Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

Thought Police: How the Tea Party’s Assault on Dissenting Thought Has Trapped the GOP

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From Alternet, by Paul Waldman,in the American Prospect

(N.B.: This is good news for progressivism in 2012.  It is early, but it is clear the Tea Party mind set is here for a while…)

The Right has always policed dissenting thought in its ranks. But in the past few years the Tea Party has upped the ante.
May 24, 2011  |
“Newt Gingrich probably thought he was being smart when a week ago he publicly rejected the budget plan put forward by House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan. After all, Ryan’s idea to change Medicare into a voucher program is profoundly unpopular, particularly with the seniors now enjoying the program’s benefits. So when Gingrich went on Meet the Press and responded to a question about the Ryan Medicare plan by saying, “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” it probably felt politically shrewd. He could distance himself from an unpopular idea and position himself not as the partisan bomb-thrower people used to consider him but as the innovative, post-partisanthinker he fancies himself to be.

It might have been a reasonable strategy — in a different era. But in 2011, identity defines politics more than ever. Gingrich’s mistake was his failure to understand that particularly at this stage of the race, no question is more important for a presidential candidate to answer than this: Are you one of us?

This question is crucial for both progressives and conservatives. Politics in America is deeply tribal and always has been. But in today’s political world, the right has a more highly developed system of policingits ideological borders. And since only Republicans have a primary race this election, that system is operating more swiftly, efficiently, and effectively than anything the left could dream of.

What the right has — as Gingrich discovered last week to his chagrin — is a ruthless identity border patrol, with agents spread throughout the political system. Step over any one of a number of lines, even lines that didn’t exist just weeks ago, and those agents will inform you, with all the subtlety of a truncheon to the kneecaps, that you are no longer within the conservative nation. “For Republicans running for president in 2012, there’s a new political reality: Support Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan — or else,”wrote the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. “Newt Gingrich learned that lesson the hard way.” And did he ever. “A candidate who is timid on entitlement reforms is not qualified to be president,” wrote Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, a group that trains and organizes Tea Partiers, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “He’s done,” Charles Krauthammer declared on Fox News. “He didn’t have a big chance from the beginning, but now it’s over.” Republicans in Congress lined up to condemn the former speaker, who, it must be said, already had more than a few enemies on the right and handed Democrats a juicy video clip they’ll be sure to use in future ads (“Even Newt Gingrich called the Ryan plan ‘right-wing social engineering'”).

As much as liberals like to imagine the right as a hierarchically organized, smoothly humming machine, the truth is that their system is diffuse, much more like a school of fish than one giant shark. A variety of players influence the school’s course: politicians, media figures, activists, and advocates. It isn’t a conspiracy in which orders are delivered from above. If there really were a conspiracy, it would be headed by someone with enough sense to say, “This Medicare plan is really risky. Let’s not make it a litmus test.”

But no one has that ability, particularly in a party that is still both in thrall to and terrified of the Tea Party. After mounting successful primary challenges against sitting Republicans in 2010, the Tea Party has settled comfortably into its role as the vanguard of the Republican identity border patrol, deciding who is and who isn’t a conservative in good standing. Some Tea Party challenges for 2012 are already materializing (Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, respected on both sides of the aisle after 35 years in office, is likely to be booted by his Tea Party opponent), while even hard-right conservatives like Orrin Hatch are forced to abase themselves before the border patrol agents to demonstrate their bona fides.

The candidates seeking the presidency know that their standing as true conservatives is always at risk, that the gaze of the border patrol agents could fall on them at any moment. A few years ago, support for an individual health-insurance mandate and a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions were reasonable conservative positions; today, having ever entertained those ideas will get you branded as something other than a real conservative. This leaves the GOP presidential candidates in a bind because most of them embraced one or both in the past; now they have to sink to their knees and beg for forgiveness. In the case of the Ryan plan, something that didn’t exist just a few weeks ago has to some become nearly as central to conservative identity as opposition to abortion or taxes. For his criticism, Gingrich found it necessary to go on a humiliating contrition tour, first calling Ryan to apologize, then appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s program to make the bizarre assertion that he wasn’t even talking about the Ryan budget on Meet the Press, that he would have voted for it, and that he and Paul Ryan are buddies.

The other candidates are doing their best to assure conservatives that they’re on board, while simultaneously trying to avoid the political stain. Jon Huntsman saidhe would have voted for the Ryan plan. Mitt Romney tied himself in a knot about it, saying, “The Ryan plan and my plan are on the same page, we have the same objectives,” while leaving himself an out: “My plan is different than his, it’s not identical. But I applaud the fact that he put forward a plan.” Tim Pawlenty too has been careful to avoid criticizing Ryan’s plan, though he promises to deliver one of his own soon.

The candidates have little choice but to tread gingerly, because at this early stage of the presidential race, most of the people they encounter are party activists who have deputized themselves in the identity border patrol. Going from living room to VFW hall in Iowa eight months before the caucuses, they won’t be talking to independent voters. They will be courting partisans who care deeply about questions of identity. In some primary elections, the discussion among partisans might concern electability, or experience, or competence. But not this year. After constructing their opposition to Barack Obama around the idea that the president isn’t really American — either literally a foreigner or practically one by virtue of philosophy and record — today’s Republicans are acutely tuned to detect any whiff of heresy and concerned most deeply with which candidate lives deepest within the heart of their tribe.

There are plenty of activists on the left who would like nothing more than to have the same power the right’s base has. But they don’t. None of the components of the liberal base — union members, minorities, non-Christians (those of other faiths and the secular), urbanites, single people — inspires even a shadow of the fear in Democratic elites that the Tea Party, the Christian right, or gun advocates produce in the Republican elite. Nor do progressive media figures have anything comparable to the power within their movement that someone like Rush Limbaugh has (try to imagine Democratic leaders being forced to make groveling apologies to Rachel Maddow for criticizing her, the way Republican leaders have when they stepped out of line and criticized Limbaugh). That fear is evidence of the multiple veto points within the conservative system, the fact that many people have the power to make life miserable for Republicans who don’t stay within the borders.

Identity lies at the core of politics, no matter what your ideology. It’s the reason candidates portray themselves as coming from humble beginnings and feeling at home among regular folks or say they have “[insert our state name here] values” and their opponent doesn’t. It underlies all the key political divides we have — North versus South, urban versus rural, the “heartland” versus the coasts. It is behind every attack on the “elite,” whether from the left or the right and whether offered honestly or not. It’s written all through human history, from the first moment a hominid tribe decided that there were others of their kind who were outsiders and could not be trusted.

