The Arrogance of Wealth

The decision rendered in the Citizens United case was one of the most poorly reasoned decisions in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. In this decision the court struck down limitations on campaign contributions and made it much easier to buy our politicians. The only way to lesson the impact of this horrible decision is to require full disclosure. We voters do not just have a right to know who is buying our politicians, we have a need to know. This is not a matter of free speech as the Republicans and the special interests would have you believe. The right of free speech is not synonymous with the right to remain anonymous. The premise of this democracy or any democracy is that an informed electorate will make the right decisions. The advertisements supporting candidates and supporting positions on issues are intentionally deceptive. Knowing who is behind those advertisements and who is supporting political candidates is essential if we voters are going to make informed decisions.

The most recent polls indicate that a large majority of the voters favor full disclosure. They want to know who is buying whom and who is supporting or opposing proposed legislation. Yet the Republicans are almost unanimous in their opposition to legislation that would require this transparency. The Republicans are ignoring the will of the people, and they are using procedural rules to defeat this legislation in the senate. They will not even let it come up for a vote. The reason they are doing this is all too obvious. They have been bought and paid for by Wall Street, the banks, the insurance companies, and the businesses that are exporting our jobs. The Republican Party is not motivated by ideology alone; they are motivated by greed! They are siding with the wealthy because the wealthy are funding the Republican Party.

The evidence supporting my contention is overwhelming. The Republicans sided with the insurance companies over the issue of health care reform. They sided with Wall Street over regulations to reform our financial institutions. They are now siding with the oil companies over liability for spills and compensation to the victims of those spills. They are siding with the wealthy over taxes while trying to deny the victims of this recession the benefits of unemployment insurance. How many ways can you say bought and paid for?

The greed of the special interests the Republican Party represent is detrimental to the economy this country. We are already seeing this in our current recession, in the destruction of the livelihoods of fisherman and others on the gulf coast, in the loss of manufacturing jobs, and in the shrinking market for the goods we still produce. We are seeing it in the concentration of wealth that deprives the middle class of the means to purchase goods and services. The bottom line is that the Republican Party represents the wealthy rather than middle class. They are not doing anything to help create jobs. Furthermore, in spite of their stated concern about the federal deficit, they are actually increasing that deficit by opposing the lapse of tax cuts for the rich. In doing this they are trying to shift the burden of paying for that deficit onto the middle class.

The whole idea behind a progressive income tax is that it shifts the burden of paying for our government onto the people who have the ability to pay those taxes. A progressive income tax involves a fundamental issue of fairness as well as a very sound economic policy. Our economy is demand driven. Henry Ford’s statement that everyone prospers when the people who make the cars can afford to buy the cars is correct. Cutting the taxes of the rich does nothing for the middle class; it does not create jobs. After the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy we saw a job growth rate of 0.28 per year. This is the lowest growth rate since the great depression, and it was accompanied by the largest federal deficit ever.

Make no mistake about it. What we are seeing is the arrogance of wealth. The special interests the Republicans represent think they can recoup the losses in demand for goods in this country with the increased demand for goods in foreign markets. The Republican Party thinks it can get away with representing those interests to our detriment because deceptive advertising paid for by anonymous interests will keep us from finding out the truth. We cannot afford to let them get away with this. We must insist on full disclosure, and we must send a clear message to the Republican Party by defeating their candidates in the elections this November.

Duped Again

When Andrew Breitbart posted the highly edited and deceptive videos of Acorn employees allegedly helping a pimp commit crimes Fox News jumped at the opportunity to air them. Those videos were not just a sensational story they also fit the Fox disinformation factory’s agenda. How dare anyone help the poor! How dare anyone help progressive candidates get out the vote! The evidence against Acorn, if you can call it evidence, appeared to be damning. I was skeptical. Something did not add up. What was missing was motive. Why would Acorn employees help a pimp commit crimes?

The problem was that the mainstream media picked up the story and congress actually withdrew the funding for Acorn. I am afraid that I, like everyone else, placed too much faith in the news media and congress. I thought some real news organization would have checked the integrity of the videos and would have done a little investigating. I thought that congress would have looked into the matter before reacting to the videos. By the time someone finally did investigate it was too late save Acorn’s funding. I do not know everyone who behaved responsibly enough to unravel the real story. What I do know is that California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, subpoenaed the full videos. The unedited videos and the other evidence he gathered revealed that the videos shown on Fox were a vicious hoax perpetrated by an unethical punk with a right wing agenda.

