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“Inequality, Dignity And Freedom”: People Least Inclined To Respect Efforts Of Ordinary Workers Are Winners Of The Wealth Lottery

Now that the Congressional Budget Office has explicitly denied saying that Obamacare destroys jobs, some (though by no means all) Republicans have stopped lying about that issue and turned to a different argument. O.K., they concede, any reduction in working hours because of health reform will be a voluntary choice by the workers themselves — but it’s still a bad thing because, as Representative Paul Ryan puts it, they’ll lose “the dignity of work.”

So let’s talk about what that means in 21st-century America.

It’s all very well to talk in the abstract about the dignity of work, but to suggest that workers can have equal dignity despite huge inequality in pay is just silly. In 2012, the top 40 hedge fund managers and traders were paid a combined $16.7 billion, equivalent to the wages of 400,000 ordinary workers. Given that kind of disparity, can anyone really believe in the equal dignity of work?

In fact, the people who seem least inclined to respect the efforts of ordinary workers are the winners of the wealth lottery. Over the past few months, we’ve been harangued by a procession of angry billionaires, furious that they’re not receiving the deference, the acknowledgment of their superiority, that they believe is their due. For example, last week the investor Sam Zell went on CNN Money to defend the 1 percent against “envy,” and he asserted that “the 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.” Dignity for all!

And there’s another group that doesn’t respect workers: Republican politicians. In 2012, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, infamously marked Labor Day with a Twitter post celebrating … people who start their own businesses. Perhaps Mr. Cantor was chastened by the backlash to that post; at a recent G.O.P. retreat, he reportedly urged his colleagues to show some respect for Americans who don’t own businesses, who work for someone else. The clear implication was that they haven’t shown that kind of respect in the past.

On the whole, working Americans are better at appreciating their own worth than either the wealthy or conservative politicians are at showing them even minimal respect. Still, tens of millions of Americans know from experience that hard work isn’t enough to provide financial security or a decent education for their children, and many either couldn’t get health insurance or were desperately afraid of losing jobs that came with insurance until the Affordable Care Act kicked in last month. In the face of that kind of everyday struggle, talk about the dignity of work rings hollow.

So what would give working Americans more dignity in their lives, despite huge income disparities? How about assuring them that the essentials — health care, opportunity for their children, a minimal income — will be there even if their boss fires them or their jobs are shipped overseas?

Think about it: Has anything done as much to enhance the dignity of American seniors, to rescue them from the penury and dependence that were once so common among the elderly, as Social Security and Medicare? Inside the Beltway, fiscal scolds have turned “entitlements” into a bad word, but it’s precisely the fact that Americans are entitled to collect Social Security and be covered by Medicare, no questions asked, that makes these programs so empowering and liberating.

Conversely, the drive by conservatives to dismantle much of the social safety net, to replace it with minimal programs and private charity, is, in effect, an effort to strip away the dignity of lower-income workers.

And it’s something else: an assault on their freedom.

Modern American conservatives talk a lot about freedom, and deride liberals for advocating a “nanny state.” But when it comes to Americans down on their luck, conservatives become insultingly paternalistic, as comfortable congressmen lecture struggling families on the dignity of work. And they also become advocates of highly intrusive government. For example, House Republicans tried to introduce a provision into the farm bill that would have allowed states to mandate drug testing for food stamp recipients. (A commenter on my blog suggested mandatory drug tests for employees of too-big-to-fail financial institutions, which receive large implicit subsidies. Now that would really cause a panic.)

The truth is that if you really care about the dignity and freedom of American workers, you should favor more, not fewer, entitlements, a stronger, not weaker, social safety net.

And you should, in particular, support and celebrate health reform. Never mind all those claims that Obamacare is slavery; the reality is that the Affordable Care Act will empower millions of Americans, giving them exactly the kind of dignity and freedom politicians only pretend to love.

 

By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 13, 2014

February 17, 2014 Posted by | Economic Inequality, Wealthy | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“John Boehner’s Sunshine Band”: A Cartoon Festival Of Illusions That Would Embarrass Disney’s Brilliant Fantasists

From now on, it’s the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah House.

