Tag Archives: Robert Reich

The Games They Play

Posted on by under Economic issues, History, Political commentary

Politics as performance art … er, without the art.  I don’t know about you folks, but I’m sick and damn tired of the games people play, the manipulation and hypocrisy from our elected officials.  Just do the job and sit down and shut up!!!  Here’s what we can expect to dominate over the next month or two …

Get ready: Two big upcoming theatrical performances

Biden wants to tax the rich, and House Republicans don’t want to raise the debt ceiling. Here’s what will happen.

Robert Reich

09 March 2023

President Biden is proposing to trim the federal budget deficit by close to $3tn over the next 10 years. He was an FDR-like spender in the first two years of his presidency. Has he now turned into a Calvin Coolidge skinflint?

Neither. He’s a cunning political operator.

Biden knows that he – along with his three immediate predecessors (Trump, Obama and George W Bush) – have spent gobs of money. In addition, Bush and Trump cut taxes on the rich and on corporations.

Not surprisingly, the national debt has soared. It’s not so much an economic problem as a political one. The huge debt is giving Republicans a big, fat target.

House Republicans are planning to stage theater-of-the-absurd pyrotechnics – refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Which means that at some point this summer, Biden’s treasury department will say that the nation is within days (or hours) of defaulting on its bills. A default would be catastrophic.

To counter this, Biden is planning his own pyrotechnics.

In the budget released this week, he’s proposing a “billionaire minimum tax” that would require wealthy American households worth more than $100m to pay at least 20% of their incomes in taxes (most middle-class Americans pay about 30%). Plus, they’d have to pay 20% a year on unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets, such as stocks, which can accumulate value for years but are taxed only when they are sold (and not even then, if left to their heirs).

Here’s the important thing: the tax would apply only to the top one-100th of 1% of American households. Over half of the revenue would come from those worth more than $1bn.

Biden is proposing additional tax hikes on the wealthy: reversing the Trump tax cut by raising the top tax rate to 39.6% from 37%, increasing the corporate tax to 28% from 21%, and raising the tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4%.

All told, Biden’s new tax proposals would amount to an almost $3tn tax increase over a decade – on the richest of the rich. Oh, and did I say? Taxing the rich is enormously popular.

Biden also wants to let Medicare officials negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices and cap the costs of drugs for seniors – a proposal that is also hugely popular.

But here’s the dirty little secret. Neither of these two theatrical productions – neither the Republicans’ refusal to raise the debt ceiling nor Biden’s big tax hike on the super-rich – will ever happen. They’re both fantasies.

A default on the nation’s obligations would bring on an economic calamity that Republicans don’t want to be responsible for. And a giant tax increase on the super-rich would be a miracle, given their political clout.

These two productions are being staged for the public – two competing performances, each intended to score political points against the other.

Biden’s performance is rational, and the Republicans’ is irrational and unserious, but that doesn’t really matter.

They will both end in a dramatic flurry of last-minute negotiations, seemingly death-defying moves and countermoves, and breathtaking cliffhangers.

Exciting? Of course. Important? Meh.

The denouement? The debt ceiling will be raised. The national debt will be lowered a bit. Social Security and Medicare will be left alone. And Biden and the Democrats will have leeway to do one or two more things before the gravitational pull of the 2024 election pulls them in – perhaps expand childcare or pre-K or enable more students to attend community college.

Yesterday I was in Columbus, Ohio, debating Arthur Laffer about the economy. We appeared before hundreds of students who had never heard of Arthur Laffer (or me, for that matter). If you’ve heard of him but don’t quite recall what he did, let me refresh your recollection: Art was the founder in the 1980s of so-called “supply-side economics,” the bonkers idea that the benefits of lower taxes on the wealthy trickle down to everyone else.

Trickle-down economics provided the theatrical scripts for Ronald Reagan’s, George W. Bush’s, and Donald Trump’s tax productions. The tax cuts were real, but the idea they were based on was always a fantasy. Nothing ever trickled down.

Did We Move, Or Did The Scale Shift?

