“Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?”: Bobby Jindal Goes Panhandling
In the post this morning on the Romney donor network, I noted that in the underlying article from WaPo’s Wesley Lowery on that network’s favorite and slightly-less-favorite ‘16ers, there was nary a mention of onetime GOP “savior” Marco Rubio.
But there was another famous name missing from a list that ultimately included non-world-beaters like Mike Pence along with the notation that Mitt’s donors generally love GOP governors: the two-term governor of Louisiana.
I was reminded of that fact in reading a separate piece from National Review’s Eliana Johnson about Bobby Jindal’s preparations for an almost certain presidential run:
Though Jindal skewered Mitt Romney just a week after the 2012 election, he’s now turning to the Romney camp in an effort to beef up his fundraising operation. Sources say he is looking to tap Romney’s vast donor network and has asked Romney’s finance director, Spencer Zwick, for an assist with introductions to some of the Romney campaign’s top givers.
A number of the GOP’s likely Republican presidential candidates, including Rand Paul, are looking to Zwick to make these introductions. That’s in part a rite of passage – presidential contenders always want access to the fundraising list compiled by the previous candidate – and in part because the Romney team, which opted out of the public-financing system, was able to raise over $1 billion, an unprecedented amount for a GOP candidate. Romney and Zwick’s stable of top-dollar donors also has an especially loyal reputation relative to that of other nominees from both parties.
So even as the Romney donor network discusses their relationships with and preferences among a long list of potential 2016 candidates (including Paul, who was mentioned in surprisingly favorable terms in the Lowery piece), Bobby Jindal is looking for ways to invite himself into that world to make a pitch. This is not a good sign for him. Nor is it a particularly good sign, BTW, that he designated himself head of the crusade for “religious liberty” in a Big Speech in California right before said crusade fell into a giant ravine next door in Arizona.
Poor Bobby. Here’s a guy so brilliant and accomplished that you’d think all he’d have to do is stand in front of GOP “invisible primary” audiences with his resume in hand and just say: “Ecce Homo!” Instead he’s running around throwing himself in front of cameras, and seeking access to donor networks, like he’s just another pol. Makes you want to cry.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 28, 2014
“An Epidemic Of Plutocrat Self-Pity”: Filthy Rich But Secretly Terrified, Inside The 1 Percent’s Sore-Winner Backlash
What explains the toxic mélange of entitlement and shame that’s driving the raging 1 percent sore-winner backlash? From Tom Perkins comparing the ultra-rich to Jews during “Kristallnacht,” to tycoon and newspaper-destroyer Sam Zell insisting “the top 1 percent work harder,” to investment banker Wilbur Ross proclaiming that “the 1 percent is being picked on for political reasons,” there’s an epidemic of plutocrat self-pity afoot. Just last week ex-CEO of Morgan Stanley John Mack told the media to “stop beating up on” CEOs Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein after they got obscene raises from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.
The sore winner backlash is odd timing. There’s no longer any real movement to hike taxes on their income or their wealth, both of which are at all-time highs. President Obama has said an increase in tax rates is “off the table.” There’s no more discussion of the “Buffett Rule,” named for the Berkshire-Hathaway oracle who famously suggested his secretary should no longer pay higher rates than her boss.
Almost nobody talks about ending the “carried interest” loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay a shamefully low rate on much of what should be considered income; instead there’s a “boom in trusts passing carried interest to heirs,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Yes, they’ve figured out a way to pass that unfair advantage onto their heirs through new estate-tax dodges. Sadly, Occupy Wall Street has fizzled, so they can even enjoy Zuccotti Park unaccosted.
So why all the whining now? I read Kevin Roose’s buzzy “I crashed a secret Wall Street society” piece Monday morning looking for insight. You should read it if you haven’t. It’s a fun hate-read. You’ll come away thinking, if you don’t already, that a lot of these people are monsters.
