The Republican mania for rewarding the rich with tax cuts has become so warped that the normal rules of budgeting no longer seem to apply. Arguing for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, Sen. Kyl spelled out what could well serve as the Party of the Rich's credo: "You should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." The same rule, of course, doesn't apply to spending for those in need: At the time he called for more borrowing on behalf of the rich, Kyl was also fighting to deny unemployment benefits to 5 million Americans. "Continuing to pay people unemployment compensation," he scoffed, "is a disincentive for them to seek new work."
In retrospect, the true victor of the midterm elections last year was not the Tea Party, or even Speaker of the House John Boehner. It was Grover Norquist.
"What has happened over the last two years is that Grover now has soldiers in the field," says Bartlett, the architect of the Reagan tax cuts. "These Tea Party people, in effect, take their orders from him." Indeed, a record 98 percent of House Republicans have now signed Norquist's anti-tax pledge – which includes a second, little-known provision that played a key role in the debt-ceiling debacle. In addition to vowing not to raise taxes, politicians who sign the pledge promise to use any revenue generated by ending a tax subsidy to immediately finance – that's right – more tax cuts.
Norquist insists the measure is necessary to force Congress to rein in spending. "I'm not focused on the deficit," he says. "The metric that matters is keeping spending down." But in the real world, the effect of Norquist's oath is to prevent the government from cutting the deficit by ending tax breaks to the rich. All told, tax breaks cost the government $1.2 trillion each year – far more than defense spending ($744 billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($719 billion) or Social Security ($701 billion). And most of the breaks – think of them as government subsidies delivered through the tax code – go to the wealthy. The richest one percent of Americans receive a 13.5 percent boost in their incomes from such subsidies – almost double the benefit the bottom 80 percent receives. Under Norquist's pledge, lawmakers are forbidden from ending any kind of tax break – mortgage deductions for luxury vacation homes, subsidies for giant oil companies, lower tax rates for private-equity millionaires – without using the money to pay for another tax cut. "If you can't get rid of tax expenditures – if old Grover is going to call that a 'tax increase' – it's not just ludicrous, it's deception," says Simpson, the former GOP senator.
Ludicrous or not, Norquist's intransigence on tax expenditures killed the "grand bargain" that President Obama proposed during the debt-ceiling standoff. In return for $1 trillion in cuts to social spending and national security, plus another $650 billion in reductions to entitlements like Medicare, Obama asked Republicans to get rid of $1.2 trillion in wasteful tax subsidies. "Democrats weren't talking about raising taxes – they were talking about eliminating tax expenditures, for God's sakes!" says Voinovich. "Many of them should have been eliminated a long time ago." But with so many Republicans committed to Norquist's anti-revenue pledge, Boehner was forced to walk away from the deal.
"Grover's got 'em terrified," says Simpson. "I always tell Republicans, 'Hell, Grover can't kill ya. He can't burn down your house. The only thing he can do to you is defeat you in re-election – and if re-election means more to you than your country, then you shouldn't be in the legislature.'"
The battle over the debt ceiling underscores the GOP's rapid evolution into the Party of the Rich. The budget savings projected from the compromise that Republicans wound up agreeing to – $2.1 trillion – won't even begin to pay for costs incurred by the Bush tax cuts. In their first decade alone, the cuts wound up depriving the Treasury of $2.5 trillion – with 38 percent of the money now going to the richest one percent of Americans. For all their talk of cutting the deficit in recent years, Republicans have spent far more of the public's money to subsidize the wealthy.
Indeed, since Republicans began their tax-cut binge in 1997, they have succeeded in making the rich much richer. While the average income for the bottom 90 percent of taxpayers has remained basically flat over the past 15 years, those in the top 0.01 percent have seen their incomes more than double, to $36 million a year. Translated into wages, that means most Americans have received a raise of $1.50 an hour since the GOP began cutting taxes during the Gingrich era. The most elite sliver of American society, meanwhile, saw their pay soar by $10,000 an hour.
