How We Think About The Dead

The New York Times described Michael Brown as “no angel.” An unfortunate choice of words on the day of his funeral. Especially if you consider (as Vox does here) the carefully worded descriptions they had published about some well-known mass killers. Timothy McVeigh, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, the Columbine shooter, and others were described as "just like you and me." Was Michael Brown unlike you and me?

There is a very subtle mechanism we all insert into our judgments, to rationalize what has happened, to explain why it happened, to excuse it, to justify it. In the case of the white murderers it was a “who could have known?” rationalization. In the case of the young black man wrongly killed a week away from freshman year in college it is a reassurance that “Hell, he wasn’t really innocent at all.” A mechanism to help us not feel so bad about it, or at least not guilty ourselves.

Vox's Matthew Yglesias turns this on its head and asks the necessary question: what might happen to any of us in our own youthful brushes with the law if we were the color of Michael Brown?

We have a long and persistent habit of racism in this country. As William Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In his poem Let America Be America Again, Langston Hughes describes how different our inheritance of liberty and freedom and opportunity is depending on our skin color. It resonates especially loudly this month in Ferguson, Missouri.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967


Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

American newspaper archives are full of photographs from the last century and before of happy laughing crowds of white people gathered around the tortured, burned, disfigured, hung corpses of black men. The atmosphere is that of a town picnic. Who are those people? They are our ancestors. How should they be described in the New York Times? We know how the men they murdered were described.

A bit of history. A lynching in Omaha in 1919. Our ancestors were there and took part. We can't rationalize that away.

David Brooks Explained

(David Brooks is the New York Times apologist for pure unregulated predatory capitalism, which is the Romney brand. Here's his most recent column, with explanatory footnotes.)

THE CAPITALISM DEBATE

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 16, 2012

Let’s say you are president in a time of a sustained economic slowdown. You initiated a series of big policies that you thought were going to turn the economy around, but they didn’t work — either because they were insufficient or ineffective (Or because your opposition and their clients and the trillions of bailout dollars hoarded by Wall Street were dedicated to making sure they didn't work). How do you run for re-election under these circumstances?

Do you spend the entire campaign saying that things would have been even worse if you hadn’t acted the way you did? No. That would be pathetic. (But it would be true. I guess the truth is pathetic if you don't like it.) You go on the attack. (Not an unreasonable thing to do since the Republican opposition has attacked and blocked and ridiculed and filibustered and evaded every proposal and every compromise you've tried in the past three and a half years.) Instead of defending your economic policies, you attack modern capitalism as it now exists. (Capitalism as it exists, as enabled by the extreme deregulation of the Bush years, is a gross distortion of the practical, regulated, moderate and egalitarian capitalism its inventor, Adam Smith, described in 1776.) You blame the system for the economy. (You blame the reckless greed and extreme inequality of wealth and power between Wall Street and Main Street, which is only fair. And honest.) You do this with double ferocity if your opponent (an affable, square jawed, handsome vulture capitalist and exporter of American jobs with unknown millions in secret bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda) happens to be the embodiment of that system.

This is what the Obama campaign appears to have done in recent months. (Finally!) Instead of defending the policies of the last four years (which had started a decent recovery until the GOP retook the House and were able to shut it down again), the campaign has begun a series of attacks on the things people don’t like about modern capitalism. (Why argue with the American people? Give them some credit for intelligence.)

They don’t like the way unsuccessful firms go bust. (Or fairly prosperous firms are seen as vulnerable by takeover artists like Romney, who use the companies' own cash to buy them, then load them up with debt to pay themselves huge bonuses, then plunder their pension funds, slash their workers' pay and benefits, break their unions and ship their jobs overseas, using the proceeds to buy a few more homes and show ponies.) Obama hit that with ads about a steel plant closure a few months ago. They don’t like C.E.O. salaries. (Why should the boss of a company earn more in a day or an hour than an average worker earns in a year by actually making stuff?) President Obama hits that regularly. (Amen!) They don’t like financial shenanigans. (Let's quit mincing words. Call it crime, fraud, looting, corrupt practice, creative tax evasion.) Obama hits that. They don’t like outsourcing and offshoring. (Explain to me how firing people and moving their jobs overseas where you can hire a 12 year-old for a dollar a day is patriotic.) This week, Obama has been hitting that.

