On an episode of The Young Turks last week, one of the stories in the social-commentary hour had to do with a growing trend in Japan regarding the lack of interest in sexual activity among the Japanese youth. In a survey of young Japanese, 59% of females said they had little or no interest in sex or relationships, and 36% of males said the same. I was bothered by the uncharacteristically unreasonable commentary on the story from Cenk Uygur, who completely ignored the fact that 59% of women aren’t looking for sex and blamed the men who’ve given up on finding a sexual partner (for whom the term “herbivore men” has been coined) for their failure. I couldn’t help but write an e-mail to the show, and I might as well post it here:
I know it’s been well over a week since you guys discussed the story of the lack of interest in sexual activity among Japanese youth and the “herbivore men” but as someone who lives in Japan and has had some first-hand experience with this issue, Cenk’s egregious oversimplification and mischaracterization of the situation has stuck in my craw and I just need to say my piece.
Before I do I just want to mention that as a junior high school teacher, I actually find this lack of sexuality among young people to be a good thing. It wasn’t too long ago that I was a middle-school student in the U.S., and while I get the impression that American kids that age have become even more sexually active since the late 90s, even then there was some sex going on and at least a preponderance of puppy-love “relationships”. But Japanese students age 13-15 don’t seem to have any interest in the opposite sex whatsoever, which for their age I couldn’t be happier about. I love these kids and I want them to stay innocent as long as possible.
But when it comes to young adults for whom sexual exploration and romantic relationships are supposed to be the norm, it’s a completely different story, and Cenk is far too harsh on the Japanese men who are victims of the situation. He seems to think that the only reason 59% of young women are not looking for a partner is because the men are all sissies and no one appeals to them.
The 59% of young women in that survey who said they had no interest in sex are not sitting at the club waiting for a manly man to come sweep them off their feet—they’re sitting at home watching TV. Of the 41% who are open to sex and relationships, at least half of them—probably more but let’s be conservative—have boyfriends. That leaves roughly 20% of the female population for the remaining 80% of men (leaving out the lucky 20% with girlfriends) to compete for. To blame them for getting discouraged is like blaming the American unemployed for their plight when there is only 1 job-opening for every 5 job-seekers.
Statistically speaking, there are bound to be failures. A significant percentage of Japanese men are doomed to fail repeatedly (“again and again and again”), especially those who through no fault of their own lack the dominant-male gene. With every failure they get more discouraged, feel more and more worthless as human beings, and more likely to just give up altogether and attempt to find emotional and sexual fulfillment in a way that doesn’t require another person. Given the statistics it’s surprising to me that the number of these herbivore men is only 36%.
As an extremely self-confident guy who has had plenty of success with the ladies, it’s very easy for Cenk to sit on his high-horse and preach about going in strong and never giving up and that success will come eventually, but he’s never walked a day in their shoes.
Yes, there’s virtue in that attitude and it would be better for Japanese society if more men had that confidence and more women were open to it, but you have to understand the historical context. The alienating effect of modern technology plays a huge role, but you also have to consider that for thousands of years, women in Japanese society were treated as little more than semen-receptacles, and now that they’re more empowered it’s no wonder that nearly two-thirds of them reject that role and choose a non-sexual lifestyle. As for the men, it’s no wonder that many of them are rejecting their own role as the dominant-male and choosing a lifestyle that is the polar opposite of subjugating women. Perhaps that’s over-reactionary on their part, but it can’t be so easily dismissed as something done out of weakness, cowardice, or laziness.
Finally, regarding Cenk’s comment about how if he were young and single again he’d be teaching English in Japan and scooping up all the girls the Japanese men are too sissy to get, I wish he could somehow give it a try and see how he does. I’ve been a bit of a herbivore myself for most of my life but nowadays I’m much more confident, but in Japan it’s just not easy for anyone these days. Casual sex is one thing and if you try enough times you’re bound to succeed eventually, but if what you’re actually looking for is a long-term relationship, that is next to impossible in this climate unless you’ve got money or power, and foreigners who teach English for a living have neither.
My memory apparently didn’t do justice to how beautiful this place is, and nor will any of the pictures I took, but I’m going to post a bunch of them here anyway.
On Thursday I got a ride with Krissi’s room-mate David to Dargan’s and had lunch at her bar, then killed the next few hours before her shift ended walking down to the beach I used to sit at all the time, then up to a cliff overlooking Ledbetter beach which was one of the first places Krissi took me, Corey, and Myson on the night we first arrived in Santa Barbara and remains my favorite spot in the city. I watched the surfers for awhile (I’m pretty sure I saw a small shark, but it swam away before I got a good look) then sat on a bench and read for awhile until it was time to head back.
I got back to Dargan’s around 5:30 and was introduced to a couple of Krissi’s friends, then Kevin showed up and we all had a beer until Krissi was finished and we went across the street to the Press Room to have one more.
After that, Krissi and I parted ways with the rest of them and spent the next hour and a half preparing to go camping, which involved obtaining things like water, alcohol, and firewood. It was already dark by the time we headed up into the mountains of Los Padres National Forest, turned onto Paradise Road, and eventually found a nice little spot far from any other campers.
The stars were more brilliant than I’ve seen in years, and while it was a bit more chilly than I would have expected the atmosphere was extremely nice. Krissi and I drank beer and whiskey, tended to the fire, listened to music on some crappy little I-pod speakers we bought for the trip and which she plans to return, and eventually reached the level of drunkenness where the two of us really click and we remember as clearly as ever why we’re still friends. The two of us are very different people on the outside—she’s extremely outgoing while I’m pretty introverted—but our minds somehow think in very similar ways about many things. We’ve shared so many experiences and spent so much time with each other (albeit spread out over nearly 13 years) that there’s a short-hand that’s developed between us in terms of conversation, and we almost never have to explain ourselves to each other because we already understand.
