Fact-Check Free Journalism For Sale Near You!

I was,  for thirty-odd years, a regular subscriber to a New York based magazine called "Newsweek".  In the days before the Internet, it was one magazine I read throughly every week, along with newspapers and whatever magazines I could snap up or read in the library.    Sort of a "platform" periodical as it were. 

I could pretty much account for any  slants of all the commentators like George Will,  the late Meg Goodman and Robert Samuelson and the good upfront reportage of writers like Eleanor Clift, Mark Starr, Michael Isakoff,  and Gloria Borger. Back then, there was something called "investigative journalism" and no one in power in Washington or Wall Street  was immune from getting their bad behavior blown up in the pages of this magazine.  

It's true that time passes,  but it's also true that many institutions like the media do not just slide down the chute in terms of value. But Newsweek certainly has done it. In fact, it can slide no longer I would say thanks to the efforts of ex-glamour magazine editor Tina Brown and her staff of fact-check free hacks who now fill what is left of that periodical with lies and half-truths and other muck. 

  I refer to the latest issue as  exhibit "A" of bad journalism--a hit piece against Barack Obama.   Reading this I was struck by how unusually close Mr. Niall  Freguson's column  was to the speakers at the Republican National Convention.  If only this snotty Tory intellectual had actually made his case based on facts and evidence.  But that was not to be.  Apparently Ferguson feels he can say anything and his work will not get spiked or reviewed.  Or if it is reviewed he will just weasel out of the argument by backtracking and quoting Margaret Thatcher to justify his inaccuracies.  Makes you wonder what he's up to?   

 That such a story made it to the cover of the magazine shows just how sensationalistic  this former news publication turned rag has become. 

Gene Lyons, who formally wrote for the magazine did the best commentary on the Ferguson piece.

Ferguson’s surely entitled to his opinions (although not his vote, as he’s a British subject, not an American citizen) but to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he’s not entitled to his own facts. Riddled with ludicrous errors and manifest deceptions, the article’s publication on the cover of a major news magazine at first struck me as ominous.

That Ferguson’s a professor made things worse. Academics theoretically hold themselves to more strenuous standards than journalists. I even found myself rummaging around in the University of Virginia honor code, where I went to school, for definitions of academic fraud.

And yes, it’s that bad. Vote for whomever you like. But if you make your choice based upon the following howler, then you’ve been had: “The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit,” Ferguson charged. “But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.”

In fact, as New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that Obamacare will actually reduce the yearly budget deficit by an estimated $210 billion over the decade. There’s a chart documenting that non-obscure fact on page two of the CBO report.

Krugman demanded a correction by Newsweek.

Instead, editor Tina Brown’s latest plaything allowed Ferguson to double-down. Rather than apologize, he posted an online rejoinder calling Krugman’s objection “truly feeble,” and boasting that he’d “very deliberately” written “‘the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,’ not ‘the ACA.’”

In short, Ferguson very deliberately misled his readers to the tune of $1.4 trillion–considering only the debit half of Obamacare’s balance sheet, but not its revenues and savings. Then he falsely cited the CBO to cover his tracks.

Even his alibi quoted the CBO report out of context. Internet sleuths quickly caught him out. 

http://www.nationalmemo.com/23853/

And it wasn't just Lyons or the New York Times'  Paul Krugman who went after Ferguson.  John Cassidy of "The New Yorker" and others did as well. 

What is pretty remarkable about the latest dustup is the weakness of the arguments presented by Ferguson, a streetwise public intellectual who, according to his Web site, now holds positions at four different élite academic institutions. If called upon three months before an election to pen a provocative cover story in a national newsmagazine clamoring for the President to be chucked out, most writers would make every effort to avoid giving the other side easy opportunities to tear down their arguments. And yet, here comes Ferguson blatantly twisting a report from the Congressional Budget Office and presenting numerous other distortions and half-truths that anybody with access to Google could discredit in a few hours.--

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/08/niall-ferguson-vs-paul-krugman.html#ixzz25RmnE9Gg 

(John Cassidy in The New Yorker")

 

Of course, conservatives might remember this recent cover of the magazine where Mitt Romney was derided as a "Wimp" (See below)  and say "See, Newsweek goes after Mitt Romney, too. So both sides are being judged with vitriol and distortions. So its all fair!" 

 That isn't the point.    

 The point is that such covers would not have even made the final cut at the old magazine   under editors like Richard Smith or Jon Meacham.  These editors knew the difference between their magazines and trash tabloids that appeal to the lowest common denominator crowd with its thirst for the name-calling and the sensational.

  Tina Brown isn't in business to sell information backed up with accuracy--she is in this to sell magazines apparently, period, and do so with apparently little reliable and verifiable  facts on the table.     Journalism without any respect for facts is just bias on a rampage.        

GOP Convention Special: Where's George and Dick?

A convention is taking place in Tampa.  Mitt Romney has been nominated and his wife thinks he's a swell guy. 

 The only suspense right now is how the GOP are going to hide Ron Paul away--an old campaigner who keeps popping up as a NPR commentator  put it, like the pesky puppet- groundhog that plagued Bill Murray back in the  movie "Caddyshack". 

