The story dominating American conversation this week is the tragedy in Tucson, Arizona. In shock, after a mentally troubled assassin named Jared Lee Loughner shoots a round from his 9mm Glock through the brain of beloved Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and then turns his weapon on the crowd and kills 6 bystanders while wounding 13 others — America mourns.
Giffords is alive today and fighting for her life, the extent of the damage caused by her wound still unknown. There are positive signs, and we can all be thankful for that. But there are 6 people who will never breathe another breath, amongst them a federal judge and a 9 year old girl named Christina Taylor Green.
President Obama, speaking at the memorial services held at the University of Arizona, attempted to call all Americans to a higher principle. He asked us to imagine our democracy through the eyes of a child, to recall the hope and awe it inspired in our own childhoods, to behold it as did Christina Green. The President spoke to the soul of America and shared his vision, “I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.”
These were moving moments in the shadow of a national tragedy. The President was truly presidential, and for the most part, was recognized as such by pundits of all political persuasions. Even relentless Obama antagonist, Glenn Beck was moved by the speech, saying that “This is probably the best speech he has ever given, and with all sincerity, thank you Mr. President, for becoming the president of the United States of America last night.” But as well received as the President’s solemn call was, the reception was far from all positive.
Fox News contributor, Michelle Malkin, who live-blogged the memorial, called it a “bizarre pep rally.” Steve Doocy, of Fox and Friends, said the event “seemed like a political rally.” Both complained about the “Together We Thrive” branding that was labeled by the Red State blog as “the Marxist message behind the memorial.”
Many were the conservative voices who found fault with the President’s speech or were quick to cast him as a “political opportunist,” proving to some degree that it really doesn’t matter what the man does. But the pond scum moment from the right has to be Rush Limbaugh’s criticism of the President for suggesting that American “society is not all together what it should be” and that we have any “duty to live up to” the “dreams and expectations” of a “nine year old little girl who was snuffed out.”
Perhaps Limbaugh and others are to be forgiven for spinning this tragedy for their own gain while accusing the President of doing the same, because that is the way the game is played in 21st Century America. But the unanimity on the right in denying any potential influence born of the vitriolic rancor that pervades our political discourse is beyond comprehension.
The fact is that Sarah Palin published a map that had gun-sight crosshairs targeted at Gabrielle Giffords. The half-term Alaskan governor who’s famous for saying “Don’t Retreat: Reload,” the woman who announced the map as the “first salvo,” now wants us to believe the symbols were surveyor’ sights. Now, isn’t that just a bit suspicious?
Palin is a key voice in the divisive fear-mongering that plagues our nation. From her “death panel” rhetoric to her narcissistic response to the Tucson tragedy, she has proven repeatedly that she’s a one trick pony with a wafer-thin comprehension of anything beyond the art of whipping up emotions. For Palin or any of her fright-wing allies to deny any culpability whatsoever in events born of the atmosphere of hate and mistrust bred by their self-serving rain of incendiary lies and distortions is patently absurd. It’s akin to shouting fire in a crowded assembly and accepting no responsibility for the toll of the ensuing stampede.
The truth of the matter is that there are consequences of our actions — all of our actions. You can’t shout fire and insulate yourself from the results, neither can you label the opposition as the “enemy,” replete of any redeeming quality and expect to incite anything but hatred. When people like Rush Limbaugh cast all liberals as evil, when the Sharron Angles of our country speak of Second Amendment remedies, when even a clarion call from President Obama for unity in the face of tragedy is labeled “socialist,” a line has been crossed. When people are cast in the same light as the most despicable of villains, charged with “government takeovers” that threaten to bring about Armageddon, when they are washed in hate and labeled with every epithet of the worst of humankind — there are consequences.
Our nation has lost its ability to deal with issues in an intelligent manner because of the polarization brought about by rhetoric so heated that the eventual outcome was guaranteed. The question has long been when, not if, violence would occur. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time, as evidenced by Gabrielle Giffords’ prediction of her own tragic shooting when Palin’s target map first appeared.
Nobody has accused Sarah Palin of causing the shooting in Tucson, and no responsible person would do so. Responsibility for that crime lies with a deranged murderer who sits in an Arizona jail. But Palin, Limbaugh, Bachmann, Beck and all the other voices of division, fear and hatred are responsible for creating an environment where such tragedies are much more likely to occur. There’s really no legitimate debate on the topic. The only real question is will they continue, and if they do, when will the next calamity strike.
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Article first published as Why Don’t the Facts Seem to Matter Anymore? on Technorati.
How do Americans make up their minds on political issues? Some, I’m sure, simply echo the positions of trusted friends. There are people who are persuaded by specific arguments that just seem to personally resonate and still others who simply adhere to strict party lines. Such practices are understandable in the fast paced world of 21st Century America. But understandable or not, one has to wonder if a more deliberate approach might be warranted.
Take for instance the current debate over the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Most polls previously showed that the majority of voters support extending the cuts for only the middle class. But the margins were remarkably thin and continue to shrink.
The most recent Gallup poll shows only 44% of participants in favor of extensions depending upon income level and tallied 40% in support of cuts regardless of income. An Associated Press poll of 1,000 people, taken just before Thanksgiving, showed a slightly larger margin, with 50% in favor of cuts for income up to $250,000 and only 34% favoring cuts for all income.
Division of this sort is typical on political issues, but what’s interesting about these results is that, while only 2% of Americans would benefit directly from cuts on income above $250,000, a third or more of those polled consistently support those very cuts. This is an atypical disparity that surely must have some explanation.
One possible motivation could be that people are concerned about jobs. According to that same AP poll, 82% of participants cited unemployment as an “extremely” or “very” important issue. Perhaps these people believe that extending tax cuts to the wealthy will result in job creation. After all, anyone who’s listened to the media has heard this argument. It’s a favorite of congressional Republicans, who regularly cast any tax increase as “job killing.”
But the fallacy of such a premise is immediately evident in even the briefest moment of serious contemplation. The fact is that employers simply don’t hire based on their personal income tax treatment. The formula for staffing is strictly limited to the number of employees required to produce the product or provide the services necessary to meet demand while maintaining a profit — period. Profits must be made before taxes even come into play. The fundamental rule is that, if demand goes up, businesses must hire more people, and if demand wanes, there will be layoffs.
I’m afraid that while the don’t-tax-the-job-creators line seems to have some legitimacy on the surface, nobody who’s actually studied the issue believes it. Economists are all forced to agree with Cornell University’s Robert Frank, who sums up the present situation with “Businesses aren’t investing because they can already produce more than people want to buy.” Indeed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) produced a report on the matter and concluded that, of the top 12 suggestions for spurring job creation, income tax cuts was the least effective option.
So, maybe jobs aren’t the primary concern. Could it be that people are moved to support tax cuts, even for millionaires and billionaires, out of a general concern over the economy? The economy was the highest priority issue amongst those voting in the AP poll. A full 90% of participants ranked it at one of the two highest levels of importance.
There has certainly been enough rhetoric flying around about the detrimental effects of raising taxes on anyone to give ample cause for alarm. Republicans are unified on the topic. The new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, voiced this conservative wisdom in an interview last August, “You cannot get the economy going again by raising taxes on those people who we expect to create jobs in America.” It sure sounds good, but once again there’s no evidence and only rare opinion to support the conclusion.
The fact of the matter is that the American economy is driven by consumer spending. To put that in perspective, around 70% of our GDP is generated thusly. So, it’s actually lack of demand that’s the key issue with the American economy today. Too many people are either without jobs and unable to spend or holding onto what money they have because they’re worried about the future. Businesses are flush with cash but aren’t investing for the same reason. They’re not refraining from hiring because they may have to pay more in taxes. They’re not hiring because there’s insufficient demand.
Tax cuts for the top 2% will stimulate the economy, but the sad truth is that pretty much any other practical option would be more effective. Numerous studies have been completed, and virtually all agree that general tax cuts are the least effective form of stimulus, and those applied to the very rich are the worst of the worst. The CBO study mentioned above again rates tax cuts at the bottom of the heap with regard to impact on the GDP, with a best case of returning $0.40 for every dollar invested. Compare that to $1.90 for increasing unemployment aid, and you might glimpse the insanity of the conservative argument.
Although concern over the deficit is also high on everyone’s list, it’s difficult to see how anyone can argue that extending tax cuts that would trim $700 billion from federal revenue could help the deficit. So, if it’s not jobs, and it’s not the economy, what is the explanation for as much as 38% of Americans supporting tax policy from which they will not personally benefit?
There is one other possibility. It could just be that good old American sense of fair play. When asked how they felt the spending cuts and tax increases needed to address the deficit should be applied, the majority (54%) of participants in the AP poll thought they should “Be spread out so that all Americans share evenly in the costs.” A truly admirable position to take.
But then, just what is it that constitutes an even share? It’s hard to believe that there’s any such equity in extending tax cuts that already provided 52.5% of the benefit to the top 5% of taxpayers. The stark truth is that you cannot achieve an “even share” by extending that which is, by design, extremely uneven.
The facts about the Bush tax cuts are dramatic. They were touted to create jobs and stimulate the economy, yet they did neither. With regard to the economy, the Bush era netted the slowest average annual growth since World War II, averaging only 2.39% per year. And that doesn’t even take into account the economic crash of 2008. The next worst period was 1971 to 1980 at 3.21%. On the job front, the results were even worse, with the Bush era producing the slowest rate of average job growth of any cycle since 1945.
In the final analysis, the Bush tax cuts served but one purpose — to accelerate the concentration of wealth in America. Things have now become so lopsided that the top 1% of Americans now have more financial wealth than the bottom 95%. When the portion of wealth held in home equity is discounted, the top 1% holds 48.4 percent of the wealth compared to 20 percent retained by the bottom 95% — and that gap is growing at an alarming rate.
By 2001, the share of financial wealth had already grown to a 39.7% – 32.5% split, but ramped sharply upward under the policies of George W. Bush. The fact is that the wealth of the very rich is being extracted by squeezing the overwhelming majority of Americans to the point of collapse. The situation is so bad today that 23.5% of overall income belongs to that top 1%.
According to Bloomberg, during the period that followed the first of the Bush cuts, up until the financial meltdown, the average annual income of the top 1% grew from $1.08 million to $1.87 million, an increase of 73%. Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bush economic cycle was the first since tracking of the data began in 1967 to produce a decline in median household income — focusing specifically on working-age household data, real incomes dropped by a whopping $2,176.
This is a sad and unethical story, and it’s not representative of the America that most Americans have grown up to love and respect. Our nation was founded on the principles of equality, of shared prosperity and shared burden — principles to which the policies of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich that have dominated the political landscape for the past 30 years are diametrically opposed.
There’s no guesswork here; we already know the outcome of the Bush policies. If the tax cuts are allowed to be extended intact, we will maintain the present trajectory. Poverty will continue to climb; the rich will get much richer, and any balance achieved will be on the backs of the middle class. Make no mistake about it; this is unfair, unethical, immoral, and completely un-American.
Welcome to the real-life tragedy of the commons in America, where the very wealthy have chosen to bleed the country dry, because regardless of the eventual outcome — they will already have their riches. It’s a game of squeeze-all-that-you-can while the squeezing is still possible; it is in essence the great national Ponzi scheme.
America’s economic elite have no interest in reforming the system to achieve sustainability. Our nation, its people and natural resources are nothing more than fodder for the mill of exploitation. And as with any Ponzi scheme, the sustainment of the system matters only to those who have not yet reaped their reward from the extraction.
The American people are the proverbial frogs in the kettle: they continue to support their own demise because they fail to recognize that the heat is still being turned up. If the American middle class is going survive, we will need a 21st Century awakening. And that awakening must begin with people rejecting the self-serving sound bites of those with their hands on the thermostat.
In the end, the inescapable truth is that, whether the American people choose to recognize the facts or not — the facts do matter. We are presently in a race to the bottom for the vast majority of Americans — and that’s a fact. We can continue this march into oblivion or we can stop the hemorrhaging and restore some semblance of shared prosperity — and that too is a fact. The choice lies with the American people, and the future of our nation depends upon which way they choose — and that’s the most important fact of all.
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Well, here I am again posting about being censored at Huffington Post. To say that I’m frustrated would be a serious understatement. As always, when my posts are blocked, I review the text of my comment in search of anything objectionable, make edits and repost. But this occurrence is a bit different.
First, it’s different because this particular story seems to be getting much more stringent review by the censors. When I posted, there were over a hundred comments awaiting approval. Even as I write the post, two days after the story was first published on HuffPost, there are 34 comments in the queue.
The other distinction regarding my presently censored comment is that I’m unable to even guess at what the censor’s objection may be. I would attempt to edit my post, as I’ve done many times in the past, but in this case I cannot for the life of me determine where to start.
The topic of the article is a Rush Limbaugh broadcast where he ridiculed President Obama for his Thanksgiving Day proclamation. This was a popular topic with over 3,300 comments at present. The Limbaugh story covers the conservative talk-radio host’s slamming of the President for, amongst other things, presenting American Indians in a favorable light. In the style of ridiculous hyperbole typical of Limbaugh, he characterizes the true story of Thanksgiving as one of “socialism failed.” He goes on to assert that “Only when we turned capitalists did we have plenty.” Completely devoid of ethics, Limbaugh even uses the occasion to blame Native Americans for the millions who have dies from ling cancer, because it was all “thanks to the Indian-invented custom of smoking tobacco.”
I attempted to post a comment that would bring Limbaugh’s attempt at poisoning the national conversation into the light of a larger context. Personally, I find Limbaugh to be the most objectionable of the fright-wing hate-mongers, and I feel that people need to become aware of the dynamics at play. The following is the full text of the post in which I attempted to bring this into focus:
Rush Limbaugh is symptomatic of a social disease that’s crippling our nation. People are hurting and want people to blame. Unfortunately, that condition provides fertile ground for the unscrupulous.
“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesman for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
Sound like anyone you know?
The quote is actually from FDR’s Vice President, Henry Wallace — in 1944. He was talking about the rising tide of fascism in the America.
Fascism was defined in the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary as: “a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
Sound anything like today’s post Citizens United right-wing?
Wallace also had this to say about Limbaugh: “With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money and more power . . .”
Limbaugh, Beck and the gang at Fox, McConnell, Boehner, Bachmann, Palin — they’re all poisoners of public information who are eating our nation away like a cancer.
Again, I ask for your critique and honest feedback. Is this comment disrespectful? Is it inappropriate? Does it warrant being censored?
And on the general issue of censorship at Huffington Post: is it appropriate for Huffington to censor without feedback as to cause, to leave people to just wonder why they been blocked? Is there some way to get Huffington to listen to their audience and develop objective rules that are consistently applied?
And of course, if you have any thoughts on the substance of the debate . . .
Thanks
