SHAME!

Thanks to the demagogues, primarily Republicans, we have to edit the inscription on the Statue of Liberty as follows:

“Don't give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Don't send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift light my no lamp beside the golden door.”

The xenophobic demagogues always blame the victims. They turned away the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Now they are turning away Muslims fleeing Assad's barrel bombs and the brutality of Daesh (ISIS). The Demagogues (particularly Republicans) are using fear and prejudice to make sure only the right sort of people are allowed to enter this country: No Mexicans or non-Christians or non-Europeans are allowed.

How many times will we Americans fall for this fear mongering? How many times will we forget what makes us great and exceptional? How many times must we apologize for not doing the right thing because we did not have the courage to stand up to the xenophobic demagogues who pose a much greater threat to our values than do the terrorists?  

It is not really the events in France that are the causing this fear mongering; the heinous attacks there are just an excuse.  The real cause of the fear mongering is a moral and intellectual bankruptcy that leaves the demagogues nothing else to sell!

Unfair to Middling

It's unfair: there are idiots to the right and reformers to the left; what's a Wall Street Plutocrat to do? The Republican demagogues are eager to do the plutocrats' bidding, but the idiots they exploit are so viciously retrogressive and nihilistic that the Republican demagogues cannot win national elections. Come on, Carson and Trump, you have to be kidding! Ah, but hope springs eternal for the Wall Street Plutocrats. They still have the power of money. They can still create super-packs, and they can create think tanks to tell the bought politicians what to say. The progressives, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, may be pushing Democrats like Hillary Clinton to the left, but those progressives have not won yet! The Democrats that are sympathetic to the Wall Street plutocrats or who are financially dependent on those plutocrats offer a third way between the idiots and the progressives.

In other words, the plutocrats are trying to take advantage of a split they see in the Democratic Party. Of that split JIm Tankersley wrote in the Washington Post:

“... One side believes what's gone wrong for the middle class is that wealthy and powerful players have rewritten the tax code, trade deals, labor law and other policies in order to advantage themselves, at the expense of workers. Middle-class stagnation, in this view, is a choice that can be corrected by shifting power back to workers, at the bargaining table and elsewhere.

The other side, the Third Way side, believes [or wants us to believe] that the stagnation is a natural consequence of a globalizing economy, which has disproportionately benefited people with high skills and people who own stock, businesses and other forms of capital. That's the story Kodak is meant to represent. Its demise wasn't imposed by someone else's policy choice, it was a failure of the company to adapt. To boost the middle-class, by that logic, workers need to be given the means to adapt.”

Notice that in the preceding paragraph Mr. Tankersley referred to the non-progressive side as the “Third Way” side. This is because the Plutocrats have established a “ Wall Street-funded Democratic think tank called Third Way.” As Richard Eskow reports in commondreams.org:

“Third Way has released a lengthy report that argues an inequality-based, populist theme will doom Democrats. Its board member, former White House Chief of Staff (and JPMorgan Chase executive) Bill Daley, even insisted to HuffPo’s Stein that Sanders’ political positions are “a recipe for disaster.

The Third Way report is available online. It introduces a number of catchphrases, often paired in threes: the Hopscotch Workforce, the Nickel-and-Dimed Workforce, and the Asset-Starved Workforce; Stalling Schools, the College Well, and Adult Atrophy; the Upside-Down Economy, the Anywhere Economy, and the Malnourished Economy.

Sadly, most of the content amounts to Misleading Minutiae, Gimmicky Wordplay, and Downright Deception.”

As Mr. Tankersley so aptly wrote: “Third Way’s argument against inequality as a leading source of our current economic woes puts them directly at odds with leading economists, including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. “Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena,” Stiglitz wrote in 2013, “when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth.”

So now we come down to the Democratic Debate held last night and what we can learn from it (besides the fact that it was an incredibly stupid idea to schedule it at a time that put it up against college football, particularly Pac 12 football, particularly in the second largest television market in the nation where NFL stands for No Football Locally and fans really follow the college teams!).

