We Need a New Version of Capitalism

Republicans - especially Donald Trump - are eager to depict whoever the Democrat presidential nominee turns out to be as a socialist and a threat to capitalism and somehow an enemy of average Americans even though the Democrat agenda is to improve the lot of a majority of Americans, not just the wealthy and big corporations as the GOP made clear was its goal in the form of the Trump/GOP tax cuts and the Trump/Pence regime efforts to roll back safety regulations and clean air and clean water regulations while destroying labor unions.  The irony is that many in Trump's base long for the 1950's when life was better for many because of labor unions that upheld wages and the far higher taxes paid by the wealthy funded infrastructure projects such as the Interstate highway system. In short, today's version of capitalism has turned toxic for the majority - much as was the case in the Gild Age, a time the GOP seeks to seemingly restore.  Not all of the wealthy are content to see income disparities continue to rise as the wallow in greed.  David Walentas, a visionary New York real estate developer definitely not cut from the same cloth as Trump, just made a $100 million gift to the University of Virginia to benefit students from families where no one has ever attended college.  Then there is Marc Benioff who argues that a new capitalism is needed in a column in the New York Times.  Here are column highlights:

Capitalism, I acknowledge, has been good to me.  Over the past 20 years, the company that I co-founded, Salesforce, has generated billions in profits and made me a very wealthy person. I have been fortunate to live a life beyond the wildest imaginations of my great-grandfather, who immigrated to San Francisco from Kiev in the late 1800s.

Yet, as a capitalist, I believe it’s time to say out loud what we all know to be true: Capitalism, as we know it, is dead.

Yes, free markets — and societies that cherish scientific research and innovation — have pioneered new industries, discovered cures that have saved millions from disease and unleashed prosperity that has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

But capitalism as it has been practiced in recent decades — with its obsession on maximizing profits for shareholders — has also led to horrifying inequality. Globally, the 26 richest people in the world now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people, and the relentless spewing of carbon emissions is pushing the planet toward catastrophic climate change. In the United States, income inequality has reached its highest level in at least 50 years, with the top 0.1 percent — people like me — owning roughly 20 percent of the wealth while many Americans cannot afford to pay for a $400 emergency. It’s no wonder that support for capitalism has dropped, especially among young people. To my fellow business leaders and billionaires, I say that we can no longer wash our hands of our responsibility or what people do with our products. Yes, profits are important, but so is society. And if our quest for greater profits leaves our world worse off than before, all we will have taught our children is the power of greed.

It’s time for a new capitalism — a more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism that actually works for everyone and where businesses, including tech companies, don’t just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact.

What might a new capitalism look like?

First, business leaders need to embrace a broader vision of their responsibilities by looking beyond shareholder return and also measuring their stakeholder return. This requires that they focus not only on their shareholders, but also on all of their stakeholders — their employees, customers, communities and the planet. Fortunately, nearly 200 executives with the Business Roundtable recently committed their companies, including Salesforce, to this approach, saying that the “purpose of a corporation” includes “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.” Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. . . . . When asked whether companies should serve all stakeholders and whether capitalism should be updated, Vice President Mike Pence warned against “leftist policies.”

But suggesting that companies must choose between doing well and doing good is a false choice. Successful businesses can and must do both. In fact, with political dysfunction in Washington, D.C., Americans overwhelmingly say C.E.O.s should take the lead on economic and social challenges, and employees, investors and customers increasingly seek out companies that share their values.

Legislation to close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act have stalled in Congress for years, and today women still only make about 80 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by men. But congressional inaction does not absolve companies from their responsibility. Since learning that we were paying women less than men for equal work at Salesforce, we have spent $10.3 million to ensure equal pay; today we conduct annual audits to ensure that pay remains equal. Just about every company, I suspect, has a pay gap — and every company can close it now.

For many businesses, giving back to their communities is an afterthought — something they only do after they’ve turned a profit. But by integrating philanthropy into our company culture from the beginning — giving 1 percent of our equity, time and technology — Salesforce has donated nearly $300 million to worthy causes, including local public schools and addressing homelessness.

Globally, few nations are meeting their targets to fight climate change, the current United States presidential administration remains determined to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and global emissions continue to rise. As governments fiddle, there are steps that business can take now, while there’s still time . . . .

