Month: April 2012

The New Nobles

by digby

Via Kevin Drum, here’s something I did not know. Perhaps you did:

Johnston: The Romneys gave $100 million to their sons and paid not one penny of gift tax. They were able to take assets they have that are producing enormous income and, under the law, give that money to their children and not pay any taxes on it.

Sambolin: Is that something you specifically found in what has been released to you?

Johnston: Yes. I have suspected this and written about it in my column that this is what happened, and last night, Brad Malt, the attorney for the Romneys, confirmed to Reuters that we were correct. They have not paid a penny of gift tax. That’s because Congress allows a very tiny group of people—the Romneys by their income are in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent—to not count as having any value the real source of their income, something called carried interest, if they give it to their children.

Sweet. But that’s not how all wealthy people handle it:

Actor and playwright Stephen Lang, 54, remembers when, at 7 or 8 years old, he asked his father to buy him a toy submachine gun.

The request wasn’t extravagant. His father, Eugene Lang, was on the way to becoming a multimillionaire as the founder of patenting firm Refac Technology Development. But rather than buy Stephen the toy, Eugene suggested they donate what it would cost to charity. It went to a boys’ home in Queens.

“I was extremely upset at first,” recalls Stephen.

But he says the gesture made an impression that remains with him today, and he doesn’t seem to mind that his 87-year-old father intends to leave most of his wealth to charity.

When Warren Buffett pledged $31 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in late June, he rekindled a debate among the rich over inheritance: whether it’s better to limit what you pass on and not spoil your heirs, or let them inherit the wealth and build on it. Buffett, 75, has often said that wealthy parents should leave their children with enough money to do anything they want but not so much that they are doomed to do nothing at all.

Eugene Lang shares those sentiments. Best known for creating the “I Have A Dream” Foundation, he has given away $150 million — more than half of his net worth — with much of the rest also earmarked for charity. After putting his three children through college, he says, he expected them to be essentially self-sufficient.

“A good education is to learn to be self-supporting so that they can build their own inheritance,” Lang says. “I never believed in luxuries. I still pick up a penny on the street.”

Those are exceptions to the rule however:

Wealthy people who don’t plan to pass along most of what they have to their children are the exception, says Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, 56. It strikes at the heart of parenthood. Even those in the middle class who have been made millionaires by homeownership risk spoiling their children, but Chambers says that won’t stop most of them. He won’t say how much he plans to leave his two children but indicates that it will be substantial.

Even though Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton continued to drive a pickup long after amassing one of the largest fortunes ever, he left behind a dynasty that will influence his heirs for generations. His four multibillionaire children are tied for fourth place among the richest people in America, behind only Gates, Buffett and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, according to Forbes magazine.

Forbes Editor-in-chief Steve Forbes, 59, is what Buffett would call a member of the lucky sperm club, a winner of the ovarian lottery. But Forbes says that this is an unfair double standard. Buffett may not have inherited his money, but, Forbes says, Buffett was endowed with genes and given an environment that made him smart and ambitious enough to succeed. Forbes sees passing down money as little different than passing down intelligence.

“Allowing children to build upon what you built is a good thing, not a bad thing,” says Forbes, who was able to make two unsuccessful runs for the presidency because of the $400 million inheritance from father Malcolm Forbes of Forbes magazine fame.

Aristocracy is inherent to conservatism. For all the talk about individual freedom and liberty, what matters most to conservatives is property and inheritance:

People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

The defenders of aristocracy represent aristocracy as a natural phenomenon, but in reality it is the most artificial thing on earth. Although one of the goals of every aristocracy is to make its preferred social order seem permanent and timeless, in reality conservatism must be reinvented in every generation. This is true for many reasons, including internal conflicts among the aristocrats; institutional shifts due to climate, markets, or warfare; and ideological gains and losses in the perpetual struggle against democracy.

