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David Brooks

Brooks, though a 49-year-old Canadian-born, suburban New York-raised, Chicago university-educated and now so much of a stellar New York Times columnist that the White House sometimes rings him to ask what he's planning to write about, is deeply Anglophilic.

via www.guardian.co.uk

‎"Think Yiddish, act British."

David Brooks: political communitarian....

Brooks hails British rather than French Enlightenment thinkers as the guys who really understood what makes the social animal tick. While Voltaire, Condorcet and Descartes used reason to confront superstition and feudalism, thinkers across the Channel – Brooks cites Burke, Hume and Adam Smith – thought it unwise to trust reason. 
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Most success stories stress academic ability, IQ, hard work, he argues. Brooks rather stresses non-cognitive skills, which, he writes, is "the catch-all category for hidden qualities that can't be easily measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfilment."
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Brooks thinks his book, written with the US in mind, speaks to British problems. He quotes the jeremiads of self-styled Red Tory Phillip Blond about Britain having become a bipolar nation in which a bureaucratic, centralised state presides over a fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. "I get to where Blond is by arguing that there have been two individualist revolutions. Conservatives embraced the individualism of the market and reacted furiously if the state impinged on individual economic choice." Brooks writes that one consequence of this is chains such as Walmart closing local shops, destroying networks of community those shops created.

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. 

via www.vanityfair.com

Here's a look going back to 1979. (Chart)

The article continues:

In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.... Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. (My emphasis.)

Also from the article, the causes of the ecomonc disparities include: 

The ordinary dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role.... But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth.....The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has [removed] limitations on [corporations'] campaign [contributions].... Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work. (My emphases.)

Here's that income gap's growth since 1917, comparing the top 5% to the nation's median income:

This puts me in mind of what Warren Buffet and billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, said about the tax breaks to the ultra-rich (which the ultra-rich make sure are put into the tax code in the first place).... 

There's been this increasing disparity between the rich and the poor, and we found out that a rising tide just lifted all yachts, not all boats.... The rich are always going to say that you know, just give us the money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on... [Y]ou might extend [the tax cuts] further for the lower class, middle class, maybe upper middle class but I think that you should raise taxes on the very rich. I lived in periods where capital gains taxes were 39.6 percent, when earned income taxes were 70 percent and our economy did just fine.
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[T]he payroll taxes become 40% of [America's] total revenue just like the income tax. And people that talk about how the rich pay their share and all that sort of thing, they totally ignore the payroll tax. You know, I did this little survey in my office a few years ago and there were 16 people who responded. And I had the lowest tax rate of the 16. I didn't have any tax shelters. I didn't have any tax planner. It was all courtesy of the U.S. Congress. I mean, they did my tax planning for me. And, literally, the average for the office, counting payroll taxes was 32% and mine was 16%.

Tom Steyer, billionaire hedge fund manager favors higher taxes on the ultra rich like himself. He says he disagrees with the sentiment: "Hang on, I did this work, this is a capitalist society, this is my just reward." Instead, he said:

I think anyone who doesn't give credit to the system that they are born into is taking an awful lot onto themselves. I mean, I really think that people have sacrificed a lot more than a little tax money to make that system available for all of us. And I would be ashamed of myself if I didn't give some credit to them.

The Vanity Fair article continues:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities.... [T]hey came up with...“marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society.... Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

By the way, President Obama wants to restore taxes on the wealthy to where they were before Bush's big tax cuts for the wealthy. Those pre-Bush tax rates on the wealthy weren't all that high to begin with. Take a look.

What is more, if we're serious about tackling America's ongoing deficits (and our debt) we need to be honest about there major causes. Those causes include tax cuts for the weathly that were enacted by President Bush.

Take a look at this chart of the Bush policies' projected (2010) shares of the deficit.

Schakowsky plan

The president's bipartisan commission has wrapped up much of its work. Co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson offered their ideas. Much was made of them. You can play along using The New York Times’ interactive tool.

Recently it was the turn of one of the commission's members, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, to offer ideas, including eliminating $132 billion of the debt by closing or limiting a variety of corporate tax breaks, and generating more than $150 billion in other new revenues, including taxing capital gains as ordinary income.

