UP@NIGHT

Student Debt from 1999 to 2011,  from The Atlantic, August 2011

Today the Republicans in the Senate blocked passage of a bill to prevent the doubling of the interest rate on Stafford Student Loans.  Here is a brief excerpt from today’s NY Times on the topic:

Republicans said they wanted to extend Democratic legislation passed in 2007 that temporarily reduced interest rates for the low-or middle-income undergraduates who receive subsidized Stafford loans to 3.4 percent from 6.8 percent.

But they oppose the Senate Democrats’ proposal to pay for a one-year extension by changing tax law that currently allows some wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying Social Security and Medicare taxes by classifying their pay as dividends, not cash income.

And why do they oppose the proposal?  Because closing these loopholes will raise taxes on people who allegedly create jobs.  In other words, by closing these loopholes in Social Security and Medicare we will slow the recovery.  I kid you not.  This is actually the Republican position.

“They want to raise taxes on people who are creating jobs when we are still recovering from the greatest recession since the Great Depression,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, who instead wanted to pay for it by eliminating a preventive health care fund in President Obama’s health care law.

This is such palpable nonsense it is hard to believe that anyone can say it with a straight face.  Right, closing loopholes for wealthy folks on Social Security and Medicare is going to slow down the engine of economic growth.

I realize that I am venting here but it seems to me that the Republicans on taxes have either become ideological fanatics, who simply can’t see that the evidence is not on their side.  Or they are absolutely committed to protecting the wealth of their donor base at all costs to the country.   Or perhaps undermining Obama’s health care initiative is such a priority they will give any excuse.  Or all of the above.

In any case, this points to an even more serious problem.  Extreme differences in income are seriously problematic on numerous levels for democratic societies.  The indebtedness of students is one piece of the puzzle of the ever increasing inequality bubble in America.   We can go on like this for several more years, I suppose.  Perhaps decades.  But this is no way to ensure the flourishing of this society over the long term.  Our children, and our children’s children, will pay for this fanatical pursuit of a form of “free” market capitalism that is simply out of date in the twenty-first century.

Charts from Huff Post, 6/5/11

Diogenes searches for an honest man     &   Sean Spicer, a man who will not end Diogenes’s search

Misrepresenting a person’s words or actions in order to score a political point is a form of lying.  Of course we know that political ads do this sort of thing regularly.  It’s wrong but no one can do much to stop it.   And there appears to be no limit to how far political operatives are willing to go, for example, distorting the presentation of a lawyer arguing a case before the Supreme Court.   Here is an excerpt from a recently published article from Bloomberg, “Republicans Tampered With Court Audio in Obama Attack Ad.”

A Republican Party Internet advertisement uses altered audio from U.S. Supreme Court (1000L) oral arguments to attack President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

In the web ad circulated yesterday, the Republican National Committee excerpts the opening seconds of the March 27 presentation of Obama’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, in which he is heard struggling for words and twice stopping to drink water.

Obamacare,” the ad concludes, in words shown against a photograph of the high court. “It’s a tough sell.”

A review of a transcript and recordings of those moments shows that Verrilli took a sip of water just once, paused for a much briefer period, and completed his thought, rather than stuttering and trailing off as heard in the edited version.

The ad marks a blurring of the line between the law and politics, in which the nation’s highest court — and the justices and lawyers who decide and argue cases — are becoming fodder for Republicans’ and Democrats’ arguments over the validity of the president’s signature domestic legislative achievement.

RNC Communications Director Sean Spicer said the video was a “mash-up” condensing and splicing together several separate pauses and stutters by Verrilli during the first two minutes of his argument, produced to illustrate how much difficulty he had had defending the health-care law.

“Are there multiple clips in that video? Yes,” Spicer said. “The point was that he continually had to stop because he was having trouble making the case for why Obamacare was valid.”

The Bloomberg piece goes on to say,

Recordings of the court proceedings reviewed by Bloomberg News reveal that the audio has been edited. While Verrilli paused once to drink water during the opening moments of his presentation, he stopped talking for only a few seconds before continuing with his argument. In the RNC ad, he pauses for about 20 seconds, coughs, sips water and stutters.