America became a great nation with a prosperous middle class on the strength of a progressive tax code – one that demands the most of those who benefit most from our society. But the Party of the Rich has succeeded in breaking the back of that ideal. Today, says Johnston, "the tax system ceases to be progressive when you get to the very top of the wealthiest one percent." Above that marker, the richer you get, the lower your relative tax burden. "We have moved toward a plutocracy," Warren Buffett warned in a recent interview. "As people have gotten richer and richer, they have been favored by taxation – and have gotten richer to a greater degree."
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109#ixzz1dFc8x3u6
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
How Republicans Protect the Rich (8)
Far from creating the trickle-down economics promised by Reagan, the policies pursued by the modern Republican Party are gusher up. Under the leadership of Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the House's radicalized GOP caucus is pushing a predatory agenda for a new gilded age. Every move that Republicans make – whether it's to gut consumer protections, roll back environmental regulations, subsidize giant agribusinesses, abolish health care reform or just drill, baby, drill – is consistent with a single overarching agenda: to enrich the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, even if it requires borrowing from China, weakening national security, dismantling Medicare and taxing the middle class. With the nation still mired in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, Republicans have categorically rejected the one financial policy with a proven record of putting the country back on a more prosperous footing. "You hear the Republicans say that you don't dare raise taxes in a weak economy," says Stockman. "Ronald Reagan did – three times." Not even the downgrading of America's debt – which placed the world's only superpower on credit par with New Zealand and Belgium – has given GOP leaders cause to reconsider their pro-wealth jihad. In August, as the so-called Supercommittee began its work to complete the debt-ceiling deal by reducing future deficits by another $1.5 trillion, Cantor issued the Party of the Rich's marching orders, insisting that Republicans not buckle under the "tremendous pressure" to hike taxes and instead target spending cuts in "mandatory programs."
The composition of the committee offers little hope that Congress will hold the rich accountable for their share of the deficit burden. While Democrats appointed deal-oriented centrists like Sen. Max Baucus to the committee, Republicans stocked it with anti-revenue hard-liners, including Sens. Jon Kyl and Pat Toomey, who used to run the Club for Growth – an ally of Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. "Your wallet is safe," Norquist tweeted after the Republican roster was announced.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Norquist expresses pride that the GOP has been so thoroughly transformed since the days of Reagan. "It's a different Republican Party now," he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan's day – those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy – to segregationists. The "modern Republican Party," he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the "modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace."
Norquist expresses no discomfort at the moral impact of his project – providing tax favors for the wealthy that are paid for by cutting services to those who truly need them. "I understand greed and envy," Norquist says. "The idea that somebody's making money and you want to steal some of it? That's an interesting idea. But it's not morality. It's certainly not justice."
Such extremist rhetoric – equating taxation with theft – is exactly the kind of talk that dismays old-line Republicans. Many of those who fought for years at the side of Ronald Reagan say they no longer recognize traditional GOP values in the new Republican Party. Fighting for the rich, after all, is not the same as championing the right.
"You can look up my record: On conservatism and taxes I was better than Jesse Helms," says Simpson, the former senator. "But whatever happened to common sense? People are going to look around in five or 10 years and say, 'Whatever happened to the things that made me comfortable? That made our streets and schools good things?' And they'll look, hopefully, at Grover Norquist. I can say to you with deepest sincerity: If this country and this legislature are in thrall to Grover Norquist, we haven't got a prayer."
This story is from the November 24, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109#ixzz1dEpE26LM
The composition of the committee offers little hope that Congress will hold the rich accountable for their share of the deficit burden. While Democrats appointed deal-oriented centrists like Sen. Max Baucus to the committee, Republicans stocked it with anti-revenue hard-liners, including Sens. Jon Kyl and Pat Toomey, who used to run the Club for Growth – an ally of Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. "Your wallet is safe," Norquist tweeted after the Republican roster was announced.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Norquist expresses pride that the GOP has been so thoroughly transformed since the days of Reagan. "It's a different Republican Party now," he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan's day – those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy – to segregationists. The "modern Republican Party," he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the "modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace."
Norquist expresses no discomfort at the moral impact of his project – providing tax favors for the wealthy that are paid for by cutting services to those who truly need them. "I understand greed and envy," Norquist says. "The idea that somebody's making money and you want to steal some of it? That's an interesting idea. But it's not morality. It's certainly not justice."