The president is now running an ad showing Mitt Romney tunelessly singing “America the Beautiful,” while the text on screen blasts him for shipping jobs to China, India and Mexico. (The text quotes newspaper reports that are actually factual. The singing is Romney's own. This is Politics 101.)

The accuracy of the ad has been questioned by the various fact-checking outfits. (Questioned before new information emerged that indicate Romney either lied to American voters or lied to the SEC about whether he was running Bain Capital during the period it was aggressively shipping jobs to China and India. Or maybe he was lying to Massachusetts election officials about whether he was living in his his Utah home or his Massachusetts home and running Bain. And how many homes does he own? Six?) That need not detain us. (Let's hurry past this because Romney's financial statements are dubious at best.) It’s safest to assume that all the ads you see this year (most of which will be paid for by the billions flowing into Republican PACs) will be at least somewhat inaccurate because the ad-makers now take dishonesty as a mark of their professional toughness. (A standard set by Nixon a generation ago and perfected by the Bush family.)

What matters is the ideology behind the ad: the assumption that Bain Capital, the private-equity (vulture capitalist) firm founded by Romney, should not have invested in (and subsequently looted) companies that (under Romney's/Bain's firm direction) hired workers abroad (after firing their American workers and looting their pension funds and taking away their health insurance); the assumption that hiring Mexican or Indian workers is unpatriotic (it's jolly patriotic if you're Mexican or Indian); the assumption that no worthy person would do what most global business leaders have been doing for the past half-century. (Let's just say it: If you could get away with being completely ruthless and greedy and violate trust and obligations right and left and ruin a lot of lives and make yourself rich in the process, wouldn't you do it? Some wouldn't. Very few people would have the gall to run for president on such a record.)

This ad — and the rhetoric the campaign is using around it — challenges the entire logic of capitalism as it has existed over several decades. (Actually, David. No. Go reread your Adam Smith. Reread your Theodore Roosevelt. Reread your Dwight Eisenhower. I'd recommend you reread Keynes, but you won't.) It’s part of a comprehensive attack on the (utter corruption and destruction of the) economic system Romney personifies. (He's the poster boy for the corporate “shenanigans” that collapsed our economy in the last few months of the Bush administration.)

This shift of focus has been audacious. (And long overdue. Obama has been too polite, too reserved, and too trusting in the age-old democratic rules and traditions in Washington, old traditions like cooperation and polity, which the Republicans have been spitting on for years. A word about audacity: Washington and Ben Franklin were audacious confronting the largest empire in the world. TR was audacious to confront the great powers and monopolies on Wall Street. Audaciousness isn't always a bad thing. Calling Obama audacious is audacious, in the negative sense.) Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. (Globalization isn't necessarily bad. Free trade can also be Fair Trade, benefiting all sides of the trade. When globalization is an excuse to exploit disorganized and unprotected workers in impoverished countries or steal their raw materials or to dismantle workers' rights in your own country, using the infrastructure and institutions and perverting the laws created as part of a fair society to do so, that is bad globalization. That is the Romney model.) There’s no real evidence that, when he’s off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. (He isn't in the offshoring business. Obama hasn't exported a single job, but none of us can avoid buying tennis shoes made by teenagers in Malaysia or the Philippines.) He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. (He praised their inventiveness and the quality of their products designed here. Like most of us, he no doubt wishes they were made here.) He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. (If you want someone to advise and manage a complex economy you hire somebody who has experience advising and managing complex international companies. It would be foolish not to hire the most competent people. Sometimes even when they don't entirely agree with you, as FDR did when he created the SEC.) His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides. (The point of Democratic policy has always been to strengthen our economy while not gutting the source of its energy which is a skilled and well-paid workforce, citizens who can afford to buy the products they manufacture. FDR's rich friends called him a traitor to his class for siding with working people. I'd call that patriotism.)

But, politically, this aggressive tactic has worked. (Americans are lied to a lot by FoxNews and talk radio, but at the end of the day they are not stupid.) It has shifted the focus of the race from being about big government, which Obama represents, (a government big enough to serve a big country and stand up to huge transnational corporations...and by the way, Obama has increased spending less than any president since Truman––look it up) to being about (predatory or vulture) capitalism, which Romney represents.