In some societies the aristocracy is rigid, closed, and stratified, while in others it is more of an aspiration among various fluid and factionalized groups. The situation in the United States right now is toward the latter end of the spectrum. A main goal in life of all aristocrats, however, is to pass on their positions of privilege to their children …

Mitt is an aristocrat. And he’s making sure that his children are aristocrats too. And, like all aristocrats, they believe their aristocratic privilege is a result of natural superiority. As Steve Forbes says above, they believe it’s exactly the same as being born with talent or intelligence. It’s God-given.

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He stole home

by digby

Little tolerance for sociopaths like Virginia Foxx

by David Atkins

Representative Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Subcommittee on higher education, went on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show to say this:

I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally…I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.

Think Progress has the audio:

I have a few words for Representative Foxx. You see, I went to UCLA on full-ride academic (Regents’) scholarship. I graduated summa cum laude with honors and highest departmental honors. I won the undergraduate of the year award during junior year for academic achievement, was published in an academic journal, and won all sorts of other scholarships and awards such that I couldn’t even get money or benefits for them as they exceeded my financial need. I did all of this while taking the bus to school for 45 minutes each way during my first two years, and while working 25-30 hours a week off-site throughout the entirety of my four years. I didn’t have a life on campus.

So whatever Ayn Randian feats of glory Ms. Foxx and her husband think they achieved, they can’t hold a candle to what I did.

Not that any of that matters. In fact, my educational attainments haven’t mattered a whit to my chosen career or hobbies, neither of which have anything to do with the subjects I studied. I’m not an educational snob, and don’t look down on anyone else for it. All in all, college was mostly a waste of my time, and I wish I had spent more time pursuing other interests while getting worse grades for all the good it did me. Having come out of a homeschooling background where I learned more on my own than in any classroom, I really couldn’t wait to leave.

But I bring it up to point out to Ms. Foxx that, having earned my way through my attainments, I feel perfectly justified in saying this: take a long walk off a short pier, Ms. Foxx. And the same to everyone else who believes as you do.

First off, college tuitions have soared since you went to school. It’s much more expensive today than it was in your day. Heck, it’s a lot more expensive now than it was even in my day, and I’m not even a decade out of school.

Second, not everyone is privileged with a strong academic background. A lot of people a lot smarter than you, Ms. Foxx, struggle to get through, and society ought to give them a fair shake at life, too.

Third, a $12-an-hour job isn’t exactly going to make much of a dent in a $15,000-$20,000 a year tuition (to say nothing of graduate school.)

Fourth, I see no reason why I should show any deference or respect for a woman of such debased moral character and lack of empathy. I don’t really care what you think you “earned.” Whatever you “earned,” I did much more than you and then some. But I have something more important: a conscience which you clearly lack.

I have very little tolerance for that. There may come a day when society will depend on much more than social status or educational attainment. A day when the skills that you, Ms. Foxx, and I have both honed will come to nothing and be mostly useless. A day when a working knowledge of medicine, mechanics and marksmanship will be more important to the world than all your book learning, “business” acumen and social climbing, pitiful as it may be while you elevate yourself on an undeserved pedestal.

And on that day, Ms. Foxx, I hope that society shows more empathy toward us than you show to the people whom you consider your lessers. At least, I hope they show it to me, my friends, my family and the rest of decent society. But there’s a part of me that hopes they don’t show you the same courtesy, so that you may feel in moments the pain and sorrow you choose to inflict on your moral betters for the course of their entire lives. Sadly, I doubt you or your amoral base of voters will live to see that day.

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Saturday Night at the Movies