Such extremist rhetoric – equating taxation with theft – is exactly the kind of talk that dismays old-line Republicans. Many of those who fought for years at the side of Ronald Reagan say they no longer recognize traditional GOP values in the new Republican Party. Fighting for the rich, after all, is not the same as championing the right.
"You can look up my record: On conservatism and taxes I was better than Jesse Helms," says Simpson, the former senator. "But whatever happened to common sense? People are going to look around in five or 10 years and say, 'Whatever happened to the things that made me comfortable? That made our streets and schools good things?' And they'll look, hopefully, at Grover Norquist. I can say to you with deepest sincerity: If this country and this legislature are in thrall to Grover Norquist, we haven't got a prayer."
This story is from the November 24, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109#ixzz1dEpE26LM
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Grains of Sand
From "The Big Think" by Adam Lee
In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins opens with an arresting analogy:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
As small and ordinary as they may be, our individual lives are spectacularly wonderful things. Each of us is one permutation out of countless possibilities, like one grain thrown up by randomness out of an ocean of sand. Each of us gets the chance to live once, to bring our distinctiveness to the world, and then each of us will die, never to exist again. Death is a tragedy, but how small it seems when weighed against the incredible gift of getting to live in the first place!
I think at times of the inconceivable odds that resulted in DNA's twisting double helixes combining to make me, me, out of all the innumerable trillions of human beings who could have been here in my place. My existence is the end result of an unimaginably vast chain of chance events, funneled and guided through the ages by the invisible tug of natural selection, billions of unborn ghosts spinning away into oblivion every second as each decision point cleaves the tree of contingency.
My genome is a patchwork, a convergence of different genes assembled by evolution over the ages. I have genes for lactose tolerance and decreased melanin, from ancestors a few dozen or a few hundred generations removed, pastoral herders who lived at high latitudes. I have genes for curiosity and wanderlust, the genetic legacy of the black men and women who were the first to leave our ancestral African homeland and spread out across the face of the world.
I have genes for upright walking and a larger braincase, first sculpted on the savanna as our apelike ancestors came down from the trees. I have genes for body hair and sweat glands and the three inner ear bones, inherited from our tiny mammalian ancestors who scurried and hid in the Triassic night to avoid the great stomp and glittering eyes of the world's reptilian masters. I have genes for five fingers and five toes, inherited from the fishlike tetrapods that swam and waded in the humid, marshy shallows of Devonian jungles. I have genes for a spinal cord, gifted to me by the wormlike ancestor of vertebrates that curled through warm Precambrian seas. And deep within my every cell, there are the mitochondria, the genetic homeobox, cytochrome C, the Krebs cycle - all common elements in the toolkit of life, some inherited from the first animals or the first eukaryotes, others dating even further back to the simple, ancient lifeform that was the common ancestor of every living thing on this planet.
The story of life is a rollercoaster ride of glory and disaster, of defeat and triumph. The planet's fossil record captures the many catastrophic blows that drove life on Earth to near-extinction, and the many subsequent resurgences as life sprang back in its exuberance, bringing forth new species to replace the vanished ones. That striving, that tenacity, that too is a hallmark of Earth and part of the generic heritage we all share.
This wasn't always the consensus view, of course. Prior to Darwin's era, the prevailing belief in paleontology was of a static world, where all species were God's perfect and eternal creations, each one a link in the great chain of being. The idea that any of them could have been lost to extinction was enormously controversial - blasphemous, you might say. Some of the first fossil hunters clung to the notion that the forms they saw preserved in stone still existed, alive and undiscovered, somewhere on the planet. But the evidence eventually mounted until that view was impossible to sustain any longer, despite its theological implications.
But the reality surpasses the fantasy. Unlike the believers who explain in all sincerity that their myths are "true but not real", our origin story is both true and real. And it's far grander and more majestic than the small, unimaginative, human-centered myths of antiquity. Just think of what it implies about our interconnectedness: the pulsing of a jellyfish's bell, the coordinated swerve of a school of fish, the dapple of sunlight through a redwood's vast green canopy, the explosive colors of a coral reef, the hidden biospheres in sulfuric hot springs and frozen Antarctic lakes - all of them are kin to me. Choose any of those living things, and however it twists and turns, there's a path backwards along the tree of life that leads to a point where my ancestors unite with theirs. (This is the subject of another outstanding book by Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, which I highly recommend.)
