Entries Tagged 'capitalism' ↓

Robert Reich writes:

Considering the magnitude of challenges ahead for America, it seems only reasonable that taxes should rise on the wealthy.

Can someone explain to me why this seems reasonable, or fair?

Let me explain what I mean. The other day I was talking to a friend, a very hardworking professional who makes a healthy amount of money, much, much more than her younger sister, who chose the uncomplicated life of an artist in a rural idyll, in which she has been supported for more than 25 years by their financially comfortable parents.

Now younger sister wants a Viking stove for her birthday. Says mom: No problem!

My friend, who could, without blinking, afford to renovate her entire (huge) kitchen and put in two Viking stoves, is annoyed. She hasn’t asked for a penny from her parents since graduating from college, after which she attended professional school, married another hardworking professional, and raised a larger-than-average family. Now that their kids are out of school (she and her husband paid full freight for their children’s education at top-ranked and top-priced universities), she is preoccupied with socking away enough money for retirement so as not to be a burden on those children.

I have known my friend for several decades. In all that time, it would never have occurred to her to buy something that was beyond her means–or indeed even to allow herself to wish for such things. Instead, she focused on her gratifying and socially responsible work and on her personal responsibilities. She earned her wealth, such as it is, through intense labor.

Robert Reich wants the rich to pay their “fair” share.

What’s fair? I’d say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich, meaning those earning over $500,000 per year. I’d also suggest an annual wealth tax of one-half of 1 percent on the net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets.

In Reich’s dream world, my friend and her husband, in addition to being treated inequitably by her parents, would also be treated unfairly by the government—all because they are hardworking people who also made a wise investment in real estate many years ago and are thus probably “worth” more than $5 million.

Now, my friend and her family are hard-core progressive Democrats. In fact, if Reich’s Rules were to come into play in a campaign, my friend would not pay without complaining. She’d be out there on the front lines volunteering for the candidate who proposed those rules. That’s just the kind of person she is.

However, I say it’s not fair to ask others in her position (which, by the way, I am not—so this isn’t a hidden plea for understanding) to do the same. Her cheerful willingness to go many extra miles to support those anonymous Americans who are not as financially comfortable as she is requires a selflessness that most people can’t—and should not be asked to—muster.

If my friend would only extrapolate from her own family situation—about which she is increasingly resentful, because her decades-long selflessness is being entirely disregarded and taken for granted—she might get a glimmer of understanding about why “liberal” or “progressive” ideas about soaking the “rich” are anathema to other Americans (including both those less well-off and those who are even better-off than she).

We don’t want to pay for little sister’s Viking stove. Furthermore, we are sick of little sister’s attitude.

Of course Reich only asks for the “rich” and “super-rich” to pay for reasonable-sounding items:

national defense and homeland security, good schools and a crumbling infrastructure, the upcoming costs of boomers’ Social Security … and, hopefully, affordable national health insurance.

But his attitude—they can afford it, so they should pay—sucks.

Here he comes to save the day. (Single-handedly!) Mighty Anderson is on the way:

No two ways about it, the Fourth Estate is on life-support — and the public is eager to pull the plug. Once regarded as the noblest of professions, journalism has toppled from the heights of David Halberstam to the muck of Judith Miller.

Still, there’s one decidedly silver lining in this clouded sky — Anderson Cooper, the prematurely gray, ultra-soigné Anderson Cooper, whose award-winning coverage of everything from Bosnia to Katrina has been heralded as creating a new genre of journalist: the “emo reporter.” Capable not only of dealing with disasters both natural (New Orleans) and man-made (Somalia), but doing so with something resembling identifiable human empathy, this feisty yet elegant man-about-the-globe has quickly become the sine qua non of reportorial style. And what complements a celebrated style better than a celebrity scent?

Hey, wait. AC wouldn’t really do that, would he?

Initially Cooper turned him down,

Whew. That’s better. It must be all that good breeding I mentioned a while back. Hold on, though. “Initially” he turned it down? Then what happened?

…  but Mom (that’s Gloria Vanderbilt to you) thinks it’s a swell idea. And being the Marie Curie of celebrity product placement, she certainly knows what she’s talking about. So Cooper is reportedly going to give it some thought.

And why the hell not? It’s not as if anyone respects TV “news” personalities anymore anyway.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” takes on a new meaning in Silicon Valley, California, where a $3 million nest egg isn’t enough to keep away the uneasy feeling that everybody is doing better than you are, sayeth the New York Times of August 5, 2007:

So spare a thought for the poor working “Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich“

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

As if their status anxiety isn’t enough to keep them awake at night, now the new working rich must also take their share of the blame for harming the middle class, and society at large, by displacing those anxieties on the unsuspecting.

