Month: April 2014

Piketty the marmot

by digby

For those of you who prefer the Classic Comic version:

I’m not going to link to any of the articles or youtubes discussing this book because there are a whole lot of them and you can easily find them if need be. It’s challenging the way people think in some fundamental ways. And that’s a good thing.

h/t to AG

Cliven Bundy let a lot of people down. Especially the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre

by digby

Poor Wayne LaPierre. It was supposed to be his week. And then Cliven Bundy imploded. My piece over at Salon this morning:

It’s always tough when a speaker has to alter his or her address at the last minute due to some big change over which they had no control. For instance, imagine what Wayne LaPierre’s speech to the National Rifle Association leadership forum on Friday must have been before right-wing hero Cliven Bundy donned a metaphorical white hood and declared himself a racist cretin in front of the entire nation.

It must have been a rousing cri de guerre summoning up the ghosts of great Americans from Patrick Henry to Wyatt Earp to Charlton Heston to illustrate the patriotism of Real Americans like Bundy. (Well, probably not Wyatt Earp — he was a notorious gun-grabber.) After all, the Second Amendment guarantees their right under the Constitution to declare the federal government illegitimate and threaten it at gunpoint. Or something.

Anyway, one can certainly imagine him laying out the thrilling scenario of a grizzled old cowboy and his friends and neighbors out on the range holding off the government thugs and finally forcing them to retreat rather than risk losing like the lily-livered cowards you just know they are…

Too bad old Cliven showed up on TV with dead animals in his arms and carrying on about how black people were better off slavery. It put a bif kink in the program.

So what did LaPierre do? He pulled an old trope off the shelf, dusted it off and pretended like it still meant something. That’s right, he declared war on the “liberal media.” Again. Still.

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Has the GOP message machine on wealth inequality really run so low on ideas?

by David Atkins

If this Judd Gregg column in Politico is the best the right wing can come up with to combat the politics of wealth inequality, I’d say they’re in some serious trouble:

We often hear these days, from President Obama and his chorus on the left, that there is massive income inequality in America and that he and his minions are committed to correcting this situation.

It is an interesting observation.

It means that after almost six years of control of the presidency and the majority of the government, those who anointed themselves to resolving the problem now implicitly — but never explicitly — acknowledge that they have failed to do so.
Why after six years of a liberal-progressive government that has taxed high-income folks at historically high rates and redistributed the money, has this issue of alleged income inequality gotten worse?

If this were a business confronting an issue so precisely seen by its leaders, one would presume those leaders would be out of work for not having come up with an effective solution.

But they are not in business; they are the government, where there is no actual accountability.

The president and his followers accept no blame and continue to shout “injustice,” hoping no one notices that they are in charge.

If one gives the president and his spokespeople, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the benefit of the doubt (and the doubt is considerable) on their claims that America is uniquely unjust in its wealth distribution, then why are their policy approaches such an abysmal failure?

First, we must examine the basis of their assumption. They seem to genuinely believe that it is not individuals who generate and create economic growth and thus wealth, but rather they themselves, the elected elite and their bureaucracy.

But in America today, the truly wealthy are for the most part the greatest producers of growth, jobs and productivity in the world’s history .

Just a few names make the point: Mark Zuckerberg; Bill Gates; Larry Ellison; and Steve Jobs, before his death. These are the folks who have developed the ideas and products that have kept the U.S. economy on the cutting edge of world growth.

Under the Democratic Party’s now dominant philosophy, they are people who must be vilified under the label of “too wealthy .”

This may be good political rhetoric but it fuels bad economics. And, when pursued in policy terms, it leads to a bad outcome for the millions of Americans whose jobs and personal prosperity have benefitted from the products these super-wealthy people have originated.

That’s the best they’ve got?

Pretending that Democrats have actually held the reins of government since 2010?
Pretending that tax rates on the wealthy are at historic highs, rather than near historic lows?
Pretending that Mark Zuckerberg has created lots of jobs, or that people actually like rather than tolerate Facebook and Microsoft?
Pretending that computers and social media would never have existed without the biggest players in those fields making billions?
Pretending that most of the super-rich are tech innovators rather than Wall Street tycoons and hedge fund managers?