And Newt Gingrich knows it as well as anyone. When he said that Barack Obama “is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together” who the president is, he was just the latest version of the homo erectus grunting to his tribesmen that his rival has been seen visiting that cave on the other side of the valley and therefore must be slain lest the tribe be contaminated. But he failed to pay close enough attention to where the borders of identity had moved, and he paid the price. It will not be the last time in this election cycle that a candidate’s identity as a member of the tribe is challenged.

Emphasis mine.

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/151071/thought_police%3A_how_the_tea_party%27s_assault_on_dissenting_thought_has_trapped_the_gop?akid=7010.123424.rCB3yY&rd=1&t=2

Three of the Biggest Lies ever told: thanks to Ayn Rand.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
to understand humans we must first understand human evolution

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From: AlterNet / By Catherine Burke

3 Fatal Flaws in Ayn Rand’s Perverse ‘Moral Philosophy’

N.B.: This post demonstrates the principle that to understand humans we must first understand human evolution!
Ayn Rand lived in a world of fiction, and it shows in her social analysis.

“It is astonishing that a 54-year-old book, based upon three patently false premises, has suddenly been resurrected. The Chair of the House Budget Committee requires his staff to read Atlas Shrugged. On April 19, 2011 it ranked 17th on Amazon’s list of best sellers. It is said to be a favorite among Tea Party activists. It’s even been made into an independent movie, albeit omitting some of the steamier sex – one woman and three men?

The first error is the assertion that we humans, at least the best of us, are autonomous individuals who have no need for other human beings other than as useful tools. The second error is to perpetuate the libertarian idea that no social goal justifies “forcing” an individual to be a resource for others. In other words,  taxation is theft from “producers” to benefit “parasites.” The third error is that markets are “free” in the sense of operating best without any rules or regulation…

It is easy to counter the argument that humans are autonomous, isolated entities with no need for relationships with other humans. To the contrary, we are, and always have been, social creatures, relianton others for our lives, our development and our survival. When our species started to evolve in Africa, about 300,000 years ago, the world was filled with predators that had sharper teeth, stronger claws, could run faster and overall physically outmatch our tiny, hairy ancestors. The question is, how did our predecessors survive and procreate allowing me to write this essay and you to read it?

If we observe herds of, say, antelope today, we observe that predators go after the slowest and weakest member of the herd, who quickly becomes a meal. Antelopes survive because they procreate rapidly, and the loss of a single animal does not threaten the herd.

Humans, however, take considerably longer to bear a child, and that child requires considerable care over several years in order to survive. It is obvious that a pregnant female would, in the later stages of gestation, be the slowest member of the herd. Later her infant or toddler would also be slow and neither mother nor child would long survive without the support of a family or clan. Thus humans would not have survived as a species had they not been able to cooperate with each other and to form and maintain social groups. Humans hadto evolve as social animals.  

As social animals we needed (and still need) a way that allows us to function as productive members of a social group. Without such a method, the species will fail. This is true of all social species. For example, the social insects have specific complex chemicals that allow individual insects to function as productive members of a very coherent social group (beehive or ant colony). These chemicals are their operating methodology.

To function as a productive member of a human social group, we rely on six core values that bind human beings one to another. Based on our evolutionary development, all people, societies and organizations actually share the same set of core values. You can argue if these are the “real” core values, but these six appear to encompass what is necessary for the continuing existence of human social groups. Each of these can be thought of as being on a scale from positive to negative. Behavior at the positive end of the scale strengthens the social group; behavior at the negative end weakens, and eventually will destroy it.  Mostof a member’s behavior must be at the positive end of the scale in order for him or her to be accepted and relied upon by others. Without such positive reliable behavior social groups must fail. The following table shows the core values on which all societies are based according to research conducted with Ian Macdonald and Karl Stewart in the U.S., England, Australia, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and Denmark.

The basic propositions are:

1. If a group of people are to maintain a productive relationship that lasts, then the members of that group must demonstrate behavior that exemplifies the positive end of the scales of the core values.

  1. If a member of that group demonstrates behavior that is judged by the other group members to be at the negative end of the scales of core values, the person will eventually be excluded (although attempts to change the behavior may be made prior to exclusion).
  1. If several people exhibit behaviors that are similar but judged by the rest of the group to be at the negative end of the scales of core values, then the group will break into factions or separate groups.

Values, per se, cannot be observed and therefore cannot be determined directly. We can and do observe what people say and how they behave. All of us interpret behavior and draw conclusions about the values that an individual’s behavior demonstrates. Often we have to wait for confirmation that our conclusions are correct, and sometimes we may be left in doubt. In some cases we may disagree with others as to how particular behavior should be interpreted. In general, however, within a coherent social group, agreement is gained in time, often very quickly.

In essence, values are the ground against which we assess our own worth and the worth of others. We argue that because humans evolved as social animals, all humans use these values as the basis for judging the worth of others as they observe and interpret their behavior.

Consider a situation that might happen in any group. Imagine a group of people of which you are a member and that you believe one of the other members has behaved in at least one of the following ways: told lies, stolen something, made fun of a less attractive member, has been indifferent to another’s serious misfortune, regularly failed to keep promises, demanded more than his or her share, or consistently avoided difficult situations. Is it possible for this person to maintain membership of the group if he or she fails to change their behavior?

We cannot maintain a productive relationship with someone we cannot trust, or someone who is dishonest, cowardly, disrespectful, indifferent to our feelings or unfair. It is likely that we and other members of the group will seek to point out the negative behavior, but if it persists, the person will be actively excluded from the group. This reflects the basic need of any group or society.

This basic requirement for a social group to continue is that members must demonstrate their ability to understand “the other.” That is, to be able to see the world from another’s point of view. This differentiates the adult world from the egocentric world of infancy and early childhood where the other’s needs are not seriously considered except to satisfy the self. It is also a classic condition of psychopathy where others are manipulated for personal gain. It is the antithesis of productive co-existence.

Rand states that the superior individual can live and work only for him or herself. Although on casual reading her characters are initially attractive, they actually are sociopaths who do not recognize their use of others to achieve their power and riches. They are indifferent to their impact upon others as they pursue their own selfish interests. Rand glorifies selfishness and sociopaths, yet her heroes and heroine succeed as much because of the work of others as of themselves. They had schooling, and even if it was private, the teachers had to be schooled, probably in a school provided by society. They rely on an educated workforce, on pilots, nurses, mechanics, plumbers, doctors, most of whom learned their skills in a public school.

From prehistoric times until the present, human beings have had to find ways to cooperate and work together in order to survive. Today, much of this cooperative behavior is supported by public services. Consider our need for education from kindergarten through universities, a stable monetary system, laws that protect property, courts to adjudicate disputes, rules to provide an even playing field in markets, hospitals, roads, airports, bridges, defense from predators whether criminal or military, development costs for technological innovations such as the Internet and modern medicines, libraries, parks and clean beaches.