Congress and the mainstream media had rushed to judgment. They had assumed that a real news organization would have checked its sources and would have some journalistic integrity. Breitbart and Fox denied all knowledge of the videos being altered. They denied all knowledge of the fact the Acorn’s employees actually notified the police of the illegal activities of the self-described pimp. They offered no apologies for their sorry role in this matter. Instead they acted like innocent victims. Worse yet, Fox has now helped to perpetrate another hoax to further its right wing agenda.

Breitbart posted another altered video, and Fox eagerly aired it with their so called news people adding their own right wing invective as editorial comments. Once more the main stream media picked up on the story and aired it without first checking the sources or investigating, and once more the government over-reacted to the story. As a result, Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign from her position with the Agriculture Department. Now, of course, the full version of her speech to the NAACP has come to light, and it reveals that another vicious right wing hoax has been perpetrated. Fox News offers no apologies for its role in this, nor is it retracting the story. Instead, it is blaming the Obama Administration for rushing to judgment!

While I agree that the Obama administration over-reacted, this in no way exonerates Fox News for its irresponsible behavior. Andrew Breitbart is not a newsman; he is a political operative with absolutely no regard for the facts. Fox News knew or should have known that Breitbart is not a credible source of information. Furthermore, these two instances are not the only times that Fox has presented blatant falsehoods as news stories. I will not go into all of those instances because I think Rachel Maddow and others have already done it better than I can. What I am saying is that Fox indulges in selective ignorance, and selective ignorance is a deception rather than an excuse. A news organization is supposed to perform a public service. It is supposed to keep the public informed. It has a duty to check the voracity of its sources and confirm the accuracy of the stories it presents. It has a duty to be as factual as it can be. It is called journalistic integrity. What is all too evident is that journalistic integrity is a concept that is foreign to Fox News. Fox is not a news organization; it is a disinformation factory with a political agenda. It is high time to hold Fox News accountable!

Please do not misunderstand what I am saying. I am a champion of the first amendment. I would never think of depriving anyone of the right to express an opinion. Fox has every right to broadcast Glen Beck throwing up all over his black board. Anyone with an IQ above ninety knows he is stating opinions. There is a real difference between that and characterizing falsehoods as news. Even real news reporters will occasionally make a mistake. When they realize they have made an error they will retract the inaccurate story and apologize to their audience or readers. The will do this because they know there is a public trust involved in reporting the news. People and organizations that continually violate this trust have no right to characterize their verbal garbage as news. We must insist that anyone who is reporting news has enough journalistic integrity to make the stories they present as factual as possible, and we must insist that opinions are clearly characterized as editorial comments. Slander and libel laws are supposed to protect people and organizations from specious stories purported to be true. Those laws should be enforced.

Even when we insist on accurate news reporting we are not insuring balanced reporting. People who have a bias will still be able to select the stories they choose to report. They will still have the ability to emphasize the stories that further their agenda. I do not have a problem with that if what they omit is not deceptive. In the case of Fox what was omitted were not stories but facts that were vital to the accuracy of those stories. Fox must not be allowed to hide behind selective ignorance. Fox has done that far too often. Fox must be forced to retract the story, and it must face some stiff penalties if it continues perpetrate outright falsehoods on a public that is depending on Fox News for information. The only other option is for the main stream media and our government to acknowledge the fact that Fox News is a disinformation factory and to stop acting as if Fox ever presents anything resembling factual reporting!

Here They Go Again

I hate to sound like Ronald Reagan, but here they go again. The Republicans still want us to believe that enriching the rich produces jobs. They are still arguing that letting Bush’s outrageous tax cuts for the rich lapse will hurt “small” businesses. This argument is so obviously false that is an insult to our intelligence. Letting the tax cuts lapse would restore the higher tax rates for large personal incomes rather than increasing the taxes paid by businesses. Increasing the personal income tax of wealthy individuals will not create a disincentive to for them to invest in their businesses. In fact, it will have the opposite effect because the sums used to improve or increase the size of businesses are deductible business expenses rather than personal income. In this regard, it makes perfect sense to defer some personal income by using it to improve their businesses. This will lower the taxes they pay on personal income and increase the future personal incomes they will derive from those businesses.