Some of the positives of the Schakowsky plan are that it doesn't

tamper with military pay, which [Bowles' and Simpson's] proposal does in cutting it...or freezing it...nor military health care, TRICARE, which their proposal does, too, again another slap at the middle class.

Schakowsky explains that “the middle and lower classes in our country” should not have to

pay for deficit and debt that they had nothing to do with creating…. You know, we talk now about shared sacrifice, but how about shared opportunity?
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[W]e have right now the greatest disparity in income from the rich to the poor and middle class than we have had since 1925, right before the Great Depression.

And this kind of income inequality is not good for our economy. And it's certainly not good for people who have seen their incomes stagnant or falling over the last couple decades. In fact, all of the growth in wealth went during the Bush years to the top -- wealthiest people in our economy.
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The Republicans are talking about tax breaks, yet more tax breaks, for the wealthiest, extending those Bush tax cuts.

A Tea Party precis

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.

via www.rollingstone.com

Matt Taibbi looks at the Tea Party movement, and after a year of interviewing members and attending events, writes what I suspect a lot of observers think, those observers being a sizeable chuck of the American population:

[Tea Partiers are] completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you!

Taibbi's observations that "Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood," and "they're shockingly willing to believe...[that] white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority" square with parts of Mark Lilla's analysis in The New York Review of Books, "The Tea Party Jacobins," which was based on Lilla's review of five recent books concerned with US politics. Here's Lilla observation, published earlier in 2010:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

Taibbi's article focuses primarily on the Tea Partiers themselves, but he gives attention also to realities that dilute the movement's grassroots creditentials, specifically, how corporate and billionaire interests have pumped millions of dollars into the movement, and to how the movement's organizational and promotional efforts were honed early on, and continue to be, by organizations like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks.

Frank Rich in "The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O'Donnell," in The New York Times notes that:

some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, [Rand] Paul and [Christine] O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

Taibbi asks: "So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street?" He declares, "That turns out to be easy."

One reason for the ease may be that pro-corporation billionaire families and the organizations that they back that aim to popularize their interests have been around since well before the Tea Party movement. They've had practice, and they've been patiently persistent. One can turn back to Matt Bai's 2004 article, "Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy," to learn about the funding of conservative and libertarian think tanks by billionaire Republicans going back decades, and as shown in a PowerPoint presentation created by Democratic operative Rob Stein, ''The Conservative Message Machine's Money Matrix." Bai writes of the presentation as making:

the case that a handful of families -- Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Coors and others -- laid the foundation for a $300 million network of policy centers, advocacy groups and media outlets that now wield great influence over the national agenda. The network, as Stein diagrams it, includes scores of powerful organizations -- most of them with bland names like the State Policy Network and the Leadership Institute -- that he says train young leaders and lawmakers and promote policy ideas on the national and local level. These groups are, in turn, linked to a massive message apparatus, into which Stein lumps everything from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to Pat Robertson's ''700 Club.'' And all of this, he contends, is underwritten by some 200 ''anchor donors.'' ''This is perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system,'' he said.

Jane Mayer's recent article in The New Yorker, "Covert Operations" concerns one especially powerful source of contributions to the institutionalized conservative message machine, the so-called "Kochtopus"--the billionaire Koch brothers heading the energy industry giant Koch Industries and their foundation, Americans for Prosperity, which recently

announced that it will spend an additional forty-five million dollars before the [2010] midterm elections, in November. Although the group is legally prohibited from directly endorsing candidates, it nonetheless plans to target some fifty House races and half a dozen Senate races, staging rallies, organizing door-to-door canvassing, and running ads aimed at “educating voters about where candidates stand.”

Rob Stein himself is cited in Mayer's article describing the Koch brothers as

at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.

And their patient commitment to a long-term plan may be paying off. Mayer interviews a Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch. He remarkes:

The Koch brothers gave the money that founded [the Tea Party]. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates.

It might also be noted that those candidates are clearly less than ideally commited to purist anti-government Tea Party ideology. Again, Rich in his editorial on candidate Christine O'Donnell and the Tea Party:

most of the Republican Tea Party standard-bearers [besides O'Donnell] lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O’Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don’t extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs.