None of the goods provided through government come free. They must be paid for, and the fairest way we have found to pay these costs is to tax everyone at a “reasonable” rate. I realize there are great differences regarding what is “reasonable,”and that our existing tax system has many injustices, but that does not mean we can simply say no more taxes, or suggest as Rand does that taxation is theft. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

Rand puts forward the libertarian principle that no social purpose justifies forcing an individual to be a resource for another. In other words, taxation for the public good is wrong. There is no recognition that her heroes in Atlas Shrugged are rich and powerful and thus are able to dictate the terms on which others work for them; in other words they can “force” their workers to become a resource for them. Thus libertarianism has, at its core, a fundamental contradiction. Coercion by government is bad; but coercion by the rich and powerful “producers” is good.

The rich and powerful also rely on society for many of the goods of civilization, which are created through the cooperative efforts of all. Despite the arguments of Rand and the libertarians none of us can opt out of our need for society and its governing institutions.

Although most people agree that certain items such as airports, roads, bridges, armies, a legal system, must be socialized because no individual could buy these items due to cost and the requirement that their uses be shared, there is often disagreement as to what goods should be paid for by the public at large, socialized if you will, and what goods should be purchased by individuals in the market, e.g. privatized. Clearly many things are best handled in a market where individual buyers and sellers agree on goods and prices, for example, groceries, iPads, an automobile, the latest in fashion shoes or suits.

There is also a middle ground where sometimes we provide a good privately and sometimes publicly depending upon the area served, for example electric power. It is provided by shareholder owned, though heavily regulated utilities, as well as municipal utilities which, interestingly, are far less regulated.

We are still debating the best way to handle health care. We don’t even agree if everyone should have access to adequate health care. Most of our health care is provided through a market-like system that is largely controlled by insurance companies. If you are rich or well-insured, you get access to the best care the world can offer. If you lack money or insurance, you may get government supported Medicaid or emergency services at a public hospital. You are also more likely to die from a treatable illness.

In addition to the private system, we already provide two types of “socialized” medicine. There is single-payer health care with private hospitals and doctors through Medicare similar to the Canadian system where the term Medicare was coined. It provides care to the disabled and elderly who were refused coverage by the insurance industry – too costly, not profitable. There is also government-run health care as in Britain (for which the dreaded term “socialized medicine” was created) through our military and veterans facilities.

The services that can only be provided by society as a whole, must be paid for. These payments are called taxes. They are not “theft” — they are essential for our long-term survival.

Rand and other libertarians argue that markets are, and must be, “free.” Yet no market has ever existed without rules and referees, any more than you can have a football game without rules and referees. In the earliest markets in small, lightly populated villages, the rules were usually set by social custom. Someone who cheated would be ostracized, even exiled, if they did not pay back the person they had cheated and promise not to do it again.

As markets became larger and more regional, for example in the Middle Ages in Europe, guilds of tradesmen were organized to set rules regarding quality and prices. As the modern industrialized world emerged, a variety of abuses threatened its development. The muckrakers of the early 20th century exposed dreadful practices in food, meat-packing and patent medicines. Monopolies in railroads threatened the livelihoods of farmers and small towns. Other monopolies threatened competition and the market itself. Financial panics and depressions demonstrated the need to regulate banks and the stock market. Thus regulations at the state and federal level were instituted, not to destroy the markets but to make them viable and acceptable.

Granted, some of the rules were badly drawn; some gave special advantages to powerful interests; there was conflict among competing regulations and some of them were plain silly. None of this, however, negates the need for “rules of the road,” though ongoing reform is essential. Technical innovations, new knowledge, better ways of organizing production may require adjustments, but without regulation the thieves and thugs take over – witness the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Even what appears to be the most unregulated market today –street corner sales of heroin – has its own rules and regulations. These are largely informal, but the rules are strictly enforced, largely with guns. Violators face severe punishment, often death.

Rand and her acolytes seem not to have looked at the human condition. Every business is a social system, and the values that bind humans together are necessary if the business is to thrive and prosper. Every community is a social system that requires humans to work together and cooperate.

Some would argue that, contrary to what I have proposed, it is clear among different social groups that we have quite different values. This confuses, for example, the underlying value of fairness, with the behaviors we perceive as fair. Different social groups will see the same behavior as either fair or unfair depending upon the stories (mythologies) embedded in that group. Mythologies are stories that may or may not be factually true, but they demonstrate a fundamental truth about human behavior – what is courageous and what is cowardly, what shows respect and what shows lack of respect, what is fair and what is unfair. People who share common mythologies are said to have a common culture.

In some groups telling lies to outsiders is not dishonest; it simply reflects the group’s lack of concern for others. Telling lies within the group is, however, punished. There are other groups where telling a lie indicates dishonesty, no matter to whom one lies. Thus both groups accept the core value of honesty, but the behavior that demonstrates honesty is different.

When it comes to taxes, some groups believe a progressive system where everyone pays the same up to a certain amount, then more for earnings above the base, and so on until the rate on earnings, say over a million dollars, is taxed at the highest rate. Others believe everyone should pay the same percentage of their income in taxes.

However we demonstrate the core values, human beings are not, and cannot be isolated and survive. We are moral beings with a strong sense of what is fair, honest, trustworthy, courageous, loving and respectful of human dignity. Our survival and continuation as a species depends upon others. As David Brooks has written, cooperation is built into our DNA. Rand is wrong, and those who follow her have created policies that have been destructive of our economy and our nation.

Catharine Burke is an associate professor at USC’s School of Public Policy and Planning.


Emphasis mine.

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/150971/3_fatal_flaws_in_ayn_rand%27s_perverse_%27moral_philosophy%27?page=entire

The Right’s ‘Big Lie’ Strategy: When Losing, Simply Rewrite History

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” America, the Tea Party GOP is coming for your kids.

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“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”  (1984, George Orwell)

From AlterNet: Contemporary conservatives aim to disseminate an alternate version of reality through the media echo chamber and the schools.

America, the Tea Party GOP is coming for your kids.

Mike Huckabee, Republican front runner and presumptive 2012 presidential nominee is getting into the education business. He has started a project, “Learn Our History,” where on a monthly basis–sort of like BMG or Columbia House music–Huckabee’s organization will send subscribers Time Travel Academy, an animated children’s cartoon featuring a group of intrepid time travelers who teach lessons about U.S. history “without a political bias.”

If judged by its artistic qualities, the cartoon is so poorly done as to be a pitiable joke. Its main characters are a contrived group of multicultural “tweens.” The history is predictable: Ronald Reagan is America’s savior, America is a Judeo-Christian country preordained by God to be exceptional, and flag-waving jingoistic nationalism is a virtue and never a sin. The guiding principle of this right-wing approved version of U.S. history is simple: “What we see and hear isn’t always the same as what we read in books, or see on TV. We know the truth. And that’s good enough for us.”