Posted on by under education, History, Personal, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

I don’t think most of us change our views much during the course of our lifetime.  Oh sure, as we age, as we learn new things, learn about history, about political and social ideologies, are exposed to new experiences, we may shift our viewpoints, but I don’t think we do much of a swing from the time we were young.  When I focus on young people in my ‘good people’ posts, I always have the feeling that these people, some as young as five or six years old, are going to grow up to be awesome adults with humanitarian values.  We are who we are, and while our views may shift, I don’t think the core of us changes much over time.  Cruel children grow into cruel adults, children who have compassion as children, typically grow into kind, compassionate adults.

I grew up in the 1950s, came of age in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been appalled and disgusted by man’s inhumanity to man, by the depths of cruelty of which the human species is capable.  When I was very young, I asked questions … LOTS of questions!  Drove my parents to drink, I did!  I stopped asking questions about religion, for I figured out early on that there were no answers, but I continued to ask questions about other things, like why my best friend, whose skin just happened to be brown, couldn’t be in our family Christmas picture that would be sent to my grandmother.  She was, in my book, part of our family.  Or why certain people had to sit in one part of a restaurant while others sat in another.  I didn’t know the words ‘racism’ or ‘bigotry’, but I saw that different people were treated differently, and I didn’t like it, didn’t understand it.

So, if one must use labels, I suppose I’ve always been liberal-minded.  I don’t think that in the “land of milk and honey”, the “land of opportunity”, anybody should be homeless or have to put their children to bed hungry at night.  I think the more education we can give our young people, the better equipped they will be to deal with the challenges ahead and help make the world a better place.  And I think education through college should be affordable and available to every single person.  I think great wealth is the most useless waste of resources – resources that could be saving lives and benefitting far more people.  Those are, of course, liberal ideas, but no different than I’ve believed for all of my adult life.

However, while at one time I was just left of center in socio-political ideology, today I and my views are called “far left”.  I’ve wondered about this for some time, had a vague notion that it was the ‘right’ pushing the left further from the center, and last night I found this clip by Robert Reich that explains it perfectly and makes much sense.  Take a look … see what you think.

A Loss Of Decency?

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Ask yourself this:  Has society become more cruel, less compassionate?  Has decency been forgotten, shame a thing of the past?  Robert Reich gives us just a few recent examples of how public perception has changed over the past decade or so …

The death of shame

What do Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump have in common?

Robert Reich

14 February 2023

Friends,

At President Biden’s State of the Union address last week, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly yelled “Liar!,” Tennessee Republican Rep. Andy Ogles shouted, “It’s your fault!,” and another Republican yelled “Bullshit!”

Fourteen years ago, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson was formally rebuked by the whole House after shouting “you lie” at Obama.

Yet now, anything goes.

Meanwhile, Rep. George Santos remains in Congress despite mounting revelations of outright lies, fabrications, and shady deals that years ago would have sent a member of Congress packing.

We’ve also just learned about Jared Kushner’s quid pro quo with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

As Middle East adviser to his father-in-law, Kushner gave MBS everything he wanted — Trump’s first trip abroad, permission to blockade Qatar, a pass on imprisoning leading Saudi citizens until they paid him billions and another on killing and dismembering journalist Jamal Khashoggi (as Trump later put it, “I saved his [MbS’s] ass.”).

Then, after Kushner left the White House, MBS reciprocated by putting $2 billion from the sovereign wealth fund he chaired into Kushner’s private equity company.

Where’s the shame?

Elon Musk’s concern about the dwindling number of people seeing his tweets prompted the zillionaire to convene a group of engineers last Tuesday to discover why his engagement numbers were tanking. When one of the company’s two remaining principal engineers explained it was likely due to waning public interest in Musk’s antics, Musk fired the engineer.

We used to call such behavior shameless. Now, it’s just what the rich and powerful do.

Shame once reenforced social norms. Through most of human history, survival depended on extended families, clans, and tribes. To be shamed and ostracized for violating the common good often meant death.

Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, thought shame may have evolved as a way to maintain social trust necessary for the survival of a group and, therefore, of its members.

In a 2012 paper, psychologists Matthew Feinberg and Dacher Keltner and sociologist Robb Willer found evidence that shame and embarrassment function as a kind of “nonverbal apology” for having done something that violates social norms. A display of embarrassment shows others that the embarrassed person is still aware of the group’s expectations and is still committed to the group’s well-being.

Four centuries ago, public shaming included scarlet A’s. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” wrote Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who also sought to put an end to public stocks and whipping posts.

