Across the Great Divide

The Way it Works for the 1%.

Mark Gisleson caught a FairTax apologist on MPR today, a fellow from the aforementioned Cato Institute. The gist of the arguments, as always, is that the wealthy pay the most in taxes and take the risks that create jobs for the little people. They deserve their big paychecks and reduced taxes.

There was another version of this partial truth playing at MPR yesterday, too, in covering a celebration of inadvertent Watergate burglary financier Ken Dahlberg.

The "don't tax the rich because it kills jobs" line runs so incessantly that otherwise sentient reporters and editors in the "liberal media" just let it go by without a challenge.

Well, call me a traitor to my class, but boys and girls, here's a more typical story of how the top 1% of earners invests — and it isn't to create jobs.

I was pedaling back with a load of pet supplies today and noticed a Free Brochure box that had fallen over in the snow just down the road from my driveway.

The flier inside says, "This lot has a beautiful building envelope, with panoramic views of the Valley." I know the 19.55 acres well because we used to own it.

In 2006, we sold it for nearly three times what we paid for the land in 1999. Now the owners are asking twice what they paid us. If  they get something close to their price, they'll clear a quarter million dollars after paying the realtor commission. All for having enough spare money lying around to park it in undeveloped land for a couple years.

Job creation? Well, maybe like us, they'll put their profits toward building a house they were going to build anyway. If they're able to build a bigger house, that will temporarily create work for a couple extra laborers who most likely slipped over the border from Mexico.

Personally, I just shut up and paid my taxes on the windfall, but there are plenty of folks who think otherwise. They'd rather give their money to create jobs at the Cato Foundation.

Ghost of State of the Union Past.

This photo of a radiant House Speaker Nancy Pelosi applauding Pres. Bush during (before?) his State of the Union address showed up on the Cato Institute's daily news dispatch the day after the speech. (The photo changes each day, and it's not archived with the story.)

I meant at the time to comment on this apparent bipartisan show of approval. Although I didn't watch much of the speech and would've missed the moment, it seemed strange that Pelosi could find anything in Bush's words to merit such enthusiasm.

When today I went to the White House site to find this shot by presidential photographer David Bohrer, it was nowhere to be found in the gallery for the speech.

Instead, there were much more prosaic shots, with Pelosi and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney obscured by a smiling president.

So what happened? Was the image pulled because Cheney looks like he just received a disturbing signal from his pacemaker?

Nothing so nefarious, it turns out. Cato, dedicated to engaging the  "intelligent, concerned lay public," chose an image from the 2007 speech. One hopes they are more scrupulous about their selection and presentation of their other material.

Did Huckabee Hamstring Hammond's Fundraising?

As I watched the video feed from Kenneth Copeland's 2008 Ministers Conference, Copeland wasn't on the top of my list of must-see TV.

Sure, I've written about his ministry, its tentacles and the Grassley Senate investigation, and I was hoping for something directly from Copeland's mouth on that. I wasn't disappointed. The big news  I stumbled across — about fundraising for Mike Huckabee during the conference — came while watching the between-sermon sessions, looking for any updates about the fate of Mac Hammond's jet.

My earnest expectation was that the ministers in attendance, inspired by subtle and not-so-subtle signals from the pulpit, would kick in the money Hammond needed, and perhaps turn the aircraft back to his ministry.

As far as I was able to determine, the Lord intends to work a little slower on that one.

But we have learned that the ministers raised $111,000 in cash and pledged another million dollars to Huckabee's presidential campaign. They observed the letter of the law prohibiting churches from explicitly advocating for a candidate by temporarily adjourning the conference, sending attendees outside, and inviting those who wished to come back in for a private session on behalf of Huckabee's campaign.

You can bet there was some hooting when Copeland and the lawyers hatched this one.

Announcing the cash total during the conference itself may still prove to have been a slip-up, but Copeland might argue that's simply like reporting the score of a football game the ministers missed because they were in a meeting. It's something many of the assembled were interested in, but there's no connection with the church.

Back to Huckabee and Hammond. Did the Huckabee fundraiser knock the props out from under the jet buy that seemed to be developing on Wednesday morning?

Choosing between two friends and two appeals, did Copeland take Huckabee's call and decide the candidate's need was more urgent? Clearly Huckabee prevailed, since there was no further mention of Hammond's plane during the broadcast portions.

Meanwhile, here's how thin the veils were in the dance of legality the ministers were led through in order to give to Huckabee...

Imagine yourself one of the thousand or so ministers at the conference who have come to learn and profess, but also to make connections, climb in Copeland's estimation and demonstrate your godliness to peers. You do that by showing you enjoy God's abundance.

The leaders of your faith defend their personal wealth by appealing to scripture and pointedly asking any believer who questions it by asking, "What's your problem? Why hasn't God Almighty blessed you?"

In an environment where money is an expression of your godliness, dropping a $100 check in the basket and pledging another thousand or more is not a political act — nor even simply a finger in the eye of the Washington devils attacking your religion.

It's an expression of your godliness. That you are worthy to sit at the right hand of Kenneth Copeland.

Looking at America Sideways.

