The Numbers Don't Lie

I'd like to know where Nicholas Kristoff gets his numbers.
He says:
1. The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the 150 million Americans who make up the bottom half.

2. The top 1 % of Americans possess more wealth than the folks who make up 90% of the nation.

I've tried finding this from the IRS website, but the IRS is more concerned with income, which, of course, especially in the case of the really rich, does not tell you much about "net wealth," which includes things like the value of stocks held, real estate and other stuff I can hardly imagine.

But if it's true, that should make quite a pie chart. That pie chart should be printed on T shirts and handed out by Democrats at super markets.

It might make some sense of the Wall Street protesters, or maybe not. Right now, I can't really quite understand those protesters. I remember protests from the sixties which looked a lot like this Kumbya crowd, but there was never any doubt what brought all those people to the national Mall in the 1960's--there was this thing called the Vietnam war. There were always people in the crowd who were vegetarians, save the planet, save the tiger, save the whales , but there was one unifying theme: Get out of Vietnam. These guys, not so much.

This protest of the "99%" reminds me of the guy in that movie who throws open a window and leans out and shouts, "I'm mad as Hell, and I'm not going to take it any more."

He could be a mad as hell Tea Party guy. You have to say what you want changed.

A depression era fighter (Raging Bull?) was asked about the pounding he took in the ring, and why he went back in, time after time. He couldn't make a living outside the ring, given the massive unemployment, but making a living in the right was brutal. Didn't he feel it was ultimately pretty discouraging, and he replied, "At least in the ring, I know who I am fighting."

Which was the problem in the Depression and now, you cannot understand who is hurting you. At least in the ring, there is clarity.

But if you have 1% or even 10% owning as much as everyone else combined, no matter how they got that wealth, something is wrong, big time.

Elizabeth Warren, Bless her, is saying what Democrats should all be saying--Okay rich guys, you 1-10% you got your wealth through a system the rest of us gave you, with our sweat. You transported your goods using our roads; you found your customers on the internet the government provided; you used the money our government prints, for Pete's sake.

Pay your share.

And, oh yes, remember it was the Republicans who repealed all those laws which were passed after the Depression to prevent another Depression, and they damn near succeeded in causing another Depression. You know who to punch out for that.

Wah Wah Republicans Enter the Twilight Zone

This is really getting fun. Rick Perry just came out with his plan to revive the ailing American economy: It turns out the disease is a pestilence called the Environmental Protection Agency and all we have to do is to kill the EPA and look right below our own feet for the wealth which lies there to make us all rich.

And, Governor Perry tells us, this plan of his, drilling in the Artic, drilling offshore, drilling baby drill will create 1.2 million jobs! Yikes. Why didn't anyone else think of this?

Actually, his job plan will create only 9,432 jobs.

How do I know? Where does that number come from? I know that number because I just now made it up, just like Rick Perry did.

These Republicans, they always have some number, usually a very big number, to throw at you. Where do they get those numbers from? I used to wonder. I don't wonder any more. I know. They get it from where they live--in La La land. They live in Fantasyland.

As T.S. Eliot observed: Humankind cannot stand too much reality.

The other problem with reality is it's damn hard work figuring out how it really works. Engineers know this. Doctors learn it, in spades, because when they don't understand reality, they watch people die right in front of them. If you are a doctor, it just doesn't work to just claim something is true and to really really have faith in it. If you are wrong, all the faith and dreaming in the world won't help.

Now, you are wondering when I am going to get to Herman Cain. He at least presents a real plan: He's going to tax your groceries at 9%, which will be added to any local tax. In New Hampshire, that's usually zero. But it means that a sales tax finally will come to New Hampshire after all we've sacrificed to avoid one. So you go spend $100 at Shaw's and your bill is $109. You buy a $1000 TV and you give the government an extra $90, a $10,000 car and you throw in $900 for "Tax and Tags," in addition to whatever you pay your state.

This actually does not bother his Republican audience, because, let's face it, for most of them, those 9% add on's are chump change. And if they see their income tax go down from 34% to 9%, they come out ahead.

It's only the family trying to live on $40,000 who really feels that hit. David Brooks says that Herman Cain's 999 plan raises taxes on the middle class by 32%. There you go with those numbers again. Trot out a number and everyone nods his head, docilely. Oh, you have a number, must be true.

Give me that old time Fantasy any time.

I could learn to love Republicans. It's like going back to the sixties, smoking hallucinogens, feeling really groovy.

Now, if they could just come up with some good music.

Romney and the Dog

It may not be the most pressing question of the 2012 campaign, but I have to ask: Just how did the story about Romney tying his dog to the roof of his car come out?

