Author Archives: Chris

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

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The Derby was yesterday so I’m a little late with this but, in honor of Derby Day, driftglass posted an excerpt from Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 article, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.   I miss Thompson.  He was as astute an observer and chronicler of American culture and politics as I can think of.  For all the controlled substances Thompson ingested, political writing doesn’t get more lucid than his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972.

(If you’re not familiar with Ralph Steadman, Thompson’s artist companion at the Derby, his website is here.)

Weekly Digest – May 3, 2015

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Must Read

Should Read

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The Sanders candidacy

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From Max Ehrenfreund, Why Bernie Sanders’s strategic gambit may not be as unreasonable as it seems:

Sanders’s strategy… won’t be to run to the left of Clinton… His campaign won’t be about mobilizing the party’s left flank or its base, its highly educated members living in coastal cities. Instead… his goal will be to appeal to working-class white voters, many of whom might describe themselves as moderate or even socially conservative in surveys…. Sanders… likes to talk about how he consistently wins by large margins in his home state, which shows that he has in fact won the allegiance of many otherwise conservative voters. [Ed.:  Sanders’s electoral history here.] His supporters, possibly, feel alienated from the political and financial elite that makes up the establishment in both parties. No Democrat represents that elite better than Clinton.

Sanders’s policies will be to her left, but in his view, his constituency will be to her right. The real question for him is not about the strength of his support among committed liberals, but whether he can persuade moderate Democrats outside of Vermont to vote for him…

If Jim Webb is going to make a serious run then that’s the approach he needs to take:  appeal to people who are alienated from the political and financial elite.   The challenge is that many of those people don’t vote.  How does Sanders (or Webb) convince them that it’s worth their while to do so?

Why spoil a good story with the facts?

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It’s not news that David Brooks is a pretentious contemptible ass, that he plays fast and loose with facts and at times even ignores them completely.  He was in fine form today with “The Nature of Poverty”.   (It reminded me of his post-earthquake Haiti column from 2010.)   When it comes to substance, his columns are without merit but they do have modest entertainment value.  Spotting the BS in them is a bit like playing Minesweeper or Tetris.  It keeps you entertained for a few minutes while you’re procrastinating.  Anyhow, one sentence in his column today caught my attention in particular:

As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person.

And I think to myself, “Ya know, that sounds like a stretch.”  Low and behold Dean Baker had already called bullshit.   From “David Brooks and the Federal Government’s $14,000 Per Year Per Poor Person”: Continue reading →

Thought for the Day: 1 May 2015

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Apropos of May Day:

Today, of course, as [self-declared Socialist Bernie] Sanders announced that he would be running for president, the [National Journal] decided to remind Americans that, yes, being a Socialist does in fact make you pretty damn liberal…. What is remarkable about Sanders’s platform is how unremarkable it would sound to any run-of-the-mill Democratic politician 40 years ago, and how moderate it would have sounded to Eugene V. Debs, the last major Socialist candidate for president.

–  Charlie Pierce

 

America’s spending problem

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The lead paragraphs to Thomas Hungerford’s “Let’s Face It – We’re Far From Broke“:

The relationship between tax policy and spending policy in the United States has changed dramatically over the past 200 years (Ippolito 2012). Kimmel (1959, 7) notes that for the first 140 years, “federal budget policy was concerned mainly with the money costs of government and raising the revenues to meet them.” In recent years, only one of the two major political parties continued to view fiscal policy this way. Democratic proposals for spending increases or tax cuts have routinely been “paid for” with new revenue sources or by offsetting spending reductions.1 For Republicans, however, tax and spending decisions appear to be developed in isolation from one another and with little regard to any impact on deficits and federal debt, with both tax cuts and spending increases unaccompanied by financing sources undertaken during Republican administrations. When Republican policy makers do pay attention to deficits, they tend to focus only on the spending side of the budget. For example, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), speaking for many in the GOP, argues, “Washington has a spending problem. Let’s face it—we’re broke” (Boehner 2012).

This is clearly wrong. While the federal government is projected to run deficits far into the future, the U.S. economy is projected to generate substantial amounts of income growth far into the future. This means the real fiscal challenge is simply the political problem of raising revenues that are sufficient to meet our spending needs. Indeed, the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) provides Congress with the power to raise revenue “to pay the debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.” This issue brief examines our nation’s fiscal situation and identifies what the real challenges on the spending and revenue sides are….

Baltimore

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An investigative report in The Baltimore Sun, Undue force.

Charlie Pierce:

Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The community cannot—it will not—tolerate coercion and mob rule. Violence and destruction must be ended—in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people. Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.

I went back to the Introduction to the Kerner Report as soon as the footage from Baltimore began to inundate all forms of media, old and new. I went back to the Kerner Report when Wolf Blitzer, on CNN, pronounced himself gobsmacked that something like this “could take place in an American city.” Jesus, Wolf, the Kerner Report was issued in 1968, after two years of serious rioting in places like Detroit, Newark, and Washington, D.C. It was issued in good faith. It was forgotten within a decade. It remained forgotten in Los Angeles in 1992, and in Ferguson last year. It was forgotten by both sides. It was forgotten by the criminals, on both sides, and it was forgotten by the victims, on both sides. No wonder Blitzer’s gob was so thoroughly smacked.

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