Beware The Dumbasses…by Dan Lynch

Ambrose Bierce was a professionally cynical journalist of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. His masterwork was a book he entitled “The Devil’s Dictionary.” In that book he offered what he felt were more accurate definitions of English words – what they really meant in the world in which he lived, as opposed to what Noah Webster had said they meant.

Some examples:

Bierce defined love as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” He defined politeness as “acceptable hypocrisy.” He defined success as “the one unpardonable sin.”

It’s still a good book today because many of Bierce’s re-definitions are more valid than ever. Take his definition of “ambition.” Bierce defined the word as meaning, “an overmastering desire to be vilified …”

That’s certainly what’s happening to our most ambitious politicians these days, nearly a century after Bierce presumably died. The real issue is the form that vilification is taking in the Republican presidential primary contest. Rick Perry is being reviled as a jovial Texas dumbass – which, frankly, he seems to be, actually. Ron Paul is being reviled as an isolationist, which also seems to have some validity. Rick Santorum is being reviled as a devout Catholic, which he is. The real issue – the extent to which he might really try to force the rest of the country to abide by his religious beliefs – is never really discussed.

The weirdest vilification, however, is being directed at Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Huntsman is being criticized because he can speak Mandarin, and Romney is attacked in a new Newt Gingrich ad because he can speak French.

Since when is it a shortcoming that an American can speak a foreign language? Well, it has been a shortcoming ever since the Republican party, beginning in the Reagan era, began to attract so many disaffected, blue-collar Democrats who practice a bizarre form of reverse snobbery. If you went to a first-class college, as Barack Obama went to Harvard Law School, then you must be an elite snob who’s out of touch with the real folks. If you can read the menu in a Chinese or French restaurant in the proprietor’s native language then there must be something distinctly wrong with you.

What’s next – name-calling because you can do long division? Revulsion because you know what H2O is? When will a high score on the college boards become a disqualification for office for Republican politicians? Not too far into the future, if this stuff keeps up. The Democrats have a good many of their own weird proclivities, but this GOP reverse snobbery is just strange and demeaning to the entire party membership. It’s also dangerous. Stupidity may have gotten us into this economic mess we’re in, but there’s no reason to believe that it’ll get us out.

I suppose that a certain amount of this is to be expected from Republican voters who reject the validity of evolution. Even Newt Gingrich, who holds a doctoral degree, panders to this point of view. Here’s Gingrich on evolution: “I always tell my friends who don’t believe in this stuff, fine, how do you think — we’re randomly gathered protoplasm? We could have been rhinoceroses, but we got lucky this week?”

It’s too easy to dismiss all this stuff as mere anti-intellectualism – to view it simply as unease with the process of gaining knowledge and engaging in rational thought. What it seems to be instead is overt, outright hostility to thought and the accumulation of knowledge. It’s millions of people — many of whom just HAVE to be smarter than Rick Perry — essentially saying, “If you revere knowledge and logic, then you’re obviously not the kind of person that I want to see hold public office.”

The other aspect of the Republican primary process that seems profoundly weird is the sight of people who profess to be conservatives who love the U. S. Constitution clamoring to change that document – and then missing entirely the breathtaking degree of contradiction in those competing values. It’s like ordering a pizza with sausage and chocolate sauce. If you’re a conservative, then you’re supposed to be reluctant to change anything. That should go double for the document that serves as the very foundation of our republic. So, if you want to change the Constitution to ban abortion and force a balanced budget, then go for it, but don’t call yourself a conservative as you do it.

Ambrose Bierce vanished in Mexico nearly a century ago, while he was covering the Pancho Villa revolution there. Too bad. Quite clearly, his book needs a sweeping update.

The Land of Opportunity…by Dan Lynch

The sticker was right there in front of me, on the left side of the bumper on a Korean sedan. It read: “Republican: Because some of us have to work.” At the other end of the bumper was another sticker: “Work harder! Millions on welfare depend on you.”

I thought to myself, “If you want to see more Americans go to work, then buy an American car.” Also, I’m sure that the driver has no idea that the vast bulk of welfare recipients are kids. The fact is, though, that these are old sentiments in American thought. They’re based on the premise that people who take government help are lazy – that they’re poor because they deserve poverty, that they brought on their poverty through self-indulgence and bad behavior and that the poor are unworthy of public support.

In some cases, by the way, that’s true. Having out-of-wedlock babies is almost always a ticket to poverty for everybody involved. Generally, though, it’s not true. Those old sentiments have their roots in Protestantism. John Calvin, one of the early Protestant thinkers and writers, revered work as the best path to a virtuous life and, therefore, to Heaven. The American Revolution was designed to replace the rule of nobility with the rule of the people. The revolutionaries thought they were creating a classless society. From the beginning, however, people with money – most of it inherited money — assumed power and held onto it until Andrew Jackson, a truly self-made man, came along decades later.

Since then, this country has seen an endless stream of self-made rich people – the big ranchers of the old west, the merchants and the money men of the east, industrialists and investors, the technical geniuses of the last 50 years. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet – self-made skillionaires all. If they can make it, then others can make it, right? Isn’t that the American dream?

