Tuesday Morning Reads
Posted: September 4, 2012 Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, Banksters, Mitt Romney, morning reads | Tags: entitlements, Hurricane Isaac Recovery, President Obama, Vulture Capitalism 50 Comments
Good Morning!
I’m trying to get back into the idea of “time” right now. I still feel jet-lagged and I keep having to remind myself what day, month and hour it is. It’s a really strange feeling to be so displaced in time. It reminds me of when I was deep in the fight against cancer and having chemo. Everything is here and now.
The President made a stop to see the flooding in St. John’s Parish yesterday. This is one of the more rural parishes in Southern Louisiana. It really got drenched. LaPlace is a bedroom community that frequently attracts families where one person works in Baton Rouge and the other in New Orleans. It sits adjacent to all kinds of interstate action so its easy to move around SE Louisiana from the small town. The rest of the parish is very rural and quite Cajun.
“What I’ve pledged to these folks is we’re going to make sure at the federal level we are getting on the case very quickly about figuring out what exactly happened here and what can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again and expedite some of the decisions that may need to be made,” Obama told reporters after touring hard-hit St. John the Baptist Parish, 30 miles outside of New Orleans.
Joined by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation, Obama walked through a neighborhood of brick homes and front yards that were a painful reminder of last week’s hurricane. Orderly piles of water-logged debris — bedding, insulation, furniture and toys — filled the yards.
The president shook hands with residents in La Place, where several neighborhoods were inundated by water and some residents were rescued from rooftops by boats.
“How y’all doing?” he asked.
“Better now,” one man shouted back.
In the sticky heat, the president walked from house to house, asking residents about what happened and posing for photos. There was debris but no signs of lingering water.
“We’re here to help,” the president said at another home.
Obama praised the coordination of federal, state and local officials and pointed out that his administration issued disaster declarations well in advance to ensure officials “weren’t behind the eight ball.” In highlighting the work, Obama was drawing a contrast with President George W. Bush’s widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina seven years ago.
The President also celebrated labor day with Auto and Steel Workers in the swing state of Ohio. Unlike Eric Cantor who insisted that Labor day was a day to salute “risk takers”, the President recognized the importance of the labor movement in the United States and was welcomed for his role in saving the US Auto Industry. Did I mention that I bought Ford for about $1.67 a share a few months after Obama took office? It’s over $9 now. Too bad I couldn’t have sunk a lot more money into it!
Hours earlier in Ohio, Obama spoke to members of the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, and noted his decision to rescue automakers General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, a move that Romney opposed.
“If America had thrown in the towel like that, GM and Chrysler wouldn’t exist today,” Obama said. “The suppliers and the distributors that get their business from these companies would have died off, too. Then even Ford could have gone down as well.”
There’s an awful essay out by Nicholas Eberstadt that suggests that we’ve become a nation of “takers”. He works for the AEI so it’s not unusual that ideology takes a front seat to evidence. He does notice that “entitlement” spending has grown more rapidly under Republicans than Democrats, but seems to overlook the idea that we all work and pay for the majority of our social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Worker’s Comp. How can we take what we have paid premiums to receive? Here’s a sample of things that I found highly offensive in his writings.
How has America’s great postwar male flight from work been possible? To ask the question is to answer it: This is a creature of our entitlement society and could not have been possible without it. Transfers for retirement, income maintenance, unemployment insurance, and all the rest have made it possible for a lower fraction of adult men to be engaged in work today than at any time since the Great Depression—and, quite possibly, at any previous point in our national history. For American men, work is no longer a duty or a necessity: rather, it is an option. In making work merely optional for America’s men, the US entitlement state has undermined the foundations of what earlier generations termed “the manly virtues”—unapologetically, and without irony. Whatever else may be said about our country’s earlier gender roles and stereotypes, it was the case the manly virtues cast able-bodied men as protectors of society, not predators living off of it. That much can no longer be said.
From a Nation of Takers to a Nation of Gamers to a Nation of Chiselers
With the disappearance of the historical stigma against dependence on government largesse, and the normalization of lifestyles relying upon official resource transfers, it is not surprising that ordinary Americans should have turned their noted entrepreneurial spirit, not simply to maximizing their take from the existing entitlement system, but to extracting payouts from the transfer state that were never intended under its programs. In this environment, gaming and defrauding the entitlement system have emerged as a mass phenomenon in modern America, a way of life for millions of men and women who would no doubt unhesitatingly describe themselves as law-abiding and patriotic citizens of the United States.