Apparently the secret fraternity Kappa Beta Phi gathers the titans of Wall Street at the St. Regis once a year for a gala that celebrates their wealth and power and mocks the rest of us. New inductees to the fraternity are charged with putting on a variety show to entertain the long-tenured. The evening features all the standard bad behavior common to male societies, from sports teams to military units to the boys of the Bohemian Grove. Cross dressing? Check.
After cocktail hour, the new inductees – all of whom were required to dress in leotards and gold-sequined skirts, with costume wigs – began their variety-show acts.
Misogyny and homophobia? Check.
The jokes ranged from unfunny and sexist (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Hillary Clinton and a catfish?” A: “One has whiskers and stinks, and the other is a fish”) to unfunny and homophobic (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Barney Frank and a Fenway Frank?” A: “Barney Frank comes in different-size buns”).
Mocking the loser-outsiders, who paradoxically make their great wealth possible? Check.
One of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”
When Roose was discovered, he was ejected from the ballroom, and the story wound up in his new book, “Young Money,” a portrait of eight entry-level Wall Street traders, which came out today. The Kappa Beta Phi story was excerpted in New York magazine.
What the excerpt captured was the insularity and paranoia of plutocrats who band together to protect themselves from mostly imagined social approbation and self-doubt. As Paul Krugman has argued, they aren’t like the titans of yore who made things; they “push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by.” They’ve gotten insanely wealthy mainly by rigging the rules of the game to privilege the world of finance, and it’s no wonder they’re worried the rest of us will someday figure that out.
The good news from Roose’s work? Among younger Wall Streeters, there’s more doubt than you might expect. The percentage of Ivy Leaguers going into investment banking straight out of college is dropping. Before it faded, Occupy Wall Street had an impact on some of his young subjects, Roose reveals. The bad news is, the people who have doubts about the morality of their enterprise, and about their own privilege, tend to leave, so that those who remain are particularly entitled and/or deluded.
Still, that nagging doubt helps explain the backlash. They project in order to protect themselves. Their self-defense gets ever louder.
Last week Tom Perkins doubled down on his plutocrat paranoia at the Commonwealth Club, insisting the more money you have, the more votes you should get. He later “clarified” his remarks by saying he was only warning about the dangers of the 50 percent of the country that doesn’t pay taxes nonetheless having the right to vote. It was an uglier version of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent remark. Neither Romney nor Perkins nor their many defenders seem to realize that the people who pay no taxes are either retirees, or low-wage workers who are paid so little they’re not taxed.
These men who rigged the rules of the game to make themselves obscenely wealthy are trying to convince themselves, and us, that they’re entitled to those rewards. If only there were a genuine political movement triggering their paranoia. Instead, it’s preemptive, a product of their buried guilt and practiced entitlement.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, February 18, 2014
“He’s No Aberration”: Tom Perkins Is Willing To Say What The Rest Of The Ultrarich Are Secretly Thinking
Tom Perkins incensed the Internet (again), when he suggested Thursday that only taxpayers should get the right to vote and that the wealthiest Americans who pay the most in taxes should get more votes. Yep, you read that right.
The sentiment is especially offensive when you consider the demographics associated with the statement (read: white and male), but it isn’t the most absurd thing he’s said. That would be a letter Perkins wrote to The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 24, in which he compared “the progressive war on the American 1 percent, namely the ‘rich’ ” to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, particularly that the 1 percent face a “rising tide of hatred” akin to Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews in 1938.
The strangest thing about the letter isn’t that he thought that or even admitted it in a paper of record. What boggles the mind is the outpouring of support he received from like-minded ultrarich Americans and conservatives.
Billionaire investor Sam Zell, appearing on Bloomberg TV recently, denounced what he termed “the politics of envy,” arguing the 1 percent have earned their position in society. “I guess my feeling is that [Perkins] is right: The 1 percent are being pummeled because it’s politically convenient to do so,” he said in an exchange with anchor Betty Liu. “The problem is that the world and this country should not talk about envy of the 1 percent. It should talk about emulating the 1 percent. The 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.”