Notes from the underground: The Lady

On a recent trip to Myanmar, Secretary of State Clinton publicly expressed her admiration for Burmese political activist Aung San Suu Kyi, acknowledging her long personal struggle (including 15 years of house arrest) as head of an opposition party that has been (peacefully) attempting to bring democracy to a country that has been under oppressive military rule for 50 years. Some encouraging news emerged earlier this month, with Suu Kyi and other members of her party winning 43 out of 45 seats in the lower house of the parliament. Indeed, Suu Kyi’s story is an extraordinary one (and which one hopes is far from over). That’s why it’s a shame that Luc Besson’s biopic, The Lady, while timely in its release, can only be described as “ordinary” in its execution. It’s an oddly uninvolving affair that starts off like Gandhi …but ends up more like Camille.
The film begins promisingly enough, with a beautifully constructed and emotionally affecting preface depicting the 3-year old Suu Kyi kissing her father goodbye for what turns out to be the last time. The year is 1947, the place is Burma (as it was then known) and General Aung San (who today is considered the nation’s “Father” for his key role in helping it gain independence from British colonial rule) is off to a political meeting, where he is assassinated. The next time we see Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh), she is an adult, living in England with her husband, Oxford academic Dr. Michael Aris (David Thewlis). They have two teenage sons (Jonathan Raggett and Jonathan Woodhouse). When Suu Kyi learns that her mother is gravely ill, she returns to Burma to be at her side. It is during this visit (in 1988) that she realizes how socio-politically unstable her country has become, and how fear and dread rule the lives of her people. When she is asked by pro-democracy activists to remain in-country to lead their burgeoning movement, she accepts.
After this setup, I assumed that I was in for a rousing story of personal sacrifice and determination, set against a backdrop of intense political turmoil and sweeping historical breadth (something along the lines of The Year of Living Dangerously or The Killing Fields). I assumed. But what follows instead is fairly by-the-numbers; holding all the dramatic import of a Powerpoint presentation. Rebecca Frayn’s screenplay takes a Cliff’s Notes approach to Suu Kyi’s life; for a 2 ½ hour film, there are an inordinate amount of unanswered questions and expository holes. For example, Suu Kyi’s dying mother is presented as little more than…her dying mother. It was only following some research after seeing the film that I was surprised to learn that Suu Kyi’s mother had a political career of her own (she was appointed Burma’s ambassador to India in 1960). Perhaps most significantly, the film is marketed as being, at its core, a great love story…but there is very little passion on display in the scenes between Thewlis and Yeoh; there is nothing offered onscreen that gives us any clue as to what sparked the attraction between the two. While I’ll grant that it is possible Thewlis made an acting choice to play the “stiff upper lip” Englishman archetype, his behavior toward Yeoh plays out as formal and detached.
Instead, we’re given a seemingly endless series of farewells and reunions, with Thewlis and sons leaving and arriving in taxis over the years, with only Eric Serra’s overbearing orchestral swells on hand to cue us that we’re supposed to be tearing up. And the part of the family’s story that should truly move us, which was Dr. Aris’ death from prostate cancer after spending the final 4 years of his life unsuccessfully petitioning the Burmese government for permission to visit Suu Kyi (under house arrest), is instead rendered like sudsy, almost laughable (if it weren’t so inherently sad) Disease of the Week melodrama.
As I am a fan of his work, I was expecting much more from Besson, who has built his reputation on slickly produced, well-paced and visually inventive films that frequently feature strong female protagonists (La Femme Nikita , The Fifth Element, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc). What he has delivered here (the opening 10 minutes aside) is a film that, while visually stunning, remains emotionally empty. For a more compelling portrait of modern-day Burma, I would recommend the documentary They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain, which I reviewed here last week. In that film, you see and hear the real Suu Kyi, and although her appearance is brief, it reveals a whole lot more about the determination, grace and fortitude of this remarkable woman.