 

 

As someone pointed out quite a while ago, political party conventions are no longer very suspenseful.  The days of the pre-television and pre-primary age, the were  smoke-filled rooms of king-makers and power players. These were called "brokered conventions" and they were numerous:

From Wikipedia:

"Before the era of presidential primary elections, political party conventions were routinely brokered. The Democratic Party required two-thirds of delegates to choose a candidate, starting with the first Democratic National Convention in 1832, and then at every convention from 1844 until 1936. This made it far more likely to have a brokered convention, particularly when two strong factions existed. The most infamous example was at the 1924 Democratic National Convention (the Klanbake), where the divisions between Wets and Drys on Prohibition (and other issues) led to 102 ballots of deadlock between frontrunners Alfred E. Smith and William G. McAdoo before dark horse John W. Davis was chosen as a compromise candidate on the 103rd ballot. Adlai Stevenson (of the 1952 Democratic Party) and Thomas Dewey (of the 1948 Republican Party) were the most recent "brokered convention" presidential nominees.^{[citation needed]}The last winning U.S. presidential nominee produced by a brokered convention was Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1932."     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokered_convention

 The closest thing we have seen in the modern age to a "brokered" convention goes all the way back to 1976 when President  Gerald Ford came to the GOP convention just shy of enough delegates to defeat former California Governor Ronald Reagan.  Ford managed to gain the delegates before the actual roll call vote, but their at least was a measure of suspense. 

The 1976 Republican Convention was also interesting for another reason---there was no speech or even a sign of Ford's predecessor, Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States and the first and only President ot resign in disgrace for office.   Few Republicans missed "Tricky Dick", the man whose cover-ups and crimes had help push Republicans to a massive defeat in the 1974 Congressional elections. No one wanted a pardoned felon to represent the Republicans in front of a national audience. 

We are seeing something of a Nixonian situation played out in Tampa this week. Where is two-term President George W Bush, the hero of "9/11" and the man who promised to bring democracy to Iraq on the war front and prosperity and jobs to the domestic front ?   

 This is the most interesting thing to me about the convention is not who is speaking---the usual group of mainly women, black   Hispanic and younger political speakers who are the human wall paper  the Republicans need to make the party look less white, worried, older and male then they really are.    Not only are these two not speaking, but Bush and  Cheney are literally not in the building and are as scarce as Elvis sightings.

I'm talking about former President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, of course.   These guys served two terms in the offices of the Chief Executive and where the hell are they? 

  Officially, they are just taking the convention off to go fishing or something. 

 

 I, for one, don't buy it. 

 

They are not in Tampa because both men are a major liability for the GOP.  If they thought about coming, these twins of economic and human rights disasters were dissuaded.  In a very polite and respectful way, I'm sure, but, believe me, if they asked to address the delegates, they were dissuaded.     

The Bush Administration was the worst failure for the GOP  since Nixon--but at least Nixon left office with only a mild recession for the country to cope with, a recession caused mainly by the "oil shocks" caused by the OPEC nations in the Middle East in the wake of the Israeli-Egyptian "Yom Kippur War" of October, 1973.    

What Bush left behind was far worse in my view. Millions of jobs were lost by the end of his term, sparked by a housing bubble fueled by an unregulated Wall Street "perfect storm" of greedy investors and irrational mortgage companies and home buyers.  And none of this bothered Bush anymore  then his trillions spent on two untaxed "credit card" wars fought halfway around the world.  

 

The man who proved that "trickle-down" economics and  perpetual tax cuts don't create jobs would be a major turd in the GOP punchbowl were he to address the GOP Convention.  And that doesn't mention his water-boarding-enthusiast pal, Dick Cheney.

It's a good thing these guys were dissaudable, good for the Romney-Ryan Ticket at least.     

i'll leave the last words to columnist and editor Froma Harrop of the Providence Rhode Island Journal:  

"The Bush tax cuts drained the Treasury of money needed to pay for what the Republicans wanted, never mind the Democrats. Ryan now calls for even more tax cuts with the proviso that they be partly offset by closing loopholes. Broadening the tax base is not a bad idea, but Ryan's plan fails to impress because it does not specify what loopholes would go. How about doing away with the big popular deductions, like those for health coverage or mortgage interest? Ryan's lips are sealed.

"So while the Tampa convention hosts no George W. Bush, it has his plan. More defense spending. Less regulation. More tax cuts for the upper incomes. As another famous Republican might have said: Here we go again."  http://www.creators.com/opinion/froma-harrop.html

Irish Parliamentary Leader Responds to American Tea Party Radio

From March, 2010, Irish President and Labour Party official Michael D Higgins responds with good old Irish spirit to a right-wing radio host to defend workers, regular people and affordable health care in the USA. This was from a radio broadcast in Boston, Massachusetts.

From Wikipedia: "Higgins was born in Limerick in 1941. When his father's health grew poor, with alcohol a contributing factor, his mother sent Higgins, aged five, and his four-year-old brother to live on his unmarried uncle and aunt's farm near Newmarket on Fergus, County Clare. His older twin sisters remained in Limerick. He was educated at Ballycar National School, County Clare; St. Flannan's College, Ennis; University College Galway (UCG); Indiana University; and Manchester University. As an undergraduate at UCG, he served as Vice Auditor of the College's Literary and Debating Society in 1963–1964, and rose to the position of Auditor in the 1964–1965 academic year. He also served as President of UCG Students' Union in 1964–65.
Higgins holds a graduate degree in sociology.

