Thank you, Conservative Yankee, for your erudite and thoughtful post.  When I referred to you as a “Conservative Republican,” I did so because you (a) revealed yourself to be a Republican in your last post, and (b) describe yourself as a “Conservative Yankee.” 

I question the accuracy of your self-description.  The idea that fiscal responsibility is by no means a virtue limited to conservatism.  There are many progressives, even democratic socialists, who appreciate the folly in runaway deficit spending.  Before George W. Bush, the largest historical deficits were those created by Reagan & George H.W. Bush.  Before that, the largest deficit spender was Richard M. Nixon.  For all that I abhor about President Clinton’s betrayal of American labor via NAFTA and the WTO, I have to concede that at least when he left office he produced a multi-billion dollar surplus.

The divide is on the purpose of expenditures.  Progressives believe that the purpose of government is set forth in the Preamble to the Constitution—to promote the general welfare.  The crony capitlists of the hard-right see government as a tool by which to enhance “inequality”—they will rail about welfare for the poor but have no qualms about accepting billions in subsidies, bailouts, and the military-industrial complex. 

If you adhere to “limited” government in the constitutional sense—checks and balances; the application of the rule of law prevent what we now have, a lawless “Unitary Executive” then there is again little difference between you as a self-described Conservative and most progressives.  The one area in which you and progressives differ is your Libetarian assumption that “big government” is bad; little government good. 

The relative size of government is not nearly as relevant as whether checks and balances insure that “public” institutions carry out their intended purpose—serving the interests of the many.

There is an ulterior motive in the hard-right’s assault on “big government.”  As former hard-right co-conspirator David Brock revealed in “Blinded by the Right,” while the anti-tax crusading Gover Norquist advocates creating such a sea of red ink that the federal government “could be drown in a bathtub,” his motives are purely partisan:  “Cutting taxes, he often said, was a way to ‘defund the left.’”  It is the politics of wealth as power, or what Bill Moyers describes as a movement that is “systematically stripping government government of its capacity…to little more than reward the rich and wage war.”

Bush put Norquist’s tactics in play when he intentionally stripped FEMA of funding and responsibility, shifting the funding for disaster relief to faith based organizations. Unfortunately it was not the federal government, but the poor, mostly African-American population of New Orleans who drowned.

The flip side of the “big government is bad” canard is the hard-right’s privatization schemes—the notion that corporations are more efficient and that where possible, governments should be run like corporations.  In “Thieves in High Places,” Jim Hightower presented a persuasive counter-argument:  “No corporation is a model for how government should operate.  Corporations are rigid, top-down, autocratic hierachies in which executive actions are delivered as fiats to be implemented unquestioningly…Corporations are towers of secrecy, in which all information is considered a proprietary asset to be doled out only in approved snippets vetted through the PR department, keeping as much as possible from employees, investors, customers, regulators, lawmakers.”

Sound like the Bush administration?  Well then consider Noam Chomsky’s observation in “Failed States” that in “structure, the political counterpart to a corporation is a totalitarian state.”

Conservative Yankee, excellent post.  My comment was primarily directed at your assumption that because I used the term “Republi-crooks” (an apt description of almost the entirety of that party’s current crop of “leaders”—the libertarian Ron Paul a notable exception) meant that I was simply a partisan Democrat.  John Dean refers to the current batch of Republicans in power as “Conservatives Without Conscience.”  Others simply refer to them as “fascists.”

(I believe it appropriate, by the way, that in providing such a response on a public forum to state a position that might generate an intellectual response from others as well.  After all, the title of this forum is Truth-dig.)

But I must tell you that I am finding it difficult to understand how someone who so obviously admires Norm Thomas can consider himself a “conservative Republican.”  But then perhaps those words, when used in the northeast corner of our nation mean something totally different than they do in the southwest corner of the nation where Randy Duke Cunningham underscored the meaning of a right-wing, ideologue “Republi-crook.”

P.S.  If I am not mistaken (I would be delighted to be mistaken), Senator Collins voted to pass the Military Commissions Act of 2006, an abomination which eliminated a right that dates back to the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, and which provided an immunity to the Bush administration, retroactive to 9/11/01, for all crimes committed in service of the so-called “war on terror.”  During WW II my father was kept in a tiny cage for months and tortured by the Japanese (water boarding); made to sign a false confession that he was a British agent.  He eventually recovered from the physical effects but the emotional scars lasted a life-time.

While I appreciate Senator Collins’ opposition to NAFTA & the WTO, I could never respect anyone, Republican, Democrat or Independent who would turn a blind eye to torture.

Conservative Yankee, the mere fact that one condemns the vice-into-virtue, “greed is good” philosophy of the Republi-crooks does not mean that one supports the equally corrupt but spineless corporate sector of the Democratic Party. 

