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FOCUS | Barbarians in Oklahoma |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Wednesday, 30 April 2014 13:15 |
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Pierce writes: "I am saying this quite deliberately. The state of Oklahoma committed an act of fucking barbarism last night."
A gurney used for executions. (photo: AP)
Barbarians in Oklahoma
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
30 April 14
 am saying this quite deliberately. The state of Oklahoma committed an act of fucking barbarism last night. It did so under the color of law, which makes every citizen of that benighted state complicit in the act of fucking barbarism. The governor of that state, a pink balloon named Mary Fallin, is a fucking barbarian. A state legislator named Mike Christian is a fucking barbarian, for reasons we will get to in a moment. Every politician in that benighted state belongs in a fucking cage this morning.
Clayton Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of three drugs in the state's new lethal injection combination was administered Tuesday evening. Three minutes later, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow. Officials later blamed a ruptured vein for the problems with the execution, which are likely to fuel more debate about the ability of states to administer lethal injections that meet the U.S. Constitution's requirement they be neither cruel nor unusual punishment.
This is only the basics of what went on. To get a real flavor of the fucking barbarism practiced by the state of Oklahoma -- Mary Fallin, Governor -- last night, you have to go to the Twitter feed of a fine AP reporter named Bailey Elise McBride, who was in the death chamber. If there ever is a Pulitzer for tweeting, Bailey Elise McBride is a stone cold lock for it. I think this is the one that is most illustrative of the act of fucking barbarism practiced by the state of Oklahoma -- Mary Fallin, Governor -- and witnessed by Bailey Elise McBride, damn fine reporter, is the one where the guy tells the people trying to kill him, "Something's wrong."
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FOCUS | Piketty Shrugged and Dashed Libertarians' Ayn Randian Fantasies |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=22800"><span class="small">Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet</span></a>
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Wednesday, 30 April 2014 11:50 |
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Parramore writes: "Libertarians have always been flummoxed by inequality, tending either to deny that it's a problem or pretend that the invisible hand of the market will wave a magic wand to cure it."
French economist Thomas Piketty's new book shatters Ayn Rands economic myths. (photo collage: RSN)
Piketty Shrugged and Dashed Libertarians' Ayn Randian Fantasies
By Lynn Stuart Parramore, AlterNet
30 April 14
"Capital in the 21st Century" reveals once and for all that the invisible hand of the market can't solve inequality
 ibertarians have always been flummoxed by inequality, tending either to deny that it’s a problem or pretend that the invisible hand of the market will wave a magic wand to cure it. Then everybody gets properly rewarded for what he or she does with brains and effort, and things are peachy keen.
Except that they aren’t, as exhaustively demonstrated by French economist Thomas Piketty, whose 700-page treatise on the long-term trends in inequality, Capital In the 21st Century, has blown up libertarian fantasies one by one.
To understand the libertarian view of inequality, let’s turn to Milton Friedman, one of America’s most famous and influential makers of free market mythology. Friedman decreed that economic policy should focus on freedom, and not equality.
If we could do that, he promised, we’d not only get freedom and efficiency, but more equality as a natural byproduct. Libertarians who took the lessons from his books, like Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980), bought into the notion that capitalism naturally led to less inequality.
Basically, the lessons boiled down to this: Some degree of inequality is both unavoidable and desirable in a free market, and income inequality in the U.S. isn’t very pronounced, anyway. Libertarians starting with these ideas tend to reject any government intervention meant to decrease inequality, claiming that such plans make people lazy and that they don’t work, anyway. Things like progressive income taxes, minimum wage laws and social safety nets make most libertarians very unhappy.
Uncle Milty put it like this:
“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.… On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”
Well, that turns out to be spectacularly, jaw-droppingly, head-scratchingly wrong. The U.S. is now a stunningly unequal society, with wealth piling up at the top so fast that an entire movement, Occupy Wall Street, sprung up to decry it with the catchphrase “We are the 99%.”
How did libertarians get it all so backwards? Well, as Piketty points out, people like Milton Friedman were writing at a time when inequality was indeed less pronounced in the U.S. than it had been in previous eras. But they mistook this happy state of affairs as the magic of capitalism. Actually, it wasn’t the magic of capitalism that reduced inequality during a brief, halcyon period after the New Deal and WWII. It was the forces of various economic shocks plus policies our government put in place to respond to them that changed America from a top-heavy society in the Gilded Age to something more egalitarian in the post-war years.
