Farewell, Bob Herbert

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT

More like “Losing our jobs.” Frank Rich is already out at the Times, and now Bob Herbert follows today’s column with the declaration that “after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run [sic] I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society.” If he were a politician, I’d believe that he just got caught finger-banging the 17-year-old daughter of his largest donor. If that’s not PR-spin for “I just got shit-canned” then Barry Bonds is the patron saint of good sportsmanship. (Please ignore the used syringe hanging out of his ass-cheek.)

This is terrible news for me personally. There are very few targets I enjoy savaging as much as Bob Herbert. Thank God I still have Gail Collins. I regard Herbert as the paragon for the liberal hyper-conscience: sloppy in its arguments, constantly offended and outraged, reactionary in its deference to the perpetual victims, and poorly punctuated. This is the man who has appointed himself as the sentinel of the impoverished and the guardian for the unemployed. Now he’s one of them.

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash

Technically, we’re pouring shiploads of treasury securities, but don’t let that bog you down.

into yet another war, this time in Libya,

Admittedly a very questionable decision, given that the operation is being run by the Canadians. I’m going to rename the Libya Mission “Operation Neutral Zone Dump-And-Chase.” For those of you not down with ESPN 6 or higher, that’s hockey lingo.

Oh wait. There was a vote of no confidence in the Canadian parliament.

while simultaneously demolishing school budgets,

Clearly, after eighteen years, Bob Herbert still doesn’t really understand the Tenth Amendment or the separation of powers between federal, state, and local governments. School budgets are an issue for local governments; “Kinetic Military Action” in Libya is very much federal.

closing libraries,

Local.

laying off teachers

Still Local.

and police officers,

Local and/or state.

and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

It’s downright depressing that the quality of your life is contingent upon how many libraries we build and how much we pay teachers.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century.

“Welcome to Barack Obama’s America,” you mean. Where the media doesn’t care about military murders and persistent economic malaise is viewed with phlegmatic indifference.

An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies.

Holla! Dude sees the light!

Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Yep. It sucks out there.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish,

Sounds a lot like plagiarism to me.

liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline.

Take it in, people, you don’t get this type of concentrated ineptitude from many other writers. It’s absolutely glorious.

Greed is part of the human condition; nothing of the last ten to twenty years has changed its role in American society.

Corporate power is massively restricted. The “Big Oil” syndicate is still unable to drill in the Gulf of Mexico despite a judge ruling that the Obama moratorium is unconstitutional and hordes of industry lobbyists. Wal-Mart, perhaps the quintessential “big business” is clawing to get into cities like Chicago, where there is an overwhelming demand for their jobs and low prices. Corporate taxes in the United States are higher than any other industrialized country except Japan. Our regulatory environment is crippling the competitiveness of American businesses.

And despite our addiction to “foreign oil,” the policies of the left have put up every roadblock imaginable to stop us from developing domestic oil. Seven years ago, when ANWR was a major issue in the 2004 election, John Kerry and his allies regularly made the argument that the oil wouldn’t be ready for five or six years anyways. They still make that argument to this day! And all we get is more fucking windmills (which, FYI, are more dangerous than nuclear plants.)

 Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The baby boomers are pretentious assholes that have squandered the hard work of the greatest generation and failed to adequately relay the cultural maxims of American exceptionalism and individual responsibility to their children. Instead, they’re still obsessed with their own adolescent self-image as long-haired rebels, litigious and whiney by habit, and thirsty for significance in all the wrong places. It took them until recently to figure out that they sucked.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities.

Not a sentence.

When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Goddamn I’m going to miss Bob Herbert. This isn’t even a coherent ideology. This is attempting to wish away the constraints of scarcity. We shouldn’t go to war unless we have a perfect educational system or full employment? Maybe we should employ more teachers in the military. Dumbass.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck.

Yes, but the labor market isn’t static. We could have a glut of new jobs if we had a pro-growth agenda from the White House.

Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

That’s because undergraduate programs like English, Sociology, Gender Studies, or virtually anything else within the humanities are absolutely worthless in the job market.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles.

It’s hard to get exasperated. It’s just fun to let the last of Bob Herbert’s unfathomable nonsense wash over me.

Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush.

Can someone please explain to me when we all decided that it was an acceptable goal for the United States federal government to use its authority to promote “income equality?”

As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

This isn’t 1895. If you don’t like your pay, quit. If you think you’re worth more, leave. If you think you can do better on your own, start your own business. The age of the internet has unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurs. Seize it!

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable.

It’s both. It’s also a worthless statistic. How does it factor negative growth? Is it calculated in percentages, or nominal terms? Does it account for class mobility?

It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

Remember when liberals used to claim that conservatives too-often pined for the past, implying that conservatives somehow wanted to return to the era of segregation? It’s why they insist on calling themselves “progressives,” which is just foolish. (The reason that the term “liberal” has such a bad connotation in the American lexicon is because of colossal failures that always seem to be the result of liberal ideology.)

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

If you’re going to be serious about income inequality, geek out on it. The United States’ Gini Coefficient is, of course rising (indicating more income inequality), but since 1950, the United States Gini Coefficient has ranged from about .36 in the early 70’s to about .45 today. This is a less precipitous rise than that of the UK, but one of the major features of the United States Gini Coefficient is that it is relatively stable in its fluctuations, unlike France, Canada, Bulgaria, Mexico, and others.

In short, this is both normal and acceptable.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train,

 They’re known as welfare recipients and old people.

is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

What on earth do you think the Tea Party is about?

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

Keep in mind, their Chairman and CEO is a close Obama advisor and was a major donor. Also keep in mind that I genuinely believe that GE is right in this instance. The fact of the matter is that our congress has passed a tax code that only an idiot-savant can decipher, as well as legions of tax credits for worthless economic activity. None of that means that GE should not take advantage of our Congress’ ineptitude.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

Keep in mind, that if we had, say, a 15% corporate tax rate instead of a 38% marginal corporate tax rate, that most of that revenue would be realized and taxable in the United States. This is precisely what conservatives are talking about when they argue that lower tax rates can generate higher tax revenues.

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

This is also why we prickle when we see hordes of Obamacare waivers being given out to Obama supporters, including Unions (who pushed the damn thing in the first place) and the state of Maine.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power.

You’ve got that backwards. Enormous imbalances in political power result in imbalances in wealth.

So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well.

It takes a particular brand of cynicism to believe that corporations are doing very well. Not to mention, it completely ignores who owns the corporations.

The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

Except for the guys who fired you at the Times. I can't say that they were wrong to fire you. You're kind of an asstard. That's not even a word.

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This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.