It is interesting that the Republicans are trying to cast their argument in terms of small businesses rather than giant corporations. Could this be because most people are not very sympathetic to executives who are pulling down base salaries of several million dollars per year and do not have the same expenses other people have because of all the perks those executives also receive? Ah, but there is the stock market. The problem with the stock market argument is that it is based on the same trickle down theory that has failed time after time. Dumping more money into the stock market simply inflates the price of stock. It does nothing to increase demand, and demand for the goods the corporations produce is the only incentive for producing more goods. There is no reason to make more products if no one is going to buy them.

During the Bush administration we have seen an increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. The result has been a decrease in real wages and a shrinking market. What has made this country so great and so prosperous is the middle class. It is the labor unions that allowed workers to earn more then they needed to buy the most basic necessities. It is the small entrepreneurs who could get the loans they needed to produce innovative products that allowed them to compete with the giants. The fallacy behind what the Republicans euphemistically call supply side economics is that it fails to recognize that wages and employment create the demand that drives our market based economy. In other words, they are still trying to till the garden with the wrong end of the hoe. They are still saying that the rich should not pay taxes they can well afford to pay even though reducing those taxes has only resulted in decreasing the revenue the government can collect and thereby increasing the deficit. The remarkable thing is that the Republicans are doing this while predicting dire consequences because of the deficit. If this hypocrisy does not tell you the Republican Party is still selling old bricks, I do not know what will.

Wall Street

So Wall Street does not like the Democratic Party’s proposed reforms. Imagine my surprise. During the height of the great depression Wall Street fought President Roosevelt’s reforms with every resource at its disposal. Then as now the capitalists had to share a large measure of the blame for the economic collapse. Then as now their greed and questionable practices posed a danger to this nation. The New Deal legislation was passed in spite of the opposition of the financial institutions and the large corporations, and fifty years of unprecedented prosperity followed. We ran into trouble when much of that legislation was repealed or ignored. How quickly we forget.

It is not easy to pass much needed reforms when such powerful interests oppose them. Those opponents will use their considerable resources to publicize lies about those reforms and to defeat the Party that is trying to prevent the reckless practices that have caused so much trouble. In this regard, one of the most effective tactics is diversion. Which is to say that the special interests will attack the reformers on issues that have little or nothing to do with the reforms. The most successful attack on President Roosevelt was the government’s deficit spending. Indeed, the concern about the consequences of that deficit spending actually caused Mr. Roosevelt to prematurely scale back some of the programs he was using to stimulate the economy. The hue and cry over the deficit now is also a smoke screen. The real issues are production and employment. It is all about jobs! People who work pay taxes, and they will buy more goods. This in turn will provide the incentive to produce more goods and hire more people. The increased revenue resulting from a healthy economy will then allow the government to reduce the deficit.

Today the special interests are aided and abetted by a Party that is putting partisan politics ahead of the interests of this country. The Republican Party is opposing the badly needed reforms and the stimulus program. They opposed the health care reform that would have driven down the cost of health insurance and would have, therefore, given the people of this country more money to spend on the goods we produce. They are heartlessly opposing an extension of unemployment insurance payments, which means more home foreclosures and fewer people who can afford the goods and services we produce. They are even apologizing to British Petroleum for the fact that the Democrats are insisting that BP compensate the victims of BP’s reckless and negligent behavior. What is obvious to anyone who is paying attention is that the Republican Party is trying to keep our government from dealing with this recession and the causes of this recession.

The motive for the Republicans to obstruct any recovery from the recession is cynical self-interest. They are hoping to gain a political advantage by making this government fail. They do not care about the victims of the recession or the victims of the oil spill. They are more than willing to let the people of this country suffer for whatever political success that suffering will bring to their political party. The choice in November could not be clearer. The people of this nation must hold the Republicans accountable. They must reject the party that is putting its interests ahead of the interests of this country!