Skeptical business leaders who say that having a purpose beyond profit hurts the bottom line should look at the facts. Research shows that companies that embrace a broader mission — and, importantly, integrate that purpose into their corporate culture — outperform their peers, grow faster, and deliver higher profits.

Of course, C.E.O. activism and corporate philanthropy alone will never be enough to meet the immense scale of today’s challenges. It could take $23 billion a year to address racial inequalities in our public schools. College graduates are drowning in $1.6 trillion of student debt. It will cost billions to retrain American workers for the digital jobs of the future. Trillions of dollars of investments will be needed to avert the worst effects of climate change. All this, when our budget deficit has already surpassed $1 trillion.

That is why a new capitalism must also include a tax system that generates the resources we need and includes higher taxes on the wealthiest among us. . . . . Nationally, increasing taxes on high-income individuals like myself would help generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and health care and fight climate change.

The culture of corporate America needs to change, and it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to do it. Every C.E.O. and every company must recognize that their responsibilities do not stop at the edge of the corporate campus. When we finally start focusing on stakeholder value as well as shareholder value, our companies will be more successful, our communities will be more equal, our societies will be more just and our planet will be healthier.

Trump and his vulture capitalist cronies embody the direct opposite of this responsible proposal.

Trump's America: Dumber, Dirtier, Sicker and More Destitute

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In keeping with the Republican Party's goal of restoring the worse aspects of the Gilded Age, Der Trumpenführer's proposed budget slashes budgets for programs that aid the less fortunate - even Meals on Wheels would be eliminated - and cut education spending while pouring money into the military.  The Washington Post described the budget as follows:

President Trump on Thursday will unveil a budget plan that calls for a sharp increase in military spending and stark cuts across much of the rest of the government including the elimination of dozens of long-standing federal programs that assist the poor, fund scientific research and aid America’s allies abroad. . . . . would increase defense spending by $54 billion and then offset that by stripping money from more than 18 other agencies. Some would be hit particularly hard, with reductions of more than 20 percent at the Agriculture, Labor and State departments and of more than 30 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency.

It would also propose eliminating future federal support for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Within EPA alone, 50 programs and 3,200 positions would be eliminated.

The Hill list some of the programs to be cut and the only redeeming factor - if one is a cynic and believe that actions need to have consequences - is that many Trump voters will be severely hurt by the proposals, underscoring the dangers of voting based on calls to racism, religious extremism and general misogyny.   Here are a dew of the programs:

The Appalachian Regional Commission, which funds projects meant to bolster businesses, education, culture, and economic development in Appalachia.

The Chemical Safety Board, which investigates accidents in the chemical industry and makes safety recommendations.

The Denali Commission, which supports utilities and infrastructure in Alaska.
 The Legal Services Corporation, which provides civil legal aid for low-income Americans.
 The Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, which funds community development project throughout the U.S.

The Northern Border Regional Commission, which supports economic development in poor areas near the Canadian border.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates efforts to fight homelessness among nearly 20 federal agencies.

Add these to the assault on the EPA, allowing coal mining wastes to be dump into rivers and streams, and the proposed curtailments to Medicaid and the message to poorer Americans is just go ahead and die.  The thing to remember through all of this is that the GOP claims to be the party of "Christian values."  The fact that 81% of evangelicals voted for this underscores the reality that conservative Christianity is toxic to the general welfare.  A column in the Washington Post aptly describes Der Trumpenführer's concept of "Making America Great Again."  Here are excerpts:

President Trump’s first budget is an attempt to reshape the federal government in his own image — crass, bellicose, shortsighted, unserious and ultimately hollow.

 

The reality is that if Congress were to accept these numbers — which it can’t possibly do — America would be made dumber, dirtier, hungrier and sicker. That may be Trump’s idea of greatness, but it’s certainly not mine.

Would we at least be safer? I doubt it. Trump wants to boost defense spending by $54 billion, or about 9 percent. But at the same time, he proposes cutting funding for the State Department by an incredible 28 percent, slashing the relatively modest hands-across-the-sea assistance and advice the United States gives to other nations. Most of the generals and admirals I know believe in projecting U.S. strength through soft power as well as hard power. Trump apparently disagrees.

[T]he proposal to cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31 percent can only be seen as a first step toward dismemberment. “The president wants a smaller EPA,” Mulvaney explained. “He thinks they overreach.”

