It never ceases to amaze me how the Republicans seek to cut the captital gains tax. No matter what happens, whether it has anything to do with economics even, their first suggestion is to cut the capital gains tax. This will do nothing to help the middle class in this country.
"Sen. McCain also shows how little he understands the economy by offering lower capital gains rates in a year in which people don't have an awful lot of capital gains," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton responded. "His trickle-down, ideological recipes won't strengthen our economy and grow our middle-class." Burton added that the McCain plan provides "no tax relief at all to 101 million hardworking families, including 97 percent of senior citizens, and it does nothing to cut taxes for small businesses or give them access to credit."
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
MCain to Promise More Help for the Affluent
In yet another attempt to jump-start his campaign, it appears that Sen. John McCain is poised to offer more help to our beleagured wealthiest citizens. This is stock Republicanism.
The two men will debate Wednesday at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y. CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer will moderate the 90-minute forum. Still, McCain promised to run a "respectful" campaign in the weeks to come. "I respect Senator Obama, we will conduct a respectful race and be sure everyone else does too. But there are stark difference between us," McCain said. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a top adviser to McCain, said the presidential candidate was considering a reduction in taxes on investments, including a possible cut in the capital gains tax. But campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said McCain would not announce any specific proposals during campaign stops Monday in Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. He added, "We will likely have further proposals this week as economic news and conditions change." Graham, on CBS News' Face the Nation said the GOP candidate was considering policy proposals that would cut taxes on investments. "I think it goes along the lines of now's the time to lower tax rates for investors, capital gains tax, dividend tax rates, to make sure that we can get the economy jump-started," Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "It will be a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes." McCain already has laid out proposals to address the crisis, including a $300 billion plan for the federal government to buy distressed mortgages and renegotiate them at a reduced price.
The two men will debate Wednesday at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y. CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer will moderate the 90-minute forum. Still, McCain promised to run a "respectful" campaign in the weeks to come. "I respect Senator Obama, we will conduct a respectful race and be sure everyone else does too. But there are stark difference between us," McCain said. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a top adviser to McCain, said the presidential candidate was considering a reduction in taxes on investments, including a possible cut in the capital gains tax. But campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said McCain would not announce any specific proposals during campaign stops Monday in Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. He added, "We will likely have further proposals this week as economic news and conditions change." Graham, on CBS News' Face the Nation said the GOP candidate was considering policy proposals that would cut taxes on investments. "I think it goes along the lines of now's the time to lower tax rates for investors, capital gains tax, dividend tax rates, to make sure that we can get the economy jump-started," Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "It will be a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes." McCain already has laid out proposals to address the crisis, including a $300 billion plan for the federal government to buy distressed mortgages and renegotiate them at a reduced price.
An Explanation of the Financial Meltdown
From my colleague Paul Durantini.
Hi Everyone,
This is one of the better summaries of why we are in the financial mess that we are in.
Cheers,
Paul
MarkRobertson Date 09-22-2008 17:48 On the heels of this weekend's latest morph involving Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the last brick from the wall that was Glass-Steagall has been kicked to the curb. Hugh McManus has shared the works of Charles R. Morris (Trillion Dollar Meltdown) with us and I thought it would be good to check and see what the seemingly-prescient Mr. Morris has on his mind lately. He didn't disappoint. See:The Madness of BankersSometimes things disappear into the ether when it comes to Internet links, so I'm going to do something unusual and copy the entire interview here, for posterity. This isn't intended to infringe on the works of The Texas Observer or Mr. Bryce or CounterCurrents in any way whatsoever.Millions of words have been written about the ongoing financial disaster largely caused by the subprime mortgage mess. But the most concise and easiest to understand handbook on the issue is almost certainly Charles R. Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. The book, published in March, spent several weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, and for good reason: The book explains in clear language exactly what happened and why.Morris, a lawyer and former banker who lives in Manhattan, has written 11 books. His articles have been published in myriad publications, including Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and BusinessWeek. He exchanged e-mails with Observer contributing writer Robert Bryce in early August.Texas Observer: You wrote a recent piece for BusinessWeek in which you argue that it is "essential to shrink the hypertrophied financial sector." Why has the financial sector grown so large over the past few decades?Charles Morris: Financial rewards on Wall Street have been rising much faster than in the rest of the economy for about 20 years. Commerce Department surveys show that financial sector profits were more than 40 percent of all corporate profits in 2007, far out of proportion to their share of output. Those rewards sucked in the cream of each year's B-school grads, top mathematicians and physicists, lawyers, etc. Couple that with the anti-regulatory atmosphere of the last couple decades, and we have seen an orgy of truly irresponsible, destructive "innovation"--anything to drive up earnings.The subprime crisis was purely a Wall Street invention. Subprime lending had always been a tiny sliver of the mortgage market, mostly within the Federal Housing Administration. In 2004 or so, Wall Street realized they needed higher mortgage yields to sell the complicated, mortgage-backed structures that produced their biggest fees. They started acquiring subprime lenders, paying brokers premiums for high-yield mortgages and the like, until by 2006, high-risk mortgages were about a third of all new originations. Nobody seemed to care that most of them could never be repaid; the focus was just on the fees. It's not much different from what happened with the infamous "investment trusts" that National City and other big banks were flogging in the late 1920s.TO: Perhaps the most important single deregulatory move of the past few decades was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a law created in 1933 that kept banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses from merging with each other. Glass-Steagall was replaced by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act (named for the trio of Republicans who sponsored it, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, U.S. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, and U.S. Rep. Thomas Bliley of Virginia), which was signed into law in 1999. How culpable is Gramm for our current mess?CM: Gramm-Leach was part of the zeitgeist, and by the time it was passed, the big banks had long since worked around the old rules, so Glass-Steagall had already become virtually a dead letter. Investment banks had been stripping away the bread-and-butter lending businesses of the commercial banks, so Gramm-Leach was partly just an attempt to restore some balance. The root problem wasn't Gramm-Leach, but the prevailing dogma that self-regulated markets were inherently superior to supervised markets.TO: Speaking of Glass-Steagall, you wrote in your book that Congress "should seriously consider restoring some version" of it, including the separation of commercial banking and investment banking. Why is this so important?CM: Over the long term, financial sector profits have been about twice as high as corporate profits as a whole, which flies in the face of economic theory. High peak profits at financial companies make sense because they are so highly leveraged. But that should also expose them to commensurately greater losses, so profits would be about average over the cycle. But we tend to socialize financial sector losses, as we're doing now, while allowing partners and shareholders to keep their profits from the booms.I think we need a rigid distinction between regulated and unregulated financial companies. Only the regulated sectors would have access to deposit insurance, the Fed window, etc., while there would be strong legal bars against government support for the unregulated sector. [The "Fed window" refers to lending that the Federal Reserve normally provides to depository commercial banks. The Fed recently opened its "window" to Wall Street investment banks.]The regulated sectors would have strict leverage rules, and be intentionally a bit boring. Enforcing such distinctions would require very carefully crafted legislation. And I admit it would probably be hard to pass. Everyone deplores "moral hazard," but bankers make a lot of money when they succumb to it.TO: In our recent phone conversation, we talked about the role of hedge funds and their use of leverage, which is magnifying the potential damage of the derivatives now being employed. You said, "We can't control hedge funds. But we can stop regulated banks from lending to hedge funds." What effect will that prohibition on lending have?CM: There are many different kinds of hedge funds, of course. But a common strategy is to earn outsized returns by using extremely high leverage; and the leveraged lending, most of the time, comes from banks. If rich people want to invest in high-risk, high-leverage undertakings, that's their business. But regulated banks with a potential claim on public support shouldn't be allowed to lend to them, or be allowed to lend only with a very high capital penalty. If a hedge fund, or a highly leveraged investment bank, a Goldman Sachs, say, is at risk of failing, the core banking and payments system won't be at risk. The corollary of that, of course, is that if a hedge fund or an unregulated investment bank, say, gets into big trouble, they must simply fail, no matter how much damage it causes, which is why the barriers to a bailout would have to be written into law. Markets can't work if there is a "social safety net" for the biggest players.TO: It's obvious from your book that you are no fan of Alan Greenspan and his laissez-faire attitude toward financial markets. How responsible is he for our current situation?CM: To state it as generously as possible: Greenspan is the classic case of a good man in a job for much too long. Starting with the 1987 market crash, he built his reputation as a financial genius by intervening, often very adroitly, to supply fresh market capital at moments of crisis. He did the same thing after 9/11 and the 2001-2002 recession, but then kept rates much too low for much too long. His anti-regulatory zealotry also blinded him to the obvious asset bubble building up. And that's not hindsight; there were a lot of warnings, including from other governments.TO: Given your book's take on Paul Volcker and how he addressed the problems in the U.S. economy in the 1980s, it appears that you favor higher interest rates as a way to strengthen the dollar and therefore restore credibility to the U.S. financial