Krissi is also the only person on earth to whom I’ve recommended The Young Turks who actually checked it out and liked it enough to also pay for membership. After watching Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian for almost two years it was awesome to finally be around someone who not only loves the show but also can’t help but use phrases like, “disaster” and “for the win” in normal conversation. It also made talking politics that much easier, as apparently there’s also a kind of shorthand among people who get their news from the same source.
Neither of us have any clue when we passed out, but it was lucky that both the alcohol and the firewood ran out at about the same time. I very unwisely decided to forego my usual water-chugging routine before passing out after a night of drinking, as I thought we’d need all our water reserves for the next day’s hike. I woke up with a bad hangover and the headache lingered well into the afternoon, but luckily the surroundings were so damn beautiful and my company so pleasant that it hardly mattered.
We did, however, decide not to do a strenuous hike and instead walk a relatively flat five-mile road to a place in the mountains called Red Rock which is a popular swimming hole. You can normally drive to a parking lot only half a mile from the pond, but there’s a bridge closed off five miles in so we had no choice but to hike. I didn’t mind the walk but Krissi’s feet blistered up pretty bad and by the end of the day it was very difficult for her. Before going we picked up a 12-pack of beer—Coor’s Light of all things—and though we each had six over the course of the next few hours it barely had any effect at all other than to make me need to urinate more frequently than I would have otherwise.
When we got to the swimming hole there was a group of about ten middle-school age boys there but luckily enough they went away shortly after we arrived and we had the whole place to ourselves for about an hour. We went swimming, which was extremely refreshing after the long walk, and jumped off one of the big boulders in the middle of the pond, which I have to admit was a bit nerve-wracking but once you were up there it was really the only easy way down.
We talked and sun-bathed on another rock for a little while, then another guy came along who was there on his own and since it was his first time there Krissi got back in and showed him how to jump off the rock. When we parted ways I asked him for his name—Brandon—and he laughed as though it was ridiculous that I’d ask such a thing when we’ll almost certainly never see each other again. I always ask for people’s names though. It’s kind of a ‘thing’ with me, and you’d be surprised how often you run into people again when you never thought you would. On our long walk back to the car, he sure enough passed us on his bicycle and I said, “It’s Brandon!” as he biked by, apparently extremely exhausted because all he said was “kill me.”
We spotted a cool-looking snake that was colored like a cow, and Krissi kept bringing it up for the rest of the day like a 7-year-old girl, which I thought was really cute of her.
The sun was dipping pretty low by the time we got back to the car, and it was officially down by the time we got back to her apartment. We spent the rest of the evening just “kickin’ it”, getting some Mexican food from a nearby restaurant (which we both agreed was sadly disappointing), drank Margeritas and watched a cartoon called “Archer” which is effing hilarious.
Krissi’s got to work until 6:00 again today, but in the mean-time Kevin is coming to pick me up and we’ll be kickin’ it with a girl named Rachel who also went to our high school and is coincidentally in town today as well.
I have no idea what the deal will be tonight, but I’m sure it’ll be fun. It couldn’t be clearer that coming here for this week during my brief time back in America was a very good decision.
I haven’t written about Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks in awhile, but last night he told a story on his show that blew me away. Hearing Cenk’s account of how MSNBC dumped him as a host in spite of his excellent ratings, then how he turned down their offer to make almost twice as much money as a contributor so long as he toned it down and kept his mouth shut about the inner workings of the network made me prouder than ever to be a TYT soldier. I think it calls for some over-the-top gushing, which I shall engage in presently in the hopes that it might get a few more people to watch the online show.
It took me far too long to discover the online news-and-commentary show The Young Turks, but once I did I couldn’t remember how I’d ever managed to digest the news without it. There are so many ways to get informed about politics these days, and while many people still believe there’s such a thing as “objective” newsmedia and that this alone is the proper way to obtain information, I’ve long since been of the opinion that there is no such thing as true objectivity, and if you’re going to listen to a news anchor or cable host every night, you might as well know exactly where they’re coming from and through what kind of lens your information is being filtered.
What made The Young Turks so perfect is that the lens through which its host Cenk Uygur views politics is almost identical to mine, and to all freethinking progressives. While most of the media still insists on framing the issues in terms of conservative Republicans vs. liberal Democrats, Cenk understands that the real power-struggle going on is between the Washington establishment (which includes Wall Street banks, oil companies, defense contractors, and every other giant corporation that buys influence in D.C.) and the masses of average American people. He’s not afraid to point out that the Democrats are not nearly as liberal as they’d have us believe, and in many cases (military spending, drug policy, and so on) the Republicans aren’t actually ‘conservative’ in the true sense of the word.
But it wasn’t until President Obama started revealing his true colors as more of a Washington-insider than the People’s Champion he ran as that I started tuning into TYT every day and became a paying member. While almost every other figure in the liberal media insisted on not only giving the president the benefit of the doubt on his compromises with Republicans but singing the praises of his hollow victories like health-care reform (massive gift to insurance companies) and so-called ‘historic’ financial reform (massive gift to investment bankers), Cenk Uygur was not the least bit shy about delving into the details of these policies and loudly trumpeting his opinion—one which I and apparently hundreds of thousands of others share—that this is not the kind of ‘change’ we were promised, that Obama’s ‘accomplishments’ are little more than window-dressing, tinkering around with a few cogs in a machine that’s on the verge of a complete breakdown.