The takeaway here is simple. The “liberals,” a cabal that ostensibly holds sway over public schools and universities, are corrupt and anti-American. In their fantasy, conservatives have access to a quasi-secret, pure and unadulterated version of history that is only available to true believers. The Right is the proverbial keeper of the flame. They are obligated, through a gospel of sorts, to both protect and share this “correct,” self-validating (and quite inaccurate) version of American history with all who will listen — and they’re using education and the media to do it.

The Time Travel Academy is patently absurd. Huckabee’s effort at overt historical revisionism is part of a larger national trend that has been decades in the making. Here, conservatives are playing chess while the Left and progressives are playing checkers. To that end, the Right has developed a two-fold strategy.

First, they correctly understand that the educational system is one of society’s primary sites for political socialization. There you create citizens. The classroom is also where citizens are equipped with the critical frameworks needed to ask hard questions about the common good, their role in society, and the State’s obligation to the people.

Conservatives have made a series of bold strikes in politicizing the classroom in the service of their agenda.

1. David Horowitz, failed academic and incendiary polemicist, and his group, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center), have been policing college classrooms for years. They have compiled aMcCarthy-like enemies list of professors who are “dangerous Leftists” that “poison” and “pollute” the minds of young people by criticizing the pet policy positions of conservatives. Offenders who earn the ire of Horowitz and his organization are routinely harassed. Some have even been drummed out of their positions as college professors for being too liberal and “Leftist” for Horowitz’s taste.

2. The Koch brothers, the astroturf puppet masters of the New Right, have beenfunding academic programs and research centers that parrot the extreme gospel of trickle-down economics, anti-statism, and other policy positions that are favorable to the most extreme elements of the conservative agenda. Subverting the rules of academic freedom, the Koch brothers have also donated monies with the condition that faculty members support their policy positions.

3. Christian Nationalist pseudo-historians such as David Barton offer an uncritical view of American exceptionalism and the Constitution where the United States is portrayed as a theocracy beholden to Judeo-Christian beliefs. They have become darlings of the New Right and the Tea Party. A historian without credentials, he has become a mascot for popular conservatives and praised by Newt Gingrich as a preeminent scholar in his field. Barton has risen to fame on the backs of Glenn Beck and Fox News, who together pander his “righteous” and “correct” versions of American history to their audiences. As part of a cottage industry that features such factually challenged writers as Jonah Goldberg, their jackbooted and incorrect versions of history (synthesized by ideological pedants and hobbyists) have become the intellectual cornerstones of contemporary conservative thought.

4. The Arizona Ethnic Studies ban, along with the efforts to rewrite Texas school books to reflect a conservative view of U.S. history, are entry points for (re)educating children in a mold that fits the Right’s social and political agenda. In the age of Obama these state-level moves are designed to quite literally whitewash American history and to remove the successes of liberals and progressives from the classroom. In total, these assaults on education are efforts to propagandize the country’s youngest and most impressionable citizens by elevating conservative mythology to the level of historical certainty.

The second part of the Right’s efforts to remake American citizenship involves the media. Aided and abetted by Fox News and the right-wing media echo chamber, there has been a concerted effort to create an alternate reality that destroys the post-Civil War consensus and the social contract that has guided this country since World War II. There are many examples that demonstrate the deleterious impact of the right-wing spin machine on the American public.

Viewers of Fox News are significantly more likely to be misinformed about politics and public policy. This effect becomes more exaggerated the longer a person watches Fox News. Conservative pundits are more likely to makeerroneous predictions about political events. As documented by a range of independent media watchdog groups, Fox News and other right-wing outlets use the lie of the “liberal media” to disseminate factually incorrect information to their audiences. In a moment when political polarization is at an extreme, it is no wonder that conversations across divides of ideology and party are so difficult. Why? The right-wing media has succeeded in creating an alternate reality for its viewers. The consequences for Americans are dire: Any efforts to move forward as a community in search of solutions to our common dilemmas are damned because the basic terms of the debate cannot even be agreed upon.

The timing of these events is critical. The United States is at a crossroads. The Great Recession has exposed an empire built on a house of cards. Imperial misadventures abroad have left a hollowed-out infrastructure. The country is mired in debt as wealth inequality rises to unconceivable levels, the plutocrats earn record profits, and the average worker faces stagnant wages and severe unemployment.

As highlighted by recent polling data suggesting that the most die-hard Republicans want to split and form a third party, conservatism is in an existential dilemma. The symbolic politics of the age of Obama, when a black man is president of the United States, has triggered all manner of upset and madness on the part of the Tea Party GOP. The Right faces a set of changing demographics where their core constituency is aging and dying off (what social scientists term as “generational replacement”). And looking forward several decades, whites will no longer be the majority racial group in America. In total, the base of the Republican Party is in decline and their electoral coalition is facing obsolescence.

The Tea Party GOP’s search for a nominee to challenge Barack Obama has highlighted their bankruptcy of ideas. When not flailing about in the mucky waters of white populism, birtherism, and xenophobia, the positions offered by the GOP frontrunners are a laughable recycling of the failed policies of trickle-down economics, the Laffer curve, and an almost cult-like devotion to a belief that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, in conjunction with draconian cuts on public services for the middle, poor, and working classes, are the only way to balance the budget and reduce the deficit.

Despite all evidence to the contrary–and warnings from responsible voices within the Republican Party about the dangers of “voodoo economics”–these tired ideas remain at the cutting edge of the Right’s vision for America in the 21st century. The irony here is deep: the Great Recession was caused in large part by these reckless policies and a devotion to “gangster capitalism.” Nevertheless, the Tea Party GOP wants to continue these policies as a means of saving the country.

Although culture warriors such as Pat Buchanan, and carnival barker pseudo-historians such as Glenn Beck would suggest otherwise, the forces of social and political conservatism have repeatedly been shown to be on the wrong side of American history. The triumphs of the Civil Rights, women’s and labor movements were high water marks for the country. While maligned by the New Right as near profanities, the long arc of American history suggests that the forces of progressive and liberal thought have expanded rights and liberties for the country’s citizens, as well as provided a more certain future in the pursuit of the common good than those alternatives offered by the Right.

For contemporary conservatives the solution to this dilemma is a simple one. When losing simply rewrite the history. Change the narrative. Then disseminate this alternate version of reality through the right-wing media and the schools.

This is the foundation of the Big Lie. The right-wing echo chamber offers a different version of the facts. In turn, their audience internalizes a partisan and ideologically skewed version of reality. Thus, shared solutions to the challenges facing the American people are almost impossible to reach because we as citizens are proceeding from a different set of priors about the nature of the problem.