Gail Collins, who is reliably droll, sane and a writer of great restraint, cannot restrain herself. It just keeps bubbling up from her primative cerebral centers, and it seems to come out of nowhere and she just cannot stop it. It appears in nearly every column, no matter how unrelated to dogs or cars or travel or even taxes or the economy.

I mean, there is only one possible source I can imagine, unless a policeman stopped him and created some sort of record.

But short of police involvement, or a some really improbable person with a cell phone camera, the only source for that story could have been Romney himself or someone in his family.

Any way you slice it, the fact the story came out at all is the really bizarre part.

I know I could look this up on the internet, and likely, some day I will. But right now, reading Gail Collins about this is just too much fun.

In fact, every discouraged Democrat ought to simply link to Gail Collins and Paul Krugman and start each day reading them. It's almost enough to make one believe there are well springs of truth, virtue and reality still percolating up through the scum and muck of the Republican vituperation and disingenuousness which passes for thought on the right.

Wah Wah Republican Follies

I missed the candidates' debate last night. Detroit was playing Texas. But I heard the headlines and the sound bites this morning.

It seems they all agreed on the big issue: The economy is in the doldrums because--one guess now, and remember these are Republicans talking: Oh, yes! It's the government!

Not just the government, the federal government.

Forget about those bankers making loans to deadbeats and people who were well meaning but incapable; forget about those Wall Street sharpies who were selling securities using those really worthless mortgage loans as security; forget about the European union implosion; forget about, most of all, those two big whirlpools over there called "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" where we spent in one week what it would cost to fund healthcare for every American for about a year.

Naw, none of that even exists--can't hear about it, can't see it and sure cannot talk about it, because Republicans stick to the script. Have been doing that since they discovered a guy named Reagan who was just great as long as he stuck to the script. And ever since then, they all do.

Except maybe for Chris Christie, who is, as Mara Liasson tells us is, "Authentic." Which means he does stray from the "Government is bad. Government is the problem not the solution. Government regulations are the problem killing the economy. Government is discouraging the almighty Job Creators." Sometimes he says something that doesn't sound as if it came out of the Republican/Fox News word processor, something you haven't heard on Rush or Glenn or Sean.

Speaking of which, did you know Elizabeth Warren is a parasite who doesn't care about her host?

That is, as opposed to all those parasites who are quite considerate of their hosts.

And here I thought Ron Paul was the designated authentic Republican.

But I'm not done with Mara Liasson. During the last presidential campaign I listened to NPR every day and whenever Mara Liasson came on I kept thinking my radio had somehow jumped the dial to Fox News. Her reports had sixty second sound bites from Sarah Palin (you remember Sarah) and a three second snippet from Barack Obama sounding as if he was choking on a biscotti. She is the great stealth bomber of the Fox News crowd. Apparently, she has the zealotry of the convert: In high school, growing up in Scarsdale, New York (fertile Fox News spawning ground) she helped form the Scarsdale Alternative School, which sounds like some kind of Hippie response to the button down privileged elitist environment of Scarsdale, but what's in a name? Then, after Brown, where they actually have a transgender dormitory, she shipped out to San Francisco, where she was, one can only imagine, traumatized by the liberal scene in Haight Ashbury and so flipped out she ran right over and joined Fox News and hasn't looked back since. Somehow, I suppose in some guilt ridden attempt to add "Balance" to NPR news,NPR hired her back which is like Abraham Lincoln hiring Jefferson Davis as his press secretary after the war, in an attempt at "Balance." Anyway, Mara thinks Chris Christies is "Authentic." That's like calling snake oil "Natural," and you know, natural is always healthy and good for you.

One thing which was really fun was hearing Michelle Bachmann tell Herman Cain that a 9% sales tax would lead to a value added tax, which came out of the same orbit as her friend who told her HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Mitt Romney, ever the centrist, said the simple 9-9-9 formula is, in fact, simplistic, and simple answers to complex problems are often ineffective. Now that, coming from a Republican, is news.

How about the simple answer: The problem with the economy is the government. Just get the government off the backs of the people and we don't have to do anything else. Is that not the Republican line? Very simple. Joe Sixpack can learn that right quick. We don't want to stray to that Democratic quamire called "Complexity," now do we?

Here's a simple formula: Vote for Brain Dead Republicans, they may be zombies, but there is very little batch to batch variation and you know what you are getting.

Wah-Wah Republicans: Given 'Em Hell, Barry

Here among my friends in New Hampshire precious few know the name Eric Cantor. Which means, of course, too few follow Jon Stewart or the essential Stephen Colbert.