A more recent version of public shaming occurred in 1954 when Joseph Welch, then chief council for the U.S. Army, stood up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy before a nationwide television audience. During a hearing in which McCarthy accused the army of harboring communists, McCarthy attacked one of Welch’s young assistants for having once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, which McCarthy considered a communist front.

Welch responded: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness …. Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Millions of Americans watching the proceedings from their living rooms saw McCarthy as the dangerous bully he was. By shaming him, Welch shamed America for having tolerated McCarthy and the communist witch hunt he was leading. It was the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s reign of terror.

But today, shamelessness has gained a certain elan. Audacity, insolence, and impudence are welcomed. Irreverence is celebrated. We hoot when someone gives society the bird. Many Americans love Donald Trump’s loutishness.

Meanwhile, instead of being directed at behavior that undermines the common good, shame is now often deployed against people who don’t fit in. Social media unleashes torrents of invective on people who do little more than say something silly or look different or are socially inept. Shaming like this can cause a sensitive teenager to take his or her life.

Why are those who violate social norms now treated like Wild West outlaw heroes, while those who are different are ridiculed? Why are bullies now applauded while those at the margin are ostracized?

What Gives … ?

Posted on by under Economic issues, education, Election 2024, Free Press Issues, Political commentary, Social commentary

The media assessments of President Biden’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday night have been overwhelmingly positive (I refer to actual news media and journalists, leaving out the likes of Fox and NewsMax that I do not consider to be legitimate news venues.)  More than a few have called his address the “best State of the Union ever!”  The speech highlighted Biden’s accomplishments, which contrary to public opinion, have been significant, especially given the opposition from Republicans in Congress.  And yet … despite his accomplishments, Biden’s approval rating remains low.  Robert Reich asks (and partly answers) the question:  What gives?

Why the discrepancy between what Biden has achieved and what Americans think about him?

Robert Reich

8 February 2023

My friends,

As I mentioned last night, I thought Biden’s second State of the Union address was superb. It was one of the best State of the Union speeches I’ve witnessed — and I’ve witnessed many.

Biden’s record so far has also been impressive — even though for the first two years of his presidency, the Democrats held a razor-thin congressional majority, and the Republican Party has become more traitorous and treacherous than at any time in modern American history.

Yet despite Biden’s impressive record, only 42 percent of Americans approve of his presidency. That’s barely above the 41 percent at his last State of the Union address, and a lower approval rating at this point in his presidency than any president in 75 years of polling except for Trump and Reagan (who at this point was hobbled by a deep recession).

Despite Biden’s significant achievements, fully 62 percent think he has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing” during his presidency. Majorities believe he has made no progress on his signature initiatives — from improving the country’s infrastructure to making electric vehicles more affordable to creating jobs.

And even though jobs are being created at an almost unprecedented rate, unemployment is at its lowest since 1969, and inflation is dropping, Americans are deeply pessimistic about the economy.

So what gives? Why the discrepancy between what Biden is achieving and what Americans think?

Let me add a few thoughts of my own.

First, let me stress my belief that Joe Biden has been an exceptionally good president. The only reason I bring up his low ratings is to try to understand why, despite his achievements, most of the public doesn’t seem to share my view.

Opinion polls are notoriously inaccurate, as we’ve all witnessed in the last major elections. Yet Biden’s consistently low ratings across almost all polls — and the bizarre fact that he’s polling no better than Trump did at this point in Trump’s presidency — can’t be blamed simply on inadequate polling methods.

Many of you blame the media — both Fox News and its radical right imitators, as well as the mainstream — for minimizing Biden’s achievements and exaggerating his inadequacies.

I largely agree. Fox News and other rightwing outlets continue to poison America. As to the mainstream media, as to anyone who reads this letter knows, I’ve been deeply concerned about its “two-sides” ism and absurd attempts to draw moral equivalence between Republicans and Democrats.

That said, only a small fraction of the public is exposed to Fox News or to the New York Times or the Washington Post. The media alone can’t account for Biden’s low ratings.

I want to suggest to you three other culprits that to my mind are playing a larger role.

First is the legacy of Trump, along with the deeply cynical and angry divide he has spawned in America. Even if George Washington were president right now, some 40 percent of the public would likely despise him.

