;)
The Commentariat -- May 22, 2012
My NYTX column is on David Brooks' latest. (I thought I had written a horrible column because I wrote it hurriedly on the way to another eye surgery. But I'm back, I can see, and -- after I corrected some typos -- I think the column is more-or-less worth your reading.) The NYTX front page is here.
Gene Robinson: "With its support for gay marriage, the NAACP has done more than strike a blow for fairness and equality. The nation's most venerable civil rights organization has made itself relevant again. The NAACP's 64-member board approved a resolution Saturday supporting 'marriage equality' not as a matter of empathy or compassion but as a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."
Stephanie Saul of the New York Times: Publicly-funded "scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children. Spreading at a time of deep cutbacks in public schools, the programs are operating in eight states and represent one of the fastest-growing components of the school choice movement.... The money has also been used to attract star football players, expand the payrolls of the nonprofit scholarship groups and spread the theology of creationism.... Most of the private schools are religious.... The programs are insulated from provisions requiring church-state separation because the donations are collected and distributed by the nonprofit scholarship groups."
Laurie Penny gives a first-person account in The Independent on her bus ride from New York to Chicago to protest against politicians who exacerbated the financial crisis. Thanks to Dave S. for the link.
Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times: "Facing opposition to a new studio in Lucas Valley, George Lucas said he would bring low-income housing there instead, inflaming wealthy neighbors in Marin County."
Frank Bruni's patronizing column in which he writes that politicians' wives would make good politicians, too, is interesting in that it highlights Christie Vilsack, the wife of Ag Secretary & former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. Christie is running for Congress against the deplorable Steve King.
Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic: RomneyCare is working well, & the Affordable Care Act -- if it had been in full force since 2001 -- would have saved Americans money. CW: let's see what the Supremes have done. They have certainly made their final decisions by now & are merely crossing the t's & dotting the i's at this point.
Presidential Race
CW: If you missed President Obama's response to Cory Booker's criticism of the Obama campaign's Bain ads, do check out the video & link in yesterday's Commentariat, which I posted late Monday. ...
... Paul Krugman: "... apparently [Cory] Booker is so close to his Wall Street donors that it never occurred to him that echoing their over-the-top reactions to Obama's very mild populism would destroy his own political future (which I believe it has)." ...
... It is not just Booker's political donors who influenced his thinking. As David Dayen of Firedoglake explains, cities like Newark have a symbiotic relationship with vulture capitalists. "... practically every state in the union uses private equity, particularly through their large pension funds. This creates a symbiotic relationship between state and local governments and vulture capitalists. The pension funds then invest in local economies, fattened by the higher returns they get from their entrusting of funds to private equity. This allows these firms, which specialize in stripping down companies and turning over profits, without regard for the workers they leave behind, to get inoculated by the political class, who want to keep this game going." ...
... Booker continues his apology tour. Booker said he had "good conversations" with members of the Obama campaign, which evidently cured his nausea:
... NEW. Tim Mak of Politico has a summary of left-leaning bloggers' reactions to Booker. ...
... Here's the campaign's latest Bain video:
Daniel Drezner of Foreign Policy: "... with Romney's NATO Chicago Tribune op-ed this past weekend, I fear he and his campaign have crossed the line from really stupid foreign policy pronouncements to logically contradictory ones.... I don't like it when a guy with a 50/50 chance of being president in January 2013 has abandoned the Logic Train." Romney's op-ed is here. ...
... AND from the right. Daniel Larison of the American Conservative: "It will not come as a shock that Romney doesn’t seem to know much about NATO." (CW: Evidently, Romney is getting his foreign policy advice from Campbell Brown's husband Dan Senor.) ...
...CW: well, thanks to Romney, I learned a new word: "revanchism."
Nicholas Confessore, et al., of the New York Times: "President Obama's once-commanding fund-raising advantage is declining as major Republican donors rally for Mitt Romney, conservative 'super PACs' far outpace their liberal counterparts and tax-exempt issue-advocacy groups swarm the political landscape."
