Christmas Goodies

By John Ballard

What else do you have to do today other than check out this collection?

?Ode To Christmas - Chuck Kramer

?Sedaris and Crumpet the Elf: A Holiday Tradition  About seven or eight minutes long. Don't miss the last few minutes which include his rendition of "Away in a Manger" in the style of Bilie Holiday.

The life of David Sedaris took an unexpected, and not entirely unwelcome, turn when his "Santaland Diaries" were first broadcast on Morning Edition in 1992.

 

edaris recounted his experiences playing Crumpet the elf at Macy's in New York during the holidays. Almost overnight, he went from obscurity to sought-after talent.

Now, 13   18 years later, he is a best-selling author who still appears on public radio from time-to-time. And in those intervening years, the popularity of his original NPR appearance has only grown. So, here, once again, is Sedaris reading in 1992 from his "Santaland Diaries."

?Toxic Toys Jingle
This is three years old. This year's version should be a take-off on toxic assets.

?The Humbug Express.  Krugman hits one out of the park with his seasonal commentary.

Hey, has anyone noticed that �A Christmas Carol� is a dangerous leftist tract?

I mean, consider the scene, early in the book, where Ebenezer Scrooge rightly refuses to contribute to a poverty relief fund. �I�m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,� he declares. Oh, wait. That wasn�t Scrooge. That was Newt Gingrich � last week. What Scrooge actually says is, �Are there no prisons?� But it�s pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state, Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?

As you can see, the fundamental issues of public policy haven�t changed since Victorian times. Still, some things are different. In particular, the production of humbug � which was still a somewhat amateurish craft when Dickens wrote � has now become a systematic, even industrial, process.

Let me walk you through a case in point, one that I�ve been following lately.

If you listen to the recent speeches of Republican presidential hopefuls, you�ll find several of them talking at length about the harm done by unionized government workers, who have, they say, multiplied under the Obama administration. A recent example was an op-ed article by the outgoing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who declared that �thanks to President Obama,� government is the only booming sector in our economy: �Since January 2008� � silly me, I thought Mr. Obama wasn�t inaugurated until 2009 � �the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs, while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.�

Horrors! Except that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employment has fallen, not risen, since January 2008. And since January 2009, when Mr. Obama actually did take office, government employment has fallen by more than 300,000 as hard-pressed state and local governments have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, firefighters and other workers.

So how did the notion of a surge in government payrolls under Mr. Obama take hold?

It turns out that last spring there was, in fact, a bulge in government employment. And both politicians and researchers at humbug factories � I mean, conservative think tanks � quickly seized on this bulge as evidence of an exploding public sector. Over the summer, articles and speeches began to appear highlighting the rise in government employment and issuing dire warnings about what it portended for America�s future.

But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen � and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census � workers who have almost all left the payroll now that the Census is done.

Is it really possible that the authors of those articles and speeches about soaring public employment didn�t know what was going on? Well, I guess we should never assume malice when ignorance remains a possibility.

There has not, however, been any visible effort to retract those erroneous claims. And this isn�t the only case of a claimed huge expansion in government that turns out to be nothing of the kind. Have you heard the one about how there�s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators? Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional �regulators� work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.

Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there�s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda, as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what �everyone knows.� (There�s nothing comparable on the left, which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)

And it�s a very effective process. When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I�ve repeatedly found that people just won�t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened. They assume that I�m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data. After all, they�ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don�t realize that everything they�ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.

So in this holiday season, let�s remember the wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge. Not the bit about denying food and medical care to those who need them: America�s failure to take care of its own less-fortunate citizens is a national disgrace. But Scrooge was right about the prevalence of humbug. And we�d be much better off as a nation if more people had the courage to say �Bah!�

?Action, Hope, 2011
In a more serious vein, Katrina vanden Heuvel outlines a constructive game plan for the coming year. Her five bullet points are all worthwhile. In my opinion, the last one is most important. Go to the link when you have time to reflect and pay attention. Scanning and forgetting this one is not in order.

Looking forward to 2011, there are many ideas, organizing efforts and causes worth fighting for�many which should engender hope as we work together to make this a more just and decent nation.

1) CIW Takes on the Supermarkets

2) Democracy Reform [...people understand in their gut that our electoral system is in trouble and desperately needs reform. Even with a Republican-controlled House...We also need to reform our voting system to encourage full participation and end winner-take-all/lesser-of-two-evils elections....ending abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, a National Popular Vote for President, DC Voting Rights, felon re-enfranchisement and universal voter registration...]

3) Afghanistan Exit Strategy

4) Taking on Poverty [...one in seven citizens�are now living below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty 51 years ago. Shamefully, that figure includes one in five children, more than one in four African Americans or Latinos and over 51 percent of female-headed families with children under 6....]

5) Building a Progressive Infrastructure [Whatever your issue�war, poverty, financial reform, clean energy, global warming�the prospects for change will be brighter if you also work to rebuild and strengthen the progressive movement in 2011.]<,/blockquote>