Trump wants to eliminate more than 3,200 EPA jobs, representing more than 20 percent of the workforce. It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who founded the agency, and it is another Republican president who apparently wants to end the federal government’s role in protecting the environment. It is perhaps no surprise that Trump wants to end EPA programs and regulations aimed at halting global warming, since he has ventured the opinion that climate change is a Chinese hoax; NASA programs to study warming would be cut as well. But the budget would also eliminate federal funding for efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes. Make America’s Water Dirty Again!

The National Institutes of Health would suffer a 19 percent cut, sharply reducing the amount of federal money available for research grants to universities.

There’s barely a peep in Trump’s budget about Medicare or Medicaid. Given the angry reaction to the Republican health-care plan, Trump must have decided — for once — that silence was the best choice.

Donald Trump is Brilliant Revenge on the GOP

For years the Republican agenda has been to use feigned religiosity, racism, anti-gay bigotry and anti-immigrant animus to dupe large sections of the population to vote against their own best economic interests.  Over time, the current lunacy of the GOP base was built on this agenda that ultimately sought to protect the rich while trashing labor unions and other policies that protected the little man from corporate and Wall Street greed.  Now, that GOP base is perhaps finally beginning to wake up to the fact that it has been played for fools.  Despite his reliance of racism and anti-immigrant fervor, Donald Trump has made comments that the GOP establishment deems to be heresy, including a call for the rich to pay more in taxes.  Some, as laid out in a piece in Salon, believe that perhaps the GOP is headed toward a major realignment such as which happened in the 1890's and first part of the 20th century.  Here are column excerpts:

Why is Donald Trump so popular? He has captured the moment when voters recognize that Republican political rhetoric has nothing in common with reality. Trump brings rhetoric and reality together in a cartoon caricature of a Republican politician that anyone can understand. That gives him a vital role in history. He is the perfect exorcist to drive a stake through the heart of the modern Republican Party. But he is not the first in history to perform this operation. The same crisis hit the party in the 1890s.

When it was over, the nation had a reformed Republican Party, and a new historical era.

Today’s Republican Party is enslaved to Movement Conservatism, and Trump trumpets the rhetoric of that movement in crude sound bites. Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have been determined to roll back the business regulations of the New Deal. But those protections are popular. So to undermine them, Movement Conservatives hammer home the idea that legislation protecting workers, people of color, or women is socialism, a con that sucks money out of the pockets of hard-working whites and siphons it into the pockets of grasping workers, shiftless blacks, or slutty women.

Movement Conservatism was a fringe force from the 1950s until the 1980s, when voters elected Movement Conservative Ronald Reagan to the White House.

In 1986, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, a former economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, created an army of evangelical voters to boost the numbers behind Movement Conservatism. He promised born-again voters pro-life and pro-Christian activism so long as they lined up behind big business economic policies.

Trump presents a crude version of these Movement Conservative themes.  . . . It is a simple idea: that “takers” want a handout. Similarly, while observers have expressed surprised that the thrice-married, non-churchgoing Trump attracts more support from evangelical voters than, say, the aggressively religious Mike Huckabee, that support reflects a Movement Conservative pattern established a generation ago.

But Trump’s danger to the Republican Party is not simply that he rips the veneer off the racism, sexism, and religious hypocrisy of Movement Conservatism . . . . Trump also articulates the anger of a generation of voters who see that they have been taken for a ride. Movement Conservatives promised voters who were falling behind in the modern world that if they voted Republican, tax cuts and a smaller government would create a roaring economy and they would prosper.

In fact, the opposite was true. Since 1980, tax cuts have not actually lowered taxes; they have moved them from the wealthy onto poorer Americans. The deregulation of the economy has indeed redistributed wealth—upward.

Donald Trump doesn’t simply echo the racism and sexism of the last several decades, he calls—in his loose, vague way—for a fairer tax code and for tariffs to protect American workers. Even more important to his supporters, he is outside politics as usual. He is outside a system that has been bought and paid for by businessmen.

By the 1870s, big-business Republicans leveraged white fears of immigrants and hatred for black Americans to retain control of the government. Democrats who advocated laws that would regulate business were socialists, Republicans insisted. They were intent on redistributing wealth from hardworking white men to lazy immigrants and African Americans. On the Republicans’ watch, the late nineteenth century became the era of the “robber barons,” when monopolies and trusts ran the government with the sole intent of protecting big business. Under Republican policies, wealth moved upward, creating an era historians later dubbed the Gilded Age.

