Progressives Unfamiliar with Meaning of Progress; Party Like It's 1917

Get yourself some Tylenol. This might be a little painful to read.

Obama needs a budget to match his progressive ideals

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, April 19, 10:53 AM

For perhaps the first time since being sworn into office, President Obama has articulated, in eloquent terms,

I truly don’t understand the myth of Obama’s eloquence. He says “let me be clear” and follows it up with platitudes and nonsensical contradictions. “Let me be clear: the United States will always stand firm with our NATO allies so long as it’s done third phase of the new moon and so long as we don’t seek input from nations in the general North Atlantic region.”

what it means to be a progressive.

There will never be an eloquent defense of what it means to be a progressive because it’s a manufactured catchall term for a political philosophy of expediency in the furtherance of state-controlled society. Publicly acknowledging and supporting the true nature of progressivism, a euphemism for liberalism, would have ordinary Americans running in horror. This is because at its heart, it always devolves into communism.

In his budget speech last week, he spoke of our obligation to the broader community

So we owe ourselves, basically. Doesn’t this kind of sound like a trophy wife whose friends tell her that she owes it to herself to spend two weeks in an Icelandic spa?

to provide a basic level of security

What’s that old saying? Those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.

and dignity.

No free good in the history of mankind has ever engendered dignity. All it does is create dependency, which is ugly, brutal, and destabilizing.

Speaking of programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, he said what every good progressive believes: “We would not be a great country without those commitments.”

This is too destructive to be snarky about. The idea that America didn’t become great until 1965 is so insulting that it reframes the entire trajectory of American history away from the accumulation of liberty and towards the accumulation of entitlements. It is so antithetical to the American identity that it’s no small wonder that people believe Obama isn’t really an American; he has never actually understood America.

He fused a defense of progressive governance with a scathing critique of Paul Ryan’s cruel budget,

How is raising already confiscatory tax rates on a small portion of the population less cruel than returning spending to 2008 levels?

which all but four Republican House members have now voted for. And he demanded that the rich finally pay their fair share,

Sigh. How many times does it have to be said? The rich already pay most of the taxes. Raising the rates on the rich is simply designed as a mechanism for class warfare, not as a serious attempt to raise revenues. By this point, even a mongoloid chimp understands that lowering tax rates increases the tax base enough to keep revenues roughly level.

vowing to let the Bush tax cuts expire.

Why is that claim taken any more seriously than Republicans’ claims that they would repeal Obamacare? Of course they can’t; they only have one house of congress. Similarly, Obama would personally have to hold about 200 House members’ children hostage to get that tax increase.

It was a powerful speech,

This is getting beyond the point of verbal fellatio.

in many ways reassuring to progressives who have been demoralized by a president who appeared missing in action.

*was* missing in action.

But rhetoric and policy are not the same thing.

And yet you continue to let this jackass skate on rhetoric alone.

And in this case, as in far too many, the policy agenda the president has laid out is not worthy of, in his words, “the America we believe in.”

But not an America that the Standard & Poors’ credit raters believe in. Just saying.

To begin with, the president continues to let Republicans define the playing field in almost every instance. Why is the debate we are having not about whether to cut, but how much to cut?

Is that really a question that you need someone to answer? Because the American people collectively shrieked in horror about three months after electing Obama and scrambled to sweep Republicans back into government en masse about six months ago.

Why isn’t it about the urgency of joblessness instead of the perils of deficits?

The two aren’t connected?

The budget the president proposed is clearly influenced by a discredited conservative economic worldview.

Discredited by whom? Paul Krugman doesn’t count.

It shouldn’t be accepted as the “progressive” alternative in the negotiations soon to come.

The President’s plan may have been influenced by conservatives in the same way that Allied military strategy was influenced by German troop movements in WWII. It is by no means conservative, and it is not accepted by anyone at all.

What’s worse is that, even on this narrow playing field, the president isn’t fighting harder for those who need government’s support the most.

Military families?

He has jettisoned the Keynesian thinking this era demands,

Oh Jesus. She might as well start quoting Marx.

prematurely embracing what might be described an austerity-lite policy, one that all but guarantees mass unemployment as the new normal.

Please elaborate on such an outlandish claim. Seriously. How do tax cuts hurt the economy? It truly baffles me that liberals are somehow allowed to believe (allowed in the sense that they’re not laughed out of every serious economic forum in existence) that adding a quarter of a point to the cost of debt via Fed open market operations can cripple an economy, yet adding about 5% to every tax bracket is completely painless.