The assault by conservatives on education is prefaced on a need to destroy those with whom they disagree. The Right has long identified “the Ivory Tower” as one of the last bulwarks that stands against their agenda. Because they have long prayed at the mantle of anti-intellectualism (see the appeal of professional mediocrity Sarah Palin to her “mama grizzlies” and the Tea Party brigands as proof) this is an easy move. The efforts by conservatives to privatize schools, destroy teacher’s unions, end tenure, and inaugurate a world where professors are all adjuncts subject to firing at any time (and compensated a pitiable salary) is the game plan to hobble their foes.

Collectively, conservatives want to create a class of consumer-citizens who are passive and ill-equipped to ask any hard questions about power, politics or society. The Right does not want critical thinkers or active citizens. Instead, they want to create drones who worship the market and live out a dystopian reality that is torn straight from the pages of one of Ayn Rand’s unreadable novels.

While Huckabee and company’s agenda may seem like child’s play at first, this is a real and deadly serious business. The Right is playing a deep game where they are remaking the very notions of citizenship and reality. What will progressives and the left do in response? Will they roll over and play nice? Or will they rise to the challenge?

The Right has been playing for keeps. The Left has been letting the fight go to the scorecards. It is time to step up and go for the knockout punch.

(Emphasis Mine)

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/150937/the_right%27s_%27big_lie%27_strategy%3A_when_losing%2C_simply_rewrite_history?page=entire

Was Torture the solution?

They were engaged in a desperate attempt to rewrite history — to argue that their methods of “enhanced interrogation” — provided the pivotal information that led to President Obama’s successful apprehension of Osama Bin Laden.

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From Robert, Huff Post:

“Last Sunday a veritable flotilla of neocon former Bush Administration national security officials flooded the zone on the Sunday Morning talk shows. They were engaged in a desperate attempt to rewrite history — to argue that their methods of “enhanced interrogation” — provided the pivotal information that led to President Obama’s successful apprehension of Osama Bin Laden.

Notable “experts” — like former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney argued authoritatively that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had provided the critical information that allowed Obama to find Bin Laden — eight years later.

Even though they behave like they have inside information, it is important to note that all of these former officials are exactly that — former. In 2008 the American voters had the good sense to make them former — since then, none of them has been privy to any thing more than the information that is available to the general public about the factors did or did not result in finding the location of Bin Laden.

That said, the information that is available publicly indicates that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad — the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, did in fact provide the “nickname” of one of Bin Laden’s couriers eight years ago. Khalid Sheik Mohammad (KSM) had in fact been subjected to repeated waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation.” The problem with their theory is that KSM did not divulge this information as a result of this “enhanced interrogation.” Apparently it was divulged many months later as a result of conventional methods. And the “nickname” of the courier was useless until signal intelligence allowed the United States to identify the real name and identity of the actual courier many years later.

In fact, the Obama Administration located Bin Laden because it re-focused substantial intelligence resources on the problem. It did the blocking and tackling of rigorous data analysis and painstaking surveillance. In other words rather than the bull-in-a-china-closet swagger and big talk that we heard from Bush and his team for years, Obama did the hard work necessary to quietly and effectively get the job done. Bush and company had failed miserably.

It’s pretty amazing that anyone would take Cheney and Rumsfeld seriously. Never mind that they diverted most of the government’s security resources away from the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks to their war in Iraq. Never mind that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used as the recruiting posters that enlisted thousands of terrorists bent on destroying the United States. Never mind that when they left office America’s prestige and popularity in the world had been squandered and was at an all time low.

Remember that just as in domestic politics, in world politics it matters if you have public support. That is especially true if the Muslim world continues its movement toward more democratic societies.

But in the end, the very fact that a coterie of former high-ranking officials are even making the argument that torture works is an embarrassment to America.

As a country, we need to emerge from this debate having placed the argument that “torture works” outside of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse once and for all.

In considering whether “torture works” the first question is: what do we mean by “works”? Torture has been used for centuries to achieve a variety of goals. It has been used to force subjects to tell what they know, to confess to crimes, to renounce their faith.

There is little question that torture gets a response from its victims. That’s why its practitioners find it “useful.” But that is also what makes its results completely unreliable. It isn’t hard for anyone to imagine that they would say pretty much anything to make the pain stop if they believed they were drowning, or if their joints felt they would break after they had hung by their arms for hours, or if they were repeatedly slammed against the wall, or if they had been left naked and shivering for hours in the cold and periodically showered with cold water, or if they had been confined in a small box for hours with insects. All of these were methods approved by the Bush Justice Department.

These are but the latest innovations in the tradition of ingenious, sadistic methods of inflicting pain and psychological torment. Over the centuries, torturers have invented machines like the rack to gradually tear apart people’s limbs. They have used rubber hoses to beat the bottom of people’s feet to a pulp. They have become adept at removing fingernails, and drilling on teeth without an anesthetic. They have learned to connect the exact amount of electric current a victim’s testicles or nipples in order to inflict maximum pain without ultimately killing the subject. And of course there has always been the ever-popular old-fashioned beating. While these were not on the list of approved methods, they differ only modestly from those on the “approved list.” All inflict excruciating physical or psychological pain.

It is precisely the fact that torture inflicts pain that makes it hard to believe the results of the intelligence that is gathered, or the truthfulness of a confession, or the sincerity of a renunciation of faith. That’s why most professionals who specialize in interrogation reject the reliability of the information gained by torture, and why courts throw out confessions obtained by torture.

That in fact is why we have the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution— to prevent the coerced confessions that were commonplace in 18th Century Europe. Remember, the Fifth Amendment is not just about protecting the rights of the accused. It is also about protecting society from the coerced, false confession that leaves the real criminal on the street…

Can’t the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be the hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago’s sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering ?”

emphasis mine

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/did-torture-work_b_859859.html

Why is the USA running in the red?

outine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

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From: The Washington Post

By Lori Montgomery, Published: April 30

“The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.

In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.

Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history,wage two wars solely with borrowed funds.“In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.

Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12 percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.

Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributorto the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate….

Most Republicans reject raising taxes as part of the solution; House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) has called it a “non-starter.” But Democrats won’t go for a proposal based solely on spending cuts. The“Gang of Six,” a bipartisan Senate group dedicated to debt reduction, is expected to unveil a strategy as soon as this week that couples sharp spending cuts with a rewrite of the tax code that would raise additional revenue.

(The debt ceiling, set at $14.3 trillion, covers all federal debt, including money the Treasury owes other federal entities, such as the Social Security trust fund. The CBO data focus on the portion of the debt borrowed from outside investors. The debt is the accumulation of annual deficits; if annual budgets are in surplus, the nation can pay down the debt.)

