Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Stan Musial (3)
I remember to this day when I opened the pack and pulled out the Stan Musial card in 1959. Oh, if only I had that baseball card today!
Monday, July 30, 2012
Stan Musial (2)
Stan Musial is Polish. Stan Musial grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburg, as did Junior Griffey. The Pirates missed out on him. He started as a limp left-handed pitcher.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Blame the Republicans
Friday, Jul 27, 2012 11:45 AM
Blame the Republicans!
A new book is an incredibly useful primer on our budget crisis, except when it comes to assigning blame for it
By Andrew Leonard
Here are some shocking facts that I learned from “Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget. Where the Trillions Come From, Where They Go, and Why Inaction Imperils Our Future.”
An amazing 64 percent of the 4.4 million employees on the federal payroll are either uniformed military personnel or work for Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security. The U.S. defense budget is “greater than the combined defense budgets of the next 17 largest spenders.”
In 1981 Medicare and Medicaid accounted for 9.5 percent of all federal outlays. Twenty years later, that number had jumped to 25 percent. By 2021, if current trends continue, it will probably hit 31 percent.
“Today, Americans pay less of their income in taxes than citizens of nearly every other developed country.”
“In the early 1950s more than 30 percent of federal revenues came from the corporate income tax — in 2011, 7.9 percent.”
“Red Ink” is an extraordinarily useful book. It is exactly what author David Wessel, economics editor for the Wall Street Journal, claims it to be: “a collection of uncomfortable, indisputable facts showing the unsustainable fiscal course the U.S. government is on.” It is concise, readable and informative. For people unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the federal budget, it should be required reading. For those who already know their way around government finances, it is still a handy resource, but at the same time deeply depressing. Because “Red Ink” is also an extraordinarily frustrating book. Our dire circumstances are undeniable – at some point, we are going to have to pay the piper for living on borrowed money — but the way out of our predicament is much less clear. And at the end of “Red Ink,” one is left wondering: Who is to blame for this mess? Who is stopping us from fixing it?
A disclaimer seems necessary here: My own view, having followed politics closely for my entire adult life, is that Republicans bear more responsibility for our mangled finances than Democrats. And as I started “Red Ink,” one of key questions was whether Wessel’s reporting would support or reject that thesis. After finishing the book, I am even more certain that our deficit debacle is primarily the GOP’s fault (and I’ll lay out my case below) — but my convictions were not influenced by any explicit argument made my Wessel.
Wessel, a member of two Pulitzer-winning teams at the Wall Street Journal, is not very helpful for those seeking to assign primary blame. He performs the remarkable feat of writing about a highly politicized issue without betraying any overt signs of bias. “Red Ink” is a book that treats people like Paul Ryan — the arch-conservative Wisconsin Republican, and chairman of the House Budget Committee — and Paul Krugman — the crusading liberal Nobel-economics-prizewinning New York Times opinion columnist — with equal respect. I suspect partisans of either stripe will feel that their own hero is given due props, while scoffing at the gentle handing of their enemies. Overall there’s a distinct sense of “a pox on both houses” pervading the narrative, and that’s probably something most readers will agree with. It took hard work by both political parties to get us where we are today.
But while it is refreshing to see a topic as complicated — and polarizing — as the federal budget set forth in such a fair-minded, non-polemical manner, the facts as laid out by Wessel do seem to tell a story in which feckless Republicans play an oversize role. The question is, by never stating that outright, is Wessel being cowardly behind a facade of fairness? This is important, because if one side is more to blame than the other, then the obvious next step is to rally political pressure against that side. The position that everybody’s equally to blame becomes a cop-out.
Everyone shares some portion of the blame, that’s for sure. Liberals are often predisposed to pin the responsibility for our current disastrous imbalance between revenue and spending on the awesome destruction wrought by George W. Bush on Bill Clinton’s budget surplus. And there’s plenty of truth to that, of course, all very neatly laid out by Wessel. But our problems go deeper than the hole George W. dug. Even if Bush hadn’t gone on a reckless tax-cut-and-spending binge, we’d still be facing the challenge of how to afford our own government in the long run. Even during the balanced budget years of the Clinton administration, anyone looking ahead could see that existing government commitments to provide healthcare through Medicare and Medicaid were going to pose huge budgetary challenges as the baby boomer generation aged.
Both parties have long been complicit in taking us down a decades-long path where taxes have steadily been cut while that looming healthcare bill continued to grow. Bipartisan consensus — backed up by a voting public that wants its safety net but doesn’t want to pay for it — got us where we are today.
Today, however, as Wessel explains we are witnessing a great ideological clash on how best to avert the coming catastrophe. Republicans want to vastly pare down our social welfare commitments and rely on a competitive, “free” market in healthcare provision to bring costs down. Democrats want to increase revenues to pay for something closer to universal coverage, while using government negotiating leverage to cut costs.
In a theoretical world we can argue ourselves blue in the face over the merits of these different approaches. We can line up our economists, compare ourselves to what other countries are doing, point out how markets tend to fail and governments tend to provide bad incentives. The parties then make their case to the voters, and the people decide which way the country should go. In this theoretical universe, it would be a helpful thing if every voter read “Red Ink” before filling out his or her ballot. It’s great to have a solid grounding in the facts.
But it’s also helpful to review reality, by which I mean the actual record of what the two parties have done while in power to tackle the looming crisis.
Obama passed a healthcare law that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, reduces the deficit. It also includes a passel of measures testing out various cost containment strategies. Liberals hate it for not going far enough, conservatives despise it as socialism, and there’s no guarantee that it will work. But it’s there — a stab at the problem.
In contrast, the last time the Republicans had control of the White House and Congress, their major contribution to our nation’s healthcare policy was to pass a huge expansion to Medicare that included no funding mechanism whatsoever. The Medicare drug prescription benefit is an open-ended commitment that in the long run will cost more than both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And Paul Ryan voted for it.
You really can’t have an argument about healthcare and the budget without confronting this basic truth. Republicans acted utterly irresponsibly when they held power. They expanded the social welfare commitments of the U.S. but provided no funding to pay for them. And there’s absolutely no guarantee that they won’t do so again if they regain power, because their anti-tax ideology allows for no wiggle room when facing the fundamental political fact: Americans like Medicare. They like Social Security. They like unemployment benefits. They will not reelect politicians who screw with those programs.
Let’s go a little further into the mire. Wessel lavishes a lot of praise on the Congressional Budget Office, calling it an institution that, by and large, has remained free from the partisan ideological morass. But he doesn’t acknowledge that during the Obama administration, congressional Republicans have routinely dismissed any CBO analysis that comes to a conclusion they don’t agree with.
It’s very difficult to dwell on this without going apoplectic. Again: Republicans passed an expansion of healthcare without any mechanism to pay for it. That’s pretty bad, from a boosting-the-deficit standpoint. But when Democrats passed their own expansion, funded by a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes that, together, lower the deficit, Republicans just dismissed the numbers as fake.
There’s a reason why we can’t seem to make any progress on our fiscal mess: One of our two political parties has gone nuts.
Wessel explicitly chooses not to make this clear in his treatment of our national budget debacle. It’s easy to understand why: As soon as you position yourself on one side of the political spectrum, you completely lose the attention of everybody who is aligned on the other. Your numbers get dismissed as partisan. This review of “Red Ink” will certainly suffer that fate. And that’s a shame. But it’s not enough to merely explain why “inaction imperils our future.” You also need to explain why there’s inaction in the first place. And that requires taking sides.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Mutual Fund
I bought my first mutual fund last week, and it has only lost money since, along with my retirement account. I need to acclimate to the turns and tides of the market!
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
The Presidential Race
I"ve had to control myself and stop reading the daily back and forth between the two candiates. It's too early and I get upset too easily.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
The Shame
The shame is that in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado, tragedy with renewed discussion of the need for gun control measure in this country. the President has to remain silent if he wants to reelected. Push for gun control measures now and unfortunately President Obama loses. He has no choice but to remain silent. It's a shame, but that's the way it is in this gun happy shoot 'em up country.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
The Political Rhetorical Muddle
by Paul Krugman
July 21, 2012, 5:57 pmComment
The Conservative Onion
Mike Konczal and Jonathan Chait both have good pieces on “You didn’t build that”, the Obama statement that, deliberately misinterpreted, has dominated right-wing discourse these past few days. Go read. But I think both of them miss a couple of tricks.
The first is that both in effect shrug their shoulders over the fact that for several days running the central theme of the Romney campaign has rested on a complete lie. I understand; going on about the dishonesty can get boring. But we should step back often to look at this remarkable spectacle. I really don’t think there’s been anything like this in American political history: a presidential campaign, with a pretty good chance of winning, that is based entirely on cynical lies about what the sitting president has said. No, Obama hasn’t apologized for America; no, he hasn’t denigrated achievement. Yet take away those claims, and there’s nothing left in Romney’s rhetoric.
The other thing that I think needs clarification is that it’s wrong to think of conservatives as having a single argument for their preferred policies. What they offer instead is more like an onion, with layers inside layers; every time you strip away one excuse there’s another one inside.
Thus someone like Paul Ryan starts by claiming to be a deficit hawk. Push him really hard, however, on why in that case he advocates big tax cuts, and he’ll shift to arguing that big government (as opposed to not-paid-for government) is the real problem. (That’s also what happened in my UK debate on Newsnight.) But if you push hard on that, it turns out that there’s yet another layer: the claim that things like taxing the rich to help pay for social insurance are immoral, because people have a right to keep the wealth they created — which is why suggesting that no plutocrat is an island is heresy.
This onion structure is why you should never believe reasonable-sounding conservatives who say that you’re attacking a straw man, that “nobody believes” that wealth creators owe nothing to society. Oh yes they do — it’s usually hidden inside a couple of more socially acceptable excuses, but at their core Ryan and people like him believe that they’re characters in Atlas Shrugged.
By the way, who built the roads in Galt’s Gulch?
July 21, 2012, 5:57 pmComment
The Conservative Onion
Mike Konczal and Jonathan Chait both have good pieces on “You didn’t build that”, the Obama statement that, deliberately misinterpreted, has dominated right-wing discourse these past few days. Go read. But I think both of them miss a couple of tricks.
The first is that both in effect shrug their shoulders over the fact that for several days running the central theme of the Romney campaign has rested on a complete lie. I understand; going on about the dishonesty can get boring. But we should step back often to look at this remarkable spectacle. I really don’t think there’s been anything like this in American political history: a presidential campaign, with a pretty good chance of winning, that is based entirely on cynical lies about what the sitting president has said. No, Obama hasn’t apologized for America; no, he hasn’t denigrated achievement. Yet take away those claims, and there’s nothing left in Romney’s rhetoric.
The other thing that I think needs clarification is that it’s wrong to think of conservatives as having a single argument for their preferred policies. What they offer instead is more like an onion, with layers inside layers; every time you strip away one excuse there’s another one inside.
Thus someone like Paul Ryan starts by claiming to be a deficit hawk. Push him really hard, however, on why in that case he advocates big tax cuts, and he’ll shift to arguing that big government (as opposed to not-paid-for government) is the real problem. (That’s also what happened in my UK debate on Newsnight.) But if you push hard on that, it turns out that there’s yet another layer: the claim that things like taxing the rich to help pay for social insurance are immoral, because people have a right to keep the wealth they created — which is why suggesting that no plutocrat is an island is heresy.
This onion structure is why you should never believe reasonable-sounding conservatives who say that you’re attacking a straw man, that “nobody believes” that wealth creators owe nothing to society. Oh yes they do — it’s usually hidden inside a couple of more socially acceptable excuses, but at their core Ryan and people like him believe that they’re characters in Atlas Shrugged.
By the way, who built the roads in Galt’s Gulch?
It Isn't 1969 Anymore
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: July 15The Washington Post
It’s good that conservatives are finally taking seriously the problems of inequality and declining upward mobility. It’s unfortunate that they often evade the ways in which structural changes in the economy, combined with conservative policies, have made matters worse.
Occupy Wall Street, whatever its future, will always merit praise for placing inequality at the center of our politics. The biggest sign of the Occupiers’ success: Conservatives once stubbornly insisted that inequality wasn’t a problem because the United States was the land of opportunity and upward mobility. Now they are facing the fact that we are by no means the most socially mobile country in the world.
Reports from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others show that social mobility is greater elsewhere, notably in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden and Germany.
What do these countries have in common? Not to put too fine a point on it, all have national policies that are, in right-wing parlance, more “socialist” or (to be precise) social democratic than ours. They guarantee their citizens health insurance. They have stronger union movements and more generous welfare states. They tend to keep higher education more affordable. In most cases, especially Germany’s, they have robust apprenticeship and job training programs. They levy higher taxes.
The lesson from this list is not that cutting back government, gutting unions and reducing taxes on the rich will re-create an America of opportunity. On the contrary, we need more active and thoughtful government policies to become again the nation we claim to be.
We also need to be more candid about the large forces that are buffeting the American middle class. Writing in The Nation about Timothy Noah’s excellent new book, “The Great Divergence,” William Julius Wilson, the distinguished Harvard sociologist, nicely summarized the factors Noah sees as explaining rising disparities of wealth and income.
They included “the increasing importance of a college degree due to the shortage of better-educated workers; trade between the United States and low-wage nations; changes in government policy in labor and finance; and the decline of the labor movement. He also considers the extreme changes in the wage structure of corporations and the financial industry, in which American CEOs typically receive three times the salaries earned by their European counterparts.”
Most conservatives accept the importance of education but then choose to ignore all the other forces Noah describes.
Recently, my friends David Brooks and Michael Gerson used their columns to address the decline in mobility. It’s to the credit of these two conservatives that they did so, yet both found ways of downplaying the challenge inequality poses to conservatism itself.