Second is social media, which has become a cauldron of ever more extremist rage. Under Elon Musk, for example, Twitter has become less of a “public square” than a hell-hole of hate. No national leader is immune to such relentless battering.

Third and perhaps most importantly is the continuing crises that most Americans find themselves in. Some two-thirds of us are living paycheck to paycheck. Almost no one has job security. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage continues to drop. COVID is receding but “long” COVID is taking a devastating toll. Fentanyl and related drug poisonings continue to rise.

Joe Biden and his administration have made important progress. Their legislative victories are important. The American Rescue Act helped millions survive the pandemic. But most Americans are still hurting. Hopefully, by the fall of 2024, the hurt won’t be nearly as bad.

Fact Vs Fiction

Posted on by under Economic issues, education, Global Issues, History, Political commentary

There are so many misconceptions and falsehoods swirling around the upcoming debt ceiling debate that people don’t know what to think.  Today’s newsletter from Robert Reich pushes aside the lies and cuts to the core of things, including why the nation needs to keep borrowing more to pay its bills.

The biggest story you’ve never heard about today’s federal debt

America’s wealthy used to pay taxes to support the nation. Now, they lend it money and collect interest from the rest of us.

Robert Reich

31 January 2023

Friends,

The dire warnings of fiscal hawks are once again darkening the skies of official Washington, demanding that the $31 trillion federal debt be reduced and government spending curtailed (thereby giving cover to Republican efforts to hold America hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling).

It’s always the same when Republicans take over a chamber of Congress or the presidency. Horrors! The debt is out of control! Federal spending must be cut!

Not only is the story false, but it leaves out the bigger and more important story behind today’s federal debt: the switch by America’s wealthy over the last half century from paying taxes to the government to lending the government money.

This back story needs to be told if Americans are to understand what’s really happened and what needs to be done about it. Republicans won’t tell it, so Democrats (starting with Joe Biden) must.

A half century ago, American’s wealthy financed the federal government mainly through their tax payments. Tax rates on the wealthy were high: Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, they were over 90 percent. Even after all tax deductions, the wealthy typically paid half of their incomes in taxes.

Since then — courtesy of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump — the effective tax rate on wealthy Americans has plummeted. Even as they’ve accumulated unprecedented wealth, today’s rich are now paying a lower tax rate than middle-class Americans. (The 400 richest American families paid a tax rate of just 3.4 percent between 2014 and 2018, while the rest of us paid an average tax rate of 13.3 percent.)

One of the biggest reasons the federal debt has exploded is that tax cuts on wealthier Americans have reduced government revenue.

Meanwhile, America’s wealthy are financing America’s exploding debt by lending the federal government money, for which the government pays them interest.

As the federal debt continues to mount, those interest payments are ballooning — hitting a record $475 billion in the last fiscal next year (which ran through September). The Congressional Budget Office predicts that interest payments on the federal debt will reach 3.3 percent of the GDP by 2032 and 7.2 percent by 2052.

The biggest recipients of these interest payments are not foreigners but wealthy Americans who park their savings in treasury bonds held by mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, personal trusts, and estates.

Hence the half-century switch: The wealthy used to pay higher taxes to the government. Now the government pays the wealthy interest on their loans to finance a swelling debt that’s been caused largely by lower taxes on the wealthy.

This means that a growing portion of your taxes are going to the wealthy in the form of interest payments, rather than paying for government services everyone needs.

So, the real problem isn’t America’s growing federal budget deficit. It’s the decline in tax revenue from America’s wealthy combined with growing interest payments to them.

Both are worsening America’s already horrific inequalities of income and wealth.

What should be done? Reduce the debt by raising taxes on the wealthy.

This back story needs to be told. Please spread the word.

MAINLY FOR AMERICANS, AND THOSE AFFECTED BY THEM — The Debt Ceiling Debate

Posted on by under Economic issues, Election 2022, Global Issues, History, Political commentary, Re-blogs

On Tuesday, I read, saved and bookmarked Robert Reich’s newsletter about the debt ceiling, planning to share it sometime soon, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Meanwhile, our friend rawgod beat me to the draw, so in the interest of not re-inventing the wheel, I shall re-blog rg’s post! Please take a few moments to read this piece, for it clears up some miscomprehensions about what the debt ceiling is and how critical it is to the very survival of this nation. Thanks, rg!

