Great Historical Bum: Wisconsin's Beery Conspiracy

Great Historical Bum: Wisconsin's Beery Conspiracy

Wisconsin's Beery Conspiracy

Among the 133 Facebook users who are not so fastidious that they cannot call Matt Wynns of Eagle, Wisconsin a friend is Wisconsin's Attorney-General, J.B. Van Hollen. The blog, Politiscoop, has been performing admirably in bringing this story to the informable public. Wynns is one of the 15 blowhards, hooligans. and peacocks who, on the 10th of this month, noisily advertised their plans to subvert democracy in Wisconsin by sabotaging the recall of Governor Walker. Their plans to take baths and dress as they imagine liberals to dress and then pose as petition circulators are as grandiose as they are illegal. In the suds-sodden haze of their imagination they will collect "hundreds of signatures. . ." No! "15K to 20K. . ." No! "Twenty-five percent" of all the signatures collected!"  (Tough guys are much drawn to the use of the character K when thousand is meant) They will then dispose of them, thwarting the will of a body of voters they doubt they can beat in a fair fight. Means of disposal would include lining bird cages with petitions, shredding them, and setting fire to heaps of them by way of staying warm in the Obama winter. State law calls that specific act a Class I felony punishable by 3 1/2 years in the penitentiary with $10,000 payable to the state upon release. Van Hollen is supposed to be the principal enforcer of state laws. Will he condemn these brownshirt conspirators for promoting this scheme. Will he, if any of them actually leaves his bar stool long enough to circulate-with-intent, prosecute? And would a newspaper or broadcast journalist kindly raise that question with him tomorrow morning? Stay tuned.

Scotty Goes A-Begging-O

Wisconsin elected Scott Walker governor during an episode of political opacity, and now Wisconsin regrets it. Help Wisconsin restore its reputation for good sense by greeting our peripatetic Union-Buster-In-Chief when he comes to your state to raise cash for his shameless attempt to fight his recall. On November 15 Walker flies to Wichita to kiss the ring (is ring-shaped? can be worn over a finger?) of the Koch brother who stayed in Kansas. Occupy Wichita promises to show him that old-fashioned Kansas hospitality. Kansas was once the polestar of native American radicalism; the Little Blue Books that schooled a couple of generations in home truths about the way the world works were published in Girard - just 137 miles distant. It's 70 miles from Ponca City; I should know because the Bad Boys of my youth drove to Wichita to tank up on the hard stuff that was harder to find in dry Oklahoma. Getting to Wichita to say Hi to Governor Walker is easy. Stand-up comedy is hard.

Confessions of a Fud

I was the youngest person in my graduating class at Ponca City Senior High School, and for many years after I was the youngest person, or nearly so,  in any group that accepted me or to which I sought admission. This was so despite the fact that I looked old enough when I began frequenting beer halls, taverns, and honkytonks that I was never carded. It was the best of both worlds.

I was not, then or now, an incurious person; I was a doubter and a questioner, and often I would pursue some piddling assertion about "the way things always have been" back to the edge of recorded history if I suspected that the real story was to be found there. It was a characteristic behavior that served me well as a broadcast interviewer. My friends and family continue to find it both annoying and a marker of my identity.

It is not true, as was foretold in the Class Prophecy at Ponca City High, that I am today Professor Alan Bickley, the Man Who Knows Everything. Gaps in my knowledge as broad as the Grand Canyon and as deep as the Marianas Trench abound. I come up especially short on popular culture, a subject that has scholarly status in addition to being self-evidently something that most people imbide as effortlessly as they breathe air. I confess to have missed whole decades of popular television shows; rock bands have come and gone and their members have gone gray, and I have no memory of them when they mattered. Titles of middlebrow novels and the faces of celebrities of decades long past mean nothing to me.

The practical consequences of my spotty acquaintance with pop culture are not socially disabling; rather, my ignorance is like Tom Sawyer's limp, and it stands in droll contrast to my knowledge of, for example, working class history, Golden Age radio, and the music of Bob Wills. But there are consequences, and what I have written above is prologue to a brief mention which I hope will prove cathartic.

