Monthly Archives: May 2012

More Trump birtherism

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The more things don’t change, part 2 –Trump and birtherism

This week’s utterances from Donald Trump actually revisit his earlier statements about President Obama’s birth certificate, somewhat more indirectly. For those who have forgotten, CNN’s Anderson Cooper aired lengthy interviews with Trump, at Trump’s request uncut, April 25 and April 26, 2011. The interviews followed CNN’s own investigation of archives in the state of Hawaii during the CNN investigation of Obama’s birth certificate. Some of the transcript from the Apr. 25, 2011, program is posted at bottom. Owing to length, some of it will have to go up later.

Back to this week–we need a dramatic-comic reading. Trump, the man who has been working overtime to bring birtherism back on to the map, is using rhetorical tactics passed down to us from the Greeks and Romans, presumably the sleazier Greeks and Romans. Among them, a professed agnosticism on whether President Obama was born in the United States, a pretend dubiety that makes an accusation while pretending not to. Here is one of Trump’s thin disavowals:

[from transcript]

“(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ACOSTA (voice-over): Mitt Romney is once again letting it ride by Donald Trump. Just hours before Romney attends a fund-raiser hosted by Trump on the Las Vegas Strip, the real estate tycoon is still voicing his doubts about whether President Obama was actually born in the U.S.

DONALD TRUMP, CHAIRMAN & CEO, TRUMP HOTELS & CASINO RESORTS:

I have never really changed. Nothing’s changed my mind. He doesn’t have a birth certificate. Now, he may have one . . .” [italics added]

 

Trump

For all the publicity over this week’s graceless comments, Trump was actually brasher back in spring 2011, when he was still thinking of running for president:

[from transcript]

“(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, CHAIRMAN & CEO, TRUMP HOTELS & CASINO RESORTS:

I have people that actually have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You have people now down there . . .

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Absolutely.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: . . . searching in Hawaii?

TRUMP: Absolutely. And they cannot believe what they’re finding.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You say that you have sent investigators there. Have your investigators been able to unearth anything more that has given your argument credence?

TRUMP: I will let you know that at a future date. I will let you know that at a future date.”

The future date never came. As we know, the president released his long-form birth certificate, Trump decided not to run for the White House, and we have yet to see those hired Trump investigators, either on television or in any other medium or forum. But Trump is back in the news, for only a slighter softer version of the same already-discredited remarks.

 

Bacon

Not that the history goes back only to April 2011. Here for the record is Francis Bacon on the Donald Trumps of the world, from the seventeenth-century essay “Of Boldness”:

“So these men, when they have promised great matters, and failed most shamefully, yet (if they have the perfection of boldness) they will but slight it over, and make a turn, and no more ado. Certainly to men of great judgment, bold persons are a sport to behold; nay, and to the vulgar also, boldness has somewhat of the ridiculous. For if absurdity be the subject of laughter, doubt you not but great boldness is seldom without some absurdity. Especially it is a sport to see, when a bold fellow is out of countenance; for that puts his face into a most shrunken, and wooden posture; as needs it must; for in bashfulness, the spirits do a little go and come; but with bold men, upon like occasion, they stand at a stay; like a stale at chess, where it is no mate, but yet the game cannot stir. But this last were fitter for a satire than for a serious observation.”

A good onstage reading of Trump from transcripts would interlace Trump’s statements with their models defined in Prof. Richard Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms.

Here, pulling out more from the archaic stockpile, is Trump in the May 29 interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

[from transcript]

“WOLF BLITZER, CNN: Joining us now from Las Vegas on the phone is the chairman and the president of Trump Organization, Donald Trump. Donald, thanks very much for joining us.

DONALD TRUMP, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, TRUMP HOTELS & CASINO RESORTS: I thought your reporter was very inaccurate in his description. And I thought the introduction was totally inappropriate and was actually very dishonest.

BLITZER: Well, tell us why.

TRUMP: Well, because what he said was wrong and what he said was almost as though President Obama wrote it, but I’m sure he knows that. And I thought it was a very inappropriate introduction. But go ahead with your first question.

BLITZER: Well, I don’t–you–is there a specific issue you want to dispute that he mentioned, because, if you do, I want to give you a chance . . .

(CROSSTALK)”

Not to give away the ending here, but this Trump interview reads like any transcript through the ages, when an interlocutor tries to pin sleaze down and the pinnee tries to wriggle out from under.

Tactic A: Pre-emptive accusation against the interlocutor, above.

Tactic B: Pretext that the target is really the source. Continuing,

“TRUMP: Obama does not like the issue of where he was born. His own publisher, as you know, using his words, said he was born in Kenya and he lived in Indonesia. Of course, now he’s denying that, amazingly.”

Also above, Tactic C: Now, I know he doesn’t want me to say this . . . Insinuation that speaker is blowing open a story covered up by nefarious others.

Tactic D: I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Speaker claims that he’s not really here to say what he’s saying:

“[Trump] So–but I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk, as you said you would, jobs, China, what’s going on with respect to China and how they’re ripping this country, what’s going on with respect to OPEC and how the nations of OPEC are laughing at the stupidity of our country. That’s what I’m here to talk about.

BLITZER: All right.

TRUMP: You know that’s what I’m here to talk about, and I thought your introduction was highly inappropriate. But that’s OK, because I have gotten to know you over the years.

BLITZER: Well, I–well, listen, Donald, first of all, I never said we weren’t going talk about the birther issue. We had a conversation earlier today. We didn’t discuss at all what we were going to talk about.

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: It’s something that bothers Obama very much.

BLITZER: I don’t know why you’re . . .

TRUMP: And I will tell you, it’s not an issue that he likes talking about. So what he does is uses reverse psychology on people like you, so that you report like, oh, gee, he’s thrilled with it. He does not like that issue because it’s hitting very close to home. You know it and he knows it.”

Reiterates tactics already used. Blitzer seems bemused at the overt attack on him and on CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

Now we get to the meat of the accusation. Tactic E: Speaker puts accusation into others’ mouths:

“(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: I don’t know it. Donald, you and I have known each other for a long time. And I don’t understand why you’re doubling down on this birther issue after the state of Hawaii formally says this is the legitimate birth certificate. He was born in Hawaii. Why are you going through all of this, Donald?

TRUMP: Well, a lot of people don’t agree with that birth certificate. A lot of people do not think it’s authentic.”

Tactic F: Speaker attempts to discredit documentary evidence.

“BLITZER: But if the state of Hawaii authorizes it, if the state of Hawaii says, this is official, he was born in Hawaii on this date, here it is, why do you deny that?

TRUMP: A lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: How can you say that if the . . .

(CROSSTALK)”

Reiterates that the accusation actually comes from others.

“TRUMP: Now, you won’t report it, Wolf, but many people do not think it was authentic.

His mother was not in the hospital.” [italics added]

Tactic G: Fabrication.

“There are many other things that came out. And, frankly, if you would report it accurately, I think you would probably get better ratings than you’re getting, which are pretty small.”