Like the donor network Stein spotlighted four and five years ago, the Tea Party phenomenon is not only billionaire-backed but also, for all intents and purposes, partisan. This flies in the face of the frequently heard Tea Party talking point that the movement is bipartisan or nonpartisan. Wendy Kaminer in "The Tea Party: phoney freedom fighters," draws heavily from a 2010 New York Times/CBS News poll, and relative to the partisanship at the heart of the Tea Party, she notes:

The Tea Party movement is sometimes at odds with the Republican establishment, but it is dominated by Republican voters (who constituted two thirds of members surveyed).... [T]he Tea Party movement, marketed as a novel, spontaneous uprising of mostly independent voters, is actually a more familiar, partisan revolt against a dramatic loss of power. Bush-era Republicans who envisioned a permanent majority were jolted out of their reveries by the 2008 election of a Democratic president, a clear majority in the House and (briefly) a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Neither party likes losing elections, but Republicans tend to win and lose them with a vengeance.

Kaminer also cites the finding of the New York Times/CBS News poll that 63% of Tea Partiers "say they get the majority of their political and current events news on television from the Fox News Channel:"

[Tea Partiers] simply don’t believe that the Democratic president and Congress represent the majority.... [T]he 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea-Partiers are convinced that they represent the majority instead: 84 per cent of them agree that ‘the views of the people involved in the Tea Party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans’. This is perhaps the FOX News effect: if you get all or most of your information from one partisan Republican source that confirms your status as a patriotic American and characterises your opponents – including moderate Democrats – as extremists, you might reflexively universalise your own convictions.

This suggests a strong echo chamber effect among Tea Partiers, which in part may also explain why 64% of Tea Partiers believe

that the president has increased taxes for most Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans got a tax cut under the Obama administration.

To be sure, both statistics, along with the fact that around 25% of all Americans and 41% of registered Republicans believe that President Obama is or probably is foreign-born, likely seems consistent with the observation of numerous commentators and journalists, and the complaint of many progressive activists, that the Obama Administration's communication efforts have been surprisingly bad. This failure may be particularly damning given that the administration and Democrats in general ought to have been able to anticipate a conservative offensive, even including some of its rhetoric, such as that regarding socialism. The Tea Party might be new, but the anti-government backlash it represents is not.

As Kevin Drum notes in his Mother Jones article, "Tea Party: Old Whine in New Bottles:"

Ever since the 1930s, something very much like the tea party movement has fluoresced every time a Democrat wins the presidency, and the nature of the fluorescence always follows many of the same broad contours: a reverence for the Constitution, a supposedly spontaneous uprising of formerly nonpolitical middle-class activists, a preoccupation with socialism and the expanding tyranny of big government, a bitterness toward an underclass viewed as unwilling to work, and a weakness for outlandish conspiracy theories.

But each time a Democratic president is elected, the rightwing extremist movement Drum describes is more effective than the time before:

The Liberty League withered after it failed to make even a dent in FDR's 1936 reelection campaign. The Birchers improved on that record, winning lots of local campaigns and eventually helping Barry Goldwater win the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, before collapsing under the weight of Robert Welch's increasingly bizarre rants. The '90s activists were more successful yet, helping Gingrich take over Congress in 1994, impeaching a president in 1998, and eventually sending George W. Bush to the White House.

Where will it end? Drum dares to make a prediction:

[The Tea Party's] core identity will slowly fade away...while its broader identity becomes subsumed by a Republican Party that's been headed down the path of ever less-tolerant conservatism for decades.



SPEAKER PELOSI, CONGRATULATIONS

Congratulations, SPEAKER Pelosi, and THANK YOU for your leadership. Congratulations also to Senate MAJORITY Leader, Harry Reid.

Congratulations to all the victorious Democrats this election cycle, including the Governor of the great State of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

Thank you for your chairmanship of the DNC, Governor Dean.

And Congratulations to all Democrats. We worked hard, and must continue to do so.

Let the First 100 Hours begin!

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Social insecurity

Amalgamated Bank's ad in The New York Times makes some important points about President Bush's anti-Social Security schemes:

*Social Security is our nation only public pension system.

*It's financially sound, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and can meet 100% of its obligations until 2052; after which it can pay 80% of its benefits even without adjustments being made. It's arguably more sound now than at any point in its 69-year history.