Cenk is the only one who consistently and loudly calls attention to the core problem at the heart of the American political system: the politicians do not work for the people they represent—they work for the people who pay them. As long as politicians take money from private health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical companies, we’ll never get real health care reform. As long as politicians take money from defense contractors, we’ll never stop wasting money on unnecessary wars. As long as politicians take money from Wall Street, our financial system will never be secure enough to prevent future collapses from happening.
This is a truth so obvious that you’d think Americans from all political backgrounds would be able to understand it, but most people are still trapped in the Left vs. Right narrative fed to them by the mainstream media, and that’s why it was such a treat to see Cenk bring this message right into the heart of the beast when he began guest-hosting some of the cable news shows on MSNBC and eventually took over as the regular host at 6 p.m.
Cenk understood that the problem with the mainstream media is essentially the same as the problem with government: the journalists work for the people who pay them, and the people who pay them work for giant corporations which themselves collect their revenue from other giant corporations. Cable-news hosts understand that certain narratives are perfectly acceptable to present, while others shouldn’t be touched with a ten-foot pole. They may not be explicitly ordered by the higher-ups to stay away from these themes, but it’s somewhat of an unspoken etiquette that you can be as fierce as you want towards a particular politician or political party, but the Establishment itself should always be respected.
And so it was both fascinating and delightful to watch Cenk enter the lion’s den and trample all over this etiquette, take on the talking-heads and make those heads explode. When a Republican would make a disingenuous argument, Cenk would rip them to shreds and smile while doing so, but he’d even go after so-called progressive Democrats who talked about the need for compromises such as raising the Social Security Retirement age, his incredulous reaction to their unnecessary capitulations a sweet cathartic release of my own frustration at being so casually tossed under the bus by my so-called ‘representatives’ in government.
Cenk spoke truth to power within a machine that essentially runs on deference to that power. The most iconic moment was probably the time Cenk asserted in front of an entire panel of conventional-wisdom peddlers like Jonathan Alter that over 90% of the politicians in both parties in Washington were bought-and-paid-for, and the pundits acted as though he’d just accused Mother Teresa of being a child-molester. Cenk asked them to name a few politicians that weren’t bought, and the best Alter could come up with was “Chuck Schumer”, one of Wall Street’s biggest helpers on the hill.
During Cenk’s run at MSNBC, he lent the network a certain degree of credibility that it had never had before, as it seemed that if they were going to let someone go after the establishment as forcefully as Cenk went after them, they must not be completely in the pockets of the corporate plutocracy.
But alas, it turns out that it was only a fluke. Like Howard Beale in the iconic film Network, Cenk Uygur could only “meddle with the primal forces of nature” for a short while before being taken into a back-room and told how the world really works.
According to Cenk, he was told by one of the producers there that there are ‘two audiences’: the average people to whom he appealed, and the management. And while he was having incredible success with the average people—his ratings were even higher than Ed Schultz’s had been in the same time-slot, he was crushing Wolf Blitzer on a consistent basis, and even beating Fox News among the younger demographic—the management, however, wasn’t happy. They didn’t like his ‘tone’ and felt that he wasn’t ‘playing ball’. Some ‘people in Washington’ weren’t happy with him, and as such he was under warning to tone it down a bit and show some more deference to the politicians who came on his show.
A normal person would have probably nodded his head and accepted this direction, grateful just to be given a second chance, but that’s not Cenk’s style. He promised his TYT viewers when he took the job that he would never become a tool of the establishment, and instead of backing off he doubled-down, and from April through June came down even harder on the crooked politicians, on the disingenuous Republicans, and most of all on the increasingly right-leaning Obama administration. Cenk went unscripted and spoke out forcefully, calling on progressives to stand up and fight, to stop waiting for our leaders in Washington to change things for us and to step up and demand change for ourselves.
Lo and behold, after a few months of this Cenk was called into the office again and told that he would no longer be the host at 6 p.m. They wanted him in a ‘different role’—that of a paid contributor, making the occasional appearance on some of MSNBC’s other shows, just another drop in the ocean of talking-heads at the network’s disposal. Of course, they’d be willing to pay him even more than he was making as a host. Less work, more money? Okay…what’s the catch?
The only catch, it seems, was that Cenk couldn’t talk about what had gone on behind the scenes at MSNBC. He’d basically just discovered from personal experience why the picture of Washington we get from the media is so skewed, but he couldn’t share that insight with his TYT audience if he took the deal. They told him, “Outsiders are cool, everybody would love to be an outsider…but we’re not outsiders. We’re insiders. We’re the establishment.”
Such an incredibly revealing piece of insight would be invaluable to share with The Young Turks audience, to give us a better understanding of the way the media world operates. All he had to do to remain at MSNBC as a contributor was to keep this story to himself.
And so came the Moment of Truth. Cenk had to decide which was his higher priority—his television career or his online audience. He chose us.
On behalf of all TYT members and fans, I want to express our sincerest “Thank You” to Cenk for doing the right thing. We won’t get to see him on TV anymore letting loose on the pundits and bringing the frustration of progressives out into the spotlight for the entire Washington establishment to see, but now we’ll have him all to ourselves again as he can turn all his focus and attention back to the show he created and within which he’s not bound by any strings.
I hope this is the dawn of a new era for TYT. Cenk has now been inside the beast—it swallowed him up, he didn’t sit right in its stomach, and it spit him back out—and now he knows a bit more about its inner workings. And now that he’s got nothing left to lose in terms of the establishment media, he can feel even freer to speak his mind even more forcefully than before.
Thanks to Cenk, we now have a better understanding of how the media machine works and why it’s so pathetically ill-suited to make democracy function properly: it’s not that there’s a secret cabal of powerful men in a back-room somewhere calling all the shots—it’s simply that the people in charge of the media world are closely connected to the people in charge in the political world, and as such they won’t allow their friends in the political world to be challenged too strongly. If you only watch Old Media, you will never get an untainted view of politics.