Tactic H: Hint of yet undisclosed corroboration. Re-uses tactic of attacking interlocutor.

“BLITZER: Donald, have you seen the actual newspaper announcements within days of his birth in Honolulu, for example, “The Honolulu Star- Bulletin”? We will put it up there. You see the birth announcement back in 1961.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Listen to me, Donald.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Can I ask . . .

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Am I allowed to talk, if you could stop defending Obama?

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Donald, Donald, you’re beginning to sound a little ridiculous, I have to tell you.

TRUMP: No, I think you are, Wolf.

Let me tell you something. I think you sound ridiculous. And if you would ask me a question and let me answer it, instead of making . . .”

Tactic I: Speaker accuses others of not letting him speak/answer.

“BLITZER: Here’s the question. Did the conspiracy start in 1961, when “The Honolulu-Star Bulletin” and “The Honolulu Advertiser” contemporaneously published announcements that he was born in Hawaii?

TRUMP: That’s right. And many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit of being so-called so-called born in this country. Many people did it. It was something that was done by many people, even if they weren’t born in the country. You know it, and so do I. And so do a lot of your viewers.”

Reiterates tactic of putting his accusation into others’ mouths. Tactic J: Lumps the falsely accused in with actual misfeasors. [Note: The idea that the birth notice was placed falsely by parents was rebutted by Anderson Cooper on CNN, more than a year ago. See transcript below.]

“BLITZER: Donald, explain why–so why did the state of Hawaii authorize that live birth certificate? Why did they do it? Are they part of this conspiracy as well?

TRUMP: Well, your Democratic governor who was the one that was really leading it, a lot of people say, where did it come from? And they’re saying how come he didn’t show it to John McCain, Hillary Clinton? It was only Donald Trump that got him to do it.

So, you know that, and I know that. And when you say that Obama doesn’t mind this, Obama hates this subject. When his publisher comes out with a statement from him made in the 1990s that he was born in Kenya and that he was raised in Indonesia, and all of a sudden it comes out, I think it’s something that he doesn’t like at all.

Now, what he says is, oh, we love it, we love it, we love it, because that’s . . .

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Donald, let me tell you–let me tell you who hates this subject. It is Mitt Romney, who totally disagrees with you on this, including today. He issued a statement.

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: I don’t speak to Mitt Romney about it.”

As mentioned, Trump has actually been less indirect in the past, look at some of his earlier remarks. The transcripts below are from Apr. 25, 2011:

From Fox News Network:

“And you know he can say what he wants, but the fact is that this guy has not revealed his birth certificate. A lot of people agree with me. I tell you what, with all that I do, what I do best is China, jobs, OPEC, all of this. That’s what I do best.

That’s going to be my strength. It is my strength. I really understand it. I know the people. But with all of that, I think I get more positive–when I’m talking down the street, when I did–recently I did a Tea Party event, and we had a tremendous crowd. They loved this issue.

There are so many people that really want him to provide his birth certificate. I mean now you have states going out and saying, in order to run for office, you have to be able to provide a birth certificate.

There is a big lot of things going on with respect to the birth certificate. You know why did he spend–why is he spending millions of dollars to fight this issue instead of just providing his birth certificate? There are so many different elements here and I will say, it’s a very frightening thing for this country.”

From CNN, same day:

“ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight: the birther battle that keeps on building. Donald Trump is on the program tonight leveling surprising new claims about President Obama’s birth certificate, Trump now saying he believes it’s missing or doesn’t even exist.

As for proof? Well, as you will hear, he has none. Remember, Trump has said for weeks now that he has a team of investigators on the ground in Hawaii looking into the president’s birth certificate. But he’s offered no proof. We decided to send our own team to Hawaii to investigate as well. And over the next two nights you’re going to see what they found. They were there for five days interviewing and talking to dozens of people.

By the way, none of the people they talked to said that they’d been contacted by anyone working for Donald Trump. We spoke exclusively to the health official who at the orders of the Republican governor actually went and examined Mr. Obama’s original 1961 birth certificate. We spoke to the newspaper that ran his birth announcement and the people who knew his family and have known him since the day he was born almost 50 years ago in Honolulu.

Now, before we show you what we found, let’s just quickly go over some of the basics. This is President Obama’s certificate of live birth. This is the only document that Hawaii now considers to be official proof of birth in the state. This is the document the state gives you, any resident of Hawaii, anyone born in Hawaii, when you request proof of birth from the state.

It gets you a driver’s license in Hawaii, and the U.S. State Department accepts it as valid proof for citizenship when you’re applying for something like a passport. Now, this is the picture of the certificate of live birth that President Obama ordered from the state during the campaign. Take a look up close.

It’s got an official stamp with a stamped signature and a raised seal. It’s been examined by a number of news organizations and nonpartisan groups. You and I can’t get our own copy of this document even with the president’s permission. And by law, you or I could not go look at the president’s original 1961 birth certificate, which is in the Department of Health in Honolulu according to authorities there.

However, anyone could go to the Hawaii Vital Statistics Office and look at official birth information that’s called index data. It’s stored in a government binder. It’s an alphabetized list of all the babies born in Hawaii. And in the book containing births from 1961 to 1964 you will find a listing for Barack Hussein Obama. II, gender male. Here’s also the local paper’s birth announcement. It’s not an ad, by the way, placed by the parents or the grandparents.

These were official announcements just like sheriff sales and other public notices. The paper would get them straight from the Department of Health. That’s how it works. So you have got the official document the state sends out, recognized by the state and the federal government. You have got a birth announcement with officially provided information from back in the day. [emphasis added]

And you have got Republican state officials who said the original birth certificate is absolutely there. Now, this information as you all know has been out there for years, but still the confusion, in some cases conspiracy theories exist. So we decided to send our team to Hawaii to try to clear up the confusion. In a moment we will talk to Donald Trump.”

 

continued in later post

Big state, soft support–Primary results in Texas

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Texas Primary Results 2012: Big state, soft support

 

Unofficial results are in for the Texas primary, and on the Republican side Mitt Romney wins with 71 percent of the vote. Not that victory wasn’t pretty certain, since all the other major candidates have already dropped out—but there are a few interesting details.

1)      Rick Santorum got more than 114,000 votes, notwithstanding the fact that he is no longer in the race, suggesting that indeed he might have done pretty well in Texas if he had been able to stay in the contest long enough to make it to the long-belated primary. Thus the state GOP apparatus in Texas delivered yet another state to Romney, one way or another, this one putting him over the top in delegates as it happens. Not as blatant as the measures taken in Virginia, perhaps, but effective nonetheless.

2)      Newt Gingrich, likewise no longer in the race, got more than 67,000 votes—enough to dent Romney’s lead among urbanites, had the major candidates all still been in.

3)      Ron Paul got his usual stalwarts, for a vote total unofficially of almost 172,000, more than 11 percent of votes cast—again, without having remained in the race.