"In his academic career, he was a Statutory Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at University College Galway and was a Visiting Professor at Southern Illinois University. He resigned his academic posts to concentrate fully on his political career."


The host is Michael Graham of Boston Newstalk 106-108fm.

Paul Ryan and His "Bold" Plan to End Middle Class Stability

A bad situation is only more worse with a bad plan.   This is something to remember the next time you hear someone in the media talking about Paul Ryan, the new Vice Presidential pick   Here we have a man who claims to be both a Roman Catholic and a follower of the cold-hearted elitist  Ayn Rand, a woman who took the terrors of the Russian Revolution of her youth and assumed--wrongly-- that the United States could either be a country of individualism or a collectivist nation. If you don't believe me, read her book "The Virtue of Selfishness" some time.

 

The truth that this manichean thinking is not what the reality of American politics is about.   To try and find a way to preserve Medicare and create an affordable health care insurance plan for Americans cannot be solved by caving in to one extreme faction over another.  It will take balance and compromise, the sort of unity and common purpose you will not find in the modern conservative movement, bankrolled by casino billionaire Sheldon Alderson and the  Koch Brothers and sold to America with the "wink and giggle" antics  a pseudo-celebrity like Sarah Palin.  

 

The plain facts are that Paul Ryan voted to turn  Social Security over to the Stock Exchanges in 2005 and he still wants to end Medicare, giving people like myself who have worked for decades and paid into the program a "voucher' and throwing millions of middle and working class Americans unto the "tender mercies" of the mega-rich and bureaucratized private health insurance industry.

Health care is not like buying a car or choosing a restaurant.  Those who will get old  will nveery likely need health care---most of you reading this now know in your heart this is true. We cannot afford to go back on the Affordable Health Care Act and we cannot cut 5 trillion out of the domestic budget and let the wealthy score yet another big tax break. 

 

I believe Barack Obama and others are right--we build an economy from the middle out----the more people can buy goods and services the more jobs we will have.  The idea of the trickle-down school of econommics---where money given to the rich creates jobs has been proved wrong in the last decade by the Bush-Cheney Administration where after eight years we had nearly zero job growth. 

Paul Ryan is not George W. Bush. His tea party  pals in Congress are worse, more idealogical and more committed to staying in office by attracting as much wealth  from the top and anger from below to stay in power in perpetuity so they will never have to face the real economy most of us have work or worked in.  They are creatures of political power from well-off families and, unlike men like FDR, Theodore Roosevelt and John Kennedy, they have no empathy for average-income Americans.

 

Our economy barely survived the last economic meltdown. Can we afford another.  Are the two candidates really just all the same.  Well, no, not for people who plan to live in this nation and see it not become a temperate-zone version of a banana republic.       

 

Gore Vidal: Writer, Political Provocateur and All-Around Contrarian

"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."---Gore Vidal on the modern United States

I note with sadness the passing of Gore Vidal the other day, at age 86.  Not that I agreed with all his historic viewpoints,  his stubborn belief that  Franklin Roosevelt's embargo of oil and iron exports  to Japan was an invitation for that Empire to destroy the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the reasons behind the rise of Christianity in the Ancient World to name two .   But I found him to be that rare person who not only wrote interesting novels about American life and its checkered past, but also someone who was quite capable of speaking his mind in television and radio interviews in an entertaining and provocative way.  His was a voice that allowed me to see the world in a different light.  

 

I am also writing this little note to give the man his due---his views from the 1960's to the 90s were pretty much correct--the USA was an empire, both parties were controlled by giant corporations, especially the Republicans but too often the Democrats,   that the war on drugs was un-winnable,  that Ronald Reagan was a corporate shill and he would bring worse shills to follow his path, that religion could be used as an instrument of hatred and intolerance, that it didn't matter a hoot in hell who people choose to sleep with, etc. 

 

And that Mr. Vidal could make all these statements in his interviews and highly cogent essays with a big dollop of wry and sharp humor. If he was a  Jeremiah issuing warnings against the inflated hopes of American Exceptional-ism, he did it with panache and satiric skill.  He was as much an entertainer in the best sense as he was a pundit and that former attribute had to be the ONLY reason he had such a high--profile platform in America's mainstream media.        

There wasn't much Gore Vidal didn't do in that major media.  He started out as one of many promising post-war novelists (after spending three years in the US Navy) and had the family connections to pursue a career in politics.  According to Vidal in his first volume of memoirs, he had  a god shot at an open seat for Congress in the state of New Mexico, where he had attended prep school.  But his novel "The City and the Pillar" about two male gay lovers, published in 1948, put an end to those chances.  Homosexuality was a no-go and even a hint of it could kill a political career, as Vidal himself showed in his  most famous play, "The Best Man" (1963) about  political in-fighting at an American party convention.