As you’ll recall, if you watched the movie Titanic, the U.S. had a class of rentiers (rich people who live off property and investments) in the early part of the 20th century who hailed from places like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They were just as nasty and rapacious as their European counterparts, only there weren’t quite so many of them and their wealth was not quite as concentrated (the Southern rentiers had been wiped out by the Civil War).
The fortunes of these rentiers were not shock-proof: If you remember Hockney, the baddie in James Cameron’s film, he survives the Titanic but not the Great Crash of ’29, when he loses his money and offs himself. The Great Depression got rid of some of the extreme wealth concentration in America, and later the wealthy got hit with substantial tax shocks imposed by the federal government in the 1930s and ’40s. The American rentier class wasn’t really vaporized the way it was in Europe, where the effects of the two world wars were much more pronounced, but it took a hit. That opened up the playing field and gave people more of a chance to rise on the rungs of the economic ladder through talent and work.
After the Great Depression, inequality decreased in America, as New Deal investment and education programs, government intervention in wages, the rise of unions, and other factors worked to give many more people a chance for success. Inequality reached its lowest ebb between 1950 and 1980. If you were looking at the U.S. during that time, it seemed like a pretty egalitarian place to be (though blacks, Hispanics, and many women would disagree).
As Piketty notes, people like Milton Friedman, an academic economist, were doing rather well in the economy, likely sitting in the top 10 percent income level, and to them, the economy appeared to be doing just fine and rewarding talents and merits very nicely. But the Friedmans weren’t paying enough attention to how the folks on the rungs above them, particularly the one percent and even more so the .01 percent, were beginning to climb into the stratosphere. The people doing that climbing were mostly not academic economists, or lawyers, or doctors. They were managers of large firms who had begun to award themselves very prodigious salaries.
This phenomenon really got going after 1980, when wealth started flowing in vast quantities from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top 10 percent. By 1987, Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan had taken over as head of the Federal Reserve, and free market fever was unleashed upon America. People in U.S. business schools started reading Ayn Rand’s kooky novels as if they were serious economic treatises and hailing the free market as the only path to progress. John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged(1957), captured the imaginations of young students like Paul Ryan, who worshipped Galt as a superman who could rise to the top through his vision, merit and heroic efforts. Galt became the prototype of the kind of “supermanager” these business schools were supposed to crank out.
Since the ‘80s, the top salaries and pay packages awarded to executives of the largest companies and financial firms in the U.S. have reached spectacular heights. This, coupled with low growth and stagnation of wages for the vast majority of workers, has meant growing inequality. As income from labor gets more and more unequal, income from capital starts to play a bigger role. By the time you get to the .01 percent, virtually all your income comes from capital—stuff like dividends and capital gains. That’s when wealth (what you have) starts to matter more than income (what you earn).
Wealth gathering at the top creates all sorts of problems. Some of these elites will hoard their wealth and fail to do anything productive with it. Others channel it into harmful activities like speculation, which can throw the economy out of whack. Some increase their wealth by preying on the less well-off. As inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go into debt. The economy gets destabilized. (Piketty, and many other economists, count the increase in inequality as one of the reasons the economy blew up in 2007-’08.)
By the time you get to 2010, U.S. inequality, according to Piketty’s data, is quantitavely as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. He predicts that inherited property is going to start to matter more and more in the U.S. as the supermanagers, the Jamie Dimons and so on, bequeath their gigantic hordes of money to their children.
The ironic twist is this: The reason a person like the fictional John Galt would be able to rise from humble beginnings in the 1950s is because the Gilded Age rentiers lost large chunks of their wealth through the shocks the Great Depression and the deliberate government policies that came in its wake, thus loosening their stranglehold on the economy and society. Galt is able to make his fortune precisely because he lives in a society that isn’t dominated by extreme concentrated wealth and dynasties. Yet the logical outcome of an economy in which there is no attempt made to limit the size of fortunes and promote greater equality is a place in which the most likely way John Galt can make a fortune is to marry an heiress. So it was in the Gilded Age. So it may be very soon in America.
