(Joel Pett via GoComics.com)
.
Shamus Khan, in the NYTimes, explains that actually “We Are Not All in This Together”:
… In the postwar period the rich found themselves in a quandary. Their wages and their membership were static. They needed to resuscitate themselves. This required allies who shared a basic concern. The rich thought, not incorrectly, that high tax rates were handicapping their capacity to advance. And they found common ground with suburbanites who didn’t see social spending as something that enhanced their lives and neighborhoods, but as something that transferred their tax dollars to a different kind of American — urban, of a notably darker hue — who had only recently gained political legitimacy. Through a tax revolt these groups went to work dismantling social programs.
They were terribly successful and they helped turn America on its head. Since the late 1970s, it has been average Americans who have experienced comparative wage stagnation and who are more likely than their parents to stay in the same economic position. For the rich, the story is the exact opposite.
Let’s say you’re fortunate enough to be in the top 1 percent of American families; at a minimum you make almost $400,000 a year. Things aren’t just good; they seem to keep getting better. While the median American worker received about a 5 percent wage increase since 1979, your raise was above 150 percent. From your perch, even when you look at people right below you in the top 5 percent, you find that the rate of your wage growth is much greater than theirs….
If you’re an average American, you don’t see this at all. It’s been more than 30 years, and you’ve barely seen a drop trickle down.
This helps us better understand why it is that the rich and the rest see the world differently, and why it’s difficult to develop political movements based on economic solidarity. We can think of elites as selfish, power-hungry monsters, or we can think of them as being like others: products of their particular experience and likely to overgeneralize from it. Elites understand their own world well enough. Yes, they underestimate the advantages that helped them along the way and overestimate their own contributions to their status. But they are not wrong to think that for them there is more mobility and growth today than there was a generation ago. What they do not see (or care to see) is that for others, stagnation is the new normal…
… We are not in this together. We need to get back to what made America great, when the many and not the few were winning. To do so we must stop conflating moral arguments with economic ones. Instead of operating under the fiction that we will all benefit from a proposed change in economic direction, let’s be honest. If a few of us are better off, then many are not. If many are better off, then the few will be constrained. Which world would you rather live in? To me the answer is obvious.
***********
What’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
raven
I have to get this antique sofa to the upholsterer but I need someone to come over and help me load it!
billgerat
The Truth is that the rich have bought the GOP lock, stock and barrel. The only Reconciliation is to get more Democrats into national office and then deal with income inequality that way.
Cermet
The ‘Ex’ called and complained about the job environment (and her inability to get one even after getting two masters.) As I explained to her, voting matters and her supporting thugs has helped create the mess she is in. Of course, and as always, she refuses to accept responsibility (surprise) and will, I am sure, continue to vote against her own interest to prevent ‘those people’ from getting anything – even if it cost her everything … our daughter refuses to either see her or talk to her at all. I’ve done my best to help try and smooth things out but she, like her politics, can’t see reality. Typical; for being so brilliant, she is still very stupid when it comes to learning from experience.
OzarkHillbilly
I’m going to screw a rich person. May not sound particularly productive (it isn’t) and rather petty on the face of it (it is) but it sure is satisfying food for the soul.
Baud
Can anyone find support for this? This chart by Jared Berstein suggests all income groups were growing proportionally in the post-war period.
Mustang Bobby
It’s the last week of work before the two-week winter break, so I will probably get inundated with urgent matters that need to be done from people who have known they had to do them since August. But it will be all my fault if it doesn’t get done.
I also have to come up with something for the Secret Santa exchange. Forcing jollity and altruism on someone who doesn’t celebrate the holiday strikes me as being counter to the sentiment of the holiday.
(Why do I get the feeling I’m going to be visited by three ghosts some night next week?)
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: The change came in the 70’s (some peg it at ’74) but the locking in of it began with Reagan. Your chart supports that. I have seen others that compare worker productivity with real wages. While worker productivity and real wages were locked together for years (the more you did, the more you made) they separated in the mid ’70’s, with wages (adjusted for inflation) flat lining. I no longer have a link but IIRC K Drum posted it (among others). This is a worthwhile read about it.
Oh, and for the record? I got my first job in ’74.
Schlemizel
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think those mid-70’s numbers were caused by the gas price shock and subsequent high inflation with high unemployment. It would be hard to unpeel exactly when these flows started but certainly St. Reagan made screwing working people a feature of government bestowed on to corporations.
Lurking Canadian
@Baud: you have to understand that “static”, in this context, doesn’t mean, “not changing”. It means, “I am not pulling away from the proles fast enough”.
Kay
I really disagree with this. I see what he’s getting at, where he doesn’t like their moral argument so he wants to drop that approach all together, but I don’t.
Our moral argument is stronger than theirs, hands down, no contest. it’s also popular. Why would I drop it?
Two examples, both referendums, both Ohio. Minimum wage and regulating predatory lenders, 2005 and 2008. Both passed with big margins. The moral argument was “fair”. That’s it. “Is this fair?”