There is a fundamental difference between a Hillary Clinton and a Dennis Kucinich.  Example—healthcare reform.  Kucinich calls for a single-payer system that would eliminate all for profit insurers and HMO’s which account for 31% of the cost of healthcare in our utterly corrupt healthcare delivery system.  Clinton, who, as first lady had at one time advanced a similar reform, has since become the largest recipient of healthcare insurer campaign contributions in the United States Senate.  In fact, only George Bush has received more healthcare insurance lobby dollars than Clinton.

What Clinton dubs as a “universal coverage reform” is but a scheme devised to subsidize the healthcare insurance industry. 

As a direct result of the policies enacted under FDR, organized labor became a major player in the political system, creating a playing field that was relatively level so that as late as 30 years ago CEO annual compensation at $1.3 million was a mere 39 times the salary of the average worker.  A graduated income and corporate tax system served to further level of the playing field.

It was the Roosevelt-leaning Democrats, aka “liberals” who brought about Social Security, Medicare, the 40 hour work week, time & 1/2 for overtime, OSHA, and child labor laws—all intended to address the gravest inequities of capitalism gone wild. 

While I agree that Roosevelt temporarily “saved capitalism” by addressing its excesses, there can be no assurance that his absence would have led to democratic socialism as opposed to what we currently face—a descent into fascism.  Indeed, a cabal of industrialists who also financed Hitler’s rise to power, including our current president’s paternal grandfather, actually plotted a coup to overthrow Roosevelt.  Records that surfaced after the war reveal that Prescott Bush was still conducting business on behalf of the Nazi war machine even as his son, George H. W., was fighting in the Pacific—How’s that for family values?  Prescott also considered himself a “conservative Yankee.” 

Today, at $37.5 million, CEO compensation is over a thousand times that of the average worker, as the tax burden has shifted to the rapidly shrinking middle class.  Indeed, the system is now so perverted that during four of the five years that Richard Cheney was its CEO, Halliburton did not pay one red cent in income tax.  Thanks to the betrayal of the Democratic base by President Clinton, who joined with Reagan/Bush in ramming NAFTA & the WTO down our throats, opening the door for the wealthiest one percent to outsource America’s manufacturing base in an incessant search for slave wage labor, as what remained of American labor was left to be Wal-Mart-ized, the American labor movement has been reduced to but an impotent shell of its former self. 

There’s only one candidate in either party with the courage to directly challenge this disgraceful inequity by calling for a repeal of NAFTA and the WTO while directly challenging the parasite known as the military-industrial complex—Dennis Kucinich.

Finally, Conservative Yankee, you seem to have forgotten that T. Roosevelt broke with the Republi-crooks over the excesses of the Gilded Age, leading to his founding of the Bull Mouse Party.  With his trust-busting attitude, T. Roosevelt would no more fit in with the current batch of fascist, Republi-crooks than would President Eisenhower, whose prescient Farewell Address forewarned us of the danger posed to liberty and to the very survival of this Republic by the military-industrial complex.

driving bear, both President’s Carter and Roosevelt did more than simply talk.  Roosevelt lifted this country out of the depression that had been caused by an earlier period of Republi-crook greed by putting people to work, protecting the rights of workers, creating the Social Security System, strictly regulating securities and banking so as to prevent reckless greed from destroying this nation.  Carter has been the living embodiment of a selfless individual who has devoted the last quarter century to redressing the inequities that have resulted from American imperialism.  His activities are the subject of a recent and extended interview by Amy Goodman.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/10/1518224

But then from your reference to the Old Testament, I see that you are not grounded in reality, so why do I bother trying to have an intellectual conversation with you?

Ernest Canning
As for you quotes of former US presidents ,I think the old saying “talk is cheap” says it all
As for CEO salaries I say look back to the bible
in the old testament and king Solomon. In the Bible we learn that King Solomon salary in terms of amount of gold , and if you translate that amount of Gold into equivalent value in US$ it comes out to $12 billion per year in just base salary

Driving bear, it is obvious that yours is a conservative mindset.  You have been raised in a culture of greed.  The greedy always try to project onto others their own selfish motives.  Psychiatry refers to that as the process of projection.

There is nothing natural about “greed.”  It is not some immutable characteristic any more than kindness and empathy.  It is a question of societal emphasis.  Consider the follow remarks by three U.S. Presidents:

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”—Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The greatest challenge we face is the growing gap between the rich and poor people on earth.”—Pres. Jimmy Carter.

“More than anything else, I want to see the United States remain a country where someone can get rich.”—President Ronald Reagan.