The New Media is the future of journalism, and with the unprecedented success of The Young Turks, Cenk is leading the way. His stint at MSNBC will probably be spun as a failure in the rest of the media, but to us it should be seen as a triumph. Those of us who’ve chosen to get most of our political commentary from Cenk Uygur can now be sure we picked the right guy. The story of how Cenk refused to be gobbled up by the establishment should be told far and wide, and it should help to get more people watching the show. Let’s keep spreading the word, keep recruiting new soldiers, and keep building the movement. One day it might be big enough to accomplish something, even without the help of the mainstream media.
I’m willing to bet anyone €1,000 that Barack Obama will concede to Republicans’ demands to extend the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans. I’m dead serious. I’ve never been more certain of anything in politics, and when you’re certain of something you want to make some money gambling on it. The only problem is that I don’t think I’d be able to find anyone dumb enough to take the other end of the bet.
Here’s the situation. After the 2010 electoral blow-out handing control of the House of Representatives to the Republican Party, the conventional wisdom is that Democrats lost their majority because they were unwilling to compromise enough with Republicans. Never mind that this is completely absurd—Obama did nothing but compromise—it’s the story that most of the media is going with.
So what better way to push back against that narrative than to reach a compromise with the Republicans over the tax-cuts issue? Obama’s stated position is that he wants to extend the Bush tax cuts for 98% of Americans but let the tax-rates for the wealthiest 2% revert back to Clinton-era levels. The Republican Party’s position is that all of the tax cuts should be extended permanently.
In his news conference on Wednesday, after Republicans took the House and gained seats in the Senate, Mr. Obama stuck to his argument that it was important to extend the tax cuts for the middle class while expressing flexibility by saying he was “absolutely” willing to negotiate on the matter.
Don’t worry too much though—he’s drawn a line in the sand:
But at his afternoon briefing, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made clear that the one thing Mr. Obama will not negotiate about is a permanent extension of the high-income tax cuts. “The president does not believe, and I think would not accept, permanently extending the upper-end tax cuts,” he said.
He won’t permanently extend the tax-cuts for the wealthy, but he’s not saying anything about extending them temporarily.
Won’t somebody, anybody, please bet me €1,000 that Obama won’t even agree to a temporary extension? I’m as certain that he will as I am that it will rain somewhere on Earth today.
Obama’s 2012 strategy is painfully clear. Continue playing the bipartisan-outreach game. Keep working with Republicans as much as possible, and force them to keep obstructing. Make it as clear as possible in the minds of the public that he is trying to work with Republicans but the Republicans won’t let him.
But they will work with him on getting those Bush tax-cuts extended for the wealthy. They’ll call it “compromise” behind closed doors but once the deal is made they’ll immediately rush out in front of the cameras to brag about how they got Barack-the-dog to heal, to see the error of his ways and agree not to raise taxes on the “job-creators” in a time of a recession. As an added bonus, they can still blame him for the economic mess that the tax-cuts won’t get us out of because they’ll claim those “job creators” would have created a lot more jobs if they’d had the security of knowing the tax-cuts would be permanent.
As long as the Washington conventional wisdom is that Obama needs to adopt more Republican proposals, that’s exactly what Obama will do. He is undoubtedly one of the weakest presidents this country has ever had. He could respond to the election results by coming back strong, but instead he’ll take the path of least resistance and do what everyone in the establishment wants him to do: lie low, let the Republicans call all the shots, and prepare to be destroyed in 2012.
I’ll close with the only bit of hope I can muster, by mentioning that Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks is hosting the 3:00 hour on MSNBC all month, so check him out if you can. He’ll be pushing back against the prevailing narrative that the election was lost because Democrats did too much and he’ll be urging them to fight harder. Hopefully some will be listening.
Despite the proclamations from Obama and the democrats that they passed “the most sweeping financial reform since the Great Depression”, very little has actually changed in the way Wall Street does business. The incentive structure that rewards employees for creating financial bubbles that eventually burst and cost taxpayers billions of dollars remains firmly in place. Not only that, but now that the precedent has been set that if Wall Street crashes the economy absolutely no harm will come to any of them personally, things may actually have gotten worse.
Wall Street firms are gearing up to hand out 144 billion dollars in bonuses this year. Wall Street bankers will be taking home tens of millions of dollars not because they earned it or that their talents are actually worth it, but because they’ve simply created this wealth out of thin air and don’t have to worry about losing it. If something goes wrong—and it almost certainly will—it’s the schmucks who can’t afford to buy half of Congress who’ll have to pay.
To the Wall Street types it’s nothing more than a game. There are winners and there are losers, and abstract concepts like morality and social responsibility don’t enter into it. They’ll make their strategic calculations and take the course that leads to the best financial outcome for them, even if it’s the worst possible outcome for everyone else. The only way to change the outcome of the game is to change the rules.
But it doesn’t need to be a huge, complicated piece of legislation. If we just impose one new rule on Wall Street—one that happens to be simple enough for everyone to understand—it could change everything.
The idea is to take the top 100 people at the Wall Street firms, the ones who make the decisions about what businesses to be in, how to deploy capital, who to hire and fire, and make them sign an agreement that they’ll put their entire net worth on the line. They’ll have to create a security out of their own personal money that would be the first thing to disappear if something goes wrong. Yes, the taxpayers would still be on the line for however many billions their reckless behavior costs the economy, but the first few hundred million will have to come directly out of their pockets.
What could be more reasonable than forcing these gamblers to actually gamble with their own money? If we do that, the incentive structure changes entirely. Yes, they can keep creating these bubbles and raking in massive amounts of short-term profit by putting the economy in jeopardy, but if they go too far and it all comes crashing down, their mansions and yachts will be the first things to go.