In his speech, he spoke eloquently of how there was “nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”

Small businesses?

Nothing courageous, indeed. And yet it is President Obama who has said that for every $1 in tax increases, we should create $2 in spending cuts.

Which itself is asinine, because you can’t assume that rate changes, which is the only thing the government adjusts when altering income taxes, corresponds to nominal dollar figures. This is because tax rates have a dynamic and sometimes uneven effect on economic growth.

Faced with the choice between new cuts to the social safety net and new taxes for the richest few, it is not just Paul Ryan but President Obama whose acceptance of the way this choice is framed leaves the poor shouldering most of the burden.

The poor don’t shoulder ANY of the burden. They haven’t for years. Put simply, the poor don’t pay income taxes. At all. None. Zero. 0.00%; $0.00.

The most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson

Hilariously, she means this as a compliment.

should be willing to embrace a bolder opening gambit.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this issue didn’t just begin when Paul Ryan proposed a budget. You guys had two years to shove a healthy dose of John Maynard Keynes down our throats. It didn’t work, and the American people have taken notice. Your turn is over.

He should not be so willing to compromise on principle, even when ultimate compromise may be necessary.

No. Just no. He shouldn’t compromise even though he has to compromise? Fuck off, Katrina.

Real leadership might require compromise, but it cannot be defined by compromise.

So…he should play hardball, but with the understanding that he’ll eventually cave?

It must instead be defined by a clear vision for the future,

Despite saying “let me be clear” about three times a speech, President Obama has never shown clarity of thought on any issue of public importance.

and most important, a willingness to defend it. It should be focused not on what is possible, but instead, on the most that is possible; not the path of least resistance, but the path of maximum potential benefit.

Seriously, it’s like the woman is discovering negotiation for the first time. It’ kind of like watching a child’s groping attempts at cursive. (Which, for the record, is a worthless “skill.”)

Failing to do so is what can produce a Tea Party budget, such as the one adopted last week. As Paul Krugman put it in his column this week,

I’m sure the Times appreciates the Post’s support. Also, did I call that she’d cite Krugman or what? Damn I’m good.

the two parties “don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes.”

In other words: not only are Republicans terrible people, they’re idiots too! This from the people who lectured us on civility.

Any embrace or acceptance of that Republican universe by the White House is a retreat from the reforms this country desperately needs — and was promised.

What a rallying cry.

“No surrender! Except when you have to surrender! But really, only kind of surrender, because surrendering is necessary but unpleasant! And we really really don’t want to surrender. Until we do.”

Yet the president has again telegraphed his willingness to compromise, admitting in his speech that he did not “expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach” he laid out. What, then, does he expect it will look like?

Probably something sane.

The further right this process moves

I.e. the further towards the American people this process moves.

—    whether as a result of a political system warped and broken by corporate interests

It was an electoral trouncing in November, but blame corporations if you must.

protecting their privilege,

The privilege is to compete against the other privileged, a group which literally anyone can join. Apparently you’re privileged to squeeze out a profit by busting your ass to do things better, faster, and cheaper than everyone else. That’s how liberals define privilege.

or lobbyists actively gutting reform

Lobbyists spend most of their time actively pushing for reform. That’s why virtually everything passed in the last two years has been a legislative disaster jam-packed with special interest sweetheart deals.

 — the more disheartening the definition of victory becomes. Is merely preventing Republicans from ending Medicare what victory looks like now?

Republicans have proposed a market-based voucher system, not dismantling all spending to Medicare.

Yes, we need a defensive opposition, but while Democrats control the Senate and the White House, they cannot act merely as a minority party.

No worries. It won’t be an issue much longer.

Shouldn’t they be laying out a clear vision of a sustainable and fair economy?

They don’t have one. And what the hell does sustainable mean in this context? It’s as if she views the economy solely as a vehicle to financing non-market programs.

As the extremists take over the GOP, is the Democratic Party really going to be content to define success so modestly?

Look, I get that you’re pissed that conservatives had so much success painting Obama as an extremist. They were helped by that fact that he was actually (and still is) an extremist. That doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. This is a center-right country. Don’t forget it.

There are at least 83 Democratic members of the House who believe that we cannot exclude alternatives that would solve this economic challenge more justly and fairly.

Jesus, you’re so deep in the euphemism you didn’t even say what it is.