We all share in this history, and we all have the potential to carry it forward, which ought to be part of what makes human life so valuable. Each of us is a bearer of that heritage, a single outward-reaching thread of life's multibillion-year journey through time. And if life survives into the far future, if one day we reach that unimaginably distant shore that beckons to us, any of us might have played a part in reaching it; in the end, anyone's genes might turn out to be essential. There are those who say that atheism devalues life, and I answer - could anything give us a better sense of how rare, fragile, and precious life really is?
In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins opens with an arresting analogy:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
As small and ordinary as they may be, our individual lives are spectacularly wonderful things. Each of us is one permutation out of countless possibilities, like one grain thrown up by randomness out of an ocean of sand. Each of us gets the chance to live once, to bring our distinctiveness to the world, and then each of us will die, never to exist again. Death is a tragedy, but how small it seems when weighed against the incredible gift of getting to live in the first place!
I think at times of the inconceivable odds that resulted in DNA's twisting double helixes combining to make me, me, out of all the innumerable trillions of human beings who could have been here in my place. My existence is the end result of an unimaginably vast chain of chance events, funneled and guided through the ages by the invisible tug of natural selection, billions of unborn ghosts spinning away into oblivion every second as each decision point cleaves the tree of contingency.
My genome is a patchwork, a convergence of different genes assembled by evolution over the ages. I have genes for lactose tolerance and decreased melanin, from ancestors a few dozen or a few hundred generations removed, pastoral herders who lived at high latitudes. I have genes for curiosity and wanderlust, the genetic legacy of the black men and women who were the first to leave our ancestral African homeland and spread out across the face of the world.
I have genes for upright walking and a larger braincase, first sculpted on the savanna as our apelike ancestors came down from the trees. I have genes for body hair and sweat glands and the three inner ear bones, inherited from our tiny mammalian ancestors who scurried and hid in the Triassic night to avoid the great stomp and glittering eyes of the world's reptilian masters. I have genes for five fingers and five toes, inherited from the fishlike tetrapods that swam and waded in the humid, marshy shallows of Devonian jungles. I have genes for a spinal cord, gifted to me by the wormlike ancestor of vertebrates that curled through warm Precambrian seas. And deep within my every cell, there are the mitochondria, the genetic homeobox, cytochrome C, the Krebs cycle - all common elements in the toolkit of life, some inherited from the first animals or the first eukaryotes, others dating even further back to the simple, ancient lifeform that was the common ancestor of every living thing on this planet.
The story of life is a rollercoaster ride of glory and disaster, of defeat and triumph. The planet's fossil record captures the many catastrophic blows that drove life on Earth to near-extinction, and the many subsequent resurgences as life sprang back in its exuberance, bringing forth new species to replace the vanished ones. That striving, that tenacity, that too is a hallmark of Earth and part of the generic heritage we all share.
This wasn't always the consensus view, of course. Prior to Darwin's era, the prevailing belief in paleontology was of a static world, where all species were God's perfect and eternal creations, each one a link in the great chain of being. The idea that any of them could have been lost to extinction was enormously controversial - blasphemous, you might say. Some of the first fossil hunters clung to the notion that the forms they saw preserved in stone still existed, alive and undiscovered, somewhere on the planet. But the evidence eventually mounted until that view was impossible to sustain any longer, despite its theological implications.
But the reality surpasses the fantasy. Unlike the believers who explain in all sincerity that their myths are "true but not real", our origin story is both true and real. And it's far grander and more majestic than the small, unimaginative, human-centered myths of antiquity. Just think of what it implies about our interconnectedness: the pulsing of a jellyfish's bell, the coordinated swerve of a school of fish, the dapple of sunlight through a redwood's vast green canopy, the explosive colors of a coral reef, the hidden biospheres in sulfuric hot springs and frozen Antarctic lakes - all of them are kin to me. Choose any of those living things, and however it twists and turns, there's a path backwards along the tree of life that leads to a point where my ancestors unite with theirs. (This is the subject of another outstanding book by Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, which I highly recommend.)
