economy out from under us. Not only did factories move to China, even whole service industries were moving to India and elsewhere as a result of “free trade” agreements. These agreements in effect forced unionized employees to compete with third world wage slaves, who toil 60 hour work weeks in dangerous factories that belch unregulated hydrocarbons into the gray skies. Terrorized at the prospect of joining the legions of the unemployed (who have no health care and crumbling schools), private-sector workers gladly conceded most if not all of their hard-won union rights in exchange for the promise of continued employment, albeit at lesser wages. That promise, of course, was a lie.

As the economy empties out, as the few remaining unions are dismantled and factories shipped overseas, as fewer and fewer services are available to working families for them to stay healthy and educate their children, it is inevitable that people will align themselves with whomever can provide them and their families with opportunities and basic human services as the government fails to do so. This is, in general, the very definition of a failed state, and it is not unreasonable to believe that it could happen here, in the US. Although a small number of people can tolerate poverty, will tens of millions just roll over and die, particularly when they know that the services exist somewhere?

That such a process is already well underway in our neighbor to our south, Mexico, should cause to tread very carefully before we proceed any further down the path that the Republicans so clearly want to take us. It’s no accident that poverty has remained an intractable problem in Mexico: Unempowered and ununionized workers are basically just wage slaves with little or nothing left to pour back into the local economy. Profits go to a mixture of the locally wealthy oligarchs and, of course, to the bottom lines of the big multinationals headquartered north of the border. As time has gone on, the local populace has fully recognized that all of their suffering and hard work will continue to do nothing to raise the standard of living for their families and country as a whole. As they continue to abandon faith in their economic system, they have increasingly cooperated with La Familia and a number of other powerful, drug-moving cartels. Since these cartels are moving capital from North of the border to South and providing basic services to people that have previously had no access, is it impossible to imagine them ‘branching out’, so to speak, north of the border and beginning to offer a similar ‘deal’ to the economically abandoned in the US?

Perhaps even more dangerous is how these cartels currently gain access to weapons: They get them from the US. Like a big corporate merger, then, won’t it make sense in the very near future for these groups, both north and south of the border, to begin to align themselves and thereby gain more power? Do we know that this hasn’t begun to occur already? Look carefully: In towns from Arizona to the Dakotas, we’ll begin to see pro-gun candidates carefully selected by the avante gard of the Cartels. Look also for the sudden an mysterious dissappearence or death of pro-labor candidates, along with large amounts of cash pouring in from unknown sources to counteract marijuana legalization.

In the end, yeah, the US debt is a bad thing. We need to get it down. Anyone with a brain has probably figured this out. But to burn the very bridges to social mobility and wealth creation that were an inherent part of the 20th century emergence of the US as the world’s economic powerhouse is suicide, and the wasteland that the Walkers and Bachmanns want to unleash on us all will be ugly indeed.

About the author: Em was a founding member (with John Cale and others) of the New York punk band Doppler Effect in the early 1980s. After living in China in the late 80s, Em worked in the physics and electrical engineering space until 2002, at which time he moved into the financial world. In July, Em returned to the US after having lived in London since 2006 and is a member of the UMOUR art/event collective. He blogs at The Magic Lantern, his"litterbox of the soul.”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Manufacture of the Tea Party

 
This guy takes the cake. And it’s a wedding cake that will serve a thousand guests. Give a round of applause to the BEST Teabagger I’ve yet seen… this guy!

He never really shows this sign to the camera completely, but you can see that the word “Hitler” is written on it. 

They give that nobody Joe the Plumber his own webs series? Sign this guy up, He’s an inadvertent comedic genius! The non-thinking man’s Michael Savage!...
 

 
Via Wonkette

 
In the spring of 1963, San Francisco poet, documentarian, and media activist Richard Moore accompanied and filmed author James Baldwin and Youth For Service Executive Director Orville Luster on a tour through the black-majority Bayview/Hunter’s Point and Fillmore districts of San Francisco. They sought to portray the real experience of African-Americans in what was considered America’s most liberal city.

That outing would result in Take This Hammer, and the footage of it was shot at a crucial time in Baldwin’s life. After 15 years in exile in Paris, the Harlem-born writer was back in the States at the peak of his renown and with political fire in his eyes. His turbulent novels from the ‘50s—especially Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country—had stunned the literary world with their exposure of racism and deeply developed queer characters.