Abuse of the generosity of our welfare state has, to be sure, aroused the ire of the American public in the past, and continues to arouse it from time to time today. For decades, a special spot in the rhetorical public square has been reserved for pillorying unemployed “underclass” gamers who cadge undeserved social benefits. (This is the “welfare Cadillac” trope, and its many coded alternatives.) Public disapproval of this particular variant of entitlement misuse was sufficiently strong that Congress managed to overhaul the notorious AFDC program in a reform of welfare that replaced the old structure with TANF. But entitlement fiddling in modern America is by no means the exclusive preserve of a troubled underclass. Quite the contrary: it is today characteristic of working America, and even those who would identify themselves as middle class.
Here is a response to the essay written by Lane Kenworthy that I found highly interesting.
Nicholas Eberstadt’s “A Nation of Takers” argues that too many Americans have become dependent on government benefits. Over the past half-century, he notes, the share who receive a government cash transfer and/or public health insurance — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment compensation, and so on — has grown steadily. The United States, according to Eberstadt, is now “on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive, and accept, transfer benefits from the government.”
Eberstadt doesn’t contend that this has weakened our economy. His concern is moral. He believes reliance on government for help is undermining Americans’ “fierce and principled independence,” our “proud self-reliance.”
In Eberstadt’s way of seeing things, we are either givers or takers — taxpayers or benefit recipients. This is mistaken. Every American who doesn’t live entirely off the grid pays some taxes. Anyone who is an employee pays payroll taxes, and anyone who purchases things at a store pays sales taxes. Likewise, every American receives benefits from government. If you or your kids attended a public school, if you’ve driven on a road, if you’ve had a drink of tap water or taken a shower in your dwelling, if you’ve deducted mortgage interest payments or a business expense from your federal income taxes, if you haven’t been stricken by polio, if you’ve never had a band of thugs remove you from your home at gunpoint, if you’ve visited a park or lounged on a beach or hiked a mountain trail, if you’ve used the internet….
Eberstadt seems to think receipt of a government cash transfer or health insurance somehow renders people less self-reliant than does receipt of the myriad public goods, services, and tax breaks that government provides. But he doesn’t say why.
Once upon a time public safety was ensured by individuals and privately-organized militias. Then we shifted to government police forces and armies. At one point humans got water and disposed of waste individually. Then we created public water and sewage systems. Education of children was once a family responsibility. Then it shifted to schools. There’s a good reason for this: government provision offers economies of scale and scope, which enables the good or service to be provided to many people who either couldn’t or wouldn’t do it on their own. Did Americans’ character or spirit diminish when these changes occurred? Is there something qualitatively different about the more recent shift from individual to government responsibility in how we deal with retirement saving, health care, unemployment, and other risks? Here too Eberstadt is silent.
The problem that I have with folks like Eberstadt is that they really don’t look at the massive economic efficiencies of placing “insurance” activities in the public arena away from profit-making, cherry picking, and all kinds of moral hazard. To me, it’s all about making a market cheap and efficient. The main goal of any thing that helps prevent risk from society is to provide a mechanism to manage and reduce the impact of the events on the “insured”. The larger the risk pool, the more standardized the paper work and policy, and the lower the incentives for the insurers to cherry pick to increase profits, the more efficient the mechanism. This is true of health insurance and saving for old age. The problem is that this leaves a vast amount of wealth and gambling money out of the hands of rich people. That is why Eberstadt is silent. He must argue not on efficiencies but moral turpitude. If government is the cheapest most efficient provider of insurance, isn’t it rational to want to go that direction? Also, if we’re paying for these things, we’re still writing checks, yes? Does it really make a difference in our moral character if we get flood insurance from the government instead of a private company? His assertions make no sense to me at all. But then, I’m not funding by private insurance companies and Wall Street, am I? Neither is Kenworthy who works for a state university. I rather think that Eberstadt is pimping for the private sector, don’t you?
Matt Taibbi has written an article in Rolling Stone Magazine called: Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital; How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill.
Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He’s closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren’t the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they’re the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he’s trying for something big: We’ve just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we’ve been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.
The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney’s run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he’s somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who’d be honored to tell Oliver Twist there’s no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.
A new article by reporter Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone sheds light on the origin of his fortune, revealing how Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, used private equity to raise
money to conduct corporate raids. Matt Taibbi writes, quote, “what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time,” Taibbi writes. He goes on to say, “In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on [planet] Earth.”
Well, Matt Taibbi joins us now, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth piece called “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital,” author of the book also, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History .
AMY GOODMAN: Lay it out for us. Excellent piece, investigative piece, on Mitt Romney’s wealth. Where did it start?