We all share in this history, and we all have the potential to carry it forward, which ought to be part of what makes human life so valuable. Each of us is a bearer of that heritage, a single outward-reaching thread of life's multibillion-year journey through time. And if life survives into the far future, if one day we reach that unimaginably distant shore that beckons to us, any of us might have played a part in reaching it; in the end, anyone's genes might turn out to be essential. There are those who say that atheism devalues life, and I answer - could anything give us a better sense of how rare, fragile, and precious life really is?
Saturday, November 5, 2011
The New JFK Biography
The Nurturing of JFK
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
Published: November 3, 2011
As President Obama struggles to find his political footing, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that at least some of his woes may be rooted in a historical Democratic Party presidential divide. On the one side are what might be called loners; on the other, dynasts. The loners — Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter — were brilliant professorial types who campaigned as moralistic, independent reformers and came to grief. By contrast, the members of family dynasties — Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy — were intimately familiar with rivalries and power politics long before they entered the Oval Office.
JACK KENNEDY
Elusive Hero
By Chris Matthews
Illustrated. 479 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.50
In his engaging biography, “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” Chris Matthews firmly sets the nation’s first Roman Catholic president in the context of his family. Matthews, the host of “Hardball” on MSNBC, makes no secret of his fervent admiration for Kennedy, but does not shy away from pointing to his shortcomings. He says that he has always been fascinated with Kennedy, and that “anytime I’ve ever met a person who knew him — someone who was there with J.F.K. in real time — I crave hearing his or her first-person memories.” Matthews, who has a deep knowledge of American political history, draws on conversations with numerous people, including his old boss (and onetime speaker of the House) Tip O’Neill and some of Kennedy’s former aides.
Matthews emphasizes the baleful shadow cast by Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch who drove his sons relentlessly. As Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain in the late 1930s, he was a stalwart apologist for the Nazi regime and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. According to Matthews, “after Kristallnacht, when it was starkly evident that there could be no accommodation with Nazism, Ambassador Kennedy was out there on his own.” John Kennedy, who had “devoured” Winston Churchill’s works as a teenager, sought to model himself on Churchill. Matthews reports that he sent a letter to The Harvard Crimson in June 1940 implicitly repudiating his father’s disgraceful position. His senior thesis, “Appeasement in Munich,” later published under the title “Why England Slept,” argued that America had to be ready to battle the Third Reich. The book was well received in Britain as well as in this country.
Kennedy’s penchant for Churchillian stands distinguished him from many Congressional Democrats in the postwar era. As a candidate for the House of Representatives in 1946, he referred to the Soviet Union as a “slave state” and was still angry that the Roosevelt administration had supposedly sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta. He went on to denounce the Truman administration for losing China to the Communists. As a senator, when it came time to censure Joseph McCarthy — an Irish-American chum of the family — Kennedy was conveniently laid up in the hospital. Matthews astutely notes that the issue was of “tribal significance” in Massachusetts and says that according to Kennedy’s aide Ken O’Donnell, it would have been “political suicide” to condemn McCarthy. Matthews adds, “A part of him, the stubborn part — the part still dominant — cheered just about anyone liberals loved to hate.”
By the late 1950s, however, he had begun to woo liberals in preparation for a presidential run. Matthews further suggests that the Bay of Pigs episode, which President Kennedy refused to escalate by sending in American forces, and the Cuban missile crisis, which he safely negotiated to a close, impressed on him the importance of averting nuclear war. In his visionary 1963 address at American University, he called for “general and complete disarmament,” an aspiration that another Irishman, Ronald Reagan, helped promote two decades later. Kennedy also established the Peace Corps, moved toward embracing civil rights and stared down corporate chieftains. Whether he would have become a great president is a matter of speculation. But Matthews offers a valuable reminder of Kennedy’s skill at uniting toughness with inspirational leadership.
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
Published: November 3, 2011
As President Obama struggles to find his political footing, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that at least some of his woes may be rooted in a historical Democratic Party presidential divide. On the one side are what might be called loners; on the other, dynasts. The loners — Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter — were brilliant professorial types who campaigned as moralistic, independent reformers and came to grief. By contrast, the members of family dynasties — Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy — were intimately familiar with rivalries and power politics long before they entered the Oval Office.