*Between 1959 and 2002, Social Security helped cut the poverty rate for senior citizens from 35.2% to 10.9%. The administrative costs for Social Security are less than 1%, far less than any other government program, less than any private pension plan.

*Bush's idea for "individual private accounts" will slash guaranteed Social Security benefits by as much as $9,000 per beneficiary per year. The conversion costs to this scheme proposed by Bush and the Republicans? $4.9 trillion dollars in debt for the next generation to be burdened with.

*If the Republican designs on Social Security are so obviously unsound, why would they push for them? Because Wall Street firms funding the privatization campaign would make untold millions in fees and commissions.

Visit: www.unionvoice.org/campaign/SaveSocialSecurity.

- Scott

Republican icon writes: those wanting to abolish Soc'l Sec. are "stupid"

Via Kos comes David Sirota's fantastic find among President Eisenhower's presidential papers--Ike's letter to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, 8 November 1954:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

As is so obvious one's tempted to leave it unstated: Ike clearly didn't imagine one of those Texas oil millionaires becoming President. As Sirota points out, the Texas oil millionaire occupying The White House currently, "is trying to abolish social security as we know it, starve unemployment programs, weaken labor laws, and gut rural/farm programs."

Bush hates that you might benefit from Soc'l Security

Social Security can be kept in its present form with a handful of tax increases, such as raising the income ceiling beyond which payroll taxes no longer apply. As Robert Reich pointed out in USA Today, keeping us focused on Social Security, "blocks [our] consideration of the real domestic crisis President Bush doesn't want to touch: the health-care system," that is, Medicare and Medicaid--both of which are rapidly approaching bankrupcy because the number of uninsured Americans is rising alarmingly.

So, tactically, Bush's talk about Social Security is about distracting us from other problems. But, strategically, it's about the ultimate goal: revenge.

Bush represents the interests of the same upper-class, "principled" selfishness (funny, I think Christ called that "greed") that motivated Republicans in the 1930's and 1940's to call the New Deal and Social Security communism, to call Franklin Roosevelt a "traitor to his class" for daring to promote progressive social welfare programs. Republicans have never forgiven Roosevelt and the Democrats for creating Social Security. They still want revenge. And total revenge would include not only sinking Social Security, but keeping the concept of a national health service still-born at best.

Bush hates Social Security. He hates the concept of a comprehensive national health service. Bush hates it when government helps people. Bush thinks government should defend the state from foreign powers and enforce on the domestic front a kind of "Bible-based" democracy and "freedom," which is a bizarre concept considering not only that the word democracy is nowhere in the Bible, but the very governmental concept is nowhere even described or alluded to within its pages. The Bible is, after all, a book with lots of kings, prophets, rebels, warriors, priests, scribes, prostitutes and even--Heaven forbid--poets!  But, you'll be hard-pressed to find a democratic statemen within its pages.

Remember what Dr. Yoshi Tsurumi wrote a little more than a year ago: "Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he...spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints."

Since his days in Tsurumi's class, according to Bush, he has had his heart "changed" by Jesus. But, apparently for "Bu$h," the heart and head aren't always in close communication with each other. Bush's thinking about progressive government seems startlingly unchanged.

Oldicaid

Good graphic over at uggabugga.

Wow! Bu$h keeps coming up with even MORE ways to talk about his bad ideas! What a talent this chimp has!

President Bu$h had a press conference! Remember those? They're those things that President Clinton and even Reagan used to have a lot, and this president never does.

"All the president did tonight was confirm that he will pay for his risky privatization scheme by cutting the benefits of middle-class seniors," said Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California."

Thanks God for Harry and Nancy! At least someone's making some sense out there. Lord knows, it isn't Bu$h who's making any sense!

From the AP article: "Bush spoke as White House officials issued written material saying the type of change he had in mind could be accomplished with a 'sliding scale benefit formula.'" Oooooooo! Written material! Ooooooooo! A sliding scale! Isn't that something like a slippery slope, Mr. President? Like, a slippery slope into poverty, maybe? Jeez.

Is this guy for real? Well, unfortunately he thinks he is. Lord, God in heaven, has the idea of President Kerry ever looked so good as it does tonight?

I smell smoke. And I think it's coming from something Bu$h is inhaling.

Two words: Poor Laura.