They believe we must challenge the limits of our narrowing debate and expand, as President Obama once called it, “our moral imagination.”

It was a nonsensical term then, it’s a nonsensical term now. Moral imagination. Jesus Christ.

They are the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), who last week introduced what they are calling the “People’s Budget,”

Sure. After we get done with that, let’s all pound some vodka, call each other “comrade” and stage a purge of all non-party members. Oh wait. That was the 1910s in Russia. This progressive thing is starting to sound kind of like regression.

an alternative both to President Obama’s proposal and the unconscionable Ryan Budget.

I suppose we are fortunate that we have a president to the right of outright Communism, but that’s kind of like giving thanks that you don’t have a giant metal rod lodged in your chest.

It lays out what a robust progressive agenda should look like. It protects the social safety net,

The status quo.

promotes a progressive tax policy

Also the status quo, but (without reading it) I’m assuming that they want to make American tax policy “more progressive.”

and makes significant cuts to the Pentagon by bringing our troops home from Iraq

Also the status quo. Since before Obama took office.

and Afghanistan.

Would have been the status quo, until Obama screwed things up.

It actually generates a surplus by 2021, according to Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the CPC.

So, by doing nothing but raising taxes on the rich and leaving Afghanstan, they achieve surplus by 2021? I don’t even have to look at this nonsense of a plan to understand that their accounting is pure bullshit.

This is the kind of budget our president should be proposing.

He would literally get laughed out of office, so…be my guest.

This is the kind of budget the progressive community should be rallying around. One that makes millionaires, billionaires and corporations pay their fair share.

Compare that to a budget that just makes millionaires and billionaires.

It’s like they think that their own misguided, childish spite is more important than economic growth.

One that protects the poor and middle class. But it is the kind of budget that establishment Democrats and media elites are inclined to ignore and dismiss.

Yeah. Because it’s both embarrassing and crazy.

We can be, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently put it, a country “of the 1%, for the 1%, by the 1%.”

The 1% that pays for 34% of the government.

Or we can be a country that believes in — and embraces — shared sacrifice.

Which, of course, is a euphemism for shifting the sacrifice to someone else.

A country not defined by the greed of the few but by the needs of the many.

Holy shit. That communism stuff before was kind of tongue-in-cheek. This isn’t. This is flat-out, Stalin-loving, Mao-reading, beorgeois-hating, state-worshipping, gulag-populating, one party-ruling propaganda for communism. From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Someone please get Katrina a little red star for her hat.

That’s the only kind of America really worth believing in.

America is a nation of free men. It is defined not by the “needs of the many,” but by the capability of the individuals to pursue their own fortune. This means failure and strife and hardship, but it also means wealth, production, and the overwhelming equalizing force of the dollar.

There is nothing to love about deference to need. By shackling America’s productive capacity to needs, it enslaves producers to leeches who would siphon their ability. It encourages the moderately able to instead leech. It debases the human spirit and undermines the basic dignity that America was designed to preserve. It is the purest form of evil, the urge to shame a man into subjugating himself to you and make his prowess yours.

This is more serious than my snarkiness. Katrina Vanden Heuvel has issued a call to arms for communism in the United States in one of the nation’s leading newspapers. This is what the other side looks like: a hammer and sickle swaddled in the stars and stripes.

You're Welcome, Jeff Immelt.

Alright you curmudgeonly shrew, let’s do that thing I do.

The wrong economic debate

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, Tuesday, April 5, 10:56 AM

There’s a janitor who lives in a studio apartment just outside of Stevens Point, Wis.

Sweet. If there’s a down-home girl with fading looks or an up-town debutante looking for excitement on the other side of the tracks, this is pretty much a Springsteen song.

Or Billy Joel.

Or something equally awesome.

He cleans the math and science buildings at a state university,

So you’re saying he’s a state employee. In Wisconsin. Where we just learned that the average Milwaukee teachers annual total compensation flirts with $100,000. This is where the rope suspending my disbelief begins to fray.

Also, blue collar Springsteen-style heroes don’t clean schools. They either clean in downtrodden manufacturing plants or gritty bars where bikers puke in the pee-trough. This shit is worse than Secret Garden.

a job he’s been doing for about 18 months, after a year of unemployment. He’s 43 and last year made $24,622.

Fuck that’s pathetic. That guy would make more on unemployment, which, for the record, he would’ve qualified for throughout about 12 of those terrible months he spent cleaning the University.

He doesn’t have kids, so he doesn’t qualify for a child-care tax credit.