Which brings us back to Friedman’s view that people naturally get what they deserve, that reward is based on talent. Well, clearly in the case of inherited property, reward is not based on talent, but membership in the Lucky Sperm Club (or marriage into it). That made Uncle Milty a little bit uncomfortable, but he just huffed that life is not fair, and we shouldn’t think it any more unjust that one person is born with mathematical genius as the other is born with a fortune. What’s the difference?
Actually, there is a very big difference. It is the particular rules governing society that determine who amasses a fortune and what part of that fortune is passed on to heirs. The wrong-headed policies promoted by libertarians and their ilk, who hate any form of tax on the rich, such as inheritance taxes, have ensured that big fortunes in America are getting bigger, and they will play a much more prominent role in the direction of our society and economy if we continue on the present path.
What we are headed for, after several decades of free market mania, is superinequality, possibly such as the world has never seen. In this world, more and more wealth will be gained off the backs of the 99 percent, and less and less will be earned through hard work.
Which essentially means freedom for the rich, and no one else.
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The Citigroup Clique |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27766"><span class="small">Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 30 April 2014 09:32 |
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Warren writes: "Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington's corridors of power, but Citi has risen above the others."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (photo: The Boston Herald)
The Citigroup Clique
By Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Reader Supported News
30 April 14
 oday, I cast my vote on the Senate Banking Committee for Stanley Fischer to serve in the No. 2 position at the U.S. Federal Reserve. I asked Fischer tough questions - in person, at his nomination hearing, and in writing - and I have been impressed with the depth of his knowledge and experience.
But I cast my vote reluctantly because of my growing frustration over the concentration of people with ties to the megabank Citigroup in senior government positions.
In recent years, Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington's corridors of power, but Citi has risen above the others in exercising a tight grip over the Democratic Party's economic policymaking apparatus. Fischer, after all, is just the latest Citi alumnus to be tapped for a high-level government position. Starting with Robert Rubin - a former Citi CEO - three of the last four Treasury secretaries under Democratic presidents have had Citigroup affiliations before or after their Treasury service. (The fourth was offered, but declined, Citigroup's CEO position.) Directors of the National Economic Council and Office of Management and Budget, as well as our current U.S. trade representative, also have had strong ties to Citigroup.
No one doubts that there are smart, hard-working people at Citigroup and elsewhere in the financial industry. When I worked to set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I interviewed, hired and worked alongside many people with private-sector experience. Private-sector experience can be valuable and should not disqualify someone from serving in the upper levels of government.
But there is danger anytime the key economic positions in our government fall under the control of a single tight-knit group. Old ideas can stay around long after they're useful, and new ideas don't get a fair hearing. We learned about the harms of groupthink in economic policymaking the hard way - first with the deregulation of the banking industry in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by the no-strings-attached bank bailouts in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently with the anemic efforts to help homeowners who were systematically cheated by financial giants.
The power of a tight group of insiders can also echo through the government in subtle ways. No one likes to ignore telephone calls from former colleagues, and no one likes to advance policies that could hurt future employers. Relationships matter, and anyone who doubts that Wall Street's outsized influence in Washington has watered down our government's approach toward still-too big-to-fail banks has their eyes deliberately closed.
Small, tight-knit groups consolidate their power through hiring. Too many people get jobs based on who they know - not what they know. And in too many cases, the group in power is confident that not just insiders, but their insiders, are best for the key jobs. The Citigroup clique has produced some effective public servants, but it has crowded out too many others who might have brought a different perspective to their service. It is bad for the country when so many top officials and advisers just happen to be part of their small club and so many others happen to be unqualified or the "wrong fit."
There are experienced and innovative people throughout the private and public sectors who are more than qualified for top economic positions in government. It defies probability that so many of the very best people all happened to have had high paying jobs on Wall Street, let alone at Citigroup in particular. When former Citigroup officials land top positions in government and former senior government officials land top positions at Citigroup time and again, Americans have good reason to question whether the interests of the people - or the big banks - is paramount.
Conflict-of-interest rules can help, but the administration needs to get serious about appointing top officials with a broader mix of career backgrounds, relationships and worldviews. That means resisting pressure to pick people with big bank ties for so many top economic positions when plenty of other companies and industries play critical roles in the economy as well.