Brooks cited a fine study by Robert Putnam, also a Harvard scholar, noting that the different parenting styles of the upper middle class and the working class are aggravating inequalities. Brooks’s conclusion: “Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before child-rearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.”
Yes, parenting (including the time crunch that two- or three-income working-class families face) is part of the issue, which is why I also admire Putnam’s study. But the balance in Brooks’s call to arms is entirely false. It’s not 1969 anymore. Progressives — including Wilson, Barack Obama and, if I may say so, yours truly — have been talking about the importance of family breakdown for decades. Brooks rightly acknowledges the need for measures to help those skidding down the class structure. The barrier here is not liberal attitudes toward the family but conservative attitudes toward government.
Gerson also said sensible things about promoting a “broad diffusion of skills and social capital” but then closed by accusing liberals of wanting to “soak the rich” and insisting that “economic redistribution is not the answer.”
Actually, liberals are not for “soaking the rich,” unless you consider the Clinton-era tax rates some kind of socialist bath. And as the experience of the more social democratic countries shows, a modest amount of “economic redistribution” — to offset the radical redistribution toward the very rich of recent decades — can begin the process of restoring the kind of mobility we once bragged about.
My challenge to conservatives worried about inequality is to follow the logic of their concern to what may be some uncomfortable conclusions, especially in an election year.
It’s good that conservatives are finally taking seriously the problems of inequality and declining upward mobility. It’s unfortunate that they often evade the ways in which structural changes in the economy, combined with conservative policies, have made matters worse.
Occupy Wall Street, whatever its future, will always merit praise for placing inequality at the center of our politics. The biggest sign of the Occupiers’ success: Conservatives once stubbornly insisted that inequality wasn’t a problem because the United States was the land of opportunity and upward mobility. Now they are facing the fact that we are by no means the most socially mobile country in the world.
Reports from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others show that social mobility is greater elsewhere, notably in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden and Germany.
What do these countries have in common? Not to put too fine a point on it, all have national policies that are, in right-wing parlance, more “socialist” or (to be precise) social democratic than ours. They guarantee their citizens health insurance. They have stronger union movements and more generous welfare states. They tend to keep higher education more affordable. In most cases, especially Germany’s, they have robust apprenticeship and job training programs. They levy higher taxes.
The lesson from this list is not that cutting back government, gutting unions and reducing taxes on the rich will re-create an America of opportunity. On the contrary, we need more active and thoughtful government policies to become again the nation we claim to be.
We also need to be more candid about the large forces that are buffeting the American middle class. Writing in The Nation about Timothy Noah’s excellent new book, “The Great Divergence,” William Julius Wilson, the distinguished Harvard sociologist, nicely summarized the factors Noah sees as explaining rising disparities of wealth and income.
They included “the increasing importance of a college degree due to the shortage of better-educated workers; trade between the United States and low-wage nations; changes in government policy in labor and finance; and the decline of the labor movement. He also considers the extreme changes in the wage structure of corporations and the financial industry, in which American CEOs typically receive three times the salaries earned by their European counterparts.”
Most conservatives accept the importance of education but then choose to ignore all the other forces Noah describes.
Recently, my friends David Brooks and Michael Gerson used their columns to address the decline in mobility. It’s to the credit of these two conservatives that they did so, yet both found ways of downplaying the challenge inequality poses to conservatism itself.
Brooks cited a fine study by Robert Putnam, also a Harvard scholar, noting that the different parenting styles of the upper middle class and the working class are aggravating inequalities. Brooks’s conclusion: “Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before child-rearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.”
Yes, parenting (including the time crunch that two- or three-income working-class families face) is part of the issue, which is why I also admire Putnam’s study. But the balance in Brooks’s call to arms is entirely false. It’s not 1969 anymore. Progressives — including Wilson, Barack Obama and, if I may say so, yours truly — have been talking about the importance of family breakdown for decades. Brooks rightly acknowledges the need for measures to help those skidding down the class structure. The barrier here is not liberal attitudes toward the family but conservative attitudes toward government.
Gerson also said sensible things about promoting a “broad diffusion of skills and social capital” but then closed by accusing liberals of wanting to “soak the rich” and insisting that “economic redistribution is not the answer.”
Actually, liberals are not for “soaking the rich,” unless you consider the Clinton-era tax rates some kind of socialist bath. And as the experience of the more social democratic countries shows, a modest amount of “economic redistribution” — to offset the radical redistribution toward the very rich of recent decades — can begin the process of restoring the kind of mobility we once bragged about.
My challenge to conservatives worried about inequality is to follow the logic of their concern to what may be some uncomfortable conclusions, especially in an election year.
The Way It Was in 1955
by Paul Krugman
July 21, 2012, 11:27 am7 Comments
Job Creators of 1955
Brad DeLong points us to an amazing Fortune reprint: a portrait of American executives in 1955, back when inequality was much lower and tax rates at the top much higher than they are today. The business leaders of the time led straitened lives by historical standards — they were substantially poorer than the previous generation of executives:
The executive’s home today is likely to be unpretentious and relatively small–perhaps seven rooms and two and a half baths. (Servants are hard to come by and many a vice president’s wife gets along with part-time help. So many have done so for so long, in fact, that they no longer complain much about it.)
The large yacht has also foundered in the sea of progressive taxation. In 1930, Fred Fisher (Bodies), Walter Briggs, and Alfred P. Sloan cruised around in vessels 235 feet long; J. P. Morgan had just built his fourth Corsair (343 feet). Today, seventy-five feet is considered a lot of yacht. One of the biggest yachts launched in the past five years is the ninety-six-foot Rhonda III, built and owned by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp., of Birmingham, Alabama. The Rhonda III cost half a million dollars to build, and the annual bill for keeping a crew aboard her, stocking her, and fueling her runs to around $130,000. As Chairman Robert I. Ingalls Jr. says, only corporations today can own even so comparatively modest a craft. The specifications of the boat that interests the great majority of seagoing executives today are “forty feet, four people, $40,000.” In this tidy vessel the businessman of 1955 is quite happily sea-borne.
According to modern conservative dogma, this kind of punishment of “job creators” should have brought economic progress to a screeching halt. Yet according to Fortune, executives continued to work hard — and the postwar generation was actually a period of economic progress that has never been matched.
Somehow, John Galt never made an appearance.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Great Summary of the Current Political Situation
Michael Tomasky: Obama Is Winning Because of the Shrinking GOP
by Michael Tomasky Jul 15, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
The economy is weak and Americans are unhappy. But Obama’s ahead because the GOP is an aristocratic party that favors the super rich. And Mitt Romney is its perfect poster boy.
Print Email Comments (302) Mitt Romney’s present travails must surely seem shocking and offensive to Republicans, both panjandrums and rank and file alike: “His is a great American success story. How can this be bad? The controversy must be all the fault of that evil liberal media and the Democrat Party!” Well, folks, sorry, but it’s not. If you’re willing to spend two minutes scouring the landscape for explanations rather than enemies, it might strike you that outsourcing is a real issue in American life—millions of citizens have been affected by it, and by definition, none of them for the better. That the ongoing Bain saga is such a shock and outrage to conservatives shows me only that conservatives are profoundly out of touch with the moderate center of the country: It helps explain why you selected this man as your nominee, and it further helps explain why he’s losing to an incumbent who, given the current economic conditions, ought to be pretty easy to take out.
Supporters stand in 100-degree temperatures to listen to President Barack Obama speak at a campaign event on the College of Fine Arts Lawn at Carnegie Mellon University July 5, 2012 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
The race is close, and of course Romney has a decent shot at winning. But the fact is that by every measure, he’s behind. He’s behind, a little, in national polls. He’s behind by more in the swing states. And behind by still more in the electoral college conjectures, where Nate Silver gives Obama 294 votes. Obama leads—narrowly, but outside the margin of error—in Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. If he wins those and holds the usual Democratic states—and yes, he’s up in Pennsylvania, where Romney has been sinking fast; only Michigan is really close—he will have won, even with maybe $1.5 billion thrown at him, a not-particularly close election.
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. But the fact is, as I wrote at the beginning of the week, Romney should be six points ahead. At least four. The congressional Republican strategy—disgraceful but successful—of opposing Obama on everything has largely worked. The biggest thing Obama did manage to pass was wildly unpopular, though matters are improving for him a bit on the health-care front. Obama was soundly rebuked in the mid-term elections. And yet for all that and more, Silver has Obama pegged at roughly a 66 percent chance of winning. That’s not insurmountable in July, but if that’s still the number after both conventions, it’s pretty close to over.
Why? One reason is that, as Peter Beinart argued yesterday, Obama is simply a lot more likeable than Romney. Certainly no arguing with that. Blech! But there’s more to it. It’s the whole Republican Party that’s not likeable.
Thomas Jefferson argued roughly that it was in the nature of mankind to divide itself, wherever there be free government, into two basic factions: an aristocratic party that wishes to “draw all powers...into the hands of the higher classes,” as he once put it; and a party that opposes that one, representing the broader people. The GOP has, I admit, done a marvelous job of convincing the media and even some liberals that it is the party of the people, because of its hold on the white working-class majority (a segment that is fast dwindling, by the way—electoral demographer Ruy Teixeira reported recently that this bloc will constitute a sizeable 3 percent less of the electorate this year than it did in 2008—the minority vote will overtake the white working-class by 2016 or certainly 2020).
The GOP has no moderate faction anymore. It’s a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning.
The Republican hold on this bloc is real, but it is, as we all know, completely about race and culture. I say this not to insult these voters. Far from it, in fact. I don’t think they’re stupid people. I think they’re entirely rational and have decided that culture is more important to them than economics, and so they’ve thrown in with the GOP on cultural grounds, even while they must know on some level that the party does not represent them in the least economically. But they accept the deal, and it permits the people who are the real heart and soul of the GOP, the corporate titans and the plutocrats, to call whatever economic shots they wish.
But their crossover appeal, shall we say, is limited. Throw in their lickspittles on Capitol Hill and in the right-wing media, and their neo-Leninist political tactics, and the picture gets even worse. The lot of them look like a bunch of grim Pharisees, and it’s all too obvious that all they really care about is cutting rich people’s taxes. It’s not a coincidence that, just a year after the Republicans took power in the House, and the public had a good chance to size them up, the GOP as of January was at its lowest point in terms of party-identification percentage since 1988, just 27 percent. The Democrats have lost ground, too, but at least they’re still in the low 30s.
Back to Bain. It’s interesting to think back now to the GOP primary. Romney’s Bain experience was nothing but a plus then. Oh, yes, he was attacked on “vulture capitalism” grounds by Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. But those attacks did in Perry and Gingrich, not Romney. They elevated Romney. The base rallied around him at that point, and the establishment ditto. It wasn’t so much that people suddenly decided they loved Romney. They were punishing Gingrich and Perry for resorting to “left-wing” attacks. But if the Bain controversy is hurting Romney, and most indications are that it is, that would appear to mean that more Americans than just left-wingers are taking the issue seriously.
But Republicans high and low couldn’t see this, because the party has no moderate faction anymore. The GOP today is a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning. Its middle has been hollowed out. If it had had a middle, someone within the party might have been able to issue warnings that Romney’s c.v. maybe carried some downsides. This may sound ironic, since Romney is considered the moderate of the group that sought the nomination, but in terms of biography, he’s the least moderate of all of them. In terms of biography, he’s a pretty perfect expression of what the GOP has become.
Mitt might win. A presidential election is a menu with only two options, meat and fish. And if fish has $1.5 billion behind it, and is financing a successful drive to keep meat supporters from being able to vote in key states, then fish can pull out a victory. But the odds are against it for a good reason, a reason that Jefferson identified.
by Michael Tomasky Jul 15, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
The economy is weak and Americans are unhappy. But Obama’s ahead because the GOP is an aristocratic party that favors the super rich. And Mitt Romney is its perfect poster boy.
Print Email Comments (302) Mitt Romney’s present travails must surely seem shocking and offensive to Republicans, both panjandrums and rank and file alike: “His is a great American success story. How can this be bad? The controversy must be all the fault of that evil liberal media and the Democrat Party!” Well, folks, sorry, but it’s not. If you’re willing to spend two minutes scouring the landscape for explanations rather than enemies, it might strike you that outsourcing is a real issue in American life—millions of citizens have been affected by it, and by definition, none of them for the better. That the ongoing Bain saga is such a shock and outrage to conservatives shows me only that conservatives are profoundly out of touch with the moderate center of the country: It helps explain why you selected this man as your nominee, and it further helps explain why he’s losing to an incumbent who, given the current economic conditions, ought to be pretty easy to take out.
Supporters stand in 100-degree temperatures to listen to President Barack Obama speak at a campaign event on the College of Fine Arts Lawn at Carnegie Mellon University July 5, 2012 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
The race is close, and of course Romney has a decent shot at winning. But the fact is that by every measure, he’s behind. He’s behind, a little, in national polls. He’s behind by more in the swing states. And behind by still more in the electoral college conjectures, where Nate Silver gives Obama 294 votes. Obama leads—narrowly, but outside the margin of error—in Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. If he wins those and holds the usual Democratic states—and yes, he’s up in Pennsylvania, where Romney has been sinking fast; only Michigan is really close—he will have won, even with maybe $1.5 billion thrown at him, a not-particularly close election.
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. But the fact is, as I wrote at the beginning of the week, Romney should be six points ahead. At least four. The congressional Republican strategy—disgraceful but successful—of opposing Obama on everything has largely worked. The biggest thing Obama did manage to pass was wildly unpopular, though matters are improving for him a bit on the health-care front. Obama was soundly rebuked in the mid-term elections. And yet for all that and more, Silver has Obama pegged at roughly a 66 percent chance of winning. That’s not insurmountable in July, but if that’s still the number after both conventions, it’s pretty close to over.