Whew. Thank God this world-beater didn’t procreate.

He doesn’t own a home

But I’m guessing the dude owns a kegerator. (Why can’t I contribute to the hypothetical janitor’s backstory?)

or a hybrid car — those credits don’t apply to him, either.

In my head, the guy drives the same beat-up Trans Am he did in high school. Except now the passenger side door is made of cardboard.

He hasn’t been enrolled in school since the 10th grade, so he definitely doesn’t qualify for any education credits or deductions.

FINE. He drives the same beat-up Trans Am he did when he should have been in high school.  Does that help alleviate the dissonance of the cross-narration?

Oh, the passenger door is still made of cardboard.

He just learned that Gov. Scott Walker’s new budget has slashed his benefits

That sneaky wench! I knew she chose Wisconsin for a reason.

and that next year he’ll be bringing in about 16 percent less per month.

Sounds like this guy is really regretting having actively avoided developing a marketable skill set his entire life.

Also, I’m not sure that math squares, but I’ll let it slide.

And when he sits down to do his taxes next week, he’ll find that he paid the federal government around $1,400 in 2010

Seriously? This dude might as well pay in pocket lint. That’s 5.7%.

About a thousand miles to the east, in Fairfield, Conn.,

Aw sweet! This story is a trans-class love affair!

General Electric, one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, posted a $14.2 billion profit for 2010.

Woot! I just imagined that I fist-bumped a symbolic representation of GE. And that symbolic representation just happened to be a squirrel named Reggie. The fist-bumping logistics with a timid rodent were indeed tricky, but I pulled the complex meneuver off like a champ. (Natch.)

When its accountants were finished working their magic, the company didn’t owe a single dollar in federal taxes.

That squirrel deserves another fist-bump.

“People can think what they think,” said Jeff Immelt, GE’s chief executive, in response to a growing anger to this story, first reported last week by the New York Times.

Yeah! Fuck ‘em. It’s not like you have any political responsibilities or anything gay like that…http://www.biztimes.com/daily/2009/2/6/obama-appoints-immelt-to-economic-recovery-advisory-board…Oh. ….Shit.

What else is there to think, one wonders, but that with the muscle and money of lobbyists and lawyers, with the access and influence built over generations, GE has done not just the audacious but the outrageous. And it is not alone.

So you’re saying that GE has good accountants and tax lawyers? Get right out of town!

Exxon Mobil, for example, made $19 billion in profits in 2009 but paid no federal income taxes. In fact, it received a $156 million rebate from the IRS. Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits and was handed a nearly $1 trillion bailout by taxpayers. The list, inconceivably, goes on.

Literally all of those examples were primarily the result of tax-loss carry-forwards, which is another way of saying “shut the fuck up about things you don’t understand, you horse-faced trollop.”

That may have been a bit harsh.

And yet the conversation in Washington hasn’t turned to aggressively closing the loopholes that GE’s lobbyists created for its accountants to exploit.

Nothing riles a liberal up like raising taxes.

Still, I fundamentally agree, but not in a way that KvH would like. The tax code is long, convoluted, and arbitrary. The only thing more predictable in Washington than the calls to simplify the tax code are the efforts to obfuscate it. The simplification always work. For about a year. Then our politicians-slash-amateur-sociologist (and truly, I can’t think of a lamer hobby) decide that the country is really just a giant beaker of blue goo that only needs a low simmer from the Bunsen Burner of Keynesian economics and some very meticulous stirring to start defying the laws of science/economics.

Within five years, the tax code is so convoluted that the IRS can’t figure it out, tax revenues are down, and fraud has ravaged the effectiveness of the poorly-conceived and even-more-poorly-implemented tax incentives. (That’s best-case. Worst-case scenarios generally involve the desertification of Iowa. Think about it.)

It hasn’t turned toward ending the ridiculous tax breaks on corporate dividends and capital gains

It takes either gigantic stones or crippling ignorance to seriously advance a full-throated defense of the double-taxation of savings in the midst of an economic crisis caused by a deficiency in savings.

that allow hedge fund managers and the very wealthy to pay the government a lower percentage than their middle-class employees.

Wow. That was quite the jump. Blink and you’ll miss it. Apparently because some wealthy corporations have low income tax rates, wealthy individuals are somehow culpable. I was under the impressions that liberals despised the idea that corporations had the same rights as individuals when it came to political donations. (After all, that was literally the only issue of the Citizens United decision.)