Every Saturday and Sunday morning for the past four weeks Suzy and I have rolled out of bed to watch UP With Chris Hayes, MSNBC's alternative to the dreary template of cable news with its disaster or scandal or celebrity disintegration-unto-death of the day. UP is miles above the average terrain because its producers value intelligence, conversation, and wit, because they believe that the attention span of UP's audience is untested, even by a two-hour commitment, and because they have shut the door to the cheerless mopes who clutter the sets of all broadcast public affairs program save this one. By this I mean the recycled political party hacks, the lobbyists, the academics-for-hire, the media has-beens, not-quites, and never-will-be's whose contributions are the stale talking points that they carry from venue to venue like the unsalable daubings that appear in "art festivals" around middle America.

Chris Hayes is an unexpected gift to audiences who have been fed mostly straw and little of nutrient value. He asks pointed questions that prove his claim to have been boning up on the subject all week, and he responds to answers intelligently in ways that inform while letting the conversation take unexpected turns.

Chris Hayes is 32 years old. His high, nasal voice would have disqualified him as a broadcaster before, let us say, 1965. His rapid speech with rising-end intonation tends to be incoherent when he wants to make a point, a condition which I have noticed in a great many people under 40 years of age. He has not been able, if he has even tried, to persuade his guests not to talk over each other. And, to get around to my point, he and his youthful guests drop pop cultural references liberally, breaking my attention, forcing me to look back to the vast, dark arroyo of my pop cultural obtuseness for a clue to what is meant by Charlie and Ents, funky cold Medina, Keith Moon, and the like. And when I say drop, I mean that their voices drop as if to exclude the dim bulb sitting in a Madison, Wisconsin living room and to solidify the Class-of-2010 bond between members of this group of five high achievers. It is tedious, it is petty, and it bespeaks an arrogance that doesn't mix well with the democratizing intentions of the UP company.

That's all I have to say about that.

The Short Memories of the Financial Flacks

Asian and European securities markets closed up more than 2% last night, and US markets opened more than 2% above Wednesday's close. Transcripts of CNN financial reporter Christine Romans' comments on the meaning of it all are not yet available, but I can say that they were obtuse, disgusting, and blind to reality. Two days have passed since the Congressional Budget Office confirmed what was no secret to anyone who cared to inquire: the rich have appropriated virtually all of the new wealth created in the United States since that appalling fraud, Ronald Reagan, was swept into power in 1981. But to Ms Romans that is Tuesday's news; it no longer describes reality. Her report this morning was a giddy celebration of the markets' confirmation of the strength of the US economy.

Many American suburbs have become depopulated and shuttered ghost towns; millions of citizens have lost the economic basis for the self-esteem that defines the middle class; state, cities, and villages are literally bankrupt or are on the edge, and an empty vessel with a job on cable is looking at a day in the life of capitalism and concluding that the economy is strong!

The morning mail brought news of a remarkable proposition made by Warren Buffett while being interviewed on CNBC last July.  I had not heard of it until a friend sent it my way as part of a mass mailing to what, by the number of addresses appears to be a large minor fraction of the American middle class. July was the month of the Rubert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal, so the musings of Buffett were not on the front burner. America's second wealthiest and probably most amiable billionaire was asked about the deficit, and what follows is my reply to my friend.

Buffett’s heart is in the right place, but his remedy for incessant deficit-creation is extreme, unwarranted, and, in many cases in which it would be administered, far more damaging to the economy than the deficit itself.