Why? One reason is that, as Peter Beinart argued yesterday, Obama is simply a lot more likeable than Romney. Certainly no arguing with that. Blech! But there’s more to it. It’s the whole Republican Party that’s not likeable.
Thomas Jefferson argued roughly that it was in the nature of mankind to divide itself, wherever there be free government, into two basic factions: an aristocratic party that wishes to “draw all powers...into the hands of the higher classes,” as he once put it; and a party that opposes that one, representing the broader people. The GOP has, I admit, done a marvelous job of convincing the media and even some liberals that it is the party of the people, because of its hold on the white working-class majority (a segment that is fast dwindling, by the way—electoral demographer Ruy Teixeira reported recently that this bloc will constitute a sizeable 3 percent less of the electorate this year than it did in 2008—the minority vote will overtake the white working-class by 2016 or certainly 2020).
The GOP has no moderate faction anymore. It’s a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning.
The Republican hold on this bloc is real, but it is, as we all know, completely about race and culture. I say this not to insult these voters. Far from it, in fact. I don’t think they’re stupid people. I think they’re entirely rational and have decided that culture is more important to them than economics, and so they’ve thrown in with the GOP on cultural grounds, even while they must know on some level that the party does not represent them in the least economically. But they accept the deal, and it permits the people who are the real heart and soul of the GOP, the corporate titans and the plutocrats, to call whatever economic shots they wish.
But their crossover appeal, shall we say, is limited. Throw in their lickspittles on Capitol Hill and in the right-wing media, and their neo-Leninist political tactics, and the picture gets even worse. The lot of them look like a bunch of grim Pharisees, and it’s all too obvious that all they really care about is cutting rich people’s taxes. It’s not a coincidence that, just a year after the Republicans took power in the House, and the public had a good chance to size them up, the GOP as of January was at its lowest point in terms of party-identification percentage since 1988, just 27 percent. The Democrats have lost ground, too, but at least they’re still in the low 30s.
Back to Bain. It’s interesting to think back now to the GOP primary. Romney’s Bain experience was nothing but a plus then. Oh, yes, he was attacked on “vulture capitalism” grounds by Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. But those attacks did in Perry and Gingrich, not Romney. They elevated Romney. The base rallied around him at that point, and the establishment ditto. It wasn’t so much that people suddenly decided they loved Romney. They were punishing Gingrich and Perry for resorting to “left-wing” attacks. But if the Bain controversy is hurting Romney, and most indications are that it is, that would appear to mean that more Americans than just left-wingers are taking the issue seriously.
But Republicans high and low couldn’t see this, because the party has no moderate faction anymore. The GOP today is a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning. Its middle has been hollowed out. If it had had a middle, someone within the party might have been able to issue warnings that Romney’s c.v. maybe carried some downsides. This may sound ironic, since Romney is considered the moderate of the group that sought the nomination, but in terms of biography, he’s the least moderate of all of them. In terms of biography, he’s a pretty perfect expression of what the GOP has become.
Mitt might win. A presidential election is a menu with only two options, meat and fish. And if fish has $1.5 billion behind it, and is financing a successful drive to keep meat supporters from being able to vote in key states, then fish can pull out a victory. But the odds are against it for a good reason, a reason that Jefferson identified.
In Today's Workplace
Saturday, Jul 14, 2012 7:00 PM UTC
Fifty shades of capitalism
Pain and bondage in the American workplace
By Lynn Parramore
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
Editor’s Note: When harmful beliefs plague a population, you can bet that the 1% is benefiting. This article is part of a new AlterNet series, “Capitalism Unmasked,” edited by Lynn Parramore and produced in partnership with author Douglas Smith and Econ4 to expose the myths and lies of unbridled capitalism and show the way to a better future.
If the ghost of Ayn Rand were to suddenly manifest in your local bookstore, the Dominatrix of Capitalism would certainly get a thrill thumbing through the pages of E.L. James’ blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey.
Rand, whose own novels bristle with sadomasochist sexy-time and praise for the male hero’s pursuit of domination, would instantly approve of Christian Grey, the handsome young billionaire CEO who bends the universe to his will.
Ingénue Anastasia Steele stumbles into his world — literally — when she trips into his sleek Seattle office for an interview for the college paper. When she calls him a “control freak,” the god-like tycoon purrs as if he has received a compliment.
“’Oh, I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele,’ he says without a trace of humor in his smile. ‘I employ over forty thousand people…That gives me a certain responsibility – power, if you will.’”
She will. Quivering with trepidation, Anastasia signs a contract to become Christian’s submissive sex partner. Reeled in by his fantastic wealth, panty-sopping charm, and less-than-convincing promise that the exchange will be to her ultimate benefit, she surrenders herself to his arbitrary rules on what to eat, what to wear, and above all, how to please him sexually. Which frequently involves getting handcuffed and spanked. “Discipline,” as Christian likes to say.
Quoting industrial tycoon Andrew Carnegie, Christian justifies his proclivities like an acolyte of Randian Superman ideology: “A man who acquires the ability to take possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.” (Rand’s worship of the Superman obliged to nothing but his intellect is well-known and imbued with dark passions; she once expressed her admiration for a child murderer’s credo, “What is good for me is right,” as “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard” in a 1928 diary.)
Christian Grey, our kinky CEO, started his literary life as a vampire when Erika Leonard, the woman behind the pseudonym “E.L. James,” published the first version of her novel episodically on a Twilight fan site, basing the story on the relationship between Stephenie Meyers’ love couple Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. It was later reworked and released in its current form. Gone was Edward the vampire, replaced by Christian the corporate slave-master.
Drunk on the intoxicants of wealth and power, Fifty Shades of Grey hints at a sinister cultural shift that is unfolding in its pages before our eyes. The innocent Anastasias will no longer merely have their lifeblood slowly drained by capitalist predators. They’re going to be whipped, humiliated and forced to wear a butt-plug. The vampire in the night has given way to the dominating overlord of a hierarchical, sadomasochistic world in which everybody without money is a helpless submissive.
Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
Invisible Handcuffs
This has been coming for some time. Ever since the Reagan era, from the factory to the office tower, the American workplace has been morphing for many into a tightly-managed torture chamber of exploitation and domination. Bosses strut about making stupid commands. Employees trapped by ridiculous bureaucratic procedures censor themselves for fear of getting a pink slip. Inefficiencies are everywhere. Bad management and draconian policies prop up the system of command and control where the boss is God and the workers are so many expendable units in the great capitalist machine. The iron handmaidens of high unemployment and economic inequality keep the show going.
How did this happen? Economists known as “free-market fundamentalists” who claim Adam Smith as their forefather like to paint a picture of the economy as a voluntary system magically guided by an “invisible hand” toward outcomes that are good for most people. They tell us that our economy is a system of equal exchanges between workers and employers in which everybody who does her part is respected and comes out ahead.
Something has obviously gone horribly wrong with the contract. Thieving CEOs get mega-yachts while hard-working Americans get stagnant wages, crappy healthcare, climate change, and unrelenting insecurity. Human potential is wasted, initiative punished and creativity starved.
Much of the evil stems from the fact that free-market economists who still dominate the Ivy League and the policy circles have focused on markets at the expense of those inconvenient encumbrances known as “people.” Their fancy mathematical models make calculations about buying and selling, but they tend to leave out one important thing: production. In other words, they don’t give a hoot about the labor of those who sustain the economy. Their perverted religion may have something to say about unemployment or wages – keeping the former high and the latter low — but the conditions workers face receive nary a footnote.
Michael Perelman, one of a small group of heretical economists that questions this anti-human regime, draws attention to the neglect, abuse and domination of workers in his aptly named book, The Invisible Handcuffs: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers. He reveals that instead of a system of fair exchanges, we have “one in which the interests of employees and employers are sharply at odds.” This creates conditions of festering conflict and employers who have to take ever-stronger measures to exert control. Hostility among workers thrives, which results in more punishment. Respect, the free flow of information, inclusive decision-making – all the things that would make for a productive work environment — fly out the window. The word of the manager is the law, and endless time and energy is expended rationalizing its essential goodness.
Americans are supposed to be people who love freedom above everything else. But where is the citizen less free than in the typical workplace? Workers aredenied bathroom breaks. They cannot leave to care for a sick child. Downtime and vacations are a joke. Some – just ask who picked your tomatoes – have been reduced to slave-like conditions. In the current climate of more than three years of unemployment over 8 percent, the longest stretch since the Great Depression, the worker has little choice but to submit. And pretend to like it.
A medieval peasant had plenty of things to worry about, but the year-round control of daily life was not one of them. Perelman points out that in pre-capitalist societies, people toiled relatively few hours over the course of a year compared to what Americans work now. They labored like dogs during the harvest, but there was ample free time during the off-seasons. Holidays were abundant – as many as 200 per year. It was Karl Marx, in his Theory of Alienation, who saw that modern industrial production under capitalist conditions would rob workers of control of their lives as they lost control of their work. Unlike the blacksmith or the shoemaker who owned his shop, decided on his own working conditions, shaped his product, and had a say in how his goods were bartered or sold, the modern worker would have little autonomy. His relationships with the people at work would become impersonal and hollow.
Clearly, the technological wonders of our capitalist system have not released human beings from the burden of work. They have brought us more work. They have not brought most of us more freedom, but less.
Naked domination was not always the law of the land. In the early 1960s, when unions were stronger and the New Deal’s commitment to full employment still meant something, a worker subjected to abuse could bargain with his employer or simply walk. Not so today. The high unemployment sustained by the Federal Reserve’s corporate-focused obsession with “fighting inflation” (code for “keeping down wages”) works out well for the sado-capitalist. The unrelenting attack on government blocks large-scale public works programs that might rebalance the scale by putting people back on the job. The assault on collective bargaining robs the worker of any recourse to unfair conditions. Meanwhile, the tsunami of money in politics drowns the democratic system of rule by the people. And the redistribution of wealth toward the top ensures that most of us are scrapping too hard for our daily bread to fight for anything better. The corporate media cheer.
Turning the Tables
In the early ’70s, the S&M counterculture scene followed the rise of anti-authoritarian punk rock, providing a form of transgressive release for people enduring too much control in their daily lives. Bondage-influenced images hit the mainstream in 1980 — the year the union-busting Ronald Reagan was elected president — in the form of a workplace comedy, 9 to 5, which became one of the highest grossing comedies of all time. 9 to 5 struck a chord with millions of Americans toiling in dead-end jobs ruled by authoritarian bosses. Audiences howled with joy to see three working women act out their fantasies of revenge on a workplace tyrant by suspending him in chains and shutting his mouth with a ball-gag.
More recently, the 2011 film Horrible Bosses follows the plot of three friends who decide to murder their respective domineering, abusive bosses. The film exceeded financial expectations, raking in over $28 million in the first three days. It went on to become the highest grossing black comedy film of all time.
The fantasy of turning the tables on the boss speaks to the deep-seated outrage that trickle-down policies and the war on workers has wrought. People naturally want to work in a rational, healthy system that offers them dignity and a chance to increase their standard of living and develop their potential. When this doesn’t happen, the social and economic losses are profound. Today’s workers are caught in Perelman’s “invisible handcuffs” – both trapped and blinded by the extent to which capitalism restricts their lives.
The market has become a monster, demanding that we fit its constraints. As long as we ignore this, the strength of the U.S. economy will continue to erode. Freedom and equality, those cornerstones of democracy, will diminish. For now, many working people have unconsciously accepted the conditions that exist as somehow natural, unaware of how the machine is constructed and manipulated to favor elites. Fear and frustration can even make us crave authority. We collaborate in our own oppression.
Just ask Anastasia Steele, whose slave contract spells out her duties with business-like efficiency:
Does the submissive consent to:
-Bondage with rope
-Bondage with leather cuffs
-Bondage with handcuffs/shackles/manacles
-Bondage with tape
-Bondage with other
Yes! She consents. The hypnotic consumption Christian offers in a world replete with fancy dinners and helicopter rides – goodies that will be revoked if she fails to obey — overturns her natural desire for free will. Once Anastasia has signed on the dotted line, her master rewards her with a telling gift that is often the first “present” an office employee receives: “I need to be able to contact you at all times…I figured you needed a BlackBerry.”
Her first note to him on her new gadget asks a question: “Why do you do this?”
“I do this,” Christian answers, “because I can.”
Until we can link ourselves together to change this oppressive system, the Christian Greys will remain fully in control.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Romney Physics
A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney
By DAVID JAVERBAUM
Published: March 31, 2012
THE recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “like an Etch A Sketch” has already become notorious. The comment seemed all too apt, an apparent admission by a campaign insider of two widely held suspicions about Mitt Romney: that he is a) utterly devoid of any ideological convictions and b) filled with aluminum powder.
The imagery may have been unfortunate, but Mr. Fehrnstrom’s impulse to analogize is understandable. Metaphors like these, inexact as they are, are the only way the layman can begin to grasp the strange phantom world that underpins the very fabric of not only the Romney campaign but also of Mitt Romney in general. For we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician.
A bit of context. Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force — the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany — compels him to alter his stance, at a speed commensurate with the size of the force (usually large) and in inverse proportion to the depth of his beliefs (invariably negligible). This alteration, framed as a positive by the candidate, then provokes an equal but opposite reaction among his rivals.
But the Romney candidacy represents literally a quantum leap forward. It is governed by rules that are bizarre and appear to go against everyday experience and common sense. To be honest, even people like Mr. Fehrnstrom who are experts in Mitt Romney’s reality, or “Romneality,” seem bewildered by its implications; and any person who tells you he or she truly “understands” Mitt Romney is either lying or a corporation.
