Laughing Sal at Playland

Photo from Laughing Squid

Laughing Sal, the San Francisco version, lived at the remnants of an 1890s Playland at the Beach, out at Ocean Beach… A classic wood framed seaside diversion, rather more carnie, probably, by the time I met it, in the 50s. Laughing Sal was displayed in a stand-alone, glass and wood frame case… you dropped in a couple quarters and she rocked and shook with laughter, looming over you…

Frankly, all too reminiscent of politics today………

I have no idea if much of this report at Politico is accurate but there is one part I think is:

Coordination between the Obama campaign and the House and Senate leadership is so weak that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — who will chair the Democrats’ convention in August — didn’t know of Obama’s decision to move his final-night acceptance speech from the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field until the campaign announced it on a conference call with reporters.

May the oceans rise to greet him.

“…we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

hmmm not quite what I see coming……

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Just saw this at the end of the last thread:

CSTAR

Naomi Klein was interviewed on Democracy Now! today by Amy Goodman. The transcript is here

I am sure most of you are aware or have read her book “Shock Doctrine”, which I read just recently: it’s out in paperback now. The book really proposes an interesting alternative narrative to the neoliberal economic thinking of the last 40-45 years. Much of this narrative begins in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina and especially Chile) and is certainly familiar to most Latin Americans. For the LatinAmerican center-left most of those memories are extremely painful.

However, I think there is a tendency in the american left to ignore that historical period and to view it as somehow disjoint or irrelevant to the politics of an a developed capitalist society. Klein does a very good job in her book of dispelling that view.

Back to the interview: There are lots of interesting things in it. Actually I think the written transcript is better. I particularly thought this exchange interesting:

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, Obama’s Chicago Boys, who are they?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, one of them is Obama. Obama spent ten years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, which is a very conservative law school. You know, I wrote a column recently talking about how conservative Obama’s economic roots are, with his ties to the University of Chicago.

His first response to the mortgage crisis, let’s remember, was he was worried about the government taking action to keep people from being evicted from their homes, because that would create moral hazard. And he was not talking about the big companies, the big mortgage lenders; he was talking about individual low-income people being thrown out of their homes. He was worried about moral hazard. That’s a very University of Chicago take on the situation.

The moral hazard Obama was worried about of course was that people should assume responsibility for their bad economic decisions. That “moral hazard” concept is interesting because it is an essential part of the corporate narrative justifying redistritribution of risk onto the poor.

This definition from WIkipedia is pretty good

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions.

Of course what is missing from the corporate narrative is that the entire financial system reeks of moral hazard in favor of the rich.

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