"Founding Fathers" quote of the day - and what it means for us in the present tense

We are free today substantially,  but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility.

It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.

The "Father of the Constitution", President James Madison,  cited in "The Great Quotations" by George Seldes - via Washington Monthly.

Rick Ungar adds this perspective on our current problems to Madison's quote:

Robert Reich - The 7 Biggest Economic Lies (in 2.5 minutes)

Via robertreich.org

Occupy Wall Street - the view from a "Wall Street Insider" at Big Business journal, FORBES

This commentary on the Wall Street protests from Gene Marcial is interesting primarily because it appeared on the Forbes magazine website. Forbes characterizes itself as "Information for the World's Business Leaders." Marcial wrote the "Inside Wall Street" column at Business Week for 28 years:

Surely, it’s time for the nation’s leaders to meet with the Occupy Wall Street protesters and publicly address their grievances. The country’s decision makers, most notably those in Congress, can’t simply watch idly by and wish them away, as they appear to be doing...

One of the major problems that most Americans feel is their utter sense of frustration and helplessness in the face of the mounting oppressive problems that the gasping economy and rudderless leadership in Congress have engendered. So this expanding public outcry shouldn’t be  surprising at all.

9-9-9: "Raising Cain" or just raising taxes on those who can least afford it?

"Don't condemn me because the first black one was bad."

Republican Presidential aspirant, pizza Godfather and book tour star Herman Cain has caused controversy with various remarks. He's labeled peaceful demonstrators "anti-American" because they call into question income inequality, waves of foreclosures after bailouts of banks and tax-fairness issues.

Worse, he has called African-Americans "brainwashed" because they've trended overwhelmingly toward the Democratic Party - their "plantation masters" according to Cain - since the 1960s when the GOP first ran a presidential candidate who opposed the Civil Rights Act and Republicans began eagerly embracing Dixiecrats who couldn't accept change.  In recycling that racial attack and posing as the "responsible" black man, Cain is giving cover to bigots like Rush Limbaugh who routinely smear black Democrats in the same vein.

And, while pandering to the GOP's racial polarization, Cain has the temerity to describe himself as a "real black man" - as opposed to President Obama.  That one is worthy of contempt, but no further comment.

In all of the brouhaha about Cain's rhetoric as he's rising in the GOP polls, appealing directly to the Tea Party base that is steeped in white resentment and hatred of President Obama, Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan tends to get overlooked. It's a 9% tax on income, a 9% tax on business profits and a 9% national sales tax.  Cain would entirely eliminate capital gains taxes - making even worse one of the most unfair income tax loopholes on the books.

On it's face, Cain's 9-9-9 scheme is obviously a tax break for the rich. Worse, it's a tax increase for the folks with the lowest incomes.  And as formulated it's even a bad deal for many businesses and for job creation.

The Wall Street Protests

In a stunningly on-point editorial, the New York Times gets it:

As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread from Lower Manhattan to Washington and other cities, the chattering classes keep complaining that the marchers lack a clear message and specific policy prescriptions. The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

Willful Distortion

William Galston of Brookings Institution and The New Republic on George Will's "misunderstanding" of Elizabeth Warren and modern liberalism:

"Baseball should be beyond the whims of the unwashed"

George Will and I have something in common: We were both trained in the close reading of political texts. Will recently applied his interpretive skills to a statement by Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Massachusetts. Here is what Warren said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. 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 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 [that] you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. 

After applying to Warren’s words William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith—a pyromaniac in a field of straw men, refuting propositions no one asserts—Will moves to the gravamen of his argument: Warren’s vision entails a collectivist political agenda. He tartly and uncharitably described that agenda as follows:

Annals of Class Warfare - "Look who's talking" edition!

Quote of the Day

Via Eric Alterman:

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” the great liberal jurist Louis Brandeis prophesied in the second decade of the 20th century. “But we can't have both.”

"Bernanke's Mostly Right"

Administration critic Robert Kuttner gives Federal Reserve Chair Ben Benanke pretty good marks on the substance of his testimony before Congress this past week.

I would not expect these guys could agree on ordering lunch - and while the substance of the commentary is worrisome, it's heartening to see some of the distance lessen between Bernanke and one of the administration's toughest liberal critics:

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says the economy is on the verge of another recession—“close to faltering” was his euphuism of choice in his testimony to Congress Tuesday—and there is only so much the Federal Reserve can do about it.

For once, he is mostly right.

"Krugman's Army?"

Rich Yeselson, an experienced organizer,  research coordinator at Change to Win and historian of social movements in America and Europe, commenting at Ezra Klein's WonkBlog on "Occupy Wall Street":

(T)he emergence of the Wall Street movement is a reminder that the liberal left has not in quite a few years actually driven anything like a mass social movement in this country. When Obama was elected, some people made the mistake of thinking that an election-bounded jolt of energy that conflated a charismatic candidate with a popular political vision was such a movement. Nobody thinks that anymore.

The left does have something important however: a coterie of several thousand intellectuals, academics, writers, and engaged professionals who articulate liberal public policy, generate empirical and analytical expertise through the Internet, the media, and universities, and staff the offices of advocacy groups and progressive politicians on the local and national level.