After the SOTU address, I heard from one reader:

I realized tonight after watching some of the "State of the Union" programming, that I may be more interested in what pundits (and perhaps one blogger) might say about issues than what a president and/or candidates may say. I am troubled by this thought and the reality.

It's true. What an exercise in immovable unreality disguised as leadership. I came in after it started and shut off the speech after about a minute. I watched Kenneth Copeland tapes instead.

*****

A U.S. map of foreclosures in 2007 showed the national average as 10.3 per 1,000 households, but some states are doing much worse. It reminded me of a post from last May, where I questioned whether former State GOP Chair and anti-tax business exec Bill Cooper had firm grasp of economic facts.

A couple paragraphs follow, annotated with the reported foreclosure rates for banker Cooper's favorite states:

Cooper repeatedly talked about "big economic activity" in Florida [20.0], where he has moved his residence, and in Texas[9.4], Arizona[15.2] and Nevada [33.8!]. People are voting with their feet, he said, because of the superior opportunities created by businessmen who were moving to low-tax states to create jobs.

Cooper himself has not run a business in those states, however. Now that he's leaving Minnesota [5.1], when he'd be free to do so, he's instead chosen Ohio [18.0] for his next venture. That's understandable, since he has family in the state — but he apparently sees no contradiction coming from the other side of his mouth. Business owners decide to locate businesses based on tax rates, he claims, and many are fleeing Minnesota right now.

Apparently, business owners in Cooperland decide to locate based on disclosure rates.

*****

Now that John Edwards is out of the race, the candidates closest to my personal views have all folded and any real urgency about the state of working Americans may leak out of the upcoming Democratic debate.

This video from Australia [via Corner House Comments] asks a question I'd like to hear asked at the next GOP debate: What have the unions ever done for us?

 

On the Fringes of the Energy Boom.

My first week back in Colorado after two months away, and I see the signs of change differently than if I'd been here all along. The bike shop that had suspiciously thin inventory — for the end of the road season or going out of business? — is now empty, and the home decorating boutique next door closes today.

Lured by the clearance signs, I see why I never set foot in there before. Ridiculous prices on stuff somewhere between folk primitive and faux luxurious. A very blonde woman with trophy written all over her wardrobe considers a hideous pair of starving artist style paintings with so little paint on them they might as well be prints, and so non-descriptly representational they could be showing flowers or a street scene for all I remember.

They are the last things on the wall, and the woman appears to regard them seriously. The decorator/saleswoman says, you wouldn't have to offset them (one his a foot higher than the other), we just displayed them this way. The customer says, I think I'd put them closer together, but I could offset them, couldn't I? Oh, yes, says the saleswoman, who must be thinking: You can burn them in the fireplace for all I care because I don't want to have to deal with them when we clear out tomorrow.

Mervyn's is holding a closing sale, too. The ad says "Mesa Mall Location Only," but that store is the only Mervyn's left in Colorado.

This part of the state is still relatively booming, with new housing still going up. One large, undeveloped tract half a mile from here where we rode our mountain bikes two months ago has a fleet of earthmoving equipment and serpentine piles of fill all along its border.

The state is in the early stages of developing a new oil and gas permits process designed to better consider public health and wildlife concerns. The industry has been making noises that too much regulation will push resource development out of the state.

The whining and industry pressure are likely to increase. The lobbyists for the mining and petroleum interests out here act like it's still 1913. But it's doubtful they'll pull up and move. After all, the oil and gas is here, not in Kansas.

People here are reasonably okay with the boost development has brought to the economy, but they're not crazy about its impact on their water supply, noise and air pollution, road wear and traffic, and the spoilation of the back country. A lot of residents believe the industry should bear more of the environmental and social burdens of drilling and the overpaid, under-educated workers it brings to a community.

If we're going to send less of our energy money to terrorists, more of it will end up in places like this, but it's not clear how much better a deal that might be.

Good Places, Good Democracy.

Catching up on my high country reading here in Colorado, I found this essay by David Oates, in which he stumbles upon an ancient "best place" while picking out his campsite in the Sierra Nevadas. It leads him on a rumination:

For a while now, environmental thinkers have been pushing us to revise our green disdain for cities. If we are to avoid overrunning every wild field and rural acre with flaccid semi-civilized sprawl, we must make good, compact, pleasing cities. Places we really like being in.

And what I’m noticing is this: The places I gravitate towards in urban environs are not so different from those good places I find in the mountains.

He finds a plaza in Provence that has many appealing similarities with the mountain site's "sheltering topography, a clear line of sight, a little water, and a certain sense of habitable proportion."

Oates expands Jay Appleton's prospect-refuge theory, adding what he calls process to define the essential urban habitat. I'd propose passage as more time- and spatially oriented word to express the same thing:

In natural settings, process is always present. Time passes visibly, in decay and death and rebirth, falling trees and rockslides, moons and seasons. When we stare contemplatively at river or shore, as often as not we’re noticing this passage of time (water its ancient symbol) and the poignancy of our own fluid and temporary lives. In town, however, we may miss it, especially in the shinier bits of the New West that have obliterated all evidence of the past and with it, all sense of the temporal. Home is a now as well as a here. Process is time made visible, and the best urban places find a way to moor us — safely but vividly — in the stream of change.

