Dirty Hippies » Wealth

“I made it. Why can’t you?”

Tom Sullivan — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 19:04:02 +0000

“They say they got where they are by working 60 hours a week for years,” my friend said (I’m paraphrasing). “They made it and they don’t see why they should pay anything to help other people who did not.”

It is a message my friend hears from doctors he knows. (This was one of those intense bar conversations, rapid-fire and wide-ranging. The kind you wish you had recorded to review again later.)

But the “I made it. Why can’t you?” view of capitalism is history written by the victors, isn’t it? An oversimplified success formula derived from too few data points, from too small a sample. We see the same kind of myopic analysis in the nation’s capital. From wealthy politicians surrounded by wealthy donors and wealthy lobbyists. Georgetown cocktail parties, high-dollar fundraiser dinners. When you and the people you hang with are all successful and rich, it is easy to question why everyone else is not. The problem must be them. That’s it, the poor are just lazy.

It’s not that most success doesn’t involve hard work and persistence. But as someone recently wrote, “Politicians can’t get past the idea that the only possible way to fail in America is if you sit back and do nothing.”

Yet the vast number of new startups fail each year. Estimates are all over the board (depending on what you count), but 3 out of 4 failing is not an outlier for new startups backed by venture capital. Half of small businesses fail in the first 5 years according to figures presented by Barry Ritholtz. Those odds don’t compute in an alternate universe where hard work by “risks-takers” guarantees success.

In this universe, watching a child keep trying and keep failing is one of the toughest challenges for a teacher. Obviously, the success formula is infallible. The problem must be the teacher.

In a world out of balance where the spread between rich and poor is at Gilded Age levels, it’s “I’m all right, Jack!” The Golden Rule and the Golden Mean are largely forgotten, as is the old proverb, “There but for the grace of god go I.” This makes “I made it. Why can’t you?” a kind of whistling past the graveyard view of our economy. It blithely ignores the casino aspects of capitalism that failed businesses and the families who owned them experience every year.

Our success formulas involve a certain degree of magical thinking. Victors are eager to share the simple, guaranteed formulas that worked for them and that anyone can copy. Some sell theirs late at night on cable TV. The uncle who hit it big at the slots in Vegas will tell his grandchildren the story of how he became the big winner years later. How he selected his machine. How he guarded it scrupulously. The wrist action he used to shove in dollars. The order he pressed the buttons. The lucky sweater. Most importantly, how persistence pays. The other uncle, the one who went bust and had to sell his watch to get home, will not be telling his grandchildren a similar story.

At a prayer meeting I once attended, a woman questioning her faith was upset that God had not answered her prayers. Another believer offered some handy, “battle tested and battle proven” advice.

“Did you plead the blood? You have to plead the blood.” (Or else the magic won’t work, she didn’t add.) Maybe she had unconfessed sin in her life, someone else offered. See, the distressed woman’s mistake wasn’t in treating the Bible as a book of spells, no. The problem was she wasn’t doing the incantations right. Because crank in a simple formula and the Creator of the Universe must jump out of his box on command, just like Jack.

Our thinking about our own wealth — and others’ lack of it — seems no less magical.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

The 1% – They Always Have Some Mighty Fine Whine

Tom Sullivan — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:54:43 +0000

With their “We are the 99%” chant, Occupy Wall Street protesters call for and end to the corporate corruption of democracy, to America’s two-tiered system of justice, and to the rigged economics that concentrates the nation’s wealth in the hands of the top 1%. By cheating, says Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, who reminds readers that even as it had its hand out for a taxpayer-funded bailout, Goldman Sachs’ effective tax rate was 1% in 2008, “the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation.” At the time, Texas Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett explained that the problem was larger than Goldman Sachs, “With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”

The other day, I posted a video from Jared Bernstein critiquing the proposed repatriation tax holiday sponsored by Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Taibbi lists four ways in which Wall Street makes a killing cheating the system, but let’s examine how the 1% whines about it all the way to their own banks.

After the finance industry brought the world economy to its knees and their employers went to the American taxpayers for a bailout, traders earning well into six figures whined that they bore no personal responsibility for their participation, and how dare taxpayers balk at paying them their six- and seven-figure bonuses. Wall Street’s Most Unindicted whined, and how dare President Obama call them “fat cats.”