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

Following are the words of Professor Robert Reich, once upon a time the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. He is now, and has long been, an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He also worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. I believe he knows the truth about what he is saying.

**********************

Friends,

Few things make me as furious as the mainstream media’s reluctance to tell the public what the Republican Party is doing — and instead hide the truth behind “both sides” rubbish. How the hell can democracy work ifTheNew York Times,CNN, and even National Public Radio obscure what’s really going on?

Let me state five central truths about the pending fight over the debt ceiling and show you how the mainstream media is distorting each of them.

Truth #1: The fight is being waged solely by the…

View original post 1,008 more words

More Important Things To Worry About

Posted on by under Free Press Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

I refuse to waste either my time or energy on the game of false equivalencies, on Republicans’ efforts to play the ‘whaddabout’ game, and thus I have little to say about the handful of documents found by President Biden’s own lawyers that were promptly returned to the National Archives.  The fact is that it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find they were planted there, but I’m not going to dive into the world of conspiracy theories … eventually the truth will out.  Meanwhile, this nation has more important things to focus on, such as the ongoing attempts to destroy our democratic foundations, the ever-growing effects of climate change, a looming debt ceiling fight, a recent surge in Covid cases/deaths, voting rights, women’s rights, Putin’s war against the world, and much more.  So, I will share Robert Reich’s words about the false equivalencies between the fewer than 20 documents found among the President’s possessions and the truckloads of documents that Trump stole upon leaving office.  Beyond this, I can only say that the mainstream media is playing into the hands of the radical right and I shall not write on this topic again unless there is a valid reason to do so.

False equivalence

Biden’s documents

Robert Reich

For years, Trump and his enablers in Congress and on Fox News have accused Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden of doing exactly what Trump has done, or worse, and the mainstream media has usually played along by making false equivalences. But of course there’s never been any valid comparison. Trump repudiated the Constitution and staged an attempted coup, which he’s still mounting, among other things.

And now we have the specter of Biden being accused of having done exactly what Trump did when Trump brazenly stole top-secret documents from the United States.

But let’s be clear: The Biden documents were discovered by Biden’s own lawyers, who then reported the discovery to the Justice Department. The Trump documents were requested repeatedly by the National Archives. Trump repeatedly refused to produce them. They were then found by the FBI over the objections of Trump and his lawyers.

Democrats have an old-fashioned belief that democracy requires truth, facts, and logic. So when mistakes are made, they usually try to explain them to the public, as the White House is now doing with regard to the documents found in Biden’s possession.

Unfortunately, the White House did not disclose the discovery to the public for two months, apparently waiting until after the November midterm elections before which the disclosure could have been damaging to Democrats.

Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland, citing what he called “extraordinary circumstances,” appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of the documents — inviting more false equivalence between two investigations: Biden’s unknowing possession of such documents and Trump’s knowing possession.

Republicans have no such qualms about democracy, facts, and logic. A Republican House hellbent on investigating Hunter Biden, the FBI, and anything they can find to embarrass Biden and the Democrats is already making as much political hay as possible out of the discovery of the documents in Biden’s possession, as are their mouthpieces on Fox News.

The task for Biden and the White House will be to keep an even keel by not getting distracted by this commotion, and continuing the important business of governing the nation. Over the long term (meaning during the next two years of run-up to the 2024 election), the contrast between the House Republicans’ zany partisan escapades and Biden’s seriousness of public purpose will offer the most potent means of avoiding all false equivalences.

Robert Reich Says “The Party’s Over”

Posted on by under Election 2022, History, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry

I watched about 20 minutes of the vote for speaker of the House of Representatives.  Rather boring, but I felt compelled to watch a bit of it, anyway.  Within those 20 minutes or so, it was clear that there will be a second vote.  Democrats unanimously voted for Hakeem Jeffries, while on the right-hand side of the aisle there were several votes for Andy Biggs of Arizona and a few for Jim Jordan of Ohio.  Neither Biggs nor Jordan will have more than a handful of votes, but it will be enough to keep Kevin McCarthy from sliding right on into the Speaker’s position as he had hoped to do … in fact, I hear he has already moved his belongings into the office!  The vote confirms what we already knew:  the Republican Party is in chaos.  Robert Reich takes it a step further and says the party’s over, that the legitimacy of the GOP, the initials of which once stood for ‘Grand Old Party’, is null and void.  I’m inclined to agree with him, if saner heads don’t step up and take control, and there probably aren’t enough of those saner heads left in the Republican Party.

