Looking for New Ideas from the Left (theme one of leaving the country unnecessarily less safe?)

PBS Talk of the Nation (abbrev extracts from personal transcription) ^ | February 17, 2005 | hosted by Frank Stasio

[baseball_fan]

(note: abbrev extracts from personal notes)

• [Peter Beinart]…1946 was in many ways like mid-term elections 2002 to 2004. Liberals were crushed because they weren’t trusted on national security issue. • 1947 there was a big fight that took 2-3 years where anti-communism became a big feature of American liberalism under Harry Truman and then later under John Kennedy. • Democrats linked anti-totalitarianism abroad with a more “just” United States. • Democrats need to shift from only calling Bush economic policy unjust and unwise (which only appeals to a minority of the population) to calling it unsafe.

• In ‘50s tax cuts were criticized as undermining the ability to maintain military and foreign aid spending to defeat communism. …Bush economic policy …leaving country weaker.

• [Gar Alperovitz}… extraordinary shift in recent years as to who controls the economic power of the country: most people are not aware that the top 1% receives more income each year than the bottom 100 million people taken together. Their share has gone up about double over the last 20 years. Top 1% now - and it’s a new situation - owns and control about 50% of the wealth….medieval numbers….

• [Jim Wallis] ...in 30 years CEO salaries in relationship to average workers have grown from 30 to 1 to about 615 to one: this is a crisis of Biblical proportion.…

• [Patricia Williams] ... incumbent on us to know the figures so you have many people who think African-Americans are taking over affirmative action, it means they are chasing away from jobs better qualified white people while at the same time they are saying this against the backdrop of New York City where 50% of all the African-American men between 18 and 65 are unemployed. This is a crisis, a shocking medieval statistic…

[baseball_fan]

These are abbreviated extracts based on my personal transcription (not verbatim exact) of what is an hour long radio program. Was trying to identify how the Democrats plan on mounting their next challenge. The theme from the program seems to be one that Bush has left us unnecessarily less safe.

On the concentration of wealth issue talked about during the radio program, many Democrats may start quoting Alan Greenspan: "...increasing concentration of incomes is not desirable in a democratic society." source - see "Riches in a few hands: In surprise, Greenspan says concentration of wealth a worry" at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1344549/posts . If anything happens to the economy, there might be some political vulnerability there that Greenspan is personally positioning himself for.

[AZ_Cowboy]

Headline: "Looking for New Ideas from the Left "

Well, there's the problem right there.

[exnavy]

The left has no new ideas, just reshapes the old ones.

[baseball_fan]

Headline: "Looking for New Ideas from the Left " Well, there's the problem right there.

When Alan Greenspan twice over the last week personally positioned himself as saying he was worried about the concentration of wealth impacting our democratic society, if anything happens to the economy things might turn politically very quickly if we don't mount some kind of preemptive answer first.

[AZ_Cowboy]

Agreed, but did he clarify the remarks? I find it hard to believe he would just say something like that without recognizing a specific detail.

[hosepipe]

The left = steal an idea from the right, add a few billion dollars, say you said it first...

[Darkwolf377]

The Greenspan quote isn't much to hang a whole political movement on, though. The left is barren of ideas--that's a common comment, but what does it mean? It means they have no core values they can justify to the mass of Americans, so they are left with the contrarian position--reacting, not acting.

I'm not saying Greenspan's quote is meaningless. I'm saying that having a political philosophy that people very easily hear as "You should pay more taxes" is not gonna fly in a nation where most people are invested in the stock market.

[baseball_fan]

"Agreed, but did he clarify the remarks? I find it hard to believe he would just say something like that without recognizing a specific detail."

I've been equally suprised that it hasn't been covered and clarified more since I saw him emphasize it twice during his C-SPAN testimony before the Senate and House last week. Here is one of the direct quotes:

[Greenspan] "There are also some issues, though, that haven't been mentioned, which I'm personally quite concerned about. We've had a stagnation of real wages in the country, at least in the last several years; slow absolute growth; and what I believe will ultimately be a real problem for the country, a growing concentration of wealth and income disparity as revealed by statistics..."

source: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-021605fedtext_wr,0,669160.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[Question Liberal Authority]

the top 1% receives more income each year than the bottom 100 million people taken together.

And that would be, what? Infants and school children?

[Question Liberal Authority]

New York City where 50% of all the African-American men between 18 and 65 are unemployed.

Personally, I'd move out of that cracker town.