The political world stopped for a moment when Speaker John Boehner broke into the jaunty old Disney tune — “My, oh my, what a wonderful day” — after a news conference in which he threw in the towel on the debt ceiling fight. He found himself trapped between the immovable object of Democrats determined that they’d never again let Republicans take the nation’s credit hostage and the irresistible force of a dysfunctional, crisis-addicted GOP majority of which he is the putative leader. Boehner decided to skip away in song.

Feb. 11, 2014, was , in fact, a wonderful day. It marked the end of a dismal experiment that saw the right wing of the conservative movement do all it could to make the United States look like a country incapable of governing itself rationally. We were so caught up in our own nasty politics that we forgot that we’re supposed to be a model for how democracy should work. There will be other episodes of foolishness, but the debt-ceiling bomb finally has been defused.

Moreover, there were lessons here that should be applied from now on. The first is that refusing to negotiate over matters that should not be subject to negotiation is the sensible thing to do. President Obama learned this the hard way after the debilitating budget battle of 2011.

It’s true that both parties have played political games around the debt ceiling. But until our recent tea party turn, politicians kept these symbolic skirmishes within safe limits. The 28 House Republicans who faced reality by voting to move on for another year sent a signal that they want to return to those prudent habits.

But this means that 199 Republicans voted to go over the cliff. Or, to be more precise, many pretended they were willing to take that leap to appease big conservative funders and organizations, knowing that a minority of their GOP colleagues and the Democrats would bail them out. These profiles in convenience included Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the Budget Committee, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Republican Conference.

This tells us something important: The House Republican majority now governs largely through gestures and is driven almost entirely by internal party fractiousness and narrow political imperatives. When Boehner tried to tie the debt ceiling vote to a popular proposal to restore modest cuts to military pensions, Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) complained that he could not vote to raise the debt limit but also didn’t want to vote against the pension restoration.

It’s a perfect parable: Cotton, an Army veteran who is trying to unseat Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, this fall, felt a need to placate pro-spending and anti-spending interest groups at the same time and didn’t want Boehner to call his bluff. No wonder the speaker gave up on mollifying his caucus and, bless him, offered his ironic melody about all the sunshine coming his way.

Something else happened on Tuesday: Fully 193 of the 195 Democrats voting were prepared to shoulder the burden of hiking the debt ceiling. This vote, like many before it, proved that there is a moderate governing majority in the House. It could work its will again and again if only Boehner were willing to put bills on the floor and give practical-minded Republicans a chance join with Democrats to enact them.

This proposition deserves a test on immigration reform. Supporters should be thinking about a discharge petition to force Boehner’s hand — or maybe even to allow him to do what he’s said privately he’d like to do. If a majority of House members signed it, there could be a successful vote for the immigration bill the Senate already passed.

The largest lesson is to those who make a living bemoaning Washington gridlock and demanding a return to old-fashioned, bipartisan, good-faith negotiations.

That would be very nice if we were dealing with the GOP of yesteryear. We’re not. The debt-ceiling vote confirms what has long been obvious: Getting to yes on anything begins with an acknowledgment of how many members of Boehner’s caucus are ready to blow up our governing process and how many others feign a desire to do so to avoid political pain from their right.

The Zip-a-dee-doo-dah House has become a cartoon festival of illusions that would embarrass Disney’s brilliant fantasists. Exposing the fantasies is the first step toward sunshine.

 

By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 12, 2014

February 16, 2014 Posted by | Debt Ceiling, John Boehner | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Politics Of Fear”: It’s The Solidarity Of The Group That Matters Most To Right Wing Conservatives, And Their Loyalty To It

The bigger they are the harder they fall. The higher they climb the greater their fear of falling.

That was the takeaway of a much talked-about piece by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo, called “the Brittle Grip,” about America’s rich and how they’ve twisted American politics because of their pathological fear of losing it all.

What Marshall’s essay highlights is how pervasively the glue which now holds the Republican coalition together is fear and anxiety. It’s a fear that is fed daily by demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and the prime time line-up on Fox News.

One reaction among the Top 1% to the near collapse of the world economy back in 2008 might have been shame and remorse and a resolution to make amends for the pain and suffering their greed and recklessness had caused for millions of Americans who lost jobs and are still struggling to find work.

Instead, the Top 1% became consumed by fears the American people, acting through their government, might rein in bankers and financial wizards the same way their ancestors did when they elected Franklin Roosevelt after capitalism almost destroyed itself way back in 1929.

The higher the Top 1% has climbed up the income ladder, the more tenuous it feels its grip on those top rungs has become. And it is that fear of falling, as Marshall says, which explains the snarling, ferocious backlash we’ve seen over the past five years among an upper class that is desperate to keep everything it’s won and furious with President Obama for suggesting they should give some of it back.

“The extremely wealthy are objectively far wealthier, far more politically powerful and find a far more indulgent political class than at any time in almost a century – at least,” says Marshall. “And yet at the same time they palpably feel more isolated, abused and powerless than at any time over the same period and sense some genuine peril to the whole mix of privileges, power and wealth they hold.”

This “disconnect” requires some socio-cultural explanation, says Marshall, because on the surface this hysteria among the swells just doesn’t make sense.

After all, President Obama angered portions of his own party when he went along with George W. Bush to push through unpopular fixes that saved the personal fortunes of a lot of the same people who are now demonizing him — like billionaire Tom Perkins who recently compared Obama to Hitler in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The irony, of course, is that Obama’s policies have been just fine for rich people, says Marshall. Taxes have stayed low. Almost nobody got prosecuted for incinerating trillions of dollars of wealth. And profits are again at record levels.

But reality is no match for a concentration of wealth and gap between rich and poor that is so massive it creates its own “status anxieties” among people who are anxious their status at the top of the social pyramid makes them targets of envy and resentment by those left behind.

The Top 1% (or .01% ) doesn’t just have more stuff, says Marshall. “The sheer scale of the difference means they live what is simply a qualitatively different kind of existence.”

Today’s income gap would create “estrangement and alienation” in any society, says Marshall. But such massive inequality is particularly problematic in a democracy like ours “where such a minuscule sliver of the population can’t hope to protect itself alone at the ballot box.”

And it’s that fear of what “the masses” might do with whatever residual political power they still retain in our democracy that has turned America’s upper class into mistrustful reactionaries who are fighting back with everything they have and demanding that the Republican Party give not one inch to this interloper in the White House and the rainbow coalition he represents.

Could that be why a once-socially responsible conservative like George F. Will, who used to regularly scold fellow conservatives for embracing a survivor-of-the-fittest ethos, has found a new home at Fox News and a second career denigrating democracy while proclaiming the infinite virtues of plutocracy?

Those shouting “class warfare!” today are the same people who were spoiled by Ronald Reagan and his Republican heirs with all their fawning flattery that those with money were the only ones “driving forward the society and economy and prosperity for everyone.”

No matter that Wall Street had come close to crashing the global economic system with its irresponsible risk taking and its gaming the political system to permit “this high-risk, wealth-juicing leverage,” says Marshall. “These were, and are, folks who just weren’t used to public criticism.”

These “masters of the universe” believed their own mythology that only they were responsible for “keeping the globe we all live on from spinning off its axis,” says Marshall. Their attitude was: “So let us enjoy our Hamptons estates and our private jets in peace and we’ll do our jobs and you do yours.”

It’s this overwhelming hubris, insecurity at the brittleness of their hold on wealth, power and privileges — combined with the reality of great wealth and power — “that breeds a mix of aggressiveness and perceived embattlement,” says Marshall.

Obama is hardly a radical socialist. Indeed, most historians and political economists locate Obama somewhere right of center on the political spectrum given his (infuriating to his supporters) caution when approaching the near economic depression of the past five years and the financial sector abuses that caused it.

But when Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the only other Democratic presidents elected in the past half century, then Barak Obama becomes the closest thing to a real progressive any of these plutocrats have seen in their adult lives. “And that was just not something any of these folks had experienced before,” says Marshall.