So, I will have to make an introduction: Mr. Cantor is a Congressman from Richmond, Virginia--you remember Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, then once the feds regulated them out of slavery (the 13th and 14th amendments), they turned their entrepreneurial spirit to the cultivation of tobacco--anyway, he is the latest attack dog for the Republican party.

Yesterday, on the Squawkbox, an insufferable morning show with an officious right wing host who has all the qualifications of a right wing agitator, good hair and a pugnacious style, Mr. Cantor inveighed against President Obama's road trips around the country during which the President brings attention to Republican senators and congressmen who refuse to tax millionaires and who have targeted Medicare and Social Security as public nuisances.

"Stop the campaigning. City after city, yeah. Listen, there's no question that that's what happened. Immediately, the next day after the speech was given, he came to Richmond, my district, and then that bridge in Ohio. Right. It's like somebody going around the country picking a fight. The country doesn't need that. I mean people are angry in this country. Middle class does need to see leadership in Washington. It's not inflaming division but instead focusing on solutions, that's what we're trying to do."

This amounts to what Paul Krugman has called, "The Panic of the Plutocrats," i.e. the politicians and right wing talk show hosts who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent. Mr. Cantor has attacked the Wall Street protesters as mobs who are "Pitting Americans against Americans," and he invokes, as do all Republicans any complaint about not taxing millionaires as "Class warfare."

Stephen Schwartzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared an Obama proposal to close a loophole that lets some millionaires pay absurdly low taxes to Hitler's invasion of Poland.

And George Will inveighed that Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic contender for the current Republican senate seat in Massachusetts, has a "collectivist agenda." Rush Limbaugh went one better, as he called her "a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it."

I defer to Mr. Limbaugh and his Republican cronies, who are the experts on sucking the life out of their hosts.

These are the people, Krugman observes, who are not Steve Jobs. They invented nothing, made nothing. They got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that brought us the wonderful world of financial collapse, and they paid no price. They are like the spider wasps, who suck their host dry, then move on. "Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers...They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees--basically they're still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose...This special treatment can't bear close scrutiny--and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage...So who's really being un-American?"

Honor, Duty, Country

"Stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong."
--Abraham Lincoln

"My country...right or wrong."
--Stephen Decatur

"A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it."
--Henry David Thoreau

"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."
--Malcolm X


So, I have opposed these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, just as I opposed the war in Viet Nam, and for many of the same reasons: A war fought for a bogus reasons, with a "Mission" at best ill conceived and at worst, phony.

Actually, I was less adamantly opposed to Afghanistan at first because I was willing to suspend judgment given there was a plausible, if not fully believable story that Osama Bin Laden, who may well have been the instigator, if not the operational commander of the attack on 9/11, may have been sheltered there.

But once the man was killed, I saw, and still see no reason to risk the loss of a single American life in that land.

Certainly, we have no business trying to build a single school or library, no business trying to change those people in any way. They live by their own rules and they suffer the consequences, and we have no business trying to whip any American values on them.

I can understand the psychology of winning. But that does not mean I'm blinded by it. In a previous posting I said my brother was not downhearted about our loss in Viet Nam, having served there. He has since corrected me. He was unhappy about that outcome. He developed no abiding affection, apparently, for the Cong, who fired rockets at him. It's tough, apparently, to remain objective about the motivations of someone who tries to shoot you. He knew and served with people who had died there and it disturbed him their deaths were in a losing effort.

I was arguing however, about Marvin Kalb's punditry in which he echoed that absurd narrative that our country behaved as a defeated man, confidence shattered, head down, never the same man again. Baloney. Our country is too big, and there were as many reactions to that outcome as there were people. Fact is, there were never any vital American interests in Viet Nam and we could simply walk away from that bad mortgage with no damage to our credit.

One of my best friends--I was best man at his wedding--is a career naval officer and he's done several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can't really talk to him any more about my opposition to those wars. He thinks the effort is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.) He has the grunt's eye view: Stupid orders from stupid people who don't understand as the grunts on the ground what needs to be done. But he wants to continue the fight. Because, as Slim Charles says in The Wire, "That's what war is, you know. Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then you fight on that lie. But you got to fight."

I don't feel that way. I never got my own nose bloodied in Viet Nam or Iraq or Afghanistan, and that gives me, I submit, an opportunity to be a little more objective. I can understand once you are bloodied, you have to be pulled off your adversary. You are no longer thinking dispassionately. In fact, you stop thinking, once your blood is up.

But somebody has to pull Sonny Corleone off the guy he's wailing on. Someone who has a cooler head has to be in charge. Sonny flies off and gets ambushed at the toll booth. He's volatile. He's easy to predict, and thus easy to defeat. A leader has to remain cool, to calculate, to be subtle, when it's necessary.

For me question is, how does this war help America?