By several measures, the individual tax burden in this country is far lower than it was under that notorious, confiscatory, Democratic despot, Dwight Eisenhower, yet some of the same people mentioned above whine that they are over-taxed by oppressive “big government.” Maybe they just don’t get out (of the country) enough.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce rends its garments over “punishing” government regulations. Business leaders complain that over-regulation is making America uncompetitive, that it will drive domestic corporations offshore to more business-friendly countries. Yet a recent study by the World Bank ranks the U.S. 4th in the world in ease of setting up a business. Just where do the whiners think they are going to go?

Oh, but they whine rhapsodically about the oppressive U.S. corporate tax rate, how we have one of the highest tax rates in the developed world. They know full well that few of our largest corporations actually pay that 35 percent, that they pay small armies of accountants and tax attorneys to ensure that those who pay any tax at all pay closer to 28 percent (estimates vary), while some pay nothing or even get money back from the government, that is, from the American taxpayer. Twenty-eight percent is bit higher than the average effective rate for industrialized countries (about 23 percent), but is that spread really what the whining is about?

According to the GAO, 55 percent of U.S. firms paid no federal income taxes during at least one year between 1998 and 2005. Even then, thousands of firms set up tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere and park their profits offshore to evade taxes, waiting — thanks to the first repatriation tax holiday under President George W. Bush — for the pressure of another recession and high unemployment so they can whine to the public once more about how they would create jobs here at home again if only Congress would allow them to repatriate their offshore profits not at 35%, not at 28%, and not at 23%, but at 5.25%. According to the GAO report, that’s a deal only most corporations doing business in the United States and paying nothing in federal income tax could pass up.

All that is preface to this rhetorical question: What reduced tax rate, what reduced level of regulation — short of Somalia’s — would stop these people from whining anyway?

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

ALEC Has Theirs. Now They Want Yours.

Tom Sullivan — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 02:20:17 +0000

The massive amounts of money America’s rich spend to keep from paying taxes seems as irrational as it is obsessively ideological. There’s something creepily cultish about it. This week’s massive leak of corporate-written model legislation from the Koch brothers-financed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has further exposed the depth and breadth of the corporate capture of what was once billed as government of, by, and for the people.

Grover Norquist, the once enfant terrible of the Right, has for years promoted the idea that taxation is theft. He has likened progressive taxation to the Holocaust. Yet so long as those tax dollars flowed their way, there were certain features of “big government” that oligarchs liked just fine – defense contracts, bank bailouts, for-profit prisons, etc. But this new breed of conservative has taken Norquist a step further. Now, if the tax dollars aren’t flowing their way, they seem to view it as theft in terms of lost opportunity cost. Why have low-paid enlisted men perform military housekeeping tasks that can be farmed out to KBR at a markup to taxpayers? They have moved beyond free-market fundamentalism into for-profit zealotry.

For people so concerned with keeping the government’s hands out of their pockets, the ALEC documents reveal that they have spent quite a lot of effort on getting their hands into yours. The Center for Media and Democracy describes ALEC’s public education efforts as an attempt to turn education into a “private commodity rather than a public good.” Charter school expansion is at the top of the agenda, and ALEC-inspired charter school bills have passed this spring in several states. Charter school chains are poised to move in. Public subsidy of charter companies like White Hat and Imagine Schools means private profit not only from state tax monies but also from complex sale-leaseback arrangements on the valuable real estate, private development subsidized at public expense or acquired through eminent domain.

The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.

Why are millionaires and billionaires targeting public education? For the same reason banksters pimped mortgage loans. For the same reason Wall Street wanted to privatize Social Security. For the same reason Willie Horton robbed banks.

Answer this question: What is the largest portion of the budget in all 50 states?

Writing in Harpers, Jonathan Kozol wrote,

Some years ago, a friend who works on Wall Street handed me a stock-market prospectus in which a group of analysts at an investment-banking firm known as Montgomery Securities described the financial benefits to be derived from privatizing our public schools. “The education industry”, according to these analysts, “represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control” that “have either voluntarily opened” or, they note in pointed terms, have “been forced” to open up to private enterprise … From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada”.

The animus toward public education isn’t really about big government. It’s about corporate America’s insatiable appetite. Big government is just fine by them so long as public money is flowing their way. It’s the rest that is wasteful spending. What they want now is a piece of the action from remaining large blocks of public funds, like Social Security and … public education.

From this perspective, it’s bad enough that states are not providing education on at least a not-for-profit basis. But it’s far worse than that. They’re giving it away! That’s a mortal sin. A crime against capitalism. The worst kind of creeping socialism. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent every year in a nonprofit community effort to educate a nation’s children, and the moguls are not skimming off the top. The horror.

