Funny How Things Work...

Creating havoc in Fort Lee didn't take him down, but stupid pictures can work wonders.

Honest Abe

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed."
--Abraham Lincoln

In Advance of the President's Speech

"But what will Republicans agree to? That’s easy: nothing. They will oppose anything Mr. Obama proposes, even if it would clearly help the economy — or maybe I should say, especially if it would help the economy, since high unemployment helps them politically."

The following is by Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman.

Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”

One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result.

Ever since the acute phase of the financial crisis ended, policy discussion in Washington has been dominated not by unemployment, but by the alleged dangers posed by budget deficits. Pundits and media organizations insisted that the biggest risk facing America was the threat that investors would pull the plug on U.S. debt. For example, in May 2009 The Wall Street Journal declared that the “bond vigilantes” were “returning with a vengeance,” telling readers that the Obama administration’s “epic spending spree” would send interest rates soaring.

The interest rate when that editorial was published was 3.7 percent. As of Friday, as I’ve already mentioned, it was only 2 percent.

I don’t mean to dismiss concerns about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you look at fiscal prospects over, say, the next 20 years, they are indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising health-care costs. But the experience of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what some of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we’re running right now — deficits we should be running, because deficit spending helps support a depressed economy — are no threat at all.

And by obsessing over a nonexistent threat, Washington has been making the real problem — mass unemployment, which is eating away at the foundations of our nation — much worse.

Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second round of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, such as it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity. State and local governments, in particular, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting many programs and have been laying off a lot of workers, mostly schoolteachers.

And somehow the private sector hasn’t responded to these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.

O.K., I know what the usual suspects will say — namely, that fears of regulation and higher taxes are holding businesses back. But this is just a right-wing fantasy. Multiple surveys have shown that lack of demand — a lack that is being exacerbated by government cutbacks — is the overwhelming problem businesses face, with regulation and taxes barely even in the picture.

For example, when McClatchy Newspapers recently canvassed a random selection of small-business owners to find out what was hurting them, not a single one complained about regulation of his or her industry, and few complained much about taxes. And did I mention that profits after taxes, as a share of national income, are at record levels?

So short-run deficits aren’t a problem; lack of demand is, and spending cuts are making things much worse. Maybe it’s time to change course?

Which brings me to President Obama’s planned speech on the economy.

I find it useful to think in terms of three questions: What should we be doing to create jobs? What will Republicans in Congress agree to? And given that political reality, what should the president propose?

The answer to the first question is that we should have a lot of job-creating spending on the part of the federal government, largely in the form of much-needed spending to repair and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. Oh, and we need more aid to state and local governments, so that they can stop laying off schoolteachers.

But what will Republicans agree to? That’s easy: nothing. They will oppose anything Mr. Obama proposes, even if it would clearly help the economy — or maybe I should say, especially if it would help the economy, since high unemployment helps them politically.

This reality makes the third question — what the president should propose — hard to answer, since nothing he proposes will actually happen anytime soon. So I’m personally prepared to cut Mr. Obama a lot of slack on the specifics of his proposal, as long as it’s big and bold. For what he mostly needs to do now is to change the conversation — to get Washington talking again about jobs and how the government can help create them.

For the sake of the nation, and especially for millions of unemployed Americans who see little prospect of finding another job, I hope he pulls it off.

Endless Disgrace

NY Times
8/31/11

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.

These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code. They are infuriated by the earned income tax credit (the pride of Ronald Reagan), which has become the biggest and most effective antipoverty program by giving working families thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds. They scoff at continuing President Obama’s payroll tax cut, which is tilted toward low- and middle-income workers and expires in December.

Until fairly recently, Republicans, at least, have been fairly consistent in their position that tax cuts should benefit everyone. Though the Bush tax cuts were primarily for the rich, they did lower rates for almost all taxpayers, providing a veneer of egalitarianism. Then the recession pushed down incomes severely, many below the minimum income tax level, and the stimulus act lowered that level further with new tax cuts. The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.