This really was, until fairly recently, a country where the pathway to success was clear and open. The problem is that’s no longer true – or, at least, it’s nowhere as true as it once was. Today, the lands of true opportunity lay on other continents. More surprising yet, they also lay in the ossified, semi-socialist nations of Western Europe.

At least five large studies in recent years have found Americans to be less likely to climb economically than citizens of other industrialized nations. A study led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised on the lowest rung of the economic ladder never leave there as adults. In Denmark, 25 per cent of men get out of poverty. In Britain, a country with an iron-clad social class system, 30 per cent fight their way out as adults.

In this country, only 8 per cent of American men raised in poverty climb to the top fifth of incomes. In Britain, 12 percent of poor kids reach the top 20 per cent of incomes. In Denmark, it’s 14 per cent.

Well, that must be because the poverty-stricken Americans don’t do the right thing. They reject the chance to get good educations, for example. The problem with that logic is that most new American college graduates are either unemployed or work in jobs that don’t require a degree. They carry an average college debt of about 28 grand. The overall youth unemployment rate tops 18 per cent. Most of these kids will be a long, long time climbing into the middle class, if ever. That’s why about 85 per cent of them are still living with Mom and Dad.

That’s not true of the rich kids, though. About 62 percent of Americans raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in that group, according to the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. A slightly larger percentage of people born in poverty stay there, too. What it boils down to is that if your daddy is rich, the odds are 2-1 in favor of you being rich, too. If your daddy is poor, well, the odds are 2-1 that you’ll be poor as well.

Meanwhile, whenever anybody talks about higher taxes on the rich, who have more money than they ever did and pay lower taxes than they ever have, politicians howl about the evils of class warfare, as though class doesn’t exist in this country. It’s time to put that fiction to bed. Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, et al, saw to it that we have no kings, dukes or earls, but some Americans are born with money they never earned while statistics demonstrate that many, many others are born with no realistic chance to earn any.

This is why so many Americans complain about the stacked deck, about the ingrained unfairness of the system, about the people with money enough to elect the politician of their choice controlling every public policy decision our government makes. And, meanwhile, people who need help from their fellow citizens are reviled on bumper stickers by the hapless working stiffs who believe, against all the available evidence, that the country is held tightly in the grip of some imaginary, all-powerful liberal tyranny bent on impoverishing those lucky enough to still have jobs in this rotten economy we’re now living through.

As this brutal presidential campaign grinds on, I hope that some of these clowns running for office start to deal with issues like this.

What I Learned This Year…by Dan Lynch

If you reach the end of a year and you haven’t learned or noticed anything new, you’re in trouble. As a lifetime student of the democratic process, and living now in the hardest economic period that I’ve ever seen, I’ve noticed and learned some things in 2011 that both encourage and depress me. Here are a few of them:

1) Historically, we Americans have always been an optimistic people with faith in the future. That seems to be less true today than in any other period in my lifetime. The polls show us that. We’re not supposed to be that way. Most of us need to buck up a bit and buckle down on digging out of this hole we’re in.

2) Too many of us seem to think that our path to a better future lies in reverting to the past – in many cases to a past that none of us really lived through and view through a filter of ignorance and political lies about history. This was not a better country before unions came along. In fact, it was a better country when unions were stronger. This was not a better country before the income tax or before Social Security. This was not a better country before ordinary people had the means to get medical care. This was not a better country when only a handful of us could go to college to put up with left-wing professors challenging our parents’ value systems. College, whatever its failings, taught us how to sort out all that.

3) Some things were better in the past. We were better off when we forced kids in school to learn or flunk rather than just pushing them through regardless of what they didn’t learn. We were better off when we weren’t producing so many out-of-wedlock babies, when the family was stronger. We were better off before widespread drug use. We were better off before the poverty-stricken nations of the world began to industrialize and compete with us so vigorously. We no longer have to eat everything on our plates because people are starving in China, although too many of us do that anyway. We just weren’t ready for any of that.

4) I haven’t belonged to a political party in 30 years or so. The left wing of the Democratic Party got so wacko then that I couldn’t be part of the same crowd. Both parties are different as we enter 2012. The old Democratic Party coalition of urban left-wingers, blue-collar workers and Bible-thumping, hard-core racist rural southerners is no more. The southerners and many of the blue-collar people are now Republicans, and the moderate Republicans of the suburbs are now independents or Democrats. Independents like me, the fastest-growing segment of the population, can go either way in a general election. Ultimately, we tend to go with whichever candidate seems the least stupid and/or crazy.

5) This would be a better country if more people knew its real history. The lying politicians don’t help with this. Not long ago, Newt Gingrich, who holds a doctorate in history, falsely claimed that the U. S. Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision “ruled that slavery extended to the whole country.” It did not. The Dred Scott ruling stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in new territories, but it stopped short of applying the ruling to all states. Blacks had been free, voting citizens in five of the original 13 states. Gingrich also claimed that President Lincoln “explicitly instructed his administration to not enforce Dred Scott.” By the time Lincoln had assumed office, about a half dozen southern states already had seceded, and the Civil War broke out about five weeks later. Lincoln never told anybody in his administration to ignore Dred Scott. Instead, he told everybody to take cover.