Buffett proposes that every member of the congress be ineligible for re-election if the deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product exceeds 3%. According to the Historical Tables of the United States Government there were, beginning with the year 1930 and ending with 2010, 32 years in which this was the case. Deficits exceeding 3% are anticipated in 2011 through 2014. Deficits are rightly associated with periods of recession and depression; they have the effect of mitigating the deflationary, destructive features of severe downturns. Thus, deficits from 1932-1940 were above 3%, except in 1937 and 1938 when FDR foolishly pulled back federal spending in response to same kind of anti-deficit quackery we hear today. In those years the country slipped back into depression. War spending beginning in 1940 producing deficits that reached 30.3% in 1943 worked their Keynesian magic and provided a job for anyone who had a pulse.

From 1946 (-7.2%) until 1974, budgets were in and out of deficit usually by fractions of a percent. In 1975 the economy stalled, and for the working class has remained stalled for 36 years. Deficits, as a consequence, have returned, rising above 3% in 17 of those years. Without deficits adding to the 25% of the economy that represents government spending, this would have been a time of abject depression for wage workers and many in the white collar class. As it happened, it was merely a puzzling, exasperating, demoralizing time for the lower 80%. Those above that level scarcely noticed what was happening, and I suspect that most of them don’t understand it today. The lords of creation at the top had no doubt about what was happening as their appropriation of new wealth ran to hundreds of percent.

Under the Buffett rule members of 7 congresses from 1932 through 1947 would have been ineligible for re-election. The French experience of revolving door governments after the Second World War comes to mind as does the word chaos. Under the Buffett rule every congress sitting at a time of recession would be history, and the country would, in addition to keeping the lower (by this time) 90% alive, be looking for 535 candidate hitherto untainted by association with deficit. Chaos on steroids with a Naga Jolokia pepper up its ass.

I am guessing that Warren Buffett knows all of this,  and that he spoke the language of Hyperbole as so many of us do when a fawning press suggest to us that we are as gods on Olympus. But let us not be bulldozed by the casual opinions of anyone, be he billionaire or ragged trousered mechanic. Hysteria is for the Tea Party. We should be about cool.

It's time to retire the adjective incredible and the adverb incredibly. A Google search of the web found approximately 835,000,000 uses of these words - somewhat more for the adverb than for the adjective. For the present into the middle future they have about as much value as did the Papiermark during the German hyperinflation of 1921-23. By comparison, the much-used expletives shit and fuck found their way to the Internet 89,000,000 and 171,000,000. Even allowing that shit and fuck can't get past the network standards departments - premium channels not included, it's a blowout for the i-words.

But overuse is not the whole of this offense against the subtlety and nimbleness of the English language. It is the mindlessness that their use puts on display, the shallow unoriginality of the demographic that I take to be the sons and daughters of the boomer generation. For it is from the mouths of the 20-40 year-olds that these leaden nuggets fall most readily.

I was alerted to this incoming tide of fatuity by hearing a young prosecutor describe someone as "an incredible witness," and later when the testimony of the witness was said to be "incredibly credible." A speaker less interested in fashionable utterances delivered at high speed in the manner of a cable host or a fourth at a frat house bong party would described her witness as - merely - credible, meaning believable or plausible or persuasive - three adjectives that are not precisely equal, but that illustrate what is meant by "shades of meaning."

A great many citations of "incredible witness" employ the words as they should be employed, that is, as comments on a witness who could not be believed. Others, like this and this and this one about a woman who broke up a robbery by turning "to Jesus," are evidence that the speaker or writer said the first thing that passed through his mind, meaning a recent thing that passed from the TV or the Internet or his bud, and ignored the 45,000 adjectives to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, most of them, by now, far more vivid and serviceable than incredible. By the way, it's interesting to see how many misuses of incredible are linked to a religious experience or an attempt to convince a reader or auditor of one's deep and sincere feeling about the supernatural. Humbug breeds superficiality.

