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Monday, July 31, 2006

Immutable President by Maureen Dowd

One of the best MoDo columns ever.

Immutable Bush

by Maureen Dowd

It's too bad President Bush spurns evolution - both in his view of the universe and his view of himself.

Scientists see more and more evidence that human evolution not only exists but is ongoing, as people adapt to changing circumstances with shifts in everything from skin color to the protein structure of sperm.

But with W., it's more a matter of survival of the stubbornist.

If you turn on TV, you see missiles flying, bodies lying, nuclear missiles unleashed and a slaughterhouse in Iraq. But don't despair, because yesterday President Bush announced the establishment of 'a joint committee to achieve Iraqi self-reliance.' He called it a 'new partnership,' as if it were some small business.

Isn't it a little late, in July 2006, to be launching a new partnership for such an old mess? Isn't it a little late to realize that Baghdad, a city where 300 garbage collectors have been killed in the last six months, according to press reports, has spun out of control?

In a press conference at the White House with his rogue puppet, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Mr. Bush explained that 'our strategy is to remain on the offense, including in Baghdad.' Then why, after three and a half years, does our offense look so much like a defense?

The president sounded like a Jon Stewart imitation of himself when he assured reporters that Mr. Maliki had 'a comprehensive plan' to pacify Iraq. 'That's what leaders do,' W. lectured, in a familiar refrain. 'They see problems, they address problems, and they lay out a plan to solve the problems.'

If only the plan were a little less robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul, and a little more road-to-Damascus epiphany. Taking troops out of Anbar Province, where the insurgency is thriving, to quell violence in Baghdad doesn't inspire confidence that the plan is truly 'comprehensive.'

And despite W.'s praise of Mr. Maliki's leadership, the plan to start from scratch, in essence, stabilizing neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad is, as The Times' Michael Gordon writes, 'an implicit acknowledgment of what every Iraqi in Baghdad already knows': the prime minister's 'original Baghdad security plan has failed. In the past two weeks, more Iraqi civilians have been killed than have died in Lebanon and Israel.'

Mr. Bush also sent Condi Rice to lay out a plan to the Arabs and Europeans about the destruction and refugee flight in Lebanon, but the plan turns out to be a plan to do nothing until Israel has more time to kick the Hezb out of Hezbollah.

W. says he supports more diplomacy, but it's the diplomacy of sanctimony. He now grudgingly notes that 'the violence in Baghdad is still terrible,' but doesn't seem to grasp the tragic enormity of an occupation that is sliding into civil war and constricting his leverage to deal with all the other crises crackling around the world. The U.N. reported last week that in May and June no less than 5,818 Iraqi civilians were killed.

Although he talked about whether America could be 'facile' and 'nimble' enough to change with the circumstances in the Middle East, in fundamental ways, he has not changed his attitude at all.



Newsweek's Richard Wolffe says he conducted four "freewheeling" interviews with the president last week, and concluded: "Bush thinks the new war vindicates his early vision of the region's struggle: of good versus evil, civilization versus terrorism, freedom versus Islamic fascism. He still believes that when it comes to war and terror, leaders need to decide whose side they are on."

The president sees Lebanon as a test of macho mettle rather than the latest chapter in a fratricidal free-for-all that's been going on for centuries. "I view this as the forces of instability probing weakness," he said. "I think they're testing resolve."

The more things get complicated, the more W. feels vindicated in his own simplified vision. The more people try to tell him that it's not easy, that this is a region of shifting alliances and interests, the less he seems inclined to develop an adroit policy to win people over to our side instead of trying to annihilate them.

Bill Clinton, the Mutable Man par excellence, evolved four times a day; he had a tactical and even recreational attitude toward personal change. But W. prides himself on his changelessness and regards his immutability as the surest sign of his virtue. Facing a map on fire, he sees any inkling of change as the slippery slope to failure.

That's what is so frustrating about watching him deal - or not deal - with Iraq and Lebanon. There's almost nothing to watch.

It's not even like watching paint dry, since that, too, is a passage from one state to another. It's like watching dry paint.

Recent Discovery: Kyle XY


Sci-Fi fans -- which include many progressives, geeks, artists, gay men and lesbians, and other 'don't-fit-the-mold' thinkers -- tend to like and identify with stylish dramas, comedies, films, art and mysteries which feature non-traditional characters searching for their identities, overcoming obstacles, learning who they really are and how to express their own voices. I give you Kyle XY.

This appealing one hour drama with comedic touches currently airs Monday nights on -- don't choke -- the ABC Family Channel. Before you dismiss it entirely, it's no namby pamby squeaky clean whitewash -- well, okay, so far only a couple of persons of color in the first episode (mainly the extremely talented and infrequently seen Dorian Harewood) ... and it's about a middle class family/community, set in the Pacific Northwest -- but it's nuanced and edgy in its own way -- including some unexpected, non-clichéd, creative touches and complex character development.

The overview:

Kyle is a handsome, sweet-natured, innocent teen boy (I know, an oxymoron and a paradox wrapped in an enigma) who wakes up in the middle of the beautiful wondrous lusciuous green forest.

Kyle is naked, covered in some sort of primoridial oozey slimey stuff. He has no language. He has no name. He has no memories. He has no belly button.

He wanders (naked) into a busy intersection, wide-eyed, open, newly birthed and is promptly taken to an institute for developmentally, mentally impaired and juvenile delinquent youths (quite a combo, huh?)

Anyway, the institutional director (Harewood) calls the facility's therapist, 'the Mom' -- and Kyle 'temporarily' becomes part of her all-American family along with Dad, Teen Daughter and pre-teen Son -- all of whom, except for Mom, are not quite so sure this Kyle kid (who is disrupting their usual patterns) is welcome.

It's a fish out of water, innocent soul story -- Kyle is in process of becoming human: learning the roles, rituals, systems, language of the host entities while possessing incredible mathematical and scientific knowledge, the ability to speed read and acquire large data sets in practically no time (he read and memorized an entire encyclopedia of 12 or twenty or so volumes in one day). But he has to learn the unspoken, unwritten rules of culture, family, romance, friendship and social relationships through experimentation, observation, iteration, trial and major error along the way. It very much reminds me of the short-lived John Doe from a few years back.

Lurking at the fringes is the creepy CIA/NSA/spy/spook/murderer guy: Nicholas Lea (whom X-File fans will remember as Alex Krychek). Mr. Lea simply does creepy, sneaky, lying spy-v-spy double-agent extremely well -- a spy who obviously knows much more about Kyle than the unsuspecting family members who are coming to love this strange and wonderful kid (who
also just happens to 'draw' beautiful photo-realistic memory images through his own version of crayon pointillism).

And this young actor who plays Kyle -- sorry I don't even know his name -- he is just so darned cute, appealing and so expressive with his gorgeous eyes, understated body language -- a real pleasure to watch.

TV Guide describes it this way:
Premise: A mysterious teen without human instincts, a past or even a navel befuddles a psychologist, who takes on his case and tries to help him adjust to his strange, new surroundings.

So, if you want to learn more about Kyle XY, I suggest you start watching and keep your eyes open for the sure-to-happen Kyle XY marathon, which must be somewhere on the horizon.

