Month: July 2012

The early Mad Men years

by digby

This excerpt from Fortune Magazine 1955 (via Brad Delong) is instructive:

The executive’s home today is likely to be unpretentious and relatively small–perhaps seven rooms and two and a half baths. (Servants are hard to come by and many a vice president’s wife gets along with part-time help. So many have done so for so long, in fact, that they no longer complain much about it.)
[…]
The large yacht has also foundered in the sea of progressive taxation. In 1930, Fred Fisher (Bodies), Walter Briggs, and Alfred P. Sloan cruised around in vessels 235 feet long; J. P. Morgan had just built his fourth Corsair (343 feet). Today, seventy-five feet is considered a lot of yacht. One of the biggest yachts launched in the past five years is the ninety-six-foot Rhonda III, built and owned by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp., of Birmingham, Alabama. The Rhonda III cost half a million dollars to build, and the annual bill for keeping a crew aboard her, stocking her, and fueling her runs to around $130,000. As Chairman Robert I. Ingalls Jr. says, only corporations today can own even so comparatively modest a craft. The specifications of the boat that interests the great majority of seagoing executives today are “forty feet, four people, $40,000.” In this tidy vessel the businessman of 1955 is quite happily sea-borne.

This was a different psychology, wasn’t it? Certainly, there didn’t seem to be the whining and petulance — and angry demands for obeisance and gratitude — that is so prevalent among the billionaires today. Humility is totally out of fashion in our culture — success means spending more time bragging about your success than actually achieving it. We are a shamelessly self-promoting lot.

But more importantly it proves that this job creator myth is a total crock. As Paul Krugman noted:

According to modern conservative dogma, this kind of punishment of “job creators” should have brought economic progress to a screeching halt. Yet according to Fortune, executives continued to work hard — and the postwar generation was actually a period of economic progress that has never been matched.

Somehow, John Galt never made an appearance.

There was a lot wrong with this era. I have no wish to go back to it. But the hard luck years of the depression and the horrors of WWII and Korea did at least force the business leaders of their day to recognize that they weren’t the modern equivalent of mythic warrior heroes. You’d hope it wouldn’t require living through the worst depression and bloodiest wars in history to prove that, but from where we sit today it appears that’s what it takes.

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At least we won’t have to worry about the best and the brightest

by digby

I’m beginning to think the Romney campaign is extra dangerous and stupid, even by Republican standards:

Shortly after the candidate’s speech in Reno, Nevada, the Romney campaign sent out a press release citing former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, who is listed as an Romney campaign advisor.

“The suggestion by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the White House was behind recent leaks of highly classified secrets, highlights the urgent need for change” Edelman said in the statement.
Edelman, however, was implicated in the country’s last major national security leak investigation — the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame — during his time in the Bush administration.

Edelman served under former Vice President Dick Cheney in the 1990s. From February 2001 to June 2003, he worked as Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, where he served directly under former Cheney aide Scooter Libby. According to the Justice Department, Edelman, identified as “Principal Deputy” in Scooter Libby’s indictment, originally suggested the idea to Libby to start leaking information about Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.

Do they think people won’t remember? Have they not heard of the internet? What’s the matter with them?

Now, I’d guess that Mitt Romney doesn’t know the details of the Scooter Libby scandal. He doesn’t seem like someone who pays much attention to details. (He’s an “idea man” which is scary.) But surely someone else on his team might have mentioned to Edelman to ixnay on the eaklay stuff seeing as he was at the center of one of the most notorious White House leaking scandals in history.

Imagine if the Republicans had nominated a serious candidate.

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Your daily dose of right-wing misogyny

by David Atkins

Via John Cole at Balloon Juice, a jaw-dropping bit of misogynistic crap from James Taranto, Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member.

Here’s a picture of Mr. Taranto:

Disgusting.