Fair wage for work, fair terms for cash advance loans. I guess we could have made a complicated economic argument where we calculated the harm to low wage employers and cash advance lenders and explained that they would “lose” if the ballot measures passed but ON BALANCE the ballot measures would benefit more people, but we didn’t, because that’s crazy and “fair” is what people respond to, and they’re right.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemizel: I agree, but not being an economist, and not yet having heard one weigh in on it, I hesitate to stick my neck out any further.
And yeah, St Ronnie raised screwing the working folk to an art form.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Except that’s not what I see him saying. He’s saying either the rich have stagnant growth or everyone else does, but not everyone can benefit together.
Baud
@Lurking Canadian:
That’s how the 1% would see things, but this guy isn’t one of their shills.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I read it slightly differently. The rich can have wildly positive growth while every one else sits and spins, or they can have much more modest growth (be constrained) and every one else will benefit. I’m not sure either read is wrong, just a slightly different meaning of the word “constrained”.
My earlier comment was just pointing out that I think he got the timing wrong.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
From the article (not excerpted above):
I think he is positing a zero-sum game view. Maybe it’s more effective rhetoric, but I don’t think it’s accurate.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Agreed. The “tax revolts” fomented by the 1% among gullible working people were sold on a “fairness” platform that was based on a lie. It has to be countered by a moral argument based on the truth.
IowaOldLady
Sometimes I despair. As money moves into fewer hands, it becomes easier and easier for them to rig the system in their own favor. Reagan broke the air traffic controllers union and made it ok to hate labor. He also made it ok for the rich to stop paying their fair share of taxes. Much of our problem can be laid at his feet. And it’s so much easier to cut taxes than raise them, that I don’t see how we get out of it.
WereBear
Heck, two year olds understand FAIR, and are eager to police cake portions and toy sharing.
Most of the chaff thrown around on the Right is to obscure the fact that their positions are grossly unfair. And what lever do they like to use? Starving children aren’t really starving, so it’s not fair that YOU have to feed them.
Stick with “fair.” It’s the one that works.
geg6
@Baud:
Yeah, that’s the question I have. I remember it as every income level doing well, even the rich, despite that high tax rate for the MoUs. Wasn’t the 50s through early 60s the time of a rising tide lifting all boats?
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
I’m with you. I have no desire to cede the moral ground, which it sounds he is advocating. I think we are morally right, in addition to economically correct. We have to make the moral argument ours again.
Southern Beale
Changing the conversation on guns …. it’s about time we started holding gun owners responsible. With rights come responsibilities.
That’s all I’ve got for today.
Baud
@IowaOldLady:
The only thing that makes me despair are circular firing squads. Otherwise, we’re always just one election away from moving the country in the right direction.
Kay
@WereBear:
Kids are the fair police. It’s hilarious. I did mediations for juveniles as part of mediator training. They would bring them in for fighting in school. They have an elaborate Code Of Fairness. They would go to great lengths to tell me why the fight was 1. justified and 2. fair.
They have to be the same size, for one. That’s why it’s “fair”. It’s like the UN, “proportionate response”. They’re better at it than we are. It’s an “aspirational goal” at the UN. They’re already following it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: OK, now I see where you get that reading. here is my take on the topic:
There are winners and losers. Most people are losers.
If you can’t dazzle them with the brilliance of your economics, baffle them with BS.
Sounds good, hells bells it sounds great! But it leads me to a question: When, in the entire history of the world, have resources flowed freely? This is my honest no BS opinion: There are 2 types of markets, and neither of them are free, there are regulated markets, and there are captured markets. Or on a line between the two.
Right now? We are living in a captured market. (or one leaning far that way would be more accurate). And the truth is, it is the regulation of it that has allowed the capturing of it.
C.V. Danes
@Cermet: Perhaps this is one of the reasons she is you ex, no?
geg6
Alex Pareene is out with this year’s Hack List. In a twist, he’s writing each entry in the voice of the actual hack. It is beautiful to behold. First entry, a personal nemesis of mine:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/16/hack_list_no_10_malcolm_gladwell/
C.V. Danes
I think it is important to note that the rich are not like the rest of us, with just more money.
The rich, quite literally, inhabit their own country, without borders, and have very little in common with the rest of us ideologically. Their country has its own rules and agenda.
There is a component of class warfare to this, but the real war is between “Richistan” and the rest of the world.
OzarkHillbilly
I gotta go, but I wanted to leave you all with this present. Our latest mental illness: Affluenza.
Comment is free
Affluenza: the latest excuse for the wealthy to do whatever they want
Ethan Couch, a teenager in Texas, killed four people but got off because he comes from a rich family and ‘didn’t know better’
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Jessica Luther gray
Jessica Luther
theguardian.com, Sunday 15 December 2013 07.30 EST
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Drinking and driving Ethan Couch
According to Suniya Luthar, psychologist 20% of upper middle-class adolescents believe their parents would help them get out of a sticky situation at school. Photograph: Getty Images
There are many reasons to feel disgust over a judge in a juvenile court in Fort Worth, Texas, sentencing 16-year-old Ethan Couch to 10 years of probation for killing four pedestrians and paralyzing his friend while driving drunk this summer.