So just as the business community tried with Social Security, there’s a massive effort to convince America that there’s something wrong with the public being involved in public education. If the public cannot be convinced, corporate-funded groups like ALEC obviously consider state legislators a softer target.

The Geek Manifesto

Tony Williams — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 22:52:17 +0000

We are geeks, and we are proud to be.

We are rational; we understand cause and effect; we understand consequences; we understand loosely-coupled distributed self-organizing systems with multiple redundant communication channels.

We are a community, not individuals entirely subject to our employers’ whims. Our personal contacts make up the backbone of the world-wide GeekWeb.

The world we live in could not function without us. It would not exist without our intellectual forebears. We have power, to do or to not do. Together, we have ultimate power. An individual can be corrupted; a community of peers cannot. Our work demands honesty. We demand it of each other. Without a central command structure there is no one to corrupt.

With power comes responsibility. We are smarter than the plutocrats. We know that their agenda will drive the world to hell, and their wealth will not insulate them from the consequences. The world has been there before. The time will come when action is necessary. We will decide how to decide. We will know what to do.

Spread the word.

Crappy Jobs Caused by Plutocracy and Austerity

Dave Johnson — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:01:48 +0000

There are good jobs and there are crappy jobs. There are burger-flipping jobs and there are skilled trades and professions. There are jobs that pay well and have benefits and jobs that don’t.

There is even the job you had, now paying less, with no benefits.

Much of the post-recession job growth is at low end. Many “better” jobs not at the low end pay less and offer fewer benefits than they used to. So the middle class continues to fall. The “economic divide” — the gap between the top few percent and the rest of us — continues to accelerate, pushed by the recent continuation of tax cuts for the wealthy, stock bubble-pumping from the Fed, and ongoing attacks on labor. And now, in particular by “austerity” budgets in the states and the pullback of stimulus and other programs from the federal government.

If you are desperate you’ll take any job, and the “austerity” idea — cutting taxes for the rich and using the resulting deficits to force cuts in unemployment, services, things government does for We, the People — forces people to be desperate enough to do just that. At the same time, it is cutting the number of jobs and the possibility that the economy will ever create more.

Why Crappy Jobs? Plutocracy and Austerity

Why isn’t the economy rebounding and producing lots of good jobs? The answer has two parts: plutocracy and austerity. Plutocracy forces the money and power to the top, and that power forces austerity measures on us to remove even more money and power from the rest.

Plutocracy: Fundamental changes brought in by the Reagan Revolution have come home to roost, shifting almost all of our economy’s income growth to a few at the top, while pitting working people around the world against each other. The forced decline of labor unions has left people on their own against giant corporations.

This video shows what it is like to negotiate on your own, up against companies with billions in resources:

Austerity: The second part of the crappy-jobs, slow-growth equation is austerity. Tax cuts for the wealthy have resulted in huge budget deficits, defunding government’s power to protect regular people. The plutocracy uses these deficits as an excuse to force budget cuts, “spending down” our infrastructure by deferring maintenance and modernization, cutting back on education, cutting back on basic scientific research and cutting back in many other areas thereby reducing our economic competitiveness. But they’re doing fine today, so they don’t care about how this hurts the rest of us tomorrow.

Austerity cuts back economic growth. This week a Goldman Sachs report says that the proposed budget cuts passed by the House shave a couple percent off of economic growth. Goldman Sachs Says GOP Budget Plan Will Hurt Economy

A Goldman Sachs economist has warned that the $60 billion package of spending cuts proposed by the Republicans to counter President Obama’s proposal could slow economic growth.

The cutbacks will also hurt employment. Center for American Progress this week, in Cuts In House GOP’s Continuing Resolution Could Drive The Unemployment Rate Up One Full Point,

Earlier this month, the Economic Policy Institute released a report finding that the $100 billion in discretionary spending cuts that the House GOP passed last weekend would result in the loss of nearly one million jobs. “Cuts of this magnitude will undermine gross domestic product performance at a time when the economy is seeing anemic post-recession growth,” wrote EPI’s Rebecca Theiss.

Another report this week shows how state and local cuts are also shaving growth. And who can be surprised by that? When you lay off thousands of teachers and other government workers, this causes a ripple effect to grocery, clothing and other stores. It causes even more foreclosures. AP: State spending cuts slow US economic growth in Q4,

The government’s new estimate for the October-December quarter illustrates how growing state budget crises could hold back the economic recovery.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that economic growth increased at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the final quarter of last year. That was down from the initial estimate of 3.2 percent.