4)      In other drop-out news, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman got 21,800 votes between them. Repeating for clarity: Bachmann and Huntsman are no longer in the race.

5)      The two least-known candidates, Buddy Roehmer and John Davis, got 9,361 votes.

6)      “Uncommitted” got 61,071 votes.

Thus the well-funded Romney, the presumptive nominee and overwhelming establishment favorite, managed to lose more than 445,000 votes in the Republican presidential primary in Texas, give or take.

 

Romney, endorsed by Donald Trump

No wonder Romney is cementing ties with a) big money and b) birthers. As previously written, this guy needs all the help he can get. No wonder the GOP establishment in Florida is doing its level best to eliminate voters from the rolls. No wonder the Secretary of State in Arizona is threatening to take President Obama off the ballot.

 

Arizona SoS Ken Bennett

By the way, if even one state in the union can actually take Obama off its official ballot using the birther pretext, then that whole birther thing is not just nut stuff. It joins other well-funded tactics in the ongoing assault on the middle class, such as

  • crushing labor—wages and benefits—by destroying labor unions including public-sector unions
  • lobbying state governments—legislators and regulators—to undermine public health and public safety protections
  • major advertising campaigns opposing environmental regulation in oil and gas.

None of the state birther challenges will be upheld in court, at least not beyond the appellate level. But any delay in printing and mailing out official ballots, at the state level, would take additional time to correct. A persistent birther challenge not nipped in the bud could conceivably interfere with early voting. Some of the more sincere whack jobs—I say this with love—may actually believe they can keep the president off the ballot in their state. Their backers, more realistic, probably just hope that they can at least divert public resources away from clean and efficient elections. And, of course, entice small donations from pitifully ignorant but hysterical supporters.

 

Cruz on cover

Back to Texas—in the U.S. Senate race, Latino candidate Ted Cruz garners 30 percent of the vote, forcing Lieutenant Gov. David Dewhurst into a run-off for the GOP nomination. Last-minute smarmy attacks on Cruz, implying that he supports illegal immigration, probably helped Dewhurst get his almost 48 percent. No doubt it’s deeply disappointing to party honchos that they didn’t hoist him to the over-50-percent mark.

 

Texas GOP senate front-runner Dewhurst

In the GOP U.S. House races, all incumbents won; open seats with multiple contenders will mostly require run-offs July 31.

 

On the Democratic side there will also be a run-off for the senate nomination, between Paul Sadler and Grady Yarbrough. A new face would be a godsend for the public compared to the solons that the Texas GOP has been electing to the senate. It’s like the old joke about the decadent Romans electing a horse to their senate: At least the Romans had the decency to send the whole horse. In narrowly political terms, the Gulf Coast including Texas is the soft underbelly of red-state strength as Winston Churchill would put it. Too bad the national Democratic party has been slow on the uptake. The national party too often heels at the beck of the national political press, which is reluctant to recalculate and slow to correct its own political misjudgments.

 

Pity about that.

 

In the U.S. House races among Dems, Rep. Silvestre Reyes is the only incumbent who lost, defeated by Beto O’Rourke, son of a late El Paso county judge, Pat O’Rourke. As with the Repubs, some of the open seats will involve primary run-offs July 31.

 

Back to the thought up top: The big news from Texas’ primary is how soft Romney’s support in Texas has proven. The Romney camp doesn’t seem too concerned to counter the perception, even. So far, they’re manning the barricades—money, hysteria—rather than spinning.

Presumably the state party establishment will kick in with a big get-together at some point.

The more things don’t change: Prufrockian candidates for a played-out Wall Street-owned GOP

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The more things don’t change

Recycling old political talent is the special province of Wall Street defenders and apologists, and we’ve been seeing a lot of it since November 2008. In fact, most of the smarmiest and most uncouth attacks on the president have come from recycled consultants, money men and white-collar goon squads whom it would be flattery to call hacks. They get used by the GOP mainly for two reasons: one, the GOP—as Willie Sutton said about banks—is where the money is, and they can get well paid for their efforts; and two, the GOP needs all the hired help it can get because it has no inspiration to offer. As I said years ago, basically the contest is people on one side, money on the other.

 

Wisconsin Gov. Walker

So the same worn ideas get fed into the public discourse, or rather, the same slogans and euphemisms get trotted out, to obfuscate the same attacks on the public weal. Examples are easy to find—‘debt’ and ‘budget’ and thrift-associated language, used to justify the gigantic unthrift of throwing money at the top; vilifying ‘big government’ and ‘regulation’, to prevent essential reforms in everything from mines to giant banks acting as stockbrokers without accountants.

 

Iconic street sign

To deliver the smoke bombs, smoke-and-mirrors or smokescreens—pick your metaphor—the same conveyances get used over and over. Massive paid advertising on television, financed by PACS and super PACS, is the most overt example and a given. Airing right now in the DC area, there’s one about President Obama’s ‘broken promises’—the national debt being the main example. Predictably, the (pro-Romney) ad does not mention that the Republicans’ trillion-dollar wars and trillion-dollar tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations produced the debt, or that the last outgoing Democratic administration left a budget surplus, or that Republicans in Congress have opposed every federal cost-saving measure in health care. Et cetera.

This is not to say that the lexicon is completely unvarying. In the wake of the most recent Wall Street disasters—JP Morgan Chase and Facebook—we are actually hearing a little discussion, in public, about ‘too big to fail’ and related problems including lack of scrutiny, in the business press and on cable business programs. There are even corporate-media commentators saying mildly critical things about the hand that feeds them. So what do they (currently) go after? Excessive executive compensation? Bonuses? Lack of capital reserves? Lack of tangible assets? Excessive ‘leverage’, aka debt? Millions spent on lobbying and on cost-ineffective legal defenses in court? Bad investments? A blindly greedy merger-and-acquisition focus resulting in offshoring, outsourcing and layoffs that cut into their own customer base? A determined refusal to boost sales by improving product and service?

Get real.

No, lately they’re going after—wait for it—companies that pay dividends. ‘Dividends’ is the new dirty word on Wall Street. The temerity of those companies that would actually reward their investors, you know, pay something back to the millions of people who enable the companies to stay alive . . . The argument seems to be that a company that pays out stock dividends—watch out for the word ‘austerity’ in this context*–is engaging in crowd-pleasing mountebankery, sort of like reminding the public of public health and public safety issues in a political context.

Sigh. (Note: Income from dividends, as from capital gains, is still income and IMO should be taxed as such.)

Does U.S. stand for Usual Suspects?

Back to the same-old.

Not only do we get the same words and slogans, the same tactics, and the same delivery system, we also get many of the same personnel. Naturally former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in politics for most of his life, and GOP lifetime honchos in Congress—Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner–are in the old sleaze game up to their hips. Naturally some of our least distinguished representatives preying upon the southeastern states—Rep. Joe “You lie!” Wilson—are carrying on as ever, sustained by money, ignorance and prejudice. Naturally some of our longest-serving GOP congressmen continue to represent rural districts and continue to turn an ever blind eye to the meth labs fueling their local economy. Take a close look at the Conroe, Texas, region for a good example of GOP-dominated law and order at work. Or not.