system. That will almost certainly lower oil prices. It's also likely to trigger a sharp recession. But you think that a quick (and likely painful) recession is the best cure for our financial ailments. Why?CM: By my rough count, the federal government has already poured some $2 trillion into propping up the financial sector--that's including new Fed lending facilities, expanded lending by Freddie and Fannie (much of which goes to buying up mortgages from banks), the spending rebates, the new housing bill, and so on.Consumers have been spending far more than their incomes, at least since 2004 or so, personal savings rates are near zero, retirements are looming, we have crippling trade deficits and a collapsing dollar, which is a big factor in the oil price rise. And the current federal strategy is just to keep all that going, pouring in borrowed federal money to make up for the fall in consumer borrowing.It's the most shortsighted, let's-get-through-the-next-month strategy possible--not unlike strapped consumers playing credit-card roulette. I fear we're just making the ultimate reckoning worse and worse, much as Japan did when it covered up its asset bubble through the 1990s.The recessions that Volcker triggered in 1981 and 1982 were awful, but he managed to wrench the country onto a radically different course. I don't think there's any choice. Consumer spending rates are still near an all-time peak relative to income, and overall debt is still rising. We need a radical change of course. Whether McCain or Obama wins the presidency, they should try to get this behind them in their first two years.TO: I agree that we need better regulation of financial institutions. But it appears that financial chicanery happens on a regular, almost predictable cycle. In the '80s we had Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. In the '90s we had the savings and loan debacle and the Barings Bank meltdown. In the early '00s, we had Enron and Adelphia. We'll never be able to stop all the scam artists, but will more regulation reduce the frequency of the disasters?CM: My hopes are more modest than that. I just want to stop the scams going on now. If Wall Street and its lobbyists have their way, we'll end up with a total Wall Street bailout, plus some cosmetic regulatory changes ... It's the same kind of thing that's proved such a brilliant success at the Department of Homeland Security.TO: Perhaps your most important recommendation is this: "Force tough leverage constraints on regulated institutions while moving all risky exposures onto the balance sheet." Enron and other companies were experts at moving their risky assets off the balance sheet. If we are to achieve better regulation of assets and assure that they get properly accounted for on the balance sheet, won't that require better funding of regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission?CM: There are two ways to defeat regulation: One is to pass toothless laws; the other is to pass tough laws and not finance them. The [Food and Drug Administration] is perhaps the classic case of the second one, even more than the SEC. But, yes, it's pointless to create regulatory regimes without the tools to do their jobs.TO: Your book is titled The Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Will the final cost be $1 trillion? Or more?CM: More. It looks like probably $1.5 to $2 trillion at this point, although there may never be a final accounting.
Hi Everyone,
This is one of the better summaries of why we are in the financial mess that we are in.
Cheers,
Paul
MarkRobertson Date 09-22-2008 17:48 On the heels of this weekend's latest morph involving Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the last brick from the wall that was Glass-Steagall has been kicked to the curb. Hugh McManus has shared the works of Charles R. Morris (Trillion Dollar Meltdown) with us and I thought it would be good to check and see what the seemingly-prescient Mr. Morris has on his mind lately. He didn't disappoint. See:The Madness of BankersSometimes things disappear into the ether when it comes to Internet links, so I'm going to do something unusual and copy the entire interview here, for posterity. This isn't intended to infringe on the works of The Texas Observer or Mr. Bryce or CounterCurrents in any way whatsoever.Millions of words have been written about the ongoing financial disaster largely caused by the subprime mortgage mess. But the most concise and easiest to understand handbook on the issue is almost certainly Charles R. Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. The book, published in March, spent several weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, and for good reason: The book explains in clear language exactly what happened and why.Morris, a lawyer and former banker who lives in Manhattan, has written 11 books. His articles have been published in myriad publications, including Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and BusinessWeek. He exchanged e-mails with Observer contributing writer Robert Bryce in early August.Texas Observer: You wrote a recent piece for BusinessWeek in which you argue that it is "essential to shrink the hypertrophied financial sector." Why has the financial sector grown so large over the past few decades?Charles Morris: Financial rewards on Wall Street have been rising much faster than in the rest of the economy for about 20 years. Commerce Department surveys show that financial sector profits were more than 40 percent of all corporate profits in 2007, far out of proportion to their share of output. Those rewards sucked in the cream of each year's B-school grads, top mathematicians and physicists, lawyers, etc. Couple that with the anti-regulatory atmosphere of the last couple decades, and we have seen an orgy of truly irresponsible, destructive "innovation"--anything to drive up earnings.The subprime crisis was purely a Wall Street invention. Subprime lending had always been a tiny sliver of the mortgage market, mostly within the Federal Housing Administration. In 2004 or so, Wall Street realized they needed higher mortgage yields to sell the complicated, mortgage-backed