. . . State and local governments, wrestling with budget shortfalls, cut spending at a 2.4 percent pace. That was much deeper than the 0.9 percent annualized cut first estimated and was the most since the start of 2010.

The Effect On People

This “austerity” craze — cutting taxes for the rich to force cuts in the things government does for We, the People — is threatening to destroy even the small amount of job creation we are getting. And what is the human effect?

A report from the Coalition on Human Needs titled, A Better Budget for All: Saving Our Economy and Helping Those in Need shows that millions of Americans would suffer from the proposed budget cuts:

At a time when 14 million people are out of work, the House approach to the federal budget fails those who are struggling most, according to a new report by the Coalition on Human Needs for the SAVE for All campaign.

The report draws a sharp contrast between the president’s budget for next fiscal year and the House plan for the remainder of this year, although it also notes serious concerns with elements of the president’s budget. It shows how the proposed budget cuts would both harm individuals and damage the country’s fragile economic recovery. The House plan includes the largest cuts, on an annualized basis, in domestic appropriations funding in history.

An Expanding Economy Fixes This

Cutbacks shrink the economy. And expanding economy provides good jobs with good pay and benefits and fixes budget deficits. We want an expanding economy for We, the People, not tax cuts for the rich and cutbacks on the things government does for We, the People. Tax cuts and austerity provide an opportunity for a few to cash out and take off, but does not provide for the rest of us.

March 10 Summit on Jobs and America’s Future

On March 10, 2011, the Summit on Jobs and America’s Future will bring together leaders and activists who understand that America faces a jobs crisis – and who are committed to building a political movement for sustainable economic growth, dynamic job creation, and a revival of the American economy.

Free. $15 with lunch. Register here.

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.

A partial response to Bill Gates’ op-ed about teachers

Kenneth Bernstein — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:46:31 +0000

Today’s Washington Post features an op-ed by Bill Gates titled How teacher development could revolutionize our schools. Teachers are the latest focus of Gates and his foundation. Before I respond to anything in this particular piece, let me remind readers that the last time Bill Gates got enthused about something in education, it was small schools. His foundations sank a huge amount of money into getting districts to create small schools while ignoring the research that had been done by those who had focused on the issue for years. The result was that the endeavor was not all that successful, the foundation has now pulled out of the effort, in some cases pulling the plug on ongoing efforts it had encouraged, and unfortunately tarnishing the concept and making it more difficult for those attempting to do it right.

Gates is now pushing a focus on teachers and teaching. That in itself would not be bad, except that as seems part and parcel of his approach, he has already locked himself in to certain approaches that are not necessarily going to help students all that much. And in the process, some of what he is advocating has the potential, especially in the times in which we find ourselves, to do great damage to teaching and thus to the learning of the students.

I will not explore all of the op ed. I simply have more important things – my students – to which I have to pay attention. I will focus on only one of his suggestions, which addresses the issue of class size, while combining it with merit pay, all of which is presumably based on some measure of teacher effectiveness.

Gates wants to do away with longevity increases. He does not want to pay more for advanced degrees. His arguments against these is largely based on test scores, not even value added test scores, since there is not a lot of other material currently available in the peer reviewed research. He is paying to develop better measures of teacher effectiveness, including working on a protocol to evaluate teachers by rating videotaped lessons. Part of the approach being used is the evaluation protocol used by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, in which evaluation of video tapes of PARTS of two lessons is PART of the overall process of determining if a teacher qualifies for National Board Certification - disclosure: I am a National Board Certified Teacher. I worry in reading Gates that his approach seems to be taking PART of that process and attempting to turn it in to the only measure, or at least to magnify it as a measure out of proportion to the other parts of the process.

That said, Gates apparently does not even want to wait to fully pilot this process. Thus we read two key paragraphs:

Perhaps the most expensive assumption embedded in school budgets – and one of the most unchallenged – is the view that reducing class size is the best way to improve student achievement. This belief has driven school budget increases for more than 50 years. U.S. schools have almost twice as many teachers per student as they did in 1960, yet achievement is roughly the same.

What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The rest of the savings could go toward improving teacher support and evaluation systems, to help more teachers become great.

Let me just focus on this. In theory, it might make more sense to give the “better” teachers more students, but Gates ignores the fact that many of us already teach too many students. And the proposal ignores the fact that in many school systems class sizes are already increasing for all teachers because of the financial pressures local and state governments are experiencing. We recently heard that high school class sizes in Detroit could go up to as many as 60 students.