Right now, Wall Street bankers take all of the gains and suffer none of the losses. They’ll get their bonuses no matter what economic harm they do. But if we change the game slightly so that they’ll have to suffer the losses before anyone else, they might not want to take such huge risks. They might want to play it safe instead, to slowly accumulate wealth as the economy slowly accumulates strength. The rising tide really would life all ships in that case, rather than the way it is now with Wall Street tilting the oceans so that all of the water flows to their end while grounding the ships on the other side.
Cohan suggests that the Wall Street firms take it upon themselves to make such an agreement because it would be good for business. Investors would feel far safer putting their money in a financial firm run by people who have even more at stake than they do. It would be wonderful if a few firms started doing this and the rest were forced to follow suit.
But apparently no Wall Street firms are willing to take that risk. They’re perfectly willing to risk other peoples’ money, but not their own. That can only mean that when they make their strategic calculations they assign a high degree of probability to another financial crisis happening, otherwise there’d be no harm in making such an agreement. But they know they can make more money by inflating the bubbles and dealing with another crisis than by going back to safer tactics. With the rules as they currently exist, we guarantee another crash because another crash is in the bankers’ best financial interest.
All we need to do is change their incentives, and if they won’t do it willingly we have to impose this rule on them. Make them put their own net worth on the line, make them financially responsible for the things they do, and watch as they start doing things more responsibly.
No big pieces of legislation necessary. Just one quick fix, one proposal that everyone can understand and that would therefore be extremely politically difficult to oppose. There’s no reason this proposal can’t be made. We just need one representative willing to make it.
I know—I’ve been sitting on this one for a long time because this kind of stuff always bores me to death unless I hear it from someone who can actually make it entertaining. I’ll do my best to make this an informative and enjoyable read, but I have to give credit to Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks for maintaining my attention long enough to get this argument through to me.
So let’s start with a fun little anecdote. Let’s say you’re a megalomaniacal owner of a giant corporation that manufactures something. It doesn’t really matter what it is, but let’s go with fish-flops:
Fish-Flop Inc. is enormously successful, raking in millions of dollars a year in profit. You’ve got fish-flop factories all over America employing thousands of workers. You may be an evil greedy bastard, but you’re having a positive impact on the economy both by contributing to the total GDP and providing American workers with a decent wage that allows them to go out and spend money on other consumer goods.
Even though you take home millions of dollars a year and live quite comfortably, you could always use a little more, so you use some of your wealth to lobby the government to cut your taxes. Let’s say you were paying 50%, but your lobbying efforts were successful and that got lowered to 30%. So if you were averaging $10 million a year in profits and were giving $5 million back to the government, now you get to keep $7 million for yourself.
Now you’ve got more money than you know what to do with. You spend as much of it on luxury goods and services as you can, letting your wealth trickle-down to the clothing designers, fancy hotel owners, and private-jet manufacturers of the world, but you’re still sitting on a huge pile of cash at the end of the day. You put that to the side so that your dimwitted spoiled children can inherit it one day and use it to make up for the fact that they never learned to do anything for themselves—now they’ll be able to continue paying people to do things for them, and that wealth will trickle down to the financial consultants, travel agents, and limousine drivers of the world.
And since you’ve got so much extra money, why not get your fish-flop factories to downsize a little bit—lay off some workers here and there to save on labor and drive that net-income of yours right up to $8 million. After all, your kids are pretty stupid. They’re going to need a lot of inheritance money. In fact, you might want to go easy on the spending as well. Your wealth has done enough trickling down already.
But wait—there’s trouble brewing! A democrat has been elected to the White House and democratic majorities now control both houses of congress. Not only that, but these are real democrats—ones you and your friends haven’t bought. Ones who are actually concerned about the middle class and the country’s education and infrastructure and are willing to use your money to cover the cost of improving these things.
Massive tax-increases are slammed on the wealthiest Americans, and that means you. Suddenly you’re required to pay a whopping 70% of your gross income, meaning you only get to keep $3 million a year and give the rest to Uncle Sam.
No way are you going to fork $7 million over to the government and only keep a paltry $3 million for yourself. You’ll show them—you’re going to take most of that $10 million your business is making and put it right back into Fish Flop Inc. You’re going to hire more workers and build more factories. You’re going to develop newer and better fish-flops that even more people will want to buy. If all goes well, you’ll double your gross income in which case you’ll be able to keep $6 million for yourself.
It occurs to you that when you die, the government is going to take a huge chunk out of your kids’ inheritance anyway, so perhaps hoarding money isn’t the best strategy. In fact, maybe you should stop spoiling your kids and make them go out in the real world and learn how to make money on their own. You know the expression: “Give a man a pair of fish-flops and he’ll be walking around in style for a day. Teach a man to make his own fish-flops and he’s set for life.”
This little story is a counter-narrative to the prevailing wisdom that cutting taxes for the rich is a cure-all for the economy. The wealthiest Americans, we are told, are the “job creators”. Cut their taxes and they’ll have more money to invest in their businesses, which means more workers will get hired and more people will have more money to spend on consumer goods and the economy improves all around. Direct more wealth to the top and more will trickle-down to the bottom.
This is such a simple argument that almost everybody accepts it without question. Nobody even considers that things might be more complicated than that. That allowing the rich to keep more of their money might be a dis-incentive to invest in their business because they’re making plenty of money already. That the money they do get to keep usually only goes to industries that cater to the wealthy and not to all businesses equally. That with a big enough hoard of money to sit on, wealthy families can settle comfortably into a worry-free lifestyle of which their kids will never have to know anything different.