Meth residue? --No problem.

Naturally some of the same old hands also continue to operate less conspicuously behind the scenes. George H. W. Bush’s national co-chairman Peter Terpeluk, Jr., is one of the names behind the GOP’s infamous 2010 ‘Joker’ campaign strategy, reported by Politico. Despite the hoopla over the Tea Party, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), writing rightwing state laws around the country, continues to work through local non-movers and non-shakers ensconced in state GOP hierarchies. NationofChange reports that the anti-Newt Gingrich ads produced by a pro-Romney super-PAC came via some of the consultants who bestowed on us the Willie Horton and ‘swift boat’ ads of 1988 and 2004. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that retreads from the GWBush administration, the GHWBush administration, ghosts of Congress past and longtime GOP consultancies dominate the political discourse as reported in media, just as they serve as gatekeepers to the political process, often for both major parties. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, after being ousted from his senate seat by Pennsylvania voters, kept his hand in in Washington, D.C., by working as a lobbyist until entering the 2012 presidential election contest—a point only tepidly acknowledged during the season of Santorum’s peak attention.

All this goes far to explain why the general public often turns away from the political process—a turning away that benefits exactly the people and companies who cause it—and why the national political press has lost so much credibility, especially among younger voters.

The damage is exacerbated when national media attention goes to some of the most transparently spent, used-up, reused and hauled-out-of-storage media personalities in politics, who emerge from other operations to present or to re-present themselves as candidates for high office. Viz Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani. Rick Perry. Newt Gingrich?!? Do the fans-of-prominence writing for major newspapers and the television networks honestly believe, in their hearts of hearts, that anyone out there—aside from flaming overt racial bigots–didn’t look at the Gingrich candidacy and say, inwardly if not to the family-room walls aloud, Really?!?

The larger corporate media outlets always lean corporate-ward. It’s in their DNA. Thus we have a spatelet of reports the past few days emphasizing Romney’s money draw. Not that Romney doesn’t pull in big bucks from his fellow Wall Streeters, of course; that’s a given. But the Center for Public Integrity reports that the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee nearly doubled the haul of Romney and the GOP for April.

If Romney and the GOP had done the same (instead of the reverse), the headlines in the WashPost among other capital media outlets would have been bigger (instead of nonexistent).

Nor is the heavy reliance on used-up retreads in the GOP getting the political analysis in news media that it deserves. Perhaps nowhere is this breathtaking blandness about the unthinkable more apparent than in regard to the Commonwealth of Virginia, where the GOP frontrunner for senator now is George Allen.

Yes, Mr. Macaca himself is currently the foremost candidate for the Republican Party nomination for U.S. Senate in the Birthplace of Presidents.

 

So much for lessons learned from Penn State

This is the kind of thing that makes the work of satirists so difficult.

 

Remember the big news about Gov. Allen during his last senate campaign—which was in 2006? It was his mother’s descent from a Jewish family in Tunisia. Unknown to Allen himself in his growing-up years, he had a Daniel Deronda story in his background; his mother was part of the Lumbroso family. –And widespread news reports were followed by inevitable commentary along the lines of look-what-George-Allen-found-out. My own take was a little different: Forget what George Allen found out. Look what the Lumbrosos found out.

The Lumbroso family in Europe, called the ‘Italian Rothschilds’, seems to be a family not just of wealth but of some distinction. Along with companies headed, family members have contributed significantly to the arts as well as to industry; it’s all a rather scintillating heritage of culture as well as presumably of status. So they find Our American Cousin and whom do they get? –George Allen. Where they could in another distribution of DNA have scored a Madeleine Albright or a John Kerrey or at least a step-grandparent of Hillary Clinton, instead the Lumbrosos get this shit-kicker, and not a real shit-kicker either, but the synthetic self-identified kind born in Whittier, Calif., grew up in Los Angeles and Chicago, son of a famous football coach, in the Senate via the University of Virginia on top of his father’s reputation; sort of the plastic kind of shit-kicker you hang from your rear-view mirror driving away from Lubbock. What my late father used to call a drugstore cowboy. You can always tell a drugstore cowboy at a glance; he’s the one who wears cowboy boots with his business suits because he has never been informed that boots are for riding, not walking. That’s why cowboy boots have those high heels canted back on high arches, to keep the feet in the stirrups. Traditionally they used to be made for sinewy little guys with aristocratic small feet.

If Allen turns up wearing a yarmulke prior to Virginia’s GOP senate primary on June 12—unlikely—or the general election Nov. 6, it will be no more spurious than, or less spurious than, his boots.

 

Speaking of remakes–

 

I have not seen the remake of All the King’s Men, with Sean Penn in the role earlier played by Broderick Crawford, so am not reading through any review of it or reading down to the bottom of comment about it. My question is whether the movie retains the ending in the Robert Penn Warren novel or goes with the revisionist moralized ending. I hope that Hollywood has had the decency to go back to the original ending rather than to the bowdlerized one, but I don’t want to know before seeing the film.

That said, All the King’s Men is still not a very strong book. Robert Penn Warren found himself with the ungracious task of trying to contain Huey Long, who had been assassinated eleven years before but who was bigger than Willie Stark, and bigger than Warren. The prose is padded with misogynistic, repetitive descriptions of female beauty aging, a kind of rhapsodizing adored by insecure Prufrockian guys who in another generation used to subscribe to National Geographic so they could look at naked native ladies without censure.

 

Southern politicians are a rare example of a political topic handled as badly by popular culture, including fiction, as by the big news outlets.

 

*Or any context.

 

Btw The saying that “The more things change, the more they stay the same” is a tiresome saying. Planet on one side, cynical superficialities on the other. The problem is not things changing or staying the same per se; the problem is failing to distinguish between better and worse.

Déjà vu all over again: Rightwing attacks on presidents

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Déjà vu all over again: Rightwing attacks on Franklin Roosevelt

 

There are few better ways to get a handle on the current political scene than to re-read The Age of Roosevelt, the historical trilogy on the New Deal by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Volume 3 is titled The Politics of Upheaval. During the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the struggles of American labor to survive, the United States had to try to conserve fiscal and social health in the face of continuing assaults from nut-right politicians and media figures. Then as now, there was an unholy alliance between the distorted faux-populists doing the vocalizing and their funders; to some extent the self-described representatives of the people—or of religion, or of morality—represented the limited short-term interests of the very wealthy and of Wall Street.

Side note: Admittedly, the term ‘nut right’ is anachronism. Back in the 1930s the destructors were called other names, often more elegant though equally negative. There is little use in trying to quantify the ugliness of the personal attacks, to compare then and now. Obviously the anti-Rooseveltians did not have race to use against their president. But they did make fun of–for example–his being disabled and in a wheelchair. A political-social occasion described by Schlesinger gets the idea across: Republican business chiefs, gathered for a dinner meeting, all rose for a ‘toast’ to the absent president, laughing as a group at the fact that he would not be able to do the same.