For too long, the titans of Wall Street succeeded in pushing government policies that made the megabanks rich beyond imagination, while leaving working families to struggle from payday to payday. Many Republicans openly acknowledge their ties to Wall Street, but Democrats have campaigned on an alternative approach focusing on expanding opportunities and leveling the playing field for the middle class. Democrats' slogans have won some elections, but once in power, Democratic administrations have too often stacked top positions in government with people close to Wall Street. Stanley Fischer is a good man and has earned my respect, but this is a real and growing problem. If the big banks can seize both parties, then the Democrats-and the country-lose the central economic argument that government should work for the people, not just for the rich and powerful.
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Tim Carpenter's Politics of Radical Inclusion: In the Streets and in the Polling Booth |
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Wednesday, 30 April 2014 09:09 |
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Nichols writes: "Tim Carpenter never lost faith in the very real prospect of a very radical change for the better."
Tim Carpenter founded Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). (photo: unknown)
Tim Carpenter's Politics of Radical Inclusion: In the Streets and in the Polling Booth
By John Nichols, The Nation
30 April 14
im Carpenter never lost faith in the very real prospect of a very radical change for the better. And he never lost his organizer’s certainty that the tipping point that would make the change was just a few more phone calls, a few more rallies, a few more campaigns away.
So he kept on organizing.
To the last.
Carpenter, the lifelong social and economic justice campaigner who nurtured Progressive Democrats of America from its founding a decade ago into a national movement, died Monday at age 55 after a long battle with cancer.
Not many hours before I learned that he had passed, Tim was on the phone with me, running through the latest numbers from a national petition drive he and PDA had organized to urge Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to seek the presidency. They were over 10,500. A few hours after the call, he emailed me, with more numbers. They were over 11,000. That was typical Tim. His enthusiasm for politics was immeasurable, and infectious.
But Tim’s was never a typical politics. He knew the drill: he had been at the side of presidential candidates, developed winning electoral strategies and helped to organize movements around every essential issue of the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush (again) and Obama eras. But Tim was always about something more; he was never satisfied with an election victory, or a legislative success; he wanted to transform politics because he wanted to transform America into a land that realized what he believed was an irrevocable promise of liberty and justice for all.
To achieve that end, Tim knew it was necessary to transform a too-often centrist, too-frequently compromised Democratic party into a dramatically more militant and more meaningful organization than it has been for a very long time. Mixing memories of the New Deal with elements of the 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements, linking the vision of the Rainbow Coalition with the new energy of fast-food and retail workers demanding a $15 minimum wage, Tim sought to define and achieve what one of his heroes, author and Democratic Socialists of America chair Michael Harrington, described as “the left wing of the possible.”
Tim refused to compromise with politics as usual. Yet, he refused just as ardently to be pushed to the margins. He waded into the middle of every new fight, grabbed a stack of precinct lists, distributed them to the activists he’d brought along in that beat-up car with Bob Dylan blasting on the stereo, and headed for the doors shouting, “Teamwork!”
“The Progressive movement is driven by people, but it is only successful because of people like Tim Carpenter,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, a PDA board member who got it right when he said, “Tim showed the kind of determination and courage that was contagious. His passionate idealism was matched only by his inexhaustible commitment to making those dreams a reality.”
Combining his encyclopedic knowledge of movement history and electoral strategy with the knowing optimism of one who had actually bent the long arc of history toward justice, Tim embraced an “inside-outside strategy” that was designed to go around the party elites and link insurgent campaigns to grassroots movements.
“In the polling booth and in the streets” was his vision, and if that meant breaking with the party establishment and aligning with the demonstrators outside the party convention, or outside the White House of a Democratic president, so be it. The principles were the point, and while Tim could join a coalition with folks who might not share every one of his positions, he believed his mission was to pull that coalition to the left.
Tim was a Democrat – to the frustration of his Green, Socialist and social Libertarian friends – but he was never a member of the Democratic Party establishment. He was the thorn in its side, declaring, “I’m not satisfied with the party as it is. I want the party as it should be.”
Tim cut his teeth on campaigns that recognized the connection between transforming politics and transforming the country: as an kid working “behind the Orange Curtain” (in then hyper-conservative Orange County) for George McGovern in 1972 and for the remarkable radical intervention that was Tom Hayden’s 1976 U.S. Senate bid. Tim was a trusted aide to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1988 “Rainbow Coalition” run for the presidency, an inner-circle strategist for Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential run (addressing that year's Democratic National Convention and urging delegates to "Save Our Party" from ideological compromises and corporate influence), a key figure in Dennis Kucinich’s anti-war presidential campaign of 2004.