That is how Republicans mutated from a party that once believed in a “hands-off fiscal and regulatory policy” to one that exhibits a “kind of feverish mindset” where conservatives can actually claim with a straight face that progressives are intent on a campaign of “mass wealth confiscation or internment or even exterminations,” says Marshall.

This “feverish mindset” at the upper end of the Republican food chain finds ample expression at the bottom of the conservative coalition as well, where the GOP’s populist right wing base is suffering its own “status anxieties” as white Christians shudder at all those lurid tales it’s been told of the dark-skinned hoards now taking over the country who mean to confiscate their bank accounts and throw them from their homes.

Theirs is the demographic panic of a Mayflower descendent like Sarah Barnes, who complained on Herman Cain’s website how Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl commercial featuring America the Beautiful sung in a chorus medley of different languages was robbing her of her heritage, her cultural inheritance and her “national identity.”

Barnes is all for “diversity” — just so long as the dark-skinned races remember their place and not turn America into a “Frankenstein national cadaver of half dead cultures, stitched together by some godless bureaucrats in Washington.”

Having told us how she really feels about her fellow Americans, Barnes can’t understand for the life of her why narrow-minded liberals are not more accepting of the “different” ideas she expresses but instead call her a racist just because she thinks America belongs to her and her kind while the rest of us are free to live here just so long as we behave.

I feel quite certain that if ever Adolph Hitler rose from the dead and threw his helmet into the ring for the Republican presidential nomination there would be those conservatives who would compare liberals to Nazis for demonizing Das Fuhrer for proposing that the vote be limited to blue-eyed Nordic blondes.

Is the odious bigotry of Sarah Barnes, so rampant now on the right, identical to fascism? Maybe not. Not yet.  But it’s a kind of fascism. Or at least the kind of toxic cultural chauvinism that leads to fascism given the right conditions.

“The human mind is so weak an instrument, and is so easily enslaved and prostituted by human passions, that one is never certain to what degree the fears of the privileged classes of anarchy and revolution are honest fears and to what degree they are dishonest attempts to put the advancing classes at a disadvantage,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932, just as FDR was taking office.

But these are not bad people, Niebuhr reminds us, just bad groups, which bring out the worst in their members.

Individuals may be moral because “they are endowed with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind” and so are able to consider interests other than their own, says Niebuhr.  And provided these  individuals are able to purge “egoistic elements” from themselves, they may even from time to time prefer the advantages of others to their own.

“But all these achievements are difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups,” says Niebuhr. That is because in every human group “there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals who compose the group reveal in their personal relationships.”

For all their fine talk about liberty and individualism, it’s the solidarity of the group that matters most to right wing conservatives, and their loyalty to it.

 

By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, February 13, 2014

February 16, 2014 Posted by | Conservatives, Economic Inequality | , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“What Makes a Scandal Stick?”: Why Scott Walker’s Proponents Aren’t Paying Attention To His Misconduct

Scott Walker is one of the few GOP figures in a position to benefit from Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal. The Wisconsin governor is uniquely appealing as a potential presidential candidate to both the moderates in his party and its far-right members. Walker is also the first governor in United States history to win a recall election, so if he wins reelection this year, he will have won three times in five years.

But Walker’s prospects aren’t totally rosy. Charles P. Pierce at Esquire has a good rundown of the lurking scandals: Aides from Walker’s first campaign went to jail for using his Milwaukee County Executive office to campaign for him for governor, another former aide was convicted of stealing money from a fund for families of U.S. soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Walker’s administration gave raises that skirted state limits after a series of phantom job transfers took place. Another corruption probe is ongoing.

For now, however, the myriad of corruption charges against his administration are being largely ignored by both the right-wing sites that love the Wisconsin governor and the mainstream media. Why hasn’t Walker’s questionable past been addressed in much of the national coverage he has received?