Oh, Kyle XY also repeats on Friday nights on the regular ABC network, and it might be repeated different times throughout the week on ABC Family. One annoying truly unbelievable story featured Kyle going to work with 'Dad' (a software programmer) one day and the company's computer server system was down -- Kyle quickly read the manual and fixed it. Hello -- a passle of programmers, code warriors and geeks who were sitting around waiting on some on-call computer fix-it guys to show up and fix their server? I don't think so. Otherwise, suspension of disbelief happens naturally enough.

Kyle XY: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Finally: Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock

Deserves wide readership -- if only more christians were more concerned about social justice (as I recall, Jesus preached about that more than anything) than promulgating and maintaining certain demagogic inegalitarian views of (utlimately fascist versions of) the social order. I could have a lot more respect for so-called christians if they were actually more like the historical Jesus. And they don't have to be progressives or liberals to be respected -- they simply don't have to try to mold everyone into their version of God's hitler youth and blind followers while destroying those who disagree with them. I don't think this guy is the most enlightened, but he's doing something you'll never see Falwell, Robertson et al doing: critical thinking on at least a basic level, challenging the demagogues, at least to a degree.
July 30, 2006
Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

MAPLEWOOD, Minn. -- Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing -- and the church's -- to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute "voters' guides" that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn't the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called "The Cross and the Sword" in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a "Christian nation" and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

"When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses," Mr. Boyd preached. "When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross."

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God's ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul -- packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals -- was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

"Most of my friends are believers," said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, "and they think if you're a believer, you'll vote for Bush. And it's scary to go against that."

Sermons like Mr. Boyd's are hardly typical in today's evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written "Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America -- an Evangelical's Lament."

And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, "The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church," which is based on his sermons.

"There is a lot of discontent brewing," said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the "emerging church," which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

"More and more people are saying this has gone too far -- the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right," Mr. McLaren said. "You cannot say the word 'Jesus' in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can't say the word 'Christian,' and you certainly can't say the word 'evangelical' without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.

"Because people think, 'Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about 'activist judges.' "

Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church's board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.

"When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker," said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. "But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can't be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70's, it wouldn't have happened. But the church was asleep."

Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd's draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.

He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, "Letters From a Skeptic," based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic -- an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into "idolatry."

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch's worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing "God Bless America" and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

"I thought to myself, What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?' " he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd's church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a "freedom celebration." Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending "your hard-earned money" on good causes.

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek "power over" others -- by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have "power under" others -- "winning people's hearts" by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

"America wasn't founded as a theocracy," he said. "America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn't bloody and barbaric. That's why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

"I am sorry to tell you," he continued, "that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ."

Mr. Boyd lambasted the "hypocrisy and pettiness" of Christians who focus on "sexual issues" like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson's breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

"Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act," he said. "And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed."

Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been "raised in a religious-right home" but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.

When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, "it was liberating to me," Mr. Churchill said.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church's Sunday school.

"They said, 'You're not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,' " she said. "It was some of my best volunteers."

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: "Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn't give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that's it."

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community -- African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus' teachings by its members' actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: "I don't regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn't know the price we were going to pay for doing it."

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn't abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have "power under" Osama bin Laden? Didn't the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: "So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn't we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?"

Mr. Boyd responded: "I don't think there's a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don't slap the label 'Christian' on it."
Source: NYT.

There are also some accompanying video and related mp3 audio of some of the Rev. Gregory Boyd's Sermons with the article but I could only get this one to download/connect: Taking America Back for God? The church has a page with mp3 archives here.

Excerpts from his book The Myth of a Christian Nation including:

For some evangelicals, the kingdom of God is largely about, if not centered on, "taking America back for God," voting for the Christian candidate, outlawing abortion, outlawing gay marriage, winning the culture war, defending political freedom at home and abroad, keeping the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, fighting for prayer in the public schools and at public events, and fighting to display the Ten Commandments in government buildings.

I do not argue that those political positions are either wrong or right. Nor do I argue that Christians shouldn't be involved in politics. While people whose faith has been politicized may well interpret me along such lines, I assure you that this is not what I'm saying. The issue is far more fundamental than how we should vote or participate in government. Rather, I want to challenge the assumption that finding the right political path has anything to do with advancing the kingdom of God.


The most bizarre thing i've NEVER heard of until i came across it on a soap site

Okay, maybe I'm even more out of the loop than I thought, but came across a totally weird news blurb and link and followed it to what turned out to be a soap site (soapcentral.com) -- so I'm posting it (mostly) without comment. At first I thought it might be one of those goofy April Fool's stories that many sites engage love to 'spoof' their readers with, but look at the date. I've never seen anything quite like it myself.
Kola Wars: bin Laden's Mistress is Fired
Posted Monday, July 17, 2006 9:53:46 PM
Updated Tuesday, July 18, 2006 3:09:32 PM

Days of our Lives has fired one of the most infamous writers in its 30-year history. The move ends what turned out to be a far more controversial moment for the NBC soap than anyone would have thought.

Kola Boof, a Sudanese-born novelist and poet, had been serving as a ghost writer for Days of our Lives. According to some sources, Boof has written most, if not all, of the story material that will air this summer. If true, it would seemingly indicate that now-former head writer James E. Reilly was let go earlier than initially believed. As previously reported by soapcentral.com, multiple Emmy winner Hogan Sheffer will assume the head writer position in August.

And in true soap opera style, Boof has a secret connection - but not to anyone on the show. Boof is the former mistress of the terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. The complete details of Boof's past with bin Laden is chronicled in her autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl. In 2003, however, Boof's relationship with bin Laden was revealed to be against her will and more akin to slavery than an affair.

Through her work on daytime television, Boof joked that she hoped to attain a much lower profile.

"I can now focus on writing far less controversial material and become a soccer mom to my two sons," Boof said. "I only wish my adopted Grandmother was alive to see me actually writing her [favorite] soap opera!"

Whether or not Boof was really penning the show's plots remains very much in dispute. Though show sources say that was the case, an official show statement hints that Boof had little to do with what was seen on screen.

"Yes, Kola Boof has had writing assignments from Days since May," DAYS' co-executive producer Stephen Wyman said in a statement. "However, she does not hold a staff position with our writing team."

Boof's name will first appear in the DAYS credits on August 8th, which is ironically the last day Reilly's name will be shown as head writer.

Site and original story here.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Fetch, Heel, Stall by Maureen Dowd

Fetch, Heel, Stall

by Maureen Dowd

Oops, they did it again. That pesky microphone problem that plagued George W. Bush and Tony Blair in St. Petersburg struck again at their White House news conference yesterday. The president told technicians to make sure his real thoughts would not be overheard this time, but somehow someone forgot to turn off the feed to my office. As a public service, I'd like to reprint the candid under-their-breath mutterings they exchanged in between their public utterances.

THE PRESIDENT: "The prime minister and I have committed our governments to a plan to make every effort to achieve a lasting peace out of this crisis."

"Actually, we talked about our plan to keep using fancy phrases like 'lasting peace' and 'sustainable cease-fire,' so we don't actually have to cease the fire. Condi had a great one! Didya hear it, Tony? She said, 'The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken cease-fires.' Man, can she talk, and she plays piano, too!"

THE PRIME MINISTER: "The question is now how to get it stopped and get it stopped with the urgency that the situation demands. ... I welcome very much the fact that Secretary Rice will go back to the region tomorrow. She will have with her the package of proposals in order to get agreement both from the government of Israel and the government of Lebanon on what is necessary to happen in order for this crisis to stop."