 

FDR

A rose by any other name . . .

The thumbnails below should seem familiar. Let’s take, for example, the unholy alliance between the rightwing super-rich and racist-demagogue politicians not typically featured in Town and Country magazine:

“ . . . the du Ponts in particular were prepared to support almost anyone who promised to stir the masses—even, it developed, Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia.

Nothing better demonstrated the naivete—or the desperation—of the American right than this decision. Since his election as governor in 1933, Talmadge had become a strident figure on the national scene. He seemed a character out of Erskine Caldwell, with black rumpled hair, suspicious eyes glaring behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, a black cigar jutting out of his wide fleshy mouth, and a collection of poor-white prejudices ejaculated with restless and rabid intensity. Talmadge, who held a law degree from the University of Georgia, was actually much less the uncouth backwoodsman from Sugar Creek than he pretended.” (520)

 

Eugene Talmadge

But Talmadge had his uses. As Georgia’s governor,

 

“Talmadge spat at the New Deal with contempt. Little riled him more than [National Recovery Act] standards of wages and hours, unless possibly it was the [Works Progress Administration] standards of relief. When Ben Stolberg asked him what  he would do for the unemployed, Talmadge roared back, “Let ‘em starve.” The Governor then added, “What you need in New York is not La Guardia but Mussolini. A little castor oil would go a long ways toward starting the wheels of industry goin’ again.” (Stolberg concluded he was talking to Buzz Windrip.)” (521)

Note: The topical allusion to Mussolini here refers to one of Mussolini’s milder forms of torture, forcing political prisoners to drink the strong laxative castor oil. The offense was memorialized in Sinclair Lewis’s darkly sardonic novel It Can’t Happen Here. Buzz Windrip is a character in the novel. The Sinclair Lewis Society, of which I am a member, can and does find Lewis all over the map. Nowadays it is hard not to see him everywhere.

 

Sinclair Lewis, avatar Steve Buschemi

Back to then Gov. Talmadge,

“A Texas lumberman named John Henry Kirby presently waited on [Talmadge] as chairman of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. Kirby and Talmadge soon conceived the idea of a convention of grass-roots Democrats to denounce the New Deal and (though this was less advertised0 to launch the Talmadge presidential boom.

Talmadge’s retrenchment policies—especially the across-the-board reduction of the property tax, which gave immense benefits to the Georgia Power Company while saving the average Georgia farmer 53 cents a year—had won him a good name among businessmen.”

 

How time doesn’t change things:

“Late in January 1936 the forces gathered at Macon, Georgia, to save the republic—Thomas L. Dixon, the author of The Klansman, Gerald L. K. Smith, an assortment of other politicians, and Talmadge himself . . . Above the platform hung the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. On every seat lay a copy of the Georgia Woman’s World with a two-column photograph splashed across the page [showing Eleanor Roosevelt in the company of African-Americans; offensive description].” (522)

Shades of Citizens for a Working America PAC. Grass roots? Not so much:

“Even in Georgia the grass-roots convention played only to a half-filled auditorium . . . What gave the episode significance was the readiness of northern businessmen—who presumably knew by 1936 all that it was necessary to know about Gene Talmadge—to give him money to advance his ideas and ambitions. Some of them—Sloan and Henry du Pont, for example—actually sent along their contributions after the [racist] revelations of Macon. Arthur Krock ascribed it not to malice but to gullibility, and he was doubtless right. The frightened rich were evidently at the mercy of every fast-talking political adventurer who came down the street.”

But fancily named organizations, like hope, spring eternal:

“Other attempts on the part of the Liberty Leaguers, du Pont section, to break through to the masses were even more ludicrous. One shrewd promoter sold them the idea of establishing something called the Farmers’ Independence Council. The only known address of the organization was the Liberty League office in Washington. “The biggest contributor,” remarked the Philadelphia Record, “was that old hayseed, Lammot du Pont, who kicked in $5000. (Crops pretty good this year, ain’t they Lammot!)” Other interested agriculturists were Sloan, Ogden Mills, Winthrop Aldrich, and Pew of Sun Oil. Relentless congressional investigation failed to disclose a single working farmer in the membership.”

On the other hand–here is a congressional committee whose time has come again:

“In the spring of 1936 Hugo Black’s Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities got around to looking at the du Pont political subsidiaries—the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, the Farmers’ Independence Council, the Crusaders, the Sentinels of the Republic. The result of the unfeeling exposure of rich men as political suckers was merriment in the press and a permanent conviction that the American Liberty League was a political bust. By midsummer, in the cruelest blow of all, the Republican party begged the Liberty League to stay away from its presidential ticket.” (523)

By the way, this chapter from Schlesinger’s book is titled “Dissidence among the Democrats.” This week, the major media outlets gave big play to theories that President Obama’s support of marriage equality would generate dissidence among minorities, and thus loss of votes for the Democrats. The Washington Post, a newspaper with a contingent actively campaigning against President Obama, has run this kind of line at frequent intervals since November 2008, although more feebly and dispiritedly lately. As regards the 2012 election, opinion polls indicate the same-sex-marriage issue less than a game changer. Meanwhile, now as ever some of the largest media outlets continue hand-wringing over the loss of ‘moderates’ in both parties blahblahblah.

 

Once again, a question for those still literate, factual, and practical: What is the ‘moderate’ number of exotic failures on Wall Street? What is the ‘moderate’ number of oil spills? What is the ‘moderate’ amount of mortgage fraud?

The methods, like the aims—money to get position, position to get money and status—are perennial. The power and will in some sectors of corporate America to push back against the interests of the general public should not be under-estimated.

 

Note: The above is re-posted, with revisions, from an earlier piece, regrettably still relevant.

May 8 primary results hold interest for Democrats

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May 8th primary more interesting for Dems

The series-of-oddities parade of GOP presidential contests since summer 2011 seems to be over for now, and the May 8 primary results hold some potential for improvement in government at the federal and state level. Quick spot-check below.