What a dump: Applause

Speaking of remarkable women, I think I have a new favorite actress. Her name is Paprika Steen, and she delivers a searing performance in a Danish import called Applause, directed and co-written (with Anders Frithiof August) by Martin Zandvliet. Technically, Steen is giving two searing performances in this film…one as an embittered, middle-aged alcoholic stage actress named Thea Barfoed, and other one as the embittered, middle-aged alcoholic “Martha”, as in “George and Martha”, the venomous, bickering couple who fuel Edward Albee’s classic play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
And, as you might guess, the clever theatrical allusions abound throughout the film, with interwoven vignettes of Thea’s nightly performances as “Martha” serving as a Greek Chorus for her concurrent real-life travails. While she continues to wow adoring fans with her expert stagecraft, the acid-tongued Thea makes a less-than-glowing impression on the people she encounters in her off-stage life (mostly due to the fact that she’s usually half in the bag by lunchtime). She has particular difficulty dealing with the fact that her ex-husband Christian (Michael Falch) has remarried, to a younger woman named Maiken (Sara-Marie Maltha). Adding insult to injury (at least from Thea’s perspective), Maiken is a psychologist, which only further fuels Thea’s ever-present paranoia and insecurities.
However, there does seem to be a tiny glimmer of light on the horizon, as Thea is making a concerted effort to step away from the bottle for good (which is sort of working out, in fits and starts). Finding herself in an unusually lucid state of mind one day, she decides to begin lobbying in earnest for acquiring more quality time with her two young sons, who live with their father and stepmother (Thea ceded custody when she divorced Christian). Although Thea is making nice with Maiken, and assuring her ex that she has “changed” since…(a mental breakdown, or possibly a prolonged stay at a rehab clinic? I wasn’t quite clear on that), Christian is remains warily skeptical. After all…she is an actress.
And so this simple, yet emotionally complex slice of life unfolds. As anyone who has seen more than one character study about an alcoholic will tell you, it’s right about the time things start looking up for the protagonist that you find yourself involuntarily cringing and waiting for the other shoe to drop (“How is she going to fuck this up? Pass the popcorn.”). While I’ve seen this story before, it’s been some time since I’ve seen it played with the fierce commitment Steen brings to the table. Thea’s shame spiral binges evoke Patty Duke’s Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls at times, but I felt Steen’s overall performance (and the film’s writing and directing style) most strongly recalled John Cassavetes’ Opening Night. In that 1977 film, Gena Rowlands plays, well, an insecure, middle-aged alcoholic stage actress, who is starring in a play that mirrors her real life angst. And just like the great Rowlands, Steen is a force of nature; a real joy to watch. She is fearless, compassionate and 100% convincing. After all…she is an actress.

NEW! Saturday Night at the Movies searchable archives
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Red scare

by digby

I guess the socialism boogeyman just wasn’t scary enough:

Mayor Bloomberg Friday said the proposed Living Wage Bill City Council Speaker Christine Quinn backs amounts to communism — and vowed it will bring on a legal battle if passed.

Our Tina Moore reports:

“The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR, and that didn’t work out so well,” the mayor said during his regular appearance on the John Gambling Show on WOR Radio.

The measure would boost pay to $11.50 an hour, or $10 with benefits, for workers at companies that receive $1 million or more in city subsidies. The state minimum wage is $7.25.

A vote is possible as early as next week, and while Bloomy has vowed a veto, Quinn has enough votes to override.

Tenants who move into the developers buildings would not have to pay the higher wages.

Yes, raising the minimum wage is exactly the same as communism. Except for all the private industry and personal wealth and what not.

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No, they really don’t like him

by David Atkins

We already have quantitative evidence that Mitt Romney is by far the least liked Republican nominee in modern presidential history among his own party. Here’s some qualitative evidence as well, courtesy a frontpage post at FreeRepublic by its founder, Jim Robinson:

A reminder for those who are not receiving the message:

Romney is a pathological compulsive liar. Lie after lie papered over with more lies. Doesn’t even flinch when caught in bald faced lies, simply tells another big whopper to cover up or dodge the issue. Funny thing, the man actually seems to believe his own latest lies and simply ignores the glaring record of his past actions/lies. And you have true blue establishment elite RINO Republicans like Karl Rove enabling and backing up his lies. Their motivation is simply to hang on to power (and riches) any way they can.

I’ve stated many times since Romney started running for the presidency way back when that I’d never vote for him and I will not. He cannot lie his way out of his decades long record of support for abortion, Roe v Wade, planned parenthood, gay rights, gun control, global warming, amnesty, liberal judges, big government, compulsory or socialized health care (RomneyCommieCare), mandates, Keynesian economics, support and approval of TARP, bailouts, stimulus packages, i.e, every damn liberal progressive issue that comes down the pike.