[pierrem15]

That's also a function of our idiotic policy on immigration: allow tens of millions of semi-literate Latin Americans into the country and you depress wage levels at the bottom half and increase wealth concentration at the upper end.

[baseball_fan]

The Greenspan quote isn't much to hang a whole political movement on, though. The left is barren of ideas--that's a common comment, but what does it mean? It means they have no core values they can justify to the mass of Americans, so they are left with the contrarian position--reacting, not acting. I'm not saying Greenspan's quote is meaningless. I'm saying that having a political philosophy that people very easily hear as "You should pay more taxes" is not gonna fly in a nation where most people are invested in the stock market.

What surprised me are some under-the-radar changes in ownership taking place mentioned by guest Gar Alperovitz. This roughly paraphrases him:

---start paraphrase---

For example there are more people involved in these worker-owned companies that have grown up over the last thirty years from about zero to now over 11,000 than there are in unions in the private sector.

There are 3,000 up to possibly 6,000 neighborhood owned corporations building housing and spreading wealth that way to benefit neighborhoods. Many municipalities under both Democrats and Republicans are going into business to provide services to the community as a whole and cutting or supplementing taxes thereby. There are also land trusts which are neighborhood owned non-profit organizations that own housing in order to prevent neighborhood gentrification. Many at the state level have public investment programs.

All of this is developing a new vision of how wealth can be used rather than 1 percent owning approximately 50% of all investment capital in the country...There has to be a change in the underlying patterns of ownership. It is a vision beyond capitalism and socialism.

---end paraphrase---

If we cannot get people in the mainstream, alternative streams seem to be developing.

[FreeKeys]

Liberals were crushed because they weren’t trusted on national security issue.

Well, after the CIA's Operations Directorate was dismantled by Sen. Church and Pres. Carter, after Carter pulled the rug out from under the Shah, enabling the ayatollahs to take over Iran, after Carter gave the Panama Canal to the Red Chinese, after Clinton let the Red Chinese have our missile guidance and nuclear technology, after being too afraid of Political Incorrectness to go after Bin Laden, WHY IN HELL WOULD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BE AFRAID TO TRUST THE DEMOCRATS WITH NATIONAL SECURITY ?????????? [/sarcasm]

[baseball_fan]

[Greenspan] "There are also some issues, though, that haven't been mentioned, which I'm personally quite concerned about. We've had a stagnation of real wages in the country, at least in the last several years; slow absolute growth; and what I believe will ultimately be a real problem for the country, a growing concentration of wealth and income disparity as revealed by statistics..."

CORRECTION: That particular quote came from Senator Jon Corzine, sorry.

This from Senator Debbie Stabenow in the same article where she quotes Greenspan:

---start Stabenow---

You talk about, quoting you. "The failure of our society to enhance the skills of a significant segment of our workforce has left a disproportionate share with less skills. The effect is a widening wage gap between the skilled and the less skilled." And then you go on to talk about, "In a democratic society, such a stark bifurcation of wealth and income trends among large segments of the population can fuel resentment and political polarization," which I believe is happening today. And I share your concern about the concentration of wealth and really, what I view as splitting of the middle class in this country due to a host of issues. But I think it's important to emphasize that you said that strengthening elementary and secondary schooling in the United States, especially in the core disciplines of math, science, and written and verbal communications, is one crucial element in avoiding such outcomes. I would not expect you to comment on this, but I would just say for my colleagues, putting my budget hat on, this is of deep concern to me when I see that one-third of what has been proposed in the president's budget in terms of cuts are in education. And I think that goes right to the heart of what you speak about here. And I would not necessarily expect you to comment on the president's budget. But I think we should be listening to you, because we have huge wage and skill gaps that will affect us for decades to come, and we need to be investing in skills and education.

---end Stabenow---

[Darkwolf377]

Thanks for posting that.

The current Slobbering Dog Left is in trouble due to this kind of thing. The old fogey Republicans have beaten them at their own game--namely, by putting economic power in the hands of the individual (which lefties do NOT want), the individual will be able to create the liberty and independence the left claims they DO want.

As you've pointed out, as unions are collapsing--and with them the union power structure, which in many cases was nothing more than another level of management taking from the worker who got little in return--employees are taking over companies. This SEEMS like a concept libs would get behind, but the employees are not creating communes, they're creating...corporations. They aren't bringing down the rich business owners--they're BECOMING business owners.

In the end, the way of the right is bringing power to the individual, which is what individuals WANT, desire. The libs are relying on what THEY think the individual SHOULD want.