More importantly, the idea that raising taxes on the wealthy actually increases their incentive to put more money into their businesses is highly counter-intuitive, but it’s logical when you think about it. If more of your wealth is tied up in your business and less is sitting in your bank account, you’re going to want to grow that business.
Of course you shouldn’t trust anecdotal evidence and thought-experiments. Just consider the facts. This is a graph showing the marginal tax-rates for the wealthiest Americans over the last 80 years plotted alongside changes in national GDP:
Of course correlation doesn’t equal causation, but one thing that’s clear is that lower tax rates do not automatically equal economic growth and higher tax rates do not automatically equal economic decline. Just look at the period when taxes were at their highest: between 1951 and 1963. This is often thought of as the Golden Age of America, the time of the greatest middle-class prosperity, and the numbers bear that out: the economy grew by an average annual rate of 3.71%. But during the last decade, when taxes were extremely low, average growth has been a mere 1.71%
In the upcoming mid-term elections, republicans are running on the same old platform of tax cuts across the board, especially for the wealthy. One of their biggest memes is that we can’t possibly afford to repeal the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% because the economy just can’t afford it. Well, think about Fish Flop Inc. and consider the following facts (also courtesy of The Young Turks):
During the 8 years of the Bush presidency, total national income was $2.74 trillion less than the 2000 levels. Of course a lot of that had to do with the economic crash at the end, but even if you limit it to 2003-2007, it’s still less than the 2000 levels by $951 billion. Bush cost the economy a total of $1.8 trillion in his 8 years as president, and if you include the effects of his policies extending into 2010, that number rises to $2.3 trillion.
Yeah, those tax-cuts worked wonders for the economy and we obviously need to keep them in place, right?
One more fact to leave you with: One out of every eight dollars in tax-cuts brought to you by the Bush administration went to the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans. Not just the top 2% or the top 1%, but to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent.
These are supposedly the “job-creators” right? How many jobs were created thanks to that? How many more people were hired to make fish-flops and other valuable merchandise? Did that top one one-thousandth of Americans use their extra income to hire new workers, or did they just add it to their already massive pile?
The next time you see a republican politician on TV imploring us to make the Bush tax-rates permanent or risk the destruction of America as we know it, feel free to laugh.
If you happen to live in the U.S. and you happen to own a TV and you happen to find yourself available to watch it at 6 p.m. Eastern this week, I’d highly recommend turning on MSNBC, as the host of The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, whom I’ve mentioned on this blog countless times, will be guest-hosting The Ed Show all week.
The appeal of The Young Turks isn’t just that Cenk is entertaining, likable, a master communicator, and right about almost everything, but that he doesn’t buy into any of the Washington establishment conventional wisdom bullshit that you find almost everywhere else on cable news. He fights for progressive causes and goes after anyone standing in the way regardless of which party they’re from.
Here’s a sample from yesterday’s show, in which he demolishes the myth that Social Security is in trouble and goes after a democrat for not committing to vote against any bill that will make cuts to the program:
Ironically, more people watch The Young Turks every day on YouTube than any cable news show, but the establishment doesn’t pay any attention because they think opinions don’t count if they’re online. When Cenk takes his message to the TV airwaves, the establishment pays attention (one can even speculate that Robert Gibbs’ “professional left” comments were sparked by Cenk’s unrestrained criticism of the Obama White House when he hosted the 3:00 hour the week before last). Watch the show, boost the ratings, and send Washington the message that this is the kind of message that resonates.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember voting for Glenn Beck for president. I don’t think many Obama supporters, upon casting their vote in 2008, were hoping that once president he would bend over backwards to do everything he possibly could to appease Fox News. I could be wrong—maybe Obama voters were really hoping for a president who would ignore progressives and listen only to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—but somehow I find that hard to believe.
Excuse me for ranting but I’ve got the need. Cenk Uygur’s epic rant over the Shirley Sherrod debacle on Wednesday’s Young Turks got me fired up. Between that and a dozen other columns and blog entries I’ve read these last couple of days, it’s clear that this story is far more significant than I initially realized.
At first my anger was directed almost entirely at Fox News. I couldn’t believe how so many people can still see them as an actual news organization when they clearly have a political agenda and will rush to broadcast any story that fits their pre-existing narrative with a deliberate disregard for what the actual facts are. Their #1 agenda is to do political harm to Obama. When presented with a heavily-edited video that seemed to show an employee of Obama’s department of agriculture boasting about how she discriminated against a white farmer, they didn’t waste a single moment checking to see whether it was what it appeared to be.
They could have found the entire unedited video but didn’t. They could have tried to contact Sherrod for her side of the story but didn’t. Most egregiously, they didn’t even try to contact the white farmers who were supposedly the victims of this discrimination, as if they had they would have learned—as the rest of the country learned when actual journalists stepped onto the scene—that Sherrod actually helped them save their farm, and that the story she’d been telling in that video was about how she learned that it was wrong to discriminate based on color.
But the Obama White House fired Shirley Sherrod before any journalism was done—before any basic questions were even asked. Sherrod told reporters that she actually had to pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation via text message because she had to be gone by the time Glenn Beck went on the air.
Brillliant move on the White House’s part. Obviously they learned their lesson from the Van Jones fiasco, when they let Fox News hammer them for days before finally getting rid of him. No doubt they were patting themselves on the back for swift, decisive action when they got rid of Sherrod within a single news cycle.
Surely they had fixed everything. Fox News, upon seeing how quickly the administration caved in to them, would undoubtedly give him all the credit in the world and begin reporting how they’d been wrong about him all along—that he’s really not a reverse-racist and that he should be applauded for getting rid of Sherrod.