Leading up to the tragedy that killed Breanna Mitchell (aged 24), Hollie Boyles (42) and Shelby Boyles (21) and Brian Jennings (43), Couch and a group of friends stole alcohol from a Walmart nearby. At the time of the crash, he was driving a pickup owned by Cleburne Sheet Metal, his father’s company. Couch had seven passengers in his truck and a blood-alcohol content of 0.24, three times the legal limit in Texas. He also had valium in his system. Two of his passengers were severely injured, including Sergio Molina, who suffered brain damage that has left him with blinking as his only form of communication.
Couch has never denied that he was driving drunk that night, nor that he killed those people. Instead, the defense argued that Couch grew up in a family that was dysfunctional, in part because of its wealth, and that he deserved therapy, not incarceration.
During the court trial, the defense called psychologist G Dick Miller as main witness. He gave now-infamous testimony. Miller diagnosed Couch as suffering from “affluenza” where his parents’ wealth fixed problems in their lives. Miller explained it this way:
“The teen never learned to say that you’re sorry if you hurt someone. If you hurt someone, you sent him money.”
See? The rich even have to suffer from maladies the rest of us lucky duckies are spared.
May that thought inspire you this day.
Cervantes
Hogwash. The problem is not that they innocently over-generalize from their experience. These are ostensibly educated people. In my experience they are well aware of the facts. It is the moral argument that they fail to comprehend.
We (well, some of us) spoke about Tony Judt the other day. He addressed this issue in his last formal public lecture at NYU, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy.”
Josie
I am currently reading The Crash of 2016 by Thom Hartmann. It sounds like one of those “how to profit from the market” books, but it is actually a history of how the middle class has gotten screwed from the time of Reagan forward. It is very interesting and follows closely the ideas in this post. He speaks of cycles in which people forget why things happened and fall for the talking points again and again.
OzarkHillbilly
Sorry, the Guardian inserted a bunch of bull I had meant to leave out. I hate it when they do that.
fka AWS
Yeah, I’m not down with abandoning the “moral” argument. Tell that to the civil rights leaders, the suffragettes, the abolitionists, the LGBT folks, etc.
Cervantes
@Baud: Can you be more specific about how your chart “suggests all income groups were growing proportionally in the post-war period”? Thanks.
rikyrah
Wisconsin Democrat who infiltrated ALEC: ‘They don’t want people involved in the political process’
By Theresa Riley, Bill Moyers & Company
Friday, August 16, 2013 12:56 EST
Representative Chris Taylor is a Democrat elected to the Wisconsin legislature in 2011. Last week, she attended the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual conference in Chicago. Writing about her experience at The Progressive magazine’s website, she describes her experience inside the “ALEC universe” and writes: “ALEC members have been quietly working out of the public eye to develop their agenda so that when given the opportunity, they are ready to start creating an ALEC nation. That time has come. And they are ready.”
We caught up with her by phone back in Wisconsin to talk about what she found out about the conservative policy-making machine.
Riley: Why did you want to attend the conference? What did you hope to achieve there?
Taylor: I’m very new in the legislature. I came in the middle of last term. So I missed a lot of the Act 10 [debate]. I was working on various issues when all of that was going on. But I wanted to learn more. I wanted to have a better understanding of the group, so that I could, when I needed to, fight some of these very regressive policies better.
I think it’s so incredibly important for people to understand where these [model] bills are coming from and try to understand the rationale. I was quite blown away by the extent of where [Wisconsin] policy is coming from, because so much of it is coming from this group.
Riley: ALEC conferences are known for being very security conscious. Were you incognito? Did you wear a badge with your party affiliation?
Taylor: No. I did wear a badge with my name and that I was a Wisconsin legislator. Every person there had a badge on. When you registered you had to present ID, which is really unusual. I mean I’ve been to conferences throughout my whole life, I’ve never had to present an ID. There was a big assumption that I was a Republican. Every person I talked to assumed that I was a Republican
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/16/wisconsin-democrat-who-infiltrated-alec-they-dont-want-people-involved-in-the-political-process/
C.V. Danes
@IowaOldLady:
To a point, but remember that the Gilded Age also brought labor and political unrest and a questioning of the nature of “capitalist democracy” by the masses.
The rich can only pilfer so much before the people get fed up and take to the streets.
rikyrah
Teacher to student: You can’t be Santa — you’re black!
By CNN Staff
updated 8:17 AM EST, Mon December 16, 2013
Ho ho — huh?
The family of an African-American high school student in New Mexico says he’s crushed after a teacher questioned why he was wearing Santa garb during a school holiday dress-up day last week, CNN affiliate KOAT reported.
The teacher told Christopher Rougier, a freshman at Cleveland High School, that he couldn’t be Santa because Santa is white, the student’s father, Michael, told KOAT.
“He was embarrassed,” he told the station.