6) Politics was uniquely nasty in this country during the 1800s, but it’s nastier now than I recall it being during the 1900s. These days, fewer and fewer people – ordinary people, not just the lying politicians – seem able to conduct a political conversation on its merits. Instead, they attack anybody who expresses an idea or view with which they disagree as an evil person. You see that in blog comments on every Web site. The non-thinkers don’t muster data to refute arguments they dislike; instead, they call those ideas and the people who hold them vile names. That’s precisely the sort of thinking found in terrorists – people who believe that the rightness of their cause makes anybody who doesn’t see the world precisely as they do an evil person. And that evil, of course, makes it okay to say or do virtually anything to them. Many right-wingers are like that. So are some left-wingers, but there are fewer of them to begin with.

7) Anybody who believes that everybody to the left of them is a liberal or anybody to their right is a Nazi is nobody with whom you should attempt to hold a serious conversation. They just aren’t up to it emotionally.

Leave Bad Enough Alone…by Dan Lynch

Everybody has the perfect solution. I love listening to it when they start in.

In this case, the guy was a friend of some years’ standing. He lives in Syracuse. He was complaining because Onondaga County was giving away clean needles to drug addicts.

“Why encourage them?” he was saying.

So, I asked him, “What do you pay in property taxes?”

“About nine grand a year.”

“About a third of that, I would guess, is the county’s share of Medicaid costs,” I told him. “A lot of that goes to care for formerly middle-class old people in nursing homes, but a lot of it also goes to care for junkies who get AIDS from dirty needles. AIDS treatment is enormously expensive, and it’s not as though they’ll stop shooting up. They’re addicted, remember? So, you can stop giving them the clean needles, and you can then watch your property taxes skyrocket to treat the junkies after they get AIDS.”

“You could let them die,” he pointed out. “They did it to themselves.”

“Yeah, but the hospitals will treat them whether you like it or not, and the hospitals will get reimbursed by the government. We have a policy in this country: We don’t let people just die without medical care, even the morons. We do that because we’re Americans.”

“I guess,” he said in resignation.

“There’s no perfect solution to any of these problems,” I said. “There are only solutions that aren’t as bad as some other solution and better than the problem. Clean needles for junkies isn’t a good idea. It’s just the best of a bunch of other bad ideas.”

That conversation took place a few years ago. I was reminded of it the other night when I was talking to somebody else about how annoying it is when women have out-of-wedlock babies to increase their welfare payments. Maybe, the person I was talking to suggested, these teenage welfare mothers shouldn’t get any more money from welfare when they have new kids.

“Well,” I said, “I had occasion to look up some of that stuff not all that long ago. First, it isn’t the kid’s fault that it was born and needs to eat and needs a roof over its head. Second, almost half of welfare mothers have only one kid. Ten per cent have four or more, but about a third of those welfare mothers have only two kids and only about 15 per cent have three. Also, three-quarters of welfare mothers are in their 20s or 30s. Teenage welfare mothers make up more like 8 per cent of that population.”

What is a problem, I said, is that the vast majority of these poor mothers never had a husband, but that problem was caused largely by a guy named Bob Byrd, who figured that he had the perfect solution to the welfare problem.

Bob Byrd died last year at 92. He’d spent more years in Congress – 57 of them — than any of the 10,000 men and women who’ve been elected to that job in the country’s history. He first got elected from West Virginia because he’d been a big wheel in the Klan down there. He once wrote, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

Byrd filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 14 hours and voted against both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, the only two black U. S. Supreme Court nominees in history. When he became head of the District of Columbia Committee in Congress, he pushed through the “Man in the House Rule.” That cut off welfare payments to any household with an able-bodied man in residence. Later, the courts threw out that rule on the ground that it violated the equal protection under the law clause of the U.S. Constitution.

By the time the courts did that, though, Byrd had pretty much destroyed marriage among the poor and had done enormous violence to the black family in America. Fathers who couldn’t find work had a choice: They could either get out or watch their kids starve.

What’s interesting is how the value system of the poor then spread to the rest of society. In 1960, only 5.3 per cent of births in this country were to single mothers. Now the out-of-wedlock birth rate is more like 40 per cent. And marriage is totally out of fashion these days. The number of married couples dropped five percent between 2009 and 2010 and has declined by more than 20 percent since 1960. Not that these people aren’t having kids, though. That’s what Bob Byrd wrought with his perfect solution to the welfare problem.

Moral of the story? Some problems just aren’t going away. Screw around with them too much, and you’ll only make things worse.

The Modern Malady – All Opinion & Very Little Fact…by Dan Lynch

“I’m a conservative,” he was saying to me. “I’m a proud one, too.”

I was in an auto salvage operation looking for a part for a car – a part that couldn’t be had new, by the way, even though the car is only five years old. Ever since General Motors went into bankruptcy, getting new GM parts has been a nightmare, the repair shop owner told me. Apparently, when GM went belly up, so did a number of its suppliers.