To say more would mark me as one possessed - a crank - so I shall leave it there with a mere smattering of synonyms taken from Thesaurus.com:

beyond belief - absurd, far-fetched, fishy, flimsy*, implausible,impossible, improbable, incogitable,inconceivable, insupposable, out of the question,outlandish, phony, preposterous, questionable,ridiculous, rings phony, suspect, thin*,unbelievable, unconvincing, unimaginable,


Far-fetched - bizarre, doubtful, dubious, eccentric, fantastic,fishy, forced, hard to swallow, illogical,implausible, improbable, incoherent,inconsequential, incredible , labored,preposterous, queer, recondite, strained,strange, suspicious, unbelievable, unconvincing,unlikely, unnatural, unrealistic

Unconvincing - assailable, baseless, contemptible,controvertible, fallacious, false, feeble, frivolous,groundless, illogical, improbable, inadequate,inane, inconceivable, incredible , inept, lame,poor, puerile, superficial, thin, transparent,trifling, trivial, unbelievable, ungrounded,unpersuasive, unreasonable, unsatisfactory,unsubstantial, weak, weakly, wishful


I have omitted from this list the word awesome which, with one billion-210-million hits on the web, deserves its own retirement party.

What The Occupation Movement and Labor Have In Common

Capital is no more human than are corporations. To grant capital a right that by its nature it does not deserve is as foolish as regarding a corporation as a citizen with the rights that citizens are guaranteed by the United States Constitution. A recognition of the inhumanity of capital and its instrument - the corporation - is what labor and the October protest movement has in common. 

When labor leaders deride anti-corporate protesters for their youth, their apparel, or their manner of expressing themselves, they betray the interests of their members and followers. 

When youthful demonstrators deprecate unions as corrupt-by-nature, when they disparage working class accents as the emblem of the outmoded, when they imbibe the sweet poison of anti-union corporate propaganda, they betray the tradition that blossomed in the heady days of the New Deal.

Americans who sell their labor to employers are in the working class, and their bedrock interest is a working class interest. Americans who live on the returns of capital have the appropriate loyalties. 

It Is 1984, And The Clocks Are Striking Thirteen

"What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, [Winston Smith] did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers but to (. . .) every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold and political or ideological significance." George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1981) p. 36

The Times mentioned above is the fictional newspaper of record in Orwell's disquieting prophecy. But there is another Times, and although it is published in New York, it purports to report and to record "all the news that's fit to print" in these United States. The New York Times has acknowledged in nine articles published between September 19 and October 4 the occupation of Wall Street, and entertains the possibility that this is a national movement with staying power. Orwell's Times would not have mentioned such a protest once, nor would such a protest proceeded beyond the gathering of the first three demonstrators. But are the papers so different?  Look here and decide.

Wall Street Uncovered

Suzy's query to the big three broadcast networks to cover the Wall Street uprising was answered with essentially the same reply in each case: we don't welcome viewer suggestions about content.

Honors to Reader Supported News for aggregating timely reports on what yet prove to be a historic event.

There are moments in the histories of nations when nothing will ever be as it was before, moments when the end of the French monarchy and the Tsarist empire and the hegemony of Britain in the American colonies was assured, and yet was not perceived as such by the subject peoples. I read of the occupation of Wall Street and the sympathetic occupations in Los Angeles and elsewhere, of the righteous rage over the state's killing of the almost certainly innocent Troy Davis, of the inability of the governing class of the United States to do what is necessary to mitigate the economic misery that is climbing up the social pyramid, of wars we cannot win and have no right to win, of generations of war contemplated by "defense intellectuals," and of decades of injustice imposed upon the people of Palestine by the cynical and perfidious policies of Britain and the United States. and I wonder: Is this that moment?

The Social Security Myth

A few readers have asked for sites and citations that support my assertion that the "debate" over Social Security is grounded in ignorance. I have assembled hundreds of pages of documents from official sources, but perhaps a better introduction would be my exchange of correspondence with the Madison Capital-Times several days ago.

The Social Security Trustees produce annual reports in which these projections maybe found. Unfortunately, their formats vary from year to year, so it is difficult to see at a glance just what is meant. . .and perhaps what is not meant to be seen. (That last part is me, the skeptic, talking. However, the different projections, labeled high cost, low cost, and intermediate cost, can be teased out by patient reading.