"I thought it was quite clever, George, to stall by sending Condi to Kuala Lumpur for that imminently skippable meeting of marginal Asian powers. And her decision to tickle the ivories while Beirut burns was inspired. The Asians love a good Brahms sonata. And she called it a 'prayer for peace'! Just brilliant. But her idea of a series of Rachmaninoff concerts at every layover on the way to the Middle East could look too conspicuously like dawdling."

THE PRESIDENT: "Hezbollah's not a state. They're a, you know, supposed political party that happens to be armed. Now what kind of state is it that's got a political party that has got a militia?"

"Uh-oh! I mean, besides all those Shiite leaders we set up in Iraq who have THEIR own militias. Oh, man, this is complicated. What about those Republican Minutemen patrolling the Mexican border? Or Vice on a hunting trip?"

THE PRIME MINISTER: "Of course the U.N. resolution, the passing of it, the agreeing of it, can be the occasion for the end of hostilities if it's acted upon, and agreed upon. And that requires not just the government of Israel and the government of Lebanon, obviously, to abide by it, but also for the whole of the international community to exert the necessary pressure so that there is the cessation of hostilities on both sides."

"And the whole of the cosmos! We can call for an intergalactic study group to act upon and agree upon and adjudicate -- George, I can keep the verbs, adjectives and conditional phrases going until these reporters keel over."

THE PRESIDENT: "My message is, give up your nuclear weapon and your nuclear weapon ambitions. That's my message to Syria -- I mean, to Iran. And my message to Syria is, you know, become an active participant in the neighborhood for peace."

"It's so hard to keep all these countries straight! And which ones are in the Axis? I hate it when Condi leaves town. Tony Baloney, just blink twice when I mention a bad country and once when I mention one we like and sell arms to. And while you're at it, heel, poodle! Har-har. Play dead! You crack me up."

THE PRIME MINISTER: "I've spoken to President Chirac, Chancellor Merkel, Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, the president of the European Union, the prime minister of Finland and many, many others."

"See? I'm no poodle. I'm here to keep the names of our allies straight. And I can stand up straight. Bush, old boy, that's not posture. That's Paleolithic Man."

THE PRESIDENT: "And so what you're seeing is, you know, a clash of governing styles. For example, you know, you know, the, the, the notion of democracy beginning to emerge -- emerge -- scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, and those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them, and so they respond. They've always been violent. ... There's this kind of almost, you know, kind of weird kind of elitism that says: well, maybe -- maybe -- certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn't be free."

"Tony, I've fallen and I can't get up!"

Source: NYT

Proof of the Storm, Reasons FOR the Storm

The Rise of the Super-Rich
By Teresa Tritch

Wednesday 19 July 2006

The gap between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story.

It is the stuff of parables and literature. It is a force in social history and political economy, from electoral campaigns to reform movements and revolutions.

But in the United States today, there's a new twist to the familiar plot. Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it's increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. The curious effect of the new divide is an economy that appears to be charging ahead, until you realize that the most of the people in it are being left in the dust. President Bush has yet to acknowledge the true state of affairs, though it's at the root of his failure to convince Americans that the good times are rolling.

The president's lack of attention may be misplaced optimism, or it could be political strategy. Acknowledging what's happening would mean having to rethink his policies, not exactly his strong suit.

But the growing income gap - and the rise of the super-rich - demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one.

I. The Growing Divide

Anyone who has driven through the new neighborhoods filled with "McMansions" that have arisen near most cities, or seen the brisk business that luxury stores are doing, has an anecdotal sense that some Americans are making a lot of money right now.

But there is no need to rely on anecdotal evidence.

Thomas Piketty, of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley recently updated their groundbreaking study on income inequality (pdf), and their findings are striking.

The new figures show that from 2003 to 2004, the latest year for which there is data, the richest Americans pulled far ahead of everyone else. In the space of that one year, real average income for the top 1 percent of households - those making more than $315,000 in 2004 - grew by nearly 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was less than 3 percent, and that probably makes things look better than they really are, since other data, most notably from the Census Bureau, indicate that the average is bolstered by large gains among the top 20 percent of households. In all, the top 1 percent of households enjoyed 36 percent of all income gains in 2004, on top of an already stunning 30 percent in 2003.

Some of the gains at the top reflect capitalism's robust reward for the founders of companies like Microsoft, Google and Dell. But most of it is due to the unprecedented largesse being heaped on executives and professionals, in the form of salary, bonuses and stock options. A recent study done for the Business Roundtable (pdf), a lobbying group for chief executives, shows that median executive pay at 350 large public companies was $6.8 million in 2005. According to the Wall Street Journal, that's 179 times the pay of the average American worker. The study is intended to rebut much higher estimates made by other researchers, but it does little to quell the sense that executive pay is out of whack. As the Journal's Alan Murray pointed out recently, the study's calculation of executive pay is widely criticized as an understatement because, as a measurement of the median, it is largely unaffected by the eight or nine-digit pay packages that have dominated the headlines of late.

Rich people are also being made richer, recent government data shows, by strong returns on investment income. In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, generally dividends and capital gains, up from 53.4 percent a year earlier.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, compared the latest data from Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez to comprehensive reports on income trends from the Congressional Budget Office. Every way it sliced the data, it found a striking share of total income concentrated at the top (pdf) of the income ladder as of 2004.

The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation's income, their biggest share in all but two of the last 70 years.

The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent (see graph).

The top one-tenth of 1 percent of households actually received nearly half of the increased share going to the top 1 percent.
These disparities seem large, and they are. (Though the latest available data is from 2004, there are virtually no signs that the basic trend has changed since then.) The top 1 percent held a bigger share of total income than at any time since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000 during the tech stock bubble. But what makes today's disparities particularly brutal is that unlike the last bull market of the late 1990's - when a proverbial rising tide was lifting all boats - the rich have been the only winners lately. According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, for most American households - the bottom 60 percent - average income grew by less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004, with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's. Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.

The best-off Americans are not only winning by an extraordinary margin right now. They are the only ones who are winning at all.

The result has been, as Andrew Hacker, a political science professor at Queens College, has observed in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, "more billionaires, more millionaires and more six-figure families."

As income has become more concentrated at the top, overall wealth has also become more skewed. According to the latest installation of a survey (pdf) that the Federal Reserve has conducted every three years since 1989, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans accounted for 33.4 percent of total net worth in 2004, compared to 30.1 percent in 1989. Over the same period, the other Americans in the top 10 percent saw their share of the nation's net worth basically stagnate, at about 36 percent, while the bottom 50 percent accounted for just 2.5 percent of the wealth in 2004, compared to 3.0 percent in 1989.

II. A Brief History of Income Inequality

While it has long been the case that the rich do better than everyone else, it has not always been true that, in the process, the poor get poorer and the middle class gets squeezed. In post-World War II America, between 1947 and the early 1970's, all income groups shared in the nation's economic growth. Poor families actually had a higher growth in real annual income than other groups.

Part of the reason was a sharp rise in labor productivity. As workers produced more, the economy grew and so did compensation - wages, salaries and benefits (see graph). This link between productivity gains and income gains was not automatic. Government policies worked to ensure that productivity gains translated into more pay for Americans at all levels, including regular increases in the minimum wage and greater investment in the social safety net. Full employment was also a government priority. And, of course, unions were strong back then, giving workers bargaining power.

From the mid-1970's until 1995, the trend reversed. The gap between the rich and poor widened at a rapid clip. The upper echelons - generally the top 20 percent of American households - experienced steady gains, while families in the bottom 40 percent were faced with declining or stagnating incomes.