This big, white-haired guy was behind the counter of the salvage operation, extolling the virtues of Newt Gingrich. I asked him where he was coming from. That’s when he told me he was a conservative.

“And who are you gonna vote for?” he demanded – just a bit bellicosely, I decided.

“I have no idea,” I told him. “I’m an independent, so I can’t vote in anybody’s primary. And before I vote for President next November I want to hear a campaign. I want to hear what these people have to say about fixing unemployment, about breaking up the banks that are too big to fail, about the national debt and foreign policy. If you know who you’re going to vote for now, that means that you’re a straight party voter, and that means that you’re one of the people who’ve screwed up the country.”

“What?” he said. “The people who belong to political parties have screwed up the country?”

I said to him, “Did you ever hear of a guy named George Washington?”

“Yeah, once or twice.”

“Did you ever read his farewell address – the speech he gave when he left office?”

“Which part of it?” he wanted to know.

“Any part of it?”

“Well,” he said more quietly, “not that I remember. Washington was a conservative, too, though.”

I took a deep breath and kept my mouth shut for a moment while I struggled to keep the top of my skull from blowing off into the ceiling.

“Actually,” I told this guy finally, “Washington wasn’t even a liberal. He was a radical. So were all those guys – Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, the whole crowd. They were way past left-wing. They were bleeping revolutionaries.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I guess they were at that.”

“Anyway, what Washington did on his way out the door was to warn everybody not to get together in political parties. He said it’s only natural for people to want to get organized to get things done, but he warned that the elevation of one party over the other in an election could lead to ‘despotism.’ He was pretty emphatic about it, too. Political domination by one party could lead to war, he said.”

“So, what happened?” the guy asked me. “We’ve always had political parties.”

“You bet. They haven’t always been the same parties. After Washington left, the two parties were the Federalists and the Democratic-Republican party. The parties squared off against each other the instant Washington walked out the door to go back to Mount Vernon. His desk chair was still warm. It has been political warfare ever since. Washington was absolutely right, only nobody listened to him.”

“Well, we got ‘em now,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied, “and they make it impossible to get anything done. Republicans in Congress are so afraid of the right in primaries and Democrats are so afraid of the left that the parties can’t get together on any kind of deal to fix anything that’s wrong.”

“Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all,” he argued.

“Sometimes that’s true,” I agreed, “but take a look at who our heroic figures in American history are. From the beginning, the people we’ve honored were the people who made big changes – the people who valued progress over keeping things the way they were or returning them to the way things were before then. That’s who Washington was, who Jefferson was, who Lincoln was, who Roosevelt was. The people who wanted things to stay the same were the conservatives. When they ran things, nothing got better. Name one conservative President people remember as a hero.”

“Reagan,” he said.

“It’s too soon to say that,” I told him. “The verdict of history isn’t in on Reagan yet. By the time it is, we’ll both be dead. The only fair way to judge a President is judgment by a later generation. John F. Kennedy is an example of that. He doesn’t look quite as good today as he did 50 years ago, does he?”

“Lincoln,” he argued.

“A civil war started when he got elected,” I said, “which proved Washington’s point about political parties. Oh, and Lincoln freed the slaves, too. Talk about big government. Lincoln was nobody’s conservative.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m one. Nothing you had to say has changed my mind on anything.”

“Yeah,” I told him, “and that’s the problem. Nobody changes anybody’s mind on anything any more. Sort of reminds me of what I’ve read about 1861.”

“What happened then?” he asked.

“Nothing I’m going to take up your time with,” I said.

Fixing Wall Street With a Dose of Real Capitalism…by Dan Lynch

Every time one of the Republican presidential candidates is asked about the Occupy Wall Street movement, the candidate expresses wonderment over what these people want and suggests that they occupy Pennsylvania Avenue instead.

It’s not a bad point, actually. The other day, on TV, they showed a Wall Street occupier waving a sign reading, “Tax the Rich.” If that’s what you want, then why are you waving your sign in lower Manhattan? Wall Street doesn’t tax anybody, especially itself. That’s what politicians do.

Moreover, if history is any guide, neither party is going to do that. The Republicans are shameless in their legs-in-the-air whoredom to big business, especially the financial industry. The Democrats aren’t much better.

Jim Webb, the Virginia Democrat who has decided to leave the U. S. Senate in apparent disgust and despair, wanted to raise the 15 per cent capital gains tax that allows Warren Buffet to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary, who lives on salary and not investment profits. That lower capital gains tax rate is one of the factors that makes the rich rich to begin with and helps them stay that way. Webb’s Democratic party, which controls the Senate, refused to do that.

Webb also pushed a bill last year to raise billions in new taxes on executives of financial institutions that received at least $5 billion in federal bailout money. That plan also never came up for a vote.

The people stomping around Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, Academy Park in Albany and other locations around the country have a legitimate grudge. The Wall Street people were largely responsible for this financial crisis that has one in five people out of work and one in five homeowners in the country owing more on their mortgages than their house is worth. And the Wall Street people whose recklessness created the crisis have prospered spectacularly ever since the taxpayers bailed them out to the tune of nearly a trillion bucks. Meanwhile, many of those taxpayers have sunk into financial ruin.