C’mon. These are the reasons the tea party sprang up and the reasons he and Rove loathe the tea party and our tea party conservative candidates. Romney famously expressed his loathing for Reagan-Bush conservatism several years ago when he was trying to run to the left of Ted Kennedy and now he’s cloaking himself in Reagan conservatism, knowing full well that it’s a lie, but he knows it’s the only way he can possibly win, er buy the Republican nomination.

Screw Romney!! I absolutely will not support or vote for a proven compulsive liar with a known record of abortion and big government socialism, liberal appointments, etc. He still lies about RomneyCommieCare today. Calls it a “conservative solution.” Get real!!

Listen to what Ronald Reagan had to say about the elites pushing socialism on America via compulsory health insurance:

Ronald Reagan speaks out against RomneyCommieCare

There will be no campaign for this Massachusetts liberal liar on FR!!

Damn the libs and RINOS, full steam ahead!!

But no matter what happens we must turn out in November to vote IN as many conservatives and vote OUT as many rats as possible at all levels of government. If we don’t have a conservative at the top of the ticket we must turn out anyway and vote straight conservative DOWN ticket!! Just think of it an off cycle election and pour on the TEA!! It’ll be doubly important that we control both houses of congress and as many statehouses as possible.

Restore the 10th amendment!! Impeach the leftist president whoever he may be!! Restore Liberty!! Rebellion comes from the bottom up!!

WOO HOO!! I CAN SEE NOVEMBER FROM MY HOUSE!!

No Bama!! No Romney!! Go tea party rebellion!!

Robinson is known to conduct purges of those who don’t follow in his ideological footsteps, and the comment thread is already over 1,750 comments–most of them supportive of Robinson’s position.

Yes, most of these people will end up pulling the lever for Mitt when push comes to shove. But if even two or three percent of these Tea Party people stay home, that could make an enormous difference in the final result.

It’s also another reminder that it’s not just the progressive base unhappy at times with its standardbearer. Far from being less divided than our politics suggest, it seems that a great many of us may actually be more divided than our politics suggest. The least divided seem to be the least politically engaged, which speaks less to centrist conviction and more to a less of engaged interest in the issues.

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Radical divergence

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Your Upper of the day

Ann and Mitt, the college years

by digby

I didn’t realize just how hard they had it:

“They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.

“It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.

“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.

“The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year — it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.

“Mitt and I walked to class together, shared housekeeping, had a lot of pasta and tuna fish and learned hard lessons.

I’m fairly sure that selling that stock was just as hard for them as it was for me to work at a full time job when I went to school. I can’t even imagine the pain I would have felt if I’d had to pick up the phone and take some profits instead of working nights and going to classes in the daytime.

Now, the truth is that Ann and Mitt had their first children during this time, so they were up all night as well. I suppose I might have done that too, but it would have been unaffordable for me to go to school and work full time and raise a child so I was very glad to have birth control easily available through Planned Parenthood. But then I’m fairly sure that Ann and Mitt wouldn’t have approved of my sluttish co-ed lifestyle. I was unmarried, after all. And with no stock to call my own. At the very least, I should have first been married at the age of 19 to a man with a famous political name who was groomed to be president of the United States. That’s how nice young ladies “struggle.”

Ann Romney raised five kids and worked as a partner in a political career, which is no picnic. I’m sure she is an energetic, hard worker who’s known her share of heartache and worry. The woman is over 60 — life happens even to the very wealthy. But she simply has not led the same kind of life that most Americans have led and for she and Mitt to pretend they personally know what it is to “struggle” like the average American is absurd.

This would not be a huge issue if she and her husband weren’t proposing policies designed to ensure that fewer and fewer Americans will be able to go to school or choose when to have their kids or keep from going bankrupt when they get a bad diagnosis. This is the problem. Nobody cares if Ann and Mitt were born into privilege and became extremely wealthy, for its own sake. What’s so galling is the fact that they are out there selling the notion that average Americans have been coddled by Big Government and won’t “take responsibility” for ourselves and need to “make sacrifices” — that what we must do is make life even easier for “job creators” like Ann and Mitt so that they might trickle down a little of their wealth to the rest of us.