 

  A television and Hollywood screenwriter in the 1950's, he left America often to write his novels in the more tranquil old-world vistas of central Italy.  Starting with "Julian" (1964) , a novel of the last non-Christian emperor of Rome,  most of his novels were popular, despite the fact that he broke taboos and smashed icons that others had tried and failed to make pay either form a lack of talent or censorship.   It was no matter if he was writing about a transvestite hero in 1940's Hollywood, "Myra Breckinbridge" (1968) or revealing the warts-and-all biographies of our sacred Founding Fathers in his favorite novel of mine,  "Burr" (1973) or writing a more sympathetic novel of the trials of the Civil War, "Lincoln" (1985), Vidal's books were entertaining and subtle subversive.  

Each of his historic novels took him about a year of research and it paid off in my view.  He also was a prolific contributor to "The New York Review of Books" "Time", "Smithsonian" , "The Nation", et al, and his book tours always gave his fans plenty of vigor and vitriol even before they bought the book.  I still recall how, in an appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in the mid-80s', how he  blithely predicted that the United States would overtly  invade Mexico because "we've done it before for land and now we need their oil."   Carson's look of faux-stoicism and quick cut to a commercial was a priceless moment. 

The Mexican invasion  didn't quite happen of course,  although the prophecy came all too true in the Middle East first with Bush I and then Bush II in Iraq and Kuwait on behalf of Big Oil and Big Military Contractors like Vice President Cheney's own boys club at Haliburton.        

 

 His feuds with his contemporaries like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and his old friend Tennessee Williams  were also famous.     Indeed I don't think we will ever see his like again---the writer-figure as a personage in him or herself, known to anyone interested in his nation or in politcal ideas.  Vidal  was right again--the value of the profession writer was ebbing in American  mainstream society , he noted lamentedly several times in interviews. I see nothing today to dispute that.       

The 28th Amendment--Make Congress Live by their Own Laws

Link

 

 

Bill Moyers Essay: Thomas Jefferson's Betrayal

For decades, journalist, author, broadcaster and former Director of the Peace Corps under President Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, has been one of the best commentators on current affairs and American history. He has done interviews over a wide range of topics from his seminal series of programs on "The Power of Myth" with Professor Joseph Campbell to his round-table discussions on a variety of political, social and spiritual topics that grew out of his Public Broadcasting series, "Bill Moyers Journal".

Here is one of his latest essays, pointing up the success of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence as a benchmark of human liberty against the terrible institution of slavery which degraded and counterpointed the struggle for freedom in the United States for decades. In was a institution that Jefferson himself perpetuated, as did many of the Founding Fathers.

Not all the major Founding Fathers thought as Jefferson did. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton criticized Jefferson and his party for demanding freedom for themselves but not for blacks. Hamilton, a senior officer in the Revolutionary war who served directly under George Washington, urged that black men willing to fight for the revolutionary cause in the Continental Army be granted the right to freedom. As an adult Hamilton was opposed to slavery, but his views
on this, as well as his far-sighted need for a National Bank to boost manufacturing, did not survive the need to unify the 13 former colonies after the war.

"The existence of slavery makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason or experience."--Alexander Hamilton.


Although their views on slavery were not advanced by our standards, men like Hamilton and Franklin saw the contradictions of the peculiar institution and served in manumission groups to try and bring a gradual end to the "peculiar institution".

The "Founding Father" Approach to Combatting Tax-Dodging Corporations

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes." --James Madison--"Notes on the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention, 1787."

  One of America's leading Founding Fathers was James Madison of Virginia. He  acted as a moderating force between the future Federalists and anti-federalist factions during the founding of our nation at the Constitutional debates at Philadelphia in 1787.  He also was a major force in getting the key states of Virginia and, (through his co-authorship of the Federalist Papers) the state of New York to adopt the Constitution leaders of both main political parties revere today. 

   "The Father of the Constitution" (and, later, Fourth President of the United States from 1809-1816)  guided his fellow delegates by reminding them of the pluses and minuses of past governments going back to the time of the Ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Republic and the leagues and confederacies and kingdoms that emerged after its fall  in Western Europe. 

Many today, looking at the qoute above,  might be tempted to see that his remarks about "the majority trampling on the rights of the minority" is  aimed at a class of people who would bring down civil society from below.  Perhaps that was a fear in 1787.   But who really is "the minority " in Washington today?  We are!

 

 I submit that, in an era where huge corporations are  considered  persons and legal-eagle  lobbying mouth-pieces have more power than constituents in the Congress and the state capitals, we are threatened.  It is the ordinary public citizen who is "out-voted" by the fiat of unlimited campaign cash. 

 

  I wonder if Madison would be surprised by the current state of affairs in the proliferation of big-money Super PACs and large-scale  lobbying and "earmarks" and loopholes and of-shore accounts for big business?  How much would he big shocked by all these corporation situated technically in places like Nevada and Delaware but solely for tax purposes?

And all the other off-shore money schemes we see rich individuals and companies like Appleand Google--who make most of their profits in the USA engage in shady loopholes to evade taxes through moving about from the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or, in Google case,  Ireland? 

 Perhaps not all that much.

Alex Marshall in an editorial in today's "New York Times:  "Someday, Madison warned, companies could grow so large they “would pass beyond the authority of a single state, and would do business in other states.” To make sure the companies remained accountable to government, he said the federal government should “grant charters of incorporation in cases where the public good may require them, and the authority of a single state may be incompetent.”