Of course not. Their number one agenda, remember, is to harm Obama politically. So when he did exactly what they wanted him to do, they hammered him for that! How could he fire her so quickly before checking all the facts? I can’t believe he just threw that poor woman under the bus like that. I mean, we’re Fox News so it’s not our job to check the facts but surely the White House has a responsibility to get the whole story before taking action.
And on that, they’re absolutely right. It’s not Fox News’s responsibility to report the truth—they are a propaganda network, not a news organization—but the White House does have a responsibility to make sure that the actions they take are based on hard facts and solid evidence.
But apparently that’s not how they operate. It would seem that they’ve got their eyes on Fox News at all times and stand ever poised to deflate whatever criticism that network might be leveling against them. They say Van Jones is a communist? Get rid of him. They say ACORN is full of criminals? Cut off its funding. Just please don’t hate us, right-wingers. We swear we’ll do whatever you say, Glenn Beck. Just stop saying mean things about us. What is it you want us to do? Just tell us who to fire and they’ll be out of here by 5 p.m.
Last year, in the midst of the health care debacle, I asked whether Obama was a pussy or a sell-out. I keep going back and forth on that question, but this drove me firmly back to the pussy side of the equation. Running the country based on Fox News talking points? How weak and pathetic can you possibly be?
What the hell do you think you’re actually accomplishing with this strategy? You think that if you keep caving in to Fox News, one day conservatives are suddenly going to change their minds about you? That if you keep compromising on all your progressive ideals and delivering watered-down, industry-friendly legislation, that right-wingers are going to start saying, “You know, maybe we were wrong about him. He might not be a radical socialist after all.”
News for you: That. Will. Never. Fucking. Happen.
So deal with it. Give up this absurd act of chasing your own tail all day long, turn off the goddamn Fox News channel, and run the country the way you would run it if there were no such thing as the Glenn Beck program.
Or better yet, listen to both sides. Progressives have criticisms too, and theirs are actually based in reality. Instead of only taking Bill O’Reilly’s advice, try listening to Rachel Maddow for once. Her advice is actually designed to help you.
The Shirley Sherrod thing, in itself, is just a small story. But taken in the larger context of the way Barack Obama has been conducting his administration, it’s one of the most important political events of his presidency. It’s one of those Wizard of Oz moments when the curtain is drawn back and you see who’s really running the show.
The strategy is clear: Don’t waste any time worrying about what liberals and progressives are saying because liberals and progressives don’t matter. They will never vote for republicans, so you gain nothing by doing anything more than the bare minimum to appease them. You win elections by appealing to swing-voters, to the moderate center, to the people who want to see both parties working together in a bipartisan fashion to accomplish things in Washington. When conservatives criticize you, you should immediately respond to that criticism in order to show how much of a centrist you are and how much you’re willing to listen to the other side.
The strategy is also dead wrong. I don’t know who this imaginary moderate centrist voter is, but I’ve never met him. Is there a single American voter who wasn’t sure about Obama until he dropped the public option, watered-down financial reform, called for more offshore oil drilling, fired Van Jones and de-funded ACORN? Seriously, I want to know how many people will go to the polls and vote for democrats this Fall because Obama proved to them that he’s not ‘too liberal’.
It’s complete and utter bullshit, and it’s so frustrating that Obama is so wrapped up inside his Washington bubble that he can’t even see it. He thinks that Bush’s approval ratings were so low because he spent too much time appeasing his base and never compromising with the other side. Wrong—Bush’s approval ratings were so low because everything he did as president was a total disaster. But at least he got shit done.
Why don’t you try that strategy for awhile, Obama? Why don’t you take a “Bring ‘em on” approach to Fox News and let them say whatever the hell they want to say while you deliver on the Change you promised? The Washington punditocracy will no doubt say you’ve gone off the deep-end, that you’re drifting perilously to the left and that this center-right country won’t stand for it. But you know what? You might find that in the Fall, liberals and progressives will actually come out and vote instead of staying home. You might even find that these all-important centrist-moderates you’re so concerned about actually come out and vote for democrats as well because…golly gee…it turns out they didn’t actually care about bipartisan posturing as much as they cared about government actually getting shit done.
Wake up, Obama. You’ve handed control of the country over to Fox News and you wonder why you’re heading for a failed presidency. In 2012 you should just let voters write in Glenn Beck’s name instead of yours so he can run the country directly without a middle-man.
The argument for American troops remaining in Afghanistan is essentially that Afghanistan needs our help. Without a strong U.S. military presence there, the Taliban will retake control, impose brutal Sharia law on all the citizens, and life for the Afghan people will be much worse than if we stay.
If that was all there was to it, I’d be saying we should stay. If we had the capability to really make Afghanistan a better country through our military presence, then I’d be the first to advocate intervening in their affairs. Not only that, but I’d also call for us to intervene in Somalia, Darfur, and everywhere else where people are suffering at the hands of brutal, corrupt, or nonexistent governments.
I’m not opposed to the idea of American Interventionism—I simply recognize that there is no “America” anymore, at least not in the sense that most people believe.
In the prophetic 1976 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky spells it out brilliantly in the pivotal scene in which network chairman Arthur Jensen explains to Howard Beale, his news-anchor-turned-crusader-for-America, how the world really works:
For those who still believe that America can and should spread its ideals throughout the world and bring peace and democracy to all, I would emphasize these words:
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels.
…
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
There is “America” and there is America. “America” is the land of the free, home of the brave, champion of human rights and individual liberty, and crusader for the rights of man worldwide. America, on the other hand, is a governmental structure which has made itself extremely well-suited to Big Business interests. Multi-national corporations can do extremely well by putting America to good use. Tax-loopholes, virtually no regulation, and the strongest military the world has ever seen.