What the Democratic debates have revealed so far is that even Hillary Clinton with her connection to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Wall Street has embraced the Progressive explanation for what “has gone wrong for the middle class.” The one thing no one can accuse Hillary of being is stupid. She would not have moved to the left if she did not think a progressive agenda is a winner!

After the October 16 debate Paul Krugman Wrote” 

“Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had an argument about financial regulation during Tuesday’s debate — but it wasn’t about whether to crack down on banks. Instead, it was about whose plan was tougher. The contrast with Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who have pledged to reverse even the moderate financial reforms enacted in 2010, couldn’t be stronger.

“For what it’s worth, Mrs. Clinton had the better case. Mr. Sanders has been focused on restoring Glass-Steagall, the rule that separated deposit-taking banks from riskier wheeling and dealing. And repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake. But it’s not what caused the financial crisis, which arose instead from “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers, which don’t take deposits but can nonetheless wreak havoc when they fail. Mrs. Clinton has laid out a plan to rein in shadow banks; so far, Mr. Sanders hasn’t.”

During the last debate Hillary pointed out what Paul Krugman wrote in this article. What Hillary did not mention was this important caveat from Robert Borosage in his July 17 article in Campaign For America's Future:

“... in what is becoming a signature of the Clinton campaign, the fundamental problem is addressed with underwhelming reforms. To abandon the culture of short-term speculation, Clinton does not call for a financial speculation tax that might slow computer-driven, nanosecond trading programs. She does not endorse taxing the income of investors at the same rate as the salaries of workers. She doesn’t mention breaking up too-big-to-fail financial institutions or reducing the bloated size of our financial community that helps drive risky financial transactions. She doesn’t penalize companies for excessive CEO compensation packages.”

I might add here that most economists, including Paul Krugman, say that repealing Glass Steagall was a mistake.* I favor restoring Glass Steagall, but I would not argue with Mr. Krugman about what else needs to be done. I cannot tell you whether Hillary Clinton will strengthen what Mr. Borosage called "underwhelming reforms," but her rhetoric is making Wall Street nervous.  The bottom line is that the incompetence of the Republican Party and the emergence of Roosevelt Democrats is dreadful news for the Wall Street Plutocrats who are afraid that their privileged position might actually become middling.

*There are also economists who disagree with Mr. Krugman about whether the repeal of Glass Steagall was a cause of the crash of 2008.  See Glass Steagall Matters!

Sad And Frightening

More than any other animal we human beings are ruled by our expectations. People, such as Crane Brinton, who have studied mass movements and revolutions will tell you that the most dangerous times for any society are when reforms are not bringing about the desired improvements fast enough or when people think they are losing ground and what they have is being taken away from them.

In many ways America is experiencing both of these things. As the folks of Black Lives Matter will tell you: in spite of the tremendous improvement in race relations since the 1960's, racism is still a problem which is too often deadly for African Americans! They demand changes and they demand them now! At the same time middle age white working class people are undergoing a crises that undermines some of our most cherished assumptions.

The New York Times Reports that an analysis by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case shows that:

“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case indicates that in middle age, poorly educated American whites “are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans.”

Indeed, “[t]he mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.” Sadly “... the death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse:alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.”

What could account for this? In the period examined by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case, the “inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 percent.“ So as Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, noted in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “...[t]he least educated also had the most financial distress.”

What frightens me is that we now have African Americans being killed and white people killing themselves. Both groups are feeling desperate. This is a situation that is almost ideal for a demagogue who wants to pit one group of people against another. Be cautious, my friends. Be very, very cautious! For decades now we have been hearing complaints by white people who believe welfare and other social programs unfairly require them to pay for the sins of their fathers long after the need to compensate the victims has passed. Unfortunately the group of white people who are suffering the most in this economy, as manufacturers move overseas and unions are destroyed, are the people who have only a high school education or less, and they are the very people who are most inclined to fall for the blame the victims tactics employed by demagogues who want to pit different groups against each other. After all, demagogues are not bothered by difficult complexities; they can make it very simple: “Just deport all immigrants, stop all affirmative action, and do away with the safety net programs you have to pay for and everything will be all right again,” they say.