In other words, a National Companies Act." 

Maybe companies who want to do business in the largest economy in the world---and are protected and enhanced by state local and federal government supports and the American citizen as worker and consumer--- should pay for the privilege just as ordinary citizens do. 

 

 

 See article in the link below:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/solving-the-corporate-tax-code-puzzle.html?_r=1

Who was Ayn Rand and Why is She Still a Big Deal?

“Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their "loved ones" or friends or business associates or political rulers- are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Let me admit I'm not a keen  student  of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1985).   I certainly was aware in college of fellow students who read her novels and admired or deplored her Objectivist  philosophy.  Most of the articles I read about her made me think her philosophy of hyper-individualism was an overreaction to the collectivist ethics of revolutionary Russia, the place of her birth.  I didn't think I had to  to read a book saying people needed to be more selfish, less charitable. Nor one to give more credit to elitists than other writers and pundits already provided in surplus. But I supposed one book needed to be read since she was so controversial and liked by many.

 

 

Rand's background I think is a clue to her obsessions. Her family were Russian Jews, and they were alos part of the urban bourgeoisie, an urban and well-educated  family with some property interests (her father was a pharmacist  and a supported of a rival socialist party, the Menshieiks.)   Her father lost  his business to the Bolsheviks in Petrograd when Ms. Rand was a teenager and they fled to the Crimea.  Later the family returned to the metropolis--later called Leningrad--after the civil war. She received an  education at a state university, and was expelled with other students for a time for not following the doctrines of the new state system.   

 

She left Russia in the mid-twenties and came to New York City.  She really liked the skyscrapers and the bustle of the new world so she stayed, living with family members for a time in Chicago.  Eventually like many young people looking for become something, she found her way out to Hollywood where she worked as a an extra in movies like Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 story of Jesus, "King of Kings".  She worked in the costume department of RKO studios and began writing screenplays and plays in her spare time.

 

By the mid-thirties she had a play --a murder mystery--running on Broadway. She  worked on movie scenarios in the studio factory system and wrote "The Fountainhead", a book about an uncompromising architect named Howard Roack.  It was published in 1941 and was a best seller.  A movie was made of the film in 1949 with Cary Cooper and Patricia Neal.  In a ironic twist, like her book's main character, Rand didn't like the film adaptation on many levels. 

 

The book that she is best remembered for is "Atlas Shrugged", published in 1957.  She had by this time developed an intellectual circle in New York City centered around her ideas. One of her followers was the future Treasury Secretary and Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Mr. Greenspan later presided over the Fed when it adopted a "hands off" policy toward the Wall Street securities and credit-default boomlet that led up to the economic crash of 2008. 

 

    

 

 

  America in the Cold War era (1947-1992) was already a nation where collectivism or even the most watered-down versions  were despised. Self-centered persons of all financial stripes were quite amply rewarded.   So, where was the fire, Ayn? 

 

Objectivism was, to me, nothing more or less than a philosophy more geared to commercial success than intellectual rigor.  There's something to be said for simple ideas clearly brought out, but the  American philosophy  of Ralph Waldo Emerson--with the great emphasis on "Self-Reliance"---and the careful personal protection of the people from government laid out by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and later on propelled to modernity by the modern conservative movement  seemed already to have staked out the place for the individual in the "polis".   

 

 Besides, even as a non-believer in God as I was as a student in college ,  I realized that any decent philosophy and religious teaching I was aware of called on people to try, in Aldous Huxley's phrase, "to just be a little nicer to each other".    

 

The major work by Rand I have read and have returned to from time to time is a slim tome of essays called "The Virtue of Selfishness". Co-written with psychologist and Rand acolyte Nicholas Brenden, it was published in 1964.   The book essentially is  warmed-over, cold blooded  cruel-to-be-kind social Darwinism only with a fetish for eliminating anything society asks people to do for the greater good or for the poor or victimized or handicapped, no matter how small. 

 

 

 

 Nothing in that book's fifteen or so essays--or in the film documentary or articles about her--inspired me to want to read any of her famous novels "The Fountainhead" (1941) or "Atlas Shrugged" (1957).  

"Virtue of Selfishness" as a book is a dedication to stamping out anything that supported the notion of the modern American or European "mixed economy" where government has a role, though not a predominant one,  in regulation and protection for citizens of all levels  in a private economy. All state action for the benefit of others is seen as irrational and unjustified.  To Rand and her ilk, all roads that would benefit thy neighbors or the larger society is a slippery slope to collectivism.  There  are no compromises, no mixed-economic regulations and supports for small or large business  or individuals and so on.

 

 

Ms. Rand, to me, seemed to be overreacting to her family misfortunes and experiences under Bolshevism and the chaos and political turmoil of the  revolutionary Russia of her youth. She thought any help for just about anybody was irrational, and would  lead society inevitably to totalitarianism.  To me, a very secular atheist at the time as she was, this seemed too much, a fear of state power in a nation where state power was more diffused than almost any other capitalist-pluralistic society. She and Dr. Branden seemed to be providing a cure for a social "disease" that didn't exist in 1980's America.  

