It’s a challenging argument but wrong. I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room…
As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership…
Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.
If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.
The difference between the Hayes view and mine is a bit like the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He wants to upend the social order. I want to keep the current social order, but I want to give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its existing ideals.
Belief that only the wealthy work hard and prioritize their kids’ education? Check. Belief that the super-wealthy actually drive their own kids to preschool rather than having the nanny do it? Check. Belief that the Mitt Romneys of the world who take big paychecks for doing no work, work longer hours than people with two jobs? Check. Belief in boarding schools as the answer to Wall Street’s moral collapse? Check. Belief that the problem with society today is that young people and anti-authoritarians have too much influence? Check. Opposition to direct regulation in favor of vague talk of ethical transformations without any sort of plan to achieve those transformations? Check.
To be fair, if I churned out this kind of drivel a few times a week and had a four million dollar house to show for it, I’d probably want to keep the existing social order as well. So maybe David Brooks isn’t QUITE as stupid as his columns indicate. But yeah, totally. No need to regulate these elites; just TELL them how important they are, and how many Poors are affected by their decisions, and surely they’ll start acting with the magnanimity of their racist, sexist, anti-Semitic predecessors—now THEY had a moral code, amiright?
I’ll wager that a woman who leaves her abusive husband and works two jobs to take care of her kids works a lot harder and cares a lot more about her kids than Brooks does. The fact that Brooks remains on the New York Times payroll and does so well for himself churning out such garbage is Exhibit A in the evidentiary vault of our institutional moral decay.
“I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” –Ralph Reed, The Hill, December 17, 1997
I don’t know how I missed this last week, but I hope lots of people saw it: a blockbuster piece by Adele Stan on the return of Ralph Reed. One would have thought that his exposure as a cheap hustler taking advantage of Indian tribes and his decades long association with criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff would have been enough to chase him out of politics forever. But he’s baaack — in a big way with his new group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition:
The day after the election Barack Obama won by a wide margin, Reed says, he woke up feeling “like I’d been hit by a truck.” Speaking of the Obama campaign, Reed explains: “We were embarrassed. They ran circles around us.”
“I founded Faith and Freedom Coalition because I vowed that as long as I was alive, we were never going to get out-hustled on the ground again,” he told a group of activists earlier in the day…
Once again cloaked in the cape of a Christian crusader, Reed is back on the trail, doing what he does best: getting religious right-wingers to the polls.
Back at the Faith and Freedom Coalition gala, and with an eye to the media, perhaps, Reed issues what sounds like both a promise and a warning. “We’re not just playing around,” he says. “We’re not shadowboxing; we are playing for keeps. We’re playing for the most valuable prize in the history of the human race and that’s the United States of America — and we are not going to lose.”
Well, he’s not going to lose anyway…
“Hey, now that I’m done with the electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I’m counting on you to help me with some contacts.” — email to Jack Abramoff, 1998
Here’s where Stan really earns her money:
For Reed, however, there’s likely another prize to collect, win or lose. It may be wrapped up in the old Red, White and Blue, but this prize comes in a distinctive shade of green. AlterNet learned that, in order to identify and make its 600,000 voter contacts in Wisconsin — many of them by text messaging and e-mail subscriptions — Faith and Freedom Coalition contracted with Millennium Marketing, a division of Century Strategies, a political consulting firm whose CEO happens to be Ralph Reed.
AlterNet contacted Billy Kirkland, FFC’s national field director, by phone on June 29 to inquire about FFC’s use of Millennium. “We did use them and they were a big help in Wisconsin,” Kirkland said. “It was one of those things where any time you can use a new technology to reach voters and educate voters on issues that are important to them — we’re trying to be on the forefront of that, so I’d be more than happy to respond by e-mail, but I’ve got a 4:00 [meeting] I’ve got to walk into.”
So I e-mailed him a few questions, including: “How much did FFC pay Millennium Marketing for what appears to be a broad array of services provided in the campaign against the Wisconsin recall?” At press time, he had yet to respond.
Asked why he chose not to go with Romney, McCain said: “Oh come on, because we thought that Sarah Palin was the better candidate. Why did we not take [Tim] Pawlenty, why did we not take any of the other 10 other people. Why didn’t I? Because we had a better candidate, the same way with all the others. … Come on, why? That’s a stupid question.”