And The Wall Street Journal, a publication most beloved by the rich, similarly came to his defense. Anyone wondering whether the paper’s editors had printed Perkins’s letter to embarrass or expose him had their answer: They published it because they were sympathetic to the argument. Under the curious headline “Perkinsnacht,” the editorial board published an indictment of “liberals in power,” waxing dramatic about how “liberal vituperation makes our letter writer’s point.” The editors concluded: “The liberals aren’t encouraging violence, but they are promoting personal vilification and the abuse of government power to punish political opponents.”
Support for Perkins’s argument was so widespread that The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson wrote a piece questioning what exactly was making “some conservatives take a leave of their senses” in coming to Perkins’s defense. The best response to that question came (as usual) from New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait. “Perkins’s letter provided a peek into the fantasy world of the right-wing one percent, in which fantasies of an incipient Hitler-esque terror are just slightly beyond the norm.”
It wasn’t just the wealthy who came to Perkins’s side. One of the most cogent conservative arguments I read came from Michelle Malkin, who argued that it’s dangerous to marginalize a group, any group, even millionaires and billionaires. It was a good point, but it was something else in her piece that caught my attention. She called Perkins a “truth-teller” whose “message in defense of our nation’s achievers will transcend, inspire, embolden and prevail.” No matter, she lamented, “the mob is shooting the messenger anyway.”
That’s just it: Perkins isn’t an aberration, and his message is offensive precisely because it speaks to something a lot of rich people and conservatives actually believe. Perkins hadn’t gaffed. He hadn’t misspoken. Although he would later qualify his remarks, he was making a point that many of the uber-rich believe instinctively. They’re just too prudent to say so.
Perkins’s most recent statement—that people who pay more in taxes should get more votes—hasn’t had time to attract the kind of support his first one garnered, but it has parallels in Erick Erickson’s 53 percent movement. The RedState.org founder’s counterpunch to Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99 percent” slogan was meant to represent the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes. The assumption is that Occupy protesters are among the now famous (thanks, Mitt Romney!) 47 percent of the country who don’t.
The sentiment would resurface again on the presidential campaign trail when Romney said the thing that doomed his candicacy. A refresher: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
Another thing Romney left off but might as well have said? Those who believe they are entitled to vote. Romney and Perkins have good reason to want to keep the 47 percent from voting. Namely, the 47 percent won’t make it a priority to protect the interests of the long-suffering 1 percent. They have more pressing concerns, like, say, groceries.
And that gets to another of Perkins’s fears: that the 1 percent is somehow endangered and at risk of “economic extinction.” To wit: “The fear is wealth tax, higher taxes, higher death taxes—just more taxes until there is no more 1 percent. And that will creep down to the 5 percent and then the 10 percent,” he said. It’s the irrationality of this fear that has garnered the bulk of media attention. But it’s also worth reflecting for a moment on just how poor Perkins’s conception of percentages is. (Pauses for dramatic effect. Moves on.)
There are a few other statistics Romney didn’t mention, such as that two-thirds of households that don’t pay federal income tax do pay payroll taxes. Or that 18 percent of all tax filers paid neither payroll nor income taxes. Of those who paid neither, nearly all of them were elderly or had incomes under $20,000.
Romney thought he was speaking in confidence, but Perkins isn’t worried about that. Perkins, as Malkin so deftly observed, is a truth-teller. He’s saying what the right-wing 1 percent truly believe but are too scared to admit publicly.
By: Lucia Graves, The National Journal, February 14, 2014
“Learning Lessons From The Umbrage Police”: The Media’s Morality Play And Melissa Harris-Perry
Here’s a can’t-miss prediction for 2014: Some time this year, a media figure will say something offensive about someone who does not share their political ideology. There will be a chorus of feigned outrage. Apologies will be demanded, then grudgingly offered. Those insincerely expressing their displeasure at the original statement will criticize the apology for its insufficient sincerity.
In fact, this little routine will happen multiple times this year (and next year, and the year after that). It will happen with both media figures and politicians. That’s just how we do it in America. There’s so much umbrage taken in politics that it practically constitutes its own industry.