Just as Republicans spent years promising voters that they could have tax cuts forever (and never pay for anything again), now the Democrats are promising voters that they can have all the benefits of capitalism without the downsides (as their parents and grandparents had in the bad old days of Truman and Eisenhower and JFK, before corporations were people in all respects but personal responsibilities), like plant closures, rich C.E.O.’s and outsourcing. (Funny how productivity gains don't count unless they are paid upward to the people in the executive suite. Workers are greedy if they demand benefits like healthcare but CEOs are shrewd if they demand free dry cleaning, free limos and courtside tickets for life) Just as Republicans used to force Democrats into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to have high taxes if you want your programs) (Historically, Republicans only wanted the streets paved to their homes, their country clubs, their factory, and, as Leona Helmsley said, thought taxes were for little people), now Democrats are casting Republicans into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to accept outsourcing and the pains of creative destruction if you want your prosperity). (Creative destruction is what the mob called burning the factory to collect on the insurance.)

The Romney campaign doesn’t seem to know how to respond. (There is no plausible response. Maybe they know this.) For centuries, business leaders have been inept when writers, intellectuals and politicians attacked capitalism (which is why the billionaire class have spent billions buying writers, economists, academics, inviting creative people to their beach homes, creating “think tanks” and buying ad talent and mass-purchasing their dreadfully bad political books onto the bestseller list. It's called bribery.), and, so far, the Romney campaign is continuing that streak. (But how many billionaires can Romney loyalists fit into one 60,000 square foot Hamptons “cottage” for a fundraiser?)

One thing is for sure. As Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute (see "billionaire funded right wing think tank", above) has said again and again (to appreciative monied audiences who pay for his airfare), it’s not enough to say that capitalism will make you money. You can’t fight what is essentially a moral critique with economics. (Since when has money made you immune to moral considerations? I think Jesus had a few things to say about the morality of the rich. Adam Smith naively assumed the rich would submit to honest, fair regulation.)

Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. (As a Bush Jr. advisor once said “We create our own reality.” In the new Republican universe reality can be bought, usually without inconveniencing rich friends with a tax bill.) He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. (Let's walk that back a couple of years and stipulate that the scandals were the most scandalous during the regime of your man George W. Bush. The Obama years have been about uncovering them and re-installing the regulations against scandalous behavior. Over fierce Republican objections.) He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues. (Assuming you don't mean the “virtues” of firing people and paying those wages to yourself and your fellow investors for your skill at firing people. Firing isn't the best word here. “Firing” assumes cause. Most of the people Romney fired were laid off for the “crime” of earning a living, for making things at a wage American companies used to pay when America's economy got its strength from workers who could afford to be consumers.)

Let’s face it, he’s not a heroic entrepreneur (except in his autobiography, his stump speeches, his reports to shareholders and his statements to the SEC). He’s an efficiency expert. (A CEO tends to define “efficiency” by how little he can pay his workers to work longer and harder and faster.) It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic (or paid a fair wage for good work) and try to make them efficient (make them pay less for more work, by hiring Asian children if need be; slashing benefits) and dynamic (a word possibly adopted by McKinsey to project a robust image onto a company without it actually meaning anything). It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape. (Here's where David begins to sound like he's writing a brochure for the Hitler Youth. I don't think that is his intention.)

That’s his selling point: rigor (forcing other people to be rail-thin and rigorous translates into his fat monthly paycheck) and productivity (again, other people's hard work and productivity can be paid directly to him for demanding it. This, if you can avoid throwing up, is called a “business model”.) If he can build a capitalist vision around that, he’ll thrive. (HE will thrive. Other people, not so much.) If not, he’s a punching bag. (Commence punching.)

Oh, heck...Bill Maher said it better than I can:

“America's rich aren't giving you money, they're taking your money. Between the years 1980 and 2005 80% of all new income generated in this country went to the richest 1%. Let me put that in terms that even you fatass teabaggers, I'm sorry, can understand.

“Say 100 Americans get together and order a 100 slice pizza. The pizza arrives and the first guy takes 80 slices. And if someone suggests, why don't you just take 79 slices, that's socialism! I know, I know. I know, I know, it's just a TV show. But it does reinforce the stupid idea people have that rich people would love us and share with us if only they got to walk a mile in our cheap plastic shoes.

“But they're the reason the shoe factory moved to China. We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get so full that they'll explode. And the candy will rain down on the rest of us.