Sen. Lugar

Indiana:

  • Most famously, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) will leave the Senate at the end of 2012, after thirty-five years in Washington. Represented as a statesman, Lugar did not question either the Iraq war or trillion-dollar tax breaks for the wealthy under GWBush. Some Pale-Blue-Dog media commentators are spinning this as a political loss for Democrats–oddly, since the GOP senate nominee in Indiana will be State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who filed a losing lawsuit against the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry. Auto parts and supplies are a significant industry in Indiana. Mourdock, a former coal and oil geologist running as an outsider, tried for Congress unsuccessfully three times in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
  • Lugar’s loss to Mourdock has been represented in media almost entirely as a story of Tea-Party-wins-one. Dick Armey of FreedomWorks sent around the same line by mass email. A version of the same narrative has Lugar the statesman driven out by extreme partisanship, faulted for his votes to confirm the president’s Supreme Court nominees, for example. Lugar’s own statement takes this line. No one points out that Lugar’s Senate votes since 2006 may have made sense as political calculation also, given that Obama won Indiana in 2008. Indeed, given not only that Obama carried the state but also that Democratic party affiliation in Indiana exceeded the GOP by nine percentage points, it looks less than wizardly that Dems didn’t bother putting up a senate opponent for Lugar in 2006. Lugar ran unopposed in 2006, but can’t even win his own primary in 2012? –Q whether that’s a major sea change, or another polite major-party bargain to ignore the popular voice.
  • That Lugar’s giving a false home address for decades went unremarked does not speak well either for political participation in Indiana or for national political reporting. If memory serves, Indiana was represented exclusively as a ‘red state’ in the 2008 elections, with no media reportage of the Dem party advantage in the state. Typically, that kind of thing gets reported only after Dems have lost the advantage; no media outlets reported that Dems outnumbered Repubs in Texas, either—until Gallup argued that Obama should have won even more states than he did, in the link above. The bright spot here is that the large media outlets have lost so much credibility in political reporting that most people know to get their information elsewhere.
  • Democrats have shown the sense to field solid candidates in all Indiana congressional districts, contesting some held by the GOP and leaving no current GOP Reps to coast to reelection unopposed. The GOP nominees all defeated Tea Party challenges except for incumbent Marlin Stutzman in the 3rd District, a Tea Partyer himself; he is challenged by Pastor Kevin Boyd (D). Two women House nominees are Democrats, Shelli Yoder in the 9th District and Tara Nelson in Indiana’s 4th District.
  • Indiana’s 5th District has State Rep. Scott Reske (D) facing GOP former U.S. Attorney Susan Brooks. The seat opened up through the retirement of Rep. Dan Burton (R). If Brooks won, she would be the first woman elected to the House by Indiana Republicans in more than fifty years. Brooks is a self-declared ‘anti-choice’ candidate linked to funding Planned Parenthood. One of the GWBush U.S. Attorneys (Southern District of Indiana) not fired, she like Mourdock is receiving heavy anti-labor support.
  • Indiana’s 6th District also has a good House contest, GOP Rep. Mike Pence leaving to run for governor. Bradley T. Bookout is the Dem nominee, a strong contestant in a Republican district against a far-right ‘young gun’ GOPer, Luke Messer. Messer like Brooks has received funding from the anti-labor ‘Citizens for a Working America’, based in Virginia.
  • In the governor’s race, the dubious Pence faces Dem attorney and former state house speaker John R. Gregg. Gregg also hosts an Indiana radio call-in talk show.
  • Unfortunately, the Indiana state legislature is so horrendously gerrymandered that only devoted legwork from the ground up will retrieve anything. State Democrats stupidly engaged in same when they were in office, leaving a field depleted of grassroots credibility for the GOP to move in on and take over in 2010.

 

Renee Ellmers

North Carolina:

  • Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton won the Democratic primary outright to run against GOPer Pat McCrory for governor. The North Carolina governorship has been Democratic for twenty years, although the GOP has money advantage. Top of the ticket is a boost in NC, which Barack Obama carried in 2008. Dems will have to work to keep the Pale-Blue-Dog media from torpedo-ing this one.
  • The Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor is former Director of State Personnel Linda Coleman.
  • More notoriously, of course, an anti-same-sex marriage amendment was added to the NC state constitution. Setting aside larger issues for the narrowly political assessment, this move in other states has yet to augment GOP successes in fall elections following. Nut-right victories are usually followed by general-electorate pullback, a point that has yet to be noticed in most ‘insider’ political commentary. These are not inspirational moves, and they offer nothing for most young voters.
  • Weird-right GOP nominees and incumbents Virginia Foxx in North Carolina’s 5th District and Renee Ellmers in the 2nd face solid Dem challengers—Elisabeth Motsinger and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Steve Wilkins. Foxx is on recent record criticizing people who take out student loans. Foxx, on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, proclaimed that she worked her way through college without borrowing—although her husband did take out some loans. No record of whether Foxx knows about the gap between 2012 college tuition and entry-level pay, or about the difference between 2012 and 1961, when she started college. While Foxx’s early self-support and commitment to her own education are laudable, it might be noted that Foxx has had what Repubs call ‘government jobs’ since 1987. That’s 25 straight years of ‘government jobs’.
  • The Democratic challenger in the 10th District is NC Rep. Patricia Keever. The incumbent is another GWBush appointee, Patrick McHenry. McHenry was among other things one of Karl Rove’s men in the 2000 political campaign. He is another long-time labor-hater, having worked for Bush’s Sec. of Labor, Elaine Chao, as a Special Assistant.

 

Mountaintop removal in WV revisited

West Virginia:

  • Obama did not carry West Virginia before, in either the primary or the general in 2008, and has little chance of doing so this time—even if the mind rejects an image of West Virginians turning out enthusiastically to vote for Mitt Romney. Sadly for it, West Virginia is not a makeweight in presidential politics, and its unimportance this primary season was highlighted by the relative success of a Texas inmate named Keith Judd as the mickey-mouse candidate who got votes. Sadly, the declining population of the state is preyed upon by vested interests. West Virginia is one of the states that most benefited from the New Deal and the Rural Electrification Administration, but any populace that sees the president as a ‘muslim’ gets little chance at a better life now.
  • That said, Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Sen. Joe Manchin are both incumbents, and neither faces a strong challenger. Tomblin’s is conservative Republican Bill Maloney, who has no experience in public office but ran a drilling company and was involved in planning the successful rescue of the trapped Chilean miners. Manchin’s is businessman John R. Raese, who lost to him before in the campaign with the infamous ‘hick’ ad. Raese also lost elections in 1984, 1988, and 2006.
  • Dems nominated two women, Robin Jean Davis and Kanawha County attorney Letitia Chafin, for seats on the West Virginia Supreme Court. Davis is also an incumbent. Reportedly the races will be expensive. The combination of low education levels and a dearth of viable newspapers means that WV, like Tennessee and Kentucky, is targeted by lobbyists against legislation and regulation in the public interest. Fertile fields.

 

Wisconsin:

 

More later

The American Economy, part 3

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American economy, part 3

Continuing yesterday’s post—

As with America’s underlying wealth, our residuals of inheritance from labor successes enable the national economy to keep going the way it’s going. They enable most of the middle class, the bottom 90 percent of the population, to survive without our having to address huge harms such as regressive taxation. To call these immense resources and assets a problem is paradoxical, as with supply in supply-and-demand, but they are a fact of American life.