Paul Waldman of American Prospect: four years and running, thousands of articles about Barack Obama's early life, and conservatives still think he hasn't been "vetted." They're still looking for that "horrible secret."
Right Wing World
I think Schumer can probably find the legislation to do this. It existed in Germany in the 1930s and Rhodesia in the '70s and in South Africa as well. He probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German. -- Grover Norquist, on Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D-N.Y.) bill to penalize Americans who renounce their citizenship to evade taxes
There is nothing quite as classy as calling a Jewish person a Nazi. -- Constant Weader
News Ledes
New York Times: "Katie Beckett, who was 3 years old and had been hospitalized almost since birth when President Ronald Reagan invoked her case as an example of irrational federal regulation in 1981 -- a key moment in the movement toward government support for home health care — died on Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the hospital where she was born. She was 34, more than three times the age her doctors had predicted she would reach."
New York Times: 'The leading American diplomat in Afghanistan, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, will leave his post this summer for health reasons after serving here less than a year, a State Department official said Tuesday."
New York Times: "A passenger flight from Paris to Charlotte, N.C., was diverted on Tuesday to Bangor, Maine, because of security concerns set off when a passenger told the crew that she had a surgically implanted device.... There was no indication that a bomb or any such device was involved in the case."
New York Times: "In an apparent breakthrough, the leader of the United Nations nuclear monitoring arm said on Tuesday that despite unspecified differences, he expects to sign a deal with Iran 'quite soon' on the arrangements for an investigation into potential military applications of Tehran's disputed nuclear program."
New York Times: "Global stocks rose on Tuesday, even as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development cut its growth forecast for the euro zone and said Europe risked creating a self-sustaining cycle of decline that could have dire effects for the world economy."
New York Times: "A private cargo rocket headed to the International Space Station blasted off early Tuesday morning. Built by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif. -- commonly known as SpaceX -- this rocket is carrying only about 1,000 pounds of cargo, and nothing of great value.... If the cargo capsule makes it all the way to the space station, it would be the first commercial, rather than government-operated, spacecraft to dock at the space station, and it would mark an important step in NASA's efforts to turn over basic transportation to low-Earth orbit to the private sector."
Washington Post: President Obama spoke at the commencement of Joplin, Missouri, High School one year after a tornado devastated the town.
Washington Post: "The Air Force said Monday that it had fined the former commander of the Dover Air Force Base mortuary $7,000 and suspended his top deputy for 20 days without pay for retaliating against whistleblowers, but it allowed both men to keep their jobs."
HealthDay: "In a highly anticipated move sure to unleash heated debate, a prominent U.S. government advisory panel is recommending that men of all ages no longer be screened for prostate cancer by undergoing the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent group of medical experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine, said PSA screening results in overdiagnosis of prostate cancer and unnecessary treatment that can leave men impotent and incontinent."
Guardian: "Facebook shares have fallen sharply on a second day of trading, leading to questions about the valuation of its IPO and the handling of the sale by its bankers."
ABC News: "A month after the Secret Service was rocked by allegations that agents brought prostitutes to a Colombia hotel where they were preparing for a visit by President Obama, the Drug Enforcement Administration today announced that at least three of its agents are also under investigation for allegedly hiring prostitutes in Cartagena."
NEW. Washington Post: "The nation's chief of nuclear safety announced his resignation Monday after a three-year tenure marked by debates over regulatory guidelines, praise for the U.S. response to the Japanese nuclear disaster and complaints that he had verbally abused women in the workplace. The departure of Gregory B. Jaczko, an advocate of tough safety standards at nuclear reactor sites during eight years on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, caps almost a year of concerns about his leadership of the NRC...."