 

 

 Even an ultra-conservative like William F. Buckley (who said jokingly ot an interviewer in 2003 that he had to be "flogged"  into reading through "Atlas Shrugged"), the late neo-Conservative Christopher Hitchens,  and former Reagan aide and best-selling conservative writer Dinesh D'Sousa had or have sharp reservations about her teachings.   

So it surprises me that Ms. Rand and her teachings are still popular, especially with the new breed of ultra-conservatives .   GOP House Budget guru Paul Ryan is a big fan, although he recently denounced her teachings when he was criticized by Catholic officials for trying to meld Randism with church teachings.  We'll see how others in the Republican far right do, trying to "square the circle" of being a practitioner of economic heartlessness and still pretend to prescribe to basic Judeo-Chrisitan precepts.    

   

A preface to the video, from ThinkProgress.org:  

"Some of the right's leading political and media lights have heaped praise upon Rand. The author of the Republicans' new budget plan to gut Medicare and Medicaid, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has said Rand is the reason he entered politics. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) have both declared themselves devotees of her writing. Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of Rand's book The Fountainhead. She's also received accolades from right-wing pundits Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, John Stossel, and Andrew Napolitano.

"During her lifetime, Rand advocated "the virtue of selfishness," declared altruism to be "evil," opposed Medicare and all forms of government support for the middle-class and the poor, and condemned Christianity for advocating love and compassion for the less fortunate:

Rand also dismissed the feminist movement as a "false" and "phony" issue, said a female commander in chief would be "unspeakable," characterized Arabs as "almost totally primitive savages," and called government efforts to aid the handicapped and educate "subnormal children" an attempt to "bring everybody to the level of the handicapped."

 

 

Meet Rep. Allen West (R-FL); the latest GOP Tea Party Troll To Snap His Cap! Uses "Redscare Redux" as Attention-Getting Device

I guess I should have seen the old red scare card from a conservative-radical politician coming. Surely it was coming, right as that Iron Horse, "Old Number 97", a' barreling down the railway tracks with Casey Jones at the helm blowing the horn! The breaks are gone, the nut-jobs are stoking the boiler, the dogs are barking, and any sane conservative left is about to make a jump for the ditch.

This whole election year has been off the wall. It just went spinning off to the 1950's all over again.

First we had the GOP's answer to "Baby Doc" Duvalier, former reactionary leader of Haiti --Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Ryan has his nefarious but popular plan in the House to balance the budget by eliminating Medicare as we know it and cutting taxes to the well-off and the super rich while pretending to balance the budget. Even though the budget itself in ten years would lose ten trillion dollars in revenue. Yeah, that will work. Yeah...sure. Why didn't I think of that?

Then it was Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich taking every word out of Barack Obama, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi's mouth and twisting it to maybe get the last blockhead voter he can out of some state primary he'll never win. And now we have Allen West, the back-bencher par excellence, coming out with his latest attempt to get someone outside his Florida district to notice him.

80 Communists in the Democratic Congressional Caucus in Washington? This guy needs medication. Seriously.

The Right Prescription for "Obama Care" at The Roberts' Supreme Court

It's the second day of arguments before the Supreme Court on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. All detractors and some proponents call this "Obama Care". It's a program passed by both Houses of Congress two years ago, designed to phase in a public-private health insurance reform estimated to cover 95 percent of all Americans in a few years.  It is neither a single-payer system many nations have, not is it a total free-market approach that would treat health care like an ordinary consumer item such as personal computers, cable or satellite television access or tangerines.

The latest  and most contentious part of the argument is the health insurance mandate that would require people to buy health insurance. The issue seems to have ignited a fervor on the parts of many conservatives that somehow being compelled to buy health insurance is an assault on basic liberty and is therefore unconstitutional. 

It is clear from the media analysis and audio transcript of this day's argument before the High Court that many of the conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts,  are seemingly skeptical of a mandate.  To these justices, a physician may as well be a grocer.

"Liberty" is something most people covet;  conservatives especially prize the idea of living a life with as few barriers as possible.   Who wants to be needy? But when it comes to health services we are not sure when neediness arises; much as many would like to stand on liberties, the rights we covet  need to be tempered whenever we are in need of assistance from the larger community.    

 

Ironically, the individual mandate idea came from the conservative Heritage Foundation and was endorsed by both Mitt Romney (who implemented it during his stewardship of a health care law as governor of Massachusetts) and Newt Gingrich.  Both these men now repudiate it. It may be that the messenger now being a Democratic US President has caused them to choose fanning flames of division over common sense principles.   

The practical matter is that anyone who is human and not a spirit can fall ill or get hit by a bus or assaulted from behind  in the street or have a vehicular accident. A parent can have  a family member or child develop a cancer or some other terrible condition.  Right now anyone who comes to an emergency room with a serious condition that requires treatment has to be given medical assistance and that can be costly.   Having everyone covered by health insurance would help reduce the drain on public expenditures. 

  To live in a nation where a family doesn't lose insurance coverage when a breadwinner is laid off or or a small business fails we need to have a health system that recognizes  people are not invulnerable to disease.  

You can go to a gym or walk ten miles a day and just eat apples and water and, even then,  STILL get sick or hurt or have a child who contracts leukemia. Anyone might  be brought unconscious and hurt  to a hospital and if you don't have insurance and the bills are astronomical the tax payer sooner or later will have to pay what you can't.   