Last week we saw one more of these cases, but it was different from most, in that the eventual apology not only contained what an actual apology should, it was obviously earnest as well. That’s so rare because the insult-apology morality play, in politics at least, is always enacted against a background of partisan contestation that discourages everyone from acting honestly.
To summarize briefly, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry had a segment on her show with a roundtable of comedians in which she put up photos and asked them to come up with amusing captions. One photo was the Romney family Christmas card, with Mitt and Ann posing amongst their hundreds of grandchildren, including a new addition to the brood, an African-American baby adopted not long ago by one of the Romney sons. One of the comedians on the panel sang, “One of these things is not like the other…” and Harris-Perry joked that it would be amusing if one day the child grew up to marry Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s baby, so Kanye and Mitt could be in-laws.
As far as these kinds of sins go, the brief exchange was pretty mild. It wasn’t as if Harris-Perry or her guest said something particularly cruel about the child; the joke was in the anomaly of a black child in the midst of a family as famously white as the Romneys (dressed on the card in matching pastel-and-khaki outfits, no less). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t problematic, just that we should be able to distinguish between the ill-considered quip and the truly hateful remark.
That broader context is something the rest of us can consider, but Harris-Perry chose not address it when she offered an on-air apology profoundly different from those we usually hear. She didn’t say “I apologize if someone was offended,” as people so often do (which actually means, “I get that you were offended, but I don’t think you should have been”). She didn’t try to minimize it; if anything, she might have made the offending segment sound more offensive than it was. She said it was wrong and took responsibility for it. And most importantly, she said this: “I am genuinely appreciative of everyone who offered serious criticisms of last Sunday’s program, and I am reminded that our fiercest critics can sometimes be our best teachers.”
There were many liberals on social media who expressed the opinion that Harris-Perry shouldn’t have apologized, mainly because it would only deliver succor to the enemies of liberalism, who are a dastardly bunch. But Harris-Perry’s words and evident sincerity made it clear that the apology wasn’t about conservatives, it was about her. She chose to do the right thing, to commit a morally righteous act even if people she doesn’t like would enjoy it.
In other words, she removed herself from the political calculation that asks of everything, “Which side is this good for?” That isn’t easy for someone involved in politics to do, because so many forces push you to see every controversy primarily from that perspective. Had Harris-Perry been focused on not giving her critics any satisfaction, or simply keeping up the fight, she might have given one of those familiar non-apology apologies. She might have said: Listen, imagining Mitt and Kanye at Thanksgiving together isn’t exactly like, say, that time during the Clinton presidency when John McCain asked the crowd at a Republican fundraiser, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father.” That was truly despicable; what I did was a misdemeanor at best.
But she didn’t say those things; instead, she acted the way a good person would, the way most of us hope we’d act in an analogous situation in our own lives. She overcame the natural instinct to be defensive that we all share and to say that our good intentions should absolve us of blame. It’s ironic that we don’t expect that of those in public life, even though in general, the light of attention tends to encourage people to show their best selves. A slew of psychological studies have shown that when we know others are watching us, we’re more likely to act cooperatively, help people in need, and even to pick up after ourselves. When we’re in public we start seeing ourselves through others’ eyes and want to project an admirable persona. That’s why it’s sometimes said that character is what you do when no one’s watching.
For politicians and media figures, someone is always watching, and there’s a legion of people waiting to expose and punish you for the things you say. When you’re being taken to task by people who most assuredly do not have your best interests at heart, it’s awfully hard to ask yourself honestly whether, just this once, they might have a point.
As I’ve often said in comparing ordinary people to presidential candidates, if somebody followed you around recording everything you said for a year—heck, even for a day—there would undoubtedly be some things that passed your lips that would make somebody angry. Now that we have social media, it isn’t necessary to have your own TV show in order to risk a rain of criticism for the ugliness of your momentary thoughts. We all have to be accountable for what we say, but we can pass or fail the test that comes after you say something you shouldn’t have.