The annual surpluses that set the nation on this course emerged in the final years of the Clinton administration. In the typical American household, a surplus comes as welcome news. But the White House is not a typical household. When Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin saw the budget shift into the black in 1998, he immediately warned President Bill Clinton that, politically, it was a mixed blessing.

Rubin wanted to use the surplus to start repaying the debt, which was then just more than $3 trillion. The White House billed it as “saving Social Security first,” viewing the surplus as an opportunity to shore up the nation’s finances before huge numbers of the baby boom generation began claiming federal retirement benefits. “The problem was a whole other part of the political spectrum wanted to use the surplus for tax cuts,” Rubin said in an interview. “They said they wanted to give the people back their money. Of course, it was also the people’s debt.”

What to do with the surplus became a central issue of the 2000 presidential campaign, with Vice President Al Gore arguing that much of it should be put in a “lockbox” to protect Social Security and Medicare. Bush pushed for a broad tax cut, arguing that taxpayers at all income levels were owed a refund. “Some say that the growing federal surplus means Washington has more money to spend, but they’ve got it backwards,” Bush said as he accepted the GOP nomination in August 2000. “The surplus is not the government’s money. The surplus is the people’s money.”

As soon as he took office, Bush pushed Congress to make good on his tax pledge. Less than a week after his inauguration, he got a boost from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who testified before the Senate Budget Committee that “tax reduction appears required” to prevent the federal government from accumulating too much cash. Greenspan feared that large surpluses would turn the government into the nation’s largest investor, creating distortions in the markets.

A chorus of skeptics warned against spending the surplus. Some stressed the inherent uncertainty of the CBO projections. Others said a big tax cut would unleash pent-up desire in both parties to pursue expensive priorities without the pay-as-you-go restraints that had helped produce the surplus.

Congress approved a $1.35 trillion tax cut in record time. A second package, worth $350 billion, followed in 2003. Together, they constituted one of the largest tax cuts since World War II, according to the conservative Tax Foundation.

Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, resigned after the White House decided to pursue the 2003 measure. “I believed we needed the money to facilitate fundamental tax reform and begin working on unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare,” O’Neill said in an interview. But the White House, he said, was focused on improving economic growth for the fourth quarter of 2004. “They wanted to make sure economic conditions were great going into the president’s reelection.”

Proponents of tax cuts argue that the legislation merely returned tax collections to their appropriate levels. They note that the CBO’s 2001 forecast assumed that tax collections would stay above 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (defined as the total of all economic output) — well above the historic average of 18 percent of GDP.

“It’s not obvious that America was ready to have taxes at a level this high persistently,” said Donald Marron, a former CBO director who now heads the nonprofit Tax Policy Center. “Some degree of tax cutting was inevitable.”

But some key advocates of the tax cuts now say such a large reduction was probably ill-advised.

“Nobody would have thought that all these things would have happened after you cut taxes,” Domenici said. “That you’d have two wars and not pay for them. That you’d have another recession. A huge extravaganza of expenditures” for the military and homeland security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “You would pause before you did it, if you knew.”

Bill Thomas, the former House Ways and Means Committee chairman who helped shepherd the tax cuts through Congress, defended the 2003 package as “fuel for the economy.” But he said in an interview that the 2001 measure was larded with “stuff that I was not all that wild about,” including bipartisan priorities such as a big increase in the child tax credit and a break for married couples — provisions Thomas believes did little to promote economic growth and amounted to “throwing money out the window.”

“I couldn’t do anything about it,” said Thomas, a California Republican who retired in 2006. “You’re the candy man when you advocate those kinds of tax cuts.”

In the end, Bush cut taxes and spent more money. Good times masked the impact, as surging tax revenues reduced the size of year-to-year deficits during the first three years of his second term. But after the economy collapsed during Bush’s final year in office, deficits — and therefore the debt — began to explode as Obama sought to revive economic activity with more tax cuts and federal spending.

Today, the CBO forecasts are unrelievedly gloomy, showing huge deficits essentially forever. As policymakers grapple with the legacy of the past decade, a demographic wave of senior citizens is crashing at their doorstep, driving up the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

William Hoagland, who was for years a top budget aide to Domenici and other GOP Senate leaders, said it is simplistic to think today’s fiscal problems began just 10 years ago. In 1976, as a young CBO analyst, Hoagland produced a long-term simulation that showed entitlement costs gradually overwhelming the rest of the federal budget.

“This situation really goes back to long before [the Bush administration], which is to say to old dead men that have long left the Congress,” he said.

Still, Hoagland said, the abandonment of fiscal discipline in the wake of the surpluses clearly didn’t help. “Nobody pushed for paying for this stuff,” he said. Not even after “it became very clear in the middle of 2003 that the line had turned on us. And the surpluses as far as the eye could see were no longer there.”

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/running-in-the-red-how-the-us-on-the-road-to-surplus-detoured-to-massive-debt/2011/04/28/AFFU7rNF_story.html?nl_headlines

The Four Freedoms of the Tea Party.

chasdarwinLeave a comment 
In 1941, President Roosevelt introduced his Four Freedoms:"In the future days, which we seek to make secure,
 we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor– anywhere in the world.”

see http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/workbook/ralprs36b.htm

Today, the Tea Party advocates have their own Four Freedoms:

Freedom to watch others die a long, slow death because they cannot afford reasonable health care.

Freedom to watch many fail in life because they do not have access to a good education.

Freedom to watch millions fall from the middle class into poverty because their union barganing rights have been destroyed.

Freedom to watch seniors live in poverty because their savings have been lost by greedy speculators, and their safety nets destroyed.

Cost Of Tax Cuts For Rich Exceeds Value Of Budget Cuts

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from HuffPost: (William Alden)

NEW YORK –” Today, as Americans submit their tax returns, the wealthiest earners will each reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax savings.

As part of a law passed late last year, the Bush-era tax cuts for the richest Americans were extended for two years. The estimated cost to the government of that portion of the tax deal, $42 billion this fiscal year, exceeds the stated $38 billion value of the savings from the federal budget cuts lawmakers approved last week.

Those budget cuts, which will affect many services for poor Americans, add more strain to a still weak economy, leading some economists to lament that this allocation of federal resources is not the most efficient way to promote economic growth.

“I don’t think it’s a good time to be trimming federal outlays if you’re interested in the vulnerability of the economy,” said economist Gary Burtless, formerly with the Labor Department and now at the Brookings Institution. “I’m not quite sure where the theories come from that this is going to strengthen economic growth over the next 12 to 18 months. It’s going to have the reverse effect. It’s going to slow it down.”

In the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the economic recovery has been uneven. The financial sector, which employs some of the country’s wealthiest citizens as its executives, has seen profits rebound. Pay at top financial firms has multiplied, while wages for most Americans have stagnated.