But that’s just the beginning of this outright lie. The wealthy decidedly do not pay less in taxes—either by nominal value or by percentage—than the middle class.

And finally, the cherry on top: corporate taxes aren’t paid by corporations anyways. Producers raise prices  to accommodate tax increases on sellers (depending, of course, on the price elasticity of demand and the price elasticity of supply for the market in question.) In effect, KvH is advocating that you should be stark-raving mad that you don’t get to pay a higher price for a washing machine.

Instead, Congress is debating whether $33 billion in cuts to the social safety net is enough to make the Tea Party happy.

It’s not.

While Republicans in the House have stopped talking nearly altogether about jobs

Well, Republicans have rightly calculated that it’s not worth the political capital to convince the American people that the unemployment figures are staggeringly misleading and, in many ways, intentionally deceptive. Instead, they’ll let the President get his good news out of the way before discouraged workers start flooding back into the labor market in the next few months.

Plus, the best job-stimulating activity they could engage in is cutting taxes. They just fought tooth and nail to keep the Bush tax cuts in place in December. After that, they can remove the obscene regulations around businesses and try to shut down the printing press to ease inflationary pressures.  Finally, they can boost investor confidence by solidifying the budgetary situation and getting the country’s fiscal house in order.

Come to think of it, Republicans haven’t talked about anything other than jobs.

 (and have embraced a budget that could cost the economy 700,000 of them, according to Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi),

As in Moody’s, the credit rating agency that keeps threatening to downgrade treasury securities because of the crippling debt that the Republican proposal seeks to fix? That Moodys?

the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, someone charged with finding a way to sustained job growth, is none other than Jeff Immelt himself, tax evader in chief.

I’m pretty sure that this counts as an honest-to-God instance of libel. Tax evasion is a crime, after all, and there is scant evidence that Jeff Immelt did anything illegal. Tax avoidance is just good business practice.

Also, it’s intellectually dishonest. Immelt is finding plenty of jobs for accountants and tax lawyers alone, but high profitability is generally a good indicator that GE will start hiring for new positions. (I feel like I’m teaching the “slow” class when I have to explain things like that.)

This is a systemic problem that neither belongs to nor can be solved by a single man. But for Immelt to keep his post with the administration now would be bad politics, bad policy and bad messaging. Yet as I write this, it doesn’t look as if he will be asked to step down.

Still, I am hopeful.

First you make libelous accusations against this man. Then you imply that his allegedly illegal activity (although you’re the only one alleging that it’s illegal) is hurting job creation, meaning that he’s also, in your estimation, bad at his job. Finally, if that weren’t enough, you call for him to lose his job.

Well thanks, you skanky platypus, but you’re not helping. Okay, my ad hominem insults are getting a little weird.

I am hopeful because an incredible spirit and energy has been unleashed.

Damn. Now this is more of a 60s folk song. Bring back Springsteen!!!

It was first shown during the Wisconsin labor battle, and it is being sustained and nurtured, and broadened to communities across the country. People are showing that they will not abide a system that finances corporate greed on the backs of the poor and middle class.

Yeah! We only finance Union greed on the backs of the poor and middle class!

On Monday, the nation commemorated the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,

Uh…

Well that was a pivot.

who was killed in Memphis, where he had gone to fight for the rights of sanitation workers.

Seriously, is this article about Unions or not? It’s getting a little late to make up your mind.

Thousands gathered across America for a national day of action supporting public employees, other working people and trade unions in a common quest for jobs, justice and decency for all citizens.

Well that’s vague.

They participated in teach-ins, protests, demonstrations and vigils,

Is it just me, or does protesting sound insufferably lame?

all with a simple and deeply American message: It is time for the richest, most privileged among us to pay their fair share.

Whoa whoa whoa. Slow down, hoss. First, we’re back to that really strange jump that you made about three paragraphs ago that because GE didn’t pay taxes, it must mean that all rich people are paying obscenely low taxes. Beyond being intellectually lazy and logically fallacious, it’ also demonstrably untrue.

But here’s the more important point: in an article when you invoke Martin Luther King Jr., it’s just uncouth to also promote the forceful application of power by the majority in an effort to target the minority. That you’re talking about economic classes is completely irrelevant; it’s antithetical to the equality that defined the civil rights movement.

They spoke of the widening gulf in American politics, between the powerful and the powerless, between those who most need the government’s assistance and those most likely, instead, to receive it.

