As we head into a presidential election year,  Dante Alighieri’s famous inscription on the Gate of Hell seems appropriate.   Once again, Frank Luntz –Republican pollster, strategist, consultant, and cunning linguist – is setting forth the rhetorical recommendations that will be used in shaping the talking points used by Republican candidates all across the nation, from those seeking the Presidency, to those seeking seats in the House or the Senate, to those seeking seats in state legislatures and even city councils.  Dante’s epic poem comes to mind because operators like Luntz have always been with us, even in the 14th century, where they were just as reviled as they are now.

It was Luntz who famously dubbed the inheritance tax the “Death Tax.” This phrase, which makes the government appear so petty that it would take the money of dead people was adopted by virtually all Republicans and used to secure the votes of millions of Americans who will never have to pay such a tax.  It did, however, make it more difficult for the government to provide services that benefit all of those very same Americans.

All of the current Republican presidential candidates are promising to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act, aka “Obamacare.” It does not matter that Presidents, by themselves, have no authority to repeal anything, this idea is very popular among the Republican base because they have been taught to believe that the healthcare act was a “government takeover.”  It was nothing of the sort, but Luntz recommended that phrase to be used by Republican politicians, which they all dutifully did. 

In what has to be one of the most brazen assertions of rhetorical criticism, Luntz has even redefined the term “Orwellian“:

To be “Orwellian” is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever.

Luntz is at it again.  He is wisely advising Republican politicians not to criticize the Occupy Wall Street protesters but to simply appease them by saying “I get it, I understand your frustration.”  Entrepreneurs are now to be referred to as “Job Creators,” even though they’ve been uncreating jobs for the last ten years.  “Capitalism,” which is understandably being questioned, should now be called “economic freedom,” even though its current formulation for the 99 percent is “indentured servitude.”  According to Luntz, “Government Spending,” should now be referred to as “Government Waste,” paved roads, education for our children, safe neighborhoods, and healthcare for the poor and elderly be damned. 

Dante knew exactly where in Hell Luntz belongs.  Of his nine circles of ever-increasing depravity, Dante places those who knowingly commit fraud in the next to last circle.  Among them are corrupt politicians and those who advise them.  According to Dante, the only thing worse than fraud is treachery, which is assigned to the ninth circle.  Among the several characters in the ninth circle are Cain (not Herman Cain – he’s appears to be guilty of lust, which places him in the only slightly bad second circle) and Judas Iscariot. Cain, who is famous for killing his brother Abel, committing humanity’s first murder, and lying about it.

We all know what Judas did.

So, the best that can be said about Frank Luntz is that although he’s bad, he’s not quite as bad as Cain or Judas.  I wonder how he might spin that.

See larger image Dante's Inferno (The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell) (Paperback) By (author) Dante Alighieri List Price: $12.95 USD New From: $12.95 In Stock Used from: $7.79 In Stock

See larger image A Collection of Essays (Paperback) By (author) George Orwell List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $4.68 In Stock Used from: $3.00 In Stock

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

My corporations employ scores of people. They depend on me to do what I do so they can make a nice salary. If Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50 percent, which is very possible, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this. I like my job, but there comes a point when taxation becomes oppressive. Is the country really entitled to half a person’s income?

This threat came after an earlier claim that he has “more power than anybody but the President.” Rush, are you listening?

Oh, what will we do without this narcissist buffoon polluting the airwaves as well as the minds of unemployed “low information” voters?  As for his scores of employees, they will surely miss working for such a kind and benevolent boss:

The idea that raising tax rates on the rich and privileged will cause some kind of Randian strike is laughable.  No matter what the top marginal rate is, I’m sure they will manage to get by, as they always have.  Income and wealth inequality, to one degree or another, has always existed in every society, no matter what economic system is in place.  Total utopian equality is a just as imaginary as Ayn Rand’s lunatic visions.  Money has an attraction to itself that causes it to accumulate in pools and become concentrated.  It’s a natural force that has been described by economists for centuries.  The purpose of civilization is to temper a natural force, that can never be overcome.

In an earlier post I tried describe the social contract that we have with one another and the responsibilities of the more fortunate among us.  Harvard Law Professor candidate for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate Elizabeth Warren, who is far more articulate than I am sums, it up perfectly:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

As powerful and clear these words are as text on a screen, the passion and conviction with which she said them is worth seeing and hearing:

My friends at Critical Pages offer a more analytical discussion, as always accompanied by a carefully selected piece of fine art, in their article “Class Warfare, Anybody?”

Recommended:

See larger image Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality That Limits Our Lives (Hardcover) By (author) Sam Pizzigati List Price: $34.95 USD New From: $31.00 In Stock Used from: $10.45 In Stock

See larger image The Affluent Society (Paperback) By (author) John Kenneth Galbraith List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $0.93 In Stock

See larger image The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Paperback) By (author) John Maynard Keynes List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $5.79 In Stock Used from: $2.08 In Stock

© 2011 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

I’ll be back in the more comforting world of literature in a few days with a post about F. Scott Fitzgerald, who also had a few things to say about the American Dream.