The Party’s Over: The end of the GOP

It has gone through three phases over the last four decades, and no longer has any reason for being

Robert Reich

03 January 2023

Today, as House Republicans convulse over electing their next Speaker, the civil war in the Republican Party comes into the open. But it’s not particularly civil and it’s not exactly a war. It’s the mindless hostility of a political party that’s lost any legitimate reason for being.

For all practical purposes, the Republican Party is over.

A half century ago, the Republican Party stood for limited government. Its position was not always coherent or logical (it overlooked corporate power and resisted civil rights), but at least had a certain consistency: the GOP could always be relied on to seek lower taxes and oppose Democratic attempts to enlarge the scope of the federal power.

This was, and still is, the position of the establishment Republican Party of the two George Bush’s, of its wealthy libertarian funders, and of its Davos-jetting corporate executive donor base. But it has little to do with the real GOP of today.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich and Fox News’s Roger Ailes ushered the Republican Party into cultural conservatism — against abortion, contraception, immigration, voting rights, gay marriage, LBGTQ rights, and, eventually, against teaching America’s history of racism, trans-gender rights, and, during the pandemic, even against masks. At the same time, the GOP was for police cracking down on crime (especially committed by Black people), teaching religion with public money, for retailers discriminating against LBGTQ people, and for immigration authorities hunting down and deporting undocumented residents.

Gingrich and Ailes smelled the redolent possibilities of cultural conservatism, sensed the power of evangelicals and the anger of rural white America, saw votes in a Republican base that hewed to “traditional values” and, of course, racism.

But this cultural conservatism was so inconsistent with limited government – in effect, calling on government to intrude in the some of the most intimate aspects of personal life – that the Party line became confused, its message garbled, its purpose unclear. It thereby opened itself to a third and far angrier phase, centering on resentment and authoritarianism.

The foundation for this third phase had been laid for decades as white Americans without college degrees, mostly hourly-wage workers, experienced a steady drop in income and security. Not only had upward mobility been blocked, but about half their children wouldn’t live as well as they lived. The middle class was shrinking. Good-paying union jobs were disappearing.

Enter Donald Trump, the con-artist with a monstrous talent for exploiting resentment in service of his ego. Trump turned the Republican Party into a white working-class cauldron of bitterness, xenophobia, racism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-science paranoia, while turning himself into the leader of a near religious cult bent on destroying anything in his way – including American democracy.  

A political party is nothing more than a shell – fundraising machinery, state and local apparatus, and elected officials, along with a dedicated base of volunteers and activists. That base gives fuels a party, giving it purpose and meaning.

Today’s Republican base is fueling hate. It is the epicenter of an emerging anti-democracy movement.

The Republican Party will continue in some form. It takes more than nihilistic mindlessness to destroy a party in a winner-take-all system such as we have in the United States.

But the Republican Party in this third phase no longer has a legitimate role to play in our system of self-government. It is over.

What we are seeing played out today in the contest for the speakership of the Republican House involves all of these pieces – small-government establishment, cultural warrior, and hate-filled authoritarian – engaged in hopeless, hapless combat with each other, and with the aspirations and ideals of the rest of America.

Capitalism Run Amok

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Economic issues, Global Issues, History, Law and justice, Social commentary

When I first heard of cryptocurrency, I scoffed.  It has nothing supporting it, nothing backing it up … it is an even bigger fluff of air than the U.S. dollar. Try going to the grocery store and ‘paying’ for your purchases with crypto!  Ha ha … you will walk out empty-handed, and perhaps escorted by the store’s security guard!  I’m the first to admit that I don’t fully understand crypto, as it is now called, but that is largely because I don’t care enough to learn.  I know only that a lot of foolish people have lost a lot of money by investing in something that is actually nothing.  The recent escapades of one Sam Bankman-Fried have caught the attention of the world, though, and it’s hard to ignore since he is on the front pages every day!  But he’s not the only big-money grifter in the headlines these days.