In his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class,” Professor [Robert H.] Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age. The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population — and not in a good way.

Knowing that Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group made almost $400 million last year, or that he spent $3 million last February on his 60th-birthday party (entertainment: Rod Stewart, Marvin Hamlisch, Martin Short, Patti LaBelle), doesn’t simply make the typical American green with envy, and hence unhappy. Rather, Frank argues, the problem is that extreme consumption — at which Schwarzman excels — helps shape norms for the whole society, not just his fellow plutocrats. “The mere presence of … larger mansions, for example, may shift some people’s perceptions about how big a house one can build without seeming overly ostentatious,” Frank writes.

Got that? While you, Mr. Jones, lust after East Egg, Mr. Smith lusts after a tenth of your nest egg.

Stop lusting after more and faster and bigger and better and newer and shinier and cooler! You’re hurting America!

I rag on Andrew Sullivan a lot—his punitive moralistic streak drives me crazy—but I’ve been reading him for a long time and, credit where credit is due: he’s a stylish and informative blogger. He always brings in great stuff from far and wide.

Like, for instance, this welcome news from The Futurist:

In partnership with Carnegie Hall and the Weill Music Institute, Juilliard has launched a new fellowship program called “The Academy,” intended to help talented graduates balance the cultivation of their craft with teaching and community outreach.

“The so-called reclusive artist of fifty or sixty years ago, the Horowitzes who showed up, played their concert and then left, although extraordinary artists, are gone. The world has changed a great deal, especially in America,” says Joseph W. Polisi, president of the Juilliard School. We need musicians, actors and dancers who can be good and effective representatives for their art or community and take advantage of various funding sources. That’s what the goal of this is, to provide an environment for the fellows of The Academy to really hear what their colleagues have to say, to provide the tools for them to be articulate spokespersons for the arts in schools and with school boards, etc. and to really give them a sense of their own entrepreneurial abilities.”

It’s a good thing they’re “down with capitalism,” as Sullivan says, since

[y]oung artists fresh from graduate school probably won’t have the support systems many of their predecessors enjoyed. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand in the arts is expected to grow as fast as for all other occupations through 2014, but the competition for both salaried and freelance jobs will intensify as talented aspiring artists with master of fine arts degrees will vastly outnumber lucrative openings for painters, dancers, and musicians.

“I Shall Exterminate Everything around me That Restricts Me from Being the Master,” George Grosz, 1921

(image scanned from the book that accompanies the show)

I went back to the Met yesterday to see the “Glitter and Doom” show before it closes. It is a stunning exhibit. David Cohen describes the period in which this work emerged:

The Weimar Republic was an interlude between German disasters. As the journalist Hans Sahl, who is quoted in the catalogue by historian Ian Buruma, put it: “Germany had lost a war and almost sleepwalked into a republic for which it wasn’t prepared. It was a time of great misery, with legless war veterans riding the sidewalks on rolling planks, with a nation that seemed to consist of nothing but beggars, whores, invalids and fatnecked speculators.”

The painters in this show took ghoulish delight in presenting such a cast of freaks. They also reveled in the extravagance, exoticism, and release of a racy, licentious city in their depiction of nighttime Berlin. In their own perverse way, in scathing portraits of generously thick-skinned patrons, they celebrated the achievements of a progressive bourgeoisie.

The style of artists like Dix and Christian Schad fused the vehemence and brutality of Expressionism with a medieval meticulousness. Neue Sachlichkeit [the New "Objectivity" or "Dispassion"] was a term coined by the Mannheim museum director, Gustav Hartlaub, to describe a tendency toward verisimilitude among artists who emerged from the twin shadows of Expressionism and the Great War. A neoclassical “return to order” was concurrently felt across Europe, particularly in France and Italy, but in Germany it took on a character and force of its own. Hartlaub identified two wings of the movement in Germany, roughly corresponding to political orientations. The right appealed to the consolations of the bucolic and the familiar. Meanwhile, the left, which Hartlaub championed and named “Verists,” used realism to confront and satirize a corrupt society.

The artists who fell under this Verist banner were diverse in style and attitude. George Grosz (who had Americanized his name from Georg Gross) was less steeped in tradition than, say, Dix or Schad. While he emulated Hogarth and Daumier, his harsh, explicitly leftist satires of the new republic employed a crudity and cruelty that were unmistakably modern. “I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master” (1921) is a grotesque portrayal of a gloating capitalist with a porcine nozzle and a cigar smoldering.