See larger image George Carlin - Life Is Worth Losing (DVD) Director: Rocco Urbisci Starring: George Carlin Rating: NR (Not Rated) List Price: $19.98 USD New From: $12.71 In Stock Used from: $8.00 In Stock Release date February 27, 2007.

See larger image Last Words (Paperback) By (author) George Carlin List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $5.18 In Stock Used from: $2.68 In Stock

© 2011 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

It’s an admittedly extreme reaction, but it’s been a lifetime in the making.  This morning, a friend sent me a YouTube link to Mario Cuomo’s keynote address from the 1984 Democratic National Convention.  The speech is both remarkable and disappointing because it not only speaks for its own time, it speaks for today, perhaps even more loudly.  Governor Cuomo’s addressed all of his remarks to the then current president, Republican Ronald Reagan.  Ironically, this speech resonates even more deeply with our current Democratic President.

The text:

Thank you very much.

On behalf of the great Empire State and the whole family of New York, let me thank you for the great privilege of being able to address this convention. Please allow me to skip the stories and the poetry and the temptation to deal in nice but vague rhetoric. Let me instead use this valuable opportunity to deal immediately with the questions that should determine this election and that we all know are vital to the American people.

Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn’t understand that fear. He said, “Why, this country is a shining city on a hill.” And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.

But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city’s splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.

In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.

In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation — Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a “Tale of Two Cities” than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.”

Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe — Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.

Maybe — Maybe, Mr. President. But I’m afraid not. Because the truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that this is how we were warned it would be. President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. “Government can’t do everything,” we were told, so it should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class.

You know, the Republicans called it “trickle-down” when Hoover tried it. Now they call it “supply side.” But it’s the same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But for the people who are excluded, for the people who are locked out, all they can do is stare from a distance at that city’s glimmering towers.

It’s an old story. It’s as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans — The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. “The strong” — “The strong,” they tell us, “will inherit the land.”

We Democrats believe in something else. We democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees — wagon train after wagon train — to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and native Americans — all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America. For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.

So, here we are at this convention to remind ourselves where we come from and to claim the future for ourselves and for our children. Today our great Democratic Party, which has saved this nation from depression, from fascism, from racism, from corruption, is called upon to do it again — this time to save the nation from confusion and division, from the threat of eventual fiscal disaster, and most of all from the fear of a nuclear holocaust.

That’s not going to be easy. Mo Udall is exactly right — it won’t be easy. And in order to succeed, we must answer our opponent’s polished and appealing rhetoric with a more telling reasonableness and rationality.

We must win this case on the merits. We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we’ll do it not so much with speeches that sound good as with speeches that are good and sound; not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that will bring people to their senses. We must make — We must make the American people hear our “Tale of Two Cities.” We must convince them that we don’t have to settle for two cities, that we can have one city, indivisible, shining for all of its people.

Now, we will have no chance to do that if what comes out of this convention is a babel of arguing voices. If that’s what’s heard throughout the campaign, dissident sounds from all sides, we will have no chance to tell our message. To succeed we will have to surrender some small parts of our individual interests, to build a platform that we can all stand on, at once, and comfortably — proudly singing out. We need — We need a platform we can all agree to so that we can sing out the truth for the nation to hear, in chorus, its logic so clear and commanding that no slick Madison Avenue commercial, no amount of geniality, no martial music will be able to muffle the sound of the truth.

And we Democrats must unite. We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can unite, because surely the Republicans won’t bring this country together. Their policies divide the nation into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the rabble. The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory. They would cut this nation in half, into those temporarily better off and those worse off than before, and they would call that division recovery.

Now, we should not — we should not be embarrassed or dismayed or chagrined if the process of unifying is difficult, even wrenching at times. Remember that, unlike any other Party, we embrace men and women of every color, every creed, every orientation, every economic class. In our family are gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex County in New York, to the enlightened affluent of the gold coasts at both ends of the nation. And in between is the heart of our constituency — the middle class, the people not rich enough to be worry-free, but not poor enough to be on welfare; the middle class — those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it was a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity. White collar and blue collar. Young professionals. Men and women in small business desperate for the capital and contracts that they need to prove their worth.

We speak for the minorities who have not yet entered the mainstream. We speak for ethnics who want to add their culture to the magnificent mosaic that is America. We speak — We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule “thou shalt not sin against equality,” a rule so simple –

I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will. It’s a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: E.R.A.

We speak — We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We speak for senior citizens. We speak for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only security, their Social Security, is being threatened. We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable people who are fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear holocaust with our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe we can pile missiles so high that they will pierce the clouds and the sight of them will frighten our enemies into submission.

Now we’re proud of this diversity as Democrats. We’re grateful for it. We don’t have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in Dallas, by propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor. But we, while we’re proud of this diversity, we pay a price for it. The different people that we represent have different points of view. And sometimes they compete and even debate, and even argue. That’s what our primaries were all about. But now the primaries are over and it is time, when we pick our candidates and our platform here, to lock arms and move into this campaign together.