The latest useful report that I can find is at the link of the American Academy of Actuaries.

http://www.actuary.org/pdf/SocialSecurity_Trustees_IB_112505.pdf

Projections for 2008 are in Trustees Report at the link below.

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/TR08/IV_LRest.html

See 1. Annual Income Rates, et al

Projections for the years 2005 and 2003 are in Trustees Reports at the links below.

http://199.173.225.5/oact/TR/TR05/II_project.html

http://199.173.225.5/oact/TR/TR03/II_project.html

The book below is available for free viewing on Google Books.

Social Security: False Consciousness and Crisis, by John Attarian – page 10 Table 1.2 contains a table listing the three actuarial estimates for the years 1990 through 2000.

Also on Google Books:

False Alarm, by Joseph White. Search for “intermediate,” you will get 10 references, 8 of which are relevant to the three scenarios issue.

A down-and-dirty statement of the raw facts about the varying projections is here.

Thanks you for taking an interest in this. I grit my teeth every time I hear some overpaid ass on TV declaiming the bankruptcy of Social Security on the basis of almost zero knowledge.

AVB

From: CN TCT Voice [mailto:tctvoice@madison.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 12:05 PM
To: Alan Bickley
Subject: RE: Social Security

Hi Alan,

Can you provide a link or reference to the three projections that we can include with your letter?

Thanks,

Lynn Danielson

opinion editor

Cap Times

---

From: Alan Bickley [mailto:avb34@charter.net]
Sent: Friday, September 09, 2011 4:32 PM
To: CN TCT Voice
Cc: 'Susan Bickley'
Subject: Social Security

It’s a good thing that the survival of Social Security in its time-tested form is pretty certain. The seniors, the survivors of workers who have died, the dependents, and the disabled will fight for this crown jewel of American public life as something bought and paid for. I wish that more people would fight for it because they understand it, but in months of watching television and reading newspapers I have found no one who has fingered the flaw in the Social Security-is-broke fantasy. Not Jon Stewart, not Ed Schultz, and not Diane Sawyer or any other of the insanely well-rewarded news readers and their guests from the worlds of corporate lobbying, political strategizing, and free floating detestation of the working class seems to know what is wrong with that Social Security Trustees projection of an exhausted trust fund by 2037 and apocalypse in 75 years.

The flaw is as follows: the Trustees make three projections. One is devoid of hope and suggests that the program will crash next Tuesday. Another is based upon much different assumptions about the future economy, and it sees every beneficiary getting a full benefit for time without end. News people, believing that truth and virtue lie midway between any two outliers, have publicized the middle projection. This is the one that gives the historic enemies of Social Security hope that they can frighten the gullible into giving up on it twenty years before trouble is expected.

Surprise! The real history of Social Security has been much closer to the most optimistic projection. There is no reason to be terrified. The only cause for fear about its prospects is, to paraphrase FDR, fear itself.

Why This American Life remains suspect

National Public Radio was in its early years the repository of hopes of those who rejected the mainstream media defense of ideas that promoted the status quo. With essays like the one found at this site it has dashed those hopes.

More on the Social Security Muddle

I posted the following on The Daily Howler blog today as a response to the continuing misunderstanding of Social Security's prospects.

"The relentless disinformation campaign continues in tandem with a state of impenetrable ignorance. The Social Security Trustees annually publish three - not one - three forecasts of the possible prospects for the trust fund and for the program's capacity pay full benefits. In keeping with the legendary laziness of journalists, only one of these, the Intermediate, is discussed in the media. The High Cost and Low Cost projections are ignored because the former would terrify its readers and because the latter would persuade many that Social Security is in good shape for all the years to come. That would mean no frightening tale with which to lure, delude, and inflame a gullible public. It is the projections of the Intermediate that provide the myth of trust fund exhaustion in 2036, reduction of benefits by a quarter until 2085, and the unspoken implication of the abyss afterward."