Nevertheless, close and repeated study of his campaign in real-world situations has yielded a standard model that has proved eerily accurate in predicting Mitt Romney’s behavior in debate after debate, speech after speech, awkward look-at-me-I’m-a-regular-guy moment after awkward look-at-me-I’m-a-regular-guy moment, and every other event in his face-time continuum.
The basic concepts behind this model are:
Complementarity. In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the situation (Fig. 1). It is not that he is one or the other; it is not that he is one and then the other. He is both at the same time.
Probability. Mitt Romney’s political viewpoints can be expressed only in terms of likelihood, not certainty. While some views are obviously far less likely than others, no view can be thought of as absolutely impossible. Thus, for instance, there is at any given moment a nonzero chance that Mitt Romney supports child slavery.
Uncertainty. Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the “principle uncertainty principle.”
Entanglement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a proton, neutron or Mormon: the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.
Noncausality. The Romney campaign often violates, and even reverses, the law of cause and effect. For example, ordinarily the cause of getting the most votes leads to the effect of being considered the most electable candidate. But in the case of Mitt Romney, the cause of being considered the most electable candidate actually produces the effect of getting the most votes.
Duality. Many conservatives believe the existence of Mitt Romney allows for the possibility of the spontaneous creation of an “anti-Romney” (Fig. 2) that leaps into existence and annihilates Mitt Romney. (However, the science behind this is somewhat suspect, as it is financed by Rick Santorum, for whom science itself is suspect.)
What does all this bode for the general election? By this point it won’t surprise you to learn the answer is, “We don’t know.” Because according to the latest theories, the “Mitt Romney” who seems poised to be the Republican nominee is but one of countless Mitt Romneys, each occupying his own cosmos, each supporting a different platform, each being compared to a different beloved children’s toy but all of them equally real, all of them equally valid and all of them running for president at the same time, in their own alternative Romnealities, somewhere in the vast Romniverse.
And all of them losing to Barack Obama.
By DAVID JAVERBAUM
Published: March 31, 2012
THE recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “like an Etch A Sketch” has already become notorious. The comment seemed all too apt, an apparent admission by a campaign insider of two widely held suspicions about Mitt Romney: that he is a) utterly devoid of any ideological convictions and b) filled with aluminum powder.
The imagery may have been unfortunate, but Mr. Fehrnstrom’s impulse to analogize is understandable. Metaphors like these, inexact as they are, are the only way the layman can begin to grasp the strange phantom world that underpins the very fabric of not only the Romney campaign but also of Mitt Romney in general. For we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician.
A bit of context. Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force — the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany — compels him to alter his stance, at a speed commensurate with the size of the force (usually large) and in inverse proportion to the depth of his beliefs (invariably negligible). This alteration, framed as a positive by the candidate, then provokes an equal but opposite reaction among his rivals.
But the Romney candidacy represents literally a quantum leap forward. It is governed by rules that are bizarre and appear to go against everyday experience and common sense. To be honest, even people like Mr. Fehrnstrom who are experts in Mitt Romney’s reality, or “Romneality,” seem bewildered by its implications; and any person who tells you he or she truly “understands” Mitt Romney is either lying or a corporation.
Nevertheless, close and repeated study of his campaign in real-world situations has yielded a standard model that has proved eerily accurate in predicting Mitt Romney’s behavior in debate after debate, speech after speech, awkward look-at-me-I’m-a-regular-guy moment after awkward look-at-me-I’m-a-regular-guy moment, and every other event in his face-time continuum.
The basic concepts behind this model are:
Complementarity. In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the situation (Fig. 1). It is not that he is one or the other; it is not that he is one and then the other. He is both at the same time.
Probability. Mitt Romney’s political viewpoints can be expressed only in terms of likelihood, not certainty. While some views are obviously far less likely than others, no view can be thought of as absolutely impossible. Thus, for instance, there is at any given moment a nonzero chance that Mitt Romney supports child slavery.
Uncertainty. Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the “principle uncertainty principle.”
Entanglement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a proton, neutron or Mormon: the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.
Noncausality. The Romney campaign often violates, and even reverses, the law of cause and effect. For example, ordinarily the cause of getting the most votes leads to the effect of being considered the most electable candidate. But in the case of Mitt Romney, the cause of being considered the most electable candidate actually produces the effect of getting the most votes.
Duality. Many conservatives believe the existence of Mitt Romney allows for the possibility of the spontaneous creation of an “anti-Romney” (Fig. 2) that leaps into existence and annihilates Mitt Romney. (However, the science behind this is somewhat suspect, as it is financed by Rick Santorum, for whom science itself is suspect.)
What does all this bode for the general election? By this point it won’t surprise you to learn the answer is, “We don’t know.” Because according to the latest theories, the “Mitt Romney” who seems poised to be the Republican nominee is but one of countless Mitt Romneys, each occupying his own cosmos, each supporting a different platform, each being compared to a different beloved children’s toy but all of them equally real, all of them equally valid and all of them running for president at the same time, in their own alternative Romnealities, somewhere in the vast Romniverse.
And all of them losing to Barack Obama.
Friday, July 13, 2012
LOL David Brooks
Friday, Jul 13, 2012 6:15 PM UTC
It’s all the hippies’ fault
David Brooks says the counter-culture explains Wall Street greed. The man is a glutton for punishment
By Andrew Leonard
Any decent hack should be able to pummel David Brooks with ease whenever he decides to share his nostalgic longing for those wonderful days when a “racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network” — his words, not mine! — nevertheless did the right thing by the United States because it was infused with a real sense of “leadership” and “responsibility.” But I’ve now read his latest offering, “Why Our Elites Stink.” and I find myself stupefyingly paralyzed. Where to begin? What’s the point in eviscerating something that is already so full of holes?
Should I launch my attack on his assertion that our elites deserve their status and riches because they simply work harder than poor people — “They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.” Or do I start raining bombs down on his notion that today’s financial sector greed and corruption is rooted in a kind of ’60s hangover — “Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else.” Or do I just go straight for the jugular in his final lament: his regret at the passing of the dominance of WASP elites, who may have been “insular and struggled with intimacy, but … did believe in restraint, reticence and service.”
Choices, choices. OK, the “work harder” thing is just ridiculous. David Brooks needs to spend an hour or two picking strawberries or cleaning toilets or bussing tables and then come back to us and try to repeat, with a straight face, his theory that hours spent driving kids to piano lessons constitute the overcoming of daunting hardship. As for “restraint and reticence,” well, I just wish Brooks would emulate his imaginary WASPs and choose what words he wants to share with us a little more carefully — and sparingly.
But the counter-culture thing? The implied blame-the-sixties scapegoating for the lax morality of today’s politicians and financiers? That’s worth taking on, because Brooks isn’t the only one making such a claim. It’s the ultimate culture war jujitsu move. Wall Street greed — it’s the hippies’ fault!
Let’s grant Brooks this much: There is a thread that connects the counter-culture upheaval of the sixties with contemporary Wall Street irresponsibility. But it’s not what he thinks. Forget about the hippies trying to stick it to the man. The key transformative events of the sixties and seventies that broke down male WASP hegemony — the civil rights struggle, the full flowering of feminism, the emergence of the environmental movement — provoked real change in America, and a fierce counter-reaction, both cultural and political.
But it’s that counter-reaction that is responsible for much of what upsets David Brooks today, and not some ludicrous identification between contemporary derivatives traders and flower children. The political map of the country changed. The enfranchisement of southern African-Americans through the Voting Rights Act ended up realigning both political parties along strictly partisan lines. The successful rise to power of the new, conservative Republican party, which saw itself as a vehicle for resisting cultural change and executing business-friendly deregulatory economic policies, is directly responsible for where we are today. So yeah, the sixties are to blame, if you figure that Ronald Reagan got elected by positioning himself as the anti-counter-culture hero. The president who told Americans that government was the problem did more to undermine elite attitudes pertaining to leadership and responsibility than any feminist or civil rights activist.
The great puzzle of David Brooks is that the man is too smart not to understand this. That era of WASP leadership that he longs for so lovingly presided over a country riddled with vast and unacceptable inequality. It might have been nice in Groton where “you were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed.” But it was a bit rougher for African Americans in the deep South, or women prevented from aspiring to any job higher than a secretary, or gays still locked in the closet.
The even greater puzzle is that after all that landmark progressive change embodied by civil rights activism and feminism and all the rest we now live in a time when purely economic inequality and social stratification is greater than it has been in a century. But it’s stupid to blame that on the triumph of counter-cultural values. It’s the reaction to the turmoil — the counter-reformation, if you will — that’s to blame. Returning to an age of reticence and restraint isn’t going to turn back the clock. Pushing for another wave of transformative change is the only way forward.
It’s all the hippies’ fault
David Brooks says the counter-culture explains Wall Street greed. The man is a glutton for punishment
By Andrew Leonard
Any decent hack should be able to pummel David Brooks with ease whenever he decides to share his nostalgic longing for those wonderful days when a “racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network” — his words, not mine! — nevertheless did the right thing by the United States because it was infused with a real sense of “leadership” and “responsibility.” But I’ve now read his latest offering, “Why Our Elites Stink.” and I find myself stupefyingly paralyzed. Where to begin? What’s the point in eviscerating something that is already so full of holes?
Should I launch my attack on his assertion that our elites deserve their status and riches because they simply work harder than poor people — “They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.” Or do I start raining bombs down on his notion that today’s financial sector greed and corruption is rooted in a kind of ’60s hangover — “Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else.” Or do I just go straight for the jugular in his final lament: his regret at the passing of the dominance of WASP elites, who may have been “insular and struggled with intimacy, but … did believe in restraint, reticence and service.”
Choices, choices. OK, the “work harder” thing is just ridiculous. David Brooks needs to spend an hour or two picking strawberries or cleaning toilets or bussing tables and then come back to us and try to repeat, with a straight face, his theory that hours spent driving kids to piano lessons constitute the overcoming of daunting hardship. As for “restraint and reticence,” well, I just wish Brooks would emulate his imaginary WASPs and choose what words he wants to share with us a little more carefully — and sparingly.
But the counter-culture thing? The implied blame-the-sixties scapegoating for the lax morality of today’s politicians and financiers? That’s worth taking on, because Brooks isn’t the only one making such a claim. It’s the ultimate culture war jujitsu move. Wall Street greed — it’s the hippies’ fault!
Let’s grant Brooks this much: There is a thread that connects the counter-culture upheaval of the sixties with contemporary Wall Street irresponsibility. But it’s not what he thinks. Forget about the hippies trying to stick it to the man. The key transformative events of the sixties and seventies that broke down male WASP hegemony — the civil rights struggle, the full flowering of feminism, the emergence of the environmental movement — provoked real change in America, and a fierce counter-reaction, both cultural and political.
But it’s that counter-reaction that is responsible for much of what upsets David Brooks today, and not some ludicrous identification between contemporary derivatives traders and flower children. The political map of the country changed. The enfranchisement of southern African-Americans through the Voting Rights Act ended up realigning both political parties along strictly partisan lines. The successful rise to power of the new, conservative Republican party, which saw itself as a vehicle for resisting cultural change and executing business-friendly deregulatory economic policies, is directly responsible for where we are today. So yeah, the sixties are to blame, if you figure that Ronald Reagan got elected by positioning himself as the anti-counter-culture hero. The president who told Americans that government was the problem did more to undermine elite attitudes pertaining to leadership and responsibility than any feminist or civil rights activist.
The great puzzle of David Brooks is that the man is too smart not to understand this. That era of WASP leadership that he longs for so lovingly presided over a country riddled with vast and unacceptable inequality. It might have been nice in Groton where “you were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed.” But it was a bit rougher for African Americans in the deep South, or women prevented from aspiring to any job higher than a secretary, or gays still locked in the closet.
The even greater puzzle is that after all that landmark progressive change embodied by civil rights activism and feminism and all the rest we now live in a time when purely economic inequality and social stratification is greater than it has been in a century. But it’s stupid to blame that on the triumph of counter-cultural values. It’s the reaction to the turmoil — the counter-reformation, if you will — that’s to blame. Returning to an age of reticence and restraint isn’t going to turn back the clock. Pushing for another wave of transformative change is the only way forward.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
The Real Battle Going Forward
Thursday, Jul 12, 2012 1:41 PM UTC
The real battle in 2012
In this election year and beyond, the real battle goes beyond red versus blue
By Robert Reich, more
It’s not merely Republicans versus Democrats, or conservatives versus liberals. The larger battle is between regressives and progressives.
Regressives want to take this nation backward — to before Social Security, unemployment insurance, and Medicare; before civil rights and voting rights; before regulations designed to protect the environment, workers, consumers, and investors. They want to sabotage much of what this nation has achieved over the last century. And they’re out to do it by making the rich far richer, turning Americans against one another in competition for a smaller and smaller slice of the pie, substituting private morality for public morality, and opening the floodgates to big money in politics.
Progressives are determined to take this nation forward — toward equal opportunity, tolerance and openness, adequate protection against corporate and Wall Street abuses, and an economy and democracy that are working for all of us.
The upcoming election is critical but it’s not the end of this contest. It will go on for years. It will require that you understand what’s at stake. And that you energize, mobilize, and organize others.
Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org. More Robert Reich.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Republican Lies and Distortion
Tuesday, Jul 10, 2012 8:27 PM UTC
Facts about Obama’s tax proposal
(And the lies the regressives are telling about it)
By Robert Reich
This handout image provided by the White House shows the signature page of President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama's tax return. (AP /White House)
This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.
To hear the media report it, President Obama is proposing a tax increase on wealthy Americans. That’s misleading at best. He’s proposing that everyone receive a continuation of the Bush tax cuts on the first $250,000 of their incomes. Any dollars they earn in excess of $250,000 will be taxed at the old Clinton-era rates.