S**t sometimes just happens.  It's part of being human. 

Right now the feeling is the individual mandate for health insurance, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, may be in trouble in the SCOTUS and no one knows how it will be ruled upon. But we all know, deep down, that life and health is not a ordinary consumer product.  It is unique. And, like it or not,all Americans, save a few very wealthy billionaires,  are all subject to the national health apparatus no matter what anyone's  philosophical qualms. 

 

The individual mandate isn't perfect but it's what we have and I hope it is retained.  It's not a total cure, but it's a rational and reasonable "treatment" than what has been "prescibed"  by any President  or session of Congress before recent times.  

Bruce Springsteen's Report to America

In his latest editorial, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts highlights a new Bruce Springsteen album, "Wrecking Ball" that proves once again why his music has connected with so many progressive-minded and just plain practical people for nearly four decades.  From "Born to Run" and "Badlands" to his haunting album "Nebraska"  and "Ghost of Tom Joad" albums, and so many other great hits with The E Street Band", he has been on the side of the angels as far as I'm concerned.   And as for the music itself, well they don't call him "The Boss" for nothing. 

From Mr. Pitts' column:     

"...for all the manicured eloquence of the constitutionally mandated report President Obama delivered in January, the new Bruce Springsteen album, "Wrecking Ball," captures more raw emotional truth about the state of the American Dream than any politician ever could.

"These first years of the millennium have been extraordinarily trying, especially for a nation that had passed a quarter century in relative peace. Then came terror. Then came wars. Then came economic meltdown. And in the last, we were galled to find that what had brought us to the brink of ruin was the greed, corruption, mendacity and predatory practices of giant money houses and that we were now required to save them from the consequences of their misdeeds because they were too big to fail.

"Meantime, we failed right, left and sideways, as jobs went away and money grew tight, as horizons receded and hope shriveled down to a wrinkled shell of itself and people who'd never asked for all that much to begin with -- a fair chance to earn their own bread, care for themselves, house themselves -- found their aspirations padlocked behind them, their dreams set out at the curb. In a nation where corporations are people and fetuses are people, actual people could not catch a break, nor even much in the way of empathy.

"It is from the heart of this disconnection, this chasm between America that is and America that ought to be, that Springsteen issues his report."

The rest of the column is here:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/20/2704404/bruce-springsteen-and-the-state.html

 

"Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right" (2012)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Thomas Frank

In 2003, Thomas Frank (a former writer for "The Wall Street Journal" who contributes to Harper's and other periodicals) previously penned the insightful "What's the Matter With Kansas?" A best-selling tome that traced how one American midwest state changed from being a hot-bed of progressive politics in the 1900's to a bastion of conservatism a century later.

Frank has now written a book to explain one of the knotty problems of recent US politics: how the free-market, hard line de-regulators of corporate capitalism (the GOP) emerged as the dominant party in the 2010 Elections s despite the tremendous losses in the economy just two years earlier under the Bush-Cheney Administration.

Mr. Frank shows in short and snappy prose how the far right revitalized itself and used corporate power to finance a lightning-fast conservative revival with the help of former Bush campaign guru Karl Rove, former Congressman Dick Armey's lobbying prowess and the money from the likes of billionaire Charles Koch and his brother in an alliance to "change the story" of the Wall Street banking crash and the mortgage crisis into a government plot rather than a failure of the heights of investment macro-capitalism and shady schemes like the credit-default swap and toxic securities games that led to the worst downfall in economic US history since the Crash of 1929 and subsequent free-fall.

Frank's book follows the rise of the American Tea Party and its appeal to the simple and accessible heartland-narrative that everything the government does is wrong and all regulations are bad because they hurt "small" business (i.e., multi-national banking and financial speculators and bond and futures traders.) Frank spends a good deal of the book showing the rise of unlikely "populists" like the commentator Glenn Beck and the enduring power of the super-capitalist propaganda writer Ayn Rand to help explain the "intellectual energy" behind the movement.

This book is a very good analysis of how the right wing of America continues to regroup over and over again (for the fourth time in forty years if you count the rise of Richard Nixon's "Silent Majority" in 1968, The Reagan "Revolution" of the 1980s and Newt Gingrich and the "Contract With America" movement in 1994.) Counting the recent upsurge in 2010 and its apparent that, like clockwork, every dozen years or so, a "thunder on the right" campaign emerges from the boardrooms and think-tanks of the American rightward establishment. And, s far, each time said movement is more radical rather than conservative than the last movement. So radical indeed that previous leaders like Nixon and Reagan would be considered too soft to lead the movements they inspired not so long ago.

Here's a portion of Frank's main themes in the book, taken from a analysis he wrote on the "Reuters" website: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/01/12/how-everyone-got-the-right-wrong/

"Rather than acknowledge that they had enjoyed thirty years behind the wheel, they declared that they had never really got their turn in the first place. The true believers had never actually been in charge, the “Conservative Ascendancy” never really existed—and therefore, the disastrous events of recent years cast no discredit on conservative ideas themselves. The solution was not to reconsider conservative dogma; it was to double down, to work even more energetically for the laissez-faire utopia.