Ezra Klein Contradicts Himself in But 12 Seconds

Another of the Truly Serious People who use cable news to explain the world to lesser beings is Ezra Klein, a Washington Post employee who appears frequently on MSNBC, possibly by way of auditioning for a regular show in the network's slightly left-of-center lineup, possibly not. Klein was called in by Lawrence O'Donnell to refute the Republican catechism: Taxes kill jobs.

Klein spoke basic truth, discoverable by anyone with an internet connection, that what are called "high" marginal tax rates do not discourage economic effort and do not inhibit the hiring of workers, or "job creation," to use the term of art.

KLEIN: It has not seemed to be a discussion particularly amenable to
evidence. But let`s try some anyway. We got a graph from the Center of
American Progress that I brought along tonight.

And what you`ll see on it is -- they did something interesting. They
looked at job creation over periods of time which had different top
marginal tax rates, different top tax rates for the people the Republicans
call the job creators. And what they found, I think, is essentially
destroys this argument. The best years -- the best years for job creation
in this country actually had the highest marginal tax rates.

If you look at the best five years since 1950, you`ll find tax rates
above 70 percent, at the highest rate. And --

O`DONNELL: Yes. And the highest bar there is in the 75 percent to 80
percent top tax bracket. That`s when you really saw job creation just
roaring along.

KLEIN: And that little tiny red line, the little itty bitty one with
the no job creation, that`s where we are now -- very, very low top marginal
rate, very, very low job creation.

And, now, I don`t want to go too far. I think it`s important to say
that we don`t want extremely high marginal tax rates. They do discourage
work. We don`t think taxes are in general a great thing for the economy,
but nor for that matter are spending cuts to things like unemployment
insurance.

What we tend to find is that taxes are not the driving factor behind
the economy. Republicans have a tendency to make taxes seem monocausal,
the economy is a simple formula. And one end of the formula is taxes. And
when they`re low, the other end of the formula does well, and when they`re
high, it does poorly. That simply is not true.

O`DONNELL: And these are, by the way, that list that we saw was a
list of the actual legislative tax rates at the time. The reality was that
no one was actually paying those top rates. The reality was even when the
rate was 90 percent, people were in effect paying around 50 percent which
is still much, much, much higher than now. And it had absolutely no
negative impact on job creation.

Where do we go from here in this debate, Ezra? The -- I was surprised
Republicans today, really, they didn`t come up with any specificity other
than Rick Perry. I got to give him credit. He noticed there was a
limitation on deductibility proposed by the president. So, that would
include deductibility for charitable giving if you gave, you know, $1
million to some charity, you would not get a 35 percent tax deduction on
it, you get a 28 percent tax deduction on it. And that may inhibit some
charitable giving around the edges. That`s possible.

Advertise | AdChoices

Other than that, there wasn`t a word of specificity in their
responses.

KLEIN: No, not a ton of it. And irony of this conversation is, the
Republicans are going to push it down in the wrong direction.

If you talk to Republican economists, if you talk to Glenn Hubbard who
is advising Mitt Romney, what he`ll tell you is that the real types of
taxes you got to worry about are marginal rate taxes. You don`t want to
raise marginal rates, it discourages work.

" . . .the best years for job creation in this country actually had the highest marginal tax rates." So said Ezra Klein. Not 12 seconds later he contradicted this verifiable fact by declaring that "I think it`s important to say that we don`t want extremely high marginal tax rates. They do discourage 
work. We don`t think taxes are in general a great thing for the economy. . ."

This not 12 seconds after he had stated the verifiable fact that high marginal tax rates do not inhibit effort or cause capitalists to throw up their hands with an Oh-Weary-Me surrender to the rapacity of government as they seek only to create jobs.