If you need any more inspiration to put some small part of your own difference aside to create this consensus, then all you need to do is to reflect on what the Republican policy of divide and cajole has done to this land since 1980. Now the President has asked the American people to judge him on whether or not he’s fulfilled the promises he made four years ago. I believe, as Democrats, we ought to accept that challenge. And just for a moment let us consider what he has said and what he’s done.

Inflation — Inflation is down since 1980, but not because of the supply-side miracle promised to us by the President. Inflation was reduced the old-fashioned way: with a recession, the worst since 1932. Now how did we — We could have brought inflation down that way. How did he do it? 55,000 bankruptcies; two years of massive unemployment; 200,000 farmers and ranchers forced off the land; more homeless — more homeless than at any time since the Great Depression in 1932; more hungry, in this world of enormous affluence, the United States of America, more hungry; more poor, most of them women. And — And he paid one other thing, a nearly 200 billion dollar deficit threatening our future.

Now, we must make the American people understand this deficit because they don’t. The President’s deficit is a direct and dramatic repudiation of his promise in 1980 to balance the budget by 1983. How large is it? The deficit is the largest in the history of the universe. It — President Carter’s last budget had a deficit less than one-third of this deficit. It is a deficit that, according to the President’s own fiscal adviser, may grow to as much 300 billion dollars a year for “as far as the eye can see.” And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a debt so large — that is almost one-half of the money we collect from the personal income tax each year goes just to pay the interest. It is a mortgage on our children’s future that can be paid only in pain and that could bring this nation to its knees.

Now don’t take my word for it — I’m a Democrat. Ask the Republican investment bankers on Wall Street what they think the chances of this recovery being permanent are. You see, if they’re not too embarrassed to tell you the truth, they’ll say that they’re appalled and frightened by the President’s deficit. Ask them what they think of our economy, now that it’s been driven by the distorted value of the dollar back to its colonial condition. Now we’re exporting agricultural products and importing manufactured ones. Ask those Republican investment bankers what they expect the rate of interest to be a year from now. And ask them — if they dare tell you the truth — you’ll learn from them, what they predict for the inflation rate a year from now, because of the deficit.

Now, how important is this question of the deficit. Think about it practically: What chance would the Republican candidate have had in 1980 if he had told the American people that he intended to pay for his so-called economic recovery with bankruptcies, unemployment, more homeless, more hungry, and the largest government debt known to humankind? If he had told the voters in 1980 that truth, would American voters have signed the loan certificate for him on Election Day? Of course not! That was an election won under false pretenses. It was won with smoke and mirrors and illusions. And that’s the kind of recovery we have now as well.

But what about foreign policy? They said that they would make us and the whole world safer. They say they have. By creating the largest defense budget in history, one that even they now admit is excessive — by escalating to a frenzy the nuclear arms race; by incendiary rhetoric; by refusing to discuss peace with our enemies; by the loss of 279 young Americans in Lebanon in pursuit of a plan and a policy that no one can find or describe.

We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and then we lie about it. We have been less than zealous in support of our only real friend — it seems to me, in the Middle East — the one democracy there, our flesh and blood ally, the state of Israel. Our — Our policy — Our foreign policy drifts with no real direction, other than an hysterical commitment to an arms race that leads nowhere — if we’re lucky. And if we’re not, it could lead us into bankruptcy or war.

Of course we must have a strong defense! Of course Democrats are for a strong defense. Of course Democrats believe that there are times that we must stand and fight. And we have. Thousands of us have paid for freedom with our lives. But always — when this country has been at its best — our purposes were clear. Now they’re not. Now our allies are as confused as our enemies. Now we have no real commitment to our friends or to our ideals — not to human rights, not to the refuseniks, not to Sakharov, not to Bishop Tutu and the others struggling for freedom in South Africa.

We — We have in the last few years spent more than we can afford. We have pounded our chests and made bold speeches. But we lost 279 young Americans in Lebanon and we live behind sand bags in Washington. How can anyone say that we are safer, stronger, or better?

That — That is the Republican record. That its disastrous quality is not more fully understood by the American people I can only attribute to the President’s amiability and the failure by some to separate the salesman from the product.

And, now — now — now it’s up to us. Now it’s up to you and to me to make the case to America. And to remind Americans that if they are not happy with all that the President has done so far, they should consider how much worse it will be if he is left to his radical proclivities for another four years unrestrained. Unrestrained.

Now, if — if July — if July brings back Ann Gorsuch Burford — what can we expect of December? Where would — Where would another four years take us? Where would four years more take us? How much larger will the deficit be? How much deeper the cuts in programs for the struggling middle class and the poor to limit that deficit? How high will the interest rates be? How much more acid rain killing our forests and fouling our lakes?

And, ladies and gentlemen, please think of this — the nation must think of this: What kind of Supreme Court will we have?