By 1890, the protests against Republican government had spread beyond the Democrats and into an upstart movement of farmers’ “Alliances.” Its leaders warned that “Wall Street owns the country…. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” In that year, as Republicans passed even stronger pro-business legislation with the promise that it would, this time, bring back prosperity, voters gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House.

The Populists organized the following year. . . . . Rather than apply accusations of redistribution only to the poor, Populists turned it against the rich. Wealthy men, they warned, had brought the nation to “the verge of moral, political, and material ruin.” . . . . Crucially, the Populists were not Democrats: They condemned both parties. Party leaders on both sides, their platform announced, were willing “to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.”

The political see-sawing showed that a new era was at hand. Younger Republicans recognized that their party could no longer embrace an ideology that served the wealthy alone. Moreover, they recognized that catering to the super rich was changing the nature of the nation, threatening to turn it from a democracy to an oligarchy. The leader of this Republican reformation was a young upstart named Theodore Roosevelt, and he, and his Progressive Republicans, ushered in the Progressive Era.

The present era is so similar to the late nineteenth century that it has been dubbed the second Gilded Age. In the 1890s, the Populists pointed out that the Republican emperors of their time, the first Gilded Age, had no clothes. Today the unsavory Donald Trump and his supporters are doing the same thing.

Scott Walker Annouces Candidacy with Appeals to Greed, Racism, Homophobia and Xenophobia

Driving home tonight I listened to portions of Scott Walker's candidacy announcement speech on Satellite radio and when not yelling at the the radio, I found myself wanting to vomit.  Particularly over the mindless cheering of an audience - which was, thankfully small - who seemed to embody the ignorance and bigotry that are now synonymous with being a Republican.  Walker's speech was big on the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda, embroiling U.S. ground troops in wars across the globe, slashing taxes for the wealthy who he code named "job creators," slashing the social safety net, and throwing American families to the whims of employers and health care insurance companies for health care coverage.  As a piece in Policususa.com noted,  you could almost see the Koch Brothers' lips moving as Walker spoke.  Here are some article highlights:

Scott Walker announced his campaign for president by repeating almost word for word the top priorities of the Koch brothers.

Scott Walker immediately listed why he thinks he should be president. He discussed his efforts to suppress the vote (voter ID laws), more guns (Castle doctrine), less medical care for women (defunding Planned Parenthood), and lower wages (union busting). Walker gave the usual empty Republican gibberish about giving power back to states. 

Gov. Walker’s whole speech was based on selling himself as someone who can win in blue states because he has managed to survive in Wisconsin. Walker announced his plan to gut federal funding for education, Medicaid and job retraining by disguising this as sending money back to the states. What Walker was referring to was block grants that would lead to fewer people getting services. 

Walker attacked poor people and talked about the “dignity of work.” Walker disguised it as helping people move from government dependence to independence. He touted his drug testing of welfare recipients. He claimed that he was making it easy to get a job, but what he has actually done in Wisconsin is throw hundreds of thousands of people off of healthcare while harming senior citizens by cutting Wisconsin’s SeniorCare program.

Scott Walker promised to take away 18 million Americans access to healthcare by repealing Obamacare. Just like every other Republican candidate, Walker called for the repeal of regulations, which he called “the Obama regulations.”

Gov. Walker’s speech was a direct point by point delivery of the Koch agenda. Walker said that job creators need a tax cut so that they can be more competitive in the world and create more jobs.

Scott Walker claimed to be a new leader, but his plan for the future is straight out of centuries past.

Walker promised to fight and win for Americans, but by Americans he clearly meant the wealthy billionaires.

The name Scott Walker will be on the ballot, but it is the Koch brothers agenda that he is running on.

Should Walker win the presidency, in short order we will find ourselves living in a reprise of the 1890's Gilded Age with all of its worse attributes.  And with all his talk of families with a "mother and father." LGBT Americans with half a mind should understand that we are on the hit list right behind unions and minorities.  When Walker is compare to Trump, at least trump is honest about his greed and his bigotry.

What I find so ironic - or should I say hypocritical - about the GOP candidates id that they all claim to revere "Christian values," what they are in fact peddling is the antithesis of the true Gospel message.  It is all about hate, division, lots of greed, and and utter disdain for the welfare of one's neighbors and fellow man.  Needless to say, the "godly folk" - for whom I have nothing but contempt - will eat it up. 