But raging around public places, waving signs and peeing on bushes doesn’t accomplish much – especially if you’re not sure what you want to accomplish in the first place. If the Occupy Wall Streeters would like a little clarity on this issue, here it is:

After the dust settled on the financial crisis and the last presidential election, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank bill. In simple terms, it did the following:

1) Consolidated regulatory agencies;

2) Tried to create comprehensive regulation of financial markets, including increased transparency of derivatives, the sort of securities that triggered the crisis;

3) Created a new consumer protection agency and strengthened investor protection;

4) Created some stronger tools for managing financial crises, and

5) Required improved accounting and tightened regulation of credit rating agencies.

Later on, at President Obama’s request, Congress added a measure that forbids banks in which ordinary people deposit money from investing more than 3% of their basic capital in private equity and hedge funds and imposed other restrictions on investment practices.

And that solved everything, right? Well, not quite.That legislation ignores the role that government played in creating the crisis. The government helped bring on the recession by keeping interest rates too low when housing prices soared out of sight and by distorting the housing market through lax credit standards used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Moreover, the government permitted some banks to grow so big that their failure would collapse the world economy, and nobody has done a damned thing to fix that – not the Republicans, of course, but not the Democrats, either.

More than three years after the financial crisis began and Congress had to bail out the banks, the six largest American financial institutions are significantly bigger than they were before. These banks now have assets worth over 66% of this country’s gross domestic product, up from 20% of GDP just a decade ago. Institutions that large pose a persistent and conspicuous risk to the world financial system, and – contrary to what the Republicans claim – offer value to the economy woefully insufficient to justify that risk.

It’s true that the very size of these banks, and the certain knowledge on the part of lenders that the federal government will never let them go belly up, keeps their borrowing costs lower by about half a per cent. The banks maintain that they need that borrowing edge to compete against foreign banks. The only problem with that argument is that foreign governments are cracking down on their banks in a big way. Among other things, governments in Switzerland and the United Kingdom are making their banks retain more capital as a hedge against risky investments.

Oh, but wait a minute. If the government forces the big banks to break into smaller pieces so the taxpayers can ignore them if they fail, isn’t that socialism? Well, that’s true only if you believe that antitrust laws, enacted more than a century ago, constitute socialism. And keeping banks small enough to fall victim to capitalism if they screw up strikes me as true capitalism. As of now, the banks enjoy the benefits of capitalism without its risks because they know that the taxpayers, in a pinch, will save them through socialism.

Hedge funds and private equity funds go down all the time when they screw up. Who cares? They’re not too big to fail. Make the banks live the same way.

And ordering them to break up isn’t the only way to solve the problem. Another would be to do what the Brits are considering doing – imposing a hefty tax on banks whose size exceeds a certain percentage of the nation’s economy. Proceeds from that tax could then go into a special reserve fund to bail out banks too big to be permitted to fail. You also could end the tax deduction that banks get on interest payments to discourage them from borrowing so much.

The reality is that there exist all sorts of solutions to the problems of a banking industry grown so enormously fat that if they topple they flatten the entire economy when they come crashing down. There exist also all sorts of solutions to the problem of income inequality that now threatens to destroy the American middle class, not the least of which is to tax income earned through investment more justly compared to income earned through labor.

What are the odds of any of that happening with the bought-and-paid-for politicians we have in both parties in Washington right now?

Hold on there. Didn’t I just spot a pig come flying by?

“Palin” by Comparison… by Dan Lynch

Normally, I let individual politicians say what they want to say without comment from me. Enough people understand by now that these people will say whatever they think their target audience wants to hear.

I’ll make this exception, though, this time. I’ll do it for Sarah Palin. Why? Because she routinely has demonstrated a public capacity for missing the point that’s so staggering, so breathtaking in its magnitude, so awe-inspiring in its sheer scope, that it borders on some sort of misguided, nit-witted grandeur.

So, the other day Palin was in Lake Buena Vista, Fl., talking to a bunch of Republican political contributors, and she took that occasion to say that the Occupy Wall Street crowd is only after “a bailout” from the government.

Well, excuuuuuuussse me, but I was under the impression that the Occupy Wall Street crowd was complaining because they can’t find paying jobs. I have that impression of their desires because – pay attention, now, Governor Palin – I actually READ A NEWSPAPER NOW AND THEN!

There’s little question that Sarah Palin is a talented woman. She has charm, warmth and a gift for pushing the right buttons with blue-collar, Joe-the-Plumber types who don’t really understand what’s going on but have plenty of opinions about it. It’s my distinct impression, though, that if she actually were to try to read more than two or three sentences at a stretch her head might explode like the bomb the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima. I base that assessment on what I’ve heard her say on TV about Paul Revere – you might want to look that up, by the way – and the opening shots of the American Revolution. (Google that one, too, if you want a real chuckle.)

Look, there are plenty of complaints to be leveled against the Occupy Wall Streeters. Too many of them seem to be Jew haters. That’s a disease of the left these days more than of the right. Some of them are more or less out-and-out commies. Some are every bit as nuts just on general principles as some of the loonies who showed up at the Tea Party rallies. They’re also pushing too hard now that they’ve made their point in cities across the country. For them, it’s time to settle down and get organized, as the Tea Party got organized before them.