Now, his son doesn’t want anything to do with Christmas.
Michael Rougier said the teacher called his wife to apologize, but that’s not enough.
“He needs to be fired,” Rougier told KOAT. “For him to make a comment like that, there has to be at a minimum prejudice in him, and we don’t have room for that.”
School district offices were not yet open early Monday morning and spokeswoman Kim Vesely did not immediately return a telephone call from CNN seeking comment.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/16/us/new-mexico-teacher-black-santa/
Chris T.
@OzarkHillbilly: If affluenza is a disease caused by too much money, the cure … is obvious!
rikyrah
Why Obama’s Haters Are Worse Than Bush’s
The left’s critics of the Bush presidency are no match to today’s paranoid right, as this week’s insane innuendo—from the Hawaii plane crash to The Handshake—perfectly illustrates.
By Michael Tomasky
December 14th 20135:45 am
In fact, both sides do different things. My assertion is this: Baseless left-wing attacks on Republicans differ in character from baseless right-wing attacks on Democrats in two ways. First, most liberal-left attacks on Republicans are more political than cultural, while virtually all right-wing attacks on Democrats are about culture. And second, those liberal-left attacks that are about culture tend to be mocking in tone, expressing derision, while the right’s attacks are fearful, expressing deep paranoia.
Let’s take them one by one. Bush and his top men were often called fascists on the left. That’s an attack that certainly has its cultural elements, but it is first and foremost political. The worst thing people on the left could think to do, in other words—call Bush a fascist—is a political smear, not a cultural one. This reflects the way most people on the left see the world—through a political lens primarily, and through a cultural one only secondarily. There are exceptions to this, but in the main, for the broad liberal-left, politics is primarily about politics, not culture.
On the right, politics is much more about culture, because the right feels itself to be an aggrieved minority whose culture (industriousness, self-reliance, Godliness, etc.) is under constant attack from the libertines and relativists, who of course far outnumber and surround the righteous few. Culture is where people on the right live, and so the worst thing they can think to do is to make attacks that are about culture, about the Democrats hating God, destroying America, and so on.
Sometimes, of course, the left goes cultural. Calling Bush a chimp and an idiot and a cowboy, say; those trafficked in liberals’ stereotypes about Texans, Southerners in general, back-slapping oil men, and so on (well, chimp just had to do with certain facial features). That wasn’t nice, I suppose, but here’s the thing. It was done to laugh at him.
By and large, the right doesn’t laugh at Obama. Oh, sometimes. There’s the absurd teleprompter meme from early on, which held that he couldn’t put two sentences together without huge transcripts placed in front of him. And there’s a strain of criticism that he’s in over his head. But those tropes are far outweighed by the ones that assign to Obama a world-historical level of devious intelligence—indeed, he’s so maliciously brilliant that he managed to fake a birth certificate decades ago, all as just the opening salvo of a grand scheme to bring America and/or the white race to ruin.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/14/why-obama-s-haters-are-worse-than-bush-s.html
greennotGreen
No, no, no, no, no. It is not all about money, and so we are all in this together.
So, we’re all in a big, multi-generation space ship. The “elites” have bigger cabins and dine with the captain, but everybody’s doing okay, all the way down to the folks who swab the decks. Over time, the elites decide that the food they’re being served isn’t enough better than everyone else’s, so they pressure the galley to change things a little. To keep the rest of their shipmates content, they take time away from schooling the young and put it into more entertainment which is cheaper to provide anyway. Eventually, they’ve bled enough resources from hoi polloi that they’re now eating much better and have taken over more cabins than everyone else, but the crew isn’t mutinying because they’re happy with the propaganda-filled entertainment which assures them that this balance is the way things should be. But the quality of the crew begins to suffer with the failure of education, so not as much food is raised in the hydroponics gardens, and the carbon dioxide scrubbers aren’t well maintained. The elites can hog the food, but they can’t choose to receive better air. And then a leak appears in the hull, but the skills required to repair it were dropped from the curriculum three generations before to shift resources to making better deck chairs for the elite.
We ARE all in this together whether the 1% realize it or not. When they don’t fund the NIH because they can’t give up their car elevators, all the money in the world won’t save them from the cancer we didn’t discover how to treat.
Also, re: tag – there are plenty of overwrought analogies left.
slippytoad
I was commenting to Ms. Slippytoad last night how we’ve seen a spate of TV shows and films all built around the theme of clawing back at and punishing the wealthy for their abuse of the rest of us. We’ve been big fans of Burn Notice for awhile now, and we just started binge-watching Leverage, which is kind of like Burn Notice without the spy stuff. And then we were watching “Now You See Me” which is about a group of magicians who stage bank robberies during their performances, and give the money to the audience in the finale. And that’s just off the top of my head.
What it makes me think is this populist rage that the wealthy are mostly thieving parasites is getting more popular. In the 1930’s, bank robbers were cultural heroes because they were striking back at the criminal upper class. We are at that point now, again. The wealthy might want to sit up and take notice before it kicks up another notch. Of course, that would require them to have read and understood history, and I have no confidence today’s C+ Augustus rich kids know more than what’s in front of their noses.