Wisconsin: A Road Map of the GOP's War on the Middle Class

The hypocrisy of the Republican Party's claims to want to aid the beleaguered middle class is stunning.   While remaining focused on tax cuts for the wealthy and in some cases raising taxes on lower income Americans, the GOP across the USA remains focused on destroying labor unions and returning workers to the status they faced during the days of the Gilded Age of a century or more ago.  That these twin agendas harm millions of Americans and often hit children particularly hard means nothing to the Republicans who make the Pharisees of the Bible look like upstanding folks.  Here are highlights from a New York Times op-ed that looks at the GOP war on average Americans:

In a nation where the long decline in unions has led to a pervasive slump in wages, Republicans’ support for anti-union legislation is at odds with their professed commitments to helping the middle class. Right-to-work laws do not attract businesses and create jobs, as proponents claim. Rather, they are linked to lower wages, fewer benefits and higher poverty. They win support among conservative lawmakers not because they are in the public interest but because cutting labor costs is a priority of far-right groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is tied to the Koch brothers.

Wisconsin is hardly alone; 13 other states have pending right-to-work bills, and in Illinois the Republican governor is trying to disable the state’s public unions by executive order. In addition, at the behest of the construction industry, legislation is pending in 18 states to repeal “prevailing wage” laws, which require private-sector bidders on taxpayer-financed construction projects to pay wages that are in line with those for comparable work in the locality. Prevailing wage laws, which are enforced by federal statute on federal projects and by 32 states on state projects, prevent lowball bids from depressing wages. Without them, taxpayer money would be routed away from workers’ paychecks and into corporate coffers.

One question is whether the maneuvering in the presidential race will tip the scales one way or the other between the pro- and anti-union forces. As has been the case in recent years, eyes are on Wisconsin to see if Republicans, including Mr. Walker, will continue to attack unions even as they profess to stand for good jobs.

When are voters going to wake up to the fact that the GOP is using religion and racism to dupe them into voting for Republicans who are against the interests of most voters? 

America is Heading Full Speed Back to the 19th Century

I've made the argument a number of times that the Republican Party is trying to reestablish the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th century when robber barons enjoyed incredible wealth and power while the rest of us, including laborers and workers, got what few scraps were left over.  In a column in Salon, former secretary of labor Robert Reich echo's my concerns.  What's amazing is how the cretins the GOP courts through religion, racism, and anti-modernity are too stupid to understand that they are supporting politicians working directly against their best interests and the futures of their families.  Here are column highlights:

My recent column about the growth of on-demand jobs like Uber making life less predictable and secure for workers unleashed a small barrage of criticism that workers get what they’re worth in the market.

A Forbes Magazine contributor, for example, writes that jobs exist only  “when both employer and employee are happy with the deal being made.” So if the new jobs are low-paying and irregular, too bad.

Much the same argument was voiced in the late nineteenth century over alleged “freedom of contract.” Any deal between employers and workers was assumed to be fine if both sides voluntarily agreed to it.

It was an era when many workers were “happy” to toil twelve-hour days in sweat shops for lack of any better alternative.

It was also a time of great wealth for a few and squalor for many. And of corruption, as the lackeys of robber barons deposited sacks of cash on the desks of pliant legislators.

Finally, after decades of labor strife and political tumult, the twentieth century brought an understanding that capitalism requires minimum standards of decency and fairness – workplace safety, a minimum wage, maximum hours (and time-and-a-half for overtime), and a ban on child labor.

We achieved that through antitrust laws that reduced the capacity of giant corporations to impose their will, and labor laws that allowed workers to organize and bargain collectively. . . . . But now we seem to be heading back to nineteenth century.

Corporations are shifting full-time work onto temps, free-lancers, and contract workers who fall outside the labor protections established decades ago.  The nation’s biggest corporations and Wall Street banks are larger and more potent than ever.

And labor union membership has shrunk to less than 6 percent of the private-sector workforce.

So it’s not surprising we’re once again hearing that workers are worth no more than what they can get in the market.

[A]s we should have learned a century ago, markets don’t exist in nature. They’re created by human beings. The real question is how they’re organized and for whose benefit.  In the late nineteenth century they were organized for the benefit of a few at the top.   But by the middle of the twentieth century they were organized for the vast majority.