Most of them, though, are just people who believe that Wall Street was largely responsible for the recession that has left 15 million people out of work in this country. Most of them simply want to find regular jobs and earn a paycheck. Most of them feel that this has gone from the Land of Opportunity to a land divided more and more into poor and rich – extremely rich, actually. And, unlike previous generations of Americans brimming over with optimism and faith in the system, they believe that if you weren’t rich when the recession hit, you never will be.

Their big complaint is that that the political system is now so frozen with partisanship and so tightly controlled by big money that it doesn’t work for most Americans – that it instead works mainly to aid the super rich in becoming ever richer. Like the Tea Partiers, they’re horrified that the government gave the reckless Wall Street bankers nearly a trillion bucks in loans with no strings at all and that the Wall Street barons are now rolling in cash while working class people are losing their homes and savings.

The big differences between the two groups are age – the Tea Partiers skew older – and education. The Occupy Wall Streeters have more schooling, and they have the college loan bills to prove it. But they don’t have jobs. That’s what they want – not bailouts from the taxpayers like the lords of Wall Street got after they screwed up.

The Tea Partiers at least had a plan to make things better – cut federal spending ruthlessly. Their solution is overly simplistic and depressingly incomplete, but at least they had a solution and the drive to push to make it work. That’s where the Occupy Wall Streeters have fallen down. Maybe, once winter chases them off the streets, they’ll smarten up and start to get organized. And maybe not.

It’s unlikely that Sarah Palin will smarten up, though. If she was going to display any intellectual horsepower my guess is that it would have happened already. She’s still seething because Katie Couric asked her on TV three years ago what she read.

The answer, quite obviously, was pretty much nothing.

When Things Are Rotten…by Dan Lynch

We go back a long way — friends since we were 13. He just got back from Italy. He was jarred by what he saw there.

“In Florence,” he told me, “we got in the middle of an enormous protest – thousands of young people in red carrying red banners protesting the greed and corruption of Italian institutions. Cababimieri and politzei were out in full force.

“It wasn’t an anomaly,” he said. “Everywhere we went, 20-somethings were just wandering around like stray dogs … something big is about to happen to the world, and I saw and heard no plan for social order when it happens. I cannot describe the discontent other than it reminds me of a sweeping international remake of “Dr. Zhivago.’”

He might be right. At the moment, Italy’s unemployment rate is 7.9 per cent, way too high but considerably lower than our 9.1 per cent. Between 1983 and last year, however, Italy’s unemployment rate averaged 9 per cent. Since the true unemployment rate is really almost twice the official rate, that means that an entire generation of Italians came of age at a time when nearly one in five of them couldn’t find a decent job. They’re seriously annoyed at that.

We Americans now seem to have entered a comparable crisis. That’s what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are all about. They’re about the recognition on the part of most people that something has gone horribly wrong with the American Dream. For too many people these days, the path to success is strewn with obstacles. And I say “most people” because that’s what the polls show us.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows that nearly half of all Americans think that the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects the views of most Americans. Two-thirds of Americans believe that our rotten economy will get even worse. Two out of three Americans believe that wealth should be distributed more evenly in this country. Seven in 10 Americans believe that the policies of Congressional Republicans favor the rich. Two-thirds object to tax cuts for corporations and want higher income taxes on millionaires
.
Nine in 10 Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing. Three in four say that the country is on the wrong track. About 85 per cent disapprove of Congress.

Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just put out a report based on income tax filings and census data that tells us something that we all suspected – that the top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades. The study shows that average inflation-adjusted after-tax income grew by 275 percent for the 1 percent of the population with the highest incomes. For others in the top 20 percent of the population, average real after-tax household income grew by 65 percent. For the 60 per cent of U. S. households in the middle of the income scale, household income increased just under 40 percent. For the poorest fifth of the population, it rose 18 percent.

In short, the rich have never been richer, the poor never have been poorer in comparison to everybody else and working people are losing to an extent not seen by anybody in this society except the very, very old. Seven decades of broad-based American prosperity has been wiped out. And nobody can see even a glimmer of light at the end of this long, dark tunnel to nowhere.

The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street people openly despise one another – interesting when you consider that each group recognizes similar problems. Each decries joblessness. Each places a good deal of blame on Wall Street for the worldwide financial crisis that hit in late 2007. Each denounces politicians who directed obscene sums in tax dollars to Wall Street to bail out the reckless financiers whose hubris contributed so heavily to the current disaster. Each sees the barons of Wall Street financial operations now growing ever richer while the masses strain to pay the electric bill.

Only one example: Jamie Dimon, boss of JP MorganChase. In 2009, after his firm took $25 billion or so from the feds, he was paid $1.3 million in 2009. Last year he got $20.8 million along with $17 million in stock and options. And just how did your income fare between 2009 and 2010?

But the Tea Partiers call the Occupy Wall Streeters communists, and the Occupy Wall Streeters call the Tea Party fascists – precisely the two groups who fought it out during the long, dismal period of German economic crisis between World War I and World War II, with the Nazis eventually winning out. If that parallel doesn’t frighten you, it should. Pick up a history book, do a little reading and you’ll end up even more frightened.