structures that produced their biggest fees. They started acquiring subprime lenders, paying brokers premiums for high-yield mortgages and the like, until by 2006, high-risk mortgages were about a third of all new originations. Nobody seemed to care that most of them could never be repaid; the focus was just on the fees. It's not much different from what happened with the infamous "investment trusts" that National City and other big banks were flogging in the late 1920s.TO: Perhaps the most important single deregulatory move of the past few decades was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a law created in 1933 that kept banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses from merging with each other. Glass-Steagall was replaced by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act (named for the trio of Republicans who sponsored it, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, U.S. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, and U.S. Rep. Thomas Bliley of Virginia), which was signed into law in 1999. How culpable is Gramm for our current mess?CM: Gramm-Leach was part of the zeitgeist, and by the time it was passed, the big banks had long since worked around the old rules, so Glass-Steagall had already become virtually a dead letter. Investment banks had been stripping away the bread-and-butter lending businesses of the commercial banks, so Gramm-Leach was partly just an attempt to restore some balance. The root problem wasn't Gramm-Leach, but the prevailing dogma that self-regulated markets were inherently superior to supervised markets.TO: Speaking of Glass-Steagall, you wrote in your book that Congress "should seriously consider restoring some version" of it, including the separation of commercial banking and investment banking. Why is this so important?CM: Over the long term, financial sector profits have been about twice as high as corporate profits as a whole, which flies in the face of economic theory. High peak profits at financial companies make sense because they are so highly leveraged. But that should also expose them to commensurately greater losses, so profits would be about average over the cycle. But we tend to socialize financial sector losses, as we're doing now, while allowing partners and shareholders to keep their profits from the booms.I think we need a rigid distinction between regulated and unregulated financial companies. Only the regulated sectors would have access to deposit insurance, the Fed window, etc., while there would be strong legal bars against government support for the unregulated sector. [The "Fed window" refers to lending that the Federal Reserve normally provides to depository commercial banks. The Fed recently opened its "window" to Wall Street investment banks.]The regulated sectors would have strict leverage rules, and be intentionally a bit boring. Enforcing such distinctions would require very carefully crafted legislation. And I admit it would probably be hard to pass. Everyone deplores "moral hazard," but bankers make a lot of money when they succumb to it.TO: In our recent phone conversation, we talked about the role of hedge funds and their use of leverage, which is magnifying the potential damage of the derivatives now being employed. You said, "We can't control hedge funds. But we can stop regulated banks from lending to hedge funds." What effect will that prohibition on lending have?CM: There are many different kinds of hedge funds, of course. But a common strategy is to earn outsized returns by using extremely high leverage; and the leveraged lending, most of the time, comes from banks. If rich people want to invest in high-risk, high-leverage undertakings, that's their business. But regulated banks with a potential claim on public support shouldn't be allowed to lend to them, or be allowed to lend only with a very high capital penalty. If a hedge fund, or a highly leveraged investment bank, a Goldman Sachs, say, is at risk of failing, the core banking and payments system won't be at risk. The corollary of that, of course, is that if a hedge fund or an unregulated investment bank, say, gets into big trouble, they must simply fail, no matter how much damage it causes, which is why the barriers to a bailout would have to be written into law. Markets can't work if there is a "social safety net" for the biggest players.TO: It's obvious from your book that you are no fan of Alan Greenspan and his laissez-faire attitude toward financial markets. How responsible is he for our current situation?CM: To state it as generously as possible: Greenspan is the classic case of a good man in a job for much too long. Starting with the 1987 market crash, he built his reputation as a financial genius by intervening, often very adroitly, to supply fresh market capital at moments of crisis. He did the same thing after 9/11 and the 2001-2002 recession, but then kept rates much too low for much too long. His anti-regulatory zealotry also blinded him to the obvious asset bubble building up. And that's not hindsight; there were a lot of warnings, including from other governments.TO: Given your book's take on Paul Volcker and how he addressed the problems in the U.S. economy in the 1980s, it appears that you favor higher interest rates as a way to strengthen the dollar and therefore restore credibility to the U.S. financial system. That will almost certainly lower oil prices. It's also likely to trigger a sharp recession. But you think that a quick (and likely painful) recession is the best cure for our financial ailments. Why?CM: By my rough count, the federal government has already poured some $2 trillion into propping up the financial sector--that's including new Fed lending facilities, expanded lending by Freddie and Fannie (much of which goes to buying up mortgages from banks), the spending rebates, the new housing bill, and so on.Consumers have been spending far more than their incomes, at least since 2004 or so, personal savings rates are near zero, retirements are looming, we have crippling trade deficits and a collapsing dollar, which is a big factor in the oil price rise. And the current federal strategy is