NEW. New York Times: "In an effort to show a unified front in their campaign against the birth control mandate, 43 Roman Catholic dioceses, schools, social service agencies and other institutions filed lawsuits in 12 federal courts on Monday, challenging the Obama administration's rule that their employees receive coverage for contraception in their health insurance policies." CW: sorry, thought I linked this yesterday.
Share Article
Reader Comments (5)
Here is some 'local' news. Chris Christie's 'Jersey Comeback' seems to be having a bit of a problem. It turns out there is a limit on political bull when it involves numbers. The State Treasury Dept reported that actual income is coming in $350M less than his highness assured us. Also Moody's announced that it gave a warning to investors and kept NJ bond ratings at one of the worst of all States. Given the fact that the NJ employment rate remains higher than the national average and 1 in 4 NJ residents live in poverty I propose that we change the State's name to New Mississippi.
Oh, oh, David Brooks has his social Darwinism hat on again. Such an apologist for Bain––for Romney––and such distain for that bad president who just doesn't seem to "get it." I'm sure Marie will whittle him down to size; all that will be left will be his hat with the words "Eat Me," written on the brim.
Do we know the full history on Bain? How many companies flourished? How many failed? What we do know is whether flourishing or failing Bain made a bundle. And when Romney speaks of his business acumen, how does he explain his short sightedness re: the auto industry? And the fact that he thinks this country can run like a business is really scary.
@P. D. Pepe. I'm on it, but it will be a while before I get my column for NYTX writ. We don't know the full history of Bain, but we know enough -- as reported by the Wall Street Journal some months back -- that they've had an uneven record, with most of their successes coming from a few deals. More later.
While waiting for Marie to baste and bake one Brooks, we have another to consider.
This morning on NPR I heard an interview with Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, described on fringe right-wing sites as borderline liberal with a bit of a center-right tilt. Brooks is flogging his latest book which purports yet again to describe just how wrong government is about pretty much everything. He runs into problems however when confronted with actual real world considerations as opposed to right-wing theory, polemics, and outright fantasy.
His thesis is that people are happier with less government. Well, who would ever have thought that? Stop the presses. Wire congress. People would also be happier with more money, better jobs, a nice big house, regular access to good health care, free cable, and afternoons sitting on a yacht sipping drinks with little umbrellas in them. We’d be happier with a whole lot of things except for the fact that the real world is hard to escape if you’re not a crazy person or one who inhabits a fantasy world.
Then the question becomes how much less government? A very little bit? Which parts do we get rid of? Which do we keep? Brooks decides that, of course, we need a minimal government to enforce contracts and ensure a safety net for free enterprise. Why that and nothing else? Why not a safety net for health care? Why not ensure public education? Because they are all part of the “market” and should be subject to the vagaries of that marketplace. He touts this as a moral issue. Capitalism is blessed with an innate moral core.
Except when it’s not.
But for the most part, according to Brooks (what is about that name?), corporations are good actors and free enterprise is really the only thing we need to be good, happy citizens. He suggests that there is a role for government to help out the truly needy and indigent (without actually defining what this means—who is classified as indigent and how much help they can expect, for instance?) but that anyone past a certain point, the middle class, for example, who retires and collects a social security check, is a deeply immoral individual because they take, according to Brooks, sometimes as much as THREE TIMES what they put into the system.
Right here is where the interviewer, Steve Inskeep should have hit him over head with a question about the moral rightness of other individuals taking hundreds and thousands of times out of the system that they put into it. Those making money off the suffering and economic hardship they intentionally caused others. When Bain Capital took over perfectly good companies and killed them in order to line their own pockets, they engineered enormous payoffs for themselves—not by doing anything, not even by doing nothing. They enjoyed enormous economic rewards by producing negative net benefits for society. They killed perfectly good businesses and put all their employees out of work. How is that a plus for anyone besides Romney and his cronies?