The growing divide coincided with a slowdown in productivity growth and a reversal in the government policies that had been promoting income equality. Legislators balked at raising the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit, a feature of the tax code that rewards the working poor by ensuring that work pays better than welfare. During the "supply side" era in the 1980's, fostered by the policies of Ronald Reagan, taxes became less progressive. The goal of full employment was eclipsed by a focus on inflation fighting that remains to this day.

As trade began to play an ever bigger role in the American economy, manufacturing jobs diminished and labor unions declined, reducing workers' clout in setting compensation. Regulatory laxness reached its apex in the fiscal disaster of the savings and loan meltdown, which drained public resources from socially and economically useful programs and polices.

The trend toward increasing inequality was interrupted, briefly, in the late 1990's. Productivity growth rebounded, and for a half decade, all income groups participated in the prosperity. Even then, the richest Americans had the best run, propelled largely by stock market gains. In fact, when the stock market hit its all time high in 2000, post-war income concentration also peaked.

But government policies of the day helped to ensure that the lower rungs also had a boost. Clinton-era welfare reforms are often cast as a success story of market-based incentives. But in fact, they were supported by a big increase in the earned income tax credit to help solidify the transition from welfare to work. At the same time, budget deficits were conquered by shared sacrifice - a mix of tax increases and spending cuts affecting all groups. The combination of economic growth and fiscal discipline spurred robust hiring and, if it had endured, could also have strengthened the Social Security safety net by allowing the government to pay down its debts.

That seems like ancient history now. Nearly everyone's income fell in 2001 and 2002, due to the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, recession in 2001 and the ensuing jobless recovery.

In the last few years, though, the trend toward inequality has reasserted itself - with a vengeance.

III. Inequality During the Bush Years

For the last few years, the tide has been rising again, but most boats have been staying where they are, or sinking. One key reason is that the link between rising productivity and broad economic prosperity has been severed. Take another look at this graph. During the years that George W. Bush has been in the White House, productivity growth has been stronger than ever. But the real compensation of all but the top 20 percent of income earners has been flat or falling. Gains in wages, salaries and benefits have been increasingly concentrated at the uppermost rungs of the income ladder.

The Bush administration would like you to believe that the situation will correct itself. Most recently, the new Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., reiterated the administration's viewpoint at his confirmation hearing in June when he said that "economic growth, job growth, productivity growth, hopefully will be followed by increases in wage income."

Well, hoping certainly won't make it so.

Neither will growth alone. As the post-World War II history of income inequality illustrates, productivity improvement is only one piece of the prosperity puzzle. The economic health of most American families also depends greatly on what government does. If it merely "gets out of the way," inequality is bound to persist and - if recent results are any indication of future performance - worsen.

The Bush administration, though, has not even done anything as benign as get out of the way. The policies it has pursued - affirmatively and aggressively - have widened the gap between rich and poor.

A. The Tax Wedge

Tax cuts are the most obvious example. The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center computed the combined effects of tax cut legislation from 2001, 2003 and 2006. The tax cuts' contribution to the income gap was significant.

In 2006, the average tax cut for households with incomes of more than $1 million - the top two-tenths of 1 percent - is $112,000 which works out to a boost of 5.7 percent in after tax income. That's considerably higher than the 5 percent boost garnered by the top 1 percent. It's far greater than the 2.5 percent increase of the middle fifth of households, and fully 19 times greater than the 0.3 percent gain of the poorest fifth of households.

The disparities are driven by tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the most affluent. In 2006, for instance, a tax cut took effect that allows high income households - those with incomes above $200,000 - to take bigger write offs for their children and other expenses, like mortgage interest on a second home. And increasingly, tax cuts are aimed at allowing America's wealthiest families to amass dynastic wealth - estates to transfer from one generation to the next virtually untouched by taxes. The most obvious example is the gradual reduction in the estate tax that is scheduled through 2010 (and regular attempts to abolish the estate tax altogether). Another huge, though lesser noted example, is the law passed last May allowing all Americans to shelter money in a tax-favored Roth I.R.A. Under previous law, Roths had been off limits to wealthy Americans, precisely because the government did not want to help people amass big estates under the guise of saving for retirement. That sound principle has now been turned on its head.

B. The Assault on Programs for the Poor and Middle Class

Tax cuts are not the only policies widening the gap between the rich and other Americans. Earlier this year, President Bush signed into law a measure that will cut $39 billion over the next five years from domestic programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and $99.3 billion from 2006 to 2015.

The president and the Republican Congress have also done harm to the finances of the poorest Americans - and to the notion of basic fairness - by not increasing the federal minimum wage - it has been $5.15 since 1997 While C.E.O. salaries have been soaring, the take-home pay of waitresses and janitors has been hit hard by inflation.

The Bush administration has also been trying, with mixed success so far, to pursue other policies that would have the effect of shifting money to the rich. The most ominous is its often-repeated desire to "address our long-term unfunded entitlement obligations." That's code for making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent while cutting Social Security, which has for 70 years been a major factor in keeping Americans financially secure in their old age.

In 2004, over the objections of Congress, the administration overturned time-and-a-half regulation for overtime. For a brief period after Hurricane Katrina, the president suspended by executive proclamation the law that requires federal contractors to pay workers the locally prevailing wage, until Congress objected. For three months after Katrina, the Labor Department suspended the law requiring federal contractors to have an affirmative action hiring plan - an invitation to discrimination and, as such, to income inequality.

C. The Too-Easy Answer

When confronted with evidence of growing income inequality, Bush administration officials invariably say the answer is more and better education. "We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, in a typical retort last January when tax data showed an increasing concentration of wealth among the highest-income Americans.

Education is critically important to individuals, society, the economy and democracy itself, and deserves strong government support. But it is neither a satisfactory explanation, nor a remedy, for today's income inequality.

There is a strong correlation between one's level of education and one's earning power. The Bush administration is assuming that the correlation will continue to hold in an ever more globalized economy. Writing in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, Princeton economist Alan S. Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, explains why that view may be mistaken:

"Other things being equal, education and skills are, of course, good things; education yields higher returns in advanced societies, and more schooling probably makes workers more flexible and more adaptable to change. But the problem with relying on education as the remedy for job losses is that 'other things' are not remotely close to equal. The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via a wireless connection) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that don't."

There is already evidence that the benefits of education are not as straightforward as many people seem to believe they are. In his review of "Inequality Matters," a collection essays commissioned by Demos, a public policy research and advocacy organization, Mr. Hacker, the Queens College political science professor, cited findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show that many college graduates now hold jobs that once required only a high school diploma. Today, according to the bureau, 37 percent of flight attendants have completed college, as have 35 percent of tour escorts, 21 percent of embalmers, and 13 percent of both security guards and casino dealers. Mr. Hacker notes that more people are expected to earn college degrees in preparation for well-paying professions. "But we cannot expect the economy will automatically create better-paid positions to match the cohort acquiring higher education," he writes.

Underscoring the point, the Bush administration's own Economic Report of the President in 2006 shows that average annual earnings of college graduates fell by 5 percent from 2000 to 2004. In those four years, the difference between the average yearly pay of a college graduate and a high school graduate shrank from 93 percent to 80 percent.

Education is vital. But as Mr. Blinder put it, it "is far from a panacea."