Sometimes, this is like playing a card game against a toddler; you’ve got to just let it go. Otherwise, you’re stuck deleting paragraphs upon paragraphs of semi-intelligible rants that simultaneously pretend to be shocked by the ineptitude of an opponent while decrying the systematic injustice of the entire language of the issue at hand.

(Not that I did that here; that happened the last time I played Go Fish against my nephew. That cheating bastard’s mom wouldn’t let me read him the letter. Apparently I say “fuck” too much for a four-year-old.)

They are not alone. For all the disappointment that progressives feel about this Congress, there are members who have been leaders and allies on Capitol Hill.

Consider Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

I’ve considered him. He’s an avowed socialist and just batshit crazy. I mean seriously? A socialist? What the hell is that about?

Always the people’s champion, Sanders has called for closing corporate tax loopholes, which, if done, would raise more than $400 billion over a 10-year period.

Yeah…no it wouldn’t. It would just encourage even more American companies to realize their revenues and move their jobs overseas.

He’s also introduced legislation imposing a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion more a year —

Yeah…no it wouldn’t. It would just encourage even more American millionaires to move to more tax-favorable locations.

more than enough to protect Pell Grants and Head Start and other programs facing the chopping block.

He is joined by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.),

Yet another mark of shame for the People’s Republic of Illinois. Also, “Ill.” hasn’t been the abbreviation for Illinois for about fifteen years.

who has introduced legislation to create a separate tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires — an option that garners the support of 81 percent of the American people, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

I literally see no distinction between modern-day liberals and WWI-era Bolsheviks. Well, the Bolsheviks used the word “proletariat” more, but then that might just be a disconnect in translation.

The common sense, humane response at this moment is to fight to reset the terms of a suffocatingly narrow and wrongheaded debate.

Humane? Humane is not redefining the terms of a debate. Humane is manning up, grabbing your old man’s bolt-action rifle, going out back, and firing off a round into the face of a dog that got rabies while fighting off a wolf to save your life. That’s fucking humane.

...Now I’m really sad.

This is the heritage of the progressive movement and, indeed, our obligation.

If this is a manifesto, it’s downright terrible.

The best principles of our country have been trampled by corporate immorality

Fuck that noise. It’s not immoral to not pay taxes if you don’t owe taxes. We responsible adults call that “fulfilling fiduciary obligations.”

and right-wing extremism.

Tax breaks were progressive ideas. GE gets tax breaks for all of the useless “green energy” nonsense it does. You think that’s a conservative idea? If I had it my way, there wouldn’t be an income tax at all.  Or if there were, it certainly wouldn’t apply to corporations, because taxing corporations is just fucking stupid. It only leads to price increases, reduced consumption, and deadweight loss of economic efficiency.

But they can be restored. Martin Luther King Jr. knew as much when he fought for the sanitation workers of Tennessee 43 years ago. Now, we must know it too.

Seriously, if you get to invoke MLK in a unions rights issue, I get to invoke Jesus for tax issues.

Even MLK would agree Jesus wins in the roshambo of rhetorical overreach. 

The Workers Well-Being is Too Important to Trust to the Workers

Science, yes. But don't forget the poor

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

In a speech to the National Academy of Sciences shortly after taking office, President Obama, while faced with a teetering economy, vast numbers of unemployed and uninsured, and two seemingly endless wars, nonetheless paused to embrace a vision of the future.

This is how the left negates their failures: religion. First, they write their icons’ legacies beforehand as a prophesy…

He spoke of President Lincoln's

…Then they invoke the gods…

 commitment to science and innovation, even in the midst of great turmoil and uncertainty.

…Throw in some heroic rhetoric…

He said: "A few months after a devastating defeat at Fredericksburg, before Gettysburg would be won,

…Establish an air of inevitability…

 before Richmond would fall, before the fate of the Union would be at all certain, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law an act creating the National Academy of Sciences. . . . Lincoln refused to accept that our nation's sole purpose was mere survival."

...thrust misrepresentations and shoddy analysis into historical context…

Lincoln was a believer in science,

Is there really anyone out there that’s not a believer in science? The notion of being a believer is rooted in the necessity of blind faith. Science is, by definition, replicable and therefore observable. Fire still burns you even if you don’t believe it’s hot. You want to know how I know that? Science. Plus I was a two year old once, and I learned that one wicked fast because of my enormous brain.

a believer in our capacity for innovation

Well that’s certainly not the same thing as being a believer in science. The first is a prerequisite for sanity; the second is an assertion that the products of our minds are gifts to the collective (aka, the liberal God) from the masses (aka, people who need to pay more taxes).

and the possibilities it represented.

