Hey, baby …
by digby
It’s a tradition on this blog to post this song on July 4th. This will be the 11th time.
This year I finally found a good Youtube of the rockin’ X version.
And here’s a new copy of the more soulful version from Dave Alvin:
Speaking of traditions, Atrios is holding his summer fundraiser. Go drop a couple of bucks in the kitty if you can.
Support independent blogging. For freedom!
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ExaroNews a British investigative web site, has just published the full transcript of a secretly recorded meeting between media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the staff of The Sun, a U.K. tabloid owned by News Corp., in which Murdoch admitted that he was aware for decades that journalists from his newspapers had been bribing both police and public officials.
According to the site (which is behind a paywall), the meeting took place in a boardroom at The Sun’s headquarters in East London with Murdoch at the head of the table. Present were nearly two dozen executives and reporters from The Sun, who had been arrested on allegations of illegal newsgathering practices.
In the wake of the phone-hacking scandal that shut down the News of the World—the Sun’s sister title—News Corp. established a management and standards committee (MSC) with the assistance of Linklaters, a law firm, in order to gather any evidence of purported wrongdoing on the part of its reporters and hand it over to the police.
The Sun staffers were irate over Murdoch’s decision to supply mass internal communications to the police “that had betrayed confidential sources, some of whom were public officials who received no payment for information,” reports ExaroNews.
The journalists felt that News Corp. had turned them into “scapegoats.” It was with that mindset that some entered the room with hidden digital recorders.
Oh what a tangled web we weave…
Click over to read the full rundown. It’s damning. And Rupert Murdoch should go to jail.
Alternative views of the 4th of July
by digby
I happen to enjoy this holiday. It’s in the middle of the summer, features fireworks and barbeques and celebrates (or so I thought) an aspirational kind of patriotism — the Declaration of Independence, a document which always seemed to me to be one thing Americans could all be proud of.
But noooo. America is a big country with a lot of competing philosophies and ideologies. Here are a couple of interesting dissents.
As a Southern nationalist the July 4 holiday is probably my least favourite time of the year. For a week or so leading up to the holiday the streets are decked out with Federal flags and the rhetoric about “the greatest nation in the world” reaches a fevered pitch. Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood songs that glorify the US flag and service in the Federal military are played again and again. Radio and television personalities implore us to be thankful for our (disappearing) freedom and to thank Federal military veterans for fighting in distant wars that do not make us safer and certainly have nothing to do with preserving our ever-fewer freedoms. Fireworks are launched, the US flag is everywhere and the churches take the lead in promoting a spirit of US nationalism. The Battle Hymn of the Republic, a song which glorifies the slaughter of Southern secessionists by the US military, is sung. All in all, it’s a very disturbing environment for any Southern nationalist to have to endure.
As Southern nationalists our primary political concern is for the well-being and independence of the Southern people. We reject the Empire that conquered our ancestors and killed about a quarter of a million Southerners, burned down Southern towns, churches and fields and raped countless Southern women. We reject the Empire that refused to allow our people to be independent and which has since then used us for cannon fodder in the continual over-seas wars. We reject the flag of our oppressors and the regime which seeks to displace our people and eradicate our culture.
After the conquest of the independent South by the United States of America, Southerners largely refused to celebrate the Yankees’ national holiday. This was not because Southerners rejected the Declaration of Independence (a secessionist document, after all) or Jefferson, Washington and the Founders. In fact, the Confederate Seal showed George Washington (a secessionist and a Virginian) on horseback. The South rejected the July 4 holiday because of what it had become – the national holiday of an Empire which oppressed Southerners. It was not until WWI (when tens of thousands of Southerners were conscripted and forced into the Federal military to be sent over-seas and participate in a war which had nothing to do with Southern freedom or well-being) that the holiday re-emerged in some Southern communities. Other communities held out even longer. But by WWII (when tens of thousands of Southerners were again conscripted and sent all around the world to fight in another awful war) the Fourth of July was celebrated by most Southerners. Since then, Southerners have become the most pro-USA region within the Empire. Our people in far greater percentages than peoples from other regions and cultures, volunteer for the Federal military and end up being used by the Empire to fight in imperialist wars around the planet. Few large Southern town is very far from a major Federal military base, a situation which further ties Dixie to Federal militarism.