Please. [beckons audience to settle down]

We — We must ask ourselves what kind of court and country will be fashioned by the man who believes in having government mandate people’s religion and morality; the man who believes that trees pollute the environment; the man that believes that — that the laws against discrimination against people go too far; a man who threatens Social Security and Medicaid and help for the disabled. How high will we pile the missiles? How much deeper will the gulf be between us and our enemies? And, ladies and gentlemen, will four years more make meaner the spirit of the American people? This election will measure the record of the past four years. But more than that, it will answer the question of what kind of people we want to be.

We Democrats still have a dream. We still believe in this nation’s future. And this is our answer to the question. This is our credo:

We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need.

We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn’t distort or promise to do things that we know we can’t do.

We believe in a government strong enough to use words like “love” and “compassion” and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.

We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.

We — Our — Our government — Our government should be able to rise to the level where it can fill the gaps that are left by chance or by a wisdom we don’t fully understand. We would rather have laws written by the patron of this great city, the man called the “world’s most sincere Democrat,” St. Francis of Assisi, than laws written by Darwin.

We believe — We believe as Democrats, that a society as blessed as ours, the most affluent democracy in the world’s history, one that can spend trillions on instruments of destruction, ought to be able to help the middle class in its struggle, ought to be able to find work for all who can do it, room at the table, shelter for the homeless, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute. And we proclaim as loudly as we can the utter insanity of nuclear proliferation and the need for a nuclear freeze, if only to affirm the simple truth that peace is better than war because life is better than death.

We believe in firm — We believe in firm but fair law and order.

We believe proudly in the union movement.

We believe in a — We believe — We believe in privacy for people, openness by government.

We believe in civil rights, and we believe in human rights.

We believe in a single — We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings — reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation.

We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child — that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.

Now for 50 years — for 50 years we Democrats created a better future for our children, using traditional Democratic principles as a fixed beacon, giving us direction and purpose, but constantly innovating, adapting to new realities: Roosevelt’s alphabet programs; Truman’s NATO and the GI Bill of Rights; Kennedy’s intelligent tax incentives and the Alliance for Progress;Johnson’s civil rights; Carter’s human rights and the nearly miraculous Camp David Peace Accord.

Democrats did it — Democrats did it and Democrats can do it again. We can build a future that deals with our deficit. Remember this, that 50 years of progress under our principles never cost us what the last four years of stagnation have. And we can deal with the deficit intelligently, by shared sacrifice, with all parts of the nation’s family contributing, building partnerships with the private sector, providing a sound defense without depriving ourselves of what we need to feed our children and care for our people. We can have a future that provides for all the young of the present, by marrying common sense and compassion.

We know we can, because we did it for nearly 50 years before 1980. And we can do it again, if we do not forget — if we do not forget that this entire nation has profited by these progressive principles; that they helped lift up generations to the middle class and higher; that they gave us a chance to work, to go to college, to raise a family, to own a house, to be secure in our old age and, before that, to reach heights that our own parents would not have dared dream of.

That struggle to live with dignity is the real story of the shining city. And it’s a story, ladies and gentlemen, that I didn’t read in a book, or learn in a classroom. I saw it and lived it, like many of you. I watched a small man with thick calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example. I learned about our kind of democracy from my father. And I learned about our obligation to each other from him and from my mother. They asked only for a chance to work and to make the world better for their children, and they — they asked to be protected in those moments when they would not be able to protect themselves. This nation and this nation’s government did that for them.

And that they were able to build a family and live in dignity and see one of their children go from behind their little grocery store in South Jamaica on the other side of the tracks where he was born, to occupy the highest seat, in the greatest State, in the greatest nation, in the only world we would know, is an ineffably beautiful tribute to the democratic process.

And — And ladies and gentlemen, on January 20, 1985, it will happen again — only on a much, much grander scale. We will have a new President of the United States, a Democrat born not to the blood of kings but to the blood of pioneers and immigrants. And we will have America’s first woman Vice President, the child of immigrants, and she — she — she will open with one magnificent stroke, a whole new frontier for the United States.

Now, it will happen. It will happen if we make it happen; if you and I make it happen. And I ask you now, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, for the good of all of us, for the love of this great nation, for the family of America, for the love of God: Please, make this nation remember how futures are built.

Thank you and God bless you.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Only 54,000 jobs were added in May — well below Wall Street’s expectations and the smallest number of jobs added in the past eight months — and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest snapshot. For the labor market to simply keep up with population growth, experts say a bare minimum of 125,000 jobs must be added each month. In the two years since the Great Recession officially ended, economists say, there has been little labor market recovery.

Republicans, however, are doubling down on their strategy to make things even worse by insisting on massive spending cuts.  Nothing will stand in their way, not the beleaguered mid-west desperately in need of assistance after floods and tornadoes, not the full faith and credit of the United States.  Disaster relief and the debt ceiling are both being held hostage to their fiscal irresponsibility.  Their solution to either cut taxes or outlaw abortion. (I’ll save the second one for another time). Once again, we hear the same complete nonsense from Republicans that we’ve been hearing for generations.  Speaker of the House, and master of the non-sequitur, John Boehner said, “One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House, it’s time to get serious about cutting spending.”