He concludes by connecting good places to achieving the good life.

Good public places actually encourage us to remember our connectedness and thus foster that most urbane phenomenon, democracy. For such places embody "the public realm" - a crucial space (both actual and virtual) where we meet ourselves and experience the puzzle of our separate and shared identities. Here citizens speak and the public good is hammered out. It’s no fluke that coffeehouses in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston fomented our famous Boston Tea Party and its private-property-destroying, government-defying mischief.

Yet many Americans today seem to have lost the feel for being citizens as well as consumers. The public realm tends to disappear in our corporate-consumerist environment, which always wants to isolate people into individual units of consumption and fast turnover. But the agora of ancient Athens, birthplace of democracy, was both forum and marketplace (as well as hangout, legislature, and university). Our public urban spaces can be, too.

It's a thought echoed elsewhere in the same edition of High Country News by writer Rebecca Solnit:

A more specific sense of being home is the sense of being a pedestrian. We live in an era where people don't go anywhere except by car and are afraid of strangers, or are ill at ease outside. Or there are those who are okay with being outside in wilderness, but not okay in public. Democracy rests with having faith in strangers, by becoming more reliant on them.

America: The World's Rent-a-Cop.

In one of those Times Magazine articles you really need the weekend to read, Parag Khanna tells you why America's shortsighted foreign policy is becoming less relevant to China and Europe — and to the rest of the world.

It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn’t really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?
[...]
While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past.

Instead of the world's policeman, the U.S. is increasingly looking like an overweight rent-a-cop, working with no benefits and coping with a rage problem.

What the Privatizers Never Talk About.

Having worked in the private sector as a grunt, a freelancer, a big company manager, consultant and business owner, I have a different perspective of how business works, compared to free marketeers who have studied business in academia or through the fog of money provided by conservative business interests.

Too many free marketeers — or anti-business types, for that matter — start from ideology and never stop working their way back to their fundamental assumptions. I came to my views more pragmatically, arriving in the business world skeptical and perhaps even insurrectionary, then moderated my views through my exposure to many different industries, organization types and levels of responsibility.

Far from making me a conservative, it made me a better-informed progressive who appreciates business's contributions to society as well as its excesses and shortcomings.

When I read the mash notes to the market written by free market apologists, I don't always disagree, but I almost always think: Not so fast. Private industry ain't that great.

Today, I read a blog post that captures some of the truth the privatizers never talk about. Government may have its faults, but today, large public bureaucracies and staff empire building are pretty rare. The office politics in public service have nothing on private industry, and the inefficiencies in corporations can be staggering, despite what they write in their annual reports to shareholders.

If this makes no sense to you, you've never worked in a large corporation. If you have, it needs no further introduction.

More Copeland-Huckabee and Less of Me.

A story by the Arkansas Gazette's religion reporter gives a very good summary of the Kenneth Copeland-Mike Huckabee connection, and includes some new information about the campaign contribution I reported last week.

The story identifies me as a Communications Fellow with Growth & Justice. I do not recall identifying myself that way to the reporter, though I did tell him I was a political progressive working on matters of economic justice.

My work on the prosperity gospel stories has no connection whatsoever with Growth & Justice.

As a fellow, I am an independent contractor. My work for Growth & Justice is non-partisan and is focused on Minnesota issues, particularly those related to taxes, smart investment and good government practices.

Although my posts on this personal blog also cover those matters, my field here is farther ranging — both in content and opinion. I appreciate the fact that Growth & Justice trusts me to keep them separate.

I don't blame the reporter for identifying me this way, instead of as a blogger and retired business owner. His intent was to show that I am not a political partisan or working for Huckabee's GOP opponents.

All the same, I want it made clear that my personal opinions and posts here have nothing to do with my affiliation with Growth & Justice unless I label them as such.

Free for a Fee.

“Here’s what everybody forgets,” he said. “The taxpayers have to pay for these programs. Why should they pay for them? Why should they? When we can provide the same service for free. I’d rather see the money spent in parks, mental health issues, the homeless. Let the private sector do it. We do it better.”
– New York Times

That argument — minus the altruistic interest in parks, mental health and the homeless — is the crux of the privatization argument. Let users pay the fees to private businesses and the taxpayers get off free.

In this case, the service has already long been privatized. The U.S. is the only country that has so commercialized this public function. Read the article and you might decide that it works better than the government approach, that it's subject to corruption, that it compensates for another flaw in the system, and/or that it  discriminates against the poor and middle-class.

“It’s a very American invention,” John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. “It’s really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.”

According to the article, "Forty percent of people released on bail are eventually acquitted or have the charges against them dropped." The bail bondsman makes his money by being good at picking the 40 percent, taking collateral from the other 60 and leaving the rest of the risk to the government.

Only 5 percent of the clients of the company in the article failed to show up for a court date, and all but 1 percent were resolved.

If bail bonding wasn't already a private business, the Cato Institute would be telling us why it should be.