IV. The Future of Income Inequality

The fast-growing gap between the rich and poor and middle-class Americans is not something that has just happened. The Bush policies are an attempt to dismantle the institutions and norms that have long worked to ameliorate inequities - progressive taxation, the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicaid and so on. The aims that can't be accomplished outright - like cuts in Social Security - are being teed up by running deficits that could force the shrinkage of government programs, even though the public would not likely condone many such cuts unless compelled to by a fiscal crisis.

Such policies are grounded in an ideology that began taking shape some 30 years ago, when economic policy makers began to disdain the notion of harnessing and protecting society's collective potential in favor of crafting incentives to align individuals' interests with those of the market. This campaign has gone by many names - "starve the beast," or "repeal the New Deal." Economist Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, calls that approach "you're on your own," or YOYO, and has written a book calling for a new way, dubbed "we're in this together," or WITT. (Click here for excerpts from "All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy," by Jared Bernstein.)

At issue, in economic terms, is the tradeoff between equality and efficiency: It can be difficult to divide the economic pie more equally without reducing the size of the pie. But it's not impossible, and doing so is crucial for widespread prosperity. A fair and well-functioning economy will always involve some inequality, which acts a motivator and can be explained by differences in risk-taking, ability and work intensity. But inequality is generally deemed to be dangerous - socially, economically, (and, perhaps, politically) - when it becomes so extreme as to be self-reinforcing, as many researchers suggest is currently the case.

The problem now is that most any attempt to reduce inequality - even a measly increase in the minimum wage - is rejected as misguided. And policies that under one set of economic conditions might allow for a justifiable modicum of inequality are pursued beyond all reason. For instance, the rationale for the tax cuts in 2001 was to return the budget surplus that Mr. Bush inherited from President Clinton. The rationale for the tax cuts in 2002 and 2003 and 2006 was to stimulate the economy. The surplus has long since been replaced by big deficits, the jobless recovery ended three years ago and inequality is on the rise. But tax cutting that overwhelmingly benefits the rich continues because, we're told, failure to keep cutting taxes would, somehow, shrink the pie. As Mr. Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute has put it: "Economics, once an elegant and sensible set of ideas and principles devoted to shaping outcomes for the betterment of society, has been reduced to a restrictive set of ideologically inspired rules devoted to an explanation of why we cannot take the necessary steps to meet the challenges we face."

For graphs and links to more information with the article please go to original article here if you have NYT select subscription or want to try their 14-day free trial.

Friday, July 28, 2006

War is still not Healthy for Children and other Living Things

You don't have to be a mom to know the wisdom of this simple iconic message and image.

vintage collectible WAR IS NOT HEALTHY for children and other living things peace art signs shirts posters jewelry pendants earrings

The another Mother for Peace logo, (above) is the iconic folk art image of a sunflower with the words, "War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things," was created by Los Angeles artist Lorraine Schneider in 1967 and became an instant classic.

Background: In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, television writer-producer Barbara Avedon invited 15 women to her house to take a stand against the conflict raging in Southeast Asia.

Lorraine Schneider, the daughter of Russian immigrants, grew up in the L.A. neigbhorhood of Boyle Heights, was schooled in non-violence, and became an artist and print-maker. She created "Primer," the original image which was to become Another Mother for Peace's logo, for an art competition. The original was only four-by-four inches.

In an introduction to a book of Schneider's art work, Avedon wrote, "On February 8, 1967, fifteen friends met at our house to discuss 'doing something' about the war in Vietnam. We wanted to do something that would communicate our horror and disgust to our elected representatives in one concerted action.

"We were not 'bearded sandaled youths,' 'wild-eyed radicals' or dyed in the wool 'old line freedom fighters' and we wanted the Congress to know that they were dealing with an awakening and enraged 'middle class' voters, precinct workers, contributors. We decided to send a Mother's Day card to Washington. We would print and distribute one thousand letters of protest that said in a very ladylike fashion:


For my Mother's Day gift of this year,

I don't want candy or flowers.

I want an end to killing.

We who have given life

must be dedicated to preserving it.

Please talk peace.

"Lorraine had given our family an etching of 'Primer' some months prior to that meeting. Its eloquent, irrefutable, sunflower truth said it all for us. I called Lorraine and asked if we could use 'Primer' on the face of the card. She said, yes, and one thousand became two hundred thousand cards. And because of her genius Another Mother for Peace was born."

The book was Lorraine Art Schneider, 1925-1972, An Illustrated Catalogue of her Graphic Work.

Schneider died in 1972 at 47.
Maybe it's time to revive the simple but powerful gesture of sending thousands, maybe millions of those cards again -- to the warmongers in the white house, elected officials (wherever you live, whatever country you hail from) ... as a simple message that we are sick of their continued use of violence (while using their empty, disingenuous rhetoric of peace).

All that rhetoric about peace, democracy on the march to justify brutalizing other human beings while obscuring their primary goals: oil profits, multi-national corporate profits, military industrial complex profits ... and all the power that goes with controlling weapons, profits, profit-making systems -- and of course that dynamic is a lock-and-key fit combined with all variations of religious fanaticism -- also about power and control over others, with profits as a benefit and tool to expand their goals.

Brutal violence as a means to achieve peace -- how contradictory is that?



Hat tip for the excerpts -- full article from the Santa Monica Mirror -- read all at CrosbyCPR.

You can still buy the highly sought after collectible and vintage versions of the original 1960s & 70s peace activist era War is Not Healthy for Children & Other Living Things T-shirts, posters, jewelry, pendants, Another Mother for Peace stickers, cards, etc at various places online including PeaceCollectibles.com, as well as peace signs and symbols on jewelry, belly rings, watches, clothes, shirts, studs, earrings, bracelets, posters, and more.




Note: I think new non-vintage ones are also available at leftist, progressive bookstores and the Another Mother website, too.

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When Robert 'Bob' Rubin Speaks ...

...Some people are listening anyway.

Came across this at Alternet, from The Nation by the highly respected William Greider, entitled Clinton Economists: A Storm Is Coming:
Economists from the Clinton era were once the biggest cheerleaders for free trade and pro-business policies -- but now economic uncertainties have them singing a different cheer.

...it's a big deal when Robert Rubin changes the subject and begins to talk about income inequality as "a deeply troubling fact of American economic life" that threatens the trading system, even the stability of "capitalist, democratic society." More startling, Rubin now freely acknowledges what the American establishment for many years denied or dismissed as inconsequential--globalization's role in generating the thirty-year stagnation of US wages, squeezing middle-class families and below, while directing income growth mainly to the upper brackets.

A lot of Americans already knew this. Critics of "free trade" have been saying as much for years. But when Bob Rubin says it, his words can move politicians, if not financial markets.

... A strategy paper Rubin co-wrote defines the core problem: "Prosperity has neither trickled down nor rippled outward. Between 1973 and 2003, real GDP per capita in the United States increased 73 percent, while real median hourly compensation rose only 13 percent."

A storm is coming, Rubin fears. He wants a new national debate around these facts. In an interview, he explains the danger he foresees for global trade: "Where there's a great deal of insecurity, where median real wages are, roughly speaking, stagnant...where a recent Pew poll showed 55 percent of the American people think their kids will be worse off than they are, I think there is a real danger of heightened difficulty around issues that are already difficult, like trade.... Look at the difficulty around immigration."

Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a Hamilton participant and Federal Reserve vice chair in the Clinton years, describes the "difficulty" in more ominous terms: "I think the prospects for the liberal trade order are not great," he says. "There's a whole class of people who are smart, well educated and articulate, and politically involved who will not just sit there and take it" when their jobs are moved offshore. He thinks CNN commentator Lou Dobbs, who has built a populist following by attacking globalization and immigration, "is just the beginning -- nothing compared to what's going to happen in the future."
Greider, however, also reminds us to remember this about 'nice guys' like Rubin:
"The big difference separating him from the Progressives is that Rubin and his investment-banking colleagues are men of capital. ... I don't question his sincerity. But as a reformer, he has competing demands on his loyalty."
And history has shown, money and power trump everything with those who have it and want to keep it at all costs.

For excellent proof, see David Sirota's thoughtful HuffPo apology and column entitled "MY APOLOGIES: Wash Post Exposes Real Agenda of Wall Street Dems" in which he
analyzes, responds to and (somewhat) disagrees with some of the implications and analysis of the truly excellent (and what Sirota calls 'stunning') WaPo piece by Steven Pealstein, "A Winning Strategy for the Democrats: Barter for Free Trade."

And by 'winning,' he means the reason democrats continue to lose elections -- because the party has lost not only its credibility, but its original populist, raison d'etre roots and I would again argue, its very SOUL.
And because these were Democrats, there were the requisite acknowledgements that, while trade is an overall plus for the economy, it has had some unpleasant side effects: insecurity about job losses, downward pressure on wages, widening inequality, and an unsustainable trade deficit.

... the problem is that, when you scratch the surface, the free-trade members of the Democratic establishment turn out to be more committed to Part A of the formula, more globalization, than they are to Part B, making sure the benefits from globalization are widely shared. For them, it's really not a package deal. And if push comes to shove, which it always does in trade politics, they'd welcome more globalization even without the compensatory social policies.

How do I know this? Because they said so.

Sirota writes:
A stunning piece by Washington Post business reporter Steve Pearlstein today shows that the real agenda of these Big Money insiders is to pretend to care about stagnating wages, slashed pensions, and job outsourcing - but not actually be willing to attack the "free" trade policies that are causing those hardships.
If Sirota is indeed 'stunned' by the revelations in Pearlstein's article, what does that say about the continuing naiveté of registered democrats?

Original excellent, must-read 'stunning' WaPo article by Pearstein is here; Sirota's Huffpo column is here.

You can read the entire Alternet post of the "Storm is Coming" article here or at The Nation under the original title, "Born-Again Rubinomics." William Greider is the author of, most recently, "The Soul of Capitalism" (Simon & Schuster).

When even the Republican Real Estate industry acknowledges the gaps between haves and have nots ...

... you know it's getting worse.



Widening income gap to wreak havoc on consumer confidence



Although the overall level of consumer confidence was unchanged in July, it masked a growing divergence between the rich and the poor, according to a survey released today.

The Index of Consumer Sentiment was 84.7 in the July 2006 survey, nearly identical with the 84.9 in June, but well below the 96.5 recorded in July 2005, according to the University of Michigan's Survey of Consumers. Current economic conditions were judged slightly less favorably, largely due to the impact of gas prices, although both current and expected economic conditions were judged much less favorably than a year ago.

"Higher prices have driven a wedge between upper- and lower-income households that now extends well beyond their personal financial situation," according to Richard Curtin, director of the survey. Comparing households in the lower one-third of the income distribution with those in the top third, the difference in the overall measure of consumer sentiment was larger than any time since the early 1980s, according to the survey.

"Households in the bottom third of the income distribution held significantly more negative views about their own financial prospects as well as a more negative outlook for employment and economic growth," Curtin said.

The Index of Consumer Expectations, a closely watched component of the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, rose slightly to 72.5 in July from 72 in June, but significantly below the 85.5 recorded in July 2005. In comparison, the Current Economic Conditions Index fell to 103.5 in July, down from 105 in June, and was significantly below the 113.5 in June 2005.

The gap between income groups is quite different than anything observed in the prior half century, the survey found. In the past, the gap grew in size immediately following a recession, as upper-income households were quicker to recognize and benefit from an improving economy. "The current situation is exactly the opposite, as the gap is now due to lower-income households voicing much less favorable economic expectations when the economy is closer to the expansion's peak," Curtin noted.

A worsening financial situation was reported twice as frequently among the bottom third compared with the top third of the income distribution, with complaints about high prices voiced nearly three times as frequently. "When asked about their financial prospects for the year ahead, half of all families in the lowest third of the income distribution expected declines in their inflation-adjusted incomes, twice as frequently as among families with incomes in the top third," Curtin said.

Buying plans for homes, vehicles and large household durable goods were all lower in the July 2006 survey than a year ago. Home-buying plans posted the largest loss, falling to a 15-year low. Although vehicle buying plans increased slightly in July due to aggressive end-of-model-year discounts, they remain significantly below the year-earlier levels.

The latest data on consumer confidence is consistent with a growth rate in real consumer spending that averages about 2.5 percent during the next four quarters. "The growth rate in spending will slow over the next four quarters, and be quite uneven across products that appeal to different income groups," said Curtin.


Source: Inman Real Estate News

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

So Few Leaders ... so few problem-solvers ... lift a brew to two who think different

Got this newsletter from pragmatic progressive thinker, Matt Miller. So little leadership in elected officialdom, much less corporate America (greedy bastards). So I hereby salute Howard Schultz and Jim Sinegal for joining the very small and elite group that includes the founders of Ben & Jerry's, mega-billionaire George Soros, and a handful of others for proving that profit does not need to come at the expense of human beings.

7/26/06
Matt Miller's new Fortune column:

THE SENATOR FROM STARBUCKS

On a freezing winter day in 1961, 7-year-old Howard Schultz came home from school in Brooklyn to find his parents in tears. His dad, a deliveryman, had broken his ankle and was out of a job, with no health insurance.

His family's fear scarred Schultz. Later, as he grew Starbucks, he vowed to build "the kind of company my father never got a chance to work for." Schultz was a leader in offering comprehensive benefits to part-timers - and the loyal talent Starbucks has thus attracted, he says, has been central to its success.

Now Starbucks' benevolent coffee republic is at risk. Like every business, it has seen double-digit increases in health costs. But the trouble goes beyond spending. "We can't be the kind of society we aspire to be when we have 50 million people uninsured," Schultz says. "It's a blemish on what it means to be an American."

And so Schultz has reached out to like-minded leaders, like Jim Sinegal of Costco, who also gives benefits to part-timers. Both men asked, What if this benefit becomes unsustainable?

Reneging wasn't an option; they'd do whatever it took to keep their commitment to employees. Starbucks launched a wellness program it hopes will deliver long-term savings, and raised prices partly to fund rising health costs. Yet those measures struck Schultz as Band-Aids.

Why should health coverage depend on whether your company can charge extra for a latte? Many companies can't make this math work. Meanwhile, in the 36 other countries where Starbucks operates, health care is basically funded by the government.

Such questions led Schultz to make the rounds in Washington, but he came away discouraged. "It's all great when you're there," he says. "Then you leave, and nothing happens." His next idea was to convene a summit on CNBC to call attention to the issue. He pulled it off late last year - barely.

"It wasn't easy to get CEOs to appear publicly on this issue," Schultz says. A few CEOs came, but one withdrew even after agreeing to join. "I just can't be out front on this," he said.

I ask Schultz why CEOs are so timid. He sips his coffee (a rare Ethiopian blend from his chairman's stash). "It's the cloud Hillary created when she tried to change the system," he says. "People burned her so badly, and everyone remembers that. It's a subject people don't want to touch."

