Winding up my day of Romney and the aristocrats (I swear it wasn’t planned) I offer the day’s stomach churning factoid. I wonder what Toqueville would have thought about this?
Concretely, between 2007 and 2010, while median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion…In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.
And in 2010, as the Walton’s wealth has risen and most other Americans’ wealth declined, it is now the case that the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined.
At the same time that the Waltons have amassed an ever larger fortune, Congress decided to cut the estate tax, a policy for which the Waltons have been pushing for years. And now that the estate tax cut is in place, conservatives are doing everything they can to ensure it doesn’t go away, allowing the Waltons to amass even larger amounts of wealth.
But don’t worry. They’re all good old boys and girls, just like you and me. Well, almost.
I am writing a story about Ann Romney and her horse Rafalca for Deadspin.com as part of our Olympic coverage. I was wondering if you might allow us to use some of the photos from this story: http://www.dressage-news.com/?p=16317 to go along with our piece. We will of course give full credit for the photos to you and your site.
Thanks, — Tom Ley Deadspin.com 210 Elizabeth St. #4, New York, NY 10012
Ken:
Afraid not. No permission is granted.
I don’t know Deaddspin.com.
KENNETH J. BRADDICK
Me:
We are a Gawker Media property with 2.3 million monthly readers. Here is a link with some information about who we are and what kind of an audience we have: http://advertising.gawker.com/deadspin/
If we were able to use some of your photos, it might help generate some increased interest in your site.
Thanks, Tom
Ken:
I have twice your viewership. According to the latest market survey released end of June dressage-news.com is #1 equestrian Internet site in world in both viewers and credibility.
I spend a fortune covering equestrian events around the world.
I don’t know what your site will do to increase my viewership/credibility.
I think I know my industry well and do not want my images, acquired at enormous cost (I’ve been in Germany since July 2, heading to London tomorrow and will be there through the Olympics, my third trip to Europe this year) used for purposes other than the way I present them.
I do not sell my photos, so by implication don’t care about expsue to a “larger” audience.
Sorry
Right. Dressage-News.com has 4.6 million monthly readers. Sure it does.
Horse showing, whether it’s dressage or jumping or whatever is a perfectly fine sport that requires real skill. But don’t kid yourself. For every normal, decent horse lover there are 10 rich creeps and their hangers-on like this guy. This is the Romneys’ world.
One of the lesser watched games of chicken coming during the lame duck session is the battle over the estate tax. As The Hill reports:
Business and farm groups are making a determined effort to rein in the estate tax before it expands significantly at the end of the year.
Thanks to a deal approved in late 2010, the estate tax is among a long list of fiscal issues awaiting action from Congress, including the extension of the George W. Bush-era tax rates and budget sequestration.
With a legislative logjam forming for the lame duck, lobbying groups such as the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and the American Farm Bureau Federation are reminding lawmakers not to forget about their issue…
Business and farm groups, and many congressional Republicans, would prefer to see the estate tax abolished.
But with that an unlikely scenario, at least this year, GOP lawmakers are instead pushing to extend the estate tax parameters included in the 2010 deal. That deal set the maximum tax rate at 35 percent with a $5 million exemption, indexed for inflation after 2011.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have prepared a broad tax-plan package that would return the estate tax to the 2009 levels of a 45 percent rate for estates, with a $3.5 million exemption, while extending Bush-era rates on family income up to $250,000.
That Democratic plan is expected to get a Senate floor vote perhaps as soon as next week, while the House GOP proposal that would extend all the Bush-era rates and the current estate tax parameters is likely to see a vote shortly before the August recess.
If lawmakers do nothing before year’s end, the estate tax will revert in 2013 to a $1 million exemption and a 55 percent rate, levels that independent analysts say would hit many more estates than either the current Democratic or Republican proposals. That would come just three years after there was no estate tax at all in 2010.
Remember that under this scenario, the 55 percent rate applies only to every dollar over $1 million. Not to the first million. As with so much else in the discussion of the Bush tax cuts, the best bet here is to do nothing at all. Let the Republicans whine about all the nonexistent “small businesses” it would harm, while the Democrats take credit for making multi-millionaires pay their fair share. Just like the American people want.