If greed were such an immutable characteristic, how does one explain such remarks as those made by Presidents Carter and Roosevelt.  If one were to look only at the post-Presidency actions of George H.W. Bush, where he has made and continues to make a fortune from the military-industrial complex through his association with the Carlyle Group, I could see where one could conclude that greed is an immutable characteristic.  But President Carter has spent the past 25 years at the Carter Center building housing for the poor, seeking to eradicate a number of third world diseases, overseeing elections in other countries to insure fairness and actively campaigning for peace sans the profit motive. 

You either buy into an illogical system that places the needs of a wealthy select few not only before the needs of the many, but, given the environmental consequences, is adverse to the very survival of our species, or you learn to live in harmony with nature and your fellow human beings; you strive for a society based on equity, justice and the common good.

To FFurks, no Reagan/Bush were not the first to bring greed to America, but they did set the stage for a fundamental undermining of middle and working class protections brought on by the New Deal; a process that was accelerated when Clinton joined them in raming NAFTA and the WTO down our throats, opening the door to outsourcing of the U.S. manufacturing base in search of cheap foreign labor as what remained of American labor is increasingly Wal-Martized.

Thirty years ago, at $1.3 million, the average annual CEO compensation was 39 times that of the average worker.  Today, at $37.5 million, it is over a thousand times the average worker.  By 1999, the net worth of just three individuals, Bill Gates, Paul Allen & Warren Buffet was larger than the GDP of the world’s 41 poorest nations and their 550 million people.  If that doesn’t strike you as illogical, driving bear, I don’t know what will.

Ernest Canning
If you want democratic socialism in America or any other country in the world , you would have do one thing first; Build a time machine and go back to the garden of Eden and stop Adam and eve from eating the forbidden fruit.
Human beings are greedy at the core and that cannot be changed. Human beings are criminals at heart and that not going to change. Humans are lazy at heart and that’s not going to change.
socialism would be an ideal system if not for human nature

What we have now is unbridled capitalism and Ayn Rand’s elevation of the “mover and shaker” to god status.

To _some_ degree, this is needed. We already saw that Communism didn’t exactly deliver the goods. However, there is also tremendous waste in the capitalist system where terrible ideas that add nothing meaningful to humanity or society are richly rewarded.

As modern life has increased the illusion of a hectic pace, people no longer take the time to reflect nor discuss the events of the day. More often than not, my attempts to provoke serious conversations are met with boredom, disinterest and bewilderment. People would rather sit around and make fart jokes and call each other stupid than to actually think about anything in a meaningful way. This is why we fill our head up with low culture like a Lindsey Lohan DUI or a Brittany Spears crotch shot. It’s a safe and easy conversation to have.

Why do we work and what are we working for? For most people, their work is not noble. People work, have kids, collect a meager fashionable status symbol or two and essentially act as consumers who dutifully service their revolving debt while sending lots of non-recycled trash to the landfill. And then they die.

We have very serious work to do, but we have never defined what we want from modernity or industrialization, and so instead of handling the core needs of a truly happy life (good food, quality shelter and a healthy social and physical environment) we eat fast food and live trapped in suburban or ghetto enclaves largely isolated from humanity and society with toxic pollution swirling all around us.

driving bear, the “solution” to poverty is probably one you don’t want to hear.  It’s called democratic socialism.  It entails a sense of community, a realization that we are all in this together; that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere; that the “greed is good” culture brought on by Reagan/Bush and the hard-right theocracy stands morality on its head.  It also entails a recognition that a system in which many starve so that the very few ultra-billionaires amongst us can get richer and more powerful is truly twisted; that when corporations have greater rights than people and can control the scope of discourse by buying up the media, democracy withers and dies. 

We are already seeing the horrific results of these twisted policies not only in the ever-widening gap between the wealthiest one percent and the rest of us but in perverted policies that provide resource wars in service of the oil companies at a time when we should be pursuing alternative energy solutions—e.g. all electric cars, wind and solar. 

Dealing with poverty has never entailed “thowing money” at the problem.  It has always required a fundamental change in the way we approach the very purpose of government.  When one considers the increasing level of ecological devastation brought on by the culture of “greed is good,” one recognizes that the growing inequality is not only unhealthy but poses a danger to the very survival of our species.

“The next story of the boy or girl now living in the shadows who will shake our consciences and change our country?” Sure, but Dionne may add that children who are not properly raised (i.e. who go hungry, or who don’t have proper lodging, or who are not wanted by their mother, or who are abused, or who don’t get minimal education, etc.) are much more likely than others to become a burden to society as adults: welfare recipients, pickpockets, con artists, pimps, drug dealers, fundamentalists, etc. Too bad the media don’t make an effort to remind us of their existence, and too bad the government jepordizes our future collective well-being by not giving them incentives to give us more down-to-earth programming.