But necessity can trump fear. And as more CEOs realize that nothing they do inside their firms can fix what ails health care, the shadow Senator from Starbucks is well positioned to catalyze the business-led conversation we need.

CEOs don't need a full-blown agenda to transform the debate. Look at the headlines Lee Scott of Wal-Mart generated a few months back merely by saying the obvious in a speech: Health care is a problem that business and government need to tackle together.

CEOs should seize the opening provided by labor leader Andy Stern when he says employer-based health care is dead. GM's Rick Wagoner, who tiptoed around such elephants in the room in Senate testimony the other day, still doesn't get what this moment requires.

But imagine that Schultz and a few other heavy-hitters join hands at the National Press Club, not only to declare that health care is in crisis but to offer a short list of principles to guide the debate.

At Fortune's Brainstorm conference in Aspen in July, I floated this idea along with three principles such a group might start with:

(1) all Americans should have basic health coverage,

(2) none should have to spend more than 10% of their income on medical expenses, and

(3) business should be insulated from excess health inflation to remain competitive.

Top executives from Pfizer and McKesson, along with AARP's Bill Novelli and Stern himself, said they'd sign on to something like this in a flash.

Memo to Schultz: Convene this group and you'll force both political parties to (finally) get serious as we head toward 2008. It's doable. And it's time.
[PAST TIME; my note & emphasis.]

***************

Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of "The 2% Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love."

Listen to Matt's NPR radio show, "Left,Right & Center"

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Like John McCain, Chris Matthews wants to have it both ways

Can there be any doubt many if not most of the people who end up dominating the airwaves or the halls of power or ... where ever ... those with the biggest salaries, most income, most resources (biggest contradictions and lack of consistent logic) and lowest levels of moral or intellectual consciousness are the least credible and trustworthy? They're all part of the 'club' that exists to perpetuate itself. Check out this conversation transcript between Don Imus and Chris Matthews:
From MSNBC/Imus: NEWS QUOTE OF THE DAY
Imus: "I had a conversation with Andrea Mitchell yesterday, from there, she had just landed in Beirut with Secretary Rice, they were going somewhere--they were going wherever they're today, at the West Bank. I said, why don't you go over to Syria and talk to that clown, and you're right--they, you know..."

Chris Matthews, MSNBC: "It's all ideology with this crowd. All they care about is ideology. The President bought it, hook, line and sinker, he had-- but you know, it was just put into his head, sometime after 9-11, and his philosophy is what he has given it. He didn't have to have any philosophy when he went in, and they handed it to him. These guys-- the guys--you know, the guys that you used to make fun of at school, pencil necks, the intellectuals, the guys you never trusted. All of the sudden he trusts the intellectuals, the guys you knew at school, yeah, they're a bunch of pencil necks and now he buys completely, their ideology, because he didn't have one of his own coming in. That was his problem. I don't know what Bush stood for, except I'm a cool guy and Gore isn't, and that was our problem. We elected the guy because he was a little cooler than the other guy, and, I hope the next election, it isn't a problem of who goes to bed with their wife at 9:30 at night, or who knows how to tell a joke on a stage. But it's who had the sense of strength that comes from having read books, most of their life, tried to understand history. Every mistake we're making in the Middle East right now, was made years and years ago by the British, by the French, but the mistakes they made in Vietnam were made by the French before. In Algeria the French made all the mistakes we're making now. If you engage in an invasion you will face resistance from the local people based upon religion, and that, and nationalism. You will then have to put down that insurgency, and you're going to have to use cruelty and torture to get information, because it's the only way to get intel in a counter insurgency. Every single thing that's happened to Iraq was predicted by history. It's a standard pattern. Ten, twenty years from now, when kids are reading this in high school--They are going to say, 'Why were the Americans so dumb?' They committed the same mistakes that all the Europeans had done before. And it's like these guys, everything is a surprise. The insurgency was a surprise. The no WMD was a surprise. Everything that happens, now he's out there now, taking the Arabs side against this, that's a surprise. Some of these guys are anti-Semitic. That's a surprise? Everything is known, and the big thing about this crowd that came in around Bush's.. they must have known it, but they didn't want to know it, and Bush didn't have the academic background to challenge them. And I don't know what this guy's-- The Vice President is. The Vice President is, you notice how he hides during difficult times. He's in his bunker. He's in his undisclosed location. Where's Cheney in all this? He just faces every----"

Imus:"Did you plan on taking a breath, at any point?"

Chris Matthews, MSNBC: "Huh?"

Imus:"Did you plan on taking a breath, at any point?"

Chris Matthews, MSNBC:"No, I was trying to complete the thought--" (Imus interrupts)

Imus: "Well no, and, I mean, you had nine thoughts."

Chris Matthews, MSNBC:"--and I think we had a-- I think if we had longer confrontations instead of back and forth in stupid American politics driving this thing we'd be better off."
He said with absolutely no irony or sense of shame.

Source: IMUS NEWSLETTER FOR WEDNESDAY JULY 26, 2006. Tomorrow's guests include Frank Rich and another lying greedy ambitious corrupt right-wing elected official who craves the power of being Prez: John McCain.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

The Emperor Has No ... Brain, Maturity, Wisdom, Intellectual Curiosity ... Clue


The Price of Fantasy
July 21, 2006
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT Op-Ed Columnist

Today we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush was president, those who believed that America could remake the world to its liking with a series of splendid little wars -- people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld -- were known within the administration as 'the crazies.' Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a dangerous fantasy.

But in 2000 the Supreme Court delivered the White House to a man who, although he may be 60, doesn't act like a grown-up. The second President Bush obviously confuses swagger with strength, and prefers tough talkers like the crazies to people who actually think things through. He got the chance to implement the crazies' vision after 9/11, which created a climate in which few people in Congress or the news media dared to ask hard questions. And the result is the bloody mess we're now in.

This isn't a case of 20-20 hindsight. It was clear from the beginning that the United States didn't have remotely enough troops to carry out the crazies' agenda -- and Mr. Bush never asked for a bigger army.

As I wrote back in January 2003, this meant that the 'Bush doctrine' of preventive war was, in practice, a plan to 'talk trash and carry a small stick.' It was obvious even then that the administration was preparing to invade Iraq not because it posed a real threat, but because it looked like a soft target.

The message to North Korea, which really did have an active nuclear program, was clear: 'The Bush administration,' I wrote, putting myself in Kim Jong Il's shoes, 'says you're evil. It won't offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It won't even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.' So 'the best self-preservation strategy ... is to be dangerous.'

With a few modifications, the same logic applies to Iran. And it's easier than ever for Iran to be dangerous, now that U.S. forces are bogged down in Iraq.

Would the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened even if the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies' agenda? Nobody knows. But it's clear that the United States would have more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush hadn't squandered both the nation's credibility and its military might on his war of choice.

So what happens next?

Few if any of the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they were wrong. Vice President Cheney continues to insist that his two most famous pronouncements about Iraq -- his declaration before the invasion that we would be 'greeted as liberators' and his assertion a year ago that the insurgency was in its 'last throes' -- were 'basically accurate.'

But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things going so badly?

The crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.

Thus William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has called for a military strike -- an airstrike, since we don't have any spare ground troops -- against Iran.