Gregg then goes on to advocate lower taxes on the rich and then blames teachers unions for not educating Americans well enough because…why not?

It’s such a pathetic, half-hearted attempt that it’s a wonder Politico even bothered publishing it.

Seriously. If this is the best case the Right can make on wealth inequality, they’ve got such a glass jaw that it needs punching at every available opportunity.

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QOTD: Maleficent of the arctic

by digby

“Come on. Enemies, who would utterly annihilate America, they who’d obviously have information on plots, to carry out Jihad. Oh, but you can’t offend them, can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen,” she said. “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists.”

This sadistic cartoon creature was on a presidential ticket six years ago.

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America land of the free: leading the world in “guard labor.”

by digby

Speaking of  a country run by greedy billionaires buying the protection of a global military empire, how about this?

Another dubious first for America: We now employ as many private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in 1980.

And that’s just a small fraction of what we call “guard labor.” In addition to private security guards, that means police officers, members of the armed forces, prison and court officials, civilian employees of the military, and those producing weapons: a total of 5.2 million workers in 2011. That is a far larger number than we have of teachers at all levels.
[…]
But however one totes up guard labor in the United States, there is a lot of it, and it seems to go along with economic inequality. States with high levels of income inequality — New York and Louisiana — employ twice as many security workers (as a fraction of their labor force) as less unequal states like Idaho and New Hampshire.

It’s a fascinating article and one that should at least make people stop and wonder just what in the hell is going on here in the land ‘o the free. The authors speculate about the effect of inequality and how that leads to a need to “guard the store.” And I’m sure that’s at the heart of much of this.

But there are other factors that make us unusual. There is the huge military manufacturing sector that is creating a market for its goods. You see police forces turning themselves into para-military operations all over the country. Half the medium size towns in America look like they’re being guarded by the Delta Force these days instead of your old fashioned beat cop.

And we are also a very wealthy nation that’s uniquely overflowing with guns. Where you have a heavily armed population of have-nots it seems logical that you’d need a lot more people guarding the store.

None of that is based in any data, of course, just my own observation. But I think it’s pretty clear that that chart above must reflect both economic inequality and a unique culture.

As I have written ad nauseam: if you build it, they will use it. If you don’t want a police state, it’s probably a good idea not to finance one. But look who needs a police state to guard its stores of vast wealth? The people at the very top who are also buying our political system. It all works together quite conveniently.

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Sunday Funnie not so funny

by digby

It’s actually just sort of depressing:

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This is not freedom, people

by digby

Public parks are a nice idea and all, but be advised that if some gun nut wants to intimidate you and your family there’s nothing you can do about it. Not in Georgia at least.

A Georgia man panicked parents and children at a local park and baseball field by randomly walking around and displaying his gun to anyone he encountered in the parking lot.

According to witnesses who spoke with WSB-TV, the man wandered around the Forsythe County park last Tuesday night showing his gun to strangers, telling them “there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Anyone who was just walking by – you had parents and children coming in for the game – and he’s just standing here, walking around [saying] ‘You want to see my gun? Look, I got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ He knew he was frightening people. He knew exactly what he was doing,” said parent Karen Rabb.

Rabb said that the man’s intimidating behavior panicked parents causing them to hustle children who were there to play baseball to safety after the man refused to leave.

“It got to the point where we took the kids and brought them into the dugout and the parents lined up in front of the dugout,” Rabb said.

You’ve got a problem with that? Tough luck.

After deputies arrived, they questioned the man who produced a permit for the handgun. According to authorities, since the man made no verbal threats or gestures, they couldn’t arrest him or ask him to leave.

The police did say they thought his behavior was “inappropriate”, so there’s that.