"Pure idealism of this sort is unusual in American politics, however, and the jaded men of the commentariat sat back and waited for the system to punish the wayward ones, for the magnetic pull of the “center” to work its corrective magic. But this time the gods didn’t intervene in the usual way. In 2010, a radicalized GOP scored its greatest victory in congressional elections in many decades.

'The simplest explanation for the conservative comeback is that hard times cause people to lash out at whoever is in power. In 2010, that happened to be Democrats. Ergo, their rivals staged a comeback. But surely the two parties are not simply interchangeable, like Coke and Pepsi. They are able to control their own fate to some degree, to differentiate themselves from each other. Besides, history provides enough examples of public sentiment moving consistently in a particular direction to show that it need not always flop aimlessly back and forth."

Yet flop the average "independent voter" who bothered to vote in 2010 did--flopping right back into the main party that led the way (along with pliable semi-conservative Democrats) to the sub-prime mortgage/toxic securitization scams that put us in trouble in the first place!

Oh, well. At least I feel better having read this engaging 187 page book. I now at least understand better how the swindlers operated.

Here's an interview with the author from January.





For access to Thomas Frank's recent essays: http://www.tcfrank.com/essays.php

"Reds" (1981) Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Maureen Stapleton

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Last night i watched this film for the first time in thirty years. I found it a daring tour de force by star-director-co-screenwriter Warren Beatty at the time. "A three-hour film about an American Communist who goes to Russia...and dies" as he puts it in the DVD commentary was not potentially the stuff of box-office gold in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan and the most heated time of Cold War America since the early Sixties.

But the film did do well enough at the box office to make a small profit and earn a number of awards, including an Oscar for Beatty as a director and Maureen Stapelton in her role as Emma Goldman.

The film follows early 20th Century American globe-trotting journalist and activist John "Jack" Reed and Louise Bryant as writers and political radicals. They fall in love and then, after moving from staid Portland, Oregon, to living a bohemian lifestyle in the Greenwich Village part of New York (and having some tumultuous old-fashioned Hollywood romantic complications) go to Russia to witness, report and (for Reed) participate in the October Revolution of 1917. Seeing the film the first time prompted me to go out and read John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World" and its a great piece of reportage, and historically significant even if some critics have found it too kind to one political movement in that revolution.

Written as it was at the beginning of such an epochal event in human history, Reed can be forgiven for being a bit too romantic about the possibilities of what was happening in Russia to empower workers and forgotten people all over the world.

The first half of the film shows us Reed's view of the Revolution and the growth of radical labor politics in World War II era America. The scene with the laborers in the barn in the clip is indicative of that.

The second half of the film shows how those around Reed (including Bryant and Emma Goldman) become more disillusioned with the chances of radical change in America and the high cost that Lenin's government is exacting on the Russian people. At the same time, Beatty and his fellow screenwriter, the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, make it clear that Reed is a man who is a man trapped between his own country (where he faces jail for sedition charges stemming from opposing the entry of America in World War One) and his lack of total revolutionary fervor for some in Russia who increasingly use him as a tool to promote their own ideas as the Bolsheviks desperately try to fight off the attempts by disenfranchised revolutionary parties, moderate and reactionary groups and foreign armies who mean to bring down their government. He seems a man without a country, chasing a revolution that has little use for his true reflections.


I couldn't help wondering what would have become of Reed's view of Russia had he lived longer? According to a quote attributed to Bryant, he felt at the end of his life he might have misjudged the Bolsheviks. But there is controversy there. What we do know without controversy is that John Reed at his best was courageous and had no tolerance for censorship or the lies of politicians or bureaucrats.

It's clear though his is a tale that would be little known outside formal history classes in America were it not for the box office clout of a American film star. No matter what you think about the beliefs of these two main people when you reflect upon them, I think most would say this is a tale well worth the telling.

Boston Legal: Television With Conviction

 "Boston Legal" was a show that ran for five seasons on ABC and was one of the few long-running shows  that blended comedy and drama together in a unusually  offbeat and engaging manner.  The setting was a major law office which somehow manage to stay together despite some very disparate characters.  The main payoffs to this shows came in the court-room scenes and in the behind-the scenes relationships between pompous and past-it super lawyer-satyr  Denny Crane (William Shatner, nicely riffing on his reputation for playing authority figures) and Alan Shore (James Spader), a younger lawyer who specializes in  ringing closing arguments.      Crane represented the Red State conservative aspects of Fortress America and Shore was the liberal smart-aleck.  All the supporting cast, including Candice Bergen, Mark Valley and Constance Zimmer, made up a fine roster of actors.  

 Serious social and political issues of the Bush/Cheney Era came up frequently.    Here's an episode from the second season on a gun control trial.  

Although I can't endorse all of the writers' views on the Christian religion here, this next example is another of "Boston Legal" going unafraid into territory few American shows would dare tread.

 

 

 

 

This last clip has some graphic images but it shows part of the counter-argument against the assault on civil rights and the Geneva Convention that was carried out by Team Bush. Did it make a difference in the 2008 elections? Maybe not, but suffice to say this was an usually frank show that snuck in a  good political agenda in with the laughs.