Love,

The true problem is not that the American people don’t care about poverty. The problem is the American people know that government “throwing money ” at the problem is not the solution. Until a workable solution is found the American people will not take action

The figures I obtained from one of the groups doing research on the damage done by Katrina was that approximately 100,000 homes and apartments were damaged (1%-100%) by Katrina.  The research also stated that about 1/2 of these dwellings were apartments (a fourplex with 4 apartments is less costly that four individual homes).

If the replacement cost for homes and apartments were even $100/sq ft, and the homes and apartments averaged 2000 sq ft each (not likely), the repair cost… if none of the dwellings had insurance, and if there was a 50% average loss… would total 100,000 X 2000(sqft) X $100/sqft X 50%.

The total for this would be… $10 billion.

The recipients of the money sent to the gulf were never the homeowners who lost everything… it was the carpetbaggers who showed up after the disaster…

There’s a lot of truth in all the posted comments.  I just wonder how long Americans will be the pawns that allow this to continue…...

Thank you E.J.Dionne for writing about the laudable concept of substance. Substance is out there, always has been. This imbalance will right itself when the profit model shifts.
While its important to make a profit the expectation that every measurable quarter will exceed the previous one w/even greater percentages, year after year must change. That change will occur when caps are put on salaries and incentives shift based on tax consequences that redirect cash flows.

When we reward acts of esteemable, responsible private & public sector motivations and dismiss this current deplorable climate for its true ugliness, we will again see changes.
But as long as Congress can continue to be so easily purchased, so easily threatened w/anthrax and the WSJrl. continues to writenice shallow pieces about the ‘Hank’ Greenburg&Sons; and the swine that populate GoldmanSachs get to show us again their new Bentleys we’ll shrug and say this is just the way it is - but its not this too shall change.

As far as the media, it’s a Sam’s Club of cheap, shallow distractions. They no longer report, they choreograph - they’re dismissed and disposed of as irrelavent
and regrettably that includes NPR/PBS.

The truth is, the poor do not matter. The rich do not care about the poor since the poor do not form a viable consumer market, constitute a workforce of an inferior unreliable quality and are a general drag on the economic march of progress. The middle class do not care since they already feel like they work very hard for very modest gains or even slippage and that the poor choose to not work or to squander opportunities like the HOPE scholarship which gives any child with a B average in Georgia free college. The poor do not care about themselves because they view poverty as a peculiar condition foisted upon them by outside forces from which there is no escape. When the rich want to relax, they fly their helicopter to the stadium and sit in a sky box luxury suite. When the middle class want to relax they want to see rich people falling on their face - Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith or Brittany Spears failures make them feel better about themselves. When the poor want to relax they do whatever it is poor people do, nobody knows or cares. People only really care about themselves, and modern life is so hectic and riddled with anxiety that there is neither time nor emotional energy to spare. Society at all levels has coarsened, and the popular media has contributed immensely to this with both its entertainment and its news. Perhaps my lens is colored from living in the Old Fourth Ward (drunks, drug dealers, gunfire, crackheads, homeless and prostitution all one block from the run down and mismanaged Martin Luther King Center) here in Atlanta, but, if I had any empathy for the impoverished, I really don’t anymore after seeing how they go about their business. It is a “harder story to writeabout” in the press, because success stories would truly be a diamond in the rough and ultimately it would be a wasted effort. It’s easy for some college educated journalist who eats organic to say, “gee, we need to writemore stories about the poor.” Well, come stay with me for a few weeks and we’ll walk around Bedford Pines Projects or the Sweet Auburn District and see how the poor do. There’s really not that much positivity to writeabout. It’s hard to care about people who don’t really seem to care about themselves unless their is a news opportunity like Katrina and the lure is a government funded ATM card which will get you that Gucci bag.

Substance can’t sell when the corporate media conspires to conceal it.  A blind poll based solely on stances on issues which excluded the names of the candidates provided Dennis Kucinich with 58% of the vote.  The poll went unreported in the corporate media.  ABC conducted two polls on who won the last debate.  Mr. Kucinich won both, handily, with Obama a distant second.  Not getting the answers it sought, ABC deleted them both from its web site and failed to air the results.

Candidates of substance are finding themselves in the same position as a falling tree in a remote forrest.  It can make all kinds of noise as it crashes to the ground, but since no one was there to hear it fall, in the greater scheme of things, has it really made a sound?

Back then you had Dole and McGovern working together for the good of the American people. Today you have two parties that hate each other so much they seldom work together and only if they see a benefit to their party or a particular candidate. The poor faces of Katrina were just a symptom of a government that lacks integrity and “real” compassion.