Representative Michele Bachmann noted recently that 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income tax; all of them, she said, should pay something because they benefit from parks, roads and national security. (Interesting that she acknowledged government has a purpose.) Gov. Rick Perry, in the announcement of his candidacy, said he was dismayed at the “injustice” that nearly half of Americans do not pay income tax. Jon Huntsman Jr., up to now the most reasonable in the Republican presidential field, said not enough Americans pay tax.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and several senators have made similar arguments, variations of the idea expressed earlier by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana that “everyone needs to have some skin in the game.”

This is factually wrong, economically wrong and morally wrong. First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010.

Economically, reducing the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit — which would be required if everyone paid income taxes — makes no sense at a time of high unemployment. The credits, which only go to working people, have always been a strong incentive to work, as even some conservative economists say, and have increased the labor force while reducing the welfare rolls.

The moral argument would have been obvious before this polarized year. Nearly 90 percent of the families that paid no income tax make less than $40,000, most much less. The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes. The two tax credits lifted 7.2 million people out of poverty in 2009, including four million children. At a time when high-income households are paying their lowest share of federal taxes in decades, when corporations frequently avoid paying any tax, it is clear who should bear a larger burden and who should not.

Know-nothings

Republicans Against Science
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Dr. King Weeps From His Grave

By CORNEL WEST


THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.)

These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.” On the Sunday after his assassination, in 1968, he was to have preached a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

Cornel West, a philosopher, is a professor at Princeton.

G.O.P. FITNESS TRAINING AT THE FOX NEWS GYM

Last night’s two-hour Republican debate from Ames, Iowa, was an entertaining exercise in The Survival of the Fittest, Herbert Spencer’s proto-libertarian take on Darwin—the only form of Darwinism that today’s Republicans can safely embrace.

The goal of the exercise, it seemed to me, was to cull the herd, so as to eliminate the weak and the stragglers and thereby ensure that the ultimate survivor will be the one best able to destroy the common enemy of everyone on the stage (eight candidates, four questioners) and, judging from the whooping and hollering, everyone in the audience, too: the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

That goal is a joint project of the Republican Party and the debate’s sponsor, organizer, and broadcaster, the Fox News Network. The unwary might therefore have reasonably expected the questions to be softballs calculated to help the candidates preen and prance, putting on a happy face for one another and directing their scowls and growls exclusively at the archfiend in the White House.

But no. The questions were tough—surprisingly tough, I thought. But, for the most part, they were tough only in a particular way. They were not so tough in matters of what one might laughingly call substance—that is, in matters of policy outside the ideological cocoon of current Party orthodoxy. For example, no questioner challenged the assumption that, in a time of mass unemployment, it is a good idea to pump money into the economy by cutting rich people’s taxes (and deficits be damned) while simultaneously sucking money out of the economy by gutting infrastructure projects and cutting poor and middle-class people’s benefits. Substance-wise, this was like watching Vladimir Putin debate himself on Russian state television.

The only apparent exceptions last night to the rule of substantive orthodoxy were military spending, abortion, and gays. But they aren’t really exceptions. With inward-looking isolationism making a comeback on the right, endless wars are no longer the consensus Republican position they were back when Ron Paul was the sole dissenter and neocon imperial triumphalism reigned supreme. It’s just as O.K. to say that Pentagon spending has to be “on the table” or “part of the conversation” as it is to say that cutting said spending would be tantamount to surrender.

On abortion, the “pro-life” orthodoxy—i.e., that a woman has no right to choose whether or not to end an unwanted pregnancy—remains in place. But a few Republican politicians (and a substantial number of Republican voters) still have qualms about treating a young girl who gets an abortion after being raped by her father as a criminal. The discussion produced the otherwise hapless Rick Santorum’s only eloquent (if politically suicidal) moment, when he passionately defended the maximalist position. (Needless to say, though, he was incapable of recognizing the cruelty of that position, blithely maintaining that forcing a raped woman to carry a fetus to term would be an act of kindness, as it would spare her “a second trauma.”)