JACK KENNEDY
Elusive Hero
By Chris Matthews
Illustrated. 479 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.50
In his engaging biography, “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” Chris Matthews firmly sets the nation’s first Roman Catholic president in the context of his family. Matthews, the host of “Hardball” on MSNBC, makes no secret of his fervent admiration for Kennedy, but does not shy away from pointing to his shortcomings. He says that he has always been fascinated with Kennedy, and that “anytime I’ve ever met a person who knew him — someone who was there with J.F.K. in real time — I crave hearing his or her first-person memories.” Matthews, who has a deep knowledge of American political history, draws on conversations with numerous people, including his old boss (and onetime speaker of the House) Tip O’Neill and some of Kennedy’s former aides.
Matthews emphasizes the baleful shadow cast by Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch who drove his sons relentlessly. As Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain in the late 1930s, he was a stalwart apologist for the Nazi regime and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. According to Matthews, “after Kristallnacht, when it was starkly evident that there could be no accommodation with Nazism, Ambassador Kennedy was out there on his own.” John Kennedy, who had “devoured” Winston Churchill’s works as a teenager, sought to model himself on Churchill. Matthews reports that he sent a letter to The Harvard Crimson in June 1940 implicitly repudiating his father’s disgraceful position. His senior thesis, “Appeasement in Munich,” later published under the title “Why England Slept,” argued that America had to be ready to battle the Third Reich. The book was well received in Britain as well as in this country.
Kennedy’s penchant for Churchillian stands distinguished him from many Congressional Democrats in the postwar era. As a candidate for the House of Representatives in 1946, he referred to the Soviet Union as a “slave state” and was still angry that the Roosevelt administration had supposedly sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta. He went on to denounce the Truman administration for losing China to the Communists. As a senator, when it came time to censure Joseph McCarthy — an Irish-American chum of the family — Kennedy was conveniently laid up in the hospital. Matthews astutely notes that the issue was of “tribal significance” in Massachusetts and says that according to Kennedy’s aide Ken O’Donnell, it would have been “political suicide” to condemn McCarthy. Matthews adds, “A part of him, the stubborn part — the part still dominant — cheered just about anyone liberals loved to hate.”
By the late 1950s, however, he had begun to woo liberals in preparation for a presidential run. Matthews further suggests that the Bay of Pigs episode, which President Kennedy refused to escalate by sending in American forces, and the Cuban missile crisis, which he safely negotiated to a close, impressed on him the importance of averting nuclear war. In his visionary 1963 address at American University, he called for “general and complete disarmament,” an aspiration that another Irishman, Ronald Reagan, helped promote two decades later. Kennedy also established the Peace Corps, moved toward embracing civil rights and stared down corporate chieftains. Whether he would have become a great president is a matter of speculation. But Matthews offers a valuable reminder of Kennedy’s skill at uniting toughness with inspirational leadership.
Friday, November 4, 2011
About "Self-Interest"
by Paul Krugman
November 4, 2011, 12:45 pm
I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means, Hypocrisy Edition
OK, let me start by talking about Mel Gibson for a minute. Bear with me, this is actually relevant.
Back in 2000 Gibson made a movie, The Patriot, about the Revolutionary War. (I think I saw it on an airplane). And when the movie came out, Michael Lind wrote an essay that has stuck with me, pointing out that nobody involved in the picture seemed to know what patriotism means. The Gibson character was presented as a man who refused to get involved until his own family was hurt — then, he went to war for personal revenge. And this was supposed to show his patriotism.
As Lind said, the truth is that that’s more or less the opposite of patriotism, which is about making sacrifices for the national good, not serving your personal motives or interests.
Which brings me to the subject of this post, the apparently equally misunderstood concept of hypocrisy. I’ve been getting some personal attacks on this front, but it’s a bigger issue than that. Here’s the personal version: suppose that you’re a professor/columnist who advocates higher taxes on high incomes and a stronger social safety net — but you yourself earn enough from various sources that you will pay some of those higher taxes and are unlikely to rely on that stronger safety net. A remarkable number of people look at that combination of personal and political positions and cry “Hypocrisy!”
Wait — it’s not just about me and the wingnuts. If you remember the 2004 election, which unfortunately I do, there were quite a few journalists who basically accused John Kerry of being “inauthentic” because he was a rich man advocating policies that would help the poor and the middle class. Apparently you can only be authentic if your politics reflect pure personal self-interest — Mitt Romney is Mr. Natural.