The only tax policy that Democrats should be championing is extending the tax cuts for people making under $250,000 a year. Continue that message all the way through the November presidential election. And then, if the Republicans object and take hostages like basic services or treaties, use Presidential authority to hold other hostages–say, military base closures in red states, big agriculture subsidies or other corporate welfare disbursements.
The Democrats needn’t give any ground on further tax breaks for the wealthy. All they need do is sit back and watch Republicans get nervous.
Josh Marshall wrote an interesting piece the other day making the case that Mitt is taking all this personally because, like his fellow Masters of the Universe, he just can’t believe anyone would think he is anything less than a stand-up guy and so much so that to even question it, much less demand proof, is beyond insulting.
This too tracks with the MOU’s view of themselves as modern nobility, quite above such inquisition from the polloi. Take, for example, this:
People always want to get more. And, you know, we’re putting out what is required plus more that is not required. And those are the two years that people are going to have. And that’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances.
Indeed. The people only need to understand “something” about his finances. Once you start giving in to their demands for details there’s just no end to it. You know how they are. Then he shook out his lace cuff, took a deep sniff of his finest snuff and dismissed the room.
The twitter is all atwitter today about this alleged Chris Matthews shark jumping moment, with conservatives having a field day condemning him for his blatant partisanship:
Yes, it is absurd, no doubt about it. But this isn’t about partisanship. He just loves him some presidential manliness. It makes him all breathless and excited, no matter who it is:
MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo of in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.
Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.
Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…
MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.
Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.
MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.
Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.
MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.
Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.
MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?
Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’
MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.
He can’t help acting like a sophomore cheerleader at her first prom. He’s just a romantic at heart.
If it’s true that Republicans are starting to realize that there are offers on the Grand Bargain table they would really like to take, they might just go along with this:
Senate Democrats — holding firm against extending tax cuts for the rich — are proposing a novel way to circumvent the Republican pledge not to vote for any tax increase: Allow all the tax cuts to expire Jan. 1, then vote on a tax cut for the middle class shortly thereafter.
The proposal illustrates the lengths lawmakers are going to in an effort to include new federal revenues in a fix for the “fiscal cliff,” the reckoning in January that would come when all Bush-era tax cuts expire and automatic spending cuts to military and domestic programs kick in.
Virtually every Republican in Congress has taken the pledge, pushed by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, never to vote for a tax increase — a pledge both parties see as a serious impediment to a tax compromise. But if tax rates snap back to the levels of the Clinton presidency on Jan. 1, any legislation to reinstate some of those tax cuts — but not all of them — would be considered a tax cut.
“Many Republicans are starting to realize something important: On Jan. 1, if we haven’t gotten to a deal, Grover Norquist and his pledge are no longer relevant to this conversation,” Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said this week in a speech at the Brookings Institution. “We will have a new fiscal and political reality.”
The idea inflamed passions on both sides on Tuesday, when fiscal issues careening toward Congress roiled hearings and deliberations and spurred political recriminations as Republican leaders accused Democrats of steering the economy back into recession.
Now, I’m all for this in isolation. Yes, by all means let the Bush tax cuts expire and propose better ones in the new congress. It’s absolutely the best thing. if the GOP wants to block tax cuts, well, let them …
However, don’t assume that this will happen in isolation. I am guessing they will see this as the big Democratic “win” which means they will have to let the Republicans have a “win” too or it just won’t be a Grand Bargain at all.
If you doubt me, look at this, from one of our progressive Democratic stalwarts:
Here’s how the argument is being framed at the Wall Street Journal
[T]he consequences of prolonged slow growth are profound. In just the period between 2017 and 2022, if the economy were to grow at its long-term average of 3.3% rather than 2.3%, it would produce $1 trillion in higher output, $904 billion in greater personal income, 1.1 million more jobs and an annual deficit $261 billion narrower. Average incomes for Americans, the study notes, would be “several thousand dollars higher.”
So, how does the country win back that extra percentage point of annual growth? Washington can’t provide the entire solution, but it certainly can provide a big part of it. That would require not just one “grand bargain” between the two parties—the kind that Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner tried to negotiate on the federal budget last year—but a whole series of them.