This environment of chest-thumping US patriotism – even at a time when the US president is a very alien character with whom most Southerners can not identify and when US policies encourage millions of aliens to replace native Southern people – is pervasive across Dixie. There can be little doubt that the Empire is in decline. And there are also signs that secessionists and Southern nationalists are making gains. But until the Empire is dead and gone it seems we will have to endure the repugnant atmosphere that comes with the July 4 US holiday. Outside my house, the Confederate battle flag which flies pretty much sums up my feelings on this Federal holiday.
I’m not crazy about some of the Imperial policies of the US government but I don’t think the Civil War was an example of it. But the Lost Cause never dies.
(Actually, it’s only true that Southern whites refused to celebrate the July 4th holiday for many decades after the civil war — newly freed African Americans celebrated with gusto.)
But modern confederates aren’t the only ones who disdain the holiday, here’s another one.
I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.
In 2008, Alvin Rabushka’s book of almost 1,000 pages appeared: Taxation in Colonial America (Princeton University Press). In a review published in the Business History Review, the reviewer summarizes the book’s findings.
Rabushka’s most original and impressive contribution is his measurement of tax rates and tax burdens. However, his estimate of comparative trans-Atlantic tax burdens may be a bit of moving target. At one point, he concludes that, in the period from 1764 to 1775, “the nearly two million white colonists in America paid on the order of about 1 percent of the annual taxes levied on the roughly 8.5 million residents of Britain, or one twenty-fifth, in per capita terms, not taking into account the higher average income and consumption in the colonies” (p. 729). Later, he writes that, on the eve of the Revolution, “British tax burdens were ten or more times heavier than those in the colonies” (p. 867). Other scholars may want to refine his estimates, based on other archival sources, different treatment of technical issues such as the adjustment of intercolonial and trans-Atlantic comparisons for exchange rates, or new estimates of comparative income and wealth. Nonetheless, no one is likely to challenge his most important finding: the huge tax gap between the American periphery and the core of the British Empire.
The colonists had a sweet deal in 1775. Great Britain was the second freest nation on earth. Switzerland was probably the most free nation, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any other nation in 1775 that was ahead of Great Britain. And in Great Britain’s Empire, the colonists were by far the freest.
I will say it, loud and clear: the freest society on earth in 1775 was British North America, with the exception of the slave system. Anyone who was not a slave had incomparable freedom.
Jefferson wrote these words in the Declaration of Independence:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
I can think of no more misleading political assessment uttered by any leader in the history of the United States. No words having such great impact historically in this nation were less true. No political bogeymen invoked by any political sect as “the liar of the century” ever said anything as verifiably false as these words.
The Continental Congress declared independence on July 2, 1776. Some members signed the Declaration on July 4. The public in general believed the leaders at the Continental Congress. They did not understand what they were about to give up. They could not see what price in blood and treasure and debt they would soon pay. And they did not foresee the tax burden in the new nation after 1783.
In an article on taxation in that era, Rabushka gets to the point.
Historians have written that taxes in the new American nation rose and remained considerably higher, perhaps three times higher, than they were under British rule. More money was required for national defense than previously needed to defend the frontier from Indians and the French, and the new nation faced other expenses.
So, as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.
The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge…
Only after the price control law was repealed in 1778 could the army buy goods again. But the hyperinflation of the continentals and state-issued currencies replaced the pre-Revolution system of silver currency: Spanish pieces of eight.
The proponents of independence invoked British tyranny in North America. There was no British tyranny, and surely not in North America.
In 1872, Frederick Engels wrote an article, “On Authority.” He criticized anarchists, whom he called anti-authoritarians. His description of the authoritarian character of all armed revolutions should remind us of the costs of revolution.
A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.
After the American Revolution, 46,000 American loyalists fled to Canada. They were not willing to swear allegiance to the new colonial governments. The retained their loyalty to the nation that had delivered to them the greatest liberty on earth. They had not committed treason.