'Yes, there would be repercussions,' he wrote in his magazine, 'and they would be healthy ones.' What would these healthy repercussions be? On Fox News he argued that 'the right use of targeted military force' could cause the Iranian people 'to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power.' Oh, boy.

Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a policymaker. But there's every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol says in public is what Mr. Cheney says in private.

And what about The Decider himself?

For years the self-proclaimed 'war president' basked in the adulation of the crazies. Now they're accusing him of being a wimp. 'We have been too weak,' writes Mr. Kristol, 'and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.'

Does Mr. Bush have the maturity to stand up to this kind of pressure? I report, you decide.

The Passion of the Embryos: Frank Rich & A Farewell to Reed

The Passion of the Embryos
by Frank Rich

How time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.

Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he's consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action -- on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president's base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq's marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.

The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush's Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran's ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America's own religious wars. The president's politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right's former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush's presidency. If we can't beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we're at least starting to rout them here.

That the administration's stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party's far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo's condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program's canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he's read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush's side.

The voting public has learned this, too. Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell "compromise" could make "more than 60" cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board's audit committee.

This time around, with the administration's credibility ruined by Iraq, official lies about science didn't fly. When Karl Rove said that embryonic stem cells weren't required because there was "far more promise from adult stem cells," The Chicago Tribune investigated and found that the White House couldn't produce a single stem-cell researcher who agreed. (Ahmad Chalabi, alas, has no medical degree.) In the journal Science, three researchers summed up the consensus of the reality-based scientific community: misleading promises about adult stem cells "cruelly deceive patients."

No less cruelly deceptive was the photo op staged to sell Mr. Bush's veto: television imagery of the president cradling so-called Snowflake babies, born via in vitro fertilization from frozen embryos that had been "adopted." As Senator Arlen Specter has pointed out, only 128 of the 400,000 or so rejected embryos languishing in deep freeze in fertility clinics have been adopted. Many of the rest are destined to be tossed in the garbage.

If you believe, as Mr. Bush says he does, that either discarding or conducting research with I.V.F. embryos is murder, then fertility clinic doctors, like stem-cell researchers, belong on death row. But the president, so proud of drawing a firm "moral" line, will no sooner crack down on I.V.F. than he did on Kim Jong Il: The second-term Bush has been downsized to a paper tiger. His party's base won't be so shy. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who led the Senate anti-stem-cell offensive and sees himself as the religious right's presidential candidate, has praised the idea of limiting the number of eggs fertilized in vitro to "one or two at a time." A Kentucky state legislator offered a preview of coming attractions, writing a bill making the fertilization of multiple eggs in I.V.F. treatments a felony.

Tacticians in both political parties have long theorized that if a conservative Supreme Court actually struck down Roe v. Wade, it would set Republicans back at the polls for years. Mr. Bush's canonization of clumps of frozen cells over potential cancer cures may jump-start that backlash. We'll see this fall. Already one Republican senatorial candidate, Michael Steele of Maryland, has stepped in Mr. Bush's moral morass by egregiously comparing stem-cell research to Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.

Mr. Reed's primary defeat is as much a blow to religious-right political clout as the White House embrace of stem-cell fanaticism. The man who revolutionized the face of theocratic politics in the 1990's with a telegenic choirboy's star power has now changed his movement's face again, this time to mud.

The humiliating Reed defeat -- by 12 points against a lackluster rival in a conservative primary in a conservative state -- is being pinned on his association with the felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also tainted that other exemplar of old-time religion, Tom DeLay. True enough, but it's what Mr. Reed did for Mr. Abramoff's clients that is most damning, far more so than the golf junkets and money-grubbing. The causes Mr. Reed enabled through manufactured grass-roots campaigns (unwittingly, he maintains) were everything he was supposedly against: Indian casinos and legal loopholes that allowed forced abortions and sexual slavery in the work force of an American commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands.

Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry -- older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn't some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right's most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed's smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing "the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century."

Actually, the Christian Coalition was soon to be accused of inflating its membership, Enron-accounting style, and was careening into debt. Only three years after his Time cover, Mr. Reed, having ditched the coalition to set up shop as a political consultant, sent his self-incriminating e-mail to Mr. Abramoff: "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" He also humped in noncorporate accounts, like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

By 2005 Mr. Reed had become so toxic that Mr. Bush wouldn't be caught on camera with him in Georgia. But the Bush-Rove machine was nonetheless yoked to Mr. Reed in their crusades: the demonization of gay couples as boogeymen (and women) in election years, the many assaults on health (not just in stem-cell laboratories but in federal agencies dealing with birth control and sex education), the undermining of the science of evolution. The beauty of Mr. Reed's unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president's men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters.

It's possible that even Joe Lieberman, a fellow traveler in the religious right's Schiavo and indecency jeremiads, could be swept out with Rick Santorum in the 2006 wave. Mr. Lieberman is hardly the only Democrat in the Senate who signed on to the war in Iraq, but he's surely the most sanctimonious. He is also the only Democrat whose incessant Bible thumping (while running for vice president in 2000) was deemed "inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours" by the Anti-Defamation League.

As Ralph Reed used to say: amen.

Friday, July 14, 2006

Left Behind Economics: Paul Krugman Gets It

Be sure to pay serious notice to his reference to the Upton Sinclair Principle!

Left Behind Economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN, Op-Ed Columnist

July 14, 2006

I'd like to say that there's a real dialogue taking place about the state of the U.S. economy, but the discussion leaves a lot to be desired. In general, the conversation sounds like this:

Bush supporter: "Why doesn't President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias."

Informed economist: "But it's not a great economy for most Americans. Many families are actually losing ground, and only a very few affluent people are doing really well."

Bush supporter: "Why doesn't President Bush get credit for a great economy? I blame liberal media bias."

To a large extent, this dialogue of the deaf reflects Upton Sinclair's principle: it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But there's also an element of genuine incredulity. Many observers, even if they acknowledge the growing concentration of income in the hands of the few, find it hard to believe that this concentration could be proceeding so rapidly as to deny most Americans any gains from economic growth.

Yet newly available data show that that's exactly what happened in 2004.

Why talk about 2004, rather than more recent experience? Unfortunately, data on the distribution of income arrive with a substantial lag; the full story of what happened in 2004 has only just become available, and we won't be able to tell the full story of what's happening right now until the last year of the Bush administration. But it's reasonably clear that what's happening now is the same as what happened then: growth in the economy as a whole is mainly benefiting a small elite, while bypassing most families.

Here's what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income -- the purchasing power of the typical family -- actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn't just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution -- that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans -- gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better -- like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers -- that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

Can anything be done to spread the benefits of a growing economy more widely? Of course. A good start would be to increase the minimum wage, which in real terms is at its lowest level in half a century.

But don't expect this administration or this Congress to do anything to limit the growing concentration of income. Sometimes I even feel sorry for these people and their apologists, who are prevented from acknowledging that inequality is a problem by both their political philosophy and their dependence on financial support from the wealthy. That leaves them no choice but to keep insisting that ordinary Americans -- who have, in fact, been bypassed by economic growth -- just don't understand how well they're doing.

From the NYT.

Re: the Upton Sinclair principle: What (key) role does the press also play in perpetuating that concept?

On a related note, be sure to read Marc Cooper's short but to-the-point 'Early Thanksgiving' column which also places Shrub's claims of good economic news in more specific context, including this gem:
I'm pleased that this is only the fourth biggest deficit in American history and not the second biggest.

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