Very informative discussion between the NYT’s Joe Nocera and Jon Stewart on TDS the other night. Watch all three parts of the interview. What they keep getting back to is what I’ve been saying for some time now — free market capitalism is dead, but no one wants to talk about that fact, much less discuss solutions. Some points well taken:
1) The tax rate on capital investments (15%) is much lower than what the majority of Americans pay on their wages (about 20%). We’ve somehow turned the whole system upside down, where plain old hard work is actually discouraged by the tax system. The “American Dream” — go to school, study hard, then get a job and work hard — is dead on arrival these days. All it’s going to do is get you another day older and deeper in debt.
2) Republicans are continually gaming the system, and that’s all quite “fair” until the system is gamed on them, and then they are up in arms. That’s what is going on right now with the Gingrich followers turning on Romney. And there’s no better example than Dick Cheney’s all of a sudden becoming pro-gay rights once he discovered his daughter was gay. This is the selfishness aspect of the right-wing that runs so deep — as long as a problem doesn’t affect them, it’s not a problem. There’s no concept whatsoever of the “common good”.
3) In the “Simple Solutions to Big Problems” department, Nocera reminds us that the oh-so-easy way to avoid another Wall St. meltdown is to split up banks in to separate entities devoted to commercial banking and investment banking. That’s the way it was back in the 1930′s up until the repeal of Glass-Steagal, and that was not only the number one cause of the 2008 crash, it was the only cause. Yet here we are three plus years after the fact, and nothing’s been done to prevent yet another disaster. Idiot Nation at it’s best.
4) Finally, they point out that the main reason why you have such complex regulation of business is that big business is forever making things complex so that they can continually game the system. The more complex the lawyers and financial wizards make the system, the harder it is to regulate so that the system can’t be gamed. It’s a no-win situation with no solutions. Well, other than what William S. suggested many years ago.
How can anyone listen to this outburst by Newt Gingrich and not find him to be a vile, despicable human being? Much less give him the huge round of applause that he got from the South Carolina Republicans attending the debate? I guess I can understand how this type of sick behavior may be acceptable in a state like South Carolina that really never made it out of the nineteenth century. But please, someone assure me that this guy is totally unelectable in the U.S. at large, that he could never garner more than say 25% of the national vote. Or is America really that sick?
Here’s a great essay by David Atkins on what “liberalism” really is. Like Atkins, I’ve always been puzzled by any attempt to even begin to equate liberalism with libertarianism. Pretty much everyone I have ever known who claimed to be a Libertarian was in fact an outright racist who was just looking for some type of philosophical cover for their racism. The number one “freedom” that most libertarians cherish is their freedom to hate. Everything else is just hogwash.
“Liberalism is and has always been about intervention. It is the opposite of libertarianism, and always has been. Liberals understand that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Left to their own devices, people with weapons and money will always try to exploit and dominate people without weapons and money unless they are stopped from doing so. It is not because we are taught to do so. It’s just innate human nature. If this were not the case, libertarianism would work as an ideology. It does not, and never has at any point in history.”
That sums it up perfectly. In any society you are going to have greedy, bigoted, selfish people who inevitably game the system to the detriment of 99% of the population. There’s no better example than what we now have in the U.S. A liberal is simply someone who believes that ain’t right, and so strives to intervene in the system to make sure that the 1% don’t make life miserable for the majority of people. Any one with any sense of human decency should be a liberal.
January 15th, 2012 | tags:
Liberalism,
Libertarianism
Like Krugman, I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse after the Bush/Cheney administration when it came to outright dishonesty. But oh, how wrong we were. Mitt Romney is a pathological liar who makes George Bush look like an amateur. In fact, when confronted with an outrageous lie, he doesn’t even attempt to defend himself or deny it, instead justifying the lies by saying “what’s sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander”. WTF does that mean?
But just when you think the Republican candidates can’t get any more disgusting, all you have to do is turn to Newt Gingrich. How can someone who is such a bigot and racist be taken seriously anywhere outside a Ku Klux Klan meeting?
Watching all the Republican candidates attack Mitch Romney for his role as the “mean, nasty, job destroyer” is hilarious! Nothing portrays free market capitalism better than Romney’s Bain Capital. This is what capitalism is all about — only bottom line profits matter, and firing people to accomplish that is not only expected, but is something that a good capitalist will enjoy. For his role at Bain, the Republicans should be worshiping Romney as a hero. He was making rich people richer, while destroying the lives of working class stiffs. This is the Holy Grail of free market capitalism.
And yet all Romney’s challengers are blasting him for this. Sheez, they sound not only like Democrats, but extreme left-wing Democrats! And that’s just how bat-shit crazy the Republican Party is these days. They have absolutely no clue at all about what they are talking.
Paul Krugman makes the point that there’s a huge difference between running a business and running a country, that “The idea that what America needs now is an executive type is just foolish”. Exactly what I was saying several weeks ago.
More validation, yay!