The answer, once Osama is dead, is then there is no way anything else over there should interest us.

We should be out of there, yesterday.

And don't give me that stuff about denying "them" a safe haven. We could wipe Iraq and Afghanistan off the face of the earth and there would still be Somalia, and Indonesia and some apartment in Berlin or some hotel in Florida or some farm in Oklahoma where Al Queda can train and plot and launch an attack.

Beyond the loss of life, beyond the ruined lives of the amputees and the brain injured, there is the cold hard calculation of the damage these wars have done our economy.

That is where Osama had his real success. He may have killed three thousand on 9/11, but his greatest victory would be he knew his adversary. He knew George II would come out with both guns blazing and George would shoot his own country not just in the foot, but in the gut, and send the economy to the intensive care unit on life support.

We have to be smarter than that.

We have to serve our country with our minds, not as wind up wooden soldiers, but as thinking, smart grown ups.

Or, as Stringer Bell would say, "We got to start acting like businessman. Sell the shit. Make the profit. And later for that gansta bullshit."

Eric Cantor: The Aroma of the Right

"What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself."

--Abraham Lincoln








Eric Cantor was on Squawkbox this morning. They asked him about his opposition, the opposition of every Republican from Kelly Ayotte to John Boehner to the tax on millionaires.

He said, "We've got a terrible wealth disparity situation in this country we have to address."

Hey, I'm with him so far. He can say things like that and then smile brightly as if he just got made Speaker of the House. Yes, I agree with this Republican, we do have a huge wealth disparity in this country. One percent of the people own 20% of all the nation's wealth, and 20% own 80% of all the wealth. I'm with this guy for even acknowledging this as a problem. Haven't heard any Republican do this before.

But wait. He kept talking: "The answer is not to go and take from the one who is successful and give it to everybody else. We want everyone else to be successful."

Well, yes Congressman, we would all have to agree we want everyone to be successful.

"Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar."
--Abraham Lincoln

And then the Congressman swings into why we should not tax the millionaires:
"Here's my response to that. We've got to fix the problem on the debt. We've got a debt crisis. And we know what the problem is. The party and the president refused to do that. So now you have a situation where you want to raise taxes and haven't fixed the problem, much. It's like throwing good money after bad."

I must have missed something. I was looking for the part where he explains why it is a bad idea to tax millionaires. If we have a debt problem, by which I think he means a deficit problem, that would mean to most people, we need to find some money to fix it, and as Willy Sutton once said, you go where the money is, But then Cantor flies off, saying we cannot go where the money is, but we ought to go back to blaming the Democratic party and the president for refusing to fix the deficit. But the President says we are going to find money to fix the problem, and some of that money should come from millionaires.

Am I missing something?

And how did he get from taxing millionaires to throwing good money after bad. That expression usually has to do with investing money in a business which is going to fail anyway. The next cliche which usually follows is, "Cut your losses," which is clearly what Mr. Cantor should have done.

But no, he continues, "What is the point of bringing it up other than demagoguing the issue for electioneering and political purposes to start 2012 early in November?"

Oh, those Democrats, trying to get a jump on the political process early in November. We've had what? A hundred Republican debates ever since the fires started burning in Texas, but that was just honest discussion, not politicking.

And he is most indignant about the President giving the Republicans Hell about their unwillingness to tax the millionaires. "Stop the campaigning. City after city, yeah. Listen, there's no question that that's what happened. Immediately, the next day after the speech was given, he came to Richmond, my district, and then that bridge in Ohio. Right. It's like somebody going around the country picking a fight. The country doesn't need that. I mean people are angry in this country. Middle class does need to see leadership in Washington. It's not inflaming division but instead focusing on solutions, that's what we're trying to do."

Oh, I must have missed that, too. I kept seeing the Party of No. Every single Republican stamping his or her feet, saying, "NO! There is nothing the government can do to help the economy or create jobs. Only the small businessman can do that. The job creators! And the government, oh the government and the president, they are so bad and nasty."

So, I would have to infer Give 'Em Hell, Obama has got their attention. Maybe doesn't have the attention, yet, of Joe Sixpack, but one thing you know about the Republican Party, they all attend the same meeting and they speak the Party Line, from Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snow, they use the same phrases, "Anti-business, Tax and Spend Democrats, regulatory burdens, Job Creators. "

So when you hear Eric Cantor complaining about Obama attacking Republicans for being in the pockets of millionaires, you know the whole Republican clique has got together and fumed about it. Wah, wah, wah. These Republicans, they can dish it out, but they cannot take it. What wusses.

Or, as one Republican President once said, "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people."

Abraham Lincoln, in case you did not guess.

Not hard to guess how Honest Abe would react to what he hears from today's Republicans.