The memories of Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves deserve better than this. Let the editors of the Wall Street Journal know how you feel:

Alan Murray
Executive Editor, WSJ Digital Network
a.murray@wsj.com

Raju Narisetti
Managing Editor, WSJ Digital Network
raju.narisetti@wsj.com

Almar Latour
Editor in Chief, Asia
a.latour@wsj.com

Tracy Corrigan
Editor in Chief, Europe
tracy.corrigan@wsj.com

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QOTD: Former Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY)

by digby

Speaking about the regulation moratorium bill, I think he says it all:

The right wing does not have a record of doing things simply to waste time; it is deadly in earnest. Its opponents would be wise to take it seriously. The Republican leadership is putting this bill forward as a genuine proposal, and that ought to spark sharp debate – as well as opposition that spans partisan lines. Those who understand the consequences of this bill, including business leaders, ought to feel obligated to speak out.

Atlas may shrug, but mere mortals should take note. The right wing is serious about disabling the government.

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Surprise! Moderate stabs Dems in the back

by digby

What a petty little man:

Wisconsin state Sen. Tim Cullen quit the Democratic caucus Tuesday — throwing a cloud of uncertainty over the party’s narrow 17-16 majority, their biggest victory from the waves of state recall elections.

Cullen announced his decision Tuesday after Majority Leader Mark Miller unveiled a list of committee chairmanships in which Cullen was the lone Democrat missing.

Cullen’s statement leaves some ambiguity as to his new intentions:

As of the sending of this email, I am no longer a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus. I will decide over the next few days or weeks whether to become an Independent. I will not become a Republican.

This entire episode makes clear to me that Sen. Miller has no time for my independent ideas and my support of bipartisan solutions to the state’s problems.

Miller disputed Cullen’s version of events, and said Cullen was indeed offered a chairmanship.

“I am disappointed in Senator Cullen and the decision he made today,” Miller said in a statement. “Senator Cullen turned down the chairmanship of the Committee on Small Business Development and Tourism. He told me that if that was the committee offered to him, he would rather chair no committee at all. It was an important committee as small business is the economic engine for Wisconsin.”

By coincidence I was just writing a post about this John Nichols piece in which he discusses the fact that Wisconsin was a victory because it stopped the Walker agenda. I had long been of the belief that the over-emphasis on Walker himself was probably a mistake and that the real emphasis should have been on the agenda.

But now, it’s all just bullshit, isn’t it? When everything hinges on the whims of any one perfidious bureaucrat with an ego the size of Montana, this is the sort of thing that happens. That’s the real problem with polarization — it gives all the power to supercilious crackpots like this.

The worst people in politics are often the so-called “moderates” who are only “moderate” by virtue of the fact that they believe themselves to superior in every way to the people who believe in something.

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The end of an era

by digby

This should be good for bringing Mexican cartel traffic home to LA:

The L.A. City Council today voted to put an end to the city’s infamous and numerous marijuana dispensaries, citing neighborhood concerns and court rulings that have questioned a city’s right to regulate the retailers.

Most of all, however, the council argued that L.A’s for-profit pot shop scene was never envisioned by state lawmakers whom the City Attorney says wanted to legalize the nonprofit growing and sharing of cannabis among the seriously ill.

What a shame. They’ve been here for 15 years and the only people who object are prissy pleasure scolds who just can’t stand the idea that there is a helpful, harmless drug that doesn’t come from a corporation.

The good news is that maybe we can bring that crime rate up!

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No, they didn’t build it on their own

by David Atkins

Mitt Romney really wants to capitalize on Barack Obama’s statement that business owners didn’t build their businesses on their own. Digby highlighted the egregious example of Gilchrist Metal yesterday. But there’s even more where that came from. Romney is having trouble finding business owners who didn’t receive government help, even in the most superficial sense:

The Romney campaign has spent the last couple of weeks deliberately ripping Obama’s remarks earlier this month out of context, implying that Obama was disparaging business people by suggesting individual initiative has nothing to do with success. As Slate’s Dave Weigel writes, conservatives have seized on this misinterpretation as “proof” Obama is actually a secret Marxist. The implication here is really twofold: Obama can’t fix the economy because he doesn’t understand business, and because “you didn’t build that,” Obama thinks it’s perfectly fine to take from hardworking rugged individualists (like you) and give to a bunch of freeloaders who’d rather not work for a living (like them).