So to say what should be obvious but apparently isn’t: supporting policies that are to your personal financial disadvantage isn’t hypocrisy — it’s civic virtue!
But, say the wingnuts, you say that rich people are evil. Actually, no — that’s a right-wing fantasy about what liberals believe. I don’t want to punish the rich, I just want them to pay more taxes. You can favor redistribution without indulging in class hatred; it’s only the defenders of privilege who try to claim otherwise.
Lind’s essay about Mel Gibson ended with concerns that we may have lost the sense of what citizenship and its duties mean. Indeed. If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost.
November 4, 2011, 12:45 pm
I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means, Hypocrisy Edition
OK, let me start by talking about Mel Gibson for a minute. Bear with me, this is actually relevant.
Back in 2000 Gibson made a movie, The Patriot, about the Revolutionary War. (I think I saw it on an airplane). And when the movie came out, Michael Lind wrote an essay that has stuck with me, pointing out that nobody involved in the picture seemed to know what patriotism means. The Gibson character was presented as a man who refused to get involved until his own family was hurt — then, he went to war for personal revenge. And this was supposed to show his patriotism.
As Lind said, the truth is that that’s more or less the opposite of patriotism, which is about making sacrifices for the national good, not serving your personal motives or interests.
Which brings me to the subject of this post, the apparently equally misunderstood concept of hypocrisy. I’ve been getting some personal attacks on this front, but it’s a bigger issue than that. Here’s the personal version: suppose that you’re a professor/columnist who advocates higher taxes on high incomes and a stronger social safety net — but you yourself earn enough from various sources that you will pay some of those higher taxes and are unlikely to rely on that stronger safety net. A remarkable number of people look at that combination of personal and political positions and cry “Hypocrisy!”
Wait — it’s not just about me and the wingnuts. If you remember the 2004 election, which unfortunately I do, there were quite a few journalists who basically accused John Kerry of being “inauthentic” because he was a rich man advocating policies that would help the poor and the middle class. Apparently you can only be authentic if your politics reflect pure personal self-interest — Mitt Romney is Mr. Natural.
So to say what should be obvious but apparently isn’t: supporting policies that are to your personal financial disadvantage isn’t hypocrisy — it’s civic virtue!
But, say the wingnuts, you say that rich people are evil. Actually, no — that’s a right-wing fantasy about what liberals believe. I don’t want to punish the rich, I just want them to pay more taxes. You can favor redistribution without indulging in class hatred; it’s only the defenders of privilege who try to claim otherwise.
Lind’s essay about Mel Gibson ended with concerns that we may have lost the sense of what citizenship and its duties mean. Indeed. If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost.
Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs
I finish this biography of Steve Jobs. I read the book simply because he died recently and I figured that everyone would be talking about him and the book. The book is OK---rather dry though---but at this point in time the definitive narration of his life.
Jobs is an iconic business figure for our time. His Apple company developed some the legendary products of our generation like the Apple I, Apple II, the Mac computers, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and, of course, the iPad. Yet he also had many failures like the Lisa computer which was totally ill-conceived from the beginning.
Suffice it to say that Jobs was a genius of a type. Isaacson tries to describe Jobs's type of genius. I shall not bother my brain trying to understand it.
Though a genius---there, I'll admit it---he was a sorry human being as he neglected his family, regularly abused his employees, and was often distant and cruel to other people. Genuis, yes; great human being, no.
Jobs is an iconic business figure for our time. His Apple company developed some the legendary products of our generation like the Apple I, Apple II, the Mac computers, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and, of course, the iPad. Yet he also had many failures like the Lisa computer which was totally ill-conceived from the beginning.
Suffice it to say that Jobs was a genius of a type. Isaacson tries to describe Jobs's type of genius. I shall not bother my brain trying to understand it.
Though a genius---there, I'll admit it---he was a sorry human being as he neglected his family, regularly abused his employees, and was often distant and cruel to other people. Genuis, yes; great human being, no.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
About Steve Jobs (3)
The more I read about Steve Jobs the less I like him. Heretofore I had never thought about him at all.
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