I don’t think he knows what he’s saying there, do you?
I would have thought that Palin would be worse than Romney in virtually every way, but I’ll take McCain’s word for it. He’s the one who vetted both of them and concluded that Mitt was second rate.
Richard Eskow has a big piece at CAF today about the continuing assault on our intelligence by the “No Labels” crew of wealthy centrists. It’s worth reading in its entirety because we’re going to be confronted with the “sacrifice” (for average citizens) agenda again even before the election. (This is giving John Boehner heartburn apparently because he’s not sure he will be able to keep his crazies in line enough even to get a temporary extension.)
I’m just going to talk about this one little piece of the program:
There’s also Presidential “fast-track” authority, which the New York Times describes as “a proposal to allow the president to send legislation to Congress twice a year that could not be amended but only approved or rejected. .. By preventing lawmakers from changing such legislation, a president could get yes-or-no answers on his top priorities.”
How would this work? The Times interviewed former Clinton aide William Galson, who “suggested that one possible subject of fast-track authority could be the … the Simpson-Bowles plan (which) included a cornucopia of unpopular tax increases and spending cuts.” Adds the Times: “(U)nder this proposal Congress would have to accept or reject the whole plan.”
See what they did right there?
In fact, supporters of this ill-advised and unpopular austerity measure have already tried to “fast-track” it several times. Had the failed Simpson/Bowles Deficit Commission come up with a proposal, Congress had agreed to subject it to just such an up-or-down vote.
Simpson Bowles isn’t a single policy prescription. It’s a smorgasbord of radical ideas which include the aforementioned benefit cuts; lowering the top tax rate for America’s millionaires and billionaires; deep cuts to other government programs; and the elimination of unnamed tax deductions that could slash employer health plans while raising the costs of paying a mortgage and raising children. And yet Congress and the President wanted to see it submitted for a single up-or-down vote, with no opportunity for amendments or changes.
A “fast track” vote creates enormous pressure on lawmakers to fall in line and denies the public the opportunity to hear an open debate about each provision of a bill. In other words, it’s ideal for unjust, impractical, and unpopular 1% proposals like Simpson Bowles.
An up or down vote on such a broad range of right-wing austerity ideas would make a travesty of the (small-“d”) democratic process. In fact, I’ll support any politician who signs a pledge against it.
Neat trick and one that I hadn’t realized was being pushed hard by the deficit fetishists. It makes sense.
In researching the Simpson-Bowles fast track solution and came upon a group called the Moment of Truth project: the era of deficit denial is over. It turns out that this is Simpson and Bowles own group, which is out there preaching the gospel. That’s to be expected. I suppose it’s also to be expected that this is also a project of the New America Foundation, one of our most revered establishment think tanks.
This is the heart of the Village, the studious centrism that also erroneously defines the leftward end of political power in our country. Certainly many people who are associated with the liberal side of the dial are involved, although it’s almost impossible to find any liberal policies among the group’s recommendations.
And they are deadly serious about slashing “entitlements.”
Key Principles
Embodies the Fiscal Commission approach
Shared sacrifice: Everything is on the table
Big enough to matter: Cuts the deficit by over $4 trillion over the next 10 years, sufficient to stabilize the debt by 2015 and reduce debt as a percentage of GDP below 70% by 2020
Balanced approach: Achieves deficit reduction with 2/3 spending cuts, 1/3 tax reform Smart savings instead of dumb cuts Permanently repeals the sequester required by the Budget Control Act and replaces across-the board cuts with a balanced, comprehensive fiscal plan to reduce the deficit and stabilize the debt
Main Elements
Tax reform: Comprehensive tax reform to promote growth, simplify the tax code, reduce marginal tax rates across the board and reduce the deficit by $1 trillion through 2021
Reduces the $1.1 trillion in annual tax expenditures and tax breaks
Reduce tax rates for individuals, small businesses, and corporations
Health care: Immediate reforms achieving savings of $485 through 2021 based on principles and framework in Simpson-Bowles report to pay for permanent SGR fix and reduce costs over the next decade
Sets a limit on long-term growth for federal health care spending of GDP+1 requiring additional reforms if the policies in this resolution and other reforms fail to keep spending below targets
Discretionary spending: Total discretionary spending for fy13 of $1.043 trillion and growth limited to 1% below inflation after 2013 for total savings of $625 billion beyond caps set in Budget Control Act
Additional savings divided proportionally between domestic and defense spending Other provisions
Instructions for committees to find approximately $300 billion in savings from other mandatory programs such as agriculture and federal retirement
Shifts to a more accurate measure of inflation for all provisions in the budget indexed to inflation
Bipartisan cooperation to enact plan to strengthen Social Security and put it on a fiscally sustainable path based on the principles and framework outlined in Simpson-Bowles report
Fully repeals sequester and replaces with comprehensive fiscal plan
Strong enforcement mechanisms to enforce spending cuts and ensure budget remains on a path to stabilize and reduce debt as a percentage of GDP.