Just think about Spicer’s defense of his ad.  It was a “mash up,” as if this is some sort of justification for manipulating the historical record.  One can easily imagine Spicer saying, “Hey, all we were doing was making Verrilli appear to be falling over his own words by changing the timing and length of his pauses and stutters.  What’s the big deal?  He should have been stuttering given what he was defending.  If I think that an opponent shouldn’t be able to make a clear argument, what’s the problem in making him appear as if he can’t?”

We are in serious trouble.  A democracy can only take so much distortion from propagandists representing major political parities– with huge sums of money to finance their machinations.  It’s bound to lead to boundless cynicism.  People will just tune out, turn off, and drop out.  But perhaps that’s ultimately the goal of the game: a population so fatigued by a system that leaves them faceless and impotent they will just let the “professionals” run the show.  Men like Sean Spicer, who like their ties with power knots.

A Collision (NASA, THE  HUBBLE)

After a hiatus, UP@NIGHT returns with a BIG BANG.  Specifically, a post on The Big Bang Theory earlier today.

In the coming months, especially as the election draws near, posts will come fast and with fury.   (Ok, maybe not so fast and perhaps not too furious.  But at least pretty often and mildly agitated.)   And not just on politics.  There will be, for example,  popular culture, music, satire, cultural criticism, and even some philosophy (my day job).

If you are new to UP@NIGHT, know that some of the most reliable predictions on the 2008 election were made here.   Really.  (See the the site’s archive.)   Also, if you wondered where the Spock/Obama meme began, UP@NIGHT was the first to have a post dedicated to the topic, as far as this blogger can discover. “Obama, Spock, and the New Star Trek Generation.”

Enjoy (and comment soon)!

International Pillow Fight Day

Well, now we have it.  As the ad below highlights, Romney thinks that corporations are people.   They are not.   They cannot vote.  They cannot serve in the military.  They cannot feel pain.  And they are treated quite differently in terms of taxes, etc., etc.

What Romney seems to want to suggest is that people make up and benefit from corporations.   And this is precisely the problem.  The biggest benefit from corporations, money, has become so concentrated in the hands of a few that it is harder and harder to see these legal fictions as responsible players.   And people are angry about this.

I believe that we need a collective venting of the anger.  I propose a pillow fight.  But given the vast disparities in power and wealth, I suggest that the sides be picked in the following fashion:  the pay of workers vs. the pay of CEO’s at the largest U.S. companies.  In 1980 one survey showed it was 42 to 1.   Another in 2010, 343 to 1 (based on the median U.S. worker pay).

So I say we match 100 CEO’s from the largest companies against 34,300 of their workers.  Each will be supplied with identical pillows.

Further, I request that the Colbert Super-PAC (Making a better Tomorrow, Tomorrow) fund the event.  We will need a rather large stadium.  (Colbert this is a challenge.  I hope you are man enough to respond.)

As readers of UP@NIGHT may know from a previous blog, “The Unpatriotic Corporation,” we here at UP@NIGHT think little of B of A.  It’s a scandal that its name suggests that it is somehow affiliated with our country.   Yesterday we learned that AIG is suing Bank of America.  Here is the beginning of how this event was reported in the NY Times.

The American International Group sued Bank of America on Monday over hundreds of mortgage-backed securities, adding to the surge of investors seeking compensation for the troubled mortgages that led to the financial crisis.

The suit seeks to recover more than $10 billion in losses on $28 billion of investments, in possibly the largest mortgage-security-related action filed by a single investor.

It claims that Bank of America and its Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial units misrepresented the quality of the mortgages placed in securities and sold to investors, according to three people with knowledge of the complaint.

This helped make my day in the middle of Monday’s crash.  But to really top it off, as this report from Stewart and Co. reveals, B of A was foreclosed on by a couple of ordinary American citizens.  It doesn’t get much better in these difficult times.

With the debt deal done, here is a statement made yesterday by Jim Messina, a senior political adviser to the president, as reported in The New York Times, August 2nd.

But Jim Messina, the manager of the president’s re-election bid, said the discord among Democrats in Washington did not reflect what campaign officials were hearing from rank-and-file supporters of the president through nightly telephone calls and door-knocking.

And here are comments from Plouffe, Obama’s top campaign strategist, same piece.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm, and I don’t see anything as contentious as this coming down the pike in terms of an intraparty situation,” said David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the president. “There will be a unified, motivated and very aggressive Democratic Party supporting the president next year.”

