Bye 2010
by digby
On behalf of Dennis, tristero and all the other fine contributors to this blog over the years — HNY!
Update: And happy blogiversary to Gary Farber who’s been keeping it real for nine long years.
Update II: Here’s a fun 2010 quiz for all you news junkies from Michael Tomasky. I was fairly shocked at how badly I did. I guess it means I have to read even more news in 2011.
I’ll give up sleeping.
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Bread and Circuses
by digby
I was struggling with a worthwhile year-end post when my favorite correspondent Bill sent me this piece by Will Bunch from last May. I couldn’t have said it better myself (and Lord knows, I’ve tried):
People forget that the whole justification for police to get Tasers in the first place was to subdue potentially violent suspects in cases in the past in which they might have been tempted to use lethal force. But the notion that the cops would have pulled a gun and shot 17-year-old field jumper Steve Consalvi is absurd, which means the rationale for tasing him is…what? There’s something oddly funny about zapping a fellow human for some reason, but Tasers are no joke to the loved ones of the estimated 50 people who died because of their use. Consalvi didn’t have the risk factors of most of those killed or injured — he is young, health, and wasn’t drunk or on drugs. But he still — while committing a misdemeanor, let’s remember — was subjected to the brief, intense pain of 50,000 volts of electricty. There was a simpler, quainter time when causing pain to another person was called…violence. I guess that quaint time was America before 9/11 — after which for some reason we lost all sense of proportionality on how to respond to various levels of wrongdoing. After my low-key blog suggestion that Tasering a mildly lawbreaking fan wasn’t a great idea, I got an email from a reader. He said, in part: “Were you there last night? I was. Idiots like that are unpredictable at best! The days of “Morgana (sic) the kissing bandit” are gone. We live in a post 911 world.” I don’t mean to be harsh to the emailer — he actually made some decent points about security entering Citizens Bank Park. But I also had to wonder: Must we see every single act of wrongdoing, even minor ones, through the prism of 9/11? Is a fan running on a field in the same ballpark with killing nearly 3,000 people? What has happened to us in this country. Did anyone call for stun-gunning “Morganna the kissing bandit” in the 1970s because we lived in “a post-JFK assassination world” and that maybe she had a concealed weapon inside of those, um. concealed weapons. Of course not. Americans have changed..and not for the better. Make no mistake — the 9/11 attacks were the most cowardly acts of pure evil ever committed on U.S. soil — but the American ideals of civil liberties should be so sacrosanct they should not have been unduly violated even for the people who planned and executed 9/11, but of course they were at Guantanamo and with the John Yoo-justified torture regime that was expanded to many people who had nothing to do with 9/11 and eventually to people who were innocent of any crime altogether. But even more damaging is the way that attitude — that any kind of lawbreaking or even potential lawbreaking requires the harshest possible response, with no regard to more than 200 years of momentum toward basic civil liberties and human rights — is filtering down to other aspects of American life.
Bunch hit on one of the main reasons why I find tasering to be such an important issue. It’s not just the use of the device itself which is awful enough. It’s what it symbolizes — the unraveling of 200 years of accumulated progress toward civil liberties and human rights. This instrument of pain is being used on everything from kids to bed-ridden grandmothers without regard to guilt or innocence or danger to the populace and the police. And many of our fellow Americans see it as a form of entertainment.
There have always been pendulum swings, but this last ten years with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the economic downturn seem to have precipitated a wilder swing than usual — and a hardening of our culture in ways that I think may be going past the usual boundaries. The recent legalization of torture and indefinite detention normalizes behaviors that our leaders would have been much too afraid to admit to doing in the past. The president’s startling assertion that he has a right to order the assassination of American citizens — and the recent calls from public figures for the same against a variety of suspected miscreants isn’t something I’ve seen before in my lifetime. While they insist that they must be allowed to hide all manner of secrets from the people, they seem to be willing to proclaim to the world that they have previously unenumerated powers to kill and imprison without due process.