And yes, as teachers have had salaries frozen - in our districts we have gone more than a year without step increases – or even worse, experienced cuts – in my case, loss of 7,000 in national board stipends and four furlough days – some desperately need any additional money they can earn to pay their bills. Believe me, I know.

Yet many of us already teach classes that are too big. My three Advanced Placement classes currently have 36, 38 and 38 students. I can in its current configuration only get 39 student desks into my room. My department chair wants to go in a different direction - she is trying to lower my class sizes in AP, so that they don’t go above 33. Thus I may have 4 sections of AP next year, but since AP classes are larger than those for the regular students, my student load will not go down – my regular classes currently have 19, 25 and 31 students. Next year I will have two such classes, probably both as 30. Do the math. I will have as many as 132 AP students (compared to my current 112) and as many as 60 regular students. That will take me right back to what was my peak load before some students withdrew from our school of 192.

It is odd to see Gates dismissing class size as a means of more effective learning. It is one of the few reforms which when done right has a solid peer-reviewed research base to support it. It is especially important in teaching reading and writing – one problem with the size of my AP classes and my total number of AP students is how little time I can give to each student’s writing. Remember those 112 AP students. If I give one written assignment that they all turn in, and it takes me only 3 minutes per paper to read, correct and advise per paper, that is 336 minutes for one set of papers. That is more than 5.5 hours of time outside of school to correct one set of papers. Increasing class sizes in secondary schools means that teachers lose the ability to work as effectively in helping students to write better.

I have always noted two problems with mandating smaller class sizes. The first is whether we actually had the physical plant to accomplish it - smaller class sizes means more classrooms. The other is one on which Gates is partially correct – to gain the full benefit of smaller classes requires more quality teachers, which in many cases we currently lack.

But what then should be our response? Should it not be to work on training, inducting, mentoring and supervising our teacher corps so that we have MORE quality teachers? If your solution is to increase the class sizes of those of us supposedly superior, it does not matter that you pay us more – each additional student in our rooms means that we become somewhat less effective for all of the students in that room. We get forced to move more in the direction of lecture, the classes may become more teacher centered rather than student centered.

Meanwhile, decreasing the class sizes of the “less effective” teachers does not in itself make them any more effective. Meanwhile, by changing the compensation structure in order to accomplish this, you create an entirely different set of problems, including destroying what should be the cooperative nature of teaching among the teachers in a building and in a department.

In short, Gates is yet again not fully understanding the nature of an aspect of education, taken his partial understanding, getting a bee in his bonnet, and using his billions to try to force education to move in a direction he has decided it needs to go, even though he never taught, and in fact never even attended public schools. I would not be surprised to find that his largest classes in the elite private high school he attended never even reached the size of my current smallest class. I do not thing he understands how much the dynamics of a class can change by adding 4 or 5 students, how much it restricts the ability of a good teacher to know students as well as they otherwise would be known. Perhaps he is thinking about an elementary teacher with one class. I teach 6. Increasing my classes by an average of 4 or 5 would mean increasing my total load by 24-30, or almost the equivalent of adding one additional class.

I will refrain from comments about the track record of the company from which Gates derives his billions, although as a Certified Data Processor and a one-time Certified Systems Professional with over 20 years in the field before I became a teacher I am more qualified to talk about his business than he is to talk about my profession.

Rather, let me close with these thoughts. Wouldn’t it be nice if governors, school boards, and especially journalists and op ed writers, would given even 1/10 of the attention to professional educators as they do to the likes of Bill Gates? Then, just maybe, we could have an honest and productive discussion of what we need to do to improve our schools.

There are plenty of teachers who could participate in such a discussion. Some of us devote time to study, to know the data, to try to educate policy makers. Some of us were in New York with the Education Writers Association. That was a rare case where our voices were somewhat heard.

I don’t have billions. My school system and state pension board are taking actions that could force me into retirement for financial reasons. Following the logic of a Bill Gates, the two new teachers who could be hired to replace me with the same money I receive may financially be more beneficial for the school system, but I question if it would be more beneficial to the almost 200 students I teach each year.

I cost more. I have several advanced degrees. I have more than 15 years of teaching experience. What makes me a superior teacher is that I am constantly reflecting and attempting to become an even better teachers. Give me another 20-30 students and I will have less time for each student, and even less time to reflect and improve. Replace me with two rookies and the students they teach will be the material on which those newbies learn how to teach.

