Is It The American Spring Yet?

From left: Ellen Schultz, Mad Dog, Gail Collins







"Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men...Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers."

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address

"Corporations are people, my friend."
--Mitt Romney

"I'll believe corporations are people when they execute one in Texas."
--Sign in the Occupy Wall Street crowd


For change to come in a republic like ours, enamored of the illusion of the independent man, living off the land, dependent on no man, we need a strong dose of truth and reality to slap the dreamers in the face and get them to open their eyes.

For years now, Joe Sixpack and countless of his fellow citizens have been working two jobs, telling themselves and their buddies they are going to make it, because in America all you have to do is work hard, play by the rules and if the government doesn't give it all away to undeserving welfare queens, why then, you will get rich; you will ascend to that promised land where the 1% live.

Gently, for some time, Gail Collins has been shaking them by the shoulders, trying to get them to see the full package of dreams the Republicans sell is simply the opiate of the masses. She has been telling them about Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann and each of the Republican snake oil salesmen, and most especially about Mitt Romney and his unfortunate wind whipped dog.

Here I must take the time to digress--you will allow me a personal note. As you can see from my updated picture, I have a personal stake in the discussion of crates strapped to the tops of cars, and, by extension, water boarding and other forms of abuse, and I can only thank Gail Collins for keeping this important issue front and center.

But back to the illuminators. Ms. Collins has given us some unsettling details about who these Republicans really are, but we needed details on how their patrons have amassed the wealth to pay for these Republican office holders.

Now, Ellen Schultz has detailed the ways in which companies like General Electric built up huge funds of cash which was held in accounts which the companies initially said were for the pensions of their employees, but which executives depleted and diverted into their own personal accounts. This allowed these executives, who walked away from their companies with tens of millions of dollars to divert half a million here and there to buy elected represenatives to pass the legislation they needed to stay out of jail.

Of course, all this robbery was perfectly legal--the one percenters made sure the congressmen and senators they owned took care of that with legislation--but that does not make it right.

So now we have pie charts which show 80% of the American population as such a thin slice you can hardly see it. And in that 80% are the policemen, the soldiers, the teachers, the pediatricians and primary care doctors, the air traffic controllers, the Coast Guard guys who jump into perfect storms to rescue fishermen, the guys who weld steel girders thirty stories above the ground, the steel workers, the people who build cars and bridges.

In the upper 1% are the people who move money, the "money changers" as Roosevelt called them.
Roosevelt chose that language deliberately. These are the money changers in the temple against whom Jesus raged. And what is the modern version of the temple? I would submit, the hospital, the factory, the roadways and bridges, the steel mills, all the work places where fruitful, necessary work which benefits the community is done. We are told none of these places could exist without that top 1% arranging for the financing. I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, but I suspect those money changers could do their work for 1/10 of what they pay themselves and still live very well.
And standing steadfastly for this 1% are Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly.

If the best disinfectant is sunlight, then someone has to shine that disinfectant on these guys, individually, systematically, until people even in New Hampshire know their names and why they should resent what each of these guys is doing.

Right now, from my own informal survey, which, if I called it a poll David Brooks would no doubt accept instantly as received truth, New Hampshire folks by and large do not know the Republicans in Washington; we do know Rush/Glenn/Sean and Bill because they are on the radio up here.

But it's time we shined the light on those guys and Washington who are hurting us. And while we are at it, let's include Kelly Ayotte and Frank Guinta, two soul mates of the Republican choir.

Let's take one small step for New Hampshire, and, hopefully, a giant leap for mankind.

Ellen Schultz and Class Warfare

Double click on the Green chart to enlarge.

Do not double click on Ellen Schultz( She looks good enough already.)






Every time Democrats have raised the idea of taxing millionaires. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and all the Republicans raise the cry "Class Warfare!"

Of course, the Democratic response has been, the only class warfare has been by the rich on the poor, trying to kill Social Security and Medicare and every program Republicans say we cannot afford and the poor do not deserve any way.

But now we have an unlikely knight in shining armor, a woman who is clearly outraged, but not raising her voice, just telling us the facts, just the facts ma'am.

She is a Wall Street Journal reporter, and she's written Retirement Heist, in which she documents just exactly how the rich have pilloried the poor. There has been, she says, a massive transfer of wealth over the past two decades from the great mass of retirees to a small number of executives, who have enriched themselves, all apparently quite legally by helping themselves to the accounts which had been set up to pay retirees pensions.

The rich simply helped themselves to the pensions of the less rich, and left the average workers to fend for themselves, stripped them of the pensions they though they had worked for all those years.