The revolutionaries are not remembered as treasonous. John Harrington told us why sometime around 1600. “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
The victors write the history books.
What would libertarians – even conservatives – give today in order to return to an era in which the central government extracted 1% of the nation’s wealth? Where there was no income tax?
Would they describe such a society as tyrannical?
That the largest signature on the Declaration of Independence was signed by the richest smuggler in North America was no coincidence. He was hopping mad. Parliament in 1773 had cut the tax on tea imported by the British East India Company, so the cost of British tea went lower than the smugglers’ cost on non-British tea. This had cost Hancock a pretty penny. The Tea Party had stopped the unloading of the tea by throwing privately owned tea off a privately owned ship – a ship in competition with Hancock’s ships. The Boston Tea Party was in fact a well-organized protest against lower prices stemming from lower taxes.
So, once again, I shall not celebrate the fourth of July.
I’m sure I could find some lefty literature that disdains the 4th of July for its sometimes show of martial fever or whatever but you get the picture.
As we watch events unfold in Egypt today (and debate our powerful government’s relationship with the constitution) I thought it was sort of interesting to contemplate the meaning of our holiday in light of the freedom we have to hate it.
Happy 4th everybody.
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Quotes from the Founding Fathers
by David Atkins
For the second time in as many July 4ths, I’d just like to highlight a few choice quotes from the founding fathers. These are the same as last year’s, but they’re worth revisiting. Let’s start with Thomas Paine:
Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue.
The property owners owe rent to those who do not own property for the privilege of cultivating the land, and taking away the natural ownership that all people have…To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.
There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by … corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”
All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
Benjamin Franklin again:
Finally, there seem to be but three Ways for a Nation to acquire Wealth. The first is by War as the Romans did in plundering their conquered Neighbours. This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating…
Thomas Jefferson:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
[P]ower always follows property. This I believe to be as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and reaction are equal is in mechanics. Nay, I believe we may advance one step farther, and affirm that the balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land. The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society; to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates. If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude in all acts of government.
Enjoy your 4th!
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The ghost of Fix the Debt
by digby
Alex Lawson and friends go to the Virginia “grassroots” chapter of the corporate astroturf outfit Fix the Debt to volunteer. I know you’ll be shocked to find out that it doesn’t seem to exist.
Check their web site for all the alleged state chapters.
Well, they may not have average Americans supporting them but they do have these fine folks, most of which seem to be business orgs or affiliates of the CRFB which is, coincidentally, the umbrella organization that organized Fix the Debt. Oh, and this group of wealthy granny-starvers, too.
Surely you don’t object to the idea that these people are total phonies who are trying to cut the social security benefits average Americans have earned and depend upon? Aren’t they just like you and me?
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Constitutional liberalism versus democracy: more lessons out of Egypt
by David Atkins
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was forced out of office Wednesday by the Egyptian military and opposition leaders, just a couple of hours after the Obama Administration voiced its first public doubts about Morsi’s handling of the massive street protests that spread across the country in recent days.
Egyptian Army Chief Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi took to state television to announce that the head of the country’s constitutional court would take over as president until new elections are held.
“We’ll build an Egyptian society that is strong and stable, that will not exclude anyone…and end the conflict,” Al-Sisi said. He said military leaders had urged Morsi to do more to meet protesters demands, but he did not go far enough to meet a 48 hour ultimatum the country’s military delcared on Monday.
Will the military actually give up power and allow for elections? Who knows? History is filled with military coups promising to stage elections whose timetables recede further and further into the distance because the country “isn’t ready.”
More importantly, if the military does give up power and allow for free and fair elections, will the comparatively secular, liberal left have the organizational power to defeat the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood in the next election? So far there is no indication that that will be the case. Egypt’s secular left has shown itself much more adept at protesting than at organizing.
Democracy and constitutional liberalism are not interchangeable ideas, any more than democracy and free markets are. Constitutional liberalism with protections for women and minorities, equality under the law, freedom of speech and worship, and all the other benefits we associate with modern democracies do not necessarily arise from democracy. These things must be built and enacted piece by piece–often in spite of the majority will of citizens.