Klein compounded his foolishness by citing Glenn Hubbard, the Columbia University economist, as an endorser of his opinions. Hubbard is an adviser to GOP presidential aspirant Mitt Romney, a preacher of a brand of economics regarded by academics as holy writ, but not being taken seriouslyin policy circles. His Wikipedia entry lists his business connections thus: "Hubbard is a member of the Board of Directors of Automatic Data Processing, Inc., BlackRock Closed-End Funds, Capmark Financial Corporation, Duke Realty Corporation, KKR Financial Corporation and Ripplewood Holdings. He is also a Director or Trustee of the Economic Club of New York, Tax Foundation, Resources for the Future, Manhattan Council and Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York, and a member of the Advisory Board of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse... Director of MetLife and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company since February 2007."

Filmgoers may recall Hubbard's performance as a flack for his financial posse in the movie described on the Wikipedia site.

"Hubbard was interviewed in Charles Ferguson's Oscar-winning documentary film, Inside Job (2010), discussing his advocacy, as chief economic advisor to the Bush Administration, of deregulation, which Ferguson argues led to the 2008 international banking crisis sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sale of Merrill Lynch. In the interview, Ferguson asks Hubbard to enumerate the firms from whom he receives outside income as an advisory board member in the context of possible conflict of interest. Hubbard, hitherto cooperative, declines to answer and threatens to end the interview."

So much for MSNBC as a relentless purveyor of liberal dogma.

I may be Amy Goodman's harshest and most relentless critic on the left. But I salute her for the question she put to Jesse Jackson as they discussed the Palestinian drive to achieve statehood recognized by the United Nations. Jackson had said: "You have a case where the Palestinians ought to renounce violence, and the Israelis ought to renounce settlement expansion."

Jackson gave credence to the false notion that violence comes solely, or even largely, from Palestinians while the Israelis' only sin worth discussing is expansion of settlements. The notion not only is false, it is endlessly repeated in the form quoted above. And yet the daily news from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is an indictment of Israeli settler violence against Palestinian farmers and other targets of opportunity, and of the organized violence of the Israeli military against unarmed demonstrators.

Goodman, often so disconnected from the subject of her interview that she appears stumped for a follow-up question, was on the qui vive when Jackson uttered this formulaic misallocation of blame for the misery of the Middle East. Said Amy: "Do you think Israel should have to renounce violence as well?" So seldom have I heard an American interviewer ask that question that I am willing to say that I have never heard it asked.

Jackson responded appropriately: "Both sides should renounce violence."

Apologies to Bush

A googling of the phrase "is our children learning" yields about 34,600.000 results. Those on the first six pages, the limit of my patience with this topic, referred to the notorious solecism which the then-candidate for president made in January of 2000 in Florence, South Carolina. This was 32 years after he graduated from Yale University.

The error may not have registered with many Americans. Indeed it seems not to have given heartburn even to the new president's liberal critics until February 2002 when it was mentioned for the first time on political blogs. Soon it became grist for the mills of television comics, Op-Ed contributors, and the kinds of people who assemble in faculty lounges and pricey urban dwellings high above the riffraff, stuffing their faces with wine and cheese, and exclaiming: "How droll! How risible that unlettered brushcutter! More evidence of his mediocrity and our corresponding merit!"

What Google does not easily reveal is which of these grammar hawks contributed to the 511,680,000 instances of "there's" followed by a plural adjective found by the search engine on August 15. By this I mean some variant of "Mackenzie says there's eight planets" or "There's five things you are in charge of" or "There's four kinds of folks in the world." The latter comes from To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel which is on high school reading lists throughout the land, mainly, I suppose, for its tone of moral uplift. I am inclined to give a pass to Bob Dylan and "There's seven people dead on a South Dakota farm." It is poetically correct and too plausible to be denied in times like these.

My point? The language police are listening! Cable news guests: your flagrant disregard for agreement of verb and noun will not go unnoticed! Without forgiving George Bush's war crimes, offenses against civil liberties, and acts of class warfare, the Sagebrush Sage is owed an apology, not for what he did or said, but for our churlish hypocrisy.

WHAT DEBT CRISIS?