During the same spring in which Take This Hammer was shot, Baldwin published the rather incredible essay Down at the Cross, and ended up on the cover of Time. That summer, he’d end his tour of the American South at the March on Washington with a quarter-million of his fellow Americans, with many other celebrities.

Baldwin’s observations certainly set The City’s white lib establishment into fits: “There is no moral distance ... between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone’s got to tell it like it is. And that’s where it’s at.” Unfortunately, as seen in documents like Kevin Epps’s 2001 doc Straight Outta Hunter’s Point, not much has changed in SF over the generations…
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Baldwin, Brando, Belafonte, Poitier, Mankiewicz and Heston talk Civil Rights, 1963

 
Stefan Goldmann is an electronic musician based in Berlin, who specializes in minimal techno and who holds a residency at the city’s prestigious Panorama Bar. He’s also a pretty good writer. In this illuminating article for the website Little White Earbuds (translated from German) he explains the changes to music production and consumption over the last decade from the point of view of a small-scale, independent artist, specifically someone catering to a very niche taste.

Absurdly, the complete disappearance of economic barriers to distribution (offering a free download doesn’t cost more than the time to upload the file) hit the wallets of the “indies” first, stripping a substantial part of their income. This mostly affected the artists and the personnel around them: designers, engineers, studio musicians, promotion and label professionals, music journalists, et al. The mass of competition they encountered meant anyone with a limited marketing budget had a difficult time surviving in the market. With the same promotional tools available to almost anyone, they lost their efficiency.

...

There’s this die-hard belief that income, at least for the musicians (but not for the professional environment), will come from the fees for live performances instead. But how do you get live performances in the first place? Well, press helps. The problem encountered there is that the media has adapted to the state of the music industry. In electronic music that means whoever succeeds in producing two singles may find himself covered by all relevant press and booked throughout the club circuit, just to be replaced by the next “lucky fool” (a term from stock speculation) about three months later. New artists get “pumped and dumped.” What about a year old break, a production that takes longer, or time for having a baby?

It’s not all doom and gloom—Goldmann has a surprisingly upbeat message for artists out there who are still dedicated to making and releasing music. I may not agree with everything he says in the article (or more specifically I may not feel it is wholly relevant to everyone) but the last few paragraphs and the post script almost read like a manifesto.

Highly individualized, lightly advertised work is way more attractive nowadays than consensus-style work, advertised to death (short, unsustainable hype is the most one can hope for there). People are starting to realize this. Many top labels stopped promoting their new singles for instance. It just appears in the shops and that’s it. It’s not unlikely that artists will increasingly lose their interest in having their output available all over and seek for a more intimate exchange with the audience. Why plaster the Internet with files? Who finds that valuable anymore?

Read the whole thing here.

 
As more and more McDonald’s are staying open 24-hours a day—apparently there is insatiable, around the clock mania for processed meat products marketed by clowns—the fast food chain is hiring for 50,000 full and part time jobs, an average of between three and four positions for each location. As USA Today, ostensibly with a straight face and sans any irony whatsoever, reports:

Turnover slowed the past few years because of the weak economy, the company says. McDonald’s sees this event as an opportunity to attract employees in a tough job market.

It is also trying to shed the negative connotation of employment at the fast-food chain, once dubbed “McJobs.” McDonald’s says about half of the company’s franchise owners and more than 75% of its managers started in entry-level jobs at McDonald’s.

“A McJob is one with career growth and endless possibilities,” the company said.

The article reports that McDonald’s held a hiring event in their Western region location in 2010. Over 60,000 people applied for 13,000 jobs. I guess when it’s all that stands between you, your family and starvation, a fucking McJob must look pretty damn good. Funny how that works…

Interested parties can apply online or in person at a McDonald’s restaurants on April 19.
 

 

 
Republican Representative Sean Duffy (WI) who some of you may recall as the conservative guy on MTV’s The Real World Boston, has a difficult time justifying his $174,000 salary to a constituent who makes quite a bit less…

I think it’s a bad time, generally speaking, to be a Republican from Wisconsin. Endangered species, aren’t they?