Between January 2008 and January 2010, the private sector lost nearly 8 million jobs. Last year, payrolls began to expand, but the pace of the recovery has been slow. With companies reluctant to spend their reserve cash on hiring, the unemployment rate remains high. Last month, 8.8 percent of the workforce was unemployed, a figure that would be significantly greater if it included the millions of jobless Americans who have entirely given up looking for work.

Thanks to the tax cut extension passed last year, struggling Americans will get to keep a few thousand dollars that otherwise would have gone to the government. A family making between $50,000 and $75,000, for instance, saves just over $2,000 on average, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. From a broad economic perspective, that’s money Americans can spend on themselves, theoretically boosting demand, stimulating business activity and generally helping promote a recovery.

But the extension of the tax breaks for the wealthy have proven more controversial, especially as job-creation has remained slow. Under the extension, a family that earns between $500,000 and $1 million gets an average $25,000 tax break, according to the Tax Policy Center. A household earning more than $1 million gets more than $130,000.

Over two years, tax cuts for the wealthy will cost the government about $120 billion and will create or save about 290,000 jobs, according to analysis by the White House-aligned research groupCenter for American Progress. That’s a cost of about $400,000 per job, many of which will likely yield salaries far below that value.

The tax extension seems especially hard for critics to swallow in light of last week’s federal budget deal, which calls for spending cuts of about $38 billion. In comparison, tax breaks for the wealthy will cost the government $42 billion during this fiscal year, according to Michael Linden, director for tax and budget policy at the Center for American Progress.

The cuts come at a period of economic weakness, when those who most rely on government services struggle to put food on the table. Last week, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for U.S. economic growth — by the same degree as it cut its forecast for Japan, whose economy faces a major strain as the country attempts to rebuild after a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

But some fiscal restraint is necessary for supporting long-term economic growth, said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. In theory, government spending cuts encourage private businesses to boost their own spending, thereby helping stimulate economic activity. A reduction of public spending might also help stem inflationary pressures and boost investors’ confidence.

While these proposed cuts represent only a small percentage of the year’s budget, they are an important first step, said Zandi, who has advised lawmakers from both parties.

“I think it’s entirely appropriate to focus on discretionary spending, and how we can reduce it going forward,” Zandi said. “My druthers would not have been to cut as deeply right now, until the economy is off and running.”

The deficit-reduction plan put forth by President Barack Obama in a speech on Wednesday includes a combination of cutting spending and ending tax breaks for the wealthy when those naturally expire. He laid out a strategy for reducing the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years, calling for additional cuts across the board.

“If they make serious cuts over time, that’s actually going to be quite good for the economy,” said Andrew Lo, professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “It’s bitter medicine, but we’ve got to take it.”

Emphasis MINE

see:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/18/tax-cuts-rich_n_848933.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=041811&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureTitle&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

Gross Income Inequality…

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From Alternet: by  Les Leopold

Hedge Fund Gamblers Earn the Same In One Hour As a Middle-Class Household Makes In Over 47 Years!

How do they make so much money? Where does it come from? How can hedge fund firms with fewer than 100 employees make as much profit as firms with thousands of employees?
“We live in a very, very rich country. Yet we seem to be utterly consumed by a collective hysteria that we’re about to go broke. Historians are certain to look back at this period and wonder why the richest country in history consumed itself in a struggle over how many teachers to fire.

How rich are we?

Just take a look at the latest reports on what the top hedge fund managers haul in. In 2010 John Paulson led the list with a record $4.9 billion in personal earnings. That’s a whopping $2.4 million an HOUR. Here’s a factoid to make you wretch: It would take the median US household over 47 years to earn as much as Paulson pocketed in just 60 minutes. And, every hedge fund manager pays a lower tax rate than the average family.

The top 25 hedge fund earners took in $22.07 billion in 2010. Thanks to a generous tax loophole these billionaires will pay a top tax rate of 15 percent instead of 35 percent. Closing that loophole on just those 25 individuals – just 25 guys who wouldn’t miss a penny of it — would raise $4.4 billion, which is enough to rehire 126,000 laid-off teachers.

Wait a sec. This is America, not Russia. Don’t we want our entrepreneurs to go out there and earn as much as possible? We don’t want to punish the successful who are building up our economy, do we?

Maybe that’s a strong argument when you’re talking about the CEO billionaires of Apple and Google and other successful companies that make products we use. But when it comes to financial billionaires, we don’t even know what they do for a living.

Each and every day I ask people and I get a blank stare or something like: “They invest. They make money.” Sure enough, but how do they make so much money? Where does it come from? How can hedge fund firms with fewer than 100 employees make as much profit as companies like Apple with tens of thousands of employees?

This much we know. They speculate. The place bets. They jump in and out of markets at lightening speeds. They have secret betting formulas just like card counters in Vegas. And as any state attorney general can tell you, a good number of them cheat by betting with illegalinsider tips, front-running trades, sneaking in trades after markets close and so on. The entire industry is barely regulated as it plays with a bankroll of $2.2 trillion that comes mostly from enormously rich investors. You can bet the next crisis will bubble out of this vast and murky casino.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument that financial billionaires produce economic value commensurate to what they earn. And if they don’t, that means they are siphoning off the wealth from the rest of our nation. Either we do something about it or we’ll watch our standard of living crumble.

Blah, blah blah. We’ve heard it all before. We know that super-rich financiers are gaming the system. We know they pay low taxes or none at all. We know they’re stashing their cash in offshore accounts. But now that the economy isn’t crashing anymore, it seems there’s nothing we can do about it. We just have to learn to live with a new kind of aristocracy. Get used to it.

Maybe not.

There’s a movement underway for what economist Dean Baker aptly named a “financial speculation tax.” The idea, first put forth by the late James Tobin to raise money to help eradicate global poverty, is to place a very small tax on all financial transactions. Here’s how Baker’s Center for Economic and Policy Research describes it:

The FST (also known as a financial transactions tax or the Robin Hood tax) is a modest set of taxes on Wall Street trading – e.g. 0.25% (1/4 of a percent) on a stock purchase or sale and 0.02% (1/50 of a percent) on the sale or purchase of a future, option, or credit default swap. These rates are proportional to the actual transaction costs in the industry….

Each time I write about these issues, my editors worry that you, the readers, have given up — that nobody believes it’s possible to fight Wall Street and win.

Well, I’m not giving up on you.”

Emphasis Mine.

see: http://www.alternet.org/story/150570/hedge_fund_gamblers_earn_the_same_in_one_hour_as_a_middle-class_household_makes_in_over_47_years?akid=6823.108242.QFQEdp&rd=1&t=2

Some Taxes are Too Low!

