Category Archives: Essays

I recently received a chain email with one of those great American myths: that somehow the poor are the advantaged people in American society, feeding off of hard working Americans.

Our educators should make a lesson plan on these statements and instill these words in the minds of all students instead of doing the opposite.

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that, my dear friend, is the beginning of the end for any society.
5. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it…”

– Adrian Rogers, 1931

This would be funny if it were not such an integral part of the naïve American psyche, if we didn’t think that somehow we were constantly being cheated by the poor — contrary to every possible fact, statistic, and evidence imaginable. Of course, I am not arguing that government intervention, welfare programs, and “socialism” are the answer. Nevertheless, the reality of American economic policy under both the Republicans and Democrats since the 1980s has proven to be nothing other than a massive transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the rich, not the other way around. As Paul Krugman recently explained about the Republican revered Reaganism,

Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.

First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.

To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.

Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.

The Republican “no government intervention” doctrine is little more than a sham whereby the government steps in time and again on behalf of the rich. Not that the Democrats aren’t part of the problem. The best example is how, first with Bush and then followed by Obama, the taxpayers just bailed out Wall Street, and now Wall Street is celebrating what JP Morgan recently called their “best year yet”; the taxpayers their worst.

Meanwhile, the American press with the indignation of the Republicans has decried the abuse of taxpayer money by the corrupt ACORN. How stupid do they think we are? ACORN is an irrelevant nothing. In thirty years, Acorn received in government funding roughly what Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, received per day during the entire Iraq war. Furthermore, every single major military contractor still receiving taxpayer dollars has been convicted of fraud at least once in U.S. courts. But, we have ACORN hysteria.

The whole idea that the poor keep benefiting at the cost of the rest of Americans wouldn’t be such a laughable farce if it weren’t for the fact that people actually believe it. Since when have the poor gotten richer and the rich poorer in this country? And yet we continue to be a country that believes deeply that “we” are being played, victimized by the poor. Who would you rather be in the U.S.? A poor woman milking the welfare state or Liz Cheney, who — along with every other child of the rich and famous — has trouble landing a job she deserves based on merit alone?

In her Washington Post op-ed, “Yale’s Misguided Retreat”, Mona Eltahawy describes how the fabricated controversy over a 2005 Danish cartoon was manipulated by “two right wings — a non-Muslim one that hijacked the issue to fuel racism against immigrants in Denmark, and a Muslim one that hijacked the issue to silence Muslims and fuel anti-Western rhetoric.” She also argues that the decision of the Yale University Press, now publishing a book on the controversy, to not publish the images in question promotes the cause of extremists.

Personally, I couldn’t care less whether the images were published or not. Nevertheless, I believe that

• Eltahawy’s conclusion that the images should be published, and
• the fact that the majority opinion in the Western media was that Muslims protesting the cartoon confirmed the inherent extremism of Islam and its incompatibility with freedom of speech

are both contrary to Western rhetoric on free speech as a free market tool to achieve the will of the people and the long history, especially in the U.S., of public outrage by Christian and Jewish groups about comparable religious satire.

Just today I read about the successful Israeli protests to remove a series of paintings (by an Israeli artist) that portray the mothers of Palestine suicide bombers as the Virgin Mary. What about the history of outrage by American Christian groups against The Last Temptation of Christ, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, Chris Ofili’s Madonna made out of cow dung (what Giuliani called “sick”)? Not to mention record and book burnings, intelligent design, the U.S. refusal – based solely on pressure from religious groups – to withhold funding to any U.N. program that promotes safe sex or family planning, even if doing so would save lives. (In Spain, it is actually illegal to poke fun at the royal family).

We are also educated to believe that instead of regulating or criminalizing certain corporate activities, we should let the free market intervene. In other words, instead of telling companies they should be environmentally-friendly or socially responsible, the free market will correct abuses through consumer demand. We celebrate the fact that people have the right to freely protest the government and industry to demand that their interests are taken into account. That is how, for example, Don Imus lost his talk show – not because he broke the law but because employees, listeners, and sponsors threatened to leave. And although Vick did his time, public pressure alone is what is keeping him from returning to pro football. This summer we had the gun-carrying Town Hall protesters and now the Republicans saying that Obama shouldn’t be allowed to speak to American school children. Furthermore, we have a foreign policy tradition of embargoes against countries – a comparable form of protest – that offend our notions of fairness (Cuba, Apartheid South Africa, Sadam’s Iraq and Iran).

So it is hard to argue, from a Western standpoint, that Muslims protesting — ironically, an exercise of free expression itself — breaks with what we commonly hail as the virtues of a free market democracy in practice.