Kay
@C.V. Danes:
I agree, for really wealthy people and “the 1%” are REALLY wealthy. It would be less damaging if they just lived “there” and stayed in that sphere but they don’t. They have a huge influence on public policy that affects places where they don’t “live”, in any ordinary sense.
I’m not an environmentalist but I always get a kick out of the arguments of environmentalists because that’s one area that really may hit all of us. To varying degrees, of course, but they’ll be touched by it.
rikyrah
Paul Ryan Threatens President Obama and America With the Debt Limit
By: Jason Easley more from Jason Easley
Sunday, December, 15th, 2013, 7:07 pm
Paul Ryan showed his true colors today by threatening the economy, and confirming that Republicans will demanding ransom in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
There’s the Paul Ryan that we all know. For a man who is obsessed with makers and takers, Ryan spends a lot of time dreaming of how he can get something extra for doing his job. It turns out all of the bipartisanship surrounding the budget deal was just for show. The real prize for Ryan and the House Republicans is the debt ceiling.
Rep. Ryan was doing his song and dance about our long term debt problem, which translated means Social Security and Medicare. Republicans have already gutted food stamps, energy assistance, and much of the safety net, but it’s Social Security and Medicare that they’ve wanted to take apart all along.
Ryan and the Republicans are back to issuing threats against the economy. I am not sure what Democrats were trying to accomplish with the budget deal. Except for avoiding a government shutdown next year and getting a small percentage of the sequester lifted, they didn’t get much.
Democrats cut a deal so that they could end up back where they started. Republicans are plotting against the economy, and President Obama will have to stand up and say no.
http://www.politicususa.com/2013/12/15/paul-ryan-threatens-president-obama-america-debt-limit.html
rikyrah
December 16, 2013 9:02 AM
See You In Hell, Granny-Starver
By Ed Kilgore
Before the lusty cheers from Beltway pundits celebrating the end of the Tea Party and all that other right-wing unpleasantness had entirely faded from the air, we learned from the Wall Street Journal’s Damian Paletta that the great statesman who coauthored the budget agreement the Senate is considering today has some nasty plans for the new year:
Ryan’s budget deal partner Sen. Patty Murray reacted to this news as one might address someone with a chronic illness in remission:
It’s understandable at this delicate moment that Murray would want to treat Ryan charitably. But since we’ve just pretty recently seen that calling the Republicans’ bluff on debt limit threats is the first successful Democratic strategy on the subject, the time will come pretty soon when the White House and congressional Democrats are going to have to reassert a united front against any negotiations over a debt limit increase. They’re going to have to be willing to look Paul Ryan in the eye and (using the affectionate nickname developed for him by Esquire’s Charles Pierce) say: “We’ll see you in Hell, Granny-Starver, before we give you a thing in exchange for a debt limit increase.”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_12/see_you_in_hell_grannystarver048211.php
Baud
@Cervantes:
The slope is the same for all groups until the 1970s.
gene108
@Kay:
I disagree.
The 1% are rich. They make a nice living. They have a bit of a cushion, if things go bad. They have some options about what to do with their money, i.e. different types of investments. They can buy a nice house and car(s).
But the bottom rung of the 1% still have to work for a living. Doctors, lawyers, executives at varying sized firms, etc. inhabit this sphere of existence. They do well for themselves, but they are not immune from the same economic forces that buffet the top 10% of earners. They maybe better insulated, but not immune.
The truly rich, which “the 1%” meme wants to refer to, do not earn income from wages. They get it from investments and other forms income that are barely understood to “the 99%” of the country. They can make their living from the U.S. or Switzerland or from their “tax home” in the Cayman Islands or wherever they want, as long as they have access to the internet and trading systems that move their money around.
What’s really at stake is the rift between the super rich and the rest of us.
In some ways, Mitt Romney wasn’t wrong in thinking people who make $250,000 a year are middle-class. Sure they have a nicer house and car than someone making $50,000 a year, but they still work for a paycheck and aren’t immune from their source of income – employer or self-employed – going belly-up the way people in Mitt’s class and up are.
I think a lot of folks in the bottom wrung of the 1% know they aren’t going to be super rich and wouldn’t mind populist economic policies.
We’re in a really strange stratification of incomes, where even the bottom rungs of the 1% are bunched into together with the rest of the 99% and the separation really becomes apparent, when you start looking at the top 0.5% on up.
rikyrah
President Obama nominates the first ever female 4-star Navy admiral
•Michelle Howard is not only female, she is an African American
•’For some of the sailors, it was a big deal—not because of the woman thing, but because of the African-American thing,’ she told Time.com
•Howard is famous for helping to win back Captain Richard Phillips when he was taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009 and is part if the inspiration for the film Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks
By Alexandra Klausner
PUBLISHED: 23:58 EST, 13 December 2013 | UPDATED: 09:19 EST, 14 December 2013
The United States named a new Full Admiral in Washington, D.C. Friday–and it’s an African American woman. She’s will be the first ever female in Naval history to win a fourth star assuming the Senate approves President Obama’s nomination. The Navy announced her nomination in an official release.