January 10th, 2012 | tags:
Business vs. Government,
gov
Robert Reich predicts that Obama will replace Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton for the 2012 election, with Biden taking over Hillary’s position as Secretary of State. The more I think about this, the more I like it. Now I know that HRC has continually denied that she has any interest in the VP position or a Presidential run in 2016, but that’s standard political positioning that means nothing. The 2012 election is still light years away, but at least the way it’s shaping up right now is that it’s pretty much Obama’s to lose, particularly given the clown show that the Republican Party is these days. The only potential gotcha is the economy, and as Reich notes, a significant part of that problem is out of our hands with the current issues in Europe and how inept they seem to be at addressing those issues. As moronic as the average American voter is (George Bush elected not once, but twice — case closed), it’s not hard to envision just a minor blip in the economy swinging enough morons to vote for the Republican candidate to cost Obama the election.
And should that happen, that would pretty much seal the fate of this country as far as democracy and equality for all goes. The damage done by thirty years of Reaganomics, and particularly the eight years of Bush-Cheney, is going to take a long, long time to repair. Obama’s first four years have been pretty much dedicated to just slowing down the march towards plutocracy and corporatism. A second Obama term would just be the beginning of re-establishing America as the great country it used to be. But it’s going to take at least another eight years after that to actually get America back to where it was in the middle of the last century.
And that’s why the Obama-Clinton ticket is so appealing. Not only does it possibly provide Obama with some insurance in getting re-elected, it would put Clinton in a very good position for the 2016 election. And that one will be just as critical as this upcoming election. There’s no way all the damage will be fixed by 2016, and to turn the country back over to a Republican White House at that point would be disastrous. What we need is a long-term plan, and Obama-Clinton is a good start on that.
January 10th, 2012 | tags:
Election 2012,
Hillary Clinton
David Atkins makes a good point here which I don’t think gets near the attention it should. Liberals and progressives complain about the lack of compassion that conservatives have, but if you confront a conservative on the issue, quite often the rebuttal is that conservatives give a lot of time and money to charities, thus proving that they are indeed compassionate people. But, as Atkins points out, this model of charity for social services is a failed model. If it worked, 15% of the population wouldn’t be living in households that are “food insecure”, 25% of children wouldn’t be living in poverty, we wouldn’t have 45,000 Americans dying every year because they don’t have access to proper health care. If you were truly compassionate you would elect a government that would eliminate all these problems by seeing that everyone contributed their fair share to the solution. But conservatives oppose any attempts at truly solving the problems — indeed, it’s almost as if they WANT a system that insures that a significant part of the population will be in dire straits, so that they can then have the opportunity to contribute to some charity and thus claim they are indeed compassionate, caring people. It’s all hypocrisy — they could easily eliminate all these problems completely by just supporting the right type of government programs. But bottom line, they really don’t care about the poor and the needy, all they care about is their egos, and of course their own greed.
As much as I rag on how ignorant most Americans are, I do have to concede that a big part of that ignorance is probably attributable to the media in this country, who are so busy pushing their agenda that a lot of Americans never hear anything close to what resembles fact and reality. And the other night while watching the evening news on my local CBS affiliate, I saw a great example of just how incompetent the media are these days. The lead story was the battle in Congress over raising the payroll tax, and here’s how Dallas’ Channel 11 presented the story. Not a single mention of the FACT that it’s the Republican Party that is voting FOR the increase in the payroll tax. The story puts the blame on “Congress” as a whole, a major distortion of reality. It’s the Republicans who are to blame, period. Every single Democrat in Congress voted to keep the tax cut. This is THE story line here — and Channel 11 totally ignored it. Right-wing media at it’s best.
And if that weren’t bad enough, WTF was the purpose in co-anchor Karen “Airhead” Borta commenting that one of the Dallas representatives, Eddie Bernice Johnson, missed the vote? Surely Borta knew that this vote was a formality, and the outcome was pre-determined. Boehner would have never brought it up for a vote unless he was 110% sure of the result. So who missed the vote and for what reasons was totally irrelevant. It had a news value of absolute zero. So why did Borta even bring it up? Surely it had nothing to do with the fact that Johnson is a Democrat? Yeah, right. Not only is Channel 11 covering up the fact that it’s the Republicans here that are the bad guys, they are trying to intimate that it’s the Democrats who are at fault. This is as irresponsible as journalism can get. And yet that’s the norm in American media these days.
December 22nd, 2011 | tags:
Media Bias,
Media Incompetence
Some times I worry that maybe I’m perhaps a bit too extreme in my progressive thinking…. so it’s always nice to see other “big name” bloggers post something that echoes what I had said earlier. Which is exactly what I’ve seen over the last couple of days. First, there’s renowned (in left-wing circles anyway!) blogger Echidne making pretty much the same point I did about the myth of “free markets”. And then there’s Pulitzer prize winner and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman commenting on “Pathetic Plutocrats“, saying exactly what I was saying a couple of days ago.
So it would seem that I’m pretty much right in the middle when it comes to progressive thinking!
December 22nd, 2011 | tags:
Liberalism