 

Making thermostats

Take some of the most homespun examples of belt-tightening. That Americans won’t do this, won’t put up with that, and are aficionados of gas-guzzling cars, for example, is often tossed out as a political given in economic discussion. Generally this line of thought is used to justify regressive and damaging economic and social policy, or lack of policy. Thus, like assertions that Americans are turned off by politics, by the duties of citizenship and by political debate, it is heard often from the noise-machine right and from GOP congress members. Regrettably, some of the more over-promoted ‘liberal’ commentators in media also use it, typically the same ones who promote the ‘close election’ and ‘divided electorate’ memes. More on that later.

 

mr

Prospective GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney

Actually, it is staggering how much belt-tightening is already taking place in this land of abundance. And in spite of all our problems—the land of abundance is also the land of waste–a staggering growth in environmental awareness and organic health awareness is also taking place.

Home vegetable garden

One problem here, up top: Unfortunately, most of the burden has been placed on the shoulders of individuals and families. Too little of the effort in relative terms has been shouldered by corporate America and by multi-nationals, too much of it by individual households. No surprise there: This, in a nutshell, is the outcome designed by all that GOP hype about the national debt, about ‘big government’ and about ‘regulation’. No asking big business for anything, no limit on what can be squeezed from private citizens. Even our most strident right-to-lifers in office do nothing to prevent, for example, chemical abortifacients and chemicals causing birth defects from being released into groundwater and the atmosphere.

 

Policy, meet consequences

Take that matter of the national debt. Set aside the obvious point that the GWBush administration gave us a trillion-dollar war and trillion-dollar tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. Set aside that current GOPers in Congress have resisted even the slightest correction for these excesses. Just look at that metaphor of the household budget that GOPers in public office are so fond of—the line that typically starts, ‘Every family knows that if you live beyond your means . . .’, accompanied by metaphors of ‘mortgaging your family’s future’ or ‘loading your children/grandchildren with debt’.

Let’s note some quick points about that household-budget analogy.

1) As we know, the biggest household debt is typically mortgages, college education, or credit cards. A house and a college education are not considered luxuries or riotous excess. These are typical and reasonable outlays of family income, for a considered purpose. Eliminating these kinds of debt would reduce some numbers on a page—but would also reduce shelter and education. It might be added that much household debt also stems from medical necessity—health care—and we’ve seen how much the GOP is attuned to reducing that kind of debt.

2) These categories of debt figure in when household debt-to-income ratio is being calculated. It’s debt-to-income that makes the difference, not debt in isolation. Never—so far as I know—is there an assumption that all the debt has to be paid off at once. Debt-to-income, as the term would imply, compares ongoing yearly/monthly outgo to ongoing yearly/monthly income. But Republican talking points tend to represent ‘debt’ as if all of our national debt had to be paid tomorrow, which is false. And the debt talking point omits revenues. It’s never debt in the context of what you need and what you can afford. It’s always debt as the whole picture, with the false implication that unaffordability is a given. This, to use the household analogy, is like budgeting by leaving your income out of the picture, looking only at your outgo, with a starting assumption that it is somehow normative for households not to spend anything at all. Maybe the core assumption is that it would be better just not to have a household at all. Maybe this is the deep structure or unstated rationale for the whole attack.

3) This disingenuousness has a purpose. As we know, the same members of Congress who do not talk about what we need, what we want for our country, and how to afford it also adamantly oppose any progressive taxation for the wealthy and for corporations. I don’t know of any household where only the kids’ allowance can be used to pay off debts. But this is the effect of GOP policy, in the GOP analogy: Disproportionately, the burden of paying for everything is shouldered by the population less able to pay. As written previously, GOP tax policy mainly boils down to this central aim—shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class, from corporations to individuals, and from the federal government to states and localities, which generally have more regressive taxes.

(Side note: GOPers so concerned with loading our grandchildren with debt show remarkably little concern about conservation. Don’t they want our grandchildren to have some oil left?)

 

Oil tanker headed overseas

 

Back to the future—

By any reasonable measure, U.S. individuals and households have made sweeping changes over recent decades. To use a few easy examples from transportation:

  • Millions more people drive smaller, more gas-efficient automobiles than previously
  • Use of mass transit is up in regions where it is available
  • Millions of people plan local trips and errand runs on the UPS model, combining tasks and planning routes so as to eliminate unnecessary driving
  • Millions of households are using online shopping and delivery, as shown by business for UPS and eBay among others
  • More expensive travel is being replaced by shorter trips and by ‘staycations’
  • Buying locally where possible is increasingly popular, including buying local produce
  • Home gardening continues to rise, bringing food supply even closer to home
  • Even the chickens are coming home to roost, in some areas

All of these are individual small changes on an immense scale, given our population of over 300 million. None of them, so far as I know, have been accompanied by massive social dislocation or even widespread unpleasantness. Some congress members may vilify Amtrak, but most people seem to recognize that there’s no percentage in making commuting or travel less feasible for the already-congested East Coast.

Regrettably, individual changes go only so far. Mass transit is a boon to people who have it, but not every region has it. Metropolitan Houston, Texas, for example, with an immense population and land area to match, is only now moving into light rail. The planners actually ripped out miles of railroad track west of town, to expand double-decker freeways. The track was ripped out because it ran parallel to—next to—the freeway. In other words, it could have been used for passengers, for commuting.

Commuting to work is still the big gap in improving traffic and energy conservation. Millions of miles of roadway, every weekday morning, in virtually every metropolitan area, fill up with one-passenger-per-car traffic. The daily commute to work, after all, is one place where purely individual trip-planning and energy conservation do not provide an adequate solution—people have no choice about going to work, and little choice about how to get there. Too little mass transit, too little company-provided transportation, too little company-subsidized moving so you can live near where you work. Instead, GOPers around the country are cutting mass transit in public budgets—and finding ways to hike taxes on individuals who benefit from mass transit, however modestly: raising fares and parking fees, taxing employer subsidies of every sort, and reducing federal contributions to cash-strapped states and localities.

Too little consistent treatment of and attention to neighborhood schools, too, so that fantastical differences among neighborhoods can be corrected or ameliorated, but maybe that’s a different chapter.

 

More later

The American Economy, part 2

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The American Economy, part 2

Following up on last week’s post–

We are all inheritors of the labor movement

Another fundamental of the U.S. economy is one that we have had for more than fifty years: We are all living on a gigantic store of assets, workplace conditions and industries produced by the American labor movement from the 1930s through the 1970s. This fundamental fact remains even in the historic economic slump from the mortgage-derivatives debacle. Despite the decline of labor unions and despite even the unthinkable wealth disparity between top and bottom in our economy, our middle class is still living on residuals of wealth and productivity from the earlier labor movement. The ‘boomerang’ phenomenon—young adults moving back in with their parents, because their parents have houses with space for them to live in—is only the most obvious example. This fundamental is not just a matter of inheritance in the limited literal sense of inheriting the parental house, a car or two and whatever is left in the family’s checking and savings accounts, etc., after end-of-life medical bills. It is a matter of being able to go to work with a reasonable expectation of a paycheck, a defined workday and a defined workweek with a weekend or other days off. It includes extensive nationwide use of ports, highways, public schools and public services that we tend to take for granted. And it is a matter of successful social programs brought about by the New Deal and the fight of the labor movement on behalf of the middle class—Social Security and Medicaid, which moved America’s elderly population out of the poverty column from the middle of the twentieth century onward. And it includes an incalculable amount of intellectual capital, much being donated or at best going for under market value in the nation’s universities, mass media and publishing.