Are there solutions to this? Maybe, if the public can get together to the point where politicians are too terrified not to find solutions. But no solution will mean anything until and unless the politicians are willing to keep this from happening again – until they make certain that no business or financial entity remains too big to fail. And the people who make our laws have refused to do that because both political parties are bought-and-paid-for subsidiaries of the firms controlled by the Wall Street magnates.

I’ll soon offer some thoughts on what those solutions might be, but it won’t be here. I’ve enjoyed my renewed connection to the newspaper where I’d spent most of my career as a reporter, editor and columnist, but I’m now moving this blog to my own Web site, forpeoplewhothink.com. There, you’ll also have access to some of the documentary films and the books that I’ve been involved in creating.

I also plan to write more often for forpeoplewhothink.com than I’ve written here because we’re now living in perilous times that deserve more serious thought from all of us about how to get out of this mess.

Here’s Looking at You…. by Dan Lynch

Here’s Looking at You …

October 19, 2011 at 10:32

The first person I thought of when I heard about the flap between Elizabeth Warren and George Will was Rick Blaine.

Warren, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy, said that people who make big bucks in business in this country owe much of that success to the government’s contributions in the form of schooling, public utilities, police and fire protection. That, she said, is what makes progressive taxation fair, especially at a time when less fortunate people are suffering so conspicuously.

George F. Will, conservative thinker and columnist, responded that Warren’s “collectivist” view is “antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government – including such public goods as roads, schools and police – is instituted to faciliate individual striving, a.k.a., the pursuit of happiness.”

All I could of was, “How would Rick react to all that?”

One of American cinema’s most memorable characters is Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in “Casablanca.” World-weary and proudly cynical as war looms between the United States and Hitler’s Germany, saloon owner Blaine early in the film describes his nationality as “drunkard.” The only cause that interests him, he proclaims early in the movie, is him.

By film’s end, though, Rick has undergone a striking change of heart. At Casablanca’s airport, he tells his girlfriend, Ilsa, that she must go off with her Czech freedom fighter husband and support him in his noble task of battling the Nazis. She can’t run off with Rick and spend the rest of her life with him, as they’d planned. Rick, too, plans to fight the Nazis.

Ilsa is shocked at Rick’s sudden flip-flop. She says, “But what about us? …I said I would never leave you.”

Rick then tells her, “And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world…”

The America of 1942, a nation of rugged individualists if ever there was one, loved that movie. It got the Oscar. Its theme was self-sacrifice – the subjugation of individual self-interest to the welfare of the larger community in time of crisis. Yeah, sure, everybody understood and sympathized with Rick’s early self-focus in a difficult, dangerous and treacherous world, but that film hit the screen during an era when Americans, regardless of their political views, understood that in time of national crisis we’re all in this together – and that we all need one another for most of us to succeed in the long run.

That, ultimately, is what civilization is about. That’s why human beings got together in the first place. That’s essentially Elizabeth Warren’s point when she maintains that people who succeed conspicuously in this society owe a big portion of that success to the benefits that civilized society provides. George Will condemns that view as an example of “the collectivist agenda.” I don’t know if he would similarly characterize public sewerage systems, but that’s the logical extension of his point of view.

Will’s argument is that government’s sole purpose is to “facilitate individual striving.” That’s certainly one purpose of the government created by Madison, Franklin, et al, but hardly the only purpose. The best indication of what the Framers had in mind as government’s proper role is to be found in what they wrote about that role.

The purpose of the federal government, they wrote in the Constitution’s preamble, is to “… establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty …”

Justice is like beauty; it exists in the eye of the beholder. That whole domestic tranquility thing suffered a bit of a setback in 1861. It’s clear, however, that the Framers were at least as concerned with the general welfare as they were with individual liberty. Quite clearly, what they were after was a fair and rational balancing of those interests when they come into conflict, as will often occur in discussions of taxation and government power.

It’s absurd, however, for anybody to argue seriously that the creators of this nation did not expect some sacrifice on the part of some citizens for the benefit of all citizens. The Framers were exceedingly smart guys. If that’s what they’d meant, that’s what they would have written; they didn’t.

That doesn’t mean that the general citizenry should enjoy a bottomless entitlement to the wealth accumulated by productive people, and only a tiny percentage of Americans believe that it should. It also does not mean that productive people can claim all the credit for their success for themselves. Herman Cain, who proclaimed the other day that if you’re not rich it’s your own fault, is a classic example. He’s clearly a bright, purposeful, energetic guy, but would Herman Cain have become Herman Cain without the Civil Rights Act, without the Voting Rights Act, without the actions taken by the federal government to clear the path to success for African Americans?

The fact is that Herman Cain might well have become Herman Cain without those government actions, but the odds would have been longer for him – considerably longer, actually. It says something not terribly complimentary about Herman Cain that he lacks either the character or the self-awareness to acknowledge that.