Huh?

Tan Man also said, “We can’t raise taxes on the very people who create jobs,” repeating a Republican talking point that I’ve been hearing since the reign of Reagan, but it’s older than that.  Republicans have been repeating this nonsense since The Great Depression and before.  It’s their conventional wisdom, but it has no basis in reality and shows that Republicans, the supposed friends of business, know absolutely nothing about running a business and should be ignored.  Or even told, “Sit down and shut up.”

The engine of our economy, the engine of any economy, is consumption.  Nothing gets designed, nothing gets built, nothing gets sold unless there are consumers with money to spend.  That’s a fundamental law of nature.  It does not matter what economic system you have – socialism, communism, capitalism – all economic activity is consumer driven.  Jobs are not created because the owner of a business gets a tax cut and therefore has extra money to spend.  Any business owner or corporate manager who does that is completely incompetent.

In all my years as a manager, I have never had a boss come to me and say, “Hey Fred, I just got a tax cut.  Why don’t you help me spend it and hire a bunch of people we don’t need?”  There is one thing alone that drives hiring–increased demand, or anticipated increased demand, for whatever it is your company sells.  Period.

Given that the economy is consumption driven, the only thing that will cause companies to start hiring again is people buying stuff.  In order for people to buy stuff, they have to have jobs.  Cutting spending, throwing thousands of federal, state, and municipal workers out of work will only make the problem worse.  Spending needs to actually be increased, paid for by tax increases to the wealthiest, who have been doing just fine, thank you.

So Mr. Speaker, your cocktail-addled brain has it exactly backward.  We don’t have a spending problem. We do, however, have a revenue problem.

For another take on this subject, see “Whatever Happened to Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” at Critical Pages.

More from the inventor of “Conventional Wisdom:

See larger image The Affluent Society (Paperback) By (author) John Kenneth Galbraith List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $5.00 In Stock Used from: $0.93 In Stock

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

These two disasters do have several things in common.  First, both occur in industries that have terrible reputations for corruption, dangerous cost-cutting, cover-ups, lax regulatory enforcement.  In the case of the BP oil spill, the criminal negligence of BP and its sub-contractors along with both the corruption and incompetence of the government agencies charged with protecting the public and the environment directly led to deaths of the oil-rig workers and the destruction of the environment.  It remains to be seen whether there was any malfeasance on the part of TEPCO and the Japanese government that led to the current crisis.  As is now being reported, however, both the Japanese government and TEPCO have a history of scandals and cover-ups.  When our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission accuses its Japanese counterpart of having a too-cozy relationship with an industry they license and regulate, you know it’s bad.

The other thing they have in common is that no matter how each crisis was initiated, natural causes or human malfeasance, they each resulted in impromptu and frantic research project to avert, or at least minimize the scope of the disaster.  We are a week into this current crisis and we still have no idea what the end looks like and every day the possible outcomes put forth by experts become bleaker and bleaker.  Brave, doomed workers at the site continue to improvise, but despite their efforts the situation continues to go from bad to worse.  The entire worldwide nuclear industry is navigating in uncharted territory.  Hindsight may tell us that the possibility of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake followed by a tsunami was something that should have been considered, but beyond that, nobody seems to have asked the question, “What do we do if the primary and backup cooling systems fail?” or, “What will happen if the primary and backup cooling systems fail?”  We are now in a situation where an entirely new way to cool down a reactor core must be invented.  Immediately.

Imagine that famous scene in the Apollo 13 where a team of engineers improvise a jerry-rigged solution to replace the carbon dioxide scrubbers on the broken spaceship, only instead of three volunteer lives at stake, it’s tens of thousands who didn’t volunteer for anything.

During the BP oil spill, engineers needed to figure out how to plug up a gushing oil well a mile beneath the surface of the ocean.  It had never been done before.  It wasn’t as if there was a shelf one could go to and grab a deep sea oil gusher cap, it had to be designed and manufactured to order while the crisis, along with the oil plume, was in full bloom.   The first cap didn’t work, so another one was designed and built.  At any point during the crisis, no one was sure anything they did was going to work.

That sounds a lot like what’s now going on in Japan.

In both of these two disasters, no matter what the initial cause, there was a failure (or an unwillingness) at the very beginning to imagine a worse-case scenario and what its solution might be.  And so, what we like to believe is a “routine” operation – drilling for oil or running a power plant – becomes a high-risk engineering research project.

In the case of Japan, there are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives at risk, and land that could be rendered poisonous for decades.  In any human endeavor, there is a risk-benefit analysis to be done; nothing can ever be totally risk free.  The unusual set of circumstances that led to this crisis were certainly low in probability, but the risk of a failure that jeopardizes so many people (and future Japanese generations) and requires a solution that lives beyond our current understanding and ability to manage that is too great to ignore.