I put the question to Dr. Amelia Arsenault, Assistant Professor of Communication at Georgia State University and author of the article “Scandal Politics in the New Media Environment.” Arsenault told me that in cases like these, there are multiple explanations that often interact. For one thing, there’s what she calls “impact journalism”—a kind of domino effect in media coverage.  “If CNN is covering it, or if The New York Times is covering it, then they all pile on, and it becomes this cycle,” she said. “Some scandals are just sexier than others, and Christie is a huge personality. He has more charisma than Scott Walker in a lot of ways in terms of being a media personality.”

Apart from the personality factor, there’s also a more deliberate element at play. Lesser known right-wing news sites often serve as the springboard for determining which scandals will enter the mainstream, according to Arsenault. “Even though they don’t have high readership, sites like The Blaze and Breitbart.com really glom onto a particular scandal, and they’re very good at activating particular scandals and then pushing them forward, so they have to be covered by [outlets] like Fox News,” says Arsenault. “People on either side of the political spectrum are going after Christie, whereas Scott Walker has sort of been the darling of the online scandalmongers.”

Then there’s the matter of various incentives on either side of the political spectrum: Far-right conservatives don’t want a pro-gun control Northeasterner as their leading presidential hopeful; Democrats are similarly eager to discredit a compelling GOP candidate, and it may work in their favor for now to ignore Walker’s skeletons in order to keep the focus on Christie.

Should Walker decide to run, however, opposition researchers would have plenty to work with. What does it say about the GOP that their next-best potential contender has scandal aplenty of his own?

 

By: Lane Florsheim, The New Republic, February 12, 2014

February 13, 2014 Posted by | Politics, Scott Walker | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Always Pick Door Number 2”: The Lessons Of John Boehner’s Latest Failure

A last-ditch plan by House Republicans to extract concessions in exchange for hiking the nation’s borrowing limit fell apart Tuesday morning, with conservative holdouts leaving the party short of the necessary votes.

That the GOP caved isn’t as surprising as the speed with which it did, just a few minutes into a morning conference meeting. All along, it was clear Republicans had no leverage with their debt-ceiling threats; they’d caved before, and public opinion was firmly against more debt limit extortion.

Still, the GOP’s latest debt ceiling defeat is yet another sign of how difficult it has become for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to move anything through his divided caucus. And Boehner’s inability to control his party is a real liability, as it’s given Democrats even less reason to concede ground in future negotiations — not only on the debt ceiling, but on other major issues as well.

Even after Republicans self immolated during last year’s debt ceiling negotiations by offering a fantastical hostage list, the party again wanted to extract some kind of concessions this time. But though the ask list was smaller, the party again couldn’t agree on a single plan, and a handful of proposals quickly collapsed. In a weird Bizarro World twist, the last idea — to restore pension benefits to some veterans — would have had Republicans either voting to raise spending, or voting against the military.

In the end, the potential damage to the GOP was so great that party leaders knew they had two options on the debt ceiling: Stand firm and destroy the party’s approval rating (again), or ask Democrats for help. Boehner gave the finger to the Tea Party and picked Door Number 2.

So now, Democrats and President Obama, who insisted throughout the ordeal that they would only support a clean debt ceiling vote, have watched the GOP cave once again. When Republicans return with more debt ceiling demands in the future, Democrats will surely be emboldened to shrug them off and say “nope” again, confident the demands are merely more empty threats.

But will Boehner keep bucking the right wing? Immigration offers a salient test case, with Boehner seemingly interested in passing some reforms, and conservative critics blasting any action as “amnesty.”

The fallout for Republicans from spiking immigration this year wouldn’t be as visceral as the damage from, say, the government shutdown. But it would give Democrats a huge talking point — “Republicans are anti-immigration” — and further impinge on the party’s ability to court minority voters.

In short, Boehner is, as he has been for some time, caught between his need to appease the right and his need to do his job. The latest debt ceiling brouhaha has only exposed how tricky that balancing act is, and shown Democrats that, with a little pressure, they can force him to dump the right and seek out their help.

 

By: Jon Terbush, The Week, February 11, 2014

February 12, 2014 Posted by | Debt Ceiling, John Boehner | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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