Robert Reich tackles some of the abuses and excesses of capitalism today, including Bankman-Fried but also Trump and Musk, in a head-shaking piece about how modern capitalism is corrupted by those with far too much money and too little conscience …

The monsters of American capitalism

Trump, Bankman-Fried’s, and Musk

Robert Reich

23 December 2022

If this past week presents any single lesson, it’s the social costs of greed. Capitalism is premised on greed but also on guardrails – laws and norms — that prevent greed from becoming so excessive that it threatens the system as a whole.

Yet the guardrails can’t hold when avarice becomes the defining trait of an era, as it is now. Laws and norms are no match for the possibility of raking in billions if you’re sufficiently ruthless and unprincipled.

Donald Trump’s tax returns, just made public, reveal that he took bogus deductions to reduce his tax liability all the way to zero in 2020. All told, he reported $60 million in losses during his presidency while continuing to pull in big money.

Every other president since Nixon has released his tax returns. Trump told America he couldn’t because he was in the middle of an IRS audit. But we now learn that the IRS never got around to auditing Trump during his first two years in office, despite being required to do so by a law dating back to Watergate, stating that “individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.”

Of course, Trump is already synonymous with greed and the aggressive violation of laws and norms in pursuit of money and power. Worse yet, when a president of the United States exemplifies — even celebrates — these traits, they leach out into society like underground poison.

Meanwhile, this past week the S.E.C. accused Sam Bankman-Fried of illicitly using customer money from FTX from the beginning to fund his crypto empire.

From the start, contrary to what FTX investors and trading customers were told, Bankman-Fried, actively supported by Defendants, continually diverted FTX customer funds … and then used those funds to continue to grow his empire, using billions of dollars to make undisclosed private venture investments, political contributions, and real estate purchases.

If the charge sticks, it represents one of the largest frauds in American history. Until recently, Bankman-Fried was considered a capitalist hero whose philanthropy was a model for aspiring billionaires (he and his business partner also donated generously to politicians).

But like the IRS and Trump, the S.E.C. can’t possibly remedy the social costs that Bankman-Fried has unleashed — not just losses to customers and investors but a deepening distrust and cynicism about the system as a whole, the implicit assumption that this is just what billionaires do, that the way to make a fortune is to blatantly disregard norms and laws, and that only chumps are mindful of the common good.

Which brings us to Elon Musk, whose slash-and-burn maneuvers at Twitter might cause even the most rabid capitalist to wince. They also raise questions about Musk’s other endeavor, Tesla. Shares in the electric vehicle maker dropped by almost 9 percent on Thursday as analysts grew increasingly concerned about its fate. Not only is Musk neglecting the carmaker but he’s appropriating executive talent from Tesla to help him at Twitter. (Tesla stock is down over 64% year-to-date.)

Musk has never been overly concerned about laws and norms (you’ll recall that he kept Tesla’s factory in Freemont, California, going during the pandemic even when public health authorities refused him permission to do so, resulting in a surge of COVID infections among workers). For him, it’s all about imposing his gargantuan will on others.

Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism — as much products of this public-be-damned era as they are contributors to it. For them, and for everyone who still regards them as heroes, there is no morality in business or economics. The winnings go to the most ruthless. Principles are for sissies.

But absent any moral code, greed is a public danger. Its poison cannot be contained by laws or accepted norms. Everyone is forced to guard against the next con (or else pull an even bigger con). Laws are broken whenever the gains from breaking them exceed the penalties (multiplied by the odds of getting caught). Social trust erodes.

Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern capitalism, never called himself an economist. He called himself a “moral philosopher,” engaged in discovering the characteristics of a good society. He thought his best book was not The Wealth of Nations, the bible of modern capitalist apologists, but the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he argued that the ethical basis of society lies in compassion for other human beings.

Presumably Adam Smith would have bemoaned the growing inequalities, corruption, and cynicism spawned by modern capitalism and three of its prime exemplars — Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk.

Some Words of Perspective …

Posted on by under education, Election 2022, Environmental Issues, Global Issues, History, Political commentary, Social commentary

If you could use a bit of encouragement today, Robert Reich has just the right message with his Election Day thoughts.  No, he doesn’t promise that everything will come up rosy in the morning, but … he does put things into context, a historical context, that reminds us that even if it ain’t a bed of roses, it also isn’t a box of thorns with nary a bud.

Take a look … listen to what he has to say and read his words of wisdom, think about what he says.  Then take a deep breath and relax, my friends.

Robert Reich’s words of encouragement