Our current technological civilization is driven by energy and the demand for it continues to grow.  Fossil fuels are a finite resource – we are consuming them much faster than the earth creates them – and our continued use of them threatens our habitat.  Unless we want our legacy to be nothing more than a larger version of those mysterious statues on Easter Island, left behind by a society that  both destroyed its environment and depleted its supply of energy through deforestation (see the book reference below), we need to find a clean renewable sources of energy.

It may very well be that nuclear energy is the short term stop-gap solution as the world’s oil reserves become depleted and the environmental impact of burning oil becomes untenable.  If that’s the case, then we’ve got face some music.  First, we must get serious about developing alternative technologies.  Second, we must efficiently use what we have.  That means modern, efficient power grids and yes, saying goodbye to 100 watt incandescent light-bulbs.

Finally, we must recognize when we are pushing the envelope.  The 104 nuclear power plants in The United States, are not ordinary, everyday operations employing known fully understood technologies like steel mills, sewage treatment plants, or bus stations.  Like deep sea oil rigs and spaceships, they are high risk experiments.  If we are going to use them at all, we need to manage them as high risk experiments, no matter what the cost.  The cost of failure is simply too high to ask anyone to bear.

Chernobyl Baby’ Explains Life In A Fallout Zone

See larger image Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition (Paperback) By (author) Jared Diamond List Price: $18.00 USD New From: $7.99 In Stock Used from: $5.30 In Stock Release date January 4, 2011.

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

Let’s enjoy the good news. We’ve avoided a ferocious 1930s-style depression. The worst of the recession is over. Unemployment has stopped rising. Employers can’t increase the workload any further and must now hire more workers if they want to boost output. The stock market has risen dramatically, which means that people with real money to risk are betting the economy is going to revive.

Wait, there’s even more good stuff. Inflation remains low and stable. People are paying off their credit card debts and are beginning to save money again. The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has come up with a long list of suggestions on how to reduce the government’s debt. Lawmakers of both parties clearly recognize that the current imbalance between what the government takes in and what it spends is leading us to disaster. So let’s enjoy the good news.

Because from here on the news gets bad. (You sensed this was coming, right?) Employment is going to rise, yes, but very, very slowly. A financial earthquake, such as we had in the final months of the Bush administration, followed by a collapse of the “real” economy, as we had in the early months of the Obama presidency, takes an especially long time to repair. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, testifying this month before Congress, said he hoped it would take only four or five years from now before employment reaches normal levels.

Furthermore, when we get back to those previous levels of employment we won’t be living as well as we used to. When there’s a big supply of eager workers and a small supply of jobs, wages don’t rise; they fall. But the problem goes much deeper than that. For the past thirty years, workers in the middle class haven’t been paid a decent share of the wealth they’ve produced. For three decades their productivity has been fine but their wages have stagnated. According to the census bureau, in 2007 a male worker earning the median male wage took home a little over $45,000. If you factor in inflation, this makes his take-home pay less than it was thirty years earlier.

By the way, our economy was much larger in 2007 than it had been thirty years earlier. The economist Robert Reich calculates that if the rise in the national economy had been divided equally among us, the typical worker would be more than 60 percent better off than he actually was in 2007. I’m not sure who got that money, but there are some interesting clues. In 1965 CEOs in major companies earned only 24 times more than an average worker, but by 1977 they earned close to 35 times more and by 1989 it was a whopping 71 times more than the average worker. Hang on, there’s more. By the year 2000, happy CEOs were pulling down 300 times more pay than the average worker. The last figures I have are for 2005 when our average blissful CEO was paid $10,982,000 a year, or 262 times the average worker’s $41,861. In other words, an average CEO earned more before lunchtime on the very first day of work in the year than a minimum wage worker earned all year.

Yes, number facts can be fun, but let’s get back to those floundering middle class families and what they did over those thirty years. They kept faith in “the American Dream.” Sure, it’s a silly, sentimental phrase, but it stands for the belief that if you work hard, you’ll earn more and live better. You’ll say good-bye to the landlord and own your own home. Maybe it’s only a bungalow with a patch of scruffy grass and a swing set for the kids but, by God, you’ve worked hard and it’s all yours.

But for thirty years wages didn’t rise. So middle-class wives went out to work to bring family incomes up to where everyone sensed they should be. But they were still falling behind. So wives and husbands began to work longer and longer hours. By the mid 2000s the typical American family put in a staggering 12 weeks more of work than it had in 1979. But you can’t keep earning more money by working more hours; you run out of hours. So families began to borrow on their credit cards. And in the last few years before the crash, they borrowed against the value of their homes.

All that’s gone now. As middle-class families go back to work they’ll find their wages effectively lower, not higher than before. Conservatives in control the House of Representatives are hyperventilating over President Obama’s stimulus policies and elbowing each other in a rush to cut government spending. When they did this in 1937 they managed to stall the recovery and extend the Great Depression. The Japanese have managed to do worse; their recession has been going on for the past twenty years and last year Japan fell behind China which became the second largest economy in the world.