MATT TAIBBI: Well, you know, for me, it started when I had to cover this campaign earlier this year, and I was listening to Romney’s stump speech about debt. You know, he came up with this whole image of a prairie fire of debt raging across America that was literally going to burn children alive in the future. And I kept thinking to myself, does nobody know what this guy did for a living and how he made his money? You know, Mitt Romney is unabashedly a leverage buyout artist. And a leverage buyout artist is a guy who borrows lots of money that other companies have to pay back. And that’s the simple formula.
He started out—his most famous deals, of course, are essentially venture capital deals like the Staples situation, where he built a company from the ground up. But after Staples, he switched to a different model, that he preferred for the rest of his professional career, in which he took over existing companies by putting down small amounts of his own cash, borrowing the rest from—typically from a giant investment bank, taking over controlling stakes in companies, and then forcing those companies to pay him either through management fees or through dividends. And that’s his business formula.
This is–to me–the punchline.
MATT TAIBBI: Well, Mitt Romney is really the representative of an entire movement that’s taken over the American business world in the last couple of decades. You know, America used to be—especially the American economy was built upon this brick-and-mortar industrial economy, where we had factories, we built stuff, and we sold it here in America, and we exported it all over the world. That manufacturing economy was the foundation for our wealth and power for a couple of centuries. And then, in the ’80s, we started to transform ourselves from a manufacturing economy to a financial economy. And that process, which, you know, on Wall Street we call financialization, was really led that—sort of this revolution, where instead of making products, we made transactions, we made financial products, like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. We created money through financial transactions rather than building products and selling them around the world. And that revolution was really led by people like Mitt Romney. And the advantage of financialization, from the point of view of the very rich and the people who run the American economy, is that it was extremely efficient at extracting wealth and kicking it upward, whereas the old manufacturing economy had the sort of negative effect of spreading around to the entire population. In the financialization revolution, you can take all of the money, and you don’t have to spread it around with anybody. And Mitt Romney was kind of a symbol of that fundamental shift in our economy.
Taibbi does a great job detailing exactly how Romney’s own brand of Vulture Capitalism really is what’s wrong with our economy and our politics right now. This brings me to the two things that I’m going to watch this week from the DNC. The first is Big Dawg’s speech. I think this should be a barn burner. The next thing is the speeches by employees of companies bought by Bain.
The speakers are slated to discuss the business practices of the private equity world, likely in order to call into the question the conduct of Romney’s former firm while he was CEO. Employees at companies controlled or managed by Bain during Romney’s tenure have already had star turns in the campaign, both in Obama campaign conference calls and in television ads run by the campaign and its allied super PAC, Priorities USA Action.
They are all rumored to be blue collar workers. In case you haven’t noticed yet, Mitt Romney is basically a con artist and a bankster.
So, I’m glad to be back in the writing seat again. However, I do notice that I’ve made this awfully long winded. Probably another symptom of my be here now frame of mind. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Sky Dancing 
Wow! Excuse my language, but Nicholas Eberstadt is a f*cking a$$hole. So now Social Security is part of the “welfare state?” What does he want–80 year old men out digging ditches? I guess Eberstadt must be one of those rich guys who doesn’t have to pay a fair share into Social Security and Medicare like us “small people” who paid big bucks throughout our working lives so we could survive old age without having to search dumpsters and garbage cans for food.
Well, he actually has a point about those “takers” but he misidentifies them. The real takers in our society are the banksters and other citizens of Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, like Mitt Romney, who gamble with other people’s money. Then when they lose, get bailed out to do it again. Those are the real “takers” in our society, not someone getting SSI payments.
Eberhardt is an ASSwipe. His senior slacker sentiment is one that I’ve read many times before. The demonization and loathing of people who are receiving SS and the benefit of Medicare, and the animosity toward those receiving food stamps or unemployment insurance or heathcare assistance in medicaid, has become the calling card of the GOP/TP. These are also the folks who ALWAYS identify themselves as christian-teavangelicals. Yaweh is turning over in his sepulchre.
I think he is a THIEF planning a robbery, you are much nicer, as Social Security and Medicare and even Unemployment Insurance are paid by the WORKERS and their EMPLOYERS and these great programs are what makes our country great and what makes workers strong, as they are paying for THEIR benefits.
I am so tired of this bull, of calling these programs ‘entitlements’ when they are not.
I personally think we should take away ALL the benefits congress receives and let them fend for themselves and see how their attitude will change. Many receive MULTIPLE pensions and serve a couple of years…with full medical benefits. Let’s start a constitutional amendment to take away their benefits, as they are serving themselves, not the people, while plotting to steal our money in Social Security and Medicare.