Tim worked on plenty of campaigns that lost – as well as winning campaigns such as those of Congresswoman Donna Edwards, D-Maryland, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and, to his immense delight, Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts – but he didn’t count wins and losses. He was interested in movement building. Drawing together veterans of the 2004 Kucinich and Howard Dean campaigns, Progressive Democrats of America grew, with Tim as its national director, into a network of activists and elected officials on the left of the party.
At the core of the mission was Tim's vision of a movement-guided politics.
It was the same vision that shaped Tim's grassroots activism, as a Catholic Worker advocate for the homeless who slept on the streets of Santa Ana to challenge police harassment; as an organizer of the anti-nuclear Alliance for Survival who counted musician-activists Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt as friends and comrades; as an organizer and champion of groups that opposed not just wars but the overreach of a military-industrial complex -- from United for Peace and Justice to Democrats for Peace Conversion. To begin to list Tim’s causes, his victories and his ongoing struggles would take days – or weeks if Tim was still telling the stories. But suffice it to say that, for more than four decades, he was there – behind the scenes, sleeping on the floor, risking arrest, flying in with the rock stars, counseling the presidential candidates, remembering the name of every son and daughter of every activist, making the money pitch, organizing, always organizing.
The Nation named Tim as its "Progressive Activist of the Year" some years back. And it was far from the only honor accorded him. When Congressman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who is the senior progressive in Congress and arguably in America politics, learned that Tim was sick, he told the U.S. House, “Tim has been indefatigable in pressing forward progressive ideals to help strengthen our American democracy. He has been in the forefront of progressive causes, from promoting nuclear disarmament to fighting to abolish the death penalty to establishing health care as a human right, as well as securing voting rights and jobs for all."
Around the same time, Tim’s daughter ran up to him with an envelope from the White House that had arrived in the mailbox of the family’s Florence, Massachusetts, home. When they opened it, there was a note from President Obama, wishing Tim well while celebrating his resilience.
That was how most of us took the news that Tim was ailing. Knowing he had beaten cancer before, we wanted to believe that Tim was unstoppable. When he warned “it’s pretty serious this time,” we paid attention to his actions, not his words. Because even as he made the rounds of doctors and hospitals, treatments and hospice preparations, he was still on the phone, still texting, still emailing, still organizing.
Tim was determined that Progressive Democrats of America, a group founded when Democrats were not doing enough to oppose the war in Iraq or to advance a “Medicare for All’ reform of a broken health-care system – PDA's slogan: “Healthcare Not Warfare” – would keep embracing new issues: amending the U.S. Constitution to end the buying of elections by billionaires and corporations, getting Washington to take seriously the threat of climate change, blocking "Fast Track" and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Tim believed every battle could be won, by building bigger coalitions, by getting more people engaged.
Tim had a remarkable gift for what actress and PDA advisory board chair Mimi Kennedy referred to as “radical inclusivity.” He was always welcoming young activists into the fold, flying off to meet with folks who might form a new PDA chapter, asking people to tell him what new issues they were working on -- and then asking how he could help. He had a faith that the change was going to come: a faith born in having won and having lost but never having surrendered the organizer’s dream of a movement that would be unstoppable.
We were in California last year and Tim asked a crowd to:
Help us grow this movement. Help us to put 435 activists in every congressional office, and another 100 activists in every Senate office to say: Not only is it time to end this war, not only is it time to bring about health care as a human right, but it’s time for our community to stop turning our back on those who so desperately need us. To stop talking just about the middle class… It’s time to talk about the 50 million Americans who are poor.
A politics that speaks not only for the middle class but for the poor – proudly, energetically, radically – jumps boundaries that many top Democrats still avoid. But that was what Tim Carpenter wanted.
"It's our responsibility to build that movement, your responsibility, my responsibility," Tim said. even as he warned, “I may not be with all of you when you are out there in those streets, in those struggles, but I will be with you in spirit.”
If we did not fully understand then, we do now.
Tim Carpenter was right. The building of the politics he wanted -- more powerful than any party or politician -- is now our responsibility. But Tim is with us in spirit, still telling us that the key is not money or television ads, not caution or compromise. It's a passion for justice. It's a belief that peace is possible. And, like Tim said, it's "Teamwork!"
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