Schultz says, "The plans were in fact significantly overfunded. They had more than enough to pay every dime for every person employed and already retired." But those funds were looted by executives for their own golden parachutes or their own retirement funds at blue chip companies like General Electric.

The result is the re distribution of wealth evident in the green pie chart. Republicans have been chiding Obama for wanting to have the government redistribute the wealth, and now we can see why they were so irate about the prospect of social engineering. They have been doing some secret social engineering of their own, and they have been laughing at the poor suckers who put in years at all those wonderful companies to fund the retirement and grand life styles of the rich.

Think the 99% would be interested in this story? Isn't that what those incoherent crowds have been shouting about? The underlying complaint is that they believe the rich have gotten their gains as ill gotten. "Behind every great fortune, there is a crime," sort of thing.

Or as someone holding a sign on Wall Street said, "I'll believe corporations are people when they start executing them in Texas."

The Difference Between Fair and Just

DOUBLE CLICK ON PIE CHART TO ENLARGE

Judge Learned Hand (his actual name) bid good-bye to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. as Judge Holmes left New York to take his new job on the United States Supreme court.

"I wanted to provoke a response," Judge Hand said, "So as he walked off, I said to him, 'Well, sir, goodbye. Do justice!"

Holmes replied, "That is not my job. My job is to play the game according to the rules."

This distinction between what is legal and what is moral has arisen in sharp relief throughout our nation's history. It was once legal to forbid Black Americans from using a Whites Only drinking fountain, or a Whites Only bathroom or Whites Only swimming pool. Legal but immoral. It was illegal to refuse to be put in a position where you had to kill Vietnamese peasants. The war in Vietnam was legal binding on every draftee, but that didn't make it morally correct to fight there.

Now Ellen Schultz, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal,( that's right, Rupert Murdock's right wing rag,) has written a book, Retirement Heist, in which she documents how large corporations have raided their employee's retirement funds, which only two decades ago, in aggregate, had a trillion dollars excess, to pay for golden parachutes and severance pay and retirement boondoggles for their chief executives, or to pay for mergers and acquisitions, all perfectly legally, all within the rules.

So the little guys at General Electric discovered their pension plan had evaporated. GE had not put one red cent into its pension plan since the mid-1980's; it used assets from the plans to pay for other things.

"The plans were in fact significantly overfunded," Schultz says. ""They had more than enough to pay every dime for every person currently employed and already retired." Meanwhile, the companies were crying Wah Wah, they didn't have enough to pay unexpectedly high health care costs or pensions for all those undeserving retirees, who had planned for, paid into and expected support from these pension plans.

So, the private sector, the great white knight on the stallion of economic drive and innovation, our only hope for the average American in this recession, as the Republicans remind us ad nauseum, the entrepreneurs and captains of industry who are the only people we can rely on to save our nation from its financial quagmire, have been robbing the average American blind all these years.

And the Republicans point their fingers at the government as the source of all misery and wrong doing. Oh, the nasty government with all those regulations!

Wouldn't those GE workers have been happy for a little more government regulation?

Just look at that pie graph. See how, playing by the rules, the rich in this country have raped the other 80% of this nation.

The rich can play by the rules, because they've bought and paid for those rules, bought and paid for Congressmen and Senators, who were either alseep at the wheel and did not know what they were voting for (the generous reading of history) or happily complicit in the rape, because they were getting paid, kept in office and flown around on private jets to nice golf courses.

The New York Times this morning has an article about President Obama's new strident, or as they put it, "caustic" tone, saying he risks alienating the part of the public which looked to him to end the partisan bickering in Washington, but instead he is playing Harry Truman and running against Congress and sounding all angry.

As if anger is never appropriate. As if moral outrage is somehow a disqualifier for public office. As if our delicate psyches just cannot take so much discord.

One might ask the New York Times, what do you think is the appropriate response to the vitriol which daily spews from Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, virtually every Republican on Capitol Hill?

Bickering is a tango; it takes two.

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell in explaining why he was voting down the jobs bills used one of those h down home quips, "There's no education in the second kick of the mule." By which he meant, if you didn't learn the first time you were kicked, you're not going to get much more enlightenment from the second. He was saying the first stimulus package Congress votes through did not help, why try again?

Of course, what he didn't say is actually the first bill would have worked, had the Republicans not wounded it so badly by cutting it down from a size which would have had the power to jump start the economy. The battery needed 400 volts and the Republicans would allow only 100 volts.

But even as diminished as that first try was, a lot of economists believe had it not been for that first stimulus bill and some other maneuvers by the Fed, we would not be mired in a recession today, we'd be in full blow Depression.