I recently wrote about the eeriness of the American Mullahs, that club of practically identical – in dress, age, gender and ethnicity — senators panicking about Judge Sotomayor.  When you consider these distinguished whiners, the historical composition of the Supreme Court (two non whites and two women out of some one hundred justices), how close we were to a path of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, how there are still more Bush’s out there, and how Liz Cheney gets airtime, then its begs the question as to whether the U.S. is in fact a meritocracy.

In commenting on how W. Bush’s daughter, Jenna Hager, got her new gig as a Today reporter, Glenn Greenwald makes the following excellent points:

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it.  They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it’s really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment.  They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency.  Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from.  There’s a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.

. . .  Just to underscore a very important, related point:  all of the above-listed people are examples of America’s Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work — The American Way.  By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor — who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice — is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.

Losing another Kennedy is like peeing in the ocean; we still have a sea of American aristocrats to fill the void. What are we left with? The worst of Europe without any of the health benefits or modern infrastructure.

I congratulate John McCain for his appearance yesterday on Face the Nation, breaking with partisan ranks, calling torture, torture and disagreeing flat out with Dick Cheney.

I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan. I think that these interrogations once publicized helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq who told– who told me that. I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed and so– and I believe that information, according to the FBI and others, could have been gained through other methods.

Of course, I don’t quite see McCain’s logic in saying that the interrogation violated the Convention and then not recognizing that failing to investigate also violates the Convention. But McCain has been off-the-wall before (remember him calling the detainee habeus corpus decision one of the worst in Supreme Court history?).

It is revealing that the Face the Nation headline was not “McCain calls Cheney Interrogation Techniques Torture” but “McCain: CIA Abuse Probe ‘Serious Mistake’”. It even says that McCain “opposes investigation into ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques” (emphasis added) when McCain clearly called them “torture” and violations of law. So much for the liberal media bias.

I don’t know what is more repulsive, Liz Cheney crying “my daddy’s innocent” or the mainstream press actually giving her airtime. Today she was back on the circuit on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, arguing that daddy is not a crook and that even second-guessing him or his subordinates would be partisan, unpatriotic and make us less safe. Transparency, by the way, is bad for America. Amongst her ridiculous and legally untenable claims, Lizzy now also argues that investigating someone twice is double jeopardy (double jeopardy attaches to prosecution, not investigation, Lizzy).

Worse, though, and particularly dangerous for democracy is the question that the press poses and the Cheney’s affirm: whether torture works. Who cares? There is no but-it-was-effective defense to a crime. In an another article by Glenn Greewald highlighting how the establishment press publishes unsubstantiated, uncorroborated and self-serving anonymous CIA leaks (as with the faux claims of Guantanamo detainees’ rates of recidivism or that waterboarding was effective with KSM after just one 20 second session) that are immediately repeated by other media outlets (including Mr. Stephanopoulos himself), considered credible and then spit back by Cheney in his defense, Greenwald explains why the question of the effectiveness of torture is irrelevant to the debate at hand:

The debate over whether torture extracted valuable information is, in my view, a total sideshow, both because (a) it inherently begs the question of whether legal interrogation means would have extracted the same information as efficiently if not more so (exactly the same way that claims that warrantless eavesdropping uncovered valuable intelligence begs the question of whether legal eavesdropping would have done so); and (b) torture is a felony and a war crime, and we don’t actually have a country (at least we’re not suppoesd to) where political leaders are free to commit serious crimes and then claim afterwards that it produced good outcomes.  If we want to be a country that uses torture, then we should repeal our laws which criminalize it, withdraw from treaties which ban it, and announce to the world (not that they don’t already know) that, as a country, we believe torture is justifiable and just.  Let’s at least be honest about what we are.  Let’s explicitly repudiate Ronald Reagan’s affirmation that “[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture” and that “[e]ach State Party is required [] to prosecute torturers.” [Emphasis added]

And I am still waiting for Liz, Dick or any other Republican for that matter to tell me what the CIA is not allowed to do.

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman (in Economics 101 style) explains why deficit spending in the short term is actually good for the economy and that the only arguments against it are purely for political gain. Perhaps his cheap shot at the Conservatives at the end of the piece, though I may agree with it, is counterproductive.

August 28, 2009
Till Debt Does Its Part
By PAUL KRUGMAN

So new budget projections show a cumulative deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade. According to many commentators, that’s a terrifying number, requiring drastic action — in particular, of course, canceling efforts to boost the economy and calling off health care reform.

The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it’s not catastrophic. Continue reading →