Innovation isn’t about possibility. It’s about actuality. The possible is not an innovation; it’s an invention. Taking the possible and making it an actuality—that’s innovation. So really, she’s promoting invention.

He saw our future prosperity tied to our ability, as a nation, to create. So does Obama.

Mostly our ability to create new guns. I dare say that sounds more like Reagan than Obama.

In many areas, the president has matched the rhetoric of his (and Lincoln's) speech with concrete action.

In April 2009, Obama created a President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which he has turned to nearly every month since to ask hard questions

Journalists always seem to think that asking hard questions is meritorious. It’s astounding they never do it.

and demand science-based answers. He has fought for - and in a number of cases succeeded in - increasing science and new technology funding.

So you would agree that he is a big spender, no? Follow-up question…what makes Barack Obama better able to decide which technologies to invest in than the individual investor? Does he not believe in the efficiency of the market, or does he believe that the profit motive is not an effective motivator?

(Ms. Vanden Heuvel, feel free to take notes. I’m doing your job for you here.)

He has appointed highly credentialed, public-spirited

Public spirited? Jesus Christ, what the hell does that mean? Avowed communists?

 scientists to key agencies.

Seriously, we need Joe McCarthy back. There are Communists in the State Department!

So it came as no surprise, then, that a central theme of President Obama's State of the Union address last week was the modern extension of Lincoln's commitment to science and innovation and of his insistence that we add "the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."

It’s kind of disrespectful to override the President’s chosen hero to compare himself to. Just a random aside: being assassinated does not make a President worthy of praise. I have nothing but contempt for William McKinley. (If you can spell his assassin’s name by heart, you may have had a kick ass 7^th grade history teacher like me. Yes, I’ll take 20^th Century Assassin spelling for $800, Alex.  Leon Czolgosz, bitches.)

Cars that can run on sunlight and water.

Clouds that rain vegan cookies and jetpacks that run on pixy-dust.

A million electric cars on the road by 2015.

Simultaneously a pipe dream and something that isn’t worth aspiring to. Also, what happens if there aren’t a million people in the United States who want electric cars? How do we remedy that once we’ve made it the espoused goal of the federal government?

 High-speed rail.

Don’t we alredy have railroad companies?

 A faster, more accessible Internet.

Don’t we already have internet service providers?

Renewable technologies paid for by eliminating subsidies to oil and gas companies.

Shouldn’t we just remove subsidies to all companies? Isn’t that “equal protection under the law?” If we selectively give subsidies—federal revenue is known in flyover country as “our money”—or if we give tax breaks and credits to those who purchase what the government suggests, then how are we living our lives free from the yoke of government tyranny? What have we done with our birthright of liberty?

These, all mentioned by the president in his address, are just a small sampling of what awaits an America that rededicates itself to scientific pursuit over the next decade.

An inefficient, market-free energy policy, a rapidly depreciating transit infrastructure that no one uses, and a taxed and regulated internet…the future sure is bright.

The goal - "to win the future" as the president put it

That line was outright stolen from about 5 people, including Newt Gingrich.

 - is, indeed, a worthy one,

Keep in mind that these are the people who objected to “War on Terror” because it was ambiguous and murky.

 especially when you consider how poorly we have handled the recent past. Largely because of trade policies that place profits ahead of working people, more than 40,000 factories have been shuttered in less than a decade.

I’m at a complete loss. Democrats used to pretend like they believed in free trade, until they decided that advocating that demanding that firms remain unprofitable to maintain jobs was sound fiscal policy with 10% unemployment.

Meanwhile, American 15-year-olds rank 25th in the world in math, and 21st in science,

In high school. High schoolers would suck even if they were great at math and science.

and we are haunted by a skills shortage that makes it harder to compete.

Yes. Skills like welding, carpentry, electric wiring, and masonry. Instead of sending the dullards of society to vocational schools, where they would learn an effective career, recent administrations have poured billions of dollars into the notion that everyone in America should have a college education, regardless of whether it confers any more economic earning power on its graduates. Meanwhile, we have thousands upon thousands of aspiring writer who can’t figure out how to use a semicolon to save their lives, but we have a dearth of employable workers doing jobs that don’t even require an 80 IQ.