The whole Marxist ethos is completely unworkable because it goes against human nature. This never bothered the lefties because they figured they would be the ones in charge during the "temporary" transition period (which the Soviet Union never quite got out of), and they don't seem to grasp that the transition is never made from the Totalitarian stage because no person willingly gives up an advantage such as being in control of the working class.

Comm'nism--it just ain't right!

[FreeKeys]

extraordinary shift in recent years as to who controls the economic power of the country: most people are not aware that the top 1% receives more income each year than the bottom 100 million people taken together

CLICK ON THE GRAPH TO SEE A CLEARER VERSION OF IT

  "Never mind the low wages and harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism.  They were all that the national economies of the time could afford.  Capitalism did not create poverty -- it inherited it.  Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive.  As proof -- the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century." -- Ayn Rand

And check out the chart on THIS page.  Also see: "The Sweatshop Scam" HERE.

---

|  THE FIXED QUANTITY OF WEALTH FALLACY  |  The fixed quantity of resources fallacy  |
| THE FIXED QUANTITY OF RESOURCES FALLACY  |

---

As Robert A. Heinlein said, "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty."

In a modern open-market capitalist society, entrepreneurs get rich and the poor get better off as a result -- OF COURSE they're not going to get as rich as fast (duh). So, of course the gap thereby gets wider -- but the top AND BOTTOM of the gap both rise to levels much higher than before. The gap is widening?? Well, hooray for everyone’s sake! ESPECIALLY the poor!

If the rich weren’t free to "get ever richer," developing or investing in ever-increasing productivity, the poor would NEVER have any chance to improve their conditions at all, let alone to obtain their ever-increasing access to the latest tools of that expanding productivity, making every hour of their labor ever-more valuable. And YOU wouldn't EVER have the chance to read this or anything else brought to you by advanced technology. 

Freedom incents the creators to empower YOU and as many other people in the world as possible. There's little an entrepreneur likes better than a bunch of ever-richer loyal customers. Remember, the wealth you see around you didn’t always exist; it was and is CREATED wherever the right CONDITIONS OF FREEDOM (including the rule of natural law evenly applied, with the rigorous protection of individual rights including property rights and respect for contracts, effective prosecution of the perpetrators of force and fraud, and the ease of engaging in trade without the interference or "permissions" of politicians and bureaucrats) are established and guaranteed._

Now recognize the true nature and scope of evil and wherein it really lies. And don't be too limp a wimp to to call viciousness viciousness even if all your friends and neighbors fawn like groupies over any mantle of global "compassion" in which the evil appears to be cloaked.

-.

Find: "Popular understanding of economics is at least two centuries behind economists' understanding of the economy." HERE
And: "Wealth is not a fixed quantity and one person's success does not come at the expense of others ... Economists have understood [that] for over two centuries, but moralists have not caught up." HERE

---

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men together in a society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." -- Frederic Bastiat

   "Wealth, when you get right down to it, is not the cause of poverty." -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein, paraphrasing George Gilder

  "If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty and not the difference. Wealth is good.  ... wealth is not a world-wide round-robin of purse snatching, and ... the thing that makes you rich doesn't make me poor. ... Without Productivity, there wouldn't be any economics, or any economic thinking, good or bad, or any pizza, or anything else.  We would sit around and stare at rocks, and maybe later have some for dinner. ... Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable.  In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable."-- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich
 

(Again)      "Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable.  In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable." -- P.J. O'Rourke in Eat the Rich

[FreeKeys]

The above graph on the "Gap Between Rich and Poor" comes from http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm

[baseball_fan]

I see the Ayn Rand quote. I thought Alan Greenspan himself at one time was a serious follower of Ayn Rand's philosophy? This is just one citation coming up in google:

"Greenspan begins to develop a serious interest in Ayn Rand's philosophical ideas, which will later be known as Objectivism. He attends regular Saturday night salons at Rand's apartment, which include the opportunity to read draft sections of Rand's forthcoming novel, Atlas Shrugged."

source: http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/greenspan-time.html

[FreeKeys]

I thought Alan Greenspan himself at one time was a serious follower of Ayn Rand's philosophy?

Yes, at one time. He even wrote a couple of chapters in CAPITALISM: The Unknown Ideal

But Rand never approved of the Fed, and I'm sure she'd be disgusted with Greenspan's having anything to do with it.

[Don W]

DING DING DING DING We have a WINNER!