Get it? Everyone is treated exactly the same. Everyone gets a one-year extension of the Bush tax cut on the first $250,000 of income. No “class warfare.”
Yet regressive Republicans want Americans to believe differently. The editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal say the President wants to extend the Bush tax cuts only “for some taxpayers.” They urge House Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for “everyone” and thereby put Senate Democrats on the spot by “forcing them to choose between extending rates for everyone and accepting Mr. Obama’s tax increase.”
Pure demagoguery.
Regressives also want Americans to think the President’s proposal would hurt “tens of thousands of job-creating businesses,” as the Journal puts it.
More baloney.
A small business owner earning $251,000 would pay the Bush rate on the first $250,000 and the old Clinton rate on just $1,000.
Congress’s Joint Tax Committee estimates that in 2013 about 940,000 taxpayers would have enough business income to break through the $250,000 ceiling – and, again, they’d pay additional taxes only on dollars earned above $250,000.
All told, fewer than 3 percent of small business owners would even reach the $250,000 threshold.
A third lie is Obama’s proposal will “increase uncertainly and further retard investment and job creation,” as the Journal puts it.
Don’t believe it.
The real reason businesses aren’t creating more jobs is American consumers — whose purchases constitute 70 percent of U.S. economic activity — don’t have the money to buy more, and they can no longer borrow as before. Businesses won’t invest and hire without consumers. Even as executive pay keeps rising, the median wage keeps dropping — largely because businesses keep whacking payrolls.
The only people who’d have to pay substantially more taxes under Obama’s proposal are those earning far in excess of $250,000 — and they aren’t small businesses. They’re the fattest of corpulent felines. Their spending will not be affected if their official tax rate rises from the Bush 35 percent to the Bill Clinton 39.6 percent.
In fact, most of these people’s income is unearned — capital gains and dividends that are now taxed at only 15 percent. If the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, the capital gains rate would return to the same 20 percent it was under Bill Clinton (the Affordable Care Act would add a 3.8 percent surcharge).
Funny, I don’t remember the economy suffering under Bill Clinton’s taxes. I was in Clinton’s cabinet, so perhaps my memory is self-serving. But I seem to recall that the economy generated 22 million net new jobs during those years, unemployment fell dramatically, almost everyone’s income grew, poverty dropped, and the economy soared. In fact, it was the strongest and best economy we’ve had in anyone’s memory.
In sum: Don’t fall for these big lies — Obama wants to extend the Bush tax cut “only for some people,” small businesses will be badly hit, businesses won’t hire because of uncertainty this proposal would create, or the Clinton-era tax levels crippled the economy,
A ton of corporate and billionaire money is behind these lies and others like them, as well as formidable mouthpieces of the regressive right such as Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journaleditorial page.
The truth is already a casualty of this election year. That’s why it’s so important for you to spread it.
Facts about Obama’s tax proposal
(And the lies the regressives are telling about it)
By Robert Reich
This handout image provided by the White House shows the signature page of President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama's tax return. (AP /White House)
This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.
To hear the media report it, President Obama is proposing a tax increase on wealthy Americans. That’s misleading at best. He’s proposing that everyone receive a continuation of the Bush tax cuts on the first $250,000 of their incomes. Any dollars they earn in excess of $250,000 will be taxed at the old Clinton-era rates.
Get it? Everyone is treated exactly the same. Everyone gets a one-year extension of the Bush tax cut on the first $250,000 of income. No “class warfare.”
Yet regressive Republicans want Americans to believe differently. The editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal say the President wants to extend the Bush tax cuts only “for some taxpayers.” They urge House Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for “everyone” and thereby put Senate Democrats on the spot by “forcing them to choose between extending rates for everyone and accepting Mr. Obama’s tax increase.”
Pure demagoguery.
Regressives also want Americans to think the President’s proposal would hurt “tens of thousands of job-creating businesses,” as the Journal puts it.
More baloney.
A small business owner earning $251,000 would pay the Bush rate on the first $250,000 and the old Clinton rate on just $1,000.
Congress’s Joint Tax Committee estimates that in 2013 about 940,000 taxpayers would have enough business income to break through the $250,000 ceiling – and, again, they’d pay additional taxes only on dollars earned above $250,000.
All told, fewer than 3 percent of small business owners would even reach the $250,000 threshold.
A third lie is Obama’s proposal will “increase uncertainly and further retard investment and job creation,” as the Journal puts it.
Don’t believe it.
The real reason businesses aren’t creating more jobs is American consumers — whose purchases constitute 70 percent of U.S. economic activity — don’t have the money to buy more, and they can no longer borrow as before. Businesses won’t invest and hire without consumers. Even as executive pay keeps rising, the median wage keeps dropping — largely because businesses keep whacking payrolls.
The only people who’d have to pay substantially more taxes under Obama’s proposal are those earning far in excess of $250,000 — and they aren’t small businesses. They’re the fattest of corpulent felines. Their spending will not be affected if their official tax rate rises from the Bush 35 percent to the Bill Clinton 39.6 percent.
In fact, most of these people’s income is unearned — capital gains and dividends that are now taxed at only 15 percent. If the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, the capital gains rate would return to the same 20 percent it was under Bill Clinton (the Affordable Care Act would add a 3.8 percent surcharge).
Funny, I don’t remember the economy suffering under Bill Clinton’s taxes. I was in Clinton’s cabinet, so perhaps my memory is self-serving. But I seem to recall that the economy generated 22 million net new jobs during those years, unemployment fell dramatically, almost everyone’s income grew, poverty dropped, and the economy soared. In fact, it was the strongest and best economy we’ve had in anyone’s memory.
In sum: Don’t fall for these big lies — Obama wants to extend the Bush tax cut “only for some people,” small businesses will be badly hit, businesses won’t hire because of uncertainty this proposal would create, or the Clinton-era tax levels crippled the economy,
A ton of corporate and billionaire money is behind these lies and others like them, as well as formidable mouthpieces of the regressive right such as Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journaleditorial page.
The truth is already a casualty of this election year. That’s why it’s so important for you to spread it.
Monday, July 9, 2012
What is Mitt Romney Hiding?
by Paul Krugman
Once upon a time a rich man named Romney ran for president. He could claim, with considerable justice, that his wealth was well-earned, that he had in fact done a lot to create good jobs for American workers. Nonetheless, the public understandably wanted to know both how he had grown so rich and what he had done with his wealth; he obliged by releasing extensive information about his financial holdings.
But that was 44 years ago. And the contrast between George Romney and his son Mitt — a contrast both in their business careers and in their willingness to come clean about their financial affairs — dramatically illustrates how America has changed.
Right now there’s a lot of buzz about an investigative report in the magazine Vanity Fair highlighting the “gray areas” in the younger Romney’s finances. More about that in a minute. First, however, let’s talk about what it meant to get rich in George Romney’s America, and how it compares with the situation today.
What did George Romney do for a living? The answer was straightforward: he ran an auto company, American Motors. And he ran it very well indeed: at a time when the Big Three were still fixated on big cars and ignoring the rising tide of imports, Romney shifted to a highly successful focus on compacts that restored the company’s fortunes, not to mention that it saved the jobs of many American workers.
It also made him personally rich. We know this because during his run for president, he released not one, not two, but 12 years’ worth of tax returns, explaining that any one year might just be a fluke. From those returns we learn that in his best year, 1960, he made more than $660,000 — the equivalent, adjusted for inflation, of around $5 million today.
Those returns also reveal that he paid a lot of taxes — 36 percent of his income in 1960, 37 percent over the whole period. This was in part because, as one report at the time put it, he “seldom took advantage of loopholes to escape his tax obligations.” But it was also because taxes on the rich were much higher in the ’50s and ’60s than they are now. In fact, once you include the indirect effects of taxes on corporate profits, taxes on the very rich were about twice current levels.
Now fast-forward to Romney the Younger, who made even more money during his business career at Bain Capital. Unlike his father, however, Mr. Romney didn’t get rich by producing things people wanted to buy; he made his fortune through financial engineering that seems in many cases to have left workers worse off, and in some cases driven companies into bankruptcy.
And there’s another contrast: George Romney was open and forthcoming about what he did with his wealth, but Mitt Romney has largely kept his finances secret. He did, grudgingly, release one year’s tax return plus an estimate for the next year, showing that he paid a startlingly low tax rate. But as the Vanity Fair report points out, we’re still very much in the dark about his investments, some of which seem very mysterious.
Put it this way: Has there ever before been a major presidential candidate who had a multimillion-dollar Swiss bank account, plus tens of millions invested in the Cayman Islands, famed as a tax haven?
And then there’s his Individual Retirement Account. I.R.A.’s are supposed to be a tax-advantaged vehicle for middle-class savers, with annual contributions limited to a few thousand dollars a year. Yet somehow Mr. Romney ended up with an account worth between $20 million and $101 million.
There are legitimate ways that could have happened, just as there are potentially legitimate reasons for parking large sums of money in overseas tax havens. But we don’t know which if any of those legitimate reasons apply in Mr. Romney’s case — because he has refused to release any details about his finances. This refusal to come clean suggests that he and his advisers believe that voters would be less likely to support him if they knew the truth about his investments.
And that is precisely why voters have a right to know that truth. Elections are, after all, in part about the perceived character of the candidates — and what a man does with his money is surely a major clue to his character.
One more thing: To the extent that Mr. Romney has a coherent policy agenda, it involves cutting tax rates on the very rich — which are already, as I said, down by about half since his father’s time. Surely a man advocating such policies has a special obligation to level with voters about the extent to which he would personally benefit from the policies he advocates.
Yet obviously that’s something Mr. Romney doesn’t want to do. And unless he does reveal the truth about his investments, we can only assume that he’s hiding something seriously damaging.
Once upon a time a rich man named Romney ran for president. He could claim, with considerable justice, that his wealth was well-earned, that he had in fact done a lot to create good jobs for American workers. Nonetheless, the public understandably wanted to know both how he had grown so rich and what he had done with his wealth; he obliged by releasing extensive information about his financial holdings.
But that was 44 years ago. And the contrast between George Romney and his son Mitt — a contrast both in their business careers and in their willingness to come clean about their financial affairs — dramatically illustrates how America has changed.
Right now there’s a lot of buzz about an investigative report in the magazine Vanity Fair highlighting the “gray areas” in the younger Romney’s finances. More about that in a minute. First, however, let’s talk about what it meant to get rich in George Romney’s America, and how it compares with the situation today.
What did George Romney do for a living? The answer was straightforward: he ran an auto company, American Motors. And he ran it very well indeed: at a time when the Big Three were still fixated on big cars and ignoring the rising tide of imports, Romney shifted to a highly successful focus on compacts that restored the company’s fortunes, not to mention that it saved the jobs of many American workers.
It also made him personally rich. We know this because during his run for president, he released not one, not two, but 12 years’ worth of tax returns, explaining that any one year might just be a fluke. From those returns we learn that in his best year, 1960, he made more than $660,000 — the equivalent, adjusted for inflation, of around $5 million today.
Those returns also reveal that he paid a lot of taxes — 36 percent of his income in 1960, 37 percent over the whole period. This was in part because, as one report at the time put it, he “seldom took advantage of loopholes to escape his tax obligations.” But it was also because taxes on the rich were much higher in the ’50s and ’60s than they are now. In fact, once you include the indirect effects of taxes on corporate profits, taxes on the very rich were about twice current levels.
Now fast-forward to Romney the Younger, who made even more money during his business career at Bain Capital. Unlike his father, however, Mr. Romney didn’t get rich by producing things people wanted to buy; he made his fortune through financial engineering that seems in many cases to have left workers worse off, and in some cases driven companies into bankruptcy.
And there’s another contrast: George Romney was open and forthcoming about what he did with his wealth, but Mitt Romney has largely kept his finances secret. He did, grudgingly, release one year’s tax return plus an estimate for the next year, showing that he paid a startlingly low tax rate. But as the Vanity Fair report points out, we’re still very much in the dark about his investments, some of which seem very mysterious.
Put it this way: Has there ever before been a major presidential candidate who had a multimillion-dollar Swiss bank account, plus tens of millions invested in the Cayman Islands, famed as a tax haven?
And then there’s his Individual Retirement Account. I.R.A.’s are supposed to be a tax-advantaged vehicle for middle-class savers, with annual contributions limited to a few thousand dollars a year. Yet somehow Mr. Romney ended up with an account worth between $20 million and $101 million.
There are legitimate ways that could have happened, just as there are potentially legitimate reasons for parking large sums of money in overseas tax havens. But we don’t know which if any of those legitimate reasons apply in Mr. Romney’s case — because he has refused to release any details about his finances. This refusal to come clean suggests that he and his advisers believe that voters would be less likely to support him if they knew the truth about his investments.
And that is precisely why voters have a right to know that truth. Elections are, after all, in part about the perceived character of the candidates — and what a man does with his money is surely a major clue to his character.
One more thing: To the extent that Mr. Romney has a coherent policy agenda, it involves cutting tax rates on the very rich — which are already, as I said, down by about half since his father’s time. Surely a man advocating such policies has a special obligation to level with voters about the extent to which he would personally benefit from the policies he advocates.
Yet obviously that’s something Mr. Romney doesn’t want to do. And unless he does reveal the truth about his investments, we can only assume that he’s hiding something seriously damaging.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
I Want to be Like Rick Blaine
The lessons of 'Casablanca' still apply, as time goes byBy Nicolaus Mills, Special to CNN
updated 8:24 PM EDT, Sat July 7, 2012
This year marks the 70th anniversary of "Casablanca," the 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and directed by Michael Curtiz. In this still from the film, a plane flies over the upscale piano bar 'Rick's Cafe Americain.'