“Like there's some kind of pinata of benevolence. But here's the thing about a pinata. It doesn't open on its own. You have to beat it with a stick.”

Eat that, David Brooks. Maybe they should hand his column to Bill Maher.

The 1% Is Fine, Thanks For Asking

The New York Times headline reads "Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds". The story will spoil your lunch.

The Washington Post reports the same results under a different headline: "Nation’s wealthiest 1 percent triple their incomes, according to CBO report." The Times didn't want to upset the mandarin class too much. Double sounds less unfair than triple.

Either way the upper upper upper class is eating our lunch. And breakfast and dinner. Maybe the message is that once you are so very rich it doesn't matter whether your income tripled or doubled. Who can keep track? Poor them, with all that income to sort out. What a headache; let's give them some more tax breaks to help them deal with it.

Another thing that's making lives more unequal is that so much more of the government's "help" is dished out to people who don't need it but just heard it was available. Imagine if rich people demanded equal access to food stamps. Rich farmers and big farmers get more relief than poor and small farmers. Big companies get more help than the small businesses who stand in as the poster children of the Chamber of Commerce (which has been screwing them for decades.)

The financial rescue was supposed to help all of us, but notice who butted to the front of the line. The too-big-to-fail banks and financial companies and major corporations (many of whom, like GE, have bigger financial services sides than their old manufacturing sides) hogged it all. They are hoarding trillions, refusing to share it, pay it out, invest it or use it to hire people or order inventory.

They are using it instead to give enormous bonuses to their tip top people. Goldman Sachs reported a $393 million loss this past quarter, but that's a fraction of the $10 billion bonuses it will pay to its executives for delivering that loss. Go figure.

Never mind, it doesn't compute. Heads they win, tails they win. The 1% always win, the 99% always lose. At least since Reagan changed the rules.

No Exit to Brooklyn

There are conflicting stories about what happened on the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday. The Times reported an entrapment maneuver by the NYPD but twenty minutes later backed away from that story. The Guardian reports conflicting accounts of the same event (some saying the police led the protesters on, some saying the police did no such thing) but paints a clear picture of non-violent non-threatening protesters manhandled by police. One documentary filmmaker and photographer was there, and her version of events is unambiguous: the police created a situation and exploited it.

I'm reminded of the children's story: "Come into my parlor, said the Spider to the Fly." Did the New York police entrap the protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge? Was their retreat strategic? Did they have arrests in mind?

There is a justification for entrapment which argues that the crime is obviously a crime. But didn't the police have bullhorns? Why didn't they announce, loudly and clearly, "If you walk onto this thoroughfare you will be arrested." Did they? Why didn't they?

Plain, unelaborated reportage can suggest all kinds of things, can be interpreted to the preference of a diversity of readers. But blunt questions can and should illuminate the reporting by laying out the obvious things that were not said, that were not done, that were enabled, that were suggested falsely.

A policeman who says "After you" could be inviting you onto a prohibited roadway or inviting you to buy illegal drugs; but law abiding citizens might believe the police are giving permission, might believe they are offering a temporary license to do something, or an escape from a place that has suddenly become too small for the crowd that has assembled.

The police have a responsibility to the crowds they are policing that is greater than their responsibility to the absent and powerful groups the assembled are there to protest. The New York Police Department is there to protect and defend New Yorkers, all New Yorkers, not just the owners of New York but the renters, the hired workers, the unemployed New Yorkers, the students going to school there, the recent graduates who live there, the powerless as much or more than the powerful. The powerful have their own protections.

Violent Suppression of Peaceful Wall Street Protesters

Lawrence ODonnell gives a rightly angry eight minutes to analyzing the brutality police are meting out to protesters in the Wall Street Occupation movement. He does a judicious and intelligent job of it.

International Business Times posted this short video. Captured from the street, it illustrates the smug amusement of the haves for the hapless on the street below. Drinking champagne and laughing, as if they know the police are working for them.

From the Nation, a welcome rebuke to the New York Times' embarrasingly biased article. The Times sent a columnist instead of a reporter and she casually cherry picked a few odd protesters, using them to discredit the whole movement and its grievances. I've not seen a balancing story from the Times. The Guardian has, so far, done the best job of covering the protests. Here's a good piece in the Guardian by Amy Goodman.