That amendment has my vote anytime.
I love that idea, WV.
First, we take Alan Simpson’s benefits!
Isn’t Nicholas Eberstadt the same jerk who said women shouldn’t vote? Is this the same guy?
Your morning crazy: Chuck Norris threatens “1,000 years of darkness” if Obama is reelected.
I’ve reached a point that I no longer have any idea what these people are even talking about anymore.
A thousand years of darkness? What the hell does that mean anyway?
I facetiously called this the “Year of the Stupid” but even I have to admit that it has become a reality when people this ignorant put it all on display.
This country has only existed for 236 years, but now suddenly Obama is going to end it and lead us to 1,000 years of “darkness?” Is that a reference to racial diversity or do these freaks think Obama is the Antichrist?
They must stand in line waiting for their turn to “upgrade the crazy” talk.
For Norris, it’s probably the Antichrist, since he’s a big fan of Huckabee. There is no reason for this Obama hate but people have lathered themselves up into a near frenzy. I’ve never seen anything like it before.
WTH – the man suffers from achluophobia/nuctophobia, and stupidphobia
I wonder if Mr. Norris took a few too many knocks to the head over the years. Srsly.
I don’t want to hear “conservatives” talk about Hollywood elite being all liberal at all. These old white dudes that make a living out of making bad movies and bad tv programs are not the spokespeople for any one except their own egos and stupidity.
In that video Chuck Norris spewed forth a big old “Obama is the anti-christ” dog whistle.
I know how these people think and talk, I’ve lived a lifetime in the middle of their religious zealnut nonsense. They’re pushing up to the edge of religious holy-war rhetoric and it is that language that fuels the militia movements and the dominionist movements that claim to derive their legitimacy and their mission to fight against the anti-christ from the End times prophecy gospel. These folks are batshit crazy,
I’m hoping that the Dem Convention speakers spare us those “up from the bootstrap” stories. I don’t think I am up to listening to any more semi autobiographies of somebody’s ancestor who “made it possible for me to be standing here tonight”. Enough already!
I know there has to be some but I hope not every speaker. That would be hellishly boring.
They need to get explicit and detailed about what their plan is for the next four years. Getting rid of the filibuster might be a good goal.
I’m with you bb. It was never designed to be used in this fashion.
My biggest fear is the loss of the Senate.
Won’t matter much then if Obama wins since they will chew him up and spit him out for the next 4 years and we will be severely f*cked should this happen.
It will still matter. Bill Clinton mattered and so will Obama if it comes down to it.
I’m glad I don’t have to listen to this convention on my battery powered radio. This time I can look at the speakers and see if they are sincere.
Yeah agree with you there Pat. I just want to hear these people tell it like it is, and not feed us bullshit. Wish some of them would just take what Kat and BB and you have said about the situation and talk like that.
Maureen Dowd has found the plot and this is just delicious.
Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball
I wish Eberstadt would make regular visits to the nursing home where my mother has been for the last decade. It’s full of “takers” – elderly men and women who worked hard, raised families, and now find themselves seriously ill and often completely dependent on “entitlements”. It is heartbreaking to see them in their wheelchairs in the crowded halls and dining areas or in their tiny rooms confined to metal hospital beds. If only they had been “risk-taking job-creators” instead of “welfare queens”, they would be living it up on a boat in the Caymens rather than sucking off the government teat. Obviously, they should have made better choices in their lives so they wouldn’t have wound up such pathetic losers. /s
I’m hoping for some hard-hitting real stories at the Democratic convention about what it’s like to be an average person in the U.S. today. Please no Hallmark greetings from the 1%.
Here’s a card for Mitt from Woody. I hope he and Paul have a nice day. Eberstadt, too. F**k them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdyLb7ouXUU
Oh, and Dak, I can completely relate to only living in the here and now. Just get through this minute, this hour, this day. Let the “1,000 years of darkness” take thought for the things of itself.
It does remind me of how I felt when I was actively doing chemotherapy.
My father owned a business for like 35 years. He’s going to be 90 this year. He’s outlived his money and he lives on social security. He owned a small Ford Dealership in a small town in Iowa. He’d be lost with out medicare and social security as would all of his employees of years and years and years.
I’d like to get him in a corner and explain to him what happens to a guy who fights for his country and ends up poisoned by radiation or depleted uranium with PTSD and unable to be the person he was before he was asked to serve. And many of these so-called “takers” lived through the Great Depression as well.