How does Mr. Brooks measure such perfidy on his moral slide rule? He doesn’t say. He does admit that there is the possibility that some companies might not do everything they should to prevent things like environmental pollution. His answer? Well, it's up to the government to clean up that mess. Bad actors, in his world view, as long as they are rich individuals or corporations (the same thing according to wise old John Roberts) get a pass. But if you’re a middle class citizen who hasn’t polluted the environment, hasn’t screwed over millions of other Americans to get rich, hasn’t lied, cheated, or stolen and then bragged about it at the country club, and you accept a social security check after working for 50 or 60 years, then you are part of the problem. You are one of those leading America down the Road to Serfdom.
He also castigates liberals for not giving to charities that help the less fortunate because that’s how things should be done. Conservatives give far more, and are religious. Both of which contribute to their happiness, the lack of which make liberals not only miserable, but bad people.
What he never takes into account is that those conservatives support a system that puts people in the position of having to beg for food, for jobs, for health care. And under that particular road to serfdom, maybe they get it, maybe they don’t (so they don’t even get to be serfs!). The only actual right accorded to everyone is the right to strike it rich under free enterprise rules.
But he also never acknowledges that there is no such beast as true free enterprise. The market is rigged by the biggest players who never lose. And they are assisted by government agencies like the Supreme Court (I guess that’s one government operation Brooks can live with). Theory is all well and good, but an appreciation of the real world is essential and there is none here.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that progressives and liberals seek a world in which people don’t have to go begging for alms at the church door. Don’t have to work for slave wages for corporations “making it” in the free enterprise system and then having to rely on the beneficence of conservative church groups in order not to live in crushing poverty after they retire and until they die.
Finally, he is forced to admit that although many Americans might agree in principle with his theories of free enterprise, they also are happy to have the benefits of a government that makes sure they don’t have to eat poisonous foods, breathe toxic air, drive dangerous cars, live in poverty after retirement, have access to health care, and are ensured things like unemployment benefits to tide them over after being screwed by Brooks’ heroes in the private sector. His response to this?
This is clearly something we need to work on. In other words, we need to force Americans to abide by conservative fantasies that fly in the face of real world conditions that no conservative policies will ever change. And don’t forget, this guy is considered a moderate, if not liberal, by many on the right.
Fantasy or stupidity? You decide.
In the Brooks (both of them)/Bain universe apparently the Lord got it wrong: the greatest of these is not charity...but cupidity..purportedly moderated by Akhilleus' neatly named and entirely absent "innate moral core."
The absence of that moral core has already had consequences far more harmful than Bain's shenanigans, and the trends offer little reason to hope for immediate improvement. The kind of wealth concentration that Bain and other private equity firms pursue is in itself both symptom and cause of much that is wrong with our politics and our lives.
I think of all that PAC money from extremely wealthy individuals and corporations whose immense fortunes were based on charging consumers far too much for whatever they had to sell--from oil to imported toys--and being taxed far too little. The proliferation of PAC's is a visible sign of how much wealth has been concentrated in relatively few hands and how much harm to a democracy that kind of concentration can do, wielding influence far beyond that of all but a very few individuals. The Roberts Court's PAC are just the visible political tip of the private equity berg that has come to dominate our democracy.
I think, too, of all the schemes in place to successfully divert public money and property to private use. Today's story on publicly funded scholarships going to fund private schools is only the latest of hundreds, and over the last thirty years--the same period when we embarked on our wealth concentration binge-- the narrative has been so much nudged to the right by a constant propaganda stream extolling the social benefits of selfishness, the outrage we should hear at every successful private raid on the commons is largely absent.
I think of the "job creators" who have successfully pitted the declining labor movement against the environmentalists by treating workers like dogs, who if they wish to be fed, are expected to beg for treats. (And now that I think of it, in today's political world capital is so powerful it can even make a Newark mayor sit and bark on command.)
You would think the obvious contradictions of rampant capitalism and morality would be more obvious to the masses than they apparently are, but recognized or not, as I said I my response to the Brooks NYTimes piece, in today's world private equity and democracy are hardly good friends.