Yet since around 1980, even though the economy has doubled once again (the Great Recession notwithstanding), the wages most Americans have stagnated. And their benefits and working conditions have deteriorated.

This isn’t because most Americans are worth less. In fact, worker productivity is higher than ever.  It’s because big corporations, Wall Street, and some enormously rich individuals have gained political power to organize the market in ways that have enhanced their wealth while leaving most Americans behind.

Antitrust leniency toward a vast swathe of American industry – including Big Cable (Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner), Big Tech (Amazon, Google), Big Pharma, the largest Wall Street banks, and giant retailers (Walmart).

But less tolerance toward labor unions — as workers trying to form unions are fired with impunity, and more states adopt so-called “right-to-work” laws that undermine unions.

We seem to be heading full speed back to the late nineteenth century.

The Koch Brothers - More Powerful (and Frightening) Than the GOP

Back at the height of the Gilded Age, the immensely wealthy routinely bought politicians.  It's a time period that the Koch brothers want to bring back even as they strive to (i) make most Americans little more than serfs who survive hand to mouth and (ii) buy themselves a license to pollute and despoil the planet.  What is truly frightening is the fact that the Koch brothers with their billions of dollars are in some ways more powerful than the Republican Party which they seek to control.  A piece in Politico looks at the frightening power of the Koch brothers and their corporate empires.  Her are excerpts:

The Koch brothers and their allies are pumping tens of millions of dollars into a data company that’s developing detailed, state-of-the-art profiles of 250 million Americans, giving the brothers’ political operation all the earmarks of a national party.

The move comes as mainstream Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, are trying to reclaim control of the conservative movement from outside groups. The Kochs, however, are continuing to amass all of the campaign tools the Republican National Committee and other party arms use to elect a president.

The Koch network also has developed in-house expertise in polling, message-testing, fact-checking, advertising, media buying, dial groups and donor maintenance. Add mastery of election law, a corporate-minded aggressiveness and years of patient experimentation — plus seemingly limitless cash — and the Koch operation actually exceeds the RNC’s data operation in many important respects.

“The Koch operations are the most important nonparty political players in the U.S. today, and no one else is even close,” said a top Republican who has been involved in the last eight presidential campaigns.

Spending more than $50 million in cash over the past four years, i360 links voter information with consumer data purchased from credit bureaus and other vendors. Information from social networks is blended in, along with any interaction the voter may have had with affiliated campaigns and advocacy groups. Then come estimated income, recent addresses, how often a person has voted, and even the brand of car they drive. Another i360 service slices and dices information about TV viewing to help campaigns target ads more precisely and cost efficiently.

GOP campaigns can get less-expensive data through the RNC, but happily pay i360 for its superior profiles. Midterm clients included several of the GOP’s marquee Senate and gubernatorial victors, including Sens.-elect Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa, and Gov.-elect Larry Hogan in Maryland.

Heading into 2016, the Koch network — under the auspices of Freedom Partners — has in many ways surpassed the reach and resources of the RNC. And, unlike the party, it isn’t bound by rules requiring it to maintain neutrality in primaries. Though the network has yet to engage in primaries, that could be the next logical step in its progression from apolitical think tank consortium to aggressive privatized political machine.

The Kochs and their donors and operatives have been sought out by most of the leading 2016 GOP prospects – from Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky to Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rick Perry of Texas. Their allies are acutely aware of the potential for the Koch groups and their donors to sway the primaries — even if they don’t formally back a candidate.

A key adviser to one of the top GOP presidential prospects said: “If I could have Karl Rove or Marc Short to run a presidential campaign today, I’d take Marc Short. He understands all the technical tools available to a modern campaign and how to apply them to the nominating process. He also has a deep understanding of the political dynamics of the GOP base vote.”

Short’s connection to another potential GOP presidential candidate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, is among the biggest reasons that the Kochs are considering whether going all-in on a presidential campaign would be a good investment. Short was chief of staff to the House Republican Conference when then-Rep. Pence was the chairman, and Short remains a close adviser to Pence.

Veterans of GOP presidential campaigns say that while the Kochs could not, by themselves, provide the credibility necessary to create a candidate for president, their weapons could make a decisive difference for someone who was already running a viable campaign for the nomination — someone like Pence, whose record could make him a bridge between the GOP’s evangelical and establishment wings.