Many of the male patients I have known at my mother’s nursing home were WWII veterans, too. Some had the medals to prove it. One of my favorite patients was part of the D-Day Invasion of Normandy. He never mentioned it. I found out about it after he died. Yeah, he was a “taker”. He took Europe back from Hitler.
Beata – so very, very true. The people in nursing homes and those living at home on pensions (Social Security in your country) did work hard their entire lives, trying to eke out a living for their families and helping to advance the country – a lot of them are WW11/Korea/Vietnam and subsequent vets who either fought in the trenches, or like my aunt, worked in the factories making munitions, planes and tanks or served on front lines in makeshift hospital settings. How quickly people forget – They paid their dues over and over again.
Well said, HT. I often read the obituaries in our local paper. After I see that I am not listed among the dead 🙂 , I marvel at the lives of “ordinary” men and women who lived through the Depression and WWII. They are fascinating and rich in accomplishments. Quiet heroes and heroines. That’s the way I think of them.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/09/04/790351/gop-senate-candidate-supported-life-sentences-for-rape-victims-who-obtain-abortions/
I do not understand what motivates these peoples’ fanatical obsession with pregnancy? Do they hate women that much? What about the men who were complicit in the pregnancy – the rapist, the incestious male relative, the paedophile, the boyfriend? Will they be charged as accessories?
These people are certifiable, and yet people are voting for them? I need a Dr Zeus rhyme.
Damn, where are they finding this many full blown nutjobs to run for the Senate? The TP is a bunch of insane people apparently.
I’ve got a post on this above with more information.
In addition to the comparison of spouses, Michelle and Ann, are the pathetic pleas of Ann to “trust” this good family man she married, to elect her “grown-up” husband who will save the country, and to remember that it’s the Obama campaign’s fault for Mitt’s low ratings with the Hispanics; here:
“Michelle Obama won’t take on GOP” — POLITICO
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/80611.html?hp=t1_3
What a freakin lie “use to be spouses were in the background shielded from the public”…………somebody better go read up on women’s history, and particularly the first ladies, and I don’t mean read their cookbooks either.
WTF?! Has Ruth Mandel ever heard of Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Reagan, or Hillary Clinton? To name just a few recent first ladies who were out front and active.
Michelle can’t take on the GOP – she’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t – even a lot of the comments on that article are distasteful.
The freepers are already attacking the President’s two children in imaginary scenarios – I won’t link because it’s to Free republic (I unfortunatly clicked on a link in my ignorance). Two young children – 11 and 14 being sexualized to cast aspersions on the current President because of the freepers hatred of Planned Parenthood. The comments btw were so disgusting, that I got out of dodge really quickly. I’m not sure whether they are all frat boys high on booze and the bong, or whether republicans are really so sick that they tolerate this kind of narrative. If the Free Republic were smart, they would remove the posting and perhaps they already have but it provides a window into the soul so to speak.
Well, never think the GOP can’t say more stupid things than the last stupid thing they just said.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/barbour-i-would-love-for-christie-to-put
There’s a problem somewhere with all these old fat white guys going on about torture, putting things in butts, and all that legislation being “rammed down their throats”.
The do seem to have a lazer focus .
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that what Barbour is suggesting was a way to discipline slaves on the plantations when they got out of line. I can’t remember the book that I read that detailed it, but (shudder) that was just one way of exerting their control.
Agree Ralph, there is a problem – these are some very twisted people. How many people in the civilized world think about torturing people? And why do the GOP use these phrases that are open to intrepretation in the worst way?
I guess the biggest searches on the web for ‘gay’ sex porn is actually in the south. That could explain a few things.
I think I will avoid that link! Sounds really sick.
Misinformed poor people need to start thinking differently so they can be rich, too:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-rich-people-think-differently-from-the-poor-2012-8?op=1
Guess he tried to make it sound good but they come off as selfish indulgent assholes to me. Another try at mainstreaming objectivism.
Selfishness is a virtue, Ralph-Baby. That’s Lesson #2 on the list.
Beata,and isn’t that the saddest thing of all – selfishness as a virtue. I cannot figure out how we got to here – from the so called hippie stupidity with all those stupid hippy values like saving the ecology, women’s rights, civil rights, fair treatment.fair pay for equal value. Now it’s every man for themselves – notice it’s every MAN, however it only applies to white, heterosexual, wealthy, old men and their families, within which these elites are futher indoctrinating their progeny so the aristocracy can continue. Makes me sick. Meritocracy means nothing. Aristocracy is all that is needed. Further they have a movement that is named the Tea Party which totally supports these plutocrats – Irony at the point of satire.