On tonight’s The Rachel Maddow Show, David Axelrod explained that everything Obama has ever done or ever will again do is just right. We actual liberals just don’t get it. We don’t understand the bigger issues that Serious Democrats understand. We don’t understand that “free” trade agreements are great because they make rich people even more rich, even though they don’t help the poor and middle class anywhere. We don’t understand that the loss of manufacturing jobs is just a sign of globalization and there is nothing we can do so we ought to be happy with those minimum wage service jobs. We don’t understand that what is good for GE, Exxon, and GM is good for America.
In other words: we don’t understand that the Republicans are right about all the economic issues.
Axelrod patiently explained that we just have to do something about Social Security because Medicare is in trouble. He also explains that, sure, he would be for raising the payroll tax cap. That ought to be part of the mix. That was his word: part. Because, you know, we have to be reasonable about this. For every dollar that a rich man pays, we need to take a dollar away from a poor man. Not doing that might, I don’t know, hurt the feelings of the Republicans. Off course, Axelrod was quick to note that a payroll tax increase will never happen. Rachel Maddow pushed back on him pretty hard; it was nice to see. And it even made Axelrod backpedal a bit.
And maybe that’s why he never got around to saying that liberals are fucking retarded. Maybe that’s why he’s not major of Chicago.
It astounds me that guys like Axelrod can’t figure out some simple economic math — like how most of every dollar government gives to the poor man is going to be spent, and most of every extra dollar allotted to the rich man is going to be hoarded.
They don’t call it "hoarded." They call it "invested." But "invest" means to become vested in something; to take a risk getting involved with a venture that may fail. Which is not what the rich do. In essence, they run a financial-services casino, where lower-rung investors can take their chances at a big payout. But the house always wins. And when the shit hits the fan, they send Joe Pesci to break your kneecaps.
I’ve been struggling with Chrystia Freeland’s "Plutocrats" lately. Not because it’s difficult or poorly written, but because every other page makes me want to gnaw off my own elbow. Freeland repeats the mantra that these people work "very hard" and thus feel they aren’t as undeserving as old-school lazy spoiled rich kids. And no doubt they put in long hours. Yet the people who make the gizmos and gadgets and pay $50 bank fees for getting a check canceled work longer, harder hours! The money at the top comes from ripping them off, either their labor or their far dearer savings.
In a bit that made me think of this site, Freeland mentions how "the international conference circuit" makes up "the real community life" of these assholes. Think TED, Davos, etc. "We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how else do you indicate you’re part of the elite?", says one turdburger (p. 67).
Aside from the fact that they DO have castles and noble titles (these things just go under different names in their world), those conferences illustrate the sheer arrogance of these people. They’re almost all thieves, but they think of themselves as "idea makers."
There’s a bizarre historical irony at the bottom of all this — it’s a real doozy. The new rich pride themselves on being self-made men, not simply inheritors of wealth like the people who poo-poohed their ideas when they were rising through the ranks.
OK — but where did the wealth of the inheritor class come from? Mostly, it was from real innovations. The Rockefellers and Carnegies and such, the scions of America’s old elite, actually saw opportunities in rail, in steel and oil, that others didn’t see. They cleverly cornered those markets, brutally squashed competitors, colluded to keep profits high and labor/consumers fucked, and bought politicians to prevent government from interfering with their monopolies. (The Supreme Court was especially corrupt during this period, and many of its rulings are still canonical.)
Eventually, all of these innovations DID massively improve the standard of living for most Americans — once government broke the old elite’s stranglehold on how those innovations were to be employed. The benefit they provided enriched this country, and while the robber barons kicked and screamed about it, they ended up keeping all their old profits. They founded families that intermarried incestuously, the inheritance kids, the stodgy investment-fund managers who left the office at 2PM to play golf whom today’s breed of rich so resented.
Today’s rich used what already existed — money they made working for old money, Pentagon-developed technology — to make fortunes by finding ways to employ these tools in the oldest old-guard fashion. They cornered markets, crushed competitors, fucked labor/consumers, and bought politicians to prevent democracy from stopping them. It’s exactly the robber-baron model. The new rich even jealously fight to maintain exclusive privileges for their kids (the best schools, the lowest taxes, and so on), guaranteeing that their offspring will be the very privileged rat-bastard numbskulls they call themselves "innovators" for having outsmarted before.