Same-sex marriage, too, remains a no-no. But Jon Huntsman, the other Mormon in the race, defended (or at least acknowledged) his support for civil unions. He even went so far as to say, “I believe our nation can do a better job with equality.” Far out! Everybody is against gay marriage as a matter of personal opinion, but there is a genuine difference between those who want it banned at the federal level (like Michele Bachmann) and those who worry that such a ban would infringe on “states’ rights.” Tonally, too, there are further cracks in the Republican ice. Rick (“man on dog”) Santorum actually faulted the Iranian regime on the grounds that it “tramples the rights of gays.”

So what were the “tough” questions? Newt Gingrich nailed it: almost without exception, they were “gotcha” questions, confronting the candidates with past embarrassments (such as the mass exodus of Gingrich’s campaign staffers) or past statements or actions at variance with the orthodoxy (such as countenancing tax hikes or supporting cap-and-trade). As such, they served the ultimate goal of the Party and its Fox News auxiliary by testing the candidates’ ability to handle the kind of questions preferred by the political press corps.

So who were the fittest, the ones that might survive? Well, there were three who, it seemed to me, demonstrated that they might have a chance at the nomination. There was Michele Bachmann. Expectations were high for her—in the only previous debate, she had surprised everybody by vaulting over the absent Sarah Palin and quickly making herself the Iowa frontrunner—and she fulfilled them, even surpassed them. She was never rattled, and she serenely reeled off one extremist bromide after another. There was Romney, who went into the debate as the national frontrunner and probably came out of it the same way. He “looked Presidential,” doncha know. And there was Rick Perry, who, not yet being an officially declared candidate, wasn’t in the room.

What about the rest? Tim Pawlenty continued his slide toward oblivion. Going after Bachmann, not for being wrong or an extremist but for being “ineffective,” T-Paw came across as querulous and a trifle desperate. Gingrich pulled off a good, angry performance, showcasing his trademark patronizing contempt, but his attacks on the press and its gotcha questions felt weird, given that the journalists asking those questions were representatives of the conservative, not the “liberal,” media. Anyway, there is probably nothing Newt Gingrich can say that would overcome his greatest liability, which is that he is Newt Gingrich. Santorum was mostly just sad, wanly complaining that he wasn’t getting as much time as the big kids. Herman Cain and Ron Paul were, as always, charming. Nobody wants to give either of them a hard time. Cain offers Republicans the comfort of imagining that theirs is not a white man’s (and woman’s, to be fair) party. Paul’s delightful heresies—his denunciations of “militarism,” even his suggestion that Iran might have understandable reasons for wanting nukes and it might not be so terrible if they got one—are tolerated as the lovable eccentricities of a cranky but harmless uncle.

I was most curious about Huntsman, whom I hadn’t before seen in action. I’ve assumed all along that he knows he has no chance in 2012 and is actually auditioning for the 2016 race, figuring that if Obama is reelected the G.O.P. might be open to nominating a relative moderate. I was a little shocked at how poorly he performed last night. He had an unexpectedly (to me) prissy air about him, notwithstanding all the motorcycle riding. He looked and sounded unhappy and unsure of himself. If indeed 2016 is to be his Carnegie Hall, he’d better practice, practice, practice. And then practice some more.

However reluctant I am to say anything nice about the Fox News message machine, I have to tip my hat to Byron York and Bret Baier for orchestrating the most revealing moment of the evening. They held a kind of auction. York, who was questioning Santorum, asked, “Is there any ratio of cuts to taxes that you would accept? Three to one? Four to one? Or even ten to one?” “No,” came the reply. Baier put the question to the rest: “Who on this stage would walk away from that deal? Can you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes you’d walk away on the ten-to-one deal?”

Obediently, humiliatingly, disgustingly, all eight raised their hands.

~Hendrik Hertzberg