The problem is that the real-world examples Romney keeps seizing on include people who got help from the government. As ABC News’ Jake Tapper reported Monday, the star of a recent Romney ad hitting Obama over “you didn’t build that” had received millions in government loans and contracts. Romney stopped in Costa Mesa, California Monday to meet with a “roundtable” of small business leaders, held in front of a sign that says “We did build it!”

Naturally, it turned out that at least two of the companies represented—Endural LLC and Philatron Wire and Cable—had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts. When Romney visited the Boston’s historic black neighborhood of Roxbury last week, Romney touted an auto repair shop, declaring that “This is not the result of government…This is the result of people who take risks, who have dreams, who build for themselves and for their families.” Except it turned out that the auto repair shop guy started out without any funds and was only able to build his business because of a bond issed by the local government.

If Romney was trying to prove that businesses only succeed on the backs of Galtian ubermensches with no external help, he’s mostly proved the opposite point.

None of which even approaches the point that even if these businesses received no grants, loans or contracts to get started, they still depend on the roads, sewers, dams, education, civil protection, general social stability and other services the government provides. As I mentioned before:

Sure, I’ve worked hard to build a business and to stay afloat when many others in my profession have called it quits. But none of it would be possible without the framework of civilization that my taxes help to support. When I buy lunch, I depend on food safety regulators to make sure a corporation hasn’t tainted the ingredients. I depend on a national transportation infrastructure for business travel and for the shipping of necessities. I depend on the post office to deliver the mail. I depend on the government to assure the stability of the Internet through which I do the majority of my work. I depend on firefighters and police to protect my property, my safety and my community. I depend on educators to ensure that the American public remains educated and affluent enough to purchase products. I depend on the social safety net that ensures relative social stability, general prosperity and an absence of armed revolutionary warlords. My own education on full ride scholarship at a state university depended heavily on government assistance. And so on and so on.

Yes, I’ve worked hard to earn some modest success. But make no mistake: I haven’t built that. I merely stood on the shoulders of a vast network of civilization paid for by tax dollars, without which I would never have had the opportunity to succeed at all. Had I been born in Somalia or Burma, my fate would have been as dismal as the fates of most of my hypothetical compatriots.

To the right wing, the notion of collective responsibility and collective success is a dangerous idea. To the rest of us it’s just common sense.

Sadly, the Romney campaign’s pathetic attempt to find any business owner at all who actually “built it on their own” even in the most simplistic way won’t hurt him in the polls. Few will hear about the failure and fewer still will care. Facts no longer determine elections. Values, team loyalty and gut instincts about the way the world works do. The problem is that about half of Americans have entirely the wrong values and gut instincts about the world.

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Religious Right Revolutionaries

by digby

Frederick Clarkson has a fascinating piece at Religion Dispatches about the new “it” boy in religious celebrity circles. This fellow’s name is Eric Metaxas:

Metaxas is not yet a household name, but this has certainly been his year. He was not only the keynote speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast where president Obama also spoke; he also succeeded the late Charles Colson—both as the voice of the nationally-syndicated radio commentary, Breakpoint, and as one of the three-member board of directors of the premier US conservative Catholic/evangelical alliance, The Manhattan Declaration.

As an up-and-coming evangelical leader, he has also been busy denouncing proposed federal regulations on contraception coverage in employer insurance packages. But he is unique in employing his status as a Bonhoeffer scholar to claim parallels between the regulations and early Nazi-era legislation, as he did, for example, in an appearance on MSNBC.

The Bonhoeffer book itself has drawn praise, but also scathing commentary, especially in the community of Bonhoeffer scholars. Clifford Green wrote in Christian Century that Metaxas is “hijacking Bonhoeffer” into the fundamentalist camp to deploy him against religious and political liberalism.