Just tell me it ain’t so, Joe (Biden)…..Is this really the line that Obama’s team is going to take: Democrats aren’t that unhappy with the debt deal and there isn’t any deep frustration?  It’s only Washington Dems who are pulling their hair out?  Heaven forbid!!  This could be the beginning of the end if they really believe this.  And if it is just a cover, it’s lame.  There is a real problem “out there.”  They need to address it.

Much more to the point were comments by Tom Strickland, found in the same article.

“There are parts of the base that are discouraged,” Ted Strickland, a former Democratic governor of Ohio, said in an interview. “I don’t know that it’s the result of any personal animosity toward the president, but going forward it’s going to be important for him to inspire us, lead us, challenge us and be a real leader.”

This is a, “I told you so” blog.   I have been arguing here and in other venues that Obama is a philosophical pragmatist and not just a political one.  At his press conference yesterday, in which he defended his compromise with the Republicans over taxes, he directly confronted a question about his core values.  He specifically placed his values in a wider framework, one that is clearly congenial to philosophical pragmatism.

Why is this important?  We need to understand the man if we are going to be able to work effectively for change.   Obama has a set of values that one might call “progressive” (and other values that might be termed “moderate” or even mildly conservative).   He is going to act on his (mostly) progressive views within a broader framework, which is his commitment to philosophical pragmatism.  This is not a sell out.  It is not a weakness in itself.  It is different from what we have seen in quite some time.   (This is NOT merely Bill Clinton’s political pragmatism, for example.)  Listen to how Obama defends his initiatives by citing the history of social security in the clip below. There is passion here.  And not the passion of someone defending a merely expedient outcome.  His commitment to pragmatism may often make him appear more conservative than he actually is.  For him, it’s about getting the best outcomes over the long term.  This is not to say that he hasn’t made tactical errors or errors in judgment and timing.  He certainly has.  It’s only to place his specific values in a broader context.

For those interested in learning more about the connection between Obama and pragmatism, there is James T. Kloppenberg’s new book, Reading Obama. The Afterword to my new book, Transcendence: On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism (Stanford) is on-line.  It discusses Obama’s pragmatism.   There is also the web site Barack Obama’s Pragmatism.

Photo Credit: AP, NY POST.……………………………….Photo Credit: Seheult/Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis)

….

Anger.  It’s in the air.  Everyone is mad as hell and won’t take it any more.

Well, there is much to be angry about.  And therein lies our problem.  To say the obvious, emoting without a proper target isn’t going to get us very far.  We will just get all the more angry.  And then we will do crazy stuff instead of fixing stuff.  Perhaps elect people who are just angry.  Case in point: Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York.  He’s angry alright.  He claims to be angry at government.  But if you watch this guy, he just seems to be angry.  Some dark anger that’s been there for years and is now finding a target, BIG BAD GOVERNMENT, as if this has been the major source of anger in his life.  If the government disappeared tomorrow, Carl would still be an angry man.

The temptation is very real in these difficult economic times to heed the siren call of the demagogues of anger.   Best here to pause and perhaps heed the words of an emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, a guy who actually had to run something larger than Ellicott Development, a Carl company.

When you are immoderately angry or impatient, remember that the life of man lasts but a moment, and after a brief while we have all been laid out for burial.  (The Meditations, Book 11.18 Grube translation)

Cartoon, National Library of Medicine, Public Domain

For months now we have been left with the impression by the news media and the Republicans that Americans are in revolt against Obama’s health care legislation.  What’s the evidence?  Polls have shown more Americans currently disapprove than approve of the legislation.  Now we have a poll that finally asks several of the right questions, including whether the law should have done more!

“A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by 2-to-1.”

Read the article here:  AP Poll: Repeal? Many wish health law went further Many of us have thought that there was something seriously misleading about polls that simply asked whether you favor the President’s health care legislation.  We now have a good idea why.  The Democrats should not run away from health care.  They need to tell the American people that if the Republicans take over, they could lose any chance for getting the health care that the majority of Americans need and want.

Well, here we are again.  Elections around the corner and about to let the FOX guard the henhouse, yet again.

Yes, we are all angry.   But let us not forget how we got into the present economic mess as we listen to the Republicans promising new ideas, once again.   Stewart and friends nail this one.