The LIBRE Initiative, a network-backed group aimed at Hispanics, has 40 staff at its Arlington, Virginia, headquarters and 40 field staff (25 of them part-time) in seven states. Generation Opportunity, the Kochs’ outreach arm for 18- to 34-year-olds, has 30 full-time, paid grass-roots staffers running boots-on-the-ground activism in 10 states. Concerned Veterans for America, another Koch-backed group based in Arlington, has 60 paid staff in 14 states.

What I find most insidious is that the Koch brothers are working diligently to convince voters to vote against the voters own best interests through propaganda and out right lies.   Meanwhile, the Kochs don't give a rat's ass about the people they are deceiving and screwing over.  They are horrible megalomaniacs driven first and foremost by greed.  If there is such a thing as the sin of greed, the Kochs embody it in America today.  They are truly foul individuals. 

The American Dream Is Leaving America

A column in the New York Times addresses a theme I have hit on before: "Old Europe" as the far right derisively call it has more upward social mobility than America and now is poised to have a higher percentage of colleges graduates than America.  One of the favorite targets of today's GOP when it comes to budget cuts is public education followed, of course, by cuts to the social safety net.  Why the antipathy towards education?  I would argue greed/selfishness among the GOP base that pushes adherents to not give a damn about others - despite the professions of respect for Christian values - and the Christofascist/Tea party's embrace of ignorance and aversion to any science and modern knowledge that challenges their increasing indefensible religious beliefs.  Then too, there is the way public education is funded in America: real estate taxes which put poor neighborhoods behind the eight ball even those these neighborhoods need education more than any where.  Here are column highlights:

THE best escalator to opportunity in America is education. But a new study underscores that the escalator is broken.

We expect each generation to do better, but, currently, more young American men have less education (29 percent) than their parents than have more education (20 percent).

Among young Americans whose parents didn’t graduate from high school, only 5 percent make it through college themselves. In other rich countries, the figure is 23 percent.

The United States is devoting billions of dollars to compete with Russia militarily, but maybe we should try to compete educationally. Russia now has the largest percentage of adults with a university education of any industrialized country — a position once held by the United States, although we’re plunging in that roster.

A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility. But the American dream seems to have emigrated because many countries do better than the United States in educational mobility, according to the O.E.C.D. study.

As recently as 2000, the United States still ranked second in the share of the population with a college degree. Now we have dropped to fifth. Among 25-to-34-year-olds — a glimpse of how we will rank in the future — we rank 12th, while once-impoverished South Korea tops the list.

A new Pew survey finds that Americans consider the greatest threat to our country to be the growing gap between the rich and poor. Yet we have constructed an education system, dependent on local property taxes, that provides great schools for the rich kids in the suburbs who need the least help, and broken, dangerous schools for inner-city children who desperately need a helping hand. Too often, America’s education system amplifies not opportunity but inequality.

[E]galitarian education used to be America’s strong suit. European countries excelled at first-rate education for the elites, but the United States led the way in mass education.

In effect, the United States has become 19th-century Britain: We provide superb education for elites, but we falter at mass education.

In particular, we fail at early education. Across the O.E.C.D., an average of 70 percent of 3-year-olds are enrolled in education programs. In the United States, it’s 38 percent.

In some quarters, there’s a perception that American teachers are lazy. But the O.E.C.D. report indicates that American teachers work far longer hours than their counterparts abroad. Yet American teachers earn 68 percent as much as the average American college-educated worker, while the O.E.C.D. average is 88 percent.

All of this is fine with the GOP which is striving hard to recreate the Gilded Age and its shocking wealth disparities. 

Tea Party’s Self-Defeating Hate And Focus on the Wrong Villians

Two things define most members of the Tea Party: they embrace ignorance and they self-identify as conservative Christians (perhaps the two go hand in hand?).  But there is another attribute that is defining: they allow themselves to be played for fools by those like the Koch brothers who are working hard with the Republican Party to return America to a Gilded Age society.  Among the long term losers will be the Tea Party members themselves.  They are simply either too stupid or too blinded by their hatred of those who are different to figure this reality out.  A piece in Salon looks at the phenomenon.  Here are sample excerpts:

When it comes to hating immigrants, the Tea Party has nothing on Samuel Gompers.

Gompers, the founder of what became today’s AFL-CIO, was so appalled by the immigrants pