Moyers & Company 108: Encore: On Winner Take All Politics from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

• Encore Broadcast: On Winner-Take-All Politics | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

  • why did they do it?

  • Jacob and I genuinely believe that it’s an optimistic story compared with the story that we’re typically told about what’s been happening to the American economy. Because what we’re typically told is there’s nothing you can do about this, that it’s just an economic reality, there’s no point in blaming any political party.

  • But the real action is inside the top one percent. If you go to the top tenth of one percent or the top hundredth of one percent, you know, you would need a much bigger graph to show what’s happening to incomes for that for that more select group. Because they’ve gone up much faster than have incomes for just your average top one percent kind of person.

  • PAUL PIERSON: In some ways, the fundamental myth that we’re trying to break out of is the idea that there’s something natural out there called "the American economy" that is prior to government, prior to politics. And that government, if it’s involved at all, is only involved sort of at the end of the day, maybe tidying things up around the edges, or redistributing money from some people to another.

  • the richest one-in-a-thousand households are truly living in an unparalleled age

  • BILL MOYERS: Well, as you speak, I can hear all of those free-marketers out they say, "Come on, Piers– come on Hacker it is the global economy. It’s that cheap labor overseas. It’s those high technology skills that you say are required, these deep forces that actually are beyond our control, and are making inevitable this division between the top and everyone else." Right? That’s what they’re saying as they listen to you right now.

  • When you start to look within the top one percent, and look at what government has done to help those people out, through taxes, through changes in the market, financial deregulation and the like, and through protecting them from efforts to try to push back.

  • Because they could.

  • And what we’ve seen in the last 30 years is a gradual erosion of the firewalls that protect our democracy from the inequalities that are occurring in the market. Money has come into politics much more.

  • So the whole idea of noblesse oblige and such and that the rich were supposed to have special responsibilities, that’s all gone, right? They have a God-given right to the lowest conceivable taxes.

     

    When you put anti-regulators in charge of the agencies who believe that regulation is bad and completely unnecessary and they destroy it, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that produces massive fraud at the most elite levels.

  • I want to see money out of government. I’m a very big proponent of campaign finance reform, of limiting the role of lobbyists, and limiting the role of corporate personhood

  • But how do you explain the fact that we’ve seen over this period where the rich have gotten richer the tax rates on the richest of the rich come dramatically down.

  • BILL MOYERS: How can this happen? How could Washington turn its back on the broad middle class to favor a relatively few at the top in a democracy?

     

    JACOB HACKER:  What has really changed is the organization of American politics, particularly the organizations that represent the deepest pocketed members of American society. What we’ve seen as an organizational revolution over the last 30 years that has meant that business, and Wall Street, and ideological conservative organizations that are pushing for free market policies have all become much more influential.

  • JACOB HACKER: When citizens are organized and when they press their claims forcefully, when there are reformist leaders within government and outside it who work on their behalf, then we do see reform. This is the story of the American democratic experiment of wave after wave of reform leading to a much broader franchise, to a much broader understanding of the American idea.

     

    In the mid-20th century we saw a period in which income gains were broadly distributed, in which middle class Americans had voice through labor unions, through civic organizations and through, ultimately, their government. We’ve seen an erosion of that world, but just because it’s lost ground doesn’t mean it can’t be saved. And so in writing this book we were hoping to sort of tell Americans that what was valuable in the past could be a part of our future.

  • BILL MOYERS: But if both political parties are indebted to the winners where do the losers find an army to join?

  • How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

  • You know, if you look to our northern neighbor, Canada, it had nothing like the same degree of banking crisis the United States did.

  • when you look at other affluent democracies that have also been exposed to these same kinds of pressures, who are actually more open — smaller economies are often more open to the global economy than the United States is — you don’t see anything like the run-up in inequality, especially this very concentrated high-end inequality, in most of these other countries that you see in the United States. Which to us, really, was a very strong clue that we need to understand why the American response to globalization, to technological change has been different than the response of most other wealthy democracies.

  • my family with two Master’s degrees is struggling

  • BILL BLACK:  What we have is recurrent, intensifying financial crises driven by elite fraud and now it’s done with almost absolute impunity.

  • And at the same time, when those risks have become apparent, there has been a studious effort on the part of political leaders to try to protect against government stepping in and regulating or changing the rules.

  • Within a few weeks after the legislation was passed, we all get a letter that says Congress and the President have given you this tax cut.

    • mine was around $300
  • these were all tax breaks that were worth a vast amount to the richest of Americans and worth very little to middle class Americans.

  • what is wrong with the priorities of our society that we cannot figure out how to translate our great wealth, our ingenuity, the hard work of our citizens, into a better standard of living that is shared broadly across the population?

  • BILL MOYERS You write, we have a government that’s been promoting inequality, and at the same time, as you just said, failing to counteract it. This has been going on, you write, 30 years or more. And here’s the key sentence: Step by step, and debate by debate, our public officials have rewritten the rules of the economy in ways that favor the few at the expense of the many.

  • “We wanted to know how our economy stopped working to provide prosperity and security for the broad middle class.”

  • JACOB HACKER: There was a poll done in 2010 that asked Americans whether the federal government had helped a great deal the following groups: large financial institutions and banks, 53 percent of Americans said they’d been helped a great deal.

     

    What about large corporations? 44 percent of Americans said they’d been helped a great deal. Then they asked, well, has the federal government helped the middle class a great deal? And do you want to guess what percent of Americans said that they’d been helped a great deal– the middle class had been helped a great deal? Two percent.

     

    BILL MOYERS: Two percent?

  • money matters much more in our politics, and where groups representing business and the wealthy are much more powerful than in the past.

  • BILL MOYERS: Protecting them?

     

    JACOB HACKER: Well, I think this is something that really needs to be understood. You know, these large shifts in our economy had been propelled in part by what government has done, say deregulating the market, the financial markets, to allow wealthy people to gamble with their own and other peoples’ money, and ways to put all of us at risk, but allow them to make huge fortunes.

  • JACOB HACKER:  We think the story that’s told about how the global economy has shifted clearly matters. But that it doesn’t get to the sort of really powerful role that government played in adapting to this new environment and in changing the well-being of people in the middle and at the top.

  • it was really designed to front-load the relatively modest benefits for the middle class, and to back-load the benefits for the wealthy.

  • Income inequality that statistics on income inequality now suggest that inequality is higher in the U.S. than it is in Egypt.

  • So, that top one percent saw its real incomes increase by over 250 percent between 1979 and 2006

  • 1979 to 2007, so all the increased household income over that period, around 40 percent of those gains went to the top one percent. And if you look at the bottom 90 percent they had less than that combined.

  • And we’re, we are deep believers in the ability of American democracy to reform itself, of the strength of our democratic institutions. But they’re in very serious disrepair right now. And we’ve seen in recent political fights a sort of paralysis and a broad loss of faith in government. And that sort of secession of the wealthy from our economic life that we’ve already started to see could be matched by a secession of them from our political life and a sort of loss of that broad democracy that was characteristic of mid-20th century. That’s the greatest fear that we have.

  • understand that inequality of income and wealth is part of a capitalist society, but it can’t overwhelm our democracy.

  • PAUL PIERSON: If you listen to many public officials over the over the last 20 or 30 years as they’ve started to recognize that inequality has grown, typically what they’ll say is, this is a result just of economic change. It’s a result of globalization changes in technology that have advantaged the educated at those with high skills at the expense of the uneducated.

  • those top 400 tax payers, they’ve seen their tax rates decline so much that it’s worth about $46 million for every one-

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Gingrich doesn’t live by the strict sexual rules laid out by conservatives, because those rules are meant for other people: the poor, Democrats, gays, and minorities.

January 25, 2012

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Newt Gingrich’s win in the South Carolina primary looks like it may not be an outlier; Gingrich’s poll numbers are rising rapidly in Florida, and he has a good chance of beating Romney there as well. Gingrich is doing well in no small part because he has so much support amongst evangelical Christians; so much so that many evangelical leaders refused to go along with an attempt to unify the Christian right behind Santorum.

In South Carolina, evangelical Christians voted for Gingrich 2-to-1 over boring family man Mitt Romney. For anyone who takes seriously the notion that evangelical Christians actually care about things like family and fidelity, this support for Gingrich is baffling, since he has a history of serial adultery that he barely bothers to disavow. But a closer examination of the situation makes clear what’s going on: for the Republican base, “family values” don’t actually matter, but are just a gloss painted over what really motivates them: reactionary rage. They love Gingrich because he’s a flaming ball of rage they can wield against everyone they hate. 

The sexual double standard is the most obvious way the us vs. them mentality works. There’s nothing the modern American conservative loves more than to decry our country’s supposedly declining sexual morals. Once the Republicans swept state legislatures and the House of Representatives, punishing sexual freedom became their number one priority, which manifested in nearly 1,000 bills restricting reproductive rights in state legislatures and a bill attacking private insurance funding of abortion in the House. Eventually, House Republicans threatened to shut down the federal government in order to defund family planning clinics, basically because they’re in the business of providing contraception and STD prevention and treatment. All this while the base continues to push abstinence-only and reject gay marriage on the grounds that it’s not “traditional.” But when it comes to a serial adulterer like Gingrich, he gets a pass. After all, he’s one of theirs, and if you’re in the tribe, you get a lot more leeway. 

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the reaction to Marianne Gingrich sticking her head out, as she periodically does, to remind the world of what a terrible man her ex-husband is. This time she added the juicy detail that Newt basically demanded that he get to have both his wife and his mistress at the same time. It was a reminder that while this flagrant cheating was going on, Gingrich was repeatedly moralizing in public over President Clinton’s adultery. To this day, the GOP base still regards Clinton as some kind of perverted sex maniac. But Gingrich? Well, during the South Carolina debate when Marianne’s interview with ABC was brought up, the audience loudly booed the mere mention of her name. For the Republican base, Gingrich not only gets to cheat, he also gets to flaunt it in his wife’s face; but a Democrat like Clinton’s more secretive and brief affairs are unforgivable.

Gingrich doesn’t live by the strict sexual rules laid out by conservatives, because those rules are meant for other people. Sex is a weapon being used against all those classes of Americans they don’t like: non-white people, gays, non-Christians, liberals, Democrats, people who have to work for a living, poor people, Democratic politicians. 

With rising levels of pious posing amongst Republicans, there has been some half-hearted attempts to pretend that they hold everyone to the same standards, which helped created the spectacle of Gov. Mark Sanford’s resignation. Gingrich represents a tossing-away of that feigned concern for fairness and a return to what conservatives really love best, a pedal-to-the-metal defense of straight white male privilege, especially that of wealthy white men. He’s the living id of the Republican Party: a spoiled brat who takes what he wants without apology, and then dresses down perceived inferiors for their supposed lack of morals and work ethic. You could easily imagine him drifting out of Tiffany’s, having bought wife number three fancy baubles with money generated from one of his direct mail schemes only to pause to lecture a homeless vet on how he deserved his fate because he didn’t sacrifice enough. 

In the Republican worldview, sex is a luxury item to be reserved for the privileged, and everyone else who indulges deserves whatever horrible fate befalls them. In the world imagined by Gingrich and his fan base, rich people get to say they’re sorry and run for public office if they have sex out of wedlock; poor people should see their health decline because they have an STD but can’t afford to see a doctor to treat it. The wealthy can afford contraception and have all the sex they want, but if Republicans succeed in cutting off family planning subsidies, poor people will go without. If abortion is banned, wealthy women will be able to travel to get abortions or depend on discreet doctors, but the poor will simply be forced to have babies. 

Of course, Republicans know better than anyone that simply giving into their worst instincts and promoting the career of someone like Newt Gingrich tends to turn off the moderates and swing voters they need to win elections. But it seems this year they don’t really care. Conservatives seem sick and tired of paying lip service to equality and family values, and instead are just enjoying the ride of cheering for the screw-you-I-got-mine guy. Will they wise up before it’s too late and Gingrich has the nomination? At this point, it’s hard to say.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon.

Is there a progressive challenge to Obama now? – YouTube

Rocky Anderson, 2012 Presidential Candidate-The Justice Party joins Thom Hartmann.

[youtube -8-BguXFOAU]

clipped from www.cfr.org Republican National Convention: Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Policy Discussion August 31, 2004 Council on Foreign Relations QUESTIONER: I’m Alan Weh, from New Mexico. I want to address the question asked by The Wall Street Journal did the war in Iraq create more terrorists? If one understands what’s going on in Iraq, you’ll understand that the war in Iraq, if anything, is reducing the number of terrorists. The real terrorists that are there are there because it’s a target-rich environment for them. You’ve got a lot of people like us that you can take an easy shot at. It’s not quite as easy over here. But the fact is that our presence there— and oh, by the way, we have a shameful scandal in the prison incident. But that’s just a breakdown in military discipline. And if you look at it too close, you’ll read more into it. But that’s all it is. the fact that we treated it so openly— would the other side, would the Muslim world treat it so openly?

I know a lot has materialized since 2004, but I don’t think this would change Alan’s agenda. We should not occupy countries and expect there to be no blow back anymore than thinking we would welcome China to set up military camp in our neighborhood. And I don’t want to pay $1 billion a week supporting it. And infinitely more important is the cost of lives. Anybody remember what the total loss of life has been for them and for us? Yeah, not something we like to think about huh? So easy, so convenient, so wrong. God have mercy on us.

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites–oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others–work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.

Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: Media & the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Republicans say what many Christians want to hear. In addition, because they say they are Christians many believe them and faithfully but blindly support them. Eventually, they find out how immoral they are.

At this point their moral principles are tested. They either suppress their conscience (very easy to do) or they speak out (very hard to do). When they speak out, they lose their friends, but that is only the beginning. If they continue to speak out they put their life in danger.

Nonetheless, this is the path Connell chose to take. It is the very path Christ took.

Christians either need to deny Christ or take on the challenge presented by Him.

John 18:37 …“For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”

If they would do what Connell did, the Republican Party would reform.

clipped from www.truthout.org Mike Connell, the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove, reportedly asked for protective custody from the government before he died. Mike Connell was, in fact – many said that’s what motivated him through all of this, his fierce anti-abortion stance. He told – Connell told Spoonamore that one of the primary reasons why he helped Bush-Cheney steal elections was to save the babies. Connell was far less ferocious he wasn’t quite as hardcore as the others. he was a little bit alienated from the others, and that’s one of the reasons why he was inclined to talk