So maybe Mitch McConnell needs that second kick in his behind.

And when President Obama delivers it, I hope he is not smiling and cooing and sounding non partisan. I hope President Obama is channeling Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt. Neither of these guys were afraid of a little outrage.

The 99%

Some weeks ago Mad Dog wrote about some really amazing pie graphs which showed in a very visually striking way the astonishing reality of wealth distribution in the United States.

Now we have the 99% crowd, apparently motivated by the same images, in streets from New York to Boston and beyond. What exactly brings them to the streets is not so easy to discern, but clearly, a common theme appears to be outrage at the few how have so much, while the many have no jobs and no prospects.

Last night, on The News Hour, a man from a "conservative think tank" said that if you really think about the 99%, they are objecting to the fact that some people make only $500,000 a year, by which he meant in the upper 10-20% of the wealthiest Americans there are people making that much but they do not make it into the upper 1%.

Nicholas Kristoff floated another figure in the New York Times: the 400 wealthiest families in the USA own more wealth than all the wealth owned by 90% of the population.

Different ways of looking at who owns how much.

For the conservative think tank guy, he is very smug about how you slice and dice the numbers, but if you look at those pie graphs, there is no real argument. This looks worse than the distribution of wealth in Marie Antoinette's France, and smug rich conservative Republicans can say "Let them eat cake," all they want to, but they ignore what everyone else can see and they do it at their own peril.

Those pie graphs ought to be printed on T shirts and handed out at super markets by Democrats here in New Hampshire and everywhere around the country. They ought to be on bumper stickers. Don't explain too much, just put up those pie graphs and let people ask you about them.

And while we are printing up T shirts, let's print a few with Got Medicare? Thank Democrats on the front and Got Social Security? Thank Democrats on the back.

And when we get closer to November 2012, Frank Guinta, Medicare Killer. Kelly Ayotte, Medicare Killer. (I know she's not running but maybe we can shame her into resigning. Hey, Republicans live in a dream world, why can't Mad Dog?)

If the 99% movement means anything, it's that class warfare should be alive and fed and nurtured. The only class warfare we've had thus far has come from the rich against all the rest of us.

FDR, Obama and the Tearful Wah Wah Republicans

One important quality of leadership is the ability to recognize when you can reason with your opponent and when you cannot, when you have to stop talking and hit him between the eyes.

Even our greatest President was guilty of not realizing when his opponents had stopped listening. Listen to his first Inaugural Address given when seven states had already seceded. No cannon had fired on Lincoln's Fort Sumter, but every Southern voice was rife with rancor. And Lincoln's response? "Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection." And he appeals to "The better angels of our nature."

Sounds like President Obama appealing to John Boehner to come by and play a round of golf, to Mitch McConnell to drop by the White House, while McConnell, lips dripping with the venom of contempt, says from the floor of the Senate his first priority is not healing the nation's economy, but his first and highest and only mission is to remove President Obama from office.

Consider how another great President began his First Inaugural Address: "Our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts...The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence...Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men."

Was this President Obama speaking? If only. No, this was Franklin Roosevelt.
Look how skillfully he alludes to the Bible, the plague of locusts, the money lenders in the temple. He doesn't have to thump his Bible, he knows his Bible, and he brings the weight of morality into play.

Oh, the class warfare!

"Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers."

Again, look at the imagery of these phrases. The Republicans are tearful, weak, wringing their hands, sobbing that there is nothing they as elected government officials can do--only the private sector, those mysterious, fabled, unseen captains of industry and commerce can rescue us; we cannot take action ourselves to help ourselves. We need to await the arrival of white knights on horseback to slay the dragons of recession and unemployment. This describes John Boehner and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor as clearly and precisely as it described their Republican ancestors. They are all cut of the same pin striped cloth.

"Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This nation asks for action and action now."

Well, here we do hear something familiar. Finally, Obama begins to echo Roosevelt. Pass my jobs bill and pass it now.

"It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources."

Hear an echo in this chamber? Has Obama not re invented this particular wheel with his hope for jobs in the green sector, jobs in clean energy, jobs to rebuild infrastructure?

"Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money."

No, that is not Obama speaking. Were it only. That's Roosevelt in 1933.

If those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, have we not found ourselves sliding down that path to a repetition of the Great Depression, with the Wah Wah Republicans crying great howls of protests about government Regulation, Roosevelt called it "supervision." Regulation got us into this horrible Recession the Republicans all wail, from Susan Collins to Olympia Snow to Rick Perry, they all read from the same hymn book. Oh, government's the problem.

But listen to FDR, and let us hope, President Obama catches some of his fire.

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.