And now we are seeing this ugly attitude spill over to the unemployed and the sick and the poor as they struggle to maintain some sort of footing in this rapidly shifting economy. The rich are complaining that they aren’t properly worshiped, with demands that the rest of us contribute more to keep them in their splendor even as they blithely demand tax cuts and insist that their wealth alone proves their superiority to the rest of us.
Meanwhile, hate radio is calling for the death of liberalism, the tea partiers are screaming about death panels, and their standard bearer has a TV show in which she is seen giggling as she clubs a fish and shoots caribou on camera to prove her macho bonafides to people who are convinced that progressives and Islamic fundamentalists are allies in the War Against Everything They Care About. When you add it all up, the infliction of the terrible pain of the taser on a teen aged prankster to the great amusement of people in a stadium seems much closer to ancient Roman circuses than anything resembling justice. It would appear that the American Empire isn’t so exceptional after all.
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Is This A Great Country (For Rich People) Or What: New Year Edition
by digby
It was a very good decade … for the very rich:
The gap between the rich and the middle class is larger than it has ever been due to the bursting of the housing bubble.
The richest 1% of U.S. households had a net worth 225 times greater than that of the average American household in 2009, according to analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. That’s up from the previous record of 190 times greater, which was set in 2004.
The top 1% household’s average net worth is 14 million — the average American’s 61k.
But average Americans don’t have enough “skin in the game” so they are going to have to learn to sacrifice. At least that’s what the upper one percent keep telling us when they aren’t demanding lower taxes.
Timothy Noah at Slate did an excellent series this year on income inequality if you feel like spending a few minutes reminding yourself of the reasons why this matters:
In 1915, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin named Willford I. King published The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. The United States was displacing Great Britain as the world’s wealthiest nation, but detailed information about its economy was not yet readily available; the federal government wouldn’t start collecting such data in any systematic way until the 1930s. One of King’s purposes was to reassure the public that all Americans were sharing in the country’s newfound wealth. King was somewhat troubled to find that the richest 1 percent possessed about 15 percent of the nation’s income. (A more authoritative subsequent calculation puts the figure slightly higher, at about 18 percent.) .prototip .slatesidebar { width: 400px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 10pt; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); }.prototip .slatesidebar .toolbar { height: 15px; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(102, 102, 102); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: bold; }.prototip .slatesidebar .content { background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(255, 255, 204); padding: 9px; }
This was the era in which the accumulated wealth of America’s richest families—the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—helped prompt creation of the modern income tax, lest disparities in wealth turn the United States into a European-style aristocracy. The socialist movement was at its historic peak, a wave of anarchist bombings was terrorizing the nation’s industrialists, and President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, Alexander Palmer, would soon stage brutal raids on radicals of every stripe. In American history, there has never been a time when class warfare seemed more imminent. That was when the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation’s income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income. What caused this to happen? Over the next two weeks, I’ll try to answer that question by looking at all potential explanations—race, gender, the computer revolution, immigration, trade, government policies, the decline of labor, compensation policies on Wall Street and in executive suites, and education. Then I’ll explain why people who say we don’t need to worry about income inequality (there aren’t many of them) are wrong.Income inequality in the United States has not worsened steadily since 1915. It dropped a bit in the late teens, then started climbing again in the 1920s, reaching its peak just before the 1929 crash. The trend then reversed itself. Incomes started to become more equal in the 1930s and then became dramatically more equal in the 1940s. .prototip .slatesidebar { width: 400px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 10pt; border: 1px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); }.prototip .slatesidebar .toolbar { height: 15px; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(102, 102, 102); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: bold; }.prototip .slatesidebar .content { background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(255, 255, 204); padding: 9px; }
And it’s getting worse as the wealthy further buy off the political system (with the help of their servants on the Supreme Court) force the average taxpayers to bear more and more of the financial burden of running the country (“skin in the game”) and then raid the treasury for their own use. If you don’t believe me, just read Krugman today, to see what they’re up to next.
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