The key thing there is the fact that they are slashing across the board (except for defense, of course.) And then there’s the revenue portion of our program, which should be lots of fun to watch since it’s composed of magical thinking:
Comprehensive tax reform to promote growth, simplify the tax code, reduce marginal tax rates across the board and reduce the deficit by $1 trillion through 2021
One would think that a debt crisis wouldn’t be the perfect moment to lower tax rates, but that’s what they’re proposing.
This is how they propose to fix the deficit. Slash spending and lower taxes. I don’t know how they are getting away with this sophistry, but they are. They feel this is their best opportunity to force the rubes to give up whatever small piece of financial security they have and they have no intention of stopping until they achieve this goal.
And as long as they adhere to the idea that low taxes equal more growth,which they explictly state above, they will always have the excuse they need to dispense favors to the “job creators.” In other words, for every loophole they close, two will be opened. If you doubt it, read about the machinations behind the scenes of the Dodd-Frank implementation. This is the full employment act for lobbyists and tax attorneys.
And keep in mind that this isn’t Pete Peterson, folks (although he is a major contributor.) This is one of the most staid, non-partisan DC institutions doing this. And they are rolling out new projects every few months with the same agenda. (Here’s the latest, announced by Simpson and Bowles just last week on CNBC — with Warren Buffet sitting by their side.)
I hope nobody is under the illusion that this fight is over. I’m not sure it ever will be. When the budget was balanced in the 90s (without radical slashing of “entitlements” much to the dismay of those who want to do it) these folks just laid low and let the government spend all the money in tax cuts and wars. They could have fought it, insisted that the surplus be spent to shore up social security and Medicare but they didn’t utter a peep. Then once the deficit returned, they cranked up the old “sacrifice” machine once more.
Thus they have proven over and over again that their real agenda is to degrade our already pitiful welfare state. Their “solutions” prove this — lower spending, lower taxes —which leads inexorably to drowning the poor safety net in the bathtub. They don’t say this. They say they just need to hold the baby’s head under the water a little bit and the baby won’t even mind it. (And anyway, it’s more important to keep the bathtub clean so they’ll be able to “bathe” even more babies.) But no matter how they dress it up as a debt problem, it’s austerity lite- soft Randism.
And sadly, it isn’t just Pete Peterson and his billion dollar foundation doing this. It’s virtually the entire political establishment.
In case there was any doubt which party is the party of plutocracy
by David Atkins
Some people want a secret plutocracy. Some people don’t:
The Senate has failed to advance legislation that would require independent groups to disclose the names of contributors who give more than $10,000 for use in political campaigns.
The measure, known as the DISCLOSE Act, died in a 51 to 44 vote on a procedural motion. It needed 60 votes to move forward.
Its failure was widely expected, but Democrats pushed for the vote, believing that Republicans will be politically damaged by their opposition to bringing new transparency to campaigns. The vote could also serve to energize the Democratic base, which has been exercised over the role they believe secret corporate donations are playing in the campaign.
To press the point, bill sponsor Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), will lead Senate Democrats in a “midnight vigil” Monday night, with floor speeches scheduled into the early morning. The goal is to hammer Republicans for blocking the bill and push for another vote on the measure Tuesday.
“We are determined to prove that transparency is not a radical concept,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.). “Our bill is as simple and straightforward as it gets – if you are making large donations to influence an election, the voters in that election should know who you are.”
Republicans say the measure could have a chilling affect on political giving, subjecting campaign donors to intimidation from their political opponents.
It’s easy to declare a pox on both houses and say that voting doesn’t matter and both parties are equally corrupt. It’s harder when the evidence to the contrary is so obvious.