The web is full of “The Worst Apologies of 2013” lists (Paula Deen figures heavily), but to my mind, the best one came from Grist‘s David Roberts, who not only apologized for something insulting he said about someone on Twitter, but wrote a long and thoughtful post unpacking the whole episode. “As for the ‘political correctness police,’ well, I’m happy they got me,” he wrote. “That kind of social censure reinforces norms that badly need reinforcement in social media … If I’m briefly being made an example of, that’s as it should be—learn from the example!”
Learning from episodes like this one can be the hardest part, since the prevailing question is usually “Who won?” But maybe next time the umbrage machine fires up, we can ask what was revealed about everyone’s character, not just in what they initially said, but in how they responded to their critics.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 6, 2014
“Thanks For Nothing Republicans”: Unemployment Benefits, The Cruelest Cut Of All
To 1.3 million jobless Americans: The Republican Party wishes you a Very Unhappy New Year!
It would be one thing if there were a logical reason to cut off unemployment benefits for those who have been out of work the longest. But no such rationale exists. On both economic and moral grounds, extending benefits for the long-term unemployed should have received an automatic, bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress.
It didn’t. Nothing is automatic and bipartisan anymore, not with today’s radicalized GOP on the scene. In this case, a sensible and humane policy option is hostage to bruised Republican egos and the ideological myth of “makers” vs. “takers.”
The result is a cruel blow to families that are already suffering. On Saturday, benefits were allowed to expire for 1.3 million people who have been unemployed more than six months. These are precisely the jobless who will suffer most from a cutoff, since they have been scraping by on unemployment checks for so long that their financial situations are already precarious, if not dire.
Extending unemployment benefits is something that’s normally done in a recession, and Republicans correctly point out that we are now in a recovery. But there was nothing normal about the Great Recession, and there is nothing normal about the Not-So-Great Recovery.
We are emerging from the worst economic slump since the Depression, and growth has been unusually — and painfully — slow. Only in the past few months has the economy shown real signs of life. Job growth is improving but still sluggish, with unemployment hovering at 7 percent — not counting the millions of Americans who have given up looking for work.
An extension of long-term unemployment benefits should have been part of the budget deal between Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) but wasn’t. Democrats tried to offer an amendment that would extend the benefits for three months, and they identified savings elsewhere in the budget to pay for it. But House Speaker John Boehner refused to allow a vote on the proposal.
In terms of economic policy, this makes no sense. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that extending long-term unemployment for a full year would cost about $25 billion, which would add to the deficit. But the measure would boost economic growth by two-tenths of 1 percent and create 200,000 jobs. Given that interest rates are at historical lows, and given that the imperative right now is to create growth and jobs, refusing to extend the benefits is counterproductive as well as cruel.
Sadly, cruelty is the point.
The Republican far right perceived the budget deal as a political defeat — even though it caps spending for social programs at levels that many Democrats consider appallingly low — because it does not slash Medicare and Social Security. For some in the GOP, accepting an unemployment extension would have been too much to swallow, simply because it was favored by Democrats.
For some other Republicans, unemployment isn’t really about spending, growth, deficits or even politics. They see it as a moral issue.
To this way of thinking, extended benefits coddle the unemployed and encourage them to loll around the house, presumably eating bonbons, rather than pound the streets for any crumbs of work they can find, however meager.
This view is consistent with the philosophy that Mitt Romney privately espoused during his failed presidential campaign. It sees a growing number of Americans as parasitic takers who luxuriate in their dependence on government benefits — 47 percent was the figure Romney came up with. The makers who create the nation’s wealth are not really helping the down-and-out by giving them financial support to make it through tough times, this philosophy holds. Much better medicine would be a kick in the pants.
I wonder if these Ayn Rand ideologues have ever actually met a breadwinner who has gone without a job for more than six months. I wonder if they know that some jobless men and women — and I know this is hard to believe — don’t have well-to-do parents or even a trust fund to fall back on. I wonder if they understand that unemployment benefits don’t even cover basic expenses, much less bonbons.
The Republican establishment doesn’t want this to be a campaign issue for Democrats, so it’s quite likely that the benefits will eventually be extended. Until then, more than 1 million households are being made to suffer privation and anxiety — for no good reason at all. Thanks for nothing, GOP.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 30, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 