There’s a moral argument to be had about whether constitutional liberalism trumps the principle of democratic self-determination. If an electorate wants to vote for a theocracy that denies women the right to vote, should they not be able to do so? Should the U.S. and other western nations impose sanctions if certain basic provisions of constitutional liberalism are not met? Wouldn’t it be imperialist to demand that Egyptians conform to our notions of freedom and justice? Truly it might be.
But then, why shouldn’t that same logic apply to the citizens of Alabama when it comes to segregation? Why shouldn’t that same logic apply to Texas when it comes women’s rights in the Lone Star state? That, indeed, is precisely the argument made by various anti-federalists and states’ rights advocates here at home. Is it not imperialist and contrary to multicultural values to impose the cultural and moral dictates of New York on the people of South Carolina? If a majority of citizens in a Middle Eastern nation want to vote for a theocratic government that oppresses minorities, should they have a right to do so? And if they do have that right by law and by universal moral principle of self-determination, why should the good people of Mississippi be denied the same right?
The end logic of promoting democracy over constitutional liberalism is either to make conveniently contradictory arguments based on the accident of federal Westphalian boundaries, or to demand that minorities consistently take to the streets in order to secure their rights.
America is still grappling with these issues in the constant battle between federal and state power. Egypt’s military now has the same choice in their hands. For the sake of the Egyptian people, I hope they choose wisely.
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QOTY: Hillary Clinton
by digby
“[Expletive] the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.” —Hillary Clinton, responding to the suggestion that it would be suspicious if President Obama skip the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on the weekend the Osama bin Laden raid took place, according to Mark Liebovich’s upcoming book on D.C., This Town.
Hey, that’s a great sentiment in any year.
Let’s hit the unemployed one more time
by digby
A new report from the National Employment Law Project calculates exactly how much [will be cut from unemployment insurance due to sequestration]: Of the more than $80 billion in automatic budget cuts that must occur between March 1 and Sept. 30, about $2.4 billion is being slashed from the federal emergency unemployment benefits program, says NELP, a labor-oriented research and advocacy group.
The organization estimates that upward of 3.8 million unemployed workers will ultimately be affected by the cuts. The average weekly benefit check of $289 is being cut by $43, or about 15 percent.
“It is the workers who have benefited least from the economic recovery who are bearing the largest share of the burden of the sequester,” the organization said in a statement.
If you go to the link you’ll see just a chart showing how much will be cut in every state. North Carolina is going to eliminate it entirely because they’ve already cut benefits so much that they no longer even qualify for federal funds.
Meanwhile, lest you worry that the job creators are similarly afflicted:
In a recent defense of the 1 percent, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw admitted it might be bad if the rich got richer by sucking cash from the economy without giving any value back. A new study suggests many of the rich — especially bankers and CEOs — are doing just that.
Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, argue in a study responding to Mankiw that most of the rise in income inequality over the past few decades is due to the soaring pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers who are milking money from the markets rather than generating much in the way of economic production.
“A substantial part of the extraordinary rise of top 1 percent incomes is not a result of well-functioning markets allocating pay according to value generated, but instead resulted from shifting institutional arrangements leading to shifting of rents to those at the very top,” Bivens and Mishel write.
The technical term for this is “rent-seeking.” Mankiw, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, suggested in his recent paper, “Defending The One Percent” that there wasn’t much of this going on, that the 1 percent are just richer than you, and getting even richer all the time, because they are better than you.
But he does admit that rent-seeking could be a problem:
If the top 1 percent is earning an extra $1 in some way that reduces the incomes of the middle class and the poor by $2, then many people will see that as a social problem worth addressing. For example, suppose the rising income share of the top 1 percent were largely attributable to successful rent-seeking. Imagine that the government were to favor its political allies by granting them monopoly power over certain products, favorable regulations, or restrictions on trade. Such a policy would likely lead to both inequality and inefficiency. Economists of all stripes would deplore it. I certainly would.