One cannot complain about negative cash flow when they ignore the opportunity to increase revenue.

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One cannot complain about negative cash flow when they ignore the opportunity to increase revenue.  (CFP)

From Portside:

“Why I’m Right About Raising Taxes on the Very Rich.

By Robert Reich
www.robertreich.org
February 15, 2011

http://robertreich.org/

My proposal to raise the marginal tax to 70 percent on
incomes over $15 million, to 60 percent on incomes between $5
million and $15 million, and to 50 percent on incomes between
$500,000 and $5 million, has generated considerable debate.
Some progressives think it’s pie-in-the-sky. Here, for
example, is Andrew Leonard, a staff writer for Salon:

A 70 percent tax bracket for the richest Americans is
pure fantasy – even suggesting it represents such a
fundamental disconnect with the world as it exists today
that it is hard to see why it should be taken seriously.
I would be deeply worried about the sanity of a
Democratic president who proposed such a thing.

Fantasy? I don’t know Mr. Leonard’s age but perhaps he could
be forgiven for not knowing that between the late 1940s and
1980 America’s highest marginal rate averaged above 70
percent. Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower it was
91 percent. Not until the 1980s under Ronald Reagan was it slashed
28 percent.

Incidentally, during these years the nation’s pre-tax income
was far less concentrated at the top than it is now. In the
mid-1970s, for example, the top 1 percent got around 9
percent of total income. By 2007, they got 23.5 percent. So
if anything, the argument for a higher marginal tax should be
even more realistic now than it was during the days when it
was taken for granted.

A disconnect with the world as it exists today? That’s
exactly the point of proposing it. For years progressives
have whined that Democratic presidents (Clinton, followed by
Obama) compromise with Republicans while Republican
presidents (Reagan through W) stand their ground – with the
result that the center of political debate has moved steadily
rightward. That’s the reason the world exists the way it does
today. Isn’t it about time progressives had the courage of
our conviction and got behind what we believe in, in the hope
of moving the debate back to where it was?

Would a Democratic president be insane to propose such a
thing? Not at all. In fact, polls show an increasing portion
of the electorate angry with an insider “establishment” – on
Wall Street, in corporate suites, and in Washington – that’s
been feathering its nest at the expense of the public. The
Tea Party is but one manifestation of a widening perception
that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

More importantly, it will soon become evident to most
Americans that the only way to reduce the budget deficit,
preserve programs deemed essential by the middle class, and
not raise taxes on the middle, is to tax the top.

In fact, a Democratic president should propose a major
permanent tax reduction on the middle class and working
class. I suspect most of the public would find this
attractive. But here again, the only way to accomplish this
without busting the bank is to raise taxes on the rich.

Republicans have done a masterful job over the last thirty
years convincing the public that any tax increase on the top
is equivalent to a tax increase on everyone – selling the
snake oil of “trickle down economics” and the patent lie that
most middle-class people will eventually become millionaires.
A Democratic president would do well to rebut these
falsehoods by proposing a truly progressive tax.

Will the rich avoid it? Other critics of my proposal say
there’s no way to have a truly progressive tax because the
rich will always find ways to avoid it by means of clever
accountants and tax attorneys. But this argument proves too
much. Regardless of where the highest marginal tax rate is
set, the rich will always manage to reduce what they owe.
During the 1950s, when it was 91 percent, they exploited
loopholes and deductions that as a practical matter reduced
the effective top rate 50 to 60 percent. Yet that’s still
substantial by today’s standards. The lesson is government
should aim high, expecting that well-paid accountants will
reduce whatever the rich owe.

Besides, the argument that the nation shouldn’t impose an
obligation on the rich because they can wiggle out of it is
an odd one. Taken to its logical extreme it would suggest we
allow them to do whatever antisocial act they wish – grand
larceny, homicide, or plunder – because they can always
manage to avoid responsibility for it.

Some critics worry that if the marginal tax is raised too
high, the very rich will simply take their money to a more
hospitable jurisdiction. That’s surely possible. Some already
do. But paying taxes is a central obligation of citizenship.
Those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid
paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

Finally, there are some who say my proposal doesn’t stand a
chance because the rich have too much political power. It’s
true that as income and wealth have moved to the top,
political clout has risen to the top as well.

But to succumb to cynicism about the possibility of
progressive change because of the power of those at the top
is to give up the battle before it’s even started.”

Emphasis Mine.

___________________________________________

The Myths about Ronald Reagan, and why they are important to the GOP.

In summary, the Reagan years were ones of opportunities lost: at the end of the day, we had a weaker economy, a much greater national debt, a neglected infrastructure, were even more dependent on foreign oil, and were less secure.

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The Myths

  • Fixed the economy – by cutting taxes.
  • Won the Cold war – by expanding our military.
  • Intimidated the Soviets – by ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system.

THE FACTS:

Economy

  • National Debt went from $1.8 trillion to $3.8 trillion.
  • Unemployment by year: 5.8, 7.1, 7.6. 9.7, 9.6, 7.5, 7.2, 7.0, 6.2.
  • GDP from   $5.5 trillion to $7.1 trillion.
  • Industries which gained included weapons, electronics, computers.
  • Primary metals, automotive, and many core industries contracted: a plus for the NorthEast, California, and the sunbelt states; a minus for the great lakes states.
  • The US went from a creditor nation to a debtor nation.

Soviets

In 1980, what was the biggest security and economic threat to the US? Dependence on imported oil, esp. from the Middle East. (As today).

  • Soviet Military spending in fact declined in the 1980’s.
  • The difference between George Lucas’ “Star Wars’ and Reagan’s is that the Lucas version was closer to reality.
  • The US was in a much superior weapon systems/military situation, but Reagan  did not use it to negotiate an advantage over Soviet Russia.

Cold War

  • What was the ‘cold war’? A standoff between the USA that lasted from the end of WWII to the collapse of the Soviet state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War
  • When did it end? 1991  (Post Reagan).
  • Who won? Japan: industry; education; infrastructure, not weapons.

An Alternative History

  • Prepare for post cold war world: by spending on industry; education; and infrastructure ,not weapons.
  • Assist basic industries,e.g.:auto; steel; rubber.
  • Reduce dependence on imported oil, benefiting domestic jobs, national security, and the environment.

In summary, the Reagan years were ones of opportunities lost: at the end of the day, we had a weaker economy, a much greater national debt, a neglected infrastructure, were even more dependent on foreign oil, and were less secure.

see: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020504/revisiting-reagan-nightmare

also: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2011/02/04/ST2011020403674.html?hpid=topnews

and: http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/102-102/4859-ronald-reagan-enabler-of-atrocities

and:http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020501/reagan-ruins

and:http://www.thenation.com/article/158321/reagans-real-legacy