Ilsa Lund (Bergman) and Rick Blaine (Bogart) had a whirlwind romance in Paris, but the Nazi occupation was bearing down on the city.
Sam (Dooley Wilson) captivates patrons of Rick's Cafe Americain with his piano stylings, but Rick has expressly forbade him to play "As Time Goes By," for reasons that quickly become apparent.
Rick and Ilsa talk in a bazaar after her surprising arrival in Casablanca. She is the wife of Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid), a Czech resistance leader whom she had thought to be dead when she fell in love with Rick in Paris.
Peter Lorre is Ugarte, an unsavory fellow who sells "letters of transit" for profit.
Rick is the embodiment of an America that has finally grasped the threat of fascism, says American studies professor and author Nicolaus Mills.
The actor S.Z. Sakall, who played Carl, poses on set outside his dressing room. Carl is a waiter at Rick's Cafe, where Bogart's character, Rick, has made a point of hiring European refugees, Mills notes.
The central tension of the film is the dilemma Rick faces. He still loves Ilsa, who tells him she still loves him, but if he wants to help Victor escape from the Nazis and continue to lead the resistance, he must let her go with her husband.
Ilsa and Victor go to see Senor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) a black market dealer, to acquire exit visas.
Ugarte holds the letters of transit that many refugees waiting in Casablanca would like to get their hands on. Here he brandishes a gun as he attempts to flee from French authorities.
At film's end, Rick manages to ensure that Ilsa leaves with Victor. But having killed the villainous Major Strasser (not pictured), he will need to flee Casablanca, presumably accompanied by the likeable but corrupt police captain, Louis Renault (Claude Rains), who has had an epiphany of his own. In the end, they walk into the fog with Rick uttering the famous last words: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
Nicolaus Mills: "Casablanca" turns 70; film had backstory, resonance that mirrored reality
He says Operation Torch had just resulted in Allies' capture of Casablanca; gave film currency
He says Bogart character had version of patriotism that was heroic, accepted ambiguity
Mills: Bogart's cool may no longer resonate, but Rick's complexity does
Editor's note: Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of "Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower."
(CNN) -- This year marks the 70th anniversary of "Casablanca," and although we are a long way from 1942, watching the film's romantic leads, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, sacrifice their wartime love still touches us.
The backstory on "Casablanca" is a good one, offering complex lessons in patriotism even today.
Few films have benefited as much from the real-world geopolitics surrounding them as "Casablanca," which opened on Thanksgiving 1942, when the nation was well into World War II, at New York's Hollywood Theater. Just 18 days earlier in Operation Torch, the Allies had invaded North Africa with a force of 65,000; among the cities they quickly captured was Casablanca.
A film that had finished production on August 3 suddenly became inseparable from actual events, as Jack Warner, whose studio produced "Casablanca," acknowledged in a November 10 memo, observing that the "entire industry envies us with picture having title 'Casablanca' ready to release, and feel we should take advantage of this great scoop."
"Casablanca" was helped even further by the politics surrounding Operation Torch, which at its outset involved getting French Vichy forces in North Africa to accept a ceasefire through a deal with Adm. Jean-Francois Darlan, who had collaborated with the Nazis after the defeat of the French army in 1940. The intrigue of "Casablanca" thus had its real-life counterpart in intrigue Americans had read about in their papers.
"Casablanca" reminded Americans of how completely their thinking had changed in the months since Pearl Harbor. Prewar America had much to apologize for in its international affairs. In 1939 the United States government failed to aid the Jewish passengers on the German ocean liner St. Louis when they were denied entry into Cuba and forced to return to Europe, and two years later the country was still not anxious to face facts about the wars raging in Europe and Asia.
Nicolaus MillsIn August 1941 the House of Representatives only reluctantly voted to renew the peacetime draft, passing it by a single vote, 203-202.
Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine is the embodiment of an America that has finally grasped the threat of fascism. On the surface, Rick is little more than the owner of a café in French Morocco, who insists, "I'm the only cause I'm interested in." But as his personal history emerges, Rick turns out to be anything but the cynic he pretends to be.
Before arriving in Casablanca, Rick fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War and ran guns for Ethiopia in its fight against Mussolini. At his café he has made a point of hiring European refugees. He has a Dutch pastry chef, a German refugee headwaiter, and a bartender from the Soviet Union. When a young Bulgarian woman asks for his help in getting her and her husband to America, Rick comes to their rescue by allowing them to win the money they need for papers at his gambling table.
The turning point in "Casablanca" occurs when Rick's former lover, Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman, shows up at his café with the Czech resistance leader, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), her husband. Rick faces a dilemma. He still loves Ilsa, who acknowledges that she also loves him, but if he wants to help Laszlo escape from the Nazis, he cannot resume his relationship with Ilsa, who is Laszlo's main support.
Rick's solution to his dilemma comes when he tells Ilsa that she should stay with Laszlo, then supplies the two of them with stolen letters of transit that will get them safely to Lisbon.
Rick's refusal to put his own needs before those of Laszlo -- and by extension the war effort -- reflects his priorities and his patriotism, but what makes Rick's sacrifice so powerful is that it is unaccompanied by chest pounding or sentimentality.
"I'm no good at being noble," he tells Ilsa, "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."
To help Ilsa and Laszlo escape, Rick must shoot the ranking German officer in Casablanca and reach an arrangement with the corrupt French chief of police. Neither decision bothers Rick, who at the end of "Casablanca" heads off to a free French garrison with the police chief while telling him, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
The remark is filled with irony and humor, but remains serious. It reflects Rick's refusal to let the ambiguity of his choices get in the way of his waging war to the best of his ability.
Today, "Casablanca" speaks to audiences very differently from how it did in 1942 or even when it was part of the Bogart revival that began in the late 1950s at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. "Casablanca's" call to arms and Bogart's cool no longer resonate as they once did. But what does resonate in our post-9/11 world is Rick's complexity. Rick is a loner who won't let his idealism get the better of his pragmatism. He will not give in to the Germans, who are the real power in Casablanca, but he refuses to do anything that needlessly exposes him to arrest. He walks a moral tightrope with understated brilliance.
These days it is easy to imagine Rick applauding America's decision to aid Libya's rebels, worrying about our ongoing war in Afghanistan, and wondering what we might do to get other countries to help us stop the bloodshed in Syria.
Given Rick's choice of friends, it is clear that he would not be overly fastidious about choosing allies -- if he believed their cooperation could save lives.
updated 8:24 PM EDT, Sat July 7, 2012
This year marks the 70th anniversary of "Casablanca," the 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and directed by Michael Curtiz. In this still from the film, a plane flies over the upscale piano bar 'Rick's Cafe Americain.'
Ilsa Lund (Bergman) and Rick Blaine (Bogart) had a whirlwind romance in Paris, but the Nazi occupation was bearing down on the city.
Sam (Dooley Wilson) captivates patrons of Rick's Cafe Americain with his piano stylings, but Rick has expressly forbade him to play "As Time Goes By," for reasons that quickly become apparent.
Rick and Ilsa talk in a bazaar after her surprising arrival in Casablanca. She is the wife of Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid), a Czech resistance leader whom she had thought to be dead when she fell in love with Rick in Paris.
Peter Lorre is Ugarte, an unsavory fellow who sells "letters of transit" for profit.
Rick is the embodiment of an America that has finally grasped the threat of fascism, says American studies professor and author Nicolaus Mills.
The actor S.Z. Sakall, who played Carl, poses on set outside his dressing room. Carl is a waiter at Rick's Cafe, where Bogart's character, Rick, has made a point of hiring European refugees, Mills notes.
The central tension of the film is the dilemma Rick faces. He still loves Ilsa, who tells him she still loves him, but if he wants to help Victor escape from the Nazis and continue to lead the resistance, he must let her go with her husband.
Ilsa and Victor go to see Senor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) a black market dealer, to acquire exit visas.
Ugarte holds the letters of transit that many refugees waiting in Casablanca would like to get their hands on. Here he brandishes a gun as he attempts to flee from French authorities.
At film's end, Rick manages to ensure that Ilsa leaves with Victor. But having killed the villainous Major Strasser (not pictured), he will need to flee Casablanca, presumably accompanied by the likeable but corrupt police captain, Louis Renault (Claude Rains), who has had an epiphany of his own. In the end, they walk into the fog with Rick uttering the famous last words: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
Nicolaus Mills: "Casablanca" turns 70; film had backstory, resonance that mirrored reality
He says Operation Torch had just resulted in Allies' capture of Casablanca; gave film currency
He says Bogart character had version of patriotism that was heroic, accepted ambiguity
Mills: Bogart's cool may no longer resonate, but Rick's complexity does
Editor's note: Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of "Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower."
(CNN) -- This year marks the 70th anniversary of "Casablanca," and although we are a long way from 1942, watching the film's romantic leads, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, sacrifice their wartime love still touches us.
The backstory on "Casablanca" is a good one, offering complex lessons in patriotism even today.
Few films have benefited as much from the real-world geopolitics surrounding them as "Casablanca," which opened on Thanksgiving 1942, when the nation was well into World War II, at New York's Hollywood Theater. Just 18 days earlier in Operation Torch, the Allies had invaded North Africa with a force of 65,000; among the cities they quickly captured was Casablanca.
A film that had finished production on August 3 suddenly became inseparable from actual events, as Jack Warner, whose studio produced "Casablanca," acknowledged in a November 10 memo, observing that the "entire industry envies us with picture having title 'Casablanca' ready to release, and feel we should take advantage of this great scoop."
"Casablanca" was helped even further by the politics surrounding Operation Torch, which at its outset involved getting French Vichy forces in North Africa to accept a ceasefire through a deal with Adm. Jean-Francois Darlan, who had collaborated with the Nazis after the defeat of the French army in 1940. The intrigue of "Casablanca" thus had its real-life counterpart in intrigue Americans had read about in their papers.
"Casablanca" reminded Americans of how completely their thinking had changed in the months since Pearl Harbor. Prewar America had much to apologize for in its international affairs. In 1939 the United States government failed to aid the Jewish passengers on the German ocean liner St. Louis when they were denied entry into Cuba and forced to return to Europe, and two years later the country was still not anxious to face facts about the wars raging in Europe and Asia.
Nicolaus MillsIn August 1941 the House of Representatives only reluctantly voted to renew the peacetime draft, passing it by a single vote, 203-202.
Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine is the embodiment of an America that has finally grasped the threat of fascism. On the surface, Rick is little more than the owner of a café in French Morocco, who insists, "I'm the only cause I'm interested in." But as his personal history emerges, Rick turns out to be anything but the cynic he pretends to be.
Before arriving in Casablanca, Rick fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War and ran guns for Ethiopia in its fight against Mussolini. At his café he has made a point of hiring European refugees. He has a Dutch pastry chef, a German refugee headwaiter, and a bartender from the Soviet Union. When a young Bulgarian woman asks for his help in getting her and her husband to America, Rick comes to their rescue by allowing them to win the money they need for papers at his gambling table.
The turning point in "Casablanca" occurs when Rick's former lover, Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman, shows up at his café with the Czech resistance leader, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), her husband. Rick faces a dilemma. He still loves Ilsa, who acknowledges that she also loves him, but if he wants to help Laszlo escape from the Nazis, he cannot resume his relationship with Ilsa, who is Laszlo's main support.
Rick's solution to his dilemma comes when he tells Ilsa that she should stay with Laszlo, then supplies the two of them with stolen letters of transit that will get them safely to Lisbon.
Rick's refusal to put his own needs before those of Laszlo -- and by extension the war effort -- reflects his priorities and his patriotism, but what makes Rick's sacrifice so powerful is that it is unaccompanied by chest pounding or sentimentality.
"I'm no good at being noble," he tells Ilsa, "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."
To help Ilsa and Laszlo escape, Rick must shoot the ranking German officer in Casablanca and reach an arrangement with the corrupt French chief of police. Neither decision bothers Rick, who at the end of "Casablanca" heads off to a free French garrison with the police chief while telling him, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
The remark is filled with irony and humor, but remains serious. It reflects Rick's refusal to let the ambiguity of his choices get in the way of his waging war to the best of his ability.
Today, "Casablanca" speaks to audiences very differently from how it did in 1942 or even when it was part of the Bogart revival that began in the late 1950s at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. "Casablanca's" call to arms and Bogart's cool no longer resonate as they once did. But what does resonate in our post-9/11 world is Rick's complexity. Rick is a loner who won't let his idealism get the better of his pragmatism. He will not give in to the Germans, who are the real power in Casablanca, but he refuses to do anything that needlessly exposes him to arrest. He walks a moral tightrope with understated brilliance.
These days it is easy to imagine Rick applauding America's decision to aid Libya's rebels, worrying about our ongoing war in Afghanistan, and wondering what we might do to get other countries to help us stop the bloodshed in Syria.
Given Rick's choice of friends, it is clear that he would not be overly fastidious about choosing allies -- if he believed their cooperation could save lives.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
The Higgs Boson
by Lawrence Krauss
How the Higgs Boson Posits a New Story of our Creation
Jul 9, 2012 1:00 AM EDT The media-adopted name for the Higgs Boson, believed to be discovered this week, couldn’t be more misleading. Lawrence M. Krauss explains how the particle could finally dispense with the idea of a supernatural creator. Plus, cosmologist Sean Carroll on how the discovery will revolutionize physics.
Print Email Comments (131) There has been a lot of hoopla since the July 4 announcement by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) that the two largest experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had uncovered evidence for a new elementary particle. The particle in question appears to be the Higgs particle, which scientists have been seeking for almost 50 years and is at the heart of our current best theory of nature. But the real excitement seems to stem from the fact that this long-sought discovery is frequently called, in colloquial circles, “the God particle.” This term appeared first in the unfortunate title of a book written by physicist Leon Lederman two decades ago, and while to my knowledge it was never used by any scientist (including Lederman) before or since, it has captured the media’s imagination.
Scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research jumped for joy at the possible discovery of an elementary particle. (Denis Balibouse / AFP-Getty Images)
What makes this term particularly unfortunate is that nothing could be further from the truth. Assuming the particle in question is indeed the Higgs, it validates an unprecedented revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics and brings science closer to dispensing with the need for any supernatural shenanigans all the way back to the beginning of the universe—and perhaps even before the beginning, if there was a before. The brash notion predicts an invisible field (the Higgs field) that permeates all of space and suggests that the properties of matter, and the forces that govern our existence, derive from their interaction with what otherwise seems like empty space. Had the magnitude or nature of the Higgs field been different, the properties of the universe would have been different, and we wouldn’t be here to wonder why. Moreover, a Higgs field validates the notion that seemingly empty space may contain the seeds of our existence. This idea is at the heart of one of the boldest predictions of cosmology, called inflation. This posits that a similar type of background field was established in the earliest moments of the big bang, causing a microscopic region to expand by more than 85 orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second, after which the energy contained in otherwise empty space was converted into all the matter and radiation we see today! Alan Guth, the originator of the theory, called it “the ultimate free lunch.”
A computer generated image provided by CERN shows the ‘typical candidate’ event (Courtesy of Cern)
If these bold, some would say arrogant, notions derive support from the remarkable results at the Large Hadron Collider, they may reinforce two potentially uncomfortable possibilities: first, that many features of our universe, including our existence, may be accidental consequences of conditions associated with the universe’s birth; and second, that creating “stuff” from “no stuff” seems to be no problem at all—everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space or perhaps a quantum burp of space itself. Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God.
How the Higgs Boson Posits a New Story of our Creation
Jul 9, 2012 1:00 AM EDT The media-adopted name for the Higgs Boson, believed to be discovered this week, couldn’t be more misleading. Lawrence M. Krauss explains how the particle could finally dispense with the idea of a supernatural creator. Plus, cosmologist Sean Carroll on how the discovery will revolutionize physics.
Print Email Comments (131) There has been a lot of hoopla since the July 4 announcement by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) that the two largest experiments at the Large Hadron Collider had uncovered evidence for a new elementary particle. The particle in question appears to be the Higgs particle, which scientists have been seeking for almost 50 years and is at the heart of our current best theory of nature. But the real excitement seems to stem from the fact that this long-sought discovery is frequently called, in colloquial circles, “the God particle.” This term appeared first in the unfortunate title of a book written by physicist Leon Lederman two decades ago, and while to my knowledge it was never used by any scientist (including Lederman) before or since, it has captured the media’s imagination.
Scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research jumped for joy at the possible discovery of an elementary particle. (Denis Balibouse / AFP-Getty Images)
What makes this term particularly unfortunate is that nothing could be further from the truth. Assuming the particle in question is indeed the Higgs, it validates an unprecedented revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics and brings science closer to dispensing with the need for any supernatural shenanigans all the way back to the beginning of the universe—and perhaps even before the beginning, if there was a before. The brash notion predicts an invisible field (the Higgs field) that permeates all of space and suggests that the properties of matter, and the forces that govern our existence, derive from their interaction with what otherwise seems like empty space. Had the magnitude or nature of the Higgs field been different, the properties of the universe would have been different, and we wouldn’t be here to wonder why. Moreover, a Higgs field validates the notion that seemingly empty space may contain the seeds of our existence. This idea is at the heart of one of the boldest predictions of cosmology, called inflation. This posits that a similar type of background field was established in the earliest moments of the big bang, causing a microscopic region to expand by more than 85 orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second, after which the energy contained in otherwise empty space was converted into all the matter and radiation we see today! Alan Guth, the originator of the theory, called it “the ultimate free lunch.”
A computer generated image provided by CERN shows the ‘typical candidate’ event (Courtesy of Cern)
If these bold, some would say arrogant, notions derive support from the remarkable results at the Large Hadron Collider, they may reinforce two potentially uncomfortable possibilities: first, that many features of our universe, including our existence, may be accidental consequences of conditions associated with the universe’s birth; and second, that creating “stuff” from “no stuff” seems to be no problem at all—everything we see could have emerged as a purposeless quantum burp in space or perhaps a quantum burp of space itself. Humans, with their remarkable tools and their remarkable brains, may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge. The Higgs particle is now arguably more relevant than God.
A Quantum Leap
A Quantum Leap
The discovery of the Higgs boson particle puts our understanding of nature on a new firm footing.
By Lawrence Krauss
Posted Wednesday, July 4, 2012, at 5:56 AM ET
Who would have believed it? Every now and then theoretical speculation anticipates experimental observation in physics. It doesn’t happen often, in spite of the romantic notion of theorists sitting in their rooms alone at night thinking great thoughts. Nature usually surprises us. But today, two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva reported convincing evidence for the long sought-after “Higgs” particle, first proposed to exist almost 50 years ago and at the heart of the “standard model” of elementary particle physics—the theoretical formalism that describes three of the four known forces in nature, and which to date agrees with every experimental observation done to date.
The LHC is the most complex (and largest) machine that humans have ever built, requiring thousands of physicists from dozens of countries, working full time for a decade to build and operate. And even with 26 kilometers of tunnel, accelerating two streams of protons in opposite directions at more than 99.9999 percent the speed of light and smashing them together in spectacular collisions billions of times each second, producing hundreds of particles in each collision; two detectors the size of office buildings to measure the particles; and a bank of more than 3,000 computers analyzing the events in real time in order to search for something interesting, the Higgs particle itself never directly appears.
Like the proverbial Cheshire cat, the Higgs instead leaves only a smile, by which I mean it decays into other particles that can be directly observed. After a lot of work and computer time, one can follow all the observed particles backward and determine the mass and other properties of the invisible Higgs candidates.
I say candidates, because so far each of the two major LHC experimental collaborations has claimed to discover a new particle with properties consistent with the other, and consistent with the general predictions of the standard model, which suggests that the Higgs particle should be produced at a rate comparable to the rate observed and should decay into the specific combinations of known elementary particles that are observed. They are being very conservative. One can in fact quantify the likelihood that the observations are mistaken and that the events are actually background noise mimicking a real signal. Each experiment quotes a likelihood of very close to “5 sigma,” meaning the likelihood that the events were produced by chance is less than one in 3.5 million. Yet in spite of this, the only claim that has been made so far is that the new particle is real and “Higgs-like.” The existing data set is still too small to statistically determine with precise accuracy that the data is consistent with the standard model.
This cautious approach is actually a good thing, because it leaves open the possibility that the particle being observed is not exactly the simple Higgs particle of the standard model. Instead, it may point the way toward understanding whatever new physics underlies the standard model—and perhaps explain outstanding mysteries from the question of why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, to whether our universe is unique.
The idea of the Higgs particle was proposed nearly 50 years ago. (Incidentally, it has never been called the “God particle” by the physics community. That moniker has been picked up by the media, and I hope it goes away.) It was discussed almost as a curiosity, to get around some inconsistencies between predictions and theory at the time in particle physics, that if an otherwise invisible background field exists permeating empty space throughout the universe, then elementary particles can interact with this field. Even if they initially have no mass, they will encounter resistance to their motion through their interactions with this field, and they will slow down. They will then act like they have mass. It is like trying to push your car off the road if it has run out of gas. You and a friend can roll it along as long as it is on the road, but once it goes off and the wheels encounter mud, you and a whole gang of friends who may have been sitting in the back seat cannot get it moving. The car acts heavier.
Within a few years, it had been recognized that this phenomenon could not only explain why elementary particles like the particles that make up our bodies have the masses they do, but it could also illuminate why two of the four known forces in nature, electromagnetism and the so-called “weak” force (responsible for the processes that power the sun), which on the surface appear very different at the scales we measure, are actually at a fundamental scale merely different manifestations of a single force, now called the “electro-weak” force.
All of the predictions based on these ideas have turned out to be in accord with experiment. But there was one major thing missing: What about the invisible field? How could we tell if it really exists? It turns out that in particle physics, for every field in nature, like the electromagnetic field, there must exist an elementary particle that can be produced if one has sufficient energy to create it. So, the background field, known as a Higgs field, must be associated with a Higgs particle.
In the 1990s in the United States, a gigantic machine called the Superconducting Super Collider was being built (involving the largest tunnel ever dug—some 60 miles in circumference) to search for the Higgs—and the origin of mass. But Congress, in its infinite wisdom (Congress seems to have gotten no wiser since), decided that the country couldn’t afford the $5 billion to $10 billion that had already been approved by three different presidents. Back then, $5 billion was a lot of money! So, the LHC was constructed in Geneva by a group of European countries, and the rest is history, or will be.
The discovery announced today in Geneva represents a quantum leap (literally) in our understanding of nature at its fundamental scale, and the culmination of a half-century of dedicated work by tens of thousands of scientists using technology that has been invented for the task, and it should be celebrated on these accounts alone.
But I find it particularly exciting for two reasons—one scientific, the other more personal. First, the standard model, as remarkably successful as it has been, leaves open more questions than it answers. What causes the Higgs field to exist throughout space today? Are there other forces that dynamically determine its configuration? Why doesn’t the same phenomenon that causes the Higgs particle to exist at the mass it does cause gravity and the other forces in nature to behave similarly? Over the past 40 years or so, a host of theoretical speculations have been developed to answer these questions. But like those who are sensorially deprived, we may just be hallucinating. The cold water of experiment may now wash away many of our wrong ideas and, perhaps more importantly, could point us in the right direction. In the process I expect what we will discover about the universe may currently be beyond our wildest dreams.
More than this, however, the Higgs field implies that otherwise seemingly empty space is much richer and weirder than we could have imagined even a century ago, and in fact that we cannot understand our own existence without understanding “emptiness” better. Readers of mine will know that as a physicist, I have been particularly interested in “nothing” in all of its forms and its relation to something—namely us. The discovery of the Higgs says that “nothing” is getting ever more interesting.
Lawrence M. Krauss is Foundation Professor and Director of the Arizona State University Origins Project. His most recent book is A Universe from Nothing.
Woody Allen - "To Rome with Love"
First of all, this movie is stock Woody Allen. Woody recreates his standard bumbling, wise-cracking, fearful, neurotic persona. There is the wear & tear of contemporary relationships. There is the music---Italian this time. There is the eternal city Rome. No more New York I guess.
It's not as good as "Midnight in Paris," but still it's quality summer movie entertainment. Of course, there is no competition at the box office this summer.
Everybody in my theatre seemed to be in my age category. Is Woody Allen now for my age set exclusively?
Is his humor dated? There is a crack in the movie about Woody's personality being "three ids." I love the Freudian references, but who relates to Freudian references these days?
Every building in Rome seems brown. Is this the way Rome really looks?
This is probably IT for me for summer releases.
It's not as good as "Midnight in Paris," but still it's quality summer movie entertainment. Of course, there is no competition at the box office this summer.
Everybody in my theatre seemed to be in my age category. Is Woody Allen now for my age set exclusively?
Is his humor dated? There is a crack in the movie about Woody's personality being "three ids." I love the Freudian references, but who relates to Freudian references these days?
Every building in Rome seems brown. Is this the way Rome really looks?
This is probably IT for me for summer releases.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Real Patriotism
by Robert Reich
July 4, 2012
In the last two weeks, the Supreme Court has allowed police in Arizona to demand proof of citizenship from people they stop on other grounds (while throwing out the rest of Arizona's immigration law), and has allowed the federal government to require everyone buy health insurance -- even younger and healthier people -- or pay a penalty.
What do these decisions -- and the national conversations they've engendered -- have to do with patriotism? A great deal. Because underlying them are two different versions of American patriotism.
The Arizona law is aimed at securing the nation from outsiders. The purpose of the heatlhcare law is to join together to provide affordable health care for all.
The first version of patriotism is protecting America from people beyond our borders who might otherwise overrun us -- whether immigrants coming here illegally or foreign powers threatening us with aggression.
The second version of patriotism is joining together for the common good. That might mean contributing to a bake sale to raise money for a local school or volunteering in a homeless shelter. It also means paying our fair share of taxes so our community or nation has enough resources to meet all our needs, and preserving and protecting our system of government.
This second meaning of patriotism recognizes our responsibilities to one another as citizens of the same society. It requires collaboration, teamwork, tolerance and selflessness.
The Affordable Care Act isn't perfect, but in requiring younger and healthier people to buy insurance that will help pay for the healthcare needs of older and sicker people, it summons the second version of patriotism.
Too often these days we don't recognize and don't practice this second version. We're shouting at each other rather than coming together -- conservative versus liberal, Democrat versus Republican, native-born versus foreign born, non-unionized versus unionized, religious versus secular.
Our politics has grown nastier and meaner. Negative advertising is filling the airwaves this election year. We're learning more about why we shouldn't vote for someone than why we should.
As I've said before, some elected officials have substituted partisanship for patriotism, placing party loyalty above loyalty to America. Just after the 2010 election, the Senate minority leader was asked about his party's highest priority for the next two years. You might have expected him to say it was to get the economy going and reduce unemployment, or control the budget deficit, or achieve peace and stability in the Middle East. But he said the highest priority would be to make sure the president did not get a second term of office.
Our system of government is America's most precious and fragile possession, the means we have of joining together as a nation for the common good. It requires not only our loyalty but ongoing vigilance to keep it working well. Yet some of our elected representatives act as if they don't care what happens to it as long as they achieve their partisan aims.
The filibuster used to be rarely used. But over the last decade the threat of a filibuster has become standard operating procedure, virtually shutting down the Senate for periods of time.