The upshot is that if parents want to protect their kids from some asshole who’s waving a gun around they can’t use the park when he’s there. He has the gun. He doesn’t need to make threats. Nobody sane with kids would confront him back, armed or not. Therefore, he owns the park.

That’s what this fetishizing of guns leads to — freedom for the people who have them to do whatever the hell they want. Everyone else is out of luck.

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A noble mission tainted by hypocrisy

by digby

So disheartening:

The US State Department announced the launch of its third annual “Free the Press” campaign today, which will purportedly highlight “journalists or media outlets that are censored, attacked, threatened, or otherwise oppressed because of their reporting.” A noble mission for sure. But maybe they should kick off the campaign by criticizing their own Justice Department, which on the very same day, has asked the Supreme Court to help them force Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen into jail.

Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports that the Justice Department filed a legal brief today urging the Supreme Court to reject Risen’s petition to hear his reporter’s privilege case, in which the Fourth Circuit ruled earlier this year that James Risen (and all journalists) can be forced to testify against their sources without any regard to the confidentiality required by their profession. This flies in the face of common law precedent all over the country, as well as the clear district court reasoning in Risen’s case in 2012. (The government’s Supreme Court brief can be read here.)

Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee commendably grilled the State Department spokesman about the contradiction of its press freedom campaign and the James Risen case at today’s briefing on the State Department initiative, repeatedly asking if the government considers press freedom issues in the United States the same way it does abroad. (The full transcript.)

As Gerstein noted, “The Justice Department brief is unflinchingly hostile to the idea of the Supreme Court creating or finding protections for journalists,” and if the Justice Department succeeds “it could place President Barack Obama in the awkward position of presiding over the jailing of a journalist in an administration the president has vowed to make the most transparent in history.”

That ship sailed some time ago, I’m afraid. The most transparent administration has been as opaque as any and has defended its secrecy with more fervor than most. It has waged a war on whistleblowers unlike any we’ve seen before. But nonetheless, one might expect an allegedly liberal administration to at least allow the courts to have the last word. But then, they are trying to do an end run with a bogus
shield law” that makes them look like they’re doing something while in reality creating a new legal roadblock that the court would have to consider:

The government does mention it is working with Congress to craft a reporter’s shield bill, which should give you some indication that the proposed bill is at best a watered-down, toothless version of what many courts have offered journalists for decades, and that would be no help to James Risen—the exact type of reporter that we should be attempting to protect the most. It’s important to remember that in Risen’s case, the government has previously analogized reporter’s privilege to a criminal receiving drugs from someone and refusing to testify about it.

That’s disgusting.

It’s also in line with decades of manipulative maneuvering in which the government (of both parties) gets caught doing something illegal and instead of stopping the illegal behavior, instead enlists congressional authoritarians in both parties to legalize it. (See FISA debacle, for which the allegedly transparency advocate Senator Obama voted even before he was elected.)The Deep State protects its prerogatives and expands the scope of its powers by consistently overreaching, then falling back a bit and only legalizing the pieces of its program it most values — one step forward two steps back. It’s the natural consequence of global military hegemony. Unless you are one of those who are under the illusion that American people are somehow more moral and principled than other human beings that’s going to lead to more and more authoritarian power.

Until people decide to challenge this system we are looking at a nation of the future run by greedy billionaires who are buying the protection of a powerful global military empire. Sound good?

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The changing face of America

by digby

We all know this.  But it’s still interesting to see this in chart form.

Now, if all white people were Republicans it would still present a big challenge for racial minorities. 43% is still a whole lot of people and a very powerful plurality. But if you look at the age demographics you see that most younger people aren’t racially prejudiced and they will likely carry those attitudes into their later years as well. So the number of white racists within that plurality of whites is also shrinking rapidly.

There will always be some racists. It’s deeply embedded in American culture and frankly, the human species. But the Cliven Bundys of the world are dying off and they aren’t being replaced. He may have 14 kids who have the same attitudes but there are 114 out there for every one of them who don’t see the world that way.

It gives you hope.

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Uh, I believe that was my stop: Last Passenger