just to keep all that going, pouring in borrowed federal money to make up for the fall in consumer borrowing.It's the most shortsighted, let's-get-through-the-next-month strategy possible--not unlike strapped consumers playing credit-card roulette. I fear we're just making the ultimate reckoning worse and worse, much as Japan did when it covered up its asset bubble through the 1990s.The recessions that Volcker triggered in 1981 and 1982 were awful, but he managed to wrench the country onto a radically different course. I don't think there's any choice. Consumer spending rates are still near an all-time peak relative to income, and overall debt is still rising. We need a radical change of course. Whether McCain or Obama wins the presidency, they should try to get this behind them in their first two years.TO: I agree that we need better regulation of financial institutions. But it appears that financial chicanery happens on a regular, almost predictable cycle. In the '80s we had Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. In the '90s we had the savings and loan debacle and the Barings Bank meltdown. In the early '00s, we had Enron and Adelphia. We'll never be able to stop all the scam artists, but will more regulation reduce the frequency of the disasters?CM: My hopes are more modest than that. I just want to stop the scams going on now. If Wall Street and its lobbyists have their way, we'll end up with a total Wall Street bailout, plus some cosmetic regulatory changes ... It's the same kind of thing that's proved such a brilliant success at the Department of Homeland Security.TO: Perhaps your most important recommendation is this: "Force tough leverage constraints on regulated institutions while moving all risky exposures onto the balance sheet." Enron and other companies were experts at moving their risky assets off the balance sheet. If we are to achieve better regulation of assets and assure that they get properly accounted for on the balance sheet, won't that require better funding of regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission?CM: There are two ways to defeat regulation: One is to pass toothless laws; the other is to pass tough laws and not finance them. The [Food and Drug Administration] is perhaps the classic case of the second one, even more than the SEC. But, yes, it's pointless to create regulatory regimes without the tools to do their jobs.TO: Your book is titled The Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Will the final cost be $1 trillion? Or more?CM: More. It looks like probably $1.5 to $2 trillion at this point, although there may never be a final accounting.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
We Can Only Hope
We can only hope that this election is the last gasp of white supremacy (the Republican Party) in this country, that the white backlast to the civil rights movement will end, and that competence over identity politics will finally prevail again. We can only hope.
How We Vote Matters
By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 10, 2008
The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.
For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.
Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.
Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.
It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.
Voting has consequences.
I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.
The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.
Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.
In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.
These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.
Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.
Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.
When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”
Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.
“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.
The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.
Published: October 10, 2008
The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.
For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.
Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.
Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.
It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.
Voting has consequences.
I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.
The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.
Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.
In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.
These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.
Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.
Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.
When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”
Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.
“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.
The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
John Podesta - The Power of Progress
John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff under President Clinton, favors us with a vision of the progressive future we need in this country, based on lessons learned from the great Progressive Era from 1890 to 1920. This is the book I've been waiting for: a call for a progressive future based on the heyday of progressivism 1890 to 1920.
In these hard economic times, we need the power of progress once again as we mainly concerned these days with our economic well-being. At the turn of the 20th century, the American Dream was threatened by growing inequalitites in wealth and the country was run by Republicans tied securely to priviliged industrialists and their allies. But that era also gave birth to a renaissance in American political thought that forever changed our nation.
It's amazing how those times are just like today as the conservative ideology served as an excuse for the accumulation of welath and privilege to detriment of the middle class. Just like in the early 20th century, we need a new progressive era that stresses justice and equality for all, economic opportunity for all, and a renewed commitment to the common good, a foreign concept to Republicans.