There’s a lesson to be learned from all this. If someone finds a new way to make money, thank them, allow them to keep what they made in the process — and then don’t allow them to have any more control of the idea or resource, ever again. All the TED/Davos conferences in the world aren’t going to produce a whit of genius. (The real innovators now are the Bakers and Stiglitzs who aren’t invited.)
And tax their children enough to make them actually work for a living. End of rant (but for once, I’m actually pleased with this one.)
Nice, except for the use of the f word, why is it that on t.v. swear words are beeped out, but not when reading online?
I also imagine the use of the r word would also rankle some people.
But thanks for the article. If you don’t point out these things, and standing up for us, nobody will. Keep holding up that candle in the dark.
@Mary – I am often accused of being oblique, so perhaps I should have clarified. The reason "fucking retarded" is used is that Rahm Emanuel famously said that about liberals.
I think bleeping and constructions like "f***ing" are simply ridiculous. In general, we’re pretty free with the expletives around here. But I will give it further thought.
Your take on [i]Plutocrats[/i] is almost exactly mine:
http://franklycurious.com/index.php?itemid=3637
Part of the problem with the TED crowd getting excited about Baker or Stiglitz or even Krugman is that these guys aren’t offering "new and exciting" ideas. They are all pushing the fundamentals that 20 years ago, I thought we all knew. The TED crowd doesn’t want to hear that because they don’t want to be told that the problem is simple but big. They want complex but small.
The issue with giving money to rich people is simply that there are very few places to invest. That’s why 10 year bonds are selling at [i]less[/i] than the inflation rate. When the economy is booming again, it might make sense to give the rich more money. But certainly not now.
That just made me think. A lot of people are into this idea of giving homeless people a food certificate (or some such) rather than money, because they don’t want them using their charity for booze or dope. (I don’t actually believe in this; charity is not treating a man as if he were a child.) Well, why doesn’t the government do the same thing with the rich? "You want more money? What are you going to do with it?" Because the truth is that right now they do [i]not[/i] know what to do with it. BTW: I thought the same thing about the bank bailouts.
@Frank — "Food certificates" are essentially food stamps. I recall my mother describing what she went through applying for food stamps the first time our family went broke and my father, too mentally ill to leave his bed or shave or not pee himself, was incapable of providing an income (while my mom had never worked before — she would eventually.) She said the mandatory class on "How To Budget!" or some such was the most insulting thing she’d ever sat through. The problem wasn’t budgeting, it was no bleeping income.
I like your idea — if the super-rich want tax breaks, we should tie those tax breaks to actual real-life job creation and innovation which benefits someone besides themselves. Rescind the tax breaks if they fail to do so. They talk, all the time, about how "the market" rewards genius with money and penalizes failure — why shouldn’t our tax code treat them the same way? (And it wouldn’t be hard to develop ways to measure how their tax breaks benefitted society as a whole, a lot of scholars work on studies like that.)
I missed your "Plutocrats" review, it’s a good one. I only requested the book because she was on Bill Moyers in the same episode he had Taibbi. And there are some similarities between the two. Both do respect the smarts and grasp of detail the people they talk to possess. (As I respect those same qualities in a good insurance analyst or schoolteacher.) Taibbi, though, is talking to the (relatively) honest financial workers — the ones mad as hell that they are being outgunned by the cheaters. Freeman’s talking to the near-top of the dungpile.
She seems to buy the notion that what they do is damnably clever and represents The Future. However, the best parts of her book (I’m only halfway through) are where she compares the new rich to the jerkholes of past eras. Those people thought themselves the future, too, and as it turned out we were all better off without their cornering the market on power.
Incidentally I’d never read much Krugman until recently, and while I’m glad he’s on the side of the angels, it seems he wasn’t always so heavenly (no doubt why he had a NYT column.) William Greider nicely dealt with Krugman in a recent "Nation" piece:
http://www.thenation.com/article/173593/why-was-paul-krugman-so-wrong
REALLY nicely, considering how snide Krugman was to Grieder’s writing. The article is worth a checkout.