Vice admiral Michelle Howard,53, is currently the deputy chief of naval operations, plans, and strategy.She will serve as the Navy’s second ranking officer, vice chief of naval operations, just a single step below the Navy’s top officer, the chief of naval operations.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2523600/President-Obama-nominates-female-4-star-Navy-admiral.html#ixzz2neCo64zW
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
rikyrah
Why there’s no Republican health care plan
12/16/13 08:00 AM—Updated 12/16/13 08:32 AM
By Steve Benen
Where’s the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act? The question is generally best suited for milk cartons – it’s pretty clear GOP officials would love to “repeal” the federal health care law, but we’ve been waiting for years to know what they’d “replace” it with.
This observation is an ongoing point of annoyance for the right, which is quick to argue that a variety of Republicans have presented reform plans of their own. Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist and Patrick Gleason push the argument in a new Politico piece, and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) made a related case in the Republicans’ official weekly address over the weekend.
And just like that, we’re reminded all over again why Republicans love to attack what exists, but struggle to craft a credible alternative of their own. Toomey still doesn’t quite understand that the Affordable Care Act is not a “wholesale government take-over” of the health care system, and more importantly, can’t get past the “nutshell” phase of the GOP’s rival policy.
In fairness, it’s worth emphasizing that Republicans did present something resembling a health care plan in 2009. Following up on our previous coverage, GOP officials missed a series of self-imposed deadlines in 2009, but eventually threw together a half-hearted joke – the GOP “policy” largely ignored the uninsured, did nothing for those with pre-existing conditions, and offered nothing for those worried about losing coverage when it’s needed most.
As Matt Yglesias noted at the time, the Republican approach to reform sought to create a system that “works better for people who don’t need health care services, and much worse for people who actually are sick or who become sick in the future. It’s basically a health un-insurance policy.” And as ThinkProgress added, the CBO crunched the numbers and found that the Republican alternative would leave “about 52 million” Americans without access to basic medical care.
Pressed for some kind of alternative to Obamacare, this was the best congressional Republicans could do.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-theres-no-republican-health-care-plan
rikyrah
Crooks and Liars: When Will CNN Start Being Honest About The ACA?
Another Sunday full of talking heads concerning their empty little selves with how Politifact’s ridiculous Lie of the Year determination might hurt Democrats.
…. If only Politifact had been around when George W. Bush was lying to us about Iraq and WMD. Maybe we could have saved thousands of lives by opposing that war before they sent troops into that godforsaken place for no specific purpose other than settling the score and Dubya’s Daddy issues.
Meanwhile, our panelists completely ignore the true liars in Politifact’s lie of the year: Insurers. Once again, I urge them to read the transcript of an actual telephone call which took place in 2010 luring an insured in a grandfathered plan out of that plan and into one that wasn’t grandfathered.
http://crooksandliars.com/2013/12/when-will-cnn-start-being-honest-about-aca
rikyrah
Obamacare class warfare in Kentucky
By Greg Sargent
December 13 at 3:13 pm
Republicans are rolling out an attack on Obamacare that sounds a lot like the Romney 2012 “free stuff” argument. As Beth Reinhard explains in a good piece, the idea is to characterize beneficiaries of the law – particularly the Medicaid expansion — as “shiftless freeloaders” enjoying “free health care,” all ”on the backs of hardworking Americans.”
Mitch McConnell recently derided the notion that Obamacare is a success by characterizing beneficiaries as “people signing up for something that is free.” Reinhard notes that this line “carries an unmistakable undertone of class warfare, a theme easy to exploit in states such as Kentucky, packed with low-income white voters who have a strong distaste for the federal government.”
The handling of Obamacare by McConnell’s Dem opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is worth considering in this context. It reflects the fact that red state Dems are approaching the health law in a more nuanced way than conventional wisdom suggests. Grimes is criticizing parts of the law, and is not embracing it — far from it. But she isn’t running from its general goals, either. Something more subtle is going on: A faulting of the Republican stance through a defense of the need to expand coverage to people who lack it — the very same beneficiaries of “free stuff” McConnell is singling out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/12/13/obamacare-class-warfare-in-kentucky/
rikyrah
NBC News @NBCNews 9s
DEVELOPING: Harvard University police sweeping all buildings after reports of explosives at four campus sites
karen
Here is the perfect example of how different the 1% are from you and me.
I’m watching Today this morning and they had a secret Santa. They mentioned that the limit was $20 and Savannah Guthrie says “Okay these are for gag gifts.”
My mouth dropped open. There are things you can buy for $20 or less but I guess for the elites of Today, all 20 dollars can get you is a “gag gift.”
C.V. Danes
@gene108:
Yes. What separates the truly rich from the merely wealthy is the concept of perpetual wealth.