The significance of the show is best described by Roberta Smith in her review:

[T]hroughout this amazing show, we are looking into faces that are watching the world as it slides from one cataclysm to the next.

Maybe it’s too much to ask of people who have been living the good life for 60 years or maybe we are just too far removed and too insulated and too addicted to escapism, but I can’t get the thought out of my head that contemporary artists are unequal to the task of describing life in the early 21st century, as we slide “from one cataclysm to the next”…
On the other hand, having just seen “Glitter and Doom” for the second time, I was struck by Gawker’s “pinup series”:

David Geffen wants a new toy, the Los Angeles Times. Nikki Finke has the scoop on what he’d like to do with it once he buys it:

Here’s what he’s saying to friends: He’ll pour money into more hires. He plans to staff — more like stuff — the paper with name writers and journalism stars. (Of course, he’ll raid The New York Times, where Frank Rich and his wife, Alex Witchel, are his good friends and occasional overnight guests. So are Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi. So are a lot of literati.) He’ll demand quality. He’ll ratchet up the Web site (even though he hates how prohibitively expensive it is to do that). He’ll figure out a way to bring in Latinos as readers. Geffen loathes how boring, badly written, inconsequential and pedestrian the L.A. Times’ editorial and opinion section is. He thinks nobody reads it. He knows nobody talks about it. Most of all, he wants his newspaper to be talked about. He’ll put the newsroom ahead of the ludicrous profit margins demanded by Wall Street and the Tribune Co. That’s not to say he wants to lose money, just that he thinks it’s a good investment already (though not if its stock price keeps dropping).

If this is anywhere near true, the idea that Geffen is looking for Glamour and Buzz and Fun in the Future in a newspaper is…well, it’s beyond sad. At a time when every newspaper in America is finally facing the grimmest realities about the future of media, Geffen wants to resurrect the lost dream of the cohort. I know he means well. But he’s nuts.Just ask the Sulzberger family.

The right side of the blogosphere is all atwitter because Mark Halperin of ABC News has taken his self-criticism show on the road (in Act One, he “admits” that indeed the media is liberal and biased agasint conservatives. Says it isn’t fair). Wow!—he must have seen the light. Right?

Well, no. A commenter at Hot Air explains all:

FOX News is kicking their collective butts. This is not an honesty issue. They are trying to court roughly half of the nation because they are losing where it counts the most: their pocketbooks.

Does anyone really think that Mr. Halperin would be having this conversation with Mr. O’reilly if the MSM was kicking the crap out of FOX News?

It’s all about the Benjamins.

The New York Times predicts that the term “Islamic fascists,” having proved oh-so-unpopular, will no longer emanate from Bush’s mouth.

By Labor Day, Islamic fascists and Islamo-fascism were the hot new conservative buzzwords.

And then, just as suddenly, they were gone — at least from the president’s lips.

“The debate that we wanted to launch was about an ideological struggle against an enemy that has very specific plans, ambitions and aspirations, much like movements of the past, like fascism and Nazism,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president. Addressing the term Islamic fascists, Mr. Bartlett said, “I’m sure he’ll use it again.”

But it seems unlikely Mr. Bush will use it again, given the outcry it provoked.

Muslims, both here and in other countries, were deeply offended.

We’ll see about where Mr. Bush goes with the term “Islamic fascism,” which gets across the message that there’s an ideology behind the terrorists who are threatening our way of life (a notion that progressives would rather not engage, because it leaves them with no peaceful options for dealing with terrorism).

Meanwhile, our pop culture reliably takes on politics—sooner or later. In this case sooner: an ad agency has caused an uproar by creating a radio spot for a car dealership that is said to be declaring a “jihad on the auto market.”

A car dealership’s tongue-in-cheek radio advertisement declaring “a jihad on the auto market,” will not be changed, the company said.

The ad has drawn criticism that its content is offensive to Muslims.

Several stations rejected the spot from Dennis Mitsubishi, which boasts sales representatives wearing “burqas” — the head-to-toe traditional dress for some Islamic women — will sell vehicles that can “comfortably seat 12 jihadists in the back.”

Jihad is a holy war waged by Muslims in defence of Islam.

“We firmly believe the ad does not in any way disrespect any religion or culture, but we feel, I guess, that maybe poking a little fun at radical extremists is fair game,” dealership president Keith Dennis said.

“It was our intention to craft something around some of the buzzwords of the day and give everyone a good chuckle and be a little bit of a tension reliever.”

Good luck with that!

…for Muslim patients:

Tim Meadows, customer service manager for Interweave, the West Yorkshire-based firm which makes the garments, believes the demand for the gowns could be huge.

“We think there is a large market out there,” he says.