That’s right. Even after all we’ve seen and done, slashing the government is the solution to slow growth. He doesn’t explain why, it just is. It’s faith-based.
Here are some specifics of the Grand Bargains we will need to have to create growth:
• Corporate taxes: Democrats accept the need for a simpler tax code and lower corporate rate, Republicans the need to eliminate loopholes to make this lower rate revenue-neutral to avoid adding to the deficit.[Again, we are solving a debt crisis without raising revenue.I don’t know why anyone continues reading after that.]
• Balancing the budget: Democrats accept a meaningful reduction in the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and Republicans selected tax increases.
• Exports: Democrats accept that new free-trade agreements, particularly in the Pacific, are necessary, and Republicans that making those agreements politically palatable means helping displaced workers at home and attacking unfair trade practices abroad.
• Education: Republicans accept more spending on schools, Democrats that education funding must be lashed to a commitment to education reforms.
• Immigration: Republicans accept the need for higher immigration levels, Democrats that it should be tilted toward newcomers with higher skills and education.
This is a Third Way plan, by the way, not a GOP plan as you might have assumed. You can see where the “sacrifices” are. He says:
The moderate Democrats who consider Third Way a policy home could accept these kinds of bargains, as could plenty of Republicans. Continued paralysis, by contrast, likely means more subpar growth and the pain that would bring.
Right, no pain in those plans at all. Just soaring growth with all the boats rising so high we’re all dizzy from the steep ascent.
Once again, I’m stuck holding out for the wingnuts to obstruct anything that they consider commie Democrat ideas. Like ending “loopholes” and levying insignificant condemnations of unfair trade practices. And higher immigration levels for doctors and computer experts. They don’t know any better. Thank God.
Lee Fang, now writing over at the Nation points out how different it used to be:
The entire controversy might have been avoided if Romney had simply followed the path set by his father, George Romney, who took steps to clearly transition from his perch as the head of American Motors Corporation to public service. The elder Romney, who stepped down exactly thirty-seven years and a day before Mitt Romney’s announcement about heading the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 1999, made a conscious effort to severe ties with his auto business.
On February 10, 1962, at a press conference with Mitt in downtown Detroit, George Romney announced his intention to run for Michigan governor as a Republican. Widely respected by both parties, George, even with minimum political experience, was seen at the time as a potential challenger to President John Kennedy. The GOP cheered a new leader—Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) celebrated the news as “a real contribution to the strength and vitality of the Republican Party”; shareholders lamented the loss of a successful businessman to the world of politics.
In fact, when George initially informed the board of his intention to resign and run, he was asked to take a leave of absence instead. Richard E. Cross, the American Motors Corporation legal counsel, told the Los Angeles Times that he was “obviously reluctant” to see George go, especially since company profits were surging with record sales of the AMC Rambler. George had been referred to back then as the “prophet of the compact car” for introducing the Rambler in 1950 as an executive at a company that later merged with AMC.
The Wall Street Journal, on Monday, February 12, reported that at 9:00 am, George planned to attend a company board meeting so that he could officially request a leave of absence as chairman and president of American Motors Corporation. It was “inconsistent with my principles that I become a candidate for public office and maintain my business responsibilities,” said George, as he explained why he planned to forgo his salary and bonus.
George, however, changed his mind and decided it would be prudent to officially resign as CEO. Before the end of the day, George had set up a management transition team. Roy Abernethy, the company’s executive vice president, would be promoted as president and chief operating officer, along with Cross, who would serve as AMC’s chairman.
The board elected George as vice chairman, but granted him an indefinite leave of absence without pay. He even had time left over to attend a political meeting in Lansing that same day. In November, after he won his election, George stepped down from his largely ceremonial role.
That’s quite a difference, isn’t it?
It brings me to something I’ve been meaning to say, but have been putting off for reasons that will be obvious when you read it. The other day everyone piled on David Brooks for writing one of his more fatuous columns (and that’s saying something) about the good old days when we trained our nice white WASP elites to run the country properly. The idea that they were protectors of such lovely institutions as Jim Crow, deadly workplaces and squalid poverty in their midst as part of their masterful stewardship doesn’t seem to have occurred to Brooks as he took his little trip back to the good old days. He considers Chris Hayes a modern Jacobin for suggesting that the so-called meritocratic system is inherently flawed since it inevitably leads to a sort of aristocracy.