Less than two weeks after presenting a copy of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy to president Obama, Metaxas found himself discussing the implications of his Nazi analogy at the bookstore of the Catholic Information Center, the DC outpost of Opus Dei (the rightist order that was made a personal prelature of the pope by John Paul II in 1982).

“I am, as an American, offended,” Metaxas told a small audience at the Center, “by the idea that we cannot discuss certain things, and there is a kind of proto-facist—(I am being generous when I say proto)—bullying that happens in the culture” that disallows discussing the “big questions” about life and God.

Bonhoeffer’s voice, Metaxas explained, was prophetic:

“I see him as someone who like Isaiah, or Jeremiah, was saying things to call the people of God to be the people of God… In his day, clearly his voice was not heeded. His voice, if it’s prophetic, is not Bonhoeffer’s voice—it is really the voice of God.”

“This HHS mandate” situation he said “is so oddly similar to where Bonhoeffer found himself” early in the Nazi era. “If we don’t fight now,” Metaxas warned,

“if we don’t really use all our bullets now, we will have no fight five years from now. It’ll be over. This it. We’ve got to die on this hill. Most people say, oh no, this isn’t serious enough. Its just this little issue. But it’s the millimeter… its that line that we cross. I’m sorry to say that I see these parallels. I really wish I didn’t.”

I guess the same rules don’t apply to “religious scholars” that apply to everyone else in public life. Comparing the ACA to Hitler is perfectly ok. If you’re a wingnut preacher.

It’s an interesting introduction to the new pastor on the block, but if you read further you will find that this “revolution” talk isn’t anything new. There have been voices among the religious right going there for quite some time. Which is scary.

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More and better Democratic women please

by digby

As a general rule, I think it’s vitally necessary to have more women in congress. And I certainly hope that most of them are liberals. (Conservative women tend not to vote differently than conservative men.) But I have to take exception to Democratic women who adopt tactics like this to beat fellow Democrats:

EMILY’s List, the nation’s largest resource for women in politics, today announced a new WOMEN VOTE! project in Connecticut’s fifth congressional district. As the nationwide voter mobilization and education project of EMILY’s List, WOMEN VOTE! will communicate with key primary voters about Chris Donovan’s fiscal record in the state legislature.

The Connecticut WOMEN VOTE! program will target more than 26,000 Democratic primary voting women who are age 45 or older. The women will receive five pieces of direct mail highlighting Chris Donovan’s record on taxes and raising his own pay. Three of the mailers will also showcase Elizabeth Esty’s commitment to Connecticut taxpayers: returning 10% of her own salary and working towards responsible budgeting in the state legislature. The first mail will be sent on July 26th.

“Chris Donovan’s 20 year record for Connecticut speaks for itself: exorbitant pay raises and the biggest tax hike in Connecticut history. Middle class families are paying the price,” said Denise Feriozzi, Director of WOMEN VOTE! “Elizabeth Esty returned taxpayer money and is committed to responsible budgeting. We are confident that once voters learn Chris Donovan’s record, they’ll choose Elizabeth Esty to represent them in Congress.”

I don’t think that’s helpful do you? And Emily’s List’s obvious belief that “anything goes” is not a value that I, as a feminist, can endorse. The value of having more women in the government is not to emulate the sleazy practices of the old boys club — it’s to challenge the premise of the club itself.

If this is how Esty is going to conduct herself in office — smearing progressives as “tax hikers” and voting as a fiscal conservative, I can’t see any purpose to supporting her candidacy. We don’t need any more Democrats who endorse Blue Dog and ALEC plans to slash the safety net and enable the most conservative opposition since the Civil War — no matter what sex they are.

I dearly want to see more women in elective office. But when there is a real progressive in the race, I would no more support a ConservaDem like Esty than I would support Michele Bachman. And there is a real progressive in the race — Chris Donovan — the candidate Emily’s List and Elizabeth Esty are trying to smear with the most hackneyed of all Republican inspired attacks — as a self-serving (raised his own pay!) taxnspend liberal. Meanwhile, in her own state

He’s on V

by digby

Uhm, I just don’t know what to say:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Fair, balanced and totally insane.

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