The truly rich will never be poor, have no fear of being poor, never fear of failure, never fear of starvation or homelessness, and never lack for what they desire (materially). Their children will always have spots waiting for them in the best schools, the best corporations, and the best government posts, merely for having the good sense to be born rich.
That is why they are different. They inhabit a totally different reality from the rest of us, where meritocracy has no meaning, nor mediocrity. Failure is not an option for them, because failure has been removed from the equation.
Chris T.
@C.V. Danes: This.
Kay
@rikyrah:
Well, but their entire electoral strategy outside Kentucky is to bring out more white lower income voters. That’s it. It’s all they have. They think they lost in Ohio in 2012 because lower income white people didn’t connect w/Romney OR just didn’t come out.
So they should probably be careful about portraying lower income white people as deadbeats.
They’re running out of people to demonize and demean. At some point “them” becomes “us”.
C.V. Danes
@Chris T.: This what? Was there supposed to be a link or something :-)
Chris T.
@C.V. Danes: No, just meant you got to the heart of the problem with “aristocracies” (now based on money instead of birth, but the money is, well, based on birth).
Cervantes
@Baud: I see — we’re looking at Bernstein’s Figure 1 and we’re pretty much defining “the post-war period” as the period in which “all income groups were growing proportionally.”
Botsplainer
@rikyrah:
They love that last bit, because it is a race to the bottom that can be the source of massive profits.
I’m picturing a place like Mississippi or South Carolina deciding to be the sump well for insurance companies. You make a legal provision that all claim disputes have to be conducted through binding arbitration, and all arbitral awards must be initially enforced through the courts of those respected states.
Voila – you’ve created a claims denial machine.
brendancalling
What’s on the agenda? After reading THAT piece?
I guess it’s either suicide or hauling out the guillotine.
Comrade Mary
Happy follow-up from Calgary flood story of last summer: Momo still doing well.
(Momo likes showers, is big and fluffy, and swam to safety? Of course he’s a Maine Coon cat!)
handsmile
Wow! Citations of Tony Judt, Thom Hartmann, and Bill Moyers on one thread, each an invaluable left/progressive writer too seldom encountered here.
Thanks to Cervantes (#29), Josie (#30) and rikyrah (#34) for getting my week off to such a bracing start! (Cervantes: as I mentioned on that thread discussing Tony Judt last week, I had the immeasurable privilege of attending that last lecure.)
Addressing C.V. Danes’ astute observation above (#27):
“the rich are not like the rest of us, with just more money. The rich, quite literally, inhabit their own country, without borders, and have very little in common with the rest of us….”
the best (anecdotally rich, well-researched, compellingly written) book I’ve read on the subject is Plutocrats:The Rise of the New Global Superrich and the Fall of Everyone Else (2011) by financial journalist Chrystia Freeland. An illuminating and infuriating book for those insufficiently alarmed/disgusted.
http://www.amazon.com/Plutocrats-Rise-Global-Super-Rich-Everyone-ebook/dp/B007V65OQG
Lurking Canadian
@handsmile: I hated that book so much that I couldn’t finish it. She started to lose me with “Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are basically the same”, further hurt er case when she “proved” caste-discrimination in Inda was no more by finding one rich guy who started out Untouchable, then finished me off with her whole chapter on “superstar economics”. Basically the book is, “See these filthy rich people who live lives of unparalleled freedom and opulence. They deserve it ’cause they’re BETTER THAN YOU!”
Cervantes
@handsmile: Freeland is another of those Harvard-Oxford-Rhodes-scholar types we were talking about the other day.
If memory serves, she was recently elected to Parliament (from Toronto).
I haven’t read the book you mention.
rikyrah
Mandela statue unveiled on South Africa’s Reconciliation Day
A nine-metre statue of Nelson Mandela will be unveiled Monday on a holiday dedicated to reconciliation, 24 hours after the solemn burial of the icon credited with South Africa’s peaceful transition.
The 30-foot, bronze colossus will be officially unwrapped by President Jacob Zuma on the lawns of the Union Buildings, the seat of government in Pretoria where Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president in 1994.
Monday’s ceremony will also mark the centenary in November of the building where apartheid-era heads of state signed off on many of the racial laws Mandela spent most of his life fighting against.
It is at the Union Buildings that the man lovingly called the father of the nation lay in state for three days last week, as up to 100,000 people stood in hours-long queues to file past his open casket and pay their last respects.
“The unveiling… signals the start of celebrating and living the late Madiba’s legacy and the end of the mourning period,” said a government statement — using the clan name by which the democracy icon was fondly known.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/131216/mandela-statue-be-unveiled-reconciliation-day
burnspbesq
Open and unrestrained scientific inquiry and debate took it in the shorts this morning. The Supremes denied cert in Harkonen v. United States, a case in which the CEO of a pharmaceutical company was convicted of wire fraud for issuing a press release that accurately described the results of a clinical trial. The theory of liability was that the data weren’t statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level, so it was fraudulent to say that the drug was clinically effective.
Un-fucking-believable.
