The Wall Street Journal seems to mistake President Obama’s fumbling around with revenue fixes for the irrelevant deficit problem for what he should be doing, which is energetically rekindling a stimulus, with real spending on jobs programs to nourish the nation’s weakening demand-side. Continue reading
Republicans Are Not Free (Is the President?)
Lancet-fluke infected ant marches to the top of a grass blade where a sheep will ingest it. Much like House Republicans and the supply-side mind virus.
Let’s get down to brass tacks: Republicans are slaves to a fantasy ideology called supply-side. They are not free to consider any actions other than those that enrich the rich. The ostensible logic of this compulsion of theirs is that the wealthy alone are capable of distributing their own wealth, that they do this by investing in ventures that create jobs for the non-wealthy. But let’s be real: Republicans are not free to think beyond the first step: Enrich the rich. Any sector other than the rich doesn’t exist for Republicans. Enrich the rich.
In this, Republicans are exactly like the lancet-fluke infected ants Daniel Dennett likes to cite when discussing freedom and religion. Like these helplessly suicidal ants, Republicans are merely the vessel by which a very dangerous meme propagates itself. Until very recently it was not absolutely clear how dangerous this meme was, but the conditions for a perfect storm unleashing the danger have been brewing since the tandem events of the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Continue reading
Fodder for #DEMANDside Argument: 12 Graphs to Make the Blood Boil
From Mother Jones, a dozen bits of graphic evidence that supply-side economics is the wrong medicine for what ails the US economy, if shared prosperity is the health standard for national prosperity. Just one pair makes that point perfectly:
GROWTH IS BACK… …BUT JOBS AREN’T
Spread the word: #Demandside
Three articles in today’s New York Times have only reinforced my determination to get the word #Demandside into the national conversation. I have little faith in anything, let alone American politics or the national discourse, but I do have utter faith in the notion that if our political so-called leaders do not return to pre-Reagan-era demand-side economics, we can kiss the prospect for shared prosperity good-bye. Continue reading
Did You Know?: South Carolina’s Drinking Water Is Controlled by a Private Interest
This letter is from today’s The State of Columbia, SC:
SC drinking water: Similar to this?
Private water companies a bad deal
We were in Italy on vacation last month when 57 percent of the Italian population came out to vote “si” on three referendums — and “no” to the privatization of water systems. Italians overwhelmingly do not want private companies to take over their drinking water because they’ve heard horror stories from Africa, and from the United States, about cash-conscious private companies bilking their customers.
Nowhere in the United States is this more apparent than in South Carolina, where many communities are squeezed at the throat by a private company with many tentacles into rural areas. Many who don’t have public water have either private wells or Utilities Inc., also known as Carolina Water. Continue reading
Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell and “Voluntary Association”
“State-enforced segregation,” Rockwell wrote, “was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one’s own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse.”
Lew Rockwell quoted in “Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters,” by Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel
Sanchez and Weigel, in the piece linked to above, plausibly trace the history and possible provenance of the most vilely racist items in Ron Paul’s popular newsletters from the late 1980s and early 1990s to libertarian intellectual Lew Rockwell, a former Paul political aide and campaign staffer. Rockwell, like Paul, shares many views in common with anti-imperialists on the left, not least of which is plain, unfettered anti-imperialism. But whereas the left views capitalism as a major source of and impetus for imperialism, Rockwell and company are undistilled free marketeers. The Rockwell quote above quite eloquently elaborates, I think, on Paul’s second principle, which I discussed in a previous post, particularly on the phrase “voluntary association.” Continue reading
“America is not a democracy. It’s a Republic.”
I saw a variation on this slogan at another WordPress blog last night, and this explanation of it:
Our Founding Fathers deemed this an important distinction to make and discussed the matter quite a bit. In the end, our Founding Fathers claimed that a democracy was both extreme and dangerous for a country as it would most assuredly result in the oppression of the minority by the majority. Take this one example from Founding Father, Elbridge Gerry: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.” And Thomas Jefferson said that democracy should never be practiced outside the limits of a town.
In a comment, I had to ask the author to connect with this hackneyed notion intellectually Continue reading
Is Ron Paul’s Principle of “Voluntary Associations” Racist Code?
2. All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order.
I mentioned in the first of this series that Tea Party and post-Democrat leftist favorite Ron Paul long ago left a trail of basely racist remarks as he crept to his current place of near-prominence in the national and world debate on issues of war, peace and economics. The article that first detailed Paul’s association with fringe-right ideas is by James Kirchik and it that appeared in The New Republic in January 2008 (quoted after the jump): Continue reading
Gun Rights of the Mentally Ill: “Rights Belong to Individuals, Not Groups”
I imagine Ron Paul and his fans would have read this front page story in today’s New York Times with a very different reaction (not to mention, frame of reference) from mine:
Across the country, states are increasingly allowing people like Mr. French, who lost their firearm rights because of mental illness, to petition to have them restored. Continue reading
A Critique of Ron Paul’s Ten Principles of a Free Society: Natural Rights?
My first encounter with the idea/s of Ron Paul came more than a decade ago on a long-defunct Website, I’m sad to say, the name of which I don’t recall. It was a repository of intelligence about some of the more bizarre beliefs of prominent right-wingers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were particularly favorite targets. But there was one page devoted to Ron Paul’s outrageous racism, a catalog of some truly ignorant and occasionally horrifyingly mean-spirited remarks Paul was alleged to have made about poor people of color over the course of his political and academic careers.
When, during the last decade, Paul’s courageous (or simply intellectually rigid?) anti-war stance earned him a lot of love from many on the left and heightened his stature internationally, I wanted to double-check my first prejudice against him. Alas, the site was gone, and the web seemed to have been scrubbed of any evidence of Paul’s backwardness on race. (A Google check today, however, now that Paul is a big favorite of Tea Party types, shows that his racist past–and probable present– is ready to come back and bite him at any time: Jonathan Chait and James Kirchik for example have written on the subject for TNR.) Continue reading
Tragic Farce 