Gates may be well meaning. Unfortunately, what he proposes is not well thought out, and is likely – as was his effort to propagate small schools – be counterproductive to real improvements in teaching and learning.

Peace.

The Rich Are Laughing at Us and the Tea Party People

Spocko — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:40:23 +0000

Remember the Enron recording where two traders were joking about how they crewed the people of California and then “Grandma Millie” was trying to get her money back?

“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”

– CBS News June 1, 2004

Every time I hear a quote from someone resenting what a great deal the public employees unions have I remember that quote. It reminds me of who we are not hearing from in this prearranged crisis in Wisconsin. We are not hearing the voices of the people who set up the financial crisis in the state.

Today Ian Murphy, editor of the Buffalo Beast, called Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, pretending to be billionaire industrialist and secretive conservative political activist David Koch. Koch (pronounced “coke”) is one of the big money people behind Walker. Walker’s office admits the call is real and for a brief period of time the media will be forced to move the focus of the story from unions and their supporters fighting Walker and conservatives.

In the call we got to hear how Walker sounds when he talks to big money. Now I’d love to hear how rich people like Koch actual talk to each other about these protests. Are they laughing at everyone? Do they chuckle when the media miss their role in this? Do they smirk watching tea partiers play their role? There will be a lot of press calling Walker’s office about the Fake Koch call, but how many will call the Real Kochs? Even if some do, Koch will be on guard.

I want to hear more unguarded conversations like this, to hear the real emotional tone behind the words. Radio is a powerful medium because while it might take listeners some time to process the meanings of the words, the tone and emotional context behind the words is deduced almost immediately. Video can also give us lots of information, as anyone who has watched Lie To Me can attest to; but it requires more focus than listening, which can slip into people’s mind almost everywhere they go.

Why do I want more people to hear how the rich say things? Because I’d like to activate certain groups of people on an emotional level. Emotions, like anger, need to be directed at the right entities. As Silivo said to Tony in the Sopranos, “Our true enemy has yet to reveal himself”.

If the Tea Party people are directing their anger and resentment at the public union employees that means they are not mad at the rich corporate persons who are actually behind making their life less rich. I suppose it is easier to be mad at someone who has a slightly better life than you than with someone who has a wildly better life than you. But if you heard these rich people laughing at you as they talk about their schemes to keep beating you down I would think that even many tea partiers would get upset.

It’s too bad that we won’t hear the conversations of people who were responsible for driving states into deficits via unproductive corporate tax breaks. Wouldn’t you love to hear the conversations of the people responsible for the financial meltdown? Do they joke about our inability to prosecute them for their economic treason? Do they laugh as the media moves on to the crisis of the day without looking for the true cause of people’s pain? Do they breath a sigh of contented relief as we turn on each other? What would it sound like?

If we heard them in all their cackling glory or insensitive obliviousness perhaps we all would want to take the fight to them. Not physically, of course, but financially. The UK Uncut movement has been showing us the way. One of the funniest and most profound movies of the eighties has a quote that I think applies here. In Trading Places Eddie Murphy’s Bill Ray Valentine finds Dan Aykroyd’s Louis Winthorpe III character cleaning a gun and explains why that is a spectacularly bad idea.

Louis Winthorpe III: Listen, do you have any better ideas?

Billy Ray Valentine: Yeah. You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.

Coleman: You have to admit, sir, you didn’t like it yourself a bit.

The rich are laughing at us, both dirty hippies and tea partiers. But when you cost your true enemies money, they don’t find it a bit funny.

Cross posted at Spocko’s Brain

Will the Right Overplay Their Hand?

James Boyce — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:06:27 +0000

There is no question that the Right has been financed by a select and small group of donors for close to forty years now; significant business players like Bob Perry and the Koch Brothers who more than likely don’t have a political bone in their bodies, but look at the their investment in politics as smart business.

Fellow Dirty Hippie Dave Johnson and I traced these efforts all the way back to the tobacco industry’s ability to prevent significant regulation for decades by creating science, or creating a ‘manufactroversy’ ie the act of creating a controversy where none exists.

What the Right may be underestimating with the advent of technology and access to information is that the light is shining more and more on the few funders that are bankrolling the revolution. I wonder if, perhaps, this change in access to information will prove to be detrimental to their efforts, time will tell I suppose.

In the meantime, check this out. A blogger posing as David Koch called Governor Walker in Wisconsin. Let’s just say he got right through.

Peace.