Post-war housing

The amount of wealth that the majority of ordinary people have inherited from past labor becomes clearer when one thinks about inheritance in the more limited sense, as in housing and the giant second-hand market in the U.S. The overwhelming majority of individuals post-World War II in this country did not grow up thinking of themselves as heirs and heiresses. The exceptions who did grow up thinking of themselves that way—figuring out how much they stood to inherit in due course—did not necessarily benefit from the perception. It can be a disincentive to good work. Nonetheless, the amount of wealth being quietly passed along by inheritance, one way or another, to people not yet senior-citizen age in this country is staggering. It isn’t written about much—most people don’t want to talk about it, for reasons ranging from grief and mourning to simple self-protection—but it is one of the reasons why so much of the American middle class can make ends meet even in a time when this country’s wealth inequality approaches that of Sri Lanka.

 

Two-carat diamond engagement ring

Some specific examples of inheritance in the limited sense, in order of generally ascending value:

  • House contents. Admittedly, a stack of empty plastic margarine containers for left-over food—hoarded by thrifty post-war parents to keep from having to buy that expensive Tupperware—may not look like a treasure trove. But the total cost of all the tools, kitchen and garden supplies, clothing, furniture and ‘miscellaneous household’ would mount up fast if purchased simultaneously, even in big-box discount chain stores. People who inherit a household of items keep them, give them to younger relatives, sell them–on eBay, at yard sales, or at auction–or donate them to charity. The thrift stores in metro areas burgeon with aids to social mobility for legal immigrants and others less likely to have inherited the equivalent supplies. As with yard sales, auctions and sometimes eBay, marginalized buyers are getting the most price-elastic goods at a discount. And an additional benefit of Keep using, Re-use, Recycle is, of course, that it keeps the stuff out of landfills. As in the household Tip O’Neill grew up in, described by Jimmy Breslin in How the Good Guys Finally Won, nothing goes to waste.
  • With some exceptions such as unsafe baby beds, house contents are the innocuous, Mamsie-Pepper side of inheritance. Diamonds are pretty much the obverse side of inheritance. Let’s note first that most diamonds are not very valuable. Any diamond less than a quarter of a carat should not cost much, and the price of a piece of jewelry set with many tiny diamonds—under 0.25 carat each—should reflect only a multiple of that individual price, skilled labor and the gold aside. Even with larger diamonds, the wholesale price is going to reflect the quality of the stone, meaning clarity and color (colorlessness), and the overwhelming majority of diamonds are not D-E VVS-IF; nowhere near. That said, someone with a solitaire diamond purchased more than five years ago—let alone thirty or more years ago–might have an asset, if s/he can get it graded accurately–not ‘appraised’, but graded for color, clarity, cut and weight. Two- or three-carat diamonds of top color and clarity are going for astronomical prices, bigger ones for even more. Regardless of whether diamonds are ‘the new gold’, as the New York Times recently suggested, good solitaires have near-immediate cash value. I am intrigued that seemingly few banks and other mortgage lenders have taken them in exchange for a mortgage balance. A six-figure diamond has got to be worth more than a risky outstanding loan (lender), and switching the genuine article with a good simulant or a white sapphire seems like a small price to pay for getting out of debt (borrower). Maybe it’s happening and they’re not talking about it.
  • Houses and land are among the most obvious inheritable assets, and tend to be written about the most comprehensively. Many articles are published in the business press, in consumer blogs, and elsewhere about the pitfalls in inheriting a house, the possible tax liability—not large, for most people—or about options for what to do with an inherited house. A modest house in a post-war tract development is not the immense treasure that many people may have imagined during the housing boom. But if the house is sellable at all, given condition and neighborhood, obviously it can generate cash to offset a car purchase, college tuition, etc., or to build a rainy-day fund. A bigger windfall could pay down or pay off descendants’ mortgages—nothing to sneeze at, if you value your health and would benefit from reducing stress in your life. Multiply that by a few million, and you’ve got something with real impact.
  • Life insurance policies are among the last few reasonably good deals in the private insurance market. It’s interesting how vague and moderated the ads for life insurance policies tend to be; looks as though the rest of insurance—health, disability, malpractice—has frowned down anything that would highlight contrasts. Back to inheritance—any parents who purchased life insurance policies at a reasonably young and healthy time of life managed a boon to their offspring, pretty much uncomplicated by tax or other liabilities.
  • Et cetera.

The collective amount of just the above-mentioned specific assets is virtually incalculable. On a macro scale, these assets are what enable so many in our population to survive while underemployed. Just the collective assets involved in home gardening for food production, and for home improvement, contribute significantly to the national economy. However, as mentioned, our national inherited wealth far exceeds the limited, literal kind of inheritance sketched here.

University of Michigan

We have inherited industries, farmland and natural resources including (for now) potable water. We have inherited universities, museums and a vast communications system, an immense intellectual infrastructure. We have inherited a national physical infrastructure with the potential for improvement that would also ‘put people back to work’, as candidates for office keep saying while refusing to do so.

Current mouthings of GOP politicians and their television shills about ‘jobs’ and ‘unemployment’, fed into media outlets for the election, do not acknowledge our immense inherited wealth. To do so would acknowledge the importance of American labor, and would acknowledge the necessity of regulation (law) to safeguard natural resources and human lives. No one on their side of the line points out that a country of our resources and assets has the capability, for example, to educate all its youth. Quite the contrary: When President Obama suggested that everyone who wants to go to college should be able to, Rick Santorum called him a “snob.”

This wasn’t mere campaign rhetoric, stupidity and mean-mindedness. Santorum and his ilk jumped on Obama’s case because, from the perspective of GOP candidates for office, the reminder that we have immense assets for education is dangerous. Once it is recognized that we can educate our population, after all, the inevitable question becomes why don’t we? We have more than enough resources and assets to provide for our health needs, too, and look what happens when someone tries to do so. Aside from what notable newspapers like the Washington Post did to health care reform, the supermarket tabloids are vile, even beyond their usual hysteria, in attacks on first lady Michelle Obama in the context of health–beauty or nutrition, exercise or fashion.

There is danger in the reminder that the U.S. has immense assets–for health, for nutrition, for music and the arts; for national parkland, our coasts, mountains in West Virginia, clean water in any river, lake or aquifer. You name it; if someone brings up or indirectly reminds the public how genuinely wealthy this country is, the rightwing noise machine gets hot to trot.*

 

More later

 

*An individual heartening exception: David Koch, to do him justice, recently donated $35 million to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. My view remains that the wingers funded by the Koch brothers mostly take from, rather than give to, the public. But this is going in the right direction.