This is why it’s a shame that Hilary Rosen didn’t choose her words more carefully. The intention, I’m sure, wasn’t to say that being “a mom” isn’t work. It was that Mitt Romney saying he depends on his wife to come off the campaign trail and fill him in on the concerns of average women says he has no personal empathy for half the population. (He also meets average women every day on the campaign trail every day, after all.) And since his wife is a highly privileged person who has little experience with the real struggles of American woman, she might not be the best person to be his Ambassador to the female half of the population. It certainly doesn’t seem to have changed their policies that reward wealthy women just like Ann Romney at the expense of poor and middle class women.

Wait, is this really a question?

by David Atkins

Yes, in the year 2012 this was one of the featured blog posts in the New York Times yesterday:

Parental Quandary: When Young Boys Joke About Rape

Two readers wrote to me recently with similar quandaries: young sons, around middle-school age, uncomfortable with the language that’s beginning to surround them at school.

For D., it started with an idyllic-seeming school gathering: one house, hosting an ever-changing pack of fifth graders and assorted parents weekly, and welcoming her son, who was new to the school. The second time her son went to the group “play date,” D. walked over to join in.

She arrived just as a large group of fifth graders came bounding in from school — and that’s when D.’s story becomes a quandary. “Three fifth-grade boys ran up the stairs and announced that they had passed a bunch of high school girls on the walk over and told them they were going to rape them.”

D., startled, said nothing — she didn’t know the boys, and wasn’t the host — but one boy repeated the remark several times.

When we got home, I was talking to my son, doing the usual play date debrief, when he mentioned that while the boys were playing upstairs, one was on the top bunk on top of another pretending to rape him and the other boys were laughing at them.

M.’s story was similar: her son, whose part Asian heritage makes him one of the few minorities at his new school, tells his mother that his classmates tell both boys and girls, “I’m going to rape you,” and “throw around the N-word as if they own it.” (None of the boys are black.)

Yes, kids say a bunch of really stupid and insensitive things that tend to shock adults. But can it even be a question to ask if joking about rape or using the n-word are ok? No, it definitely shouldn’t be.

I have to admit, I’ve played my share of online real-time videogames with screaming 15-year-olds who virtually teabag defeated opponents. I laugh at anyone who claims that playing videogames makes a person inherently more violent or likely to do violence. I’m not at all disturbed by the virtual violence in a game, because it can be cathartic and there’s no impulse to act violently in real life afterward.

But the language used by these kids both inside and outside the game is appalling. Offensive language about rape, race and sexuality are used constantly, with apparently no adult intervention of any kind. Not two minutes goes by without some kid calling another player a “faggot” or “ni**er” and threaten to rape said other random person. Every time I hear it, I have to ask myself: where are the parents? Where are the school officials? Doesn’t anyone out there care that this sort of language is being used so casually?

I suppose this could be just a case of an out-of-touch guy in his thirties shocked by the exploitation of the latest taboos. But there’s something very different about the language of rape first and foremost but also slurs on ethnicity and sexuality. It’s one thing to use formerly more taboo words like “fuck” and “shit.” They’re decontextualized, and lack direct sexist or racist threat. The language of rape and ethnic or sexual slurs is something else altogether.

This stuff is part of what drives the homeschool movement–both liberal and conservative. I got away with all sorts of foul language as a kid, but joking about rape and race was appropriately taboo. If “socializing” kids means putting them in environments where such things are widely accepted even in parental presences, then it’s no surprise that many parents are choosing to opt out of socializing venues where such things occur.

And if it’s a question that’s debated openly in parenting forums in the New York Times, we’re in a lot more trouble as a society than I’d like to admit. Or maybe I’m just an old fogey already at a mere 31 years of age.

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