As long as these people are willing to spend billions of dollars stealing elections and can get away with doing so under cover of total darkness, they don’t really care how many people march in the streets. The little people mean nothing to them. And even if worst comes to worst, it still won’t matter to them. After all, it’s not as if the villains will be anywhere in the remote vicinity of the revolution even if it were to ever come, which it won’t. They’ll already be safely in the arms of Dubai, Nassau, or any other welcoming city whose country has low taxes and little will to extradite. Armed revolutions usually accomplish little except the slaughter of the innocent.
The alternative, of course, is to vote and fight like hell within the confines of the democratic system. Even if the choices aren’t necessarily between good and evil, non-participation in the process is inexcusable when it’s so abundantly clear which side is the far greater evil.
So Tom Coburn is launching a full blown assault on Grover’s no-tax pledge, proclaiming the “starve the beast” strategy has failed:
[R]ather than forcing Republicans to bow to him, Mr. Norquist is the one who is increasingly isolated politically. […] The problem with the pledge is that it is powerless to prevent future automatic tax increases and has failed to restrain past spending. The “starve the beast” strategy to shrink the size of the federal government by cutting revenue but not spending was a disaster. Every dollar we borrow is a tax increase on the next generation.
And in a debt crisis, higher interest rates and the debasement of our currency would be additional tax hikes. In that sense, no one is doing more to violate the spirit of the pledge than Mr. Norquist himself, who is asking Republicans to reject the very type of agreement that could prevent future tax increases.
I think Coburn misunderstands Norquist’s intentions, but then he’s not the brightest bulb. However Coburn isn’t the only one bucking Norquist and I suspect that some of these others are seeing what we’ve been seeing for some time now — a willingness on the part of Democrats to slash the safety net programs in exchange for some minor tax increases on the wealthy and some phony loophole closing. That is the best deal they’ve ever been offered and some of them aren’t so stupid that they don’t know it. The Democrats, after all, are offering up their greatest political achievement. The Republicans would be offering up insignificant portion of the tax cuts that George W. Bush put through in 2001.
At some point they are going to take yes for an answer.
Johnny Chung, a struggling businessman whose eager giving to national Democratic candidates turned him into a leading figure in the investigation of campaign finance abuses, was charged here today with four counts of bank fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy and will plead guilty and cooperate with the authorities.
Mr. Chung is the fourth person in five weeks to be prosecuted by the Justice Department. On Jan. 28 a former restaurateur in Little Rock, Ark., and good friend of President Clinton, Yah Lin (Charlie) Trie, was charged in a 15-count indictment with obstruction of justice and other crimes related to fund-raising. Antonio Pan, a Democratic fund-raiser, was also charged in the indictment. Maria Hsia, a Democratic fund-raiser from Los Angeles, was indicted on Feb. 18 on charges of laundering campaign donations.
Mr. Chung is scheduled to enter his guilty plea on Monday morning in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, a few miles from a 1995 Clinton/ Gore ’96 fund-raising event in a Century City hotel where Federal officials said he used phony or ”conduit” contributors to illegally give the campaign $20,000, $19,000 more than permitted for one person under the Federal Election Campaign Act, according to the charges filed today.
The wingnut fever swamp managed to convince a good portion of the public that this was good evidence that Bill Clinton was a Chinese agent — and the press was so hysterical by that point that they seemed to believe it too.
Imagine if now were then, and this donor was a Democrat:
A decade ago gambling magnate and leading Republican donor Sheldon Adelson looked at a desolate spit of land in Macau and imagined a glittering strip of casinos, hotels and malls.
Where competitors saw obstacles, including Macau’s hostility to outsiders and historic links to Chinese organized crime, Adelson envisaged a chance to make billions.
Adelson pushed his chips to the center of the table, keeping his nerve even as his company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in late 2008.
The Macau bet paid off, propelling Adelson into the ranks of the mega-rich and underwriting his role as the largest Republican donor in the 2012 campaign, providing tens of millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other GOP causes.
Now, some of the methods Adelson used in Macau to save his company and help build a personal fortune estimated at $25 billion have come under expanding scrutiny by federal and Nevada investigators, according to people familiar with both inquiries.