SCOTUSBlog’s description of the case is here.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/12/petition-of-the-day-530/
El Cid
Class warfare is open and involving every deployable set of both loud & quiet weaponry, and we ordinary people are losing.
Some more updated material from the absolutely crucially significant scholar of the US power structure G. William Domhoff, from his (UC Santa Cruz hosted) website:
Chris
@slippytoad:
I, too, am currently binging on Leverage. Thank God it’s finally on Netflix!
The others aren’t bad (White Collar is another one in that kind of mold), but in terms of TV shows for the Great Recession, Leverage absolutely takes the cake. You can’t get much more on-the-nose than a protagonist whose son died because the insurance company wouldn’t cover him.
handsmile
@Lurking Canadian:
Appreciate your reply and the ardor behind it! As I don’t own a copy of the book to consult it here and now, I can only say that I had a very different reaction to (and memories of) its content.
For me, Freeland was reporting on the phenomenon of the erosion of national identity and civic-mindedness, resulting in a loss of social constraints upon their behavior, by the “super-rich.” I do not recall whatsoever any claim on her part of the moral superiority of the social/economic elites because of their financial advantages. On this, our mileages do seem to vary considerably.
As your nym suggests you inhabit “The Great White North,” any comment on Freeland’s performance thus far as a MOP (as Cervantes rightly noted #63)? Has she opined, for instance, on her city’s criminal mayor?
The Republic of Stupidity
Well… after reading the article you linked to, I’d say if you’re anywhere below the top 1%, it’s most likely another steaming, piping hot bowl of…
C.V. Danes
@handsmile: I had something of an epiphany this morning on reading this blog post and resulting commentary :-)
I wrote a blog post a little while back on eugenics and how the rich would use “positive” eugenics to reinforce the trope of genetic superiority as a reason for their success. However, it is not genetic superiority that they represent, but, in some sense, the superiority of the human form when elevated by the best infrastructure that money can buy.
There is nothing genetically superior about the rich; they do not represent some kind of “master race”; they are not statistically more intelligent, or faster, or stronger, or more beautiful. What they represent is what happens when you have access to the best education, the best doctors, the best food, the best clothes, the best access to information, and the best personal contacts that come with being members of an exclusive club.
Anoniminous
@Kay:
Re: conflating moral arguments with economic ones
Economics is supposed to be an empirical study. There’s this Real World Thing called “The Economy” and people supposedly spend time and effort analyzing it and inferring How It Works.
Supposedly.
Actually, starting in the early 1900s, mainstream Economics, i.e., href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics”>Neo-Classical Economics (NCE,) went off the rails from the challenge of the popularity of Henry George and the Single Tax Movement. (See: Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George, in Fred Harrison, The Corruption of Economics. London: Shepheard-Walwyn Publishing Co. pp. 29-164.) The result is, over time, Economics has become divorced from Reality. Economists do not spend their time analyzing “The Economy” but a mathematical construct – Model – having little to do with the phenomena. One of the key and fundamental axioms of NCE is:
which we (can) know from Cognitive Science, neuroscience, epistemology, neuro-psychology, and neuro-biology (and more!) is utter and complete nonsense. Further, the generally accepted Dynamic General Stochastic Equilibrium (no link) bears NO relation to the actual workings of The Economy. Example, one will search in vain for Feedback Loops in DGSE.
One, of many, practical results of the NCE fantasy are the various Austerity Policies rapidly destroying the actual economies of the US and EU.
While I agree with your comment in general, in specific I submit we can’t fight something with nothing. We need a reality based Economic Theory to:
(a) fight against NCE
(b) as a basis for Public Policy
If we don’t have these it doesn’t matter how many non-Conservatives are elected as their underlying schemata for their Decision Making will remain structured on NCE.
Manyakitty
And totally off-topic, does anyone know if the 2013 calendar for sale in the store has the new pictures in it, or are we still waiting for that one?
rikyrah
@Kay:
THEM has ALWAYS been US
the only ones who didn’t know that were the White Working Class.
handsmile
@C.V. Danes:
The notion that genetic superiority is concomitant with financial advantage sears the mind with its stupidity. Little more than the generational replication of social privilege. Bullion and bias, not biology, creates those divisions and distinctions.
I’m happy to be introduced to The Cosmogonic Grunt and will be revisiting. Your “Professional Grunters” roster is an all-star cast, to be sure!
C.V. Danes
@handsmile: Indeed, indeed :-)
ranchandsyrup
Imma gonna put this here:
Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo 21 May
I’d love to see some serious environmental writer do a post on what good things might come from global warming. Surely there must be some.
Chris
@rikyrah:
And even more the white middle class. As the article notes, post World War Two suburbia is where the 1% found their first allies when trying to build a new coalition.
Paul in KY
@gene108: The bottom tier of 1% is income of $400,000 a year. They may be working for it, but unless thay have a bad blow habit, pretty soon they are living off their investments & interest.
Those people who you say are still ‘working’ fully consider themselves as part of the 1% and vote/donate accordingly.
Betsy
@geg6: oh THANK you for that link!! fun