The only flaw in Arthur Jensen’s speech is this:
And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that perfect world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.
In all fairness to Chayefsky, this is what the corporate titans who really control the world probably tell themselves to justify their actions—that when all the world is a business there will be no need for war. But they ignore one important thing: war is great business.
Military and defense contractors, oil companies, drug-lords, corrupt government officials, and a slew of multi-national corporations all stand to make loads of money through continued American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is their bidding that our troops are doing there. American interventionism is actually corporate interventionism conducted through America.
But what if “America” actually existed? What if, as a nation, we collectively decided to intervene in countries that needed our help? What if instead of deploying armies of soldiers equipped with guns and bombs, we deployed armies of doctors equipped with medical supplies?
If you have the time, I’d strongly recommending watching this clip from the Young Turks’ “Rethink Reviews” segment in which documentary-film critic Jonathan Kim discusses the film “Living in Emergency” (about Doctors Without Borders) with Cenk Uygur (discussion begins at 4:49):
Doctors Without Borders is a non-governmental organization that does exactly the kind of intervention I wish America would do—sending doctors into impoverished nations and war-zones to offer humanitarian assistance to the people who need it most.
For those of you without the time or patience to sit through the whole clip, here is what Doctors With Borders did in 2006 alone:
• Held more than 9 million out-patient consultations
• Hospitalized half a million patients
• Delivered 99,000 babies
• Treated 1.8 million people for malaria
• Treated 150,000 malnourished children
• Provided 100,000 people with HIV and AIDS retro-virus therapy
• Vaccinated 1.8 million people against meningitis
• Conducted 64,000 surgeries
They did this with a team of 20,000-26,000 doctors and nurses who work for free, either out of the goodness of their hearts or to pad their resumes. Either way, they do an amazing amount of good with an amazingly small amount of resources.
Here are the statistics that will blow your mind:
• In 2006, the United States spend about $2 billion per week in Iraq.
• Doctors Without Borders runs with a budget of about $400 million per year.
• For the price of a week in Iraq, we could have either funded Doctors Without Borders for five years, or quintupled the size of Doctors Without Borders and ran it for one year.
• It’s estimated that there are at most 100 Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and we have about 100,000 soldiers there at a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year.
• This means we have about 1,000 troops per Al Qaeda member, which means we are spending $1 billion per Al Qaeda member.
• This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 2.5 years.
• National priorities: We can either chase one Al Qaeda member in Afghanistan for a year or fund Doctors Without Borders for two and a half years.
• This fiscal year, we’re spending $167 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 417.5 years.
Do I even need to spell it out? If the idea behind American Interventionism is to improve the lot of humanity on a global scale, there are far better ways of doing it than dropping bombs on civilians. If the main argument for staying in Afghanistan is that we’re helping the Afghan people, it is undeniable that the money could be spent in much wiser ways to help much more people. Not necessarily by funding Doctors Without Borders, but by modeling our overseas interventions as humanitarian rather than military campaigns.
Obviously, security is important and we need to have soldiers to protect the doctors we deploy as well as to support the national governments of countries threatened by violent insurgency. But right now the focus is far more on the cost of weapons than the cost of medical supplies.
The entire justification for the Global War on Terror is to fight the enemy overseas to keep America safe at home. But by making this an almost purely military endeavor, we’re only boosting the perception that America is an Empire and we’re occupying these foreign countries out of our own selfish interests. As such, more terrorists are recruited and we lose the support of allies who were otherwise willing to help us in the fight against violent extremism.
But if we spent the same amount of money on medicine and infrastructure as we do on weapons, the perception would be completely different. Our international image would be unassailable, and we’d once again be looked up to by the rest of the world with respect and admiration. What Muslim kid is going to strap on a bomb and blow himself up to fight the country that built his school or cured his father of a terminal illness? Terrorist organizations would find themselves obsolete within a matter of years.
Unfortunately, this is never going to happen, precisely because “America” as it was once understood no longer exists. We may be the most powerful nation-state on earth, but we’re not the most powerful entity. The multi-national corporations have all the power, and it’s in their best interests to keep the engines of war churning, to keep third-world nations impoverished, and to keep the peoples of the world divided, distrustful, and hateful of each other.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.
You can’t meddle with the primal forces of nature.
If you happen to live in the United States and own a television that you happen to have access to on weekdays at 4:00 p.m. you might want to check out the Dylan Ratigan show, if only for the regular appearances made by Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, which I will continue to plug on this blog until every last American is watching it.
Nobody shatters conventional wisdom better than Cenk:
That’s right—cutting taxes for the rich doesn’t always help the economy. Historically, the economy has always done the best when taxes on the wealthy are at their highest.
Of course to be fair, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. It might just be a coincidence that the Great Depression came at a time of low taxes for the rich, that the golden years of the 50s and 60s came at a time of high taxes for the rich, and the current “Great Recession” came after a period of historically low taxes for the rich thanks to George W. Bush’s deficit-inflating tax cuts which the republicans now want to make permanent.
But the reasoning makes sense. Republicans want us to think that if you let the rich keep more of their money, they’ll put it back into the economy and everyone will benefit. But it seems that what actually happens when you let them keep their money is that they just keep their money. If, on the other hand, they don’t have so much money to keep, they have to rely more on their businesses for income, and they reinvest more of their money into those businesses which opens up opportunities for everyone.
Is this debatable? Yes. But it’s a debate we should be having instead of just accepting what we’ve always been told.
Just a guy sharing his thoughts and experiences as he wanders his way through life and the world. Here you'll find stories from the life of an American living overseas, politics from a liberal point of view, and philosophical thoughts about man's place in the universe.