Meanwhile, some members of the House have been willing to shut down the entire government in order to get their way. Last summer they were even willing to risk the full faith and credit of the United States in order to achieve their goals.
In 2010 the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited money from billionaires and corporations overwhelming our democracy, on the bizarre theory that corporations are people under the First Amendment. Congress won't even pass legislation requiring their names be disclosed.
Some members of Congress have signed a pledge -- not of allegiance to the United States but of allegiance to a man named Grover Norquist, who has never been elected by anyone. Norquist's "no-tax" pledge is interpreted only by Norquist, who says closing a tax loophole is tantamount to raising taxes and therefore violates the pledge.
True patriots don't hate the government of the United States. They're proud of it. Generations of Americans have risked their lives to preserve and protect it. They may not like everything it does, and they justifiably worry when special interests gain too much power over it. But true patriots work to improve the U.S. government, not destroy it.
But these days some Americans loathe the government, and are doing everything they can to paralyze it, starve it and make the public so cynical about it that it's no longer capable of doing much of anything. Norquist says he wants to shrink it down to a size it can be "drowned in a bathtub."
When arguing against paying their fair share of taxes, some wealthy Americans claim "it's my money." They forget it's their nation, too. And unless they pay their fair share of taxes, Americans can't meet the basic needs of our people. True patriotism means paying for America.
So when you hear people talk about patriotism, be warned. They may mean securing the nation's borders, not securing our society. Within those borders, each of us is on our own. These people don't want a government that actively works for all our citizens.
Yet true patriotism isn't mainly about excluding outsiders seen as our common adversaries. It's about coming together for the common good.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
July 4, 2012
In the last two weeks, the Supreme Court has allowed police in Arizona to demand proof of citizenship from people they stop on other grounds (while throwing out the rest of Arizona's immigration law), and has allowed the federal government to require everyone buy health insurance -- even younger and healthier people -- or pay a penalty.
What do these decisions -- and the national conversations they've engendered -- have to do with patriotism? A great deal. Because underlying them are two different versions of American patriotism.
The Arizona law is aimed at securing the nation from outsiders. The purpose of the heatlhcare law is to join together to provide affordable health care for all.
The first version of patriotism is protecting America from people beyond our borders who might otherwise overrun us -- whether immigrants coming here illegally or foreign powers threatening us with aggression.
The second version of patriotism is joining together for the common good. That might mean contributing to a bake sale to raise money for a local school or volunteering in a homeless shelter. It also means paying our fair share of taxes so our community or nation has enough resources to meet all our needs, and preserving and protecting our system of government.
This second meaning of patriotism recognizes our responsibilities to one another as citizens of the same society. It requires collaboration, teamwork, tolerance and selflessness.
The Affordable Care Act isn't perfect, but in requiring younger and healthier people to buy insurance that will help pay for the healthcare needs of older and sicker people, it summons the second version of patriotism.
Too often these days we don't recognize and don't practice this second version. We're shouting at each other rather than coming together -- conservative versus liberal, Democrat versus Republican, native-born versus foreign born, non-unionized versus unionized, religious versus secular.
Our politics has grown nastier and meaner. Negative advertising is filling the airwaves this election year. We're learning more about why we shouldn't vote for someone than why we should.
As I've said before, some elected officials have substituted partisanship for patriotism, placing party loyalty above loyalty to America. Just after the 2010 election, the Senate minority leader was asked about his party's highest priority for the next two years. You might have expected him to say it was to get the economy going and reduce unemployment, or control the budget deficit, or achieve peace and stability in the Middle East. But he said the highest priority would be to make sure the president did not get a second term of office.
Our system of government is America's most precious and fragile possession, the means we have of joining together as a nation for the common good. It requires not only our loyalty but ongoing vigilance to keep it working well. Yet some of our elected representatives act as if they don't care what happens to it as long as they achieve their partisan aims.
The filibuster used to be rarely used. But over the last decade the threat of a filibuster has become standard operating procedure, virtually shutting down the Senate for periods of time.
Meanwhile, some members of the House have been willing to shut down the entire government in order to get their way. Last summer they were even willing to risk the full faith and credit of the United States in order to achieve their goals.
In 2010 the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited money from billionaires and corporations overwhelming our democracy, on the bizarre theory that corporations are people under the First Amendment. Congress won't even pass legislation requiring their names be disclosed.
Some members of Congress have signed a pledge -- not of allegiance to the United States but of allegiance to a man named Grover Norquist, who has never been elected by anyone. Norquist's "no-tax" pledge is interpreted only by Norquist, who says closing a tax loophole is tantamount to raising taxes and therefore violates the pledge.
True patriots don't hate the government of the United States. They're proud of it. Generations of Americans have risked their lives to preserve and protect it. They may not like everything it does, and they justifiably worry when special interests gain too much power over it. But true patriots work to improve the U.S. government, not destroy it.
But these days some Americans loathe the government, and are doing everything they can to paralyze it, starve it and make the public so cynical about it that it's no longer capable of doing much of anything. Norquist says he wants to shrink it down to a size it can be "drowned in a bathtub."
When arguing against paying their fair share of taxes, some wealthy Americans claim "it's my money." They forget it's their nation, too. And unless they pay their fair share of taxes, Americans can't meet the basic needs of our people. True patriotism means paying for America.
So when you hear people talk about patriotism, be warned. They may mean securing the nation's borders, not securing our society. Within those borders, each of us is on our own. These people don't want a government that actively works for all our citizens.
Yet true patriotism isn't mainly about excluding outsiders seen as our common adversaries. It's about coming together for the common good.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
Monday, July 2, 2012
More on Roberts
I wish I could let this Supreme Court health care decision go, but it's all so interesting in its ramifications.
by Jonathan Chair
Jan Crawford has an amazing report showing what many of us suspected immediately when the Supreme Court announced its shocking and bizarre decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act: John Roberts switched his position on the law because he feared the crisis of legitimacy he would create by embracing such an activist position. He is perfectly eager to join in future bouts of right-wing judicial activism, but this particular one, and this particular time, frightened him away from the precipice.
I should explain why I call the decision shocking and bizarre. There were numerous arguments for the constitutionality of the law. The argument that it could be uphold under the power to tax struck me as convincing (Jack Balkin made the case a month before the decision) but not completely airtight. You could plausibly deny the mandate was a tax, whereas the arguments denying it as a function of the Commerce Clause were insanely tendentious. Liberal lawyers were unanimously supportive of the Commerce Cause justification and divided on the taxing arguments. Conservative lawyers were divided on the Commerce Clause and united on the taxing authority. The overlap of legal minds willing to accept the fantastical right-wing arguments against the law but also to accept the weakest liberal argument for it contained nobody at all, until Roberts himself stepped forward to claim this unoccupied territory.
Crawford’s report will enrage conservatives. (The conservative justices and/or clerks who spoke with her probably leaked the story precisely in the hope that it would.) They’re right to be enraged. The essence of law is to decide cases on the basis of what the law says, not on the basis of personal preference or some other consideration. Roberts seems to have corrupted his role as a judge, deciding upon the outcome that made him most comfortable and working backward to a justification for it. The epithet legal scholars use for this sort of thing is a “results-oriented decision.”
And this suggests why, as reassuring as the bottom-line result of Roberts's decision may be, the process by which he arrived at it was so unnerving. The legal arguments he did endorse were simply crazy. And, beneath the legal gobbledygook, the form of craziness was crude and obvious.
The case against the law was, basically, to devise a series of often niggling, semantic or outright false distinctions between Obamacare and other of the many ways in which Congress has regulated commerce before. Then, freed from precedent, it could turn the decision into a philosophical game, imagining that upholding this law would enable some future law which adopted a vaguely related rationale to some horrible dystopian end (mandatory broccoli!) You could use this kind of dorm room logic to declare any law unconstitutional. All you have to do is find some way in which it’s different from previous laws – and every law is different from other laws in some way – then imagine President Stalin and a complaint Congress twisting the justification to some unimaginable purpose, and presto, unconstitutional.
David Frum brilliantly compares the this-isn’t-really-in-the-Constitution-so-I’ll-wing-it logic of the conservative dissent to the famous liberal activism that liberal justices used to create a right to sexual freedom in Griswold v. Connecticut. That earlier case, rightly scored by conservatives for decades, declared that “emanations” from the Third, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments created a right to privacy that extended to sex. The four conservative justices insisted Obamacare couldn’t be constitutional because… well, just because:
What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States. Whatever may be the conceptual limits upon the Commerce Clause and upon the power to tax and spend, they cannot be such as will enable the Federal Government to regulate all private conduct and to compel the States to function as administrators of federal programs.
They can’t say what limits the government can prescribe upon private conduct. But they don’t like this health care business. So they’ll just cite the Constitution in general as their source here, with all the legal precision of some guy in a tricorner hat at a Tea Party rally. (Scalia also hates dope smokers so anything he may have said about limiting their private conduct does not apply to health care.)
Roberts was willing to endorse the legal logic of this thinly veiled justification, but unwilling to accept the political consequences of it. If his decision was justice, it was justice of the roughest kind.
by Jonathan Chair
Jan Crawford has an amazing report showing what many of us suspected immediately when the Supreme Court announced its shocking and bizarre decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act: John Roberts switched his position on the law because he feared the crisis of legitimacy he would create by embracing such an activist position. He is perfectly eager to join in future bouts of right-wing judicial activism, but this particular one, and this particular time, frightened him away from the precipice.
I should explain why I call the decision shocking and bizarre. There were numerous arguments for the constitutionality of the law. The argument that it could be uphold under the power to tax struck me as convincing (Jack Balkin made the case a month before the decision) but not completely airtight. You could plausibly deny the mandate was a tax, whereas the arguments denying it as a function of the Commerce Clause were insanely tendentious. Liberal lawyers were unanimously supportive of the Commerce Cause justification and divided on the taxing arguments. Conservative lawyers were divided on the Commerce Clause and united on the taxing authority. The overlap of legal minds willing to accept the fantastical right-wing arguments against the law but also to accept the weakest liberal argument for it contained nobody at all, until Roberts himself stepped forward to claim this unoccupied territory.
Crawford’s report will enrage conservatives. (The conservative justices and/or clerks who spoke with her probably leaked the story precisely in the hope that it would.) They’re right to be enraged. The essence of law is to decide cases on the basis of what the law says, not on the basis of personal preference or some other consideration. Roberts seems to have corrupted his role as a judge, deciding upon the outcome that made him most comfortable and working backward to a justification for it. The epithet legal scholars use for this sort of thing is a “results-oriented decision.”
And this suggests why, as reassuring as the bottom-line result of Roberts's decision may be, the process by which he arrived at it was so unnerving. The legal arguments he did endorse were simply crazy. And, beneath the legal gobbledygook, the form of craziness was crude and obvious.
The case against the law was, basically, to devise a series of often niggling, semantic or outright false distinctions between Obamacare and other of the many ways in which Congress has regulated commerce before. Then, freed from precedent, it could turn the decision into a philosophical game, imagining that upholding this law would enable some future law which adopted a vaguely related rationale to some horrible dystopian end (mandatory broccoli!) You could use this kind of dorm room logic to declare any law unconstitutional. All you have to do is find some way in which it’s different from previous laws – and every law is different from other laws in some way – then imagine President Stalin and a complaint Congress twisting the justification to some unimaginable purpose, and presto, unconstitutional.
David Frum brilliantly compares the this-isn’t-really-in-the-Constitution-so-I’ll-wing-it logic of the conservative dissent to the famous liberal activism that liberal justices used to create a right to sexual freedom in Griswold v. Connecticut. That earlier case, rightly scored by conservatives for decades, declared that “emanations” from the Third, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments created a right to privacy that extended to sex. The four conservative justices insisted Obamacare couldn’t be constitutional because… well, just because:
What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States. Whatever may be the conceptual limits upon the Commerce Clause and upon the power to tax and spend, they cannot be such as will enable the Federal Government to regulate all private conduct and to compel the States to function as administrators of federal programs.
They can’t say what limits the government can prescribe upon private conduct. But they don’t like this health care business. So they’ll just cite the Constitution in general as their source here, with all the legal precision of some guy in a tricorner hat at a Tea Party rally. (Scalia also hates dope smokers so anything he may have said about limiting their private conduct does not apply to health care.)
Roberts was willing to endorse the legal logic of this thinly veiled justification, but unwilling to accept the political consequences of it. If his decision was justice, it was justice of the roughest kind.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Plantation America
Sunday, Jul 1, 2012 10:00 PM UTC
It’s been said that the rich are different than you and me. What most
Americans don’t know is that they’re also quite different from each other, and
that which faction is currently running the show ultimately makes a vast
difference in the kind of country we are.
Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that’s corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here’s what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.
North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty
Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite — and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.
For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic ofnoblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they’ve done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.
Southern values revived
How a brutal strain of conservative American aristocrats have come to rule America
This photo provided by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles
shows the design of a proposed Sons of the Confederacy license plate. (AP/Texas
Department of Motor Vehicles)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
Right now, a lot of our problems stem directly from the fact that the wrong sort has finally gotten the upper hand; a particularly brutal and anti-democratic strain of American aristocrat that the other elites have mostly managed to keep away from the levers of power since the Revolution. Worse: this bunch has set a very ugly tone that’s corrupted how people with power and money behave in every corner of our culture. Here’s what happened, and how it happened, and what it means for America now.
North versus South: Two Definitions of Liberty
Michael Lind first called out the existence of this conflict in his 2006 book, Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. He argued that much of American history has been characterized by a struggle between two historical factions among the American elite — and that the election of George W. Bush was a definitive sign that the wrong side was winning.
For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic ofnoblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they’ve done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.
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