The decline in unions from 30 percent of the workforce in to about 7 percent today parallels the period of wage stagnation for the average male worker. This same period has seen a growing influence of moneyed interests in Washington. But only the past is unchangeable, not the future. If middle-class voters unite to limit the power of rich people and wealthy corporations to make the laws of this country; if they demand and get a more progressive income tax; if they downsize the Pentagon budget, we’ll all live better.

(For a more complete profile, visit Eugene Mirabelli at The Author’s Guild.)

Also by Eugene Mirabelli:

See larger image The Goddess in Love with a Horse (Paperback) By (author) Eugene Mirabelli List Price: $17.00 USD Used from: $14.99 In Stock

See larger image The Passion of Terri Heart (Paperback) By (author) Eugene Mirabelli List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $10.15 In Stock Used from: $10.14 In Stock

See larger image The Language Nobody Speaks (Hardcover) By (author) Eugene Mirabelli List Price: $20.00 USD New From: $20.00 In Stock Used from: $5.99 In Stock

© 2011, Eugene Mirabelli. All rights reserved.

At the same time, Huckleberry Finn is one of the pillars of American literature, and it’s a shame that teachers should be prevented from teaching it, or feel uncomfortable teaching it when they are allowed, so the desire to have a cleansed version of the classic is, while misguided, understandable.  The hypocrisy and intolerance that Twain masterfully laid bare in Huckleberry Finn is the reason why it is such a powerful book, so while the word nigger has become a much more universally offensive word than when Twain used it, its casual usage in the text only serves to amplify the irony that was already there.  It’s a violent word that carries with it five hundred years of cruelty.  Twain was a committed anti-racist his entire life and if he were here with us today he might take note of the current controversy and say, “That’s exactly what I was trying to say.”

While it’s understandable that we don’t want young schoolchildren and their teachers to feel uncomfortable, hiding from our history by cleansing the text hurts us as a people and a nation even more.  It’s like modern Confederacy fetishists claiming that secession was a state’s right and it wasn’t about slavery, or Haley Barbour claiming that the racism in the Mississippi of his youth “wasn’t that bad.”

It may well be that Huckleberry Finn is not appropriate for elementary and middle school students.  It’s biting satire and irony alone require a certain level of maturity that most younger students have not yet acquired.

Later this week, we saw that schoolchildren are not the only ones being protected from the harsh truths of our history, but also the House of Representatives.  The newly elected Tea Party members in the House decided to open their session with a reading of the Constitution.  This in itself is ironic because while they have spoken of the document as if it were some divine revelation handed down from the demi-gods who founded our country, they don’t seem to understand anything that’s in it.  To avoid confronting the fact that the constitution, as successful as it has been, was in its initial form a compromised and flawed document that has required, to date, twenty-seven amendments, they chose to exclude the reading of the parts that are no longer in effect.  The most notable of these parts is the one where slave are considered three fifths of a person.  How could it be that this divine scripture could contain such an idea?  Weren’t the Framers (or was it the Founding Fathers, Tea Partiers don’t know the difference) divinely inspired and all-wise?  Or were they well-intentioned but humanly flawed men who did the best they could under difficult political and economic circumstances and were constrained by the prejudices of their age.

To ask those questions and to face the truths of our history is not to denigrate their legacy.  Instead, it is to recognize how the document they created has been used as a framework for continuously creating a more perfect union by bringing to pass things that they, in their own time, could not.

The Founding Father Fetishism of the Tea Partiers prevents them from understanding any of this and threatens their faith-based belief in our nation’s moral perfection, so they just skipped the parts that don’t fit.

This same group of Tea Partiers, who came to Washington declaring themselves “Constitutionalists” whose goal is to restore constitutional government, have decided that they need special classes on the Constitution from a Supreme Court Justice.  While I’m not against members of the legislature seeking out expert advice on constitutional matters, I find it unseemly that they have arrived in the nation’s capital as elected legislators and are asking for remedial help in doing the job they claimed they were qualified to do.

The Supreme Court Justice who will be providing these remedial classes is non other than Antonin Scalia, who was also in the news this week.  In an interview, Scalia declared that the Constitution does not provide woman (and presumably other minorities too) with protection from discrimination.  This declaration decidedly moved Scalia from the realm of just plain crazy into the realm of batshit crazy, although some might argue that he made that jump years ago with his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas.   Somehow, the equal protection clause of The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t seem to say what everyone thinks it’s said for nearly one hundred and fifty years.  As a “strict constructionist” he has argued that the “original intent” of the The Fourteenth Amendment was that it applied to the slaves who had been freed by the Civil War.  It doesn’t actually say anything like, “The provisions of this amendment only apply to slaves who have been freed by the Civil War,” so Scalia may be a strict constructionist  of an imaginary Constitution.

He furthermore argued that if women want constitutional protection, the legislature should create an amendment.  This is rich.  There was a decade long campaign back in the seventies for an Equal Rights Amendment.  It was supported by all sorts of leftwing radicals, including Gerald Ford.  The ERA was never ratified.  The legal argument that led to its defeat was that it was not necessary because the equal protection clause of The Fourteenth Amendment already provided the protections offered by the ERA.  It was a reasonable argument at the time and the wording of The Fourteenth Amendment is intentionally broad so that weasels like Scalia can’t play games by saying that because it says that this group is named, it doesn’t apply to any other group not explicitly named.