David Frum: "On the most urgent issue of the day...the GOP is seriously wrong"

I am loathe to credit former "W" Bush speech-writer David Frum - a leading proponent of the Iraq war and author of the nutty and utterly incoherent "Axis of Evil" (Iraq-Iran-North Korea) locution that signaled the cynicism and delusions of the Bush-Cheney inner circle - but increasingly Frum has come around to a relatively reasonable and chastened  conservatism that rejects the aggressive ignorance of the Tea Party Right and takes a step back from the most assertive neo-conservative expressions of global bullying as a "national security" strategy.

In a commentary entitled, paradoxically, "What Romney Gets Right", the conservative gadfly Frum acknowledges that the GOP is totally bankrupt in its economic agenda.

Frum's conclusions about the chameleon Romney are tepid at best ("the only one who has shown any degree of skepticism about the profoundly and dangerously mistaken Republican consensus"), but his indictment of Republican orthodoxy is brutal, considering it's coming from a very conservative author:

On the most urgent economic issue of the day – recovery from the Great Recession – the Republican consensus is seriously wrong.

Jon Stewart on the GOP "Front-Runner" - Mitt Romney & his dueling personalities

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The "One Percenters" - charting the economic elite

From Think Progress - The top five facts we should know about the wealthiest 1% at the pinnacle of growing U.S. income inequality:

1. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40 Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth: As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, the richest 1 percent of Americans now own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

The "Government regulations are killing jobs!" canard - Desperate claims by desperate men

The Republicans are desperate. They have no serious policy agenda in the face of our jobs crisis - other than  recycling the most stale, disreputable and evidence-free assertions about taxes and federal regulations "killing jobs," despite all evidence to the contrary.

Lingering extreme unemployment is driven by lack of consumer demand - there's not enough spending to sustain full recovery.  Businesses - small businesses in particular - are not hiring because they're not making sales. Taxes are lower than ever and government regulations have nothing to do with the extended crisis - other than regulatory failure in the financial sector helping to trigger the economic collapse three years ago.

Conservative commentator and former Reagan White House aide Bruce Bartlett, writing at NYTs Economix, takes the regulation hysterics apart and finds an empty shell of an argument lodged by opportunistic politicians totally comfortable with fabrication and misdirection:

Once more...it's "Yes, We Can!' - not "Yes, He Can!"

E.J. Dionne columnizes at WAPO:

Why hasn’t there been a Tea Party on the left? And can President Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship?

That those two questions are not asked very often is a sign of how much of the nation’s political energy has been monopolized by the right from the beginning of Obama’s term. This has skewed media coverage of almost every issue, created the impression that the president is far more liberal than he is, and turned the nation’s agenda away from progressive reform.

Annals of Class Warfare

Warren Buffett:  

"The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good...It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be."

From Protest to Policy: "Three Concrete Demands to Hold Wall Street Accountable"

 Mike Konzcal of the Roosevelt Institute:

The (Occupy Wall Street) protesters emphasize that their demands are "a process" intended to allow people to "talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies ... [and] zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination."

Since they're looking for suggestions, here are three policy changes that should be on their list of demands. There is often a conflict between demands that are specific requests versus visions of where we want to end up. These three try to do both. They are specific demands that speak to the long-term end goal of a better, more just economy.

A National Infrastructure Movement - proposed organizing strategy as the first, concrete step to "Rebuilding the Dream" (discussion draft)

I'm going to break with much of the "sturm and drang" convention of the blogosphere and, rather than register my "outrage" at events, suggest a way forward from some of the impasse and negativity - a proposal predicated on political organizing beyond the constraints and constricted expectations of electoral politics that are too-often reduced to the cynicism of "voting against" rather than "voting for."

I believe it is imperative for sensible people to offer some alternatives to the "grass-roots" (such as it is) far-right populism of the Tea Party movement that has managed to gridlock Beltway politics around the most retrograde notions, and for self-styled progressives,  liberals and, yes, concerned "moderates" to begin the difficult work of bringing the country together - beginning at the grass-roots community level - around  constructive agendas and the realization that there is more to civic action and engagement than electoral politics.

The Jobs Crisis

Mark Thoma ("Economist's View") asks, "Why isn't the unemployment crisis a national emergency?"

Fourteen million people are unemployed, long-term unemployment remains near record highs, the ratio of job seekers to job openings is 4.3 to 1, and the employment to population ratio has dropped precipitously. Even if the economy grows at a robust average of 3.5% beginning in 2013, labor markets won’t fully recover until 2017. And if average growth is only 3.0% – well within the range of possibility – it will take until 2020. In short, labor markets are in crisis and the longer the crisis persists, the more permanent and growth-inhibiting the damage becomes.

Class Warfare Alert! - The GOP's budget proposal guts skills training for unemployed job seekers

 

GOP Speaker of the House, John Boehner:  “Since the moment Americans entrusted us with the majority, our focus has been on job creation...

"Helping Americans get back to work is our number one priority..."

Think Progress reports on how this "priority" works in practice:

House Republicans yesterday released their draft budget proposal for labor, health, and human service, which in one fell swoop revives the assault on all their favorite bugaboos, including Planned Parenthood, National Public Radio, the National Labor Relations Board, and President Obama’s health care reform law. The GOP also targeted heat subsidies that prevent low-income families from freezing in the winter, and slashed education funding by $2.4 billion. The bill also eliminates the Administration’s “Race to the Top” education reform program and reduces eligibility for Pell Grants for low-income college students.

Perhaps most surprisingly for a party that claims to be focused on job creation, the GOP budget reduces funding for job training programs that give the unemployed the skills they need to find work in an ailing economy: