For the past four decades, the very foundations of our hard-won progressive democracy have been under ferocious assault by a bewildering variety of extremely reactionary organizations, foundations, "think tanks," and political action committees. Whether or not this onslaught constitutes a "conspiracy" or "movement" in the strict definition of those terms, The American Prospect has made a convincing case that their origins can be traced back to a 1971 memorandum sent by corporate attorney and soon-to-be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Lewis Powell to Eugene Sydnor, Jr.,chair of the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In their view, the free-enterprise system--and conservatism in general--was losing the battle of ideas and policies to the dominant ideology of "liberalism." <It was not until the onset of the 21st century that the "liberalism" of the past 70 years gradually morphed into "progressivism," a philosophy that traced its roots to the early 1900s> "No thoughtful person," according to Powell, "can question that the American economic system is under broad attack." "Conservatism," he argued, had been marginalized for decades by the New Deal and its lineal descendants. Pro-business candidates and policies were being overwhelmed by a "massive assault upon its philosophy, upon its right to manage its own affairs," and had "responded--if at all--by appeasement, ineptitude, and ignoring the problem." <Reality Check: those three decades were also characterized by the most sustained and equitably distributed prosperity in the nation's history.> To "remedy" that "awful" state of affairs, Powell proposed an number of specific steps that the Chamber, and business in general, could undertake.
Corporate America, Powell insisted, had to learn that political power is necessary, that "it must be assiduously cultivated, and that, when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination." Among other things, he recommended that the Chamber establish "a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system," and "help conservative academics publish their ideas both in journals and in books." Business should insist on getting its viewpoint represented on television news shows, and publicize the "crucial role of stockholders--the real entrepreneurs, the real capitalists--and try to mobilize them on behalf of corporate interests and priorities." According to the editors of TAP, the Powell memo "must be reckoned as one of the most successful political directives in history," because corporations increased their involvement in both lobbying and elections, "proclaimed the shareholder (instead of the worker) to be the most important figure in the American economy, and established and funded a host of new institutions (or reinvigorated old ones, like the American Enterprise Institute) to advance their viewpoints and interests." The Powell Memo "spawned an assertive business and intellectual infrastructure that formulated the ideas and policies of the revitalized conservative movement." <At the risk of sounding naive or self-righteous, I feel compelled to point out that the essence of social science research is to study the way things really are and how they actually operate in the real world before hazarding any interpretations or judgments. Social Science is supposed to proceed by the inductive method, not the deductive. That some social scientists don't always live up to those protocols,does not relieve anyone of the imperative to at least try to proceed according to the canons of empiricism. Powell and his cronies don't even bother "to pay lip service" to the fundamental premise of social science.>
As the TAP editors contend, "the right is reaping the rewards of having built for the long term." They also have learned to coordinate the efforts of various organization so that they reinforce one another.The list of their advocacy groups is staggering, and not a little bit scary. Not even Orwell or Kafka could make up some of them:
1. American Legislative Exchange Council (widely known as ALEC). Founded by Paul Weyrich with money from the Scaife Foundation, it drafts model pro-business, anti-regulatory, tax-destroying bills that have been introduced almost verbatim in state legislatures with widely varying histories and demographics..
2. Century Strategies/Faith and Freedom Coalition: founded by "professional Christian" Ralph Reed who refers to it as "the Christian Coalition on steroids." Successor to the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell.
3. Americans for Tax Reform: Headed by anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, who has orchestrated the notorious no- tax pledge by Republican office holders
4. The Federalist Society: An organization of 30,000 ultraconservative lawyers who put pressure on judges and legislators. Its most prominent members are Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Anton Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas.<Scalia's son Eugene is the chief lobbyist and litigator for the finance industry in its fight against any form of regulation, especially the Dodd-Frank law.>
For a detailed account,see Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin, The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals, (Vanderbilt U. Press, 2013) and Steven M. Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, (Princeton U. Press, 2008).
5. The James Madison Center for Free Speech: Founded by Mitch McConnell and headed by James Bopp, right-wing lawyer par excellence, long time attorney for anti-abortion forces, and vigorous opponent of any efforts to regulate campaign financing. Played a key role in the case that resulted in Citizens United.
6. American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS: Co-founded by Karl Rove and bankrolled by Texas oil and real estate barons Harold Simmons and Bob Perry, who also financed the "Swift Boat" smear against Kerry in 2004. Has spent tens of millions of dollars on right-wing candidates for Congress
7. Freedom Works/Americans for Prosperity: Funded largely by the Koch brothers and headed by sleazy Congressman Dick Armey. It provides guidance and resources to the Tea Party and right-wing Republican candidates.
8. The Tea Party: Phony "grass-roots" movement financed largely by Americans for Prosperity and promoted by Glenn Beck and fellow Talk Radio screamers.
9. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: The Chamber took the Powell Memo to undreamed of heights. Major opponent of the regulation of the health care and finance industries regulation and of a more equitable tax structure. It has become so blatantly right-wing that even Apple and Yahoo have resigned from membership.
10. The Business Roundtable: Made up of the heads of the nation's most wealthy and powerful banks and corporations, it is adamantly opposed to any measures of consumer or labor protection and to the taxation of corporations. It is the major forces behind "free trade" agreements.
11. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation/Fox News: Owns the Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Chief purveyor of right-wing propaganda as "news."
12. Talk Radio: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck and a menagerie of hate-mongers
13. Conservative College Newspapers: Funded by the Olin Foundation to counter the effect of legitimate chroniclers of campus news and opinion. The National Journalism Center, headed by M. Stanton Evans, provides comfortable internships in D.C. for right-wing journalism students, Ann Coulter is one of their most famous alumnae.
Who provides the funding for these "think tanks," foundations, and institutes? We all do because most of them--probably all of them-- fiendishly masquerade as "social welfare organizations.," making them eligible to claim tax-exempt status under the provisions of section 501 (c) (4) of the Internal Revenue Service code. <More about that in a later post.>
1. Charles and David Koch: The sons of John Birch Society founder Fred Koch. They are oil, gas, and chemical billionaires (One of the worst polluters and contributors to global warming, whose existence they vociferously deny. They co-founded the ultra-libertarian Cato Institute and are the chief funding source of Freedom Works, which runs the Tea Party and Americans for Freedom.
2. The Bradley Foundation: Since 1985, it has contributed about $30 million dollars annually to the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and Americans for Tax Reform.
3. The Scaife Foundations: Bankrolled by the banking fortune of Andrew Mellon and Richard Mellon Scaife, they have established four foundations and several right-wing newspapers. They are a major source of funding for numerous "think-tanks" It also funded the Arkansas Project, a quasi-investigative journalistic adventure that tried unsuccessfully to find evidence linking President Clinton to drug-running and murder.
4. The Olin Foundation: Established in 1953 by John M. Olin, a leading ammunition and chemical manufacturer, it funded the Heritage Foundation and several right-wing college newspapers,until it used up all of its endowment in 2005.
5. William E. Simon Foundation: Former Treasury Secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford. President of the Olin Foundation for 23 years. These two pseudo- foundations have funded numerous right-wing causes and think-tanks.
6. Joseph Coors: The grandson of brewer Adolph Coors, he bankrolled the rise of Ronald Reagan and the Heritage Foundation. He established an internship and a dormitory for students who worked half-time for conservative Congressmen and half-time for the Heritage Foundation. He also paid for a cargo plane that was a key element in the Iran-Contra Affair of Oliver North and Reagan. <I am particularly incensed by Budwiser, Coors, and Miller breweries because they market their product primarily to working class people, while lobbying against collective bargaining,, minimum wage laws, and pro-labor legislation, in general. They also deliberately conceal the fact that they are all owned by foreign conglomerates.
Crucial to the right-wing cause are the so-called think tanks that masquerade as non-partisan, pseudo-academic seekers after "truth," which they have already defined in advance:
1. The Cato Institute: So libertarian that they are to the right of the Tea Party and ultraconservative Republicans, they have led the crusade to privatize Social Security and Medicare, and to abolish the minimum wage. As libertarian ideologues, its members clash with their less doctrinaire Republican colleagues over the War on Drugs and intervention into the affairs of other nations.
2. American Enterprise Institute: Founded in 1938 as an anti-New Deal clearing house, it bankrolled Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan throughout his career. It laid the groundwork for Reagan's "welfare reform" and for the "Iraqi Surge" of 2009.
3. The Heritage Foundation:Founded in 1973 with Coors and Koch money,it provided much of the propaganda behind the Reagan tax cuts, and Newt Gingrich's Contract With <On?> America, as well as the idea of a health insurance mandate, which they no bitterly oppose because it has become one of the keystones of the Affordable Care Act.
4. The Manhattan Institute: Founded in 1978 by future CIA director William Casey, it has always tried to prevent unionization and multiculturalism. It led the fight against the Clinton Healthcare Act.
5. The Hudson Institute: Founded in 1961 by Herman Kahn, who insisted that a nuclear war was "winnable." It is adamantly "hawkish" on foreign and military matters, and helped devise Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson's insidious "work-to-welfare" scheme. Its senior vice-president is Lewis "Scooter" Libby of the Valerie Plame fiasco.
6. The Claremont Institute: Founded in 1979 (and not affiliated with Claremont Colleges), it focuses on national and foreign policy issues, as well as those dealing directly with California. Former "fellows" include Christine O'Donnell, the failed Delaware Senatorial candidate, who was so far out thar she was even repudiated by the leaders of her own party..
There can be little doubt that the ultimate goal of this reactionary juggernaut is "trying to repeal the twentieth century,l" to quote Timothy Egan in the New York Times Not all of it, just the hard-won achievements of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights Movement for women and minorities; in short anything that has moved this country forward out of the great abyss of the Gilded Age. Nor can there be any serious doubt that they have amassed the financial, organizational, and ideological resources to do exactly that,unless we are somehow able to reverse the trajectory of the last three decades. As much as it pains me to say so, I have to grudgingly acknowledge their success in responding to the Powell Memo. What is even more alarming is that they have managed to persuade millions of Americans to work against their own obvious self-interest and security--and that of their children and grandchildren.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Republicans Still Don't Get It; They Don't Even Know What "It" Is
It ia right there on their website--<growthopp.gop.com/>--all 100 pages of it. Its official name in Growth and Opportunity Project of the Republican National Committee, but it is becoming much more commonly known as "the Republican Autopsy Report." It is the brainchild of R.N.C.Chairman Reince Priebus, who first gained notoriety by wresting that position away from its previous occupant, Michael Shields, who was the first African American ever to reach that exalted rank. Priebus and I are both privileged to reside in the First Congressional District of Wisconsin, which is represented by none other than rejected vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. [How did I get so lucky as to live in such an enlightened district?] Priebus is an attorney who lives in "Pleasant Prairie," a suburb of Kenosha, which is one of the most Democratic cities in the state. I first became aware of him when he made his only try for public office against Democrat Bob Wirch, who has been a member of the Wisconsin Legislature since 1993. Priebus ran one of the most vicious campaigns in recent memory, in which some of his handlers went door-to-door impersonating Wirch people, and espousing blatantly false distortions of his opponent's record and platform. [Fortunately, a solid majority of voters in the 22nd Senatorial District saw through Priebus's curtain of deceit and slime and elected Wirch by a sizable margin.] Disturbed by the fact Democratic candidates has won four of the last six presidential election [five, if you go by popular votes] by an average yield of 327 to 211 electoral votes, and that "public perception of the Party is at record low, Chairman Priebus appointed a commission of "distinguished" Republicans to investigate the causes of that disastrous situation and "recommend a plan to further ensure Republicans are victorious in 2013, 2014, 2016 and beyond," and that will be "critical as we move forward as a party and take our message to every American."
The five person commission consisted of Henry Barbour, the nephew of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and leader of the campaign to oust Shields as R.N.C.chairman and replace him with Priebus; Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush's erstwhile press secretary; Sally Bradshaw, who was a "top ally" of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a senior adviser to both Mitt Romney [remember him?] and the Florida Republican Party, and adviser to Hayley Barbour's political action committee; Zoraida Fonalledas, long-time national committeewoman for Puerto Rico, and Glenn McCall, a national committeeman from South Carolina and an African American. They
boast that their recommendations were based upon more than 52,00 Contacts Made, including 36,000 online surveys, 800 conference calls, 3,000 group listening sessions, 500 one-on-one phone calls, and 250 one-on-one meetings, all with various Project chairs. They also held more than 50 focus groups in Des Moines and Columbus, and conducted 2,640 surveys with "women,"[???] 2,000 with Hispanics, 100 with pollsters, 225 with consultants, 6,390 with volunteers and 600 with field staff. Their final report makes seven categories of recommendations: Messaging, Demographic Partners, Campaign Mechanics, Third Party Groups, Fundraising, Campaign Finance, and Primary Process.
In a halfhearted mea culpa, the commissioners assert that "public perception of the Party is at an all time low", that "young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents," and that "many minorities wrongfully think that the Republicans do not like them or want them in the country." Even though the party core has remained "the Party of Reagan, "it sounds "increasingly out of touch," and "needs to stop talking to itself," is "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac," and that some people say that "Republicans don't care," are "scary," and "narrow-minded." The commissioners go so far as to quote Tea Party sage Dick Armey: "You can't
call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you." [Throughout, the report demonstrates an almost schizophrenic attitude toward the extreme right-wing of the party, trying to maintain their support while tacitly recognizing that most of the negative attitudes to which they refer are in reaction to the widely perceived "Tea Partyization" of the G.O.P. How can you move the party toward a more moderate middle without alienating your core constituency? How can you "reach out" to minorities, youth, the elderly, and "women" when those are the very people your most rabid supporters despise?] Their attitude reminds me of satirical song by comedian Stan Freberg called "Take An Indian to Lunch." I don't recall all the lyrics, but the gist is "let's pretend that he is part of our regular bunch," and "let him believe that he is almost as good as we."
The commissioners attribute part of the problem to the fact that "Democrats tend to talk about people, Republicans tend to talk about policy", and that "we need to do a better job connecting people to our policies." Coming painfully close to reality, they acknowledge that "the middle class has struggled mightily and that far too many of our citizens live in poverty." While they continue to believe that the answer to most questions lie in "private sector economic growth," they also claim to understand that "people who are flat on their back, unemployed or disabled or in need of help...do not care if the help comes from the private sector or the government." But their job as Republicans is to champion private economic growth so people will not turn to government in the first place," to "make sure that "government works for those truly in need." and that "the government's safety net is a trampolene, not a trap." They want the G.O.P. to be the "champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder," and to give everyone a "chance to make it in life." They profess that Republicans "need to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare," and to "speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file are left unemployed." They need "to do a better job talking in normal people-oriented terms and "go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and and make our case," and to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and "demonstrate that we care about them, too. We have to engage them and show our sincerity." In doing so, however, "it is not just the tone that counts. Policy always matters." !!!!!!!!!! While acknowledging that they "are not a policy committee," they do assert that "we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform, "because it is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all. The "Party must "in fact and deed" be inclusive and welcoming, because if it isn't "we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues." The ultimate message, the report concludes, is that "The Grand Old Party should be synonymous with the Growth and Opportunity Party.
The commissioner's overarching recommendation in their "Demographic Partners" section is the formation of a Growth And Opportunity Inclusion Council, which should meet a minimum of four times a year for training, exchange of ideas, and effectiveness assessment. It should conduct "grass roots educational programs," identify, prepare and promote a diversified and talented pool of future candidates and leaders, and convene "focus groups with non-Republican ethnic groups in an effort to gain insight into the real and perceived issues affecting their communities." It should design a "surrogate program to train and prepare ethnic conservatives for media presentations," to educate Republican candidates "on the particular culture, aspirations, positions, positions on issues, contributions to the country, etc. of the demographic group they are trying to reach." They also recommend that the R.N.C. hire a "faith-based outreach director to focus on engaging faith-based organizations and communities with the Republican Party." They stress the urgency of "reaching out" to Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, African Americans, Youth [?], and Women [?], all of whom apparently are terra incognito to most Republicans. [Women, too?] Most of the specific recommendations seem to be variations on a template of how to deal with "exotic" peoples. They recommend hiring communications and political directors,carefully craft a tone that takes into consideration the unique perspective of the targeted group, make "real Republicans" aware of the way to treat them" with tolerance and respect, hire field staff within each group, build a nationwide data base of leaders, promote staff and candidates within the Party, engage their faith-based communities, encourage individual Republicans to participate in cultural organizations "so that these organization's leadership is no longer dominated by Democrat-leaning individuals," and develop an extensive network of each group's political operatives.
If the commissioners seem to regard "non-Republicans" as a different species, they also appear to view social media, and communications technology in general, as some kind of incomprehensible alien language. [I must confess to feeling a certain sense of empathy with them about that, but I am fortunate to have many people in my life who can translate for me.] It is clear from the report that the authors attribute Obama's victory primarily to the Democrat's far greater savvy about communications technology and "grass roots" organizing. They passionately believe that it was the "media," and not the "message," that prevailed. For example, they make much of the fact that the Obama campaign asked voters what information they needed to make their decision and provided that knowledge to their volunteers, that Obama's media research and buying staff was 5 to 15 times larger than Romney's, and that campaign workers should be sure to include their contact's cell phone numbers and email addresses in their data bases. They also recommend that the R.N.C. "design, fund, and implement an aggressive early and absentee voting program, and that they should recruit and hire a chief technology and digital officer, as well as "train campaign managers and candidates in basic media terminology and media budgeting/management."
Throughout, the report is a bewildering hodgepodge of superficial technical jargon and business new speak.
Although the "nuts and bolts" of the Autopsy's are too detailed to rehearse here, [You should read it for yourself.] it suffers from at least two major internal contradictions. One is its ambivalent attitude toward the relationship between the R.N. C. and state Republican parties, especially in the allocation of responsibility for implementing the recommendations of the report. It even admits that "the GOP today is a tale of two parties": a "gubernatorial wing" that is growing and successful, and the "federal wing," that is "increasingly marginalizing itself." It exults that Republicans holds almost as many governorships than it had during the glorious 1920s. [And just how did that turn out?] It praises Republican governors as "reformers in chief," who "continue to deliver on conservative promises of reducing the size of government while making people's lives better," regularly "win a larger share of the minority vote than GOP presidential candidates," and "demonstrate an appeal that goes beyond the base of the Party." In all fairness, they make a sincere effort to beef up the role of state parties and to assign them specific tasks in "campaign mechanics," including candidate recruitment, voter contact and registration, vendor selection, polling, media buying and placement, fundraising, and finance. But, understandably, it also gives the R.N.C. ultimate oversight power in all of those areas, all but guaranteeing that considerable conflict will emerge in day to day operations. Exacerbating that tension is the fact that the members of the commission are, almost by definition, mainstream Republicans nervous about the Tea Party orientation of several state parties. They are obviously well aware that the seemingly endless debates and primaries of 2012 pushed Romney farther to the right than they wanted him to go, and drastically shortened his campaign time once he finally received the official nomination. Consequently, they strongly advocate reducing the number of debates and compressing the primary season to a few months early in the election year. By May, at the latest, they want an official Republican presidential candidate who can then try to heal the deep divisions and ruptures that the debates and primaries inevitably exacerbate. Republican Representatives and Senators are also concerned about being "primaried" by extremist candidates who accuse them of being too moderate and who are likely to lose in a general election.
Even more problematic are the report's recommendations for trying to maximize the party's appeal to racial and ethnic minorities, young people, and women. This seems to totally contradict the party's strategy in 2012, which was to disenfranchise as many of those same people as possible through requiring photo IDs, complicating the procedures for registration and voting, shortening the hours and moving the location of polling stations, gerrymandering districts, curtailing early and absentee voting, and various other devises, both legal and surreptitious. [See my post of September 27, 2012 and " The Truth About Voter Fraud" by the Brennan Center for Justice of the New York University School of Law.] Many of those laws are still on the books in various states;
and are only temporarily stayed by injunctions and other legal maneuvers. The most sweeping one of all is the case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court [Shelby County, Alabama v.Holder] which would strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, thereby removing the requirement that several states infamous for their suppression of African American voters have to clear any changes in their electoral laws with the Department of Justice. Voter suppression is all part of their wider program to repeal all of the progressive gains of the past century, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act itself. The ultra right wingers are also trying to get rid of all the regulatory and environment protection laws and leave most Americans to the tender mercies of "the Market," one that is almost completely manipulated by multinational corporations beyond the control of any national government.
So despite all the "mea culpas" and pledges to be more inclusive and more technologically savvy, it is obvious that even the most moderate of Republicans still don't "Get It." And what is the "It" that they do not "Get"? We"ll give them a hint: It is not the "Media."
The five person commission consisted of Henry Barbour, the nephew of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and leader of the campaign to oust Shields as R.N.C.chairman and replace him with Priebus; Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush's erstwhile press secretary; Sally Bradshaw, who was a "top ally" of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a senior adviser to both Mitt Romney [remember him?] and the Florida Republican Party, and adviser to Hayley Barbour's political action committee; Zoraida Fonalledas, long-time national committeewoman for Puerto Rico, and Glenn McCall, a national committeeman from South Carolina and an African American. They
boast that their recommendations were based upon more than 52,00 Contacts Made, including 36,000 online surveys, 800 conference calls, 3,000 group listening sessions, 500 one-on-one phone calls, and 250 one-on-one meetings, all with various Project chairs. They also held more than 50 focus groups in Des Moines and Columbus, and conducted 2,640 surveys with "women,"[???] 2,000 with Hispanics, 100 with pollsters, 225 with consultants, 6,390 with volunteers and 600 with field staff. Their final report makes seven categories of recommendations: Messaging, Demographic Partners, Campaign Mechanics, Third Party Groups, Fundraising, Campaign Finance, and Primary Process.
In a halfhearted mea culpa, the commissioners assert that "public perception of the Party is at an all time low", that "young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents," and that "many minorities wrongfully think that the Republicans do not like them or want them in the country." Even though the party core has remained "the Party of Reagan, "it sounds "increasingly out of touch," and "needs to stop talking to itself," is "driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac," and that some people say that "Republicans don't care," are "scary," and "narrow-minded." The commissioners go so far as to quote Tea Party sage Dick Armey: "You can't
call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you." [Throughout, the report demonstrates an almost schizophrenic attitude toward the extreme right-wing of the party, trying to maintain their support while tacitly recognizing that most of the negative attitudes to which they refer are in reaction to the widely perceived "Tea Partyization" of the G.O.P. How can you move the party toward a more moderate middle without alienating your core constituency? How can you "reach out" to minorities, youth, the elderly, and "women" when those are the very people your most rabid supporters despise?] Their attitude reminds me of satirical song by comedian Stan Freberg called "Take An Indian to Lunch." I don't recall all the lyrics, but the gist is "let's pretend that he is part of our regular bunch," and "let him believe that he is almost as good as we."
The commissioners attribute part of the problem to the fact that "Democrats tend to talk about people, Republicans tend to talk about policy", and that "we need to do a better job connecting people to our policies." Coming painfully close to reality, they acknowledge that "the middle class has struggled mightily and that far too many of our citizens live in poverty." While they continue to believe that the answer to most questions lie in "private sector economic growth," they also claim to understand that "people who are flat on their back, unemployed or disabled or in need of help...do not care if the help comes from the private sector or the government." But their job as Republicans is to champion private economic growth so people will not turn to government in the first place," to "make sure that "government works for those truly in need." and that "the government's safety net is a trampolene, not a trap." They want the G.O.P. to be the "champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder," and to give everyone a "chance to make it in life." They profess that Republicans "need to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare," and to "speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file are left unemployed." They need "to do a better job talking in normal people-oriented terms and "go to communities where Republicans do not normally go to listen and and make our case," and to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and "demonstrate that we care about them, too. We have to engage them and show our sincerity." In doing so, however, "it is not just the tone that counts. Policy always matters." !!!!!!!!!! While acknowledging that they "are not a policy committee," they do assert that "we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform, "because it is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all. The "Party must "in fact and deed" be inclusive and welcoming, because if it isn't "we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues." The ultimate message, the report concludes, is that "The Grand Old Party should be synonymous with the Growth and Opportunity Party.
The commissioner's overarching recommendation in their "Demographic Partners" section is the formation of a Growth And Opportunity Inclusion Council, which should meet a minimum of four times a year for training, exchange of ideas, and effectiveness assessment. It should conduct "grass roots educational programs," identify, prepare and promote a diversified and talented pool of future candidates and leaders, and convene "focus groups with non-Republican ethnic groups in an effort to gain insight into the real and perceived issues affecting their communities." It should design a "surrogate program to train and prepare ethnic conservatives for media presentations," to educate Republican candidates "on the particular culture, aspirations, positions, positions on issues, contributions to the country, etc. of the demographic group they are trying to reach." They also recommend that the R.N.C. hire a "faith-based outreach director to focus on engaging faith-based organizations and communities with the Republican Party." They stress the urgency of "reaching out" to Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, African Americans, Youth [?], and Women [?], all of whom apparently are terra incognito to most Republicans. [Women, too?] Most of the specific recommendations seem to be variations on a template of how to deal with "exotic" peoples. They recommend hiring communications and political directors,carefully craft a tone that takes into consideration the unique perspective of the targeted group, make "real Republicans" aware of the way to treat them" with tolerance and respect, hire field staff within each group, build a nationwide data base of leaders, promote staff and candidates within the Party, engage their faith-based communities, encourage individual Republicans to participate in cultural organizations "so that these organization's leadership is no longer dominated by Democrat-leaning individuals," and develop an extensive network of each group's political operatives.
If the commissioners seem to regard "non-Republicans" as a different species, they also appear to view social media, and communications technology in general, as some kind of incomprehensible alien language. [I must confess to feeling a certain sense of empathy with them about that, but I am fortunate to have many people in my life who can translate for me.] It is clear from the report that the authors attribute Obama's victory primarily to the Democrat's far greater savvy about communications technology and "grass roots" organizing. They passionately believe that it was the "media," and not the "message," that prevailed. For example, they make much of the fact that the Obama campaign asked voters what information they needed to make their decision and provided that knowledge to their volunteers, that Obama's media research and buying staff was 5 to 15 times larger than Romney's, and that campaign workers should be sure to include their contact's cell phone numbers and email addresses in their data bases. They also recommend that the R.N.C. "design, fund, and implement an aggressive early and absentee voting program, and that they should recruit and hire a chief technology and digital officer, as well as "train campaign managers and candidates in basic media terminology and media budgeting/management."
Throughout, the report is a bewildering hodgepodge of superficial technical jargon and business new speak.
Although the "nuts and bolts" of the Autopsy's are too detailed to rehearse here, [You should read it for yourself.] it suffers from at least two major internal contradictions. One is its ambivalent attitude toward the relationship between the R.N. C. and state Republican parties, especially in the allocation of responsibility for implementing the recommendations of the report. It even admits that "the GOP today is a tale of two parties": a "gubernatorial wing" that is growing and successful, and the "federal wing," that is "increasingly marginalizing itself." It exults that Republicans holds almost as many governorships than it had during the glorious 1920s. [And just how did that turn out?] It praises Republican governors as "reformers in chief," who "continue to deliver on conservative promises of reducing the size of government while making people's lives better," regularly "win a larger share of the minority vote than GOP presidential candidates," and "demonstrate an appeal that goes beyond the base of the Party." In all fairness, they make a sincere effort to beef up the role of state parties and to assign them specific tasks in "campaign mechanics," including candidate recruitment, voter contact and registration, vendor selection, polling, media buying and placement, fundraising, and finance. But, understandably, it also gives the R.N.C. ultimate oversight power in all of those areas, all but guaranteeing that considerable conflict will emerge in day to day operations. Exacerbating that tension is the fact that the members of the commission are, almost by definition, mainstream Republicans nervous about the Tea Party orientation of several state parties. They are obviously well aware that the seemingly endless debates and primaries of 2012 pushed Romney farther to the right than they wanted him to go, and drastically shortened his campaign time once he finally received the official nomination. Consequently, they strongly advocate reducing the number of debates and compressing the primary season to a few months early in the election year. By May, at the latest, they want an official Republican presidential candidate who can then try to heal the deep divisions and ruptures that the debates and primaries inevitably exacerbate. Republican Representatives and Senators are also concerned about being "primaried" by extremist candidates who accuse them of being too moderate and who are likely to lose in a general election.
Even more problematic are the report's recommendations for trying to maximize the party's appeal to racial and ethnic minorities, young people, and women. This seems to totally contradict the party's strategy in 2012, which was to disenfranchise as many of those same people as possible through requiring photo IDs, complicating the procedures for registration and voting, shortening the hours and moving the location of polling stations, gerrymandering districts, curtailing early and absentee voting, and various other devises, both legal and surreptitious. [See my post of September 27, 2012 and " The Truth About Voter Fraud" by the Brennan Center for Justice of the New York University School of Law.] Many of those laws are still on the books in various states;
and are only temporarily stayed by injunctions and other legal maneuvers. The most sweeping one of all is the case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court [Shelby County, Alabama v.Holder] which would strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, thereby removing the requirement that several states infamous for their suppression of African American voters have to clear any changes in their electoral laws with the Department of Justice. Voter suppression is all part of their wider program to repeal all of the progressive gains of the past century, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the Voting Rights Act itself. The ultra right wingers are also trying to get rid of all the regulatory and environment protection laws and leave most Americans to the tender mercies of "the Market," one that is almost completely manipulated by multinational corporations beyond the control of any national government.
So despite all the "mea culpas" and pledges to be more inclusive and more technologically savvy, it is obvious that even the most moderate of Republicans still don't "Get It." And what is the "It" that they do not "Get"? We"ll give them a hint: It is not the "Media."
Thursday, March 28, 2013
The People's Budget
To those who get most of their news and analysis via the mainstream media, it seems as if the nation has only two budget choices--the one clearly absurd and catastrophic, the other not quite that bad, but still pretty awful. The first one, of course, is "the fantasy budget" of Paul Ryan, which is even worse than the 2012 version that the electorate decisively repudiated last November. [Remember? There was an election and Ryan and his running mate lost.] The 2013 version would reduce federal spending by $4.6 trillion over the next decade, repeal the Affordable Care Act [which the voters and even the Supreme Court accepted], reprise his effort to turn Medicare into a voucher program, cut $757 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, cut most safety net programs for the working poor, while keeping January's tax "increases," and proposing an overhaul of the tax structure that would generously benefit the Super Rich and gigantic corporations. Specifically, it would reduce the number of income tax brackets from six to two, lower the maximum rate from 39% to 25%, and transform the corporate tax code to an "international" system. The Center for American Progress has estimated these Tax Cuts for the Super Rich would cost the nation $7 billion in revenue, which Ryan promises will be magically covered by closing mysterious, as yet unspecified "loopholes." As Charles Pierce has charged, in a recent article in Esquire, Ryan's latest budget is "constructed in the same magical thinking, the same conjuring words, the same elusive asterisks, and the same obvious obfuscations of its actual intent." Even Ryan himself admitted to Chris Wallace on Fox News that his projections, assumed the repeal of "Obamacare." When Wallace objected that repeal "was not going to happen," Ryan insisted that "we believe that it should." Incredibly, he also factors in the much-maligned cuts in payment to Medicare providers that would only occur if the ACA stays in effect. Ryan and his cronies also insist on raising the eligibility age for Medicare and cutting federal costs for Medicaid. [I can't help but thinking of the tale ascribed to Abraham Lincoln about the man who planned to build a new cabin out of the materials from the existing one, but was going to live in the existing one until the new one was completed.] Just to show that there are degrees of delusion and craziness even among the Tea Party Republicans, the New York Times of March 19th published an Op-Ed rant by Georgia Republican Congressman Paul C. Brown, proclaiming that "Paul Ryan's Ax Isn't Sharp Enough" because his plan would take ten years to balance the budget, which Brown insisted could be done in a single year.
The supposed alternative to the Ryan budget is the administration-backed Budget Control Act of 2011, reinforced by the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson commission and the budget that just barely passed the Senate on March 22. Although it is slightly less drastic in spending cuts and slightly more aggressive in raising taxes, especially on the Super Rich, it still suffers from two major problems: First of all, it smacks too much of the president's "negotiating strategy," which often seems to be conceding "quids," without demanding some corresponding "quos." It is difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with people who have shown--over and over again--that they are not willing to compromise. [Case in point: The House passing the Ryan Budget and repeal of the Affordable Care Act even though the voters resoundingly repudiated the one and endorsed the other. How can we claim to have representative government and democracy when election results have no effect on public policy?] Secondly, the administration budget seems to concur that reducing the national debt is more important than easing unemployment and jump-starting the economy. President Obama has stated that "the deals I have put forward, the balanced approach of spending cuts and entitlement reform and tax reform...are still on the table. I've offered sensible reforms to Medicare and other entitlements, and my health care proposals achieve the same amoungt of savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms that have been proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission. [emphasis mine]. Under what Cole Stangler of In These Times refers to as "the technocratic neoliberal budgets of the Obama administration,", domestic spending will be cut by $740 billion in 2013, with more certain to come later. Nor does the other side of the deal--taxes on the richest one percent--come anywhere near offsetting the cuts in domestic services. Specifically, as Robert Kuttner convincingly demonstrates in an article in The American Prospect (24 [Mar/Apr 2013] pp. 58-62), it accepts the absurd notion that economic recovery "requires us to achieve a particular ratio of public debt to to gross domestic product. It steadily rachets down government outlay over a decade. Domestic discretionary spending will be cut from about 7% of GDP to less than 4% this year, to 2.3% by 2023, the lowest since the 1950s. "The economic assumptions behind this logic are backward," according to Kuttner and such progressive economists as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stieglitz, James Galbraith, and Dean Baker. The future debt ratio, Kuttner argues, "reflects not just the consequence of budget deficits but also the rate of economic growth. In a weak economy, too much deficit cutting raises the the ratio of debt to GDP--because it reduces GDP." Cutting the debt ratio is the wrong target, Kuttner insists, "the right one is getting growth back on track." After calling for budget cuts of $4 trillion over the course of a decade, Obama projects that we now only need another $1.5 trillion. That, according to Kuttner, amounts to budget cutting of some 50% larger than that mandated by the infamous "sequester." What is even more scary is the fact that, whatever happens in 2013 the Republicans will press for more in 2014 and beyond. "What we face," he warns, is not a single decisive showdown but ongoing retrench warfare." Their real purpose, after all, has little or nothing to do with national debt, but with gutting the regulatory powers of the federal government over the economy and the environment, while obliterating what is left of the safety net.
If either the House Budget or the administration's counter proposal become the law of the land, the results will be nothing short of disastrous. The best chance of preventing that melt-down lies in The People's Budget proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with the technical assistance of Economic Policy Institute. Founded in the early 1990s by Bernie Sanders and like-minded Democratic members, it is the largest single caucus of minority members in the House, currently 72. [Although Sanders is officially listed as an Independent, he still caucuses with the Democrats.] According to co-chair Keith Ellison, the CPC "might not be the center of the Congress, but it is the center of America." It spearheads Democratic opposition to cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, a more rapid end to the war in Afghanistan, advocates a transactions tax on Wall Street traders, and is committed to achieve full employment, and a Constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people. It also adamantly opposed to "balancing the budget on the backs of those most in need." It is best known for its espousal of the People's Budget of FY 2012 and the Budget for All for FY 2013. Their general outlines have been endorsed by former President Bill Clinton, Paul Krugman. Dean Baker, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, Rachel Maddow, The Economist, The New Republic, the Washington Post,The Guardian, The Nation, the Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, Rolling Stone, and even Forbes. Although its specifics are too long and complex to rehearse here, the crux of the matter is that it "makes no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits, and asks those who have benefited most from our economy to pay a sensible share." It attacks unemployment with more $2.9 trillion in job creating investments and "utilizes every tool at the government's disposal to get our economy moving again". That includes, among others, a School Improvement Corps, a Park Improvement Corps, and a Student Job Corps, tax incentives to spur clean energy, manufacturing, and cutting-edge technological investments in the private sector, and widespread domestic investments, including an infrastructure bank,a $556 billion surface transportation bill, and more than $2 trillion in widespread domestic investment. It achieves $6.8 trillion in deficit reduction, hits the same debt to GNP ratio as the Republican budget, and has lower deficits in the last five years. It does so by focusing on "the drivers of our debt--unsustainable tax policies, the wars overseas, and policies that helped cause the recent recession--rather than putting the middle class's social safety net on the chopping block." To create a "fairer America," it ends tax cuts for the top 2%, extends tax relief for middle class households and the vast majority of Americans, ends the code's preferential treatment of capital gains and dividends, creates new tax brackets for for millionaires and billionaires, abolishes corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal companies, eliminates loopholes that allow businesses to dodge their true tax liability,calls for the adoption of the "Buffet Rule," and creates a publicly funded election system that gets corporate money out of politics for good. It "responsibly and expeditiously ends our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and modernizes our military to address 21st century threats and stop contributing to our deficit problems." Finally, it seeks to protect American families by providing a "Making Work Pay tax credit" for families struggling with high gas and food prices, extending the Earned Income Tax Credit, and creating a "Child and Dependent Care Credit," and investing in programs to stave off further foreclosures to keep families in their homes, and to increase investments in education.training and social services. In short, the CPC's budgets would not only restore "the Promise of American Life," for tens of millions of our fellow countrymen, but would make the U.S. comparable and competitive with most other nations in the modernized world. Every progressive ought to familiarize herself or himself with its tenets, and urge every one we know to do the same.
As an historian, I can't help thinking about the original People's Budget, which led to one of the greatest triumphs of progressivism in the history of the United Kingdom. In 1909, the Liberal government of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, prodded by Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and President of the Board of Trade Winston Churchill, introduced a budget including several unprecedented taxes on the nation's wealthy, as well as a number of "radical" social welfare programs. Lloyd George and Churchill were derisively called the "Terrible Twins" by their opponents, while the latter's biographer,William Manchester, dubs their program a "revolutionary concept," because it was the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the public through graduated income and inheritance taxes. It also called for a complete land valuation and a 20% tax on increases in value when land changed hands, based in part on the theory of the "general tax" espoused by American reformer Henry George.. As such, it was bitterly opposed by the House of Lords and most members of the Conservative Party. The resultant controversy sparked two general elections in 1910 and the eventual enactment of the Parliament Act of 1911. In introducing the budget on 29 April 1909, Lloyd George proclaimed that it would eliminate poverty:
This is a war budget. It is for raising implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot
help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a
great step towards that good time, when povery, and the wretchedness and human degradation that always
follows in its camp , will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves that once infested its
forests
Its opponents derided it as the "thin end of a socialist wedge," and proposed instead a tariff increase that would have raised the cost of most foodstuffs and and benefit agricultural landowners. In a July speech at Limehouse, Lloyd George, who also favored strengthening the navy, argued that "a fully equipped duke cost as much to keep up as two dreadnaughts," but was "much less easy to scrap." Despite King George IV's private entreaties to pass the budget to avoid a crisis, the Lord's vetoed the budget bill. They did, however, agree to accept it as soon as the Liberals could obtain an electoral mandate. The Liberals responded by making the right to reduce the power of the upper house the focus of the general election held in January, 1910. Both that election and another in December, 1910 resulted in hung parliaments,but the Lords finally accepted the budget, after a tenuous coalition of Liberals, Labour, Unionists and Irish party members agreed to drop the land tax proposal. The Lords finally passed the Parliament Act of 1911, after the new king, George V, reluctantly threatened to flood the House of Lords with hundreds of new Liberal peers nominated by Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill. Shades of FDR and the "Court Packing Proposal" of 1937, which failed of adoption but persuaded the Supreme Court to accept the measures of the Second New Deal. Where are Lloyd George and Churchill when we really need them.
JDB
The supposed alternative to the Ryan budget is the administration-backed Budget Control Act of 2011, reinforced by the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson commission and the budget that just barely passed the Senate on March 22. Although it is slightly less drastic in spending cuts and slightly more aggressive in raising taxes, especially on the Super Rich, it still suffers from two major problems: First of all, it smacks too much of the president's "negotiating strategy," which often seems to be conceding "quids," without demanding some corresponding "quos." It is difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with people who have shown--over and over again--that they are not willing to compromise. [Case in point: The House passing the Ryan Budget and repeal of the Affordable Care Act even though the voters resoundingly repudiated the one and endorsed the other. How can we claim to have representative government and democracy when election results have no effect on public policy?] Secondly, the administration budget seems to concur that reducing the national debt is more important than easing unemployment and jump-starting the economy. President Obama has stated that "the deals I have put forward, the balanced approach of spending cuts and entitlement reform and tax reform...are still on the table. I've offered sensible reforms to Medicare and other entitlements, and my health care proposals achieve the same amoungt of savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms that have been proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission. [emphasis mine]. Under what Cole Stangler of In These Times refers to as "the technocratic neoliberal budgets of the Obama administration,", domestic spending will be cut by $740 billion in 2013, with more certain to come later. Nor does the other side of the deal--taxes on the richest one percent--come anywhere near offsetting the cuts in domestic services. Specifically, as Robert Kuttner convincingly demonstrates in an article in The American Prospect (24 [Mar/Apr 2013] pp. 58-62), it accepts the absurd notion that economic recovery "requires us to achieve a particular ratio of public debt to to gross domestic product. It steadily rachets down government outlay over a decade. Domestic discretionary spending will be cut from about 7% of GDP to less than 4% this year, to 2.3% by 2023, the lowest since the 1950s. "The economic assumptions behind this logic are backward," according to Kuttner and such progressive economists as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stieglitz, James Galbraith, and Dean Baker. The future debt ratio, Kuttner argues, "reflects not just the consequence of budget deficits but also the rate of economic growth. In a weak economy, too much deficit cutting raises the the ratio of debt to GDP--because it reduces GDP." Cutting the debt ratio is the wrong target, Kuttner insists, "the right one is getting growth back on track." After calling for budget cuts of $4 trillion over the course of a decade, Obama projects that we now only need another $1.5 trillion. That, according to Kuttner, amounts to budget cutting of some 50% larger than that mandated by the infamous "sequester." What is even more scary is the fact that, whatever happens in 2013 the Republicans will press for more in 2014 and beyond. "What we face," he warns, is not a single decisive showdown but ongoing retrench warfare." Their real purpose, after all, has little or nothing to do with national debt, but with gutting the regulatory powers of the federal government over the economy and the environment, while obliterating what is left of the safety net.
If either the House Budget or the administration's counter proposal become the law of the land, the results will be nothing short of disastrous. The best chance of preventing that melt-down lies in The People's Budget proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with the technical assistance of Economic Policy Institute. Founded in the early 1990s by Bernie Sanders and like-minded Democratic members, it is the largest single caucus of minority members in the House, currently 72. [Although Sanders is officially listed as an Independent, he still caucuses with the Democrats.] According to co-chair Keith Ellison, the CPC "might not be the center of the Congress, but it is the center of America." It spearheads Democratic opposition to cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, a more rapid end to the war in Afghanistan, advocates a transactions tax on Wall Street traders, and is committed to achieve full employment, and a Constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people. It also adamantly opposed to "balancing the budget on the backs of those most in need." It is best known for its espousal of the People's Budget of FY 2012 and the Budget for All for FY 2013. Their general outlines have been endorsed by former President Bill Clinton, Paul Krugman. Dean Baker, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, Rachel Maddow, The Economist, The New Republic, the Washington Post,The Guardian, The Nation, the Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, Rolling Stone, and even Forbes. Although its specifics are too long and complex to rehearse here, the crux of the matter is that it "makes no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits, and asks those who have benefited most from our economy to pay a sensible share." It attacks unemployment with more $2.9 trillion in job creating investments and "utilizes every tool at the government's disposal to get our economy moving again". That includes, among others, a School Improvement Corps, a Park Improvement Corps, and a Student Job Corps, tax incentives to spur clean energy, manufacturing, and cutting-edge technological investments in the private sector, and widespread domestic investments, including an infrastructure bank,a $556 billion surface transportation bill, and more than $2 trillion in widespread domestic investment. It achieves $6.8 trillion in deficit reduction, hits the same debt to GNP ratio as the Republican budget, and has lower deficits in the last five years. It does so by focusing on "the drivers of our debt--unsustainable tax policies, the wars overseas, and policies that helped cause the recent recession--rather than putting the middle class's social safety net on the chopping block." To create a "fairer America," it ends tax cuts for the top 2%, extends tax relief for middle class households and the vast majority of Americans, ends the code's preferential treatment of capital gains and dividends, creates new tax brackets for for millionaires and billionaires, abolishes corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal companies, eliminates loopholes that allow businesses to dodge their true tax liability,calls for the adoption of the "Buffet Rule," and creates a publicly funded election system that gets corporate money out of politics for good. It "responsibly and expeditiously ends our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and modernizes our military to address 21st century threats and stop contributing to our deficit problems." Finally, it seeks to protect American families by providing a "Making Work Pay tax credit" for families struggling with high gas and food prices, extending the Earned Income Tax Credit, and creating a "Child and Dependent Care Credit," and investing in programs to stave off further foreclosures to keep families in their homes, and to increase investments in education.training and social services. In short, the CPC's budgets would not only restore "the Promise of American Life," for tens of millions of our fellow countrymen, but would make the U.S. comparable and competitive with most other nations in the modernized world. Every progressive ought to familiarize herself or himself with its tenets, and urge every one we know to do the same.
As an historian, I can't help thinking about the original People's Budget, which led to one of the greatest triumphs of progressivism in the history of the United Kingdom. In 1909, the Liberal government of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, prodded by Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and President of the Board of Trade Winston Churchill, introduced a budget including several unprecedented taxes on the nation's wealthy, as well as a number of "radical" social welfare programs. Lloyd George and Churchill were derisively called the "Terrible Twins" by their opponents, while the latter's biographer,William Manchester, dubs their program a "revolutionary concept," because it was the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the public through graduated income and inheritance taxes. It also called for a complete land valuation and a 20% tax on increases in value when land changed hands, based in part on the theory of the "general tax" espoused by American reformer Henry George.. As such, it was bitterly opposed by the House of Lords and most members of the Conservative Party. The resultant controversy sparked two general elections in 1910 and the eventual enactment of the Parliament Act of 1911. In introducing the budget on 29 April 1909, Lloyd George proclaimed that it would eliminate poverty:
This is a war budget. It is for raising implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot
help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a
great step towards that good time, when povery, and the wretchedness and human degradation that always
follows in its camp , will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves that once infested its
forests
Its opponents derided it as the "thin end of a socialist wedge," and proposed instead a tariff increase that would have raised the cost of most foodstuffs and and benefit agricultural landowners. In a July speech at Limehouse, Lloyd George, who also favored strengthening the navy, argued that "a fully equipped duke cost as much to keep up as two dreadnaughts," but was "much less easy to scrap." Despite King George IV's private entreaties to pass the budget to avoid a crisis, the Lord's vetoed the budget bill. They did, however, agree to accept it as soon as the Liberals could obtain an electoral mandate. The Liberals responded by making the right to reduce the power of the upper house the focus of the general election held in January, 1910. Both that election and another in December, 1910 resulted in hung parliaments,but the Lords finally accepted the budget, after a tenuous coalition of Liberals, Labour, Unionists and Irish party members agreed to drop the land tax proposal. The Lords finally passed the Parliament Act of 1911, after the new king, George V, reluctantly threatened to flood the House of Lords with hundreds of new Liberal peers nominated by Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill. Shades of FDR and the "Court Packing Proposal" of 1937, which failed of adoption but persuaded the Supreme Court to accept the measures of the Second New Deal. Where are Lloyd George and Churchill when we really need them.
JDB
Thursday, February 28, 2013
The War of Words
There is definitely a "war of words" between reactionaries and progressives, and our side is losing. That is pretty sad, considering that most of us are "words people." Not only do most of us earn our daily bread by the written or spoken word, but we are generally better educated, well read, and articulate than our opponents. And yet, we keep letting our adversaries impose their nomenclature on the most crucial debates of the day. No matter how much we protest, the mainstream media always seem to adopt the right's shorthand frame of reference rather than ours.
[Mayhap that says something important about the quality of today's journalism, but that is a topic for another post.]
The popular terms are almost always loaded with value judgments that allow opponents to put us on the defensive. Take, for instance, the general acceptance by the communications media, and even "progressive" politicians, of the term "entitlement" to characterize the terms of the debate over Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other items of our shredded and inadequate safety net. To my way of thinking, an entitlement is something that you possess without having done anything to earn it, such as "picking the right parents," marrying the boss's daughter, or gaining legacy admission to a university otherwise beyond your capability. Put in baseball lingo, it is like waking up on third base and assuming that you got there by hitting a triple. [The most extreme cases wait confidently for the umpire to call a balk on the pitcher, so they can stroll home unimpeded.] The term "entitlement"is actually the polar opposite of programs that people have earned by a lifetime of labor, and that they and their employers have contributed toward financially for that same length of time.
Equally egregious is the alacrity with which progressives and the mainstream media have accepted "Obamacare" as a shorthand term for discussing the Affordable Care Act. Like entitlement, it began as a term of derision and a weapon with which to bludgeon the president and other progressive candidates during the recent election campaign. It is still a term of opprobrium designed to coerce state officials into refusing to participate in the insurance exchanges that are the "building blocks"--inadequate as they most certainly are-- of the nascent health care system. [Here in Wisconsin, our esteemed governor Scott Walker has just announced his decision to refuse to participate, turning down the federal money attached. He will soon announce his own plan for Wisconsin, which promises to be a bonanza for everyone but patients]. It is also clearly designed to mobilize resistance to the individual and employer mandates that are equally as crucial to the success of the ACA.
Then there is the "fiscal cliff," the "sequester," the "Grand Bargain," "Fix the Debt,"and all the other terms thrown around with reckless abandon by those whom Paul Krugman calls "fiscal scolds" and "austerians". The simplistic analogy between the family household budget and that of the federal government ranges between pathetic and absurd. It holds water only "if those households can print dollar bills in the basement," as John Buell so succinctly puts in in The Progressive Populist. "A sovereign government the debts of which are denominated in its own currency," he adds "can never default unless it chooses to do so." And if my household had the kind of taxing power conferred on the federal government by Article I, Section 8 and the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, I would have exercised it more times than I can count. Whether those who constantly invoke that analogy really believe it themselves is highly unlikely, but it is difficult to underestimate the knowledge base and reasoning ability of either Congress or Wall Street. Either way, the analogy serves as a tried and true smokescreen for right wingers, an excuse to diminish or eliminate government programs. "The real north star of Ryan's policy record," as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post has cogently observed, "isn't deficits or spending, though he often uses those concerns in service of his real agenda. It's radically reforming the way the federal government provides public services, usually by privatizing or devolving those public services away from the federal government."
This deliberate falsification in the right-wing labeling of crucial public issues is long and growing. Here are some that I find especially widespread and pernicious:
Pro-Life or Right to Life
Although some "pro-lifers" admit of exceptions [e.g.rape, incest, serious defects in the fetus], or broaden their concerns to include opposition to capital punishment, torture, or abuse of women and children, the core belief remains opposition to abortion in any form. Moreover, the rebuttal most commonly used to describe the other side, namely "pro-choice," has inadvertently handed the anti-abortion forces an additional weapon by claiming that most women who resort to abortion do so frivolously or callously.
Death Tax
Inheritance or estate taxes do not fall on the deceased, but rather upon the unearned income of their beneficiaries. In any case, the tax threshold is set so high that it reaches only the super-rich. Those beneficiaries whose inheritance falls below that threshold are not effected at all. Even Andrew Carnegie, who vehemently opposed the federal income tax, argued that those who were unable or unwilling to dispose of their wealth through charitable contributions, deserved to have it confiscated and applied to the general welfare.
Right to Work
Unable to bring back indentured servitude, employers used every possible device or method to ensure that workers had to bargain for wages, hours of labor, working conditions, or benefits as individuals, not as members of a labor union or other type of employee organization. Against overwhelming odds, and with help from progressive politicians, many unions succeeded in gaining the right to bargain collectively by the post-World War II era. Since that high point in the early 1960s, however, employer organizations and "free-market" ideologues have succeeded in rolling back the calendar to the Gilded Age,destroying the majority of private sector unions and are utilizing
every means possible to eliminate public sector bargaining units as well. To buttress their case against public sector unions, they have worked at labeling teachers, policemen, fire fighters, social workers, emergency relief personnel, and other civil servants as public employees--a diabolically clever attempt at constructing a double-double entendre.
Voter Fraud
Despite the fact that every serious, non-partisan study conducted by such unimpeachable institutions as the Brennan Center of the New York University Law School, the League of Women Voters, and the Public Policy Institute have found that claims of illegal voting to be virtually non-existent, the Republican Party launched a massive campaign during the 2012 elections to require photo IDs, limit provisional and absentee balloting, complicate registration and voting procedures and various other measures to discourage or prevent voting by those most likely to vote Democratic. [See, for example, my earlier posts on Voter Suppression and the need for a national voting law.] Although most of these were temporarily blocked by the courts and the Justice Department, it is obvious that right-wing Republicans are preparing to mount an even more momentous campaign in 2013 and beyond. In the most basic sense of the term, they are clearly out to destroy our democratic system, which has taken more than two centuries of struggle to establish.
Right to Bear Arms
It is painfully obvious that we will never come to anything like a consensus over the meaning of the Second Amendment.That is not surprising since even the people who wrote it and ratified it did not agree on its definition. Is the right to bear arms an individual one or a collective one? The best way to begin the dialogue is to start with matters on which there is majority agreement and work out from there. According to a January NTTimes/ CBS News Poll, 53% would agree to a nationwide ban on semiautomatic weapons, 74% favor prohibiting the sale of high-capacity magazines, 92% would support background checks on all potential gun buyers, and 78% feel that there should be a nationwide data base of all gun sales. Not surprisingly, households without guns favor these measures a good deal more than those who keep guns in their homes, while women are more supportive than men. The NRA has succeeded in making this seem an "all or nothing" issue, which it clearly isn't.
Demographic. Inner City. Urban
The latest in a long line of code words used to describe racial and ethnic minorities and poor people in general. They are designed to mask the real meaning and motive of right-wing Republican efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters by Voter ID laws, gerrymandering of Congressional districts, eliminating same day registration and voting, as well as organized registration and voting drives, curtailment of early voting and provisional ballots, reducing the hours for voting. and the number and locations of polling places As I have already shown in my earlier posts, many of these are simply rehashes of the voter suppression laws of the Jim Crow Era.
Corporations as "Persons"
This is essentially a perversion of the Fourteenth Amendment which made former slaves citizens of the U.S. and of the states in which they reside, prohibiting the states from denying them either due process or equal protection. The concept of "corporate personhood" dates from the Supreme Court's 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v.The Southern Pacific Railroad Company. But it was not part of the Court's official decision, but rather a , "headnote" written by the court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company. [Headnotes are "not the work of the Court, but are simply the work of the Reporter, giving his understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession."] The claim that "corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States" comes from the brief filed by counsel for the Southern Pacific and was never discussed by the members of the Court. In fact, Chief Justice Morrison Waite expressly stated at the outset that the Court did not wish to consider or discuss the issue because "we are all of the opinion that it does." At best then, the supposedly sacrosanct doctrine that corporations were protected from state regulation by the 14th Amendment was only the court reporter's rendition of the personal opinion of the Chief Justice who claimed to speak for the entire Court on an issue which they never even discussed. It was not part of the Court's official decision and appears only in Davis's headnote in the United States Reports, which the other justices may--or may not--have even read and which has no legal status. In Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson (1938) Justice Hugo Black held that "the history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments...The language of the amendment itself does not support the theory that it was passed for the benefit of corporations." Writing in 1949, Justice William O. Douglas said that "the Santa Clara case becomes one of the most momentous of all our decisions...Corporations were now armed with constitutional prerogatives."
Money as "Free Speech"
This pipe dream was made real in the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission on 21 January 2010. The justices divided 5-4 on the question of whether corporations could use money out of their treasury to support or oppose specific candidates during an election. The conservative majority consisted of Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, while the dissenting minority was composed of Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. (To show that it was not favoring corporations, the majority also included labor union as if their ability to raise money was the equal and opposite of corporations. In what universe is that real?) The ruling ignored numerous precedents in which earlier Courts had barred corporations from electioneering, while overturning most of the provisions of the existing McCain-Feingold Act. The majority opinion went so far as deny that corporate electioneering would even give the appearance of impropriety. In his 90 page dissent, part of which he actually read from the bench, John Paul Stevens asserted that the decision "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution....A democracy cannot function efficiently when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold." Because several of the candidates backed by corporate money failed of election in 2012, some critics have expressed relief and argue that grass roots mobilizing can effectively counter corporate money every time.. But 2012 was only the first round. They will get better at it, believe me. If it takes a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, then lets get busy enacting one.
What can progressives do to counter this manipulation and distortion of language in the service of reactionary politics? Obviously, there is no quick or easy answer, but I think that following excerpt from "Language Versus Lies" by Scott Russell Sanders in the latest issue of The Progressive is a good place to begin:
[Mayhap that says something important about the quality of today's journalism, but that is a topic for another post.]
The popular terms are almost always loaded with value judgments that allow opponents to put us on the defensive. Take, for instance, the general acceptance by the communications media, and even "progressive" politicians, of the term "entitlement" to characterize the terms of the debate over Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other items of our shredded and inadequate safety net. To my way of thinking, an entitlement is something that you possess without having done anything to earn it, such as "picking the right parents," marrying the boss's daughter, or gaining legacy admission to a university otherwise beyond your capability. Put in baseball lingo, it is like waking up on third base and assuming that you got there by hitting a triple. [The most extreme cases wait confidently for the umpire to call a balk on the pitcher, so they can stroll home unimpeded.] The term "entitlement"is actually the polar opposite of programs that people have earned by a lifetime of labor, and that they and their employers have contributed toward financially for that same length of time.
Equally egregious is the alacrity with which progressives and the mainstream media have accepted "Obamacare" as a shorthand term for discussing the Affordable Care Act. Like entitlement, it began as a term of derision and a weapon with which to bludgeon the president and other progressive candidates during the recent election campaign. It is still a term of opprobrium designed to coerce state officials into refusing to participate in the insurance exchanges that are the "building blocks"--inadequate as they most certainly are-- of the nascent health care system. [Here in Wisconsin, our esteemed governor Scott Walker has just announced his decision to refuse to participate, turning down the federal money attached. He will soon announce his own plan for Wisconsin, which promises to be a bonanza for everyone but patients]. It is also clearly designed to mobilize resistance to the individual and employer mandates that are equally as crucial to the success of the ACA.
Then there is the "fiscal cliff," the "sequester," the "Grand Bargain," "Fix the Debt,"and all the other terms thrown around with reckless abandon by those whom Paul Krugman calls "fiscal scolds" and "austerians". The simplistic analogy between the family household budget and that of the federal government ranges between pathetic and absurd. It holds water only "if those households can print dollar bills in the basement," as John Buell so succinctly puts in in The Progressive Populist. "A sovereign government the debts of which are denominated in its own currency," he adds "can never default unless it chooses to do so." And if my household had the kind of taxing power conferred on the federal government by Article I, Section 8 and the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, I would have exercised it more times than I can count. Whether those who constantly invoke that analogy really believe it themselves is highly unlikely, but it is difficult to underestimate the knowledge base and reasoning ability of either Congress or Wall Street. Either way, the analogy serves as a tried and true smokescreen for right wingers, an excuse to diminish or eliminate government programs. "The real north star of Ryan's policy record," as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post has cogently observed, "isn't deficits or spending, though he often uses those concerns in service of his real agenda. It's radically reforming the way the federal government provides public services, usually by privatizing or devolving those public services away from the federal government."
This deliberate falsification in the right-wing labeling of crucial public issues is long and growing. Here are some that I find especially widespread and pernicious:
Pro-Life or Right to Life
Although some "pro-lifers" admit of exceptions [e.g.rape, incest, serious defects in the fetus], or broaden their concerns to include opposition to capital punishment, torture, or abuse of women and children, the core belief remains opposition to abortion in any form. Moreover, the rebuttal most commonly used to describe the other side, namely "pro-choice," has inadvertently handed the anti-abortion forces an additional weapon by claiming that most women who resort to abortion do so frivolously or callously.
Death Tax
Inheritance or estate taxes do not fall on the deceased, but rather upon the unearned income of their beneficiaries. In any case, the tax threshold is set so high that it reaches only the super-rich. Those beneficiaries whose inheritance falls below that threshold are not effected at all. Even Andrew Carnegie, who vehemently opposed the federal income tax, argued that those who were unable or unwilling to dispose of their wealth through charitable contributions, deserved to have it confiscated and applied to the general welfare.
Right to Work
Unable to bring back indentured servitude, employers used every possible device or method to ensure that workers had to bargain for wages, hours of labor, working conditions, or benefits as individuals, not as members of a labor union or other type of employee organization. Against overwhelming odds, and with help from progressive politicians, many unions succeeded in gaining the right to bargain collectively by the post-World War II era. Since that high point in the early 1960s, however, employer organizations and "free-market" ideologues have succeeded in rolling back the calendar to the Gilded Age,destroying the majority of private sector unions and are utilizing
every means possible to eliminate public sector bargaining units as well. To buttress their case against public sector unions, they have worked at labeling teachers, policemen, fire fighters, social workers, emergency relief personnel, and other civil servants as public employees--a diabolically clever attempt at constructing a double-double entendre.
Voter Fraud
Despite the fact that every serious, non-partisan study conducted by such unimpeachable institutions as the Brennan Center of the New York University Law School, the League of Women Voters, and the Public Policy Institute have found that claims of illegal voting to be virtually non-existent, the Republican Party launched a massive campaign during the 2012 elections to require photo IDs, limit provisional and absentee balloting, complicate registration and voting procedures and various other measures to discourage or prevent voting by those most likely to vote Democratic. [See, for example, my earlier posts on Voter Suppression and the need for a national voting law.] Although most of these were temporarily blocked by the courts and the Justice Department, it is obvious that right-wing Republicans are preparing to mount an even more momentous campaign in 2013 and beyond. In the most basic sense of the term, they are clearly out to destroy our democratic system, which has taken more than two centuries of struggle to establish.
Right to Bear Arms
It is painfully obvious that we will never come to anything like a consensus over the meaning of the Second Amendment.That is not surprising since even the people who wrote it and ratified it did not agree on its definition. Is the right to bear arms an individual one or a collective one? The best way to begin the dialogue is to start with matters on which there is majority agreement and work out from there. According to a January NTTimes/ CBS News Poll, 53% would agree to a nationwide ban on semiautomatic weapons, 74% favor prohibiting the sale of high-capacity magazines, 92% would support background checks on all potential gun buyers, and 78% feel that there should be a nationwide data base of all gun sales. Not surprisingly, households without guns favor these measures a good deal more than those who keep guns in their homes, while women are more supportive than men. The NRA has succeeded in making this seem an "all or nothing" issue, which it clearly isn't.
Demographic. Inner City. Urban
The latest in a long line of code words used to describe racial and ethnic minorities and poor people in general. They are designed to mask the real meaning and motive of right-wing Republican efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters by Voter ID laws, gerrymandering of Congressional districts, eliminating same day registration and voting, as well as organized registration and voting drives, curtailment of early voting and provisional ballots, reducing the hours for voting. and the number and locations of polling places As I have already shown in my earlier posts, many of these are simply rehashes of the voter suppression laws of the Jim Crow Era.
Corporations as "Persons"
This is essentially a perversion of the Fourteenth Amendment which made former slaves citizens of the U.S. and of the states in which they reside, prohibiting the states from denying them either due process or equal protection. The concept of "corporate personhood" dates from the Supreme Court's 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v.The Southern Pacific Railroad Company. But it was not part of the Court's official decision, but rather a , "headnote" written by the court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company. [Headnotes are "not the work of the Court, but are simply the work of the Reporter, giving his understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession."] The claim that "corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States" comes from the brief filed by counsel for the Southern Pacific and was never discussed by the members of the Court. In fact, Chief Justice Morrison Waite expressly stated at the outset that the Court did not wish to consider or discuss the issue because "we are all of the opinion that it does." At best then, the supposedly sacrosanct doctrine that corporations were protected from state regulation by the 14th Amendment was only the court reporter's rendition of the personal opinion of the Chief Justice who claimed to speak for the entire Court on an issue which they never even discussed. It was not part of the Court's official decision and appears only in Davis's headnote in the United States Reports, which the other justices may--or may not--have even read and which has no legal status. In Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson (1938) Justice Hugo Black held that "the history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments...The language of the amendment itself does not support the theory that it was passed for the benefit of corporations." Writing in 1949, Justice William O. Douglas said that "the Santa Clara case becomes one of the most momentous of all our decisions...Corporations were now armed with constitutional prerogatives."
Money as "Free Speech"
This pipe dream was made real in the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission on 21 January 2010. The justices divided 5-4 on the question of whether corporations could use money out of their treasury to support or oppose specific candidates during an election. The conservative majority consisted of Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, while the dissenting minority was composed of Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. (To show that it was not favoring corporations, the majority also included labor union as if their ability to raise money was the equal and opposite of corporations. In what universe is that real?) The ruling ignored numerous precedents in which earlier Courts had barred corporations from electioneering, while overturning most of the provisions of the existing McCain-Feingold Act. The majority opinion went so far as deny that corporate electioneering would even give the appearance of impropriety. In his 90 page dissent, part of which he actually read from the bench, John Paul Stevens asserted that the decision "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution....A democracy cannot function efficiently when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold." Because several of the candidates backed by corporate money failed of election in 2012, some critics have expressed relief and argue that grass roots mobilizing can effectively counter corporate money every time.. But 2012 was only the first round. They will get better at it, believe me. If it takes a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, then lets get busy enacting one.
What can progressives do to counter this manipulation and distortion of language in the service of reactionary politics? Obviously, there is no quick or easy answer, but I think that following excerpt from "Language Versus Lies" by Scott Russell Sanders in the latest issue of The Progressive is a good place to begin:
We can examine every slogan and label critically, those we use ourselves as well as those
encounter in the public arena. We can challenge euphemisms. we can insist that torture
is torture, murder is murder, poison is poison. We can expose verbal tricks. We can defend
the names of things we value from those who would corrupt them. We can maintain, for example,
that corporations are legal constructs, not persons, and therefore not entitled to the rights of human
beings, regardless of what a slender majority on the Supreme Court might argue.We can explain that
"outsourcing" means the elimination of jobs in one place by moving them to another place, usually
abroad, where labor is cheaper and safeguards for workers and nature are weaker. We can show what
the coal industry calls "mountaintop removal mining" is is really "mountaintop devastation
mining," because the forests, animals, topsoil, and stone blasted from the peaks and dumped into
waterways are not simply "removed," as a hat or lid of a pot might be, but are permanently shattered,
fouling streams, destroying habitats and erasing beauty. We can explain that "death taxes" are not
levied on the dead, who have passed beyond reach of the IRS, but on the heirs who did nothing to earn
the money; and they are levied, moreover,on only a tiny fraction of estates, the gargantuan ones, which
typically accumulate tax-free in shelters available only to the super rich. We can observe that abortion
opponents who advocate the "right to life" of fetuses rarely show equal concern for the needs of the
resulting children, let alone for the fate of the millions of species that are being driven to extinction by
the relentless growth of human population. But we need not give in to lies. We need not surrender
language, the greatest of all our common creations, to charlatans. We can defend the things we love,
and language itself, by striving to speak and write clearly, accurately, and honestly.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Casting Abraham Lincoln as a Ghostly Shill
How far will corporations and their advertising stooges go in their pursuit of a buck? To quote Buzz Lightyear: "to infinity and beyond." I frequently revise my list of the most self-serving, tasteless, and arrogant commercials. I must tell you that the current advertising campaign for "The Lincoln Motor Company" has catapulted to the top of my list, and I sincerely hope that there will be nothing in the near future to challenge its hegemony.
History and common sense both tell us that Lincoln, the man, and Lincoln, the automobile, never crossed paths. We know that the "Great Emancipator" was assassinated in 1865, while the first automobile of that name did not appear until 1908. We are also are aware that Lincoln, the automobile, has been the luxury division of the Ford Motor Company for most of the past century. Thus the full page ad that "The Lincoln Motor Company" took out in the December 10, 2012 New York Times is "something of a puzzlement," to quote the King of Siam. It is introduced with the headline "Hello, Again," in boldface type. The text begins with the obsequious and putative self-deprecating declaration that 'It takes a special type of ego to presume that the world needs another luxury car." In fact, "it's a bit like the kind [of ego] that interrupts your otherwise meaningful pursuit of current events with a full page ode to our intentions." How does the reader really know that he or she has that "special type of ego": To really see, look inward." [Obsequious is not a strong enough word, but I can't think of any other that doesn't involve affection for unspeakable body parts. Even Narcissus would hesitate.]
Besides, it continues, "sometimes ego isn't as self-serving as it sounds," because "true trail blazers follow their inner light." You have to be "pretty confident to create what has never been done. It is true in history, invention, art, you name it. Even automotive design...The Lincoln Motor Company is undoubtedly traveling down a different road, and only those who have what it takes to be a "true trailblazer" deserve to take that same route."[ As the old saw says, "it takes one to know one."' The ad mildly chastises Henry Ford for trying "to create the most popular car in the world," while praising his son Edsel for taking "a fundamentally different approach at Lincoln." In a self-conscious attempt at candor, the ad concedes that "the cars Edsel created were different" and that 'truth be told, not everyone liked them." Nevertheless, the ad continues, Edsel dedicated himself to an uncompromising belief in design...because he knew the best way to serve the driver was to design the best possible car." Those who liked them "found four-wheeled kindred spiits that spoke to therm." Sometimes, it pontificates, "it is worth sacrificing the lukewarm affection of some, if it means forging a remarkable bond between man and machine." "Edsels's ego was the self-sacrificing kind (???) that served only one thing--the needs of the individuals who drove his cars." This is how Lincoln started. This is how we will become great again.
Despite its strong beginnings, the ad confesses,"our once great company eventually lost its way. Which is why we're introducing a full-blown reimagining of the one you once knew--or in many cases, never knew." [After all, Edsel died in 1943.] During that brief hiatus, however, "we've picked up a few things about making cars. To think smaller. Smarter. More nimbly." We have refocused "on the things that made us great--starting with a new design studio." Over the next four years, the company pledges to release "four disarmingly new models," reinvigorate dealerships, and elevate our owner services to be on a par with the world's most exclusive concierges." In short, We have reinvented the wheel by placing you at the center. Ultimately, they proclaim, "this is an investment hell-bent on rewarding not us, but the individual," so that "you'll find a refreshing respect for your time, whether you are shopping for a Lincoln or driving one." You will be treated "as a client, not as a customer," and you will "get the distinctive sense that there are people at Lincoln who actually care." Their goal, the ad frankly asserts, "is not a car in every driveway [take that, Herbert Hoover and Henry Ford], our name in every household, nor to be all things to all people. Simply, our goal is to be everything for a certain few.
Translated into realspeak by analyst Bill Vlasic, in the Times "AUTOMOBILES" section, however,this imperious argumentum ad nauseam reads "Ford Redoubles Effort to Reawaken Its Sleepy Lincoln Brand." In the highly competitive world of luxury cars, Vlasic flatly states, "the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln brand has long been stuck in the slow lane, with stodgy models, older buyers, and a distinct lack of pizazz." Left in the dust by BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, and Mercedes-Benz, Lincoln ranks eighth, and falling, among luxury cars sold in the U.S. It accounts for just 3 percent of Ford's total sales, down from 8 percent in the early 1990s."There is nothing more frustrating for us," according to James D. Farley, the newly named chief of the Lincoln Revival Team,"than to have someone who loves their Ford car and S.U.V., but goes out to buy a luxury model from another brand because we don't have one." [I am fairly certain that those Americans not looking to buy a third car--and a luxury one at that--can think of a million things more frustrating.] The big question is, according to the marketing firm Trout and Partners, "how can Lincoln convince people it is more than a gassed-up Ford.?" The answer, as Vlasic interprets the gist of the Lincoln advertising campaign, is "upgraded customer service initiatives, a new brand name that plays down the Ford connection and an unusual advertising campaign that features Abraham Lincoln, the president for whom the brand is named." Its 300 leaders "are learning the new tenets of luxury service at training sessions nicknamed the Lincoln Academy. A 108-page manual of 'luxury truths' details the new approach to pampering potential buyers, ranging from how to welcome them at a dealership to celebrating the anniversary of their purchase."
This "rechristening," involves television spots that begin "with an image of Lincoln, stovepipe hat and all." It also presumably involves improving the automobiles themselves, as well as "a revamped Web site that links consumers to a Lincoln "concierge," who can arrange test drives or set up appointments at dealerships." The latter will also feature "a consultant available 24 hours a day for live discussions about the products and to streamline the buying process. Prospective buyers will be given "an opportunity for a 'date-night with Lincoln' [surely the car and not the president, although who can doubt the marvels that adverting technology has in store for the future?] which includes a two-day test drive and a free meal at a restaurant." A newly formed team of 200 people "is intent on establishing the Lincoln Motor Company as a boutique luxury line known for personalized service." Every customer who reserves the pioneering MKZ model, "will be presented with an elegant gift upon receiving the car"--a choice of fine wines and Champagne, custom-made jewelry or sunglasses, or a one-night stay at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.
But all of this would be simply an modernized version of the obscene excesses of the decaying Roman Empire or Gilded Age America, if it weren't for its use of Abraham Lincoln as a metaphor for its cars. "The name Lincoln has a very strong meaning for this country," says Farley, chief of the Lincoln Revival Team. "What he stood for as president was independence [I don't think that Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee would agree] fortitude and elegant thinking." Needless to say, "any connection with the new Stephen Spielberg film about the widely admired president, is both fortunate and coincidental...We didn't plan it that way, but sometimes it's better to be lucky." Lets see. What is Lincoln's most popular nickname? HONEST ABE?
THE OFFICIAL 2013 LINCOLN MKZ COMMERCIAL begins with the image of a tall man in a frock coat, complete with stovepipe hat, floating toward us out of the mists of time. The reverential voice-over assures us that "this is about moving forward by looking back" Amid the collage of seemingly disconnected images that follow are brief glimpses of Lincoln with frock coattails flowing and looking thoughtfully out to sea. As the narrator breathlessly intones some gobbledegook about "setting precedents for presidents," there are flashes of FDR, Dean Martin, and [I think] Clark Gable. Go Figure! The narrator concludes by saying "This is about going places where others aren't. Introducing The Lincoln Motor Company." My favorite Lincoln commercial, however, shows a young couple driving a 1940s model over an idyllic country road, while an evanescent image of "the man" floats tantalizingly over the surrounding countryside.
Curiously enough, there was no image of Lincoln in the company's horrendous Super Bowl commercial that one critic pronounced "an immediate contender for the titles of the worst Super Bowl commercial of all time and worst car commercial of all time, an unlikely and breathtaking confluence of failures." Maybe they should have invoked the blessing of the president who saved the Union and freed the slaves.
JDB
History and common sense both tell us that Lincoln, the man, and Lincoln, the automobile, never crossed paths. We know that the "Great Emancipator" was assassinated in 1865, while the first automobile of that name did not appear until 1908. We are also are aware that Lincoln, the automobile, has been the luxury division of the Ford Motor Company for most of the past century. Thus the full page ad that "The Lincoln Motor Company" took out in the December 10, 2012 New York Times is "something of a puzzlement," to quote the King of Siam. It is introduced with the headline "Hello, Again," in boldface type. The text begins with the obsequious and putative self-deprecating declaration that 'It takes a special type of ego to presume that the world needs another luxury car." In fact, "it's a bit like the kind [of ego] that interrupts your otherwise meaningful pursuit of current events with a full page ode to our intentions." How does the reader really know that he or she has that "special type of ego": To really see, look inward." [Obsequious is not a strong enough word, but I can't think of any other that doesn't involve affection for unspeakable body parts. Even Narcissus would hesitate.]
Besides, it continues, "sometimes ego isn't as self-serving as it sounds," because "true trail blazers follow their inner light." You have to be "pretty confident to create what has never been done. It is true in history, invention, art, you name it. Even automotive design...The Lincoln Motor Company is undoubtedly traveling down a different road, and only those who have what it takes to be a "true trailblazer" deserve to take that same route."[ As the old saw says, "it takes one to know one."' The ad mildly chastises Henry Ford for trying "to create the most popular car in the world," while praising his son Edsel for taking "a fundamentally different approach at Lincoln." In a self-conscious attempt at candor, the ad concedes that "the cars Edsel created were different" and that 'truth be told, not everyone liked them." Nevertheless, the ad continues, Edsel dedicated himself to an uncompromising belief in design...because he knew the best way to serve the driver was to design the best possible car." Those who liked them "found four-wheeled kindred spiits that spoke to therm." Sometimes, it pontificates, "it is worth sacrificing the lukewarm affection of some, if it means forging a remarkable bond between man and machine." "Edsels's ego was the self-sacrificing kind (???) that served only one thing--the needs of the individuals who drove his cars." This is how Lincoln started. This is how we will become great again.
Despite its strong beginnings, the ad confesses,"our once great company eventually lost its way. Which is why we're introducing a full-blown reimagining of the one you once knew--or in many cases, never knew." [After all, Edsel died in 1943.] During that brief hiatus, however, "we've picked up a few things about making cars. To think smaller. Smarter. More nimbly." We have refocused "on the things that made us great--starting with a new design studio." Over the next four years, the company pledges to release "four disarmingly new models," reinvigorate dealerships, and elevate our owner services to be on a par with the world's most exclusive concierges." In short, We have reinvented the wheel by placing you at the center. Ultimately, they proclaim, "this is an investment hell-bent on rewarding not us, but the individual," so that "you'll find a refreshing respect for your time, whether you are shopping for a Lincoln or driving one." You will be treated "as a client, not as a customer," and you will "get the distinctive sense that there are people at Lincoln who actually care." Their goal, the ad frankly asserts, "is not a car in every driveway [take that, Herbert Hoover and Henry Ford], our name in every household, nor to be all things to all people. Simply, our goal is to be everything for a certain few.
Translated into realspeak by analyst Bill Vlasic, in the Times "AUTOMOBILES" section, however,this imperious argumentum ad nauseam reads "Ford Redoubles Effort to Reawaken Its Sleepy Lincoln Brand." In the highly competitive world of luxury cars, Vlasic flatly states, "the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln brand has long been stuck in the slow lane, with stodgy models, older buyers, and a distinct lack of pizazz." Left in the dust by BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, and Mercedes-Benz, Lincoln ranks eighth, and falling, among luxury cars sold in the U.S. It accounts for just 3 percent of Ford's total sales, down from 8 percent in the early 1990s."There is nothing more frustrating for us," according to James D. Farley, the newly named chief of the Lincoln Revival Team,"than to have someone who loves their Ford car and S.U.V., but goes out to buy a luxury model from another brand because we don't have one." [I am fairly certain that those Americans not looking to buy a third car--and a luxury one at that--can think of a million things more frustrating.] The big question is, according to the marketing firm Trout and Partners, "how can Lincoln convince people it is more than a gassed-up Ford.?" The answer, as Vlasic interprets the gist of the Lincoln advertising campaign, is "upgraded customer service initiatives, a new brand name that plays down the Ford connection and an unusual advertising campaign that features Abraham Lincoln, the president for whom the brand is named." Its 300 leaders "are learning the new tenets of luxury service at training sessions nicknamed the Lincoln Academy. A 108-page manual of 'luxury truths' details the new approach to pampering potential buyers, ranging from how to welcome them at a dealership to celebrating the anniversary of their purchase."
This "rechristening," involves television spots that begin "with an image of Lincoln, stovepipe hat and all." It also presumably involves improving the automobiles themselves, as well as "a revamped Web site that links consumers to a Lincoln "concierge," who can arrange test drives or set up appointments at dealerships." The latter will also feature "a consultant available 24 hours a day for live discussions about the products and to streamline the buying process. Prospective buyers will be given "an opportunity for a 'date-night with Lincoln' [surely the car and not the president, although who can doubt the marvels that adverting technology has in store for the future?] which includes a two-day test drive and a free meal at a restaurant." A newly formed team of 200 people "is intent on establishing the Lincoln Motor Company as a boutique luxury line known for personalized service." Every customer who reserves the pioneering MKZ model, "will be presented with an elegant gift upon receiving the car"--a choice of fine wines and Champagne, custom-made jewelry or sunglasses, or a one-night stay at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.
But all of this would be simply an modernized version of the obscene excesses of the decaying Roman Empire or Gilded Age America, if it weren't for its use of Abraham Lincoln as a metaphor for its cars. "The name Lincoln has a very strong meaning for this country," says Farley, chief of the Lincoln Revival Team. "What he stood for as president was independence [I don't think that Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee would agree] fortitude and elegant thinking." Needless to say, "any connection with the new Stephen Spielberg film about the widely admired president, is both fortunate and coincidental...We didn't plan it that way, but sometimes it's better to be lucky." Lets see. What is Lincoln's most popular nickname? HONEST ABE?
THE OFFICIAL 2013 LINCOLN MKZ COMMERCIAL begins with the image of a tall man in a frock coat, complete with stovepipe hat, floating toward us out of the mists of time. The reverential voice-over assures us that "this is about moving forward by looking back" Amid the collage of seemingly disconnected images that follow are brief glimpses of Lincoln with frock coattails flowing and looking thoughtfully out to sea. As the narrator breathlessly intones some gobbledegook about "setting precedents for presidents," there are flashes of FDR, Dean Martin, and [I think] Clark Gable. Go Figure! The narrator concludes by saying "This is about going places where others aren't. Introducing The Lincoln Motor Company." My favorite Lincoln commercial, however, shows a young couple driving a 1940s model over an idyllic country road, while an evanescent image of "the man" floats tantalizingly over the surrounding countryside.
Curiously enough, there was no image of Lincoln in the company's horrendous Super Bowl commercial that one critic pronounced "an immediate contender for the titles of the worst Super Bowl commercial of all time and worst car commercial of all time, an unlikely and breathtaking confluence of failures." Maybe they should have invoked the blessing of the president who saved the Union and freed the slaves.
JDB
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Let's Scrap the Employer Mandate
One of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) that has aroused the most controversy (perhaps because it is one of the few provisions that most people can readily understand) is the "employer mandate" requiring that all businesses with 50 or more workers provide their full-time employees with health care coverage by 2014. While the employer mandate does not affect nearly as many people as the "individual mandate" requiring that every man, woman, and child purchase health insurance by that date or face a substantial monetary penalty, it has generated its own little tempest. Most of the resistance to the employer mandate has come from restaurant chains, most notably from the CEO of Papa John's Pizza, John Schnatter. He made quite a splash last December by predicting that companies like his would "find loopholes to get around" the requirement, opining that "its common sense for companies to reduce workers hours so that they no longer fit the definition of full-time employees. Darden Restaurants, which owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden, acknowledged that it was experimenting with cutting workers's hours for the same purpose. The owners of Carl's Jr. and Hardees chains announced that they would employ many more part-time workers in the future. One Denny's franchise owner in Florida said that he would add 5% to the price of each meal. Papa John himself calculates that providing health insurance coverage would add from 11 to 14 cents per pizza. (Maybe I am missing something here, but don't hours reductions and price increases place the burden on employees and customers, rather than on owners and managers?) Reacting to a customer backlash (workers obviously have a choice between working part-time and seeking other employment with more sympathetic fast food entrepreneurs), some companies and their executives have softened their original positions. Last week, Darden announced that it would not reduce the hours of current employees (what about new hires?), while Papa John said that while he could not speak for individual franchise owners, the corporation itself would not cut workers hours. In addition, he announced on The Huffington Post "the good news" that full-time workers would receive coverage, and that the company would not be put at a competitive disadvantage because "our competitors are going to have to do the same thing."
Incredibly enough, the concept of employer mandate originated during the administration of that notorious crypto-socialist Richard Nixon. Realizing that the Democrats had accumulated a lot of political capitol by enacting Medicare and Medicaid, and aware that the rising costs of health care were a serious drag upon the economy, he proposed that all employers be required to pay health benefits for their workers. He even suggested a subsidized government insurance program for all Americans that employer coverage did not reach. (This was a giant leap from his position during the 1960 presidential debates when he had half-heartedly suggested that those who who so desired should have a choice government or private insurance.) Of course, he was not unaware that such a program would mean millions of new customers for private insurance companies, but let's give the devil his due.
As Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker has observed, Nixon seemed "more interested in rationalizing health care than promoting national health insurance. Although as many as 20 separate bills were introduced during Nixon's administration. no proposal for universal coverage received a majority vote from a Congressional committee until the ill-fated measure designed by Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1994. Perhaps the major result of Nixon's efforts was the formation of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), which were a great boon to insurers and to the medical profession in general. Membership in HMOs was clearly out of the financial reach of millions of citizens. Ironically, opposition to Nixon's proposals was led by none other than Ted Kennedy, who wanted single-pay universal coverage. It was a mistake that he later regretted. He had erroneously believed that the momentum for universal health insurance was irresistible. "It was that rare moment in his Senate career when he made a fundamental miscalculation about what was politically possible--a lot of liberals did," according to Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. "What was not recognized by anyone at the time was that this was the end of the New Deal era" he adds, and that the tax revolts of the 1970s "ushered in Ronald Reagan and a conservative, antigovernment [sic] philosophy." That mindset, in turn, was given a momentous boost by the Watergate Scandal and Nixon's forced resignation, (Poor Trick Dick. Even when he tried to "appeal to the better angels of our nature", he was sandbagged by his baser instincts.) As for Ted, Chappaquiddick proved to be his Watergate. He had earlier joined with Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and several physicians, professors, and politicians in forming a Committee for National Health Insurance, which produced an ill-fated Health Security bill. In 1991, he
co-sponsored an unsuccessful Health America bill that combined an employer mandate with "Medicare For All.".(Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt even facetiously asked the "Liberal Lion" if he intended to give Nixon a footnote.)
So, for better or worse, the employer mandate has been one of the cornerstones of our health care policy, for nearly 40 years. It is clearly nothing new or radical. In fact, it has generally enjoyed bipartisan support. What, then, is causing all this brouhaha? Maybe it is because "Obamacare" signals a greater determination on the part of the federal government to expand and enforce the mandate. Much of it is certainly due to the fact that today's health care industry is much better organized, more powerful, and more intransigent than it was in the 1970s. Much of it is certainly due to the fact that today's Republicans make those of the Nixon Era seem like flaming liberals--or even, heaven forfend, socialists. As noted above, many employers fervently believe that the mandate will force them take measures that would pain them to the quick--raise prices, cut back workers' hours, or mechanize and computerize because machines don't get sick and don't require health coverage. It would also put them at the mercy of private health insurers, which is a state that no savvy businessman would submit to willingly. They understand that insurers would make them "pay through the nose," because that is exactly what most of them would do in a similar situation.
Fortunately, there is a solution, one that would employer and employees alike, as well as the millions of Americans who have not been able to secure or hold a job that entitles them to health care coverage. It would liberate employers from an onerous and expensive obligation, significantly lower their cost of doing business, and free them to spend more money on adding new workers, paying higher wages and other benefits, research and development, and service to their communities. It would free them from conforming to the endless paperwork and red tape imposed by business and government bureaucracies alike. It would eliminate the need to haggle with unions or other employee advocates. over the relative merits of insurance plans, and to worry if they were doing the best possible job of providing the best possible health care for their employees It would eliminate one major bone of contention between employers and employees. It would eliminate the nagging fear that their workers have decided to work for them, instead of one on their competitors, solely because they have a better health insurance plan. We could call it universal health coverage, single-pay, a public option, Medicare for All, or any of the various models that grown-up countries already have. We could even call it something like a free market in health insurance. It would validate the first principle of insurance: the larger the pool of subscribers, the more the risks are spread out and their total cost minimized. It would not necessarily eliminate private, for-profit health insurers. It would only require them to compete on an equal footing with their peers and against the "yardstick" provided by a public option. Of course, it might cut down on their profits and dividends, as well as on the salaries and benefit packages of their executives, but that would be a relatively small price to pay for creating a much more efficient and economical health care system.
Come to think of it, such a system would also eliminate the even more odious individual mandate.
Incredibly enough, the concept of employer mandate originated during the administration of that notorious crypto-socialist Richard Nixon. Realizing that the Democrats had accumulated a lot of political capitol by enacting Medicare and Medicaid, and aware that the rising costs of health care were a serious drag upon the economy, he proposed that all employers be required to pay health benefits for their workers. He even suggested a subsidized government insurance program for all Americans that employer coverage did not reach. (This was a giant leap from his position during the 1960 presidential debates when he had half-heartedly suggested that those who who so desired should have a choice government or private insurance.) Of course, he was not unaware that such a program would mean millions of new customers for private insurance companies, but let's give the devil his due.
As Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker has observed, Nixon seemed "more interested in rationalizing health care than promoting national health insurance. Although as many as 20 separate bills were introduced during Nixon's administration. no proposal for universal coverage received a majority vote from a Congressional committee until the ill-fated measure designed by Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1994. Perhaps the major result of Nixon's efforts was the formation of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), which were a great boon to insurers and to the medical profession in general. Membership in HMOs was clearly out of the financial reach of millions of citizens. Ironically, opposition to Nixon's proposals was led by none other than Ted Kennedy, who wanted single-pay universal coverage. It was a mistake that he later regretted. He had erroneously believed that the momentum for universal health insurance was irresistible. "It was that rare moment in his Senate career when he made a fundamental miscalculation about what was politically possible--a lot of liberals did," according to Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. "What was not recognized by anyone at the time was that this was the end of the New Deal era" he adds, and that the tax revolts of the 1970s "ushered in Ronald Reagan and a conservative, antigovernment [sic] philosophy." That mindset, in turn, was given a momentous boost by the Watergate Scandal and Nixon's forced resignation, (Poor Trick Dick. Even when he tried to "appeal to the better angels of our nature", he was sandbagged by his baser instincts.) As for Ted, Chappaquiddick proved to be his Watergate. He had earlier joined with Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and several physicians, professors, and politicians in forming a Committee for National Health Insurance, which produced an ill-fated Health Security bill. In 1991, he
co-sponsored an unsuccessful Health America bill that combined an employer mandate with "Medicare For All.".(Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt even facetiously asked the "Liberal Lion" if he intended to give Nixon a footnote.)
So, for better or worse, the employer mandate has been one of the cornerstones of our health care policy, for nearly 40 years. It is clearly nothing new or radical. In fact, it has generally enjoyed bipartisan support. What, then, is causing all this brouhaha? Maybe it is because "Obamacare" signals a greater determination on the part of the federal government to expand and enforce the mandate. Much of it is certainly due to the fact that today's health care industry is much better organized, more powerful, and more intransigent than it was in the 1970s. Much of it is certainly due to the fact that today's Republicans make those of the Nixon Era seem like flaming liberals--or even, heaven forfend, socialists. As noted above, many employers fervently believe that the mandate will force them take measures that would pain them to the quick--raise prices, cut back workers' hours, or mechanize and computerize because machines don't get sick and don't require health coverage. It would also put them at the mercy of private health insurers, which is a state that no savvy businessman would submit to willingly. They understand that insurers would make them "pay through the nose," because that is exactly what most of them would do in a similar situation.
Fortunately, there is a solution, one that would employer and employees alike, as well as the millions of Americans who have not been able to secure or hold a job that entitles them to health care coverage. It would liberate employers from an onerous and expensive obligation, significantly lower their cost of doing business, and free them to spend more money on adding new workers, paying higher wages and other benefits, research and development, and service to their communities. It would free them from conforming to the endless paperwork and red tape imposed by business and government bureaucracies alike. It would eliminate the need to haggle with unions or other employee advocates. over the relative merits of insurance plans, and to worry if they were doing the best possible job of providing the best possible health care for their employees It would eliminate one major bone of contention between employers and employees. It would eliminate the nagging fear that their workers have decided to work for them, instead of one on their competitors, solely because they have a better health insurance plan. We could call it universal health coverage, single-pay, a public option, Medicare for All, or any of the various models that grown-up countries already have. We could even call it something like a free market in health insurance. It would validate the first principle of insurance: the larger the pool of subscribers, the more the risks are spread out and their total cost minimized. It would not necessarily eliminate private, for-profit health insurers. It would only require them to compete on an equal footing with their peers and against the "yardstick" provided by a public option. Of course, it might cut down on their profits and dividends, as well as on the salaries and benefit packages of their executives, but that would be a relatively small price to pay for creating a much more efficient and economical health care system.
Come to think of it, such a system would also eliminate the even more odious individual mandate.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
My Invitation to Join the NRA
My mailed invitation to join the NRA is headed "Dear Friend," and is signed by Wayne LaPierre, the organization's executive vice-president and CEO. That greeting seems overly familiar and grossly impersonal, all at the same time.
I have never owned a gun of any sort and have never contributed to any organization nor subscribed to any publication even remotely connected to the NRA. In fact, the only time in my life that I ever held a gun in my hand and fired one at a rifle range is when I was in compulsory Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps at Loras Academy back in the 1950s. I learned to take apart and reassemble a World War II MI carbine, as well as to march and drill with one. Even though I rose to the rank of major and executive officer of our battalion, and won the Chicago Tribune Award for excellence in military science and tactics, ROTC was not one of the most pleasant experiences of my high school career. I have never touched a handgun of any description, unless you count playing "Cowboys and Indians" as a kid. We had "cap pistols" that made noise and gave off the smoke and smell of ersatz gun powder. I never even asked for a "BB Gun" for Christmas like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story," although I am sure that my parents would have refused, probably because they were afraid that "you will shoot your eye out." My father, who grew up on a farm in Iowa, told of people that he knew who had been seriously wounded or even killed by the "unloaded" shotguns that some of his neighbors kept behind their kitchen doors. Besides that, I am a long-time, card- carrying member of the Wisconsin Democratic Party,belong to more progressive organizations and subscribe to more progressive publications than I can remember , and have signed numerous petitions advocating almost every kind of gun control imaginable. My ideological orientation virtually screams from my blog posts, Facebook info, and other devices of social media, as well as from my myriad publications and letters to the editor.
So what?, you.ask. My point is this: If the NRA sponsored a contest or a survey to find the people least likely to join their organization, I flatter myself that I would at the very top of the shortest possible list. So how on earth did the NRA possibly single me out as a potential member? How in hell do they generate their mailing list?
Regardless of the answer to that puzzle, I have to admit that the NRA offered me a lot more incentives to join than I have ever gotten from other organization. To begin with, the invitation offered me a substantial discount just for joining: $25.00 for one year (normally $35.00) and $70.00 for three years, instead of the normal $85.00.
It was also very careful to inform me that "contributions, gifts, or membership dues made or paid to the National Rifle Association of America are not refundable or transferable and are not deductible as charitable contributions for Federal income tax purposes." It also acknowledged that "$3.75 of the membership dues are designated for magazine subscription," and that I could choose among American Rifleman, American Hunter, or Freedom First..American Rifleman is also available in Digital or Premium Digital editions. The latter also includes several bonuses, including instant videos, links to other sites, photo galleries, interactive ads, social media sharing, sound, animation, and "special editions." The digital edition is narrated by a professional quality voice-over which assures me that subscribing puts the viewer "in the driver's seat," and saves the organization the cost of printing and postage which can then be applied to the "fight for firearms freedom." There is also a "juniors only" magazine called Insights.
In addition, new members also receive $7,500 of insurance, free admission to the NRA's Annual Guns, Gear, and Outfitter Show, membership card and decal, and invitations to "special events and more." New members can also have a choice among three free gifts: a Rosewood Handle Knife, a Black and Gold Duffel Bag, and a Digital Camo Duffel Bag. They can also contribute to the Military Membership Fund, shop at an NRA Stores, access its video-on-demand archive, Wayne LaPierre's daily blog, live web casts on NRANews.com, and the NRA Car Buying Service, as well as shop at NRA Stores. By calling toll free numbers, members can also receive a Visa credit card and checks bearing the NRA logo, as well as property, casualty, auto, home, and term life insurance. They can also receive a 15% discount from Beverly Hills International, Inc. [located, oddly enough, in Boca Raton, Florida], "which supplies corporate awards, business gifts, and promotional products to companies and organizations worldwide." And that is only the tip of an iceberg of "perqs" and "bennies".
Members are also eligible for a veritable cornucopia of additional Members Only Discounts, including those from: Lifelock Identity Theft Protection, North American and Allied Van Lines, and Air Brook Limousine Service ("A chauffeur-driven full service featuring luxury sedans, stretch limos, vans, mini -buses and full size motor coaches, including day trips, tours and packages."); I did not have the intestinal fortitude to print out the entire list, but I did determine that, if I had, it would run to 68 pages with several items on each page. Even more informative and awe-inspiring is the roster of "NRA Affiliate Discounts": MoveBenefits that include mortgage and real estate services, Outdoor Affinity Telecom, bsecure Family Protection, NRA wine club, holiday cards, and video collections, Lifeline screening, hearing benefits, prescription drug plans, health services, Hertz, Avis, Budget, Enterprise, National. and Alamo car rental services, Baymont, Knights Inn, Best Western, Hawthorn, Microtel, Howard Johnson, Ramada, Super 8, Wyndham, Travelodge, and Wingate hotel chains. Then there are the NRA Licensed Products that include Gun Safes by Liberty, Second Amendment Revolvers, Moose ATV and UtV Products, Resistol Hats, Sportsman's Bench Products, and T-Shirts By Buck Wear. You can also shop online at <NRAProducts.com> and access NRA Program Materials Center, Fold-Up Duck Decoys, Blue Book Publications, and Palladium Press.
To broadcast its message as widely and completely as possible, the NRA maintains no less than 40 web sites, including Business Alliance, Civil Rights Defense Fund, Firearms For Freedom, Gunsmithing, Hunters Rights, National Firearms Museum, NRA Country, NRA Digital Network, Life Of Duty, Women's Network, Political Victory Fund, Shooting Illustrated, and NRA Instructors and Programs. There is also a membership recruiting program called "NRA Recruiter" that invites members to "join the thousands of NRA certified instructors, affiliated clubs, independent businesses, and dedicated members who are already participating," This program "provides a great opportunity to not only strengthen the NRA by increasing membership, but also to earn money at the same time." There is no cost to enroll and "participants are furnished with NRA recruiting materials, as well as effective recruiting techniques.?
On a less mercenary level, the organization proclaims that "the NRA is you," millions of Americans representing a diverse contrast of age, sex, race, and religion. You are patriots one and all. You believe in the Constitution,
staunch in the defense of your rights, and you actively pursue some of the country's finest traditions--Hunting and Sports Shooting. Since its incorporation in 1871, the NRA has grown as a service organization involved in all aspects of the shooting sports and a proud defender of the Bill of Rights[at least the second half of the Second Amendment]." Just in case that lofty appeal is not sufficiently motivating, the organization's pitch reminds prospective members that they will also be eligible for "a wide range of benefits that add up to savings, convenience, and fun." For many Americans, the NRA seems little different from the myriad fraternal/benevolent societies that have always been a distinguishing hallmark of the United States, except that none of the others offer such a dazzling array of member benefits.
Of course it is impossible to calculate how much of the NRA's ability to recruit and retain members is a product of its incredible benefits package. Its very existence, however, suggests strongly that the organization is afraid to rely entirely upon its ideological orientation for success. Moreover, even a casual reading of the list of discounts, benefits, and perquisites outlined above, and of the roster of mainstream businesses and organizations that are engaged in providing those member benefits, strikingly demonstrates the degree to which the NRA has succeeded in making itself seem a "normal" and non-threatening part of our economic and social fabric. By bonding its members to an "all or nothing" dictum of gun ownership, it has effectively forestalled possible defections over such proposals as a ban on automatic assault weapons or opposition to "concealed carry" laws. It success at this strategy is demonstrated by the fact that only 44% of Americans currently support stricter guns laws, compared to
78% in 1990. Since that time, it has expanded to more than four million members with an operating budget of some $300 million, an increase of about 400% since 1990. According to a recent article on the Huffington Post, the NRA has 140 times more dues paying members than does its opposite number-- the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence--and spent 1,000 times more money on the 2012 election. Although it received "a ton of money from gun manufacturers and vendors (including those who manufacture assault weapons and high capacity magazines), such as Arsenal, Beretta, Browing, Brownells, DPMS Panther Arms, Glock, Remington Arms, Smith and Wesson, Sturm, Ruger &Co., and Winchester", the "majority of its funds still come from ordinary citizens--from kits 4.3 million members." Small wonder that the NRA is so attractive to so many different people, and so intimidating to so many politicians. After all, "nobody shoots Santa Claus."
I have never owned a gun of any sort and have never contributed to any organization nor subscribed to any publication even remotely connected to the NRA. In fact, the only time in my life that I ever held a gun in my hand and fired one at a rifle range is when I was in compulsory Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps at Loras Academy back in the 1950s. I learned to take apart and reassemble a World War II MI carbine, as well as to march and drill with one. Even though I rose to the rank of major and executive officer of our battalion, and won the Chicago Tribune Award for excellence in military science and tactics, ROTC was not one of the most pleasant experiences of my high school career. I have never touched a handgun of any description, unless you count playing "Cowboys and Indians" as a kid. We had "cap pistols" that made noise and gave off the smoke and smell of ersatz gun powder. I never even asked for a "BB Gun" for Christmas like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story," although I am sure that my parents would have refused, probably because they were afraid that "you will shoot your eye out." My father, who grew up on a farm in Iowa, told of people that he knew who had been seriously wounded or even killed by the "unloaded" shotguns that some of his neighbors kept behind their kitchen doors. Besides that, I am a long-time, card- carrying member of the Wisconsin Democratic Party,belong to more progressive organizations and subscribe to more progressive publications than I can remember , and have signed numerous petitions advocating almost every kind of gun control imaginable. My ideological orientation virtually screams from my blog posts, Facebook info, and other devices of social media, as well as from my myriad publications and letters to the editor.
So what?, you.ask. My point is this: If the NRA sponsored a contest or a survey to find the people least likely to join their organization, I flatter myself that I would at the very top of the shortest possible list. So how on earth did the NRA possibly single me out as a potential member? How in hell do they generate their mailing list?
Regardless of the answer to that puzzle, I have to admit that the NRA offered me a lot more incentives to join than I have ever gotten from other organization. To begin with, the invitation offered me a substantial discount just for joining: $25.00 for one year (normally $35.00) and $70.00 for three years, instead of the normal $85.00.
It was also very careful to inform me that "contributions, gifts, or membership dues made or paid to the National Rifle Association of America are not refundable or transferable and are not deductible as charitable contributions for Federal income tax purposes." It also acknowledged that "$3.75 of the membership dues are designated for magazine subscription," and that I could choose among American Rifleman, American Hunter, or Freedom First..American Rifleman is also available in Digital or Premium Digital editions. The latter also includes several bonuses, including instant videos, links to other sites, photo galleries, interactive ads, social media sharing, sound, animation, and "special editions." The digital edition is narrated by a professional quality voice-over which assures me that subscribing puts the viewer "in the driver's seat," and saves the organization the cost of printing and postage which can then be applied to the "fight for firearms freedom." There is also a "juniors only" magazine called Insights.
In addition, new members also receive $7,500 of insurance, free admission to the NRA's Annual Guns, Gear, and Outfitter Show, membership card and decal, and invitations to "special events and more." New members can also have a choice among three free gifts: a Rosewood Handle Knife, a Black and Gold Duffel Bag, and a Digital Camo Duffel Bag. They can also contribute to the Military Membership Fund, shop at an NRA Stores, access its video-on-demand archive, Wayne LaPierre's daily blog, live web casts on NRANews.com, and the NRA Car Buying Service, as well as shop at NRA Stores. By calling toll free numbers, members can also receive a Visa credit card and checks bearing the NRA logo, as well as property, casualty, auto, home, and term life insurance. They can also receive a 15% discount from Beverly Hills International, Inc. [located, oddly enough, in Boca Raton, Florida], "which supplies corporate awards, business gifts, and promotional products to companies and organizations worldwide." And that is only the tip of an iceberg of "perqs" and "bennies".
Members are also eligible for a veritable cornucopia of additional Members Only Discounts, including those from: Lifelock Identity Theft Protection, North American and Allied Van Lines, and Air Brook Limousine Service ("A chauffeur-driven full service featuring luxury sedans, stretch limos, vans, mini -buses and full size motor coaches, including day trips, tours and packages."); I did not have the intestinal fortitude to print out the entire list, but I did determine that, if I had, it would run to 68 pages with several items on each page. Even more informative and awe-inspiring is the roster of "NRA Affiliate Discounts": MoveBenefits that include mortgage and real estate services, Outdoor Affinity Telecom, bsecure Family Protection, NRA wine club, holiday cards, and video collections, Lifeline screening, hearing benefits, prescription drug plans, health services, Hertz, Avis, Budget, Enterprise, National. and Alamo car rental services, Baymont, Knights Inn, Best Western, Hawthorn, Microtel, Howard Johnson, Ramada, Super 8, Wyndham, Travelodge, and Wingate hotel chains. Then there are the NRA Licensed Products that include Gun Safes by Liberty, Second Amendment Revolvers, Moose ATV and UtV Products, Resistol Hats, Sportsman's Bench Products, and T-Shirts By Buck Wear. You can also shop online at <NRAProducts.com> and access NRA Program Materials Center, Fold-Up Duck Decoys, Blue Book Publications, and Palladium Press.
To broadcast its message as widely and completely as possible, the NRA maintains no less than 40 web sites, including Business Alliance, Civil Rights Defense Fund, Firearms For Freedom, Gunsmithing, Hunters Rights, National Firearms Museum, NRA Country, NRA Digital Network, Life Of Duty, Women's Network, Political Victory Fund, Shooting Illustrated, and NRA Instructors and Programs. There is also a membership recruiting program called "NRA Recruiter" that invites members to "join the thousands of NRA certified instructors, affiliated clubs, independent businesses, and dedicated members who are already participating," This program "provides a great opportunity to not only strengthen the NRA by increasing membership, but also to earn money at the same time." There is no cost to enroll and "participants are furnished with NRA recruiting materials, as well as effective recruiting techniques.?
On a less mercenary level, the organization proclaims that "the NRA is you," millions of Americans representing a diverse contrast of age, sex, race, and religion. You are patriots one and all. You believe in the Constitution,
staunch in the defense of your rights, and you actively pursue some of the country's finest traditions--Hunting and Sports Shooting. Since its incorporation in 1871, the NRA has grown as a service organization involved in all aspects of the shooting sports and a proud defender of the Bill of Rights[at least the second half of the Second Amendment]." Just in case that lofty appeal is not sufficiently motivating, the organization's pitch reminds prospective members that they will also be eligible for "a wide range of benefits that add up to savings, convenience, and fun." For many Americans, the NRA seems little different from the myriad fraternal/benevolent societies that have always been a distinguishing hallmark of the United States, except that none of the others offer such a dazzling array of member benefits.
Of course it is impossible to calculate how much of the NRA's ability to recruit and retain members is a product of its incredible benefits package. Its very existence, however, suggests strongly that the organization is afraid to rely entirely upon its ideological orientation for success. Moreover, even a casual reading of the list of discounts, benefits, and perquisites outlined above, and of the roster of mainstream businesses and organizations that are engaged in providing those member benefits, strikingly demonstrates the degree to which the NRA has succeeded in making itself seem a "normal" and non-threatening part of our economic and social fabric. By bonding its members to an "all or nothing" dictum of gun ownership, it has effectively forestalled possible defections over such proposals as a ban on automatic assault weapons or opposition to "concealed carry" laws. It success at this strategy is demonstrated by the fact that only 44% of Americans currently support stricter guns laws, compared to
78% in 1990. Since that time, it has expanded to more than four million members with an operating budget of some $300 million, an increase of about 400% since 1990. According to a recent article on the Huffington Post, the NRA has 140 times more dues paying members than does its opposite number-- the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence--and spent 1,000 times more money on the 2012 election. Although it received "a ton of money from gun manufacturers and vendors (including those who manufacture assault weapons and high capacity magazines), such as Arsenal, Beretta, Browing, Brownells, DPMS Panther Arms, Glock, Remington Arms, Smith and Wesson, Sturm, Ruger &Co., and Winchester", the "majority of its funds still come from ordinary citizens--from kits 4.3 million members." Small wonder that the NRA is so attractive to so many different people, and so intimidating to so many politicians. After all, "nobody shoots Santa Claus."
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