It is time to begin the work.
In these hard economic times, we need the power of progress once again as we mainly concerned these days with our economic well-being. At the turn of the 20th century, the American Dream was threatened by growing inequalitites in wealth and the country was run by Republicans tied securely to priviliged industrialists and their allies. But that era also gave birth to a renaissance in American political thought that forever changed our nation.
It's amazing how those times are just like today as the conservative ideology served as an excuse for the accumulation of welath and privilege to detriment of the middle class. Just like in the early 20th century, we need a new progressive era that stresses justice and equality for all, economic opportunity for all, and a renewed commitment to the common good, a foreign concept to Republicans.
It is time to begin the work.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
50 Greatest Villians in LIterature
From the Telegraph:
50. Helen Grayle/Velma Valento from Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
49. Steerpike from Titus Groan and Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
48. Shere Khan from The Jungle Book stories, by Rudyard Kipling
47. Long John Silver from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
46. Moriarty from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle
45. The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis
44. Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
43. Fred from The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
42. Grendel's Mother from Beowulf
41. O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
40. Captain Hook from Peter and Wendy, by J M Barrie
39. Moby-Dick from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
38. Gil-Martin from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg.
37 Surtur in A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay
36 The Judge from Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
35 Mrs Coulter from the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
34 Clare Quilty from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
33 Count Fosco from The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
32 Signor Montoni from The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
31 Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
30 Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
29 Marquise de Merteuil from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
28 Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens
27 Alec d'Urberville from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
26 Cthulhu from The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft
25 Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, by J R R Tolkien
24 Don Juan in (among others) El Burlador de Sevilla, by Tirso di Molina
23 The Joker from Batman, by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jenny Robinson
22 Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the James Bond novels, by Ian Fleming
21 Augustus Melmotte from The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
20 Mr Hyde from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
19 Edmund from King Lear, by William Shakespeare
18 Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
"
17 Patrick Batemen from American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
16 Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster
15 Svengali from Trilby, by George du Maurier
14 Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris
13 Count Dracula from Dracula, by Bram Stoker
12 Barabas from The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe
11 Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
10 Vindice from The Revenger's Tragedy, by Thomas Middleton
9 Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
8 Claudius from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
7 Ambrosio from The Monk, by M G Lewis
6 Robert Lovelace from Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson
5 Voldemort from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
4 Iago from Othello, by William Shakespeare
3 Cruella de Vil from The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith
2 Samuel Whiskers from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, by Beatrix Potter
1 Satan from Paradise Lost, by John Milton
50. Helen Grayle/Velma Valento from Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
49. Steerpike from Titus Groan and Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
48. Shere Khan from The Jungle Book stories, by Rudyard Kipling
47. Long John Silver from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
46. Moriarty from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle
45. The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis
44. Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
43. Fred from The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
42. Grendel's Mother from Beowulf
41. O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
40. Captain Hook from Peter and Wendy, by J M Barrie
39. Moby-Dick from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
38. Gil-Martin from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg.
37 Surtur in A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay
36 The Judge from Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
35 Mrs Coulter from the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
34 Clare Quilty from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
33 Count Fosco from The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
32 Signor Montoni from The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
31 Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
30 Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
29 Marquise de Merteuil from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
28 Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens
27 Alec d'Urberville from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
26 Cthulhu from The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft
25 Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, by J R R Tolkien
24 Don Juan in (among others) El Burlador de Sevilla, by Tirso di Molina
23 The Joker from Batman, by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jenny Robinson
22 Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the James Bond novels, by Ian Fleming
21 Augustus Melmotte from The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
20 Mr Hyde from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
19 Edmund from King Lear, by William Shakespeare
18 Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
"
17 Patrick Batemen from American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
16 Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster
15 Svengali from Trilby, by George du Maurier
14 Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris
13 Count Dracula from Dracula, by Bram Stoker
12 Barabas from The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe
11 Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
10 Vindice from The Revenger's Tragedy, by Thomas Middleton
9 Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
8 Claudius from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
7 Ambrosio from The Monk, by M G Lewis
6 Robert Lovelace from Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson
5 Voldemort from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
4 Iago from Othello, by William Shakespeare
3 Cruella de Vil from The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith
2 Samuel Whiskers from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, by Beatrix Potter
1 Satan from Paradise Lost, by John Milton
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