The group named in The Fourteenth Amendment is “persons.” That’s a pretty big group.  If you’re a  person, you’re protected.  Mr. Strict Constructionist seems to have decided that women are not persons.  Amazingly, Mr. Strict Constructionist also recently decided that corporations are persons.

Up is down, down is up, we are living in interesting times.  Mark Twain would be amused.  Or horrified.

Update 1/10/2011:

Jill Lepore’s article about the historic battle over constitutional interpretation at NewYorker.com.

See larger image Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (The Ignatius Critical Editions) (Paperback) By (author) Mark Twain List Price: $9.95 USD New From: $4.99 In Stock Used from: $4.89 In Stock

© 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

“Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.  They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.  They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.  Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.  They are different.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”

Roger Simon has written an incredibly brain-dead article.  Not that it’s really anything unusual for Mr. Simon or for that bastion of deep thought known as Politico.com.  The phrase “class warfare” has been getting thrown around lately as if it is some new pernicious feature of American politics, along with the idea of “wealth redistribution.”

How stupid do they think the rest of us are?  Class politics and wealth redistribution have been the fundamental components of governments, no matter what form they may take, since the beginning of civilization.  It began when the head of one clan said to the head of another clan, “Your clan my better shoes than my clan.  How about my clan growing enough food for all of us while your clan makes shoes for all of us.”  So began division of labor, the specialization of skills, and the development of science and art that has created Beethoven’s 9th, the Guttenberg press, antibiotics, The Mona Lisa, and the Lunar Module to name just a few miracles.  Along the way,  clothes needed to washed and mended, garbage needed to be collected and hauled away, children needed to educated, public buildings like schools and libraries needed to be constructed and maintained.  A society’s greatest achievements are not just the achievements of a few geniuses, they are also the achievement of the entire social and economic infrastructure supporting those geniuses.     A society’s achievements, a civilization’s achievements, are made possible by the excess value created by everyone in it, whether it comes in the form of patronage from the rich, a government subsidy, or the disposable income of ordinary working people.  The wealth of a nation is…the wealth of a nation.

It is inevitable that in any society wealth will tend to become concentrated.  Social and political structures provide a kind of organic regulator that balances the distribution of wealth among all of the contributors to a nation’s wealth.  True equality will never exist, and as the Bible says, “The poor will always be with you,” but one thing is certain. When the wealth of a nation becomes concentrated in a progressively smaller portion of the population, bad things happen:  civil unrest, revolutions, stock market crashes, and economic depressions.  As this disproportionate distribution increases, it gets reinforced by the ever-increasing influence of the very, very rich.  Somehow, this is not ever characterized as class warfare. Only when this theft of a nation’s wealth is called out by its victims is it called class warfare.

F. Scott Fitzgerald made his reputation in the 1920′s, the last time that wealth was so disproportionately distributed.  He moved in the circles of the super-rich, but wasn’t a true member of that class.  He had come from a good family whose fortunes had dwindled over time.  His success as a writer in the 1920′s brought him wealth, primarily from his short stories about the rich and privileged.   He was fascinated by the rich, but he always viewed them with a critical eye.  He is sometimes misread as celebrating the rich and their excesses, and was unfairly derided by Hemingway for it, but the truth is that his work exposes their moral corruption that lies just underneath the veil of respectability.   No character more exemplifies that than Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Unlike Mr. Simon, Fitzgerald held no illusions about the rich and was never under their spell.

There is a commonly held delusion that we are a classless society, that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can raise themselves up into the most privileged classes in our society.  There are, of course, some examples of this, but they are extremely rare.  This mythical American Dream, which makes politicians of every stripe wax poetic and tear up, is what reinforces this delusion and convinces poor and middle-class members of our society to vote against their own best interests.  Ninety-eight percent of them will never inherit a multi-million dollar estate, but if they did, they certainly wouldn’t want to be taxed.  And so, while their schools crumble and fail to educate their children, their social security trust fund gets raided, their quality of life sinks at an ever increasing rate while super-rich allocate an ever increasing share of the nation’s wealth for themselves, enabled by ignorant tools like Roger Simon.

See larger image The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $21.99 USD New From: $11.10 In Stock Used from: $3.61 In Stock Release date September 20, 1995.

See larger image The Great Gatsby (Paperback) By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald List Price: $15.00 USD New From: $6.05 In Stock Used from: $2.73 In Stock Release date September 30, 2004.

See larger image Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality That Limits Our Lives (Hardcover) By (author) Sam Pizzigati List Price: $34.95 USD New From: $31.00 In Stock Used from: $10.45 In Stock

See larger image A People's History of the United States (P.S.) (Paperback) By (author) Howard Zinn List Price: $25.00 USD New From: $12.49 In Stock Used from: $9.55 In Stock Release date November 2, 2010.

© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.