All of this is as wrong as everyone said it was. (For the most thorough fisking, see this one by driftglass.) However, Brooks wasn’t entirely wrong about one thing. He wrote this:
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.
He’s right. They did have a stewardship mentality. Granted, it was often paternalistic and exclusionary, but in America at least, white males of all social strata were allowed into the club once they had achieved success. But once there, they were required to assume the mantle of community pillar and caretaker of the institutions they’d created and served. George Romney is a good example of how that worked. He wasn’t born into money and didn’t have a college education. But as a successful businessman and civic leader he adhered to those standards. A surprisingly large number of people in that position did, whether through some form of noblesse oblige, personal integrity or simple adherence to the social norms.
Obviously, the system was horrible in many ways — no women, no minorities, undemocratic and cruel. That’s why it had to be challenged. But the idea of stewardship of institutions through generations was a worthwhile civic value and it’s gone. In today’s world, George Romney’s peers would ostracize him for being a naif. A chump. A foolish betrayer of what’s really important.
Brooks blames all this, of course, on lax morals of our liberal society (even as he extols the Masters of the Universe for being hard workers and taking care of their children, as if that makes them special.) But he needs to look closer to home to see what’s happened to civic and istitutional leadership. It is, as driftglass pointed out, largely a result of the Randification of the ruling class:
The public intellectual who has been more responsible that anyone for the giddy, amoral rapacity and bone-deep contempt for institutions which Mr. Brooks now decries is not Ed Asner (whom Mr. Brooks despises) of Noam Chomsky (whom Mr. Brooks really despises), but the very, very ,very Conservative Ms. Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand, who helped put Mr. Brooks’ hero, Ronald Reagan, on the “Government is the Problem” path to the White House.
Ayn Rand, who gave Mr. Brooks’ hero, Alan Greenspan, the intellectual terrarium within which he built his entire view of economics.
Ayn Rand, who taught an entire generation of Conservatives that “altruism” was contemptible fascist trickery on a par with Nazism, that all religions were lies and all belief in the divine was a sign of mental illness, that all taxes of any kind are slavery, and that the very idea of stewardship which Mr. Brooks longs for — the notion of owing some sort of moral obligation to one’s fellow human beings, present or future — was Stalinist twaddle of the lowest order.
“The language of meritocracy (how to succeed)” did not eclipse “the language of morality (how to be virtuous)”, Mr. Brooks. Instead, Ayn Rand and her heirs have spent half a century insisting that the language of meritocracy was the language of morality — that rapacity was virtue — and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a dirty Commie stooge who hated freedom, liberty and America.
That’s exactly right. The “morality” (amorality, actually) of capitalism has smothered civic virtue, for sure. And David Brooks needs to look no further than his own social circle and intellectual soulmates to figure out how that happened.
Chris Hayes is right, I fear, about meritocracy. After all, aristocracies were often originally formed by warriors who earned their land and titles through heroic feats and then passed them on to their heirs. It’s a very natural, human impulse. The question for Americans is how we are going to deal with the fact that our system has created the kind of civic decay and immorality that this system inevitably produces.
Goldman Sachs is building an in-house private bank to serve wealthy customers around the world as part of a cautious strategy to reshape its business, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The banking push, which has not been previously disclosed, will give Goldman more deposits, a source of low-cost funding less vulnerable to the vagaries of financial markets.
The new unit will also lend more directly to corporations, some of which already make investments and do business with Goldman. Bank executives have set a goal of $100 billion in loans, up from $12 billion at the end of March, the Journal said.
Goldman has no plans to open retail branches, build a network of automated teller machines, pitch credit cards or “give away toasters,” Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein told the Wall Street Journal.
Nifty move by Goldman. Start by driving the casino market’s reckless gambling to a fever pitch of leverage, then take a big government loan at no interest and clean up all the chips when everyone else loses their shirt. Dramatically increase the divide between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else, living high on the hog and believing that you’re doing God’s work.