This battle over what America really stands for has raged on since long before I drew my first breath. It’s essentially a battle between people who respect the obligation of membership in a larger community and people whose general mindset is, “Screw everybody but me.”

That’s why the Americans of 1942 fell in love with Rick Blaine’s epiphany that life in the real world involved something more than his own desires. At the time, Americans faced a common enemy whose danger to all was obvious even to the most dim-witted among us.

Today, this country has 25 million people looking for fulltime jobs – one out of five of us in the workforce. Yet a disturbingly high number of the four out of five people who still have jobs and income don’t grasp how that situation can adversely affect them.

They lack the knowledge of history to understand how corrosive and universally devastating large-scale, long-term unemployment can be to a society. They don’t grasp the dangers of immense disparities in wealth – of people at the top of the heap getting richer and richer over decades while the masses grow ever poorer, day by grinding day.

They know nothing about the forces that gave birth to the French Revolution or to the Nazis a century and a half later. They simply don’t see how somebody else’s enormous economic problem is their problem, too.

So, while loudly annunciating their fervent love of country, they hide behind utterly false interpretations of this nation’s founding principles. They ignore words meticulously chosen by the Framers, and they cling to the totally fallacious view that success involves only effort, drive and individual commitment. To them, there’s no such thing as luck, no such thing as disadvantage, no virtue in community, no universal benefit to be derived from a public support system designed with the goal of giving everybody an equal chance.

“Casablanca” was fiction – great fiction that celebrated the concepts of altruism and mutual obligation. The mindset that I’ve just described is also fiction.

But it’s hardly reassuring as a window on human nature.

PIETY and the POOR

October 12, 2011 at 5:19 pm by Dan Lynch

As a kid growing up in a small city in upstate New York, I was raised in a world divided into Catholics, Protestants and Jews.

I knew why the Jews weren’t Catholics, like my family. They didn’t buy the story that Jesus was the son of God. I wasn’t sure why all those Protestants weren’t Catholics, like normal people. They came in a perplexing variety of flavors – Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Quakers, Assembly of God, Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and a whole bunch of other sects whose belief systems were utterly mysterious to me.

There also was a brick building near my elementary school with a sign proclaiming it to be the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. My parents told me that the people who went to church there were called Mormons and that they were Protestants, too. To me, that just meant that they didn’t have to smear their foreheads with ashes once a year, as I did.

So, imagine my surprise the other day when I discovered that Mormons aren’t Christians. I learned that when I turned on the TV and saw this minister from Texas, Robert Jeffress, saying that Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is part of a “cult” and that, “I just do not believe that we as conservative Christians can expect him to stand strong for the issues that are important to us.”

Jeffress added that even though the U.S. Constitution says explicitly that there should be no religious test for pubic office, “I do not think evangelical voters are going to be motivated to go out and vote for Mitt Romney … Private citizens can impose all kinds of religious tests.”

Well, he’s certainly right about that. You can vote for or against somebody for any reason – because he’s bald or fat, because he’s a jerk, because he goes to the wrong church or goes to no church at all. You can vote against him because he’s a her, or would like to be, or because he’s the wrong color. Hey, this is America. Believe what you want and vote accordingly.

But all this stuff about religion and politics confuses me, frankly. Herman Cain is a perfect example of what I mean. He’s an associate minister at Antioch Baptist Church North in the Atlanta suburbs. The other day a CNN reporter asked him about all these demonstrations against the Wall Street people, and he said, “… If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself … it is someone’s fault if they failed.”

Growing up Catholic, I never saw much of the Bible as a kid. The Church never encouraged us to read it. That’s what priests were for. Nonetheless, I found myself curious about how Jesus might react to that view of poor people expressed by a man who takes religion seriously enough to become a minister. So, I looked up some of what the Bible says about poor people. Here’s what I found:

Proverbs 14:21
He who despises his neighbor sins, but blessed is he who is kind to the needy.

Proverbs 14:31
He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.

Proverbs 19:17
He who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and He will reward him for what he has done.

Proverbs 21:13
If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered.

Proverbs 22:9
A generous man will himself be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor.

Proverbs 28:27
He who gives to the poor will lack nothing, but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses.

Proverbs 31:8-9
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.

Isaiah 58:6-7;10
…if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.

Ezekiel 16:49
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.

And that’s just the Old Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John express the same sentiments.

Luke 14:13 & 14 reads, “ … when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

Matthew 19:21 reads, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”

Matthew also quotes Jesus as saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself. [Matthew 22:39]

So in everything, do to others as you would have them do to you. [Matthew 7:12.]

If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. [Matthew 19:21].

I also read that Rev. Jeffress supposedly operates a megachurch in Dallas, with many thousands of people praying there regularly. I wondered what Jesus might think of an operation like that, so I looked up what Jesus had to say on the topic.

In Matthew 6:6 & 7, Jesus said, “And when thou pray, thou shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou pray, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret …”

So, the whole business can be fairly confusing, I think. And maybe, when we talk about politics, it might be a good idea to leave religion out of it. Apparently, at least some of the people who are deeply into both religion and politics haven’t read the Bible all that closely.

I have a strong hunch that the guy who said that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s would prefer that we handle our democracy that way.