There is, in fact, no national public debt crisis that merits the apocalyptic tone of the reports that issue from the White House, unless it is admitted that such economic stalwarts as Singapore, Germany, and Brazil are in worse trouble than is the United States.

The CIA Factbook of 2010 lists 128 countries and the public debt of each as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. The United States, with sovereign debt estimated to be 14-trillion 780-billion dollars in 2010, is number 36, its debt-to-GDP ratio 59.3. That's well behind Singapore's 102.4 and Germany's 83.2. It's lower than the average of all the listed countries: 59.3.

The "burden" of sovereign debt amounting to more than 80 percent of its GDP has not impeded Germany in producing and distributing a greater dollar value of tradable manufactured goods than any other country than China, which edged past Germany during 2009's global economic readjustment. Nor has it prevented the United States from holding third place in that ranking.

The United States emerged from World War Two owing 117.5% of the value of its GDP, but that was no obstacle to its three decades of prosperity without significant inflation. What's more, the fruits of the good times of 1945-1975 were more equally shared than they have been since.

Income equality, measured by the Gini Index, fell during the 1930s and 1940s to a low of 38.6 in 1968 - the lowest ever reported. It then rose, gradually and then more steeply, as successive presidential administrations rejected the egalitarian and redistributionist values of the New Deal, to a high of 47 in 2006.

It's likely that the spending policies of the 1930s through the 1960s made the US more prosperous that it might have been if a policy of radical debt reduction and budget balancing been pursued during the middle years of the 20th century.

A PRIMARY CHALLENGE TO OBAMA

What is an angry, demoralized, and disappointed citizen to do? Betrayed by Barack Obama and ignored by the dominant wing of the congressional Democrats, that citizen has few choices short of emigration or utter surrender to a system that no longer responds to that citizen's desire for an end to America's wars, an end to the political right's assault upon the living standards of the lower 90 percent, and a restoration of democratic practices and institutions undone by 35 years of collaboration of two political parties that are two faces of one oligarchy.


The Democratic Party will not permit a primary challenge to Barack Obama. Its leaders believe that in 2012 as in presidential elections from 1980 the 2008 the voters of the center-to-left will vote for the Democrat because to do otherwise will bring into power the truly frightening Republican. That rancid appeal to our baser natures worked in 1992, 1996, and 2008. Instead of voting for what they wanted, these earnest, ever-hopeful souls voted against the existential horror. Now we see just what 30 years of compromise with conscience brings.


I am told that social media made a difference in the routing of the old regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Adroit users of Facebook and Twitter mobilized and rallied, informed their fellows and confounded their enemies, with tweets and postings that put people in the right place at the right time with clarity of analysis and firmness of purpose as their guide.


Why can't that happen in 2012? Why can't we - the citizens no longer befuddled by empty promises of change and vacuous autobiographies and meaningless slogans - why can't we use those same social media to challenge Barack Obama in the presidential primaries in which, otherwise, our voting would be pointless?


I propose an online process in which plausible candidates are proposed by any or all who wish to take part, in which the case for or against each is made with the civility and passion and thoughtfulness that the gravity of the task merits, leading at last to a winnowing of that crop to a deserving few who would, under favorable circumstances be superior to the party-anointed incumbent in fundamental fidelity to the values and principles for which the shorthand term is Progressive. I propose that we then agree that, as voters in our various Democratic primaries in 2012, we write in the name of one of our few paladins. An honest count of the votes would have a salutary effect on candidate Obama. It would show him and his handlers that a price must be paid for four years of betrayal - wars without end, groveling before wealth, spinelessness in defending the social gains of the 20th century, and collaboration with the enemy in destroying our civil liberties.


I'll have more to say about this as time passes. I hope that this appeal and others like it attract friends and followers. With or without them I shall not be voting for Obama in a primary. With enough friends of like mind and what it takes to be steady to the end Obama can lose a primary here or there. It could be the beginning of the end for a dark period in our country's history.


My candidate? Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Who's yours?