What the uneducated cannot seem to grasp is that taxes are a rather small component of real income. In fact the wages earned by workers have now become so small that the percentage of people who are required to pay income taxes has dropped significantly. Furthermore, with real incomes decreasing the working class is becoming more dependent on the safety nets they have been paying for all these years. And it is not the exploited minorities that are causing the decrease in wages. So oppressing minorities will not accomplish anything but resistance. We are in a very dangerous place right now. We have to do something to restore the dignity and incomes of our workers, and we have to do it before their desperation blinds them to all reason. Too many of them are already being hoodwinked by the Greedy Old Plutocrats as it is.

If you look back at a time when we manufactured things, when labor unions were strong, and when the middle class was the great engine of prosperity you will see that the disparity in wealth between the top 2 or 3 percent and everyone else was much less than it is now! And everyone prospered at that time; the top 2 or 3 percent were still very well off, and it was reasonable for the rest of us to believe our children would be better off than we were. Enriching the rich only exacerbates our current problems, as do bad trade agreements. I cannot tell you I have all the answers but I can tell you that the Republicans with their enrich the rich, trickle down theory will only make things worse. It is only through the collective strength we can exert through our government that we can make things better. We have to vote the special interests out. We desperately need an aggressive and progressive government! That is why I intend to vote for Bernie Sanders.

De Farce

I have to admit that I did not watch most of the so called Republican debate last night. What I saw of it told me it was, unfortunately, the sort of farce one would expect from the Fox disinformation factory. As the great God of Republican victimization knows, only a blasphemous liberal would fact check a Republican! Indeed, fact checking Republicans is like body checking people who are on crutches. How dare you trip up the willfully ignorant demagogues with facts! This sanctimonious display of ignorant indignation from the nitwits seeking the Republican nomination is an insult to the intelligence of anyone with an average IQ. What makes this farce even worse is that most of the participants were actually quoting from their stump speeches; which is about the only thing Marco Rubio does well. Sorry folks, but the outrageous and unchallenged falsehoods told by the prospective candidates made me so angry that I had to change the channel! Although I did not hear enough to give you a detailed accounting of the proceedings, I did hear enough to form the following opinions.

Democrats want to take us into the future with the successful policies of the past. Republicans want to take us into the future with the failed policies of the past. The Democrats deal with real information: this is what was done in the past and this is what worked. The Republicans are trying to sell us ignorance: forget about what happened in the past it's time to try something new, they say. But new for them is old, it is doing away with all of the regulations that protect us from monopolies, unsafe products, and unfair trade practices, as well as doing away with the graduated income tax, all of the safety nets and earned benefits programs such as Social Security and Medicare, while giving huge tax breaks to the rich and stuffing the coffers of the military industrial complex with your money (President Eisenhower must be rolling over in his grave).

The Queen of sanctimonious falsehoods is Carly Fiorina. She claims that all regulations hurt small businesses and rails against Dodd Frank. She obviously thinks the Koch Bros. are small businessmen! She would never admit that there are some regulations such as anti-trust laws and fair lending laws that protect and help small businesses. Furthermore, Dodd Frank was not even a glimmer in the eyes of Mr. Dodd or Mr. Frank before or during the crash of 1929 or the crash of 2008. I might add that Glass Steagall was not a factor in the Crash 1929 or 2008 either. In point of fact both Dodd Frank and Glass Steagall were reactions to the abuses that caused those crashes! To put it bluntly, Carly Fiorina is a certifiable liar: See Fiorina Lies, Fiorina is lying, Fiorina's fetus claim.  No wonder she hates fact checkers.

When the likes of Donald Trump and Ben Carson are the leading prospective candidates for your Party's Presidential nomination there are no winners.

Oh The Humors!