Unfortunately, this is pretty much what has happened in the past 30 years, as Bivens and Mishel show, with numbers.
But really, who cares? They really deserve it because they work so hard. And miss their kids’ soccer games and everything. Also too: they wouldn’t have all that money if they weren’t worth it. Isn’t that how our system works?
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Laying the groundwork
by digby
Just as they spent years demagogueing “partial birth abortion” they anti-abortion fetishists are now laying the groundwork to form a “consensus” that abortion should be completely illegal after 20 weeks. And they’re doing it in similar fashion, by lying about the science to increase the ick factor.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is planning to introduce a bill in the Senate that would ban abortion after 20 weeks, the Weekly Standard reported on Wednesday. The bill is meant to mirror anti-abortion legislation passed last month by the House of Representatives.
Under the plan reportedly being proposed by Rubio, a woman would be unable to get an abortion beyond 20 weeks gestation. And though the bill does include exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and if the life of the mother is at risk, it doesn’t appear to make exceptions if a woman’s health is at stake.
The foundation for this legislation is a scientifically disputed idea that fetuses can feel pain after 20 weeks. It is the same motivation that has driven such bans at the state level. Most recently, Texas has taken the national spotlight for its proposed 20-week ban, and eight other states have passed ‘fetal pain’ laws.
If Rubio really does move this bill forward, it would be more for the purposes of political showmanship than real policy-making. The bill doesn’t stand a chance of passing through the Democratically-controlled Senate. Additionally, there is a serious question about the constitutionality of a 20-week ban. Three of those eight states that have passed such bans had to put their laws on hold, since courts have contested their constitutionality.
To all those who think that just because their rights are secured today it means their rights are secured forever, think again. They won’t pass this today. But the fact that they’re even trying 40 years after Roe vs wade should startle people out of their complacency.
And to fatuous columnists like Melinda Hennenberger, who bring up the European laws that ban abortion after 20 weeks to hit abortion rights advocates over the head but neglect to mention that in these countries abortion is affordable and easily accessible to everyone without any shame or obstacle before then, just shut up. We know they want to ban abortion entirely, they have made that very clear. So all this bellyaching about abortions after 20 weeks is obviously a convenient increment on the road to achieving their final goal.
Just because she is a Villager in good standing doesn’t mean she’s any different than the shrieking zealots who stand outside abortion clinics waving bloody pictures and raving incoherently. In fact, she’s worse. Because she’s a liar.
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What it really takes to live like a decent human being in the USA
by digby
EPI has done some important research on the real cost of living that makes a whole lot more sense to me than the Federal government’s calculations for what constitutes poverty and what doesn’t:
It costs almost twice as much to live in New York City as it does in Marshall County, Mississippi, according to figures published Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
The median cost of modest living for an American family of four in the United States can be found in Newaygo County, Michigan, where $63,000 covers food, transportation, housing, child care, healthcare and taxes – but no extras such as vacations, eating out, or savings.
In New York the same lifestyle costs $93,500 and in Mississippi it can be had for $48,000.
“It’s surprising to a lot of people just how much it costs to live,” said Elise Gould, one of the researchers who compiled data for the policy group. EPI used data from 615 communities to update its online budget calculator (www.epi.org/resources/budget/)
Most of the household budgets identified by the EPI far exceed the 2013 official poverty line of about $23,500 for a family of four, though by varying amounts.
“There is an acknowledgement that the official poverty measure is inadequate,” said Gould.
Many government benefit programs, including subsidies in the new healthcare law, are pegged to the poverty line, which is the same in all states except Alaska and Hawaii, even though regional differences in living expenses vary wildly.
The Census Bureau issued a Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011 that varied geographically by housing costs, but many government welfare policies are still based on the official threshold.
Housing costs – which can eat up as much as 25 percent of the family budget in places like San Francisco – drive the discrepancy between regions.
“Housing cost has taken up an increasing share of budgets” in recent decades said Gould, the report’s chief author.
Read on for the other highlights.
And if you want to calculate the cost of living for a family in your area, you can go here.
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