All the while, we spent the better part of a decade with a president who scorned science,

This is a veiled reference to fetal stem-cell research. There is a difference between scorning science and having principled ethical objections to methodologies. There’s a reason Tuskegee doesn’t happen anymore, and it’s not because the experiment didn’t yield results. It’s because it’s morally atrocious. Saying so doesn’t make anyone scornful of science.

 and a federal government that always let politics trump scientific progress.

Three questions would need to be resolved before I could get on board with this:

1)     From where does the federal government derive its authority to regulate and monitor “scientific progress?”

2)     Does any non-military department in the federal bureaucracy have a history of developing marketable ideas or products?

3)     Assuming that the federal government has both the right to regulate and a history of effectively regulating scientific progress, does this government function make us more or less prosperous and free?

But while Lincoln was committing himself to the advancement of science and innovation, he remained focused on ending the nation's more immediate and immobilizing crises.

One might say he was “focused like a laser beam” on preserving the Union.

President Obama must do the same; it is today's job market, not tomorrow's, and the victims of our historic chasm between great wealth and deep poverty, that deserve his primary focus now.

Are you seriously putting income inequality up as a national tragedy equivalent to centuries of slavery and the atrocities of one of the dead and wounded in what is still to date our nation’s bloodiest war?

We live in a country with nearly 15 million unemployed, and many millions more underemployed.

This was supposed to be a column on science, no?

 A country where job creation can barely keep pace with population growth, where for a staggering number of people, the pain of recession continues without any real relief. These are people who cannot wait for a decade-long economic transformation; they need relief - and jobs - now.

No argument here.

And yet, with more Americans now mired in poverty than at any time in the last 40 years -a record 47 million - the president did not include a single mention of poverty or the plight of the poor in his speech.

Do the poor need to be reminded that their lives are desolate and empty?

Ironically,

Seriously, I haven’t read the end of this sentence. Scout’s honor. I’m willing to bet ten dollars that there is absolutely no irony in this sentence. No one ever got rich betting on the competence of the American media.

 Republican Paul Ryan's response did acknowledge that government still has the responsibility "to help provide a safety net for those who cannot provide for themselves."

You owe me $10.

Of course, the programs that the most vulnerable

I’m not allowing this euphemism to continue. Poverty and vulnerability are not interchangeable. You’re talking about the poor. Say so.

depend on are the very ones that Ryan, new chairman of the House Budget Committee, has committed to defund and dismantle.

I knew there was a reason I mancrush on that dude.

That Obama was silent on poverty is troubling. But the real challenge for Obama, who through his work as a community organizer has seen poverty as close up as any president,

Washing their feet, perhaps?

 will come when Ryan and his reactionary colleagues pass a budget in the House. It will be in that moment that the president will have to stand and fight to preserve the safety net,

Lincoln fought to preserve the Union; Obama fights to preserve the safety net. See what she’s doing there by using the same verbiage?

 to defend those who may never see the benefit of a retooled economy.

Have you ever heard the expression “a rising tide lifts all boats?” Everyone sees the benefits of a strong economy.

Obama could bury the word "stimulus"

I bet Lincoln knew when a word didn’t do well in focus groups too.

but still find innovative initiatives (such as a National Infrastructure Bank or large-scale public-private partnerships) to prop up cities and states and frugal pension funds.

Is that frugal used as a pejorative?

 And he could push for a 21st-century Works Progress Administration-style program, one that would give those able and willing to work the stability - and dignity - of employment.

And yet, provide absolutely no economic benefit to the economy. Brilliant.

Lincoln said that "the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves - in their separate, and individual capacities."

In other words, Lincoln didn’t recognize the limitations on government put in place by the Constitution, so we can throw it away too.

Even if this were the standard by which the government derived its authority, provide an argument that the government can run a train line better than private industry. Provide an argument that the government can provide heathcare better than the private sector. Provide an argument that the government can produce new goods and services with the frantic energy of a free economy. I dare you to make the argument that statism and central planning through government is the most efficient economic model. I triple dog dare you.

The president must remember that there are some things that need to be done now, things that no leap of science of technological innovation can cure.

Herpes?

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. She writes a weekly online column for The Post.

To simplify, Rich <> Evil

(<> means "not equal to, for those of you who aren't particularly math-inclined)

Predator's ball

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

"Apres nous, le deluge." Surely the reactionary gang of five

In the common vernacular: “the majority”

on the Supreme Court should have cited Louis XV

Actually, Madame de Pompadour.