Posted on 02/21/2005 7:21:24 PM PST by 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 werent 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 its 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
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
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.
Headline: "Looking for New Ideas from the Left "
Well, there's the problem right there.
The left has no new ideas, just reshapes the old ones.
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.
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.
The left = steal an idea from the right, add a few billion dollars, say you said it first...
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.
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
And that would be, what? Infants and school children?
Personally, I'd move out of that cracker town.
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.
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.
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]
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---
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!
| THE FIXED QUANTITY OF WEALTH FALLACY | The fixed quantity of resources fallacy | | THE FIXED QUANTITY OF RESOURCES FALLACY |
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"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
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The above graph on the "Gap Between Rich and Poor" comes from http://freedomkeys.com/gap.htm
"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
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.
DING DING DING DING We have a WINNER!
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