Then once the gains of the 1% are most consolidated and the blackjack tables get a little too hot for comfort, offer nice, stable banking and investment services for the new plutonomic aristocracy.
It’s all perfectly legal, in the same sense that payday loan scammers, self-help cult leaders, bookies and porn kings do legal business. What’s more remarkable is that Goldman employees receive a greater level of respect, when in reality they do more damage to society than all of those professions combined.
Oh, fergawdsakes. What in the hell is Joe Klein talking about?
Indeed, that’s the Willie Horton argument building against Romney. Democrats were appalled by the Horton ads (the most devastating was produced by an “independent” committee, “unrelated” to the Bush campaign). They were, allegedly, racist. Horton was black. But they cut to the heart of a significant problem the Democratic Party had at the time: it was sort of soft on crime, in the midst of the post-Vietnam left’s “they’re depraved because they’re deprived” delusion. And Mitt Romney’s Willie Horton? His tax returns.
Huh? Is there any dispute about whether the Willie Horton ads were racist? And does Klein really still believe that the Democrats were “soft on crime”? Jesus, let’s do the time warp again.
The PBS documentary, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, chronicles the life of Republican operative and campaign manager to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, Lee Atwater, who once said of Dukakis: “By the time I’m done … people will think Willie Horton is his running mate.” In the PBS film, former South Carolina state Sen. Tom Turnipseed stated of the Horton ads: “I think he was used primarily because he was black. Like Lee said before he died, you don’t call them ni**er, ni**er, ni**er anymore like you did 30 years ago. You know, you got to be more subtle than that. It wasn’t very subtle at all to me.”
Or to any other sentient being.
As for the soft on crime trope, it was a Republican strategy to entice northern white voters who were unnerved by the unrest among the you-know-who’s. It did succeed in making the Democrats eager to put even more people in jail than they already did, particularly as a result of their drug war, but that wasn’t saying much since they had already been quite eager to do it before. The whole thing was a political strategy to stoke racial animosity and fear. But hey, if Joe Klein doesn’t know that by now, he never will.
Apparently he believes the Willie Horton ad wasn’t racist, and because it represented the fact that Democrats really were soft on crime, Dukakis deserved the hit (not to mention black people.) Therefore, he thinks it’s also ok to demand to see Mitt’s tax returns because it represents that Republicans are all Masters of the Universe. (That’s going to be a stretch when it comes to Louis Gohmert, but ok …)
No, there is a fully formed critique of the GOP, with its dystopian agenda of every man for himself and forced right wing religiosity. And Mitt is subject to it as well — he certainly subscribes to it. But the Bain issue and the tax returns are all about Mitt’s personal qualification to be president, which he himself has promoted, and his card-carrying membership in the 001%. If he wants to run on that record he needs to let the American people see what it really was. Klein’s confused about all this, but that’s nothing new.
It never pays to give conservatives the benefit of the doubt.
Yesterday I was alerted by several readers to this piece by National Review writer Jay Nordlinger writing about St. Ronnie:
Truth is, some conservatives lamented that he had indeed “grown” in office. He had gone out of his way to accommodate liberals and moderates, and to accommodate the Kremlin. He was raising taxes, spending like crazy, welcoming wetbacks, pursuing arms control. One common cry from the right was, “None of this would be happening if Ronald Reagan were alive.”
The term “welcoming wetbacks” was the offending passage, of course. And it is offensive. But my reaction to it was that he was speaking in the voice of a (crude) conservative of the time and not saying it himself. Obviously he should have put it in scare quotes and it would have been more clear, but I was willing to assume that he didn’t mean it to reflect his own, current vocabulary.
I was wrong. Here he is today:
Look: I am not a politician. I’m a writer. And if you don’t like what I write — for heaven’s sake, there are 8 billion others you can click on. I would further say to the complainers, using a phrase I’ve never liked, frankly: Get a life. Get a frickin’ life.
One more word: If people wet their pants on seeing the word “wetback,” this country is as far gone as the most pessimistic and alarmist people say it is.
I think that clears it up.
How many racist writers does National Review employ anyway? They seem to come tumbling out of their closets every couple of months or so.