Forget about the West Point Kerfuffle. There is something far worse about Dr. Ben Carson. As a very competent, modern physician, Dr. Carson has correctly rejected the once prevalent theory of humors that caused doctors to purge and bleed their patients. But as an incompetent, reactionary politician he still embraces the fallacious Trickle Down theory hypotheses that would cause him to starve the beast, which is the equivalent of purging and bleeding the economy. This is political quackery of the first order. He would commit governmental malpractice if we were ever foolish enough to elect him.

Democratic Forum 2016

I am glad I watched the Democratic Forum last night. MSNBC and Winthrop University did such a good job of organizing it that they made it look easy. I have say though that it takes someone with the talent of the late Tim Russert or Rachel Maddow to transform this format into something that is both entertaining and informative. One of the problems from an entertainment standpoint is that this format does not provide the drama of candidates directly confronting each other as they would in a debate. While there is still the possibility of a candidate embarrassing himself or herself with the sort of excited utterances wimpy Republican candidates always blame on “gotcha questions” propounded by “liberal media” persons, you only get those utterances when a candidate moves away from his or her talking points!

Rachel Maddow has a real talent for drawing out the personalities of the people she interviews and an almost uncanny ability to ask tough questions in a manner that does not seem confrontational or combative. She admits to having that famous liberal bias you cannot find anywhere else, but she also has that famous commercial bias you can find everywhere else! Which is to say that she throws hard balls; she just does not snarl at you while throwing them at your head. For instance, she asked Martin O'Malley about his low standing in the polls and how he was addressing that. Bernie Sanders has been criticized about his stand on gun control and gun rights; so she asked him questions about that criticism and where he stood on gun control issues. Hillary Clinton has been criticized about her ties to Wall Street and for being a war hawk; Rachel asked Hillary questions about both of those subjects. All of the candidates held up well to the questioning without adding the sort of ignorant embellishments that get so many Republicans in trouble. I might add that both Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders also criticized Hillary Clinton, but there was nothing that sensational about the criticisms.

What made this forum interesting was not the excitement of conflict. It was not like watching a boxing match. It was more like watching the dating game as Rachel Maddow tried to draw the candidates out so we could get to know more about them, and they tried to accentuate their positives while minimizing their negatives.

Martin O'Malley: He appeared to be the most rehearsed and seemed to stick the closest to his talking points. The fact that he was given as much time as the other candidates, however, allowed him to paint an appealing picture of himself. He demonstrated that he is a candidate who deserves some serious consideration.

Bernie Sanders: He appeared to be the most spontaneous. He was funny and charming as well as informative. He did well in answering questions regarding race and civil rights. Rachel Maddow also did him a favor by showing a picture of him at a sit-in protesting the segregated housing at the University of Chicago in the nineteen sixties. Bernie has a stellar civil rights record but young people are about today, and Bernie has a lot of ground to make up on Hillary when it comes to African Americans. He is addressing more racial issues now, but his big thing is still the economic mess. I really bless him for his economic message, but I want to give him a bit of advice in regard to racial issues. I am hoping that someone who has been as committed to the cause of civil rights as he has will not think I am being arrogant.

Bernie knew that African Americans, particularly young males, are more likely than white males to be arrested or beaten or shot by law enforcement officers. I am also sure that those facts really bothered him. Yet when he was confronted by Black Lives Matter he said what I have to admit I would have said. He said: “Of course black lives matter. All lives matter!” The folks of Black Lives Matter (probably correctly) interpreted this to mean that as a white person Bernie did not feel the urgency they felt about reducing the disproportionate risk black people face. “Justice delayed is justice denied” becomes much more poignant when the delay is measured in lives ruined or lost. The folks of Black Lives Matter want to see a sense of urgency, they want to see the fire Bernie had in his eyes at that sit in when he was a young man!  Bernie should thank them for making him feel young again by putting that fire back in his eyes. Go Bernie!

Hillary Clinton: Hillary was well prepared and stuck to her talking points without giving the appearance of being too well rehearsed. In spite of her normal reserve, she showed enough of her personality to court her audience. South Carolina is a state where the African American vote is crucial to Democrats, and Hillary hit hard on the issues that are important to African Americans. The woman is a consummate professional and that is a good thing.