Internal email and company documents, disclosed here for the first time, show that Adelson instructed a top executive to pay about $700,000 in legal fees to Leonel Alves, a Macau legislator whose firm was serving as an outside counsel to Las Vegas Sands.
The company’s general counsel and an outside law firm warned that the arrangement could violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It is unknown whether Adelson was aware of these warnings. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bars American companies from paying foreign officials to “affect or influence any act or decision” for business gain.
Federal investigators are looking at whether the payments violate the statute because of Alves’ government and political roles in Macau, people familiar with the inquiry said. Investigators were also said to be separately examining whether the company made any other payments to officials. An email by Alves to a senior company official, disclosed by The Wall Street Journal, quotes him as saying “someone high ranking in Beijing” had offered to resolve two vexing issues — a lawsuit by a Taiwanese businessman and Las Vegas Sands’ request for permission to sell luxury apartments in Macau. Another email from Alves said the problems could be solved for a payment of $300 million. There is no evidence the offer was accepted. Both issues remain unresolved.
That’s from a Frontline Investigation and there’s so much intrigue, corruption and vast amounts of money it sounds like it has to be fiction. I urge you to read the whole thing — and then contemplate how we can possible have a democracy when people like this are allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the government. The scope of the corruption is mind-boggling.
Meanwhile, here’s Sarah Silverman doing her part to make a difference. (WARNING: NSFW)
The reason it matters is that Bain Capital was involved in some significant outsourcing and offshoring of jobs from 1999 and 2002 that Romney doesn’t want to take the blame for. Romney wants the world to believe that even though he was the CEO of the company and took a six-figure plus salary, he wasn’t involved in the company’s operations. That’s going to be a tough sell.
So the merry-go-round of politics will spin round the question of what “involvement” means, why Romney was paid a big salary for doing what he himself says was no work, and so on.
But what is often lost is the larger context. Romney’s entire campaign is based on his economic experience with Bain Capital. Sure, he was governor of Massachusetts for a while, but he can’t exactly run on that because his signature accomplishment, Romneycare, is a significant political liability for him against the President. It shouldn’t be, but because the GOP base would rather that the poor die than receive decent healthcare, Romney can’t run on his record as Massachusetts governor. That and that the fact that the Massachusetts jobs picture didn’t do so well under his tenure.
Bain Capital, then, is Romney’s entire rationale for being President. He’s supposed to be the businessman who knows how the economy works. To run away from Bain Capital for any reason, then, isn’t just to attempt to deny an embarrassing set of circumstances from the candidate’s past. For Romney, to run away from Bain is to run away from the very rationale for his candidacy. To demand that opponents stop talking about your record on the subject that constitutes his sole argument for being president comes off as both laughable and weak.
Of course, the nations’ political divide is such that Romney’s near catastrophic troubles only cost him marginally at the polls. But in a close contest, that marginal difference is more than enough to be decisive.
James Dobson’s family research council has about half a million dues paying members and countless others who listen to and read its various programs and newsletters.
Here’s what it’s saying about the ACA:
Many historians point to the Stamp Act of 1765 as catalytic to the War for Independence. Passed by the British Parliament, the Act placed a small tax on nearly every kind of document produced in the colonies, including newspapers. It was omnipresent. Protests broke out; colonial legislatures adopted resolutions opposing the Act, and businessmen joined to boycott British goods. It took only until March, 1766, for Parliament to repeal the law, so loud was the protest, coupled with serious pressure from British businessmen.
Obamacare is much farther reaching than the Stamp Act, impacting every American’s personal health care from before the cradle to grave; mandating a huge tax: the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars annually for many families and huge fines on businesses and individuals who refuse to submit; and employing tens of thousands of new IRS agents to exact obedience and levy fines on the American people.
Obamacare is tyranny, heretofore unimagined in the U.S. Advocates laugh off the House vote to repeal, insisting that the law – affirmed by the Congress, the President and the Supreme Court – is a done deal. But they underestimate the power of prayer and the determination of the American people to remain free. Some are willing, for the false security of government-run health care, to help create an over-reaching, overly powerful federal government that will use unlimited federal debt and oppressive tax and enforcement to finance it; others are not! Even if it appears to be flickering, there is still a flame of liberty burning in America. There are still God-fearing American patriots among the American people, who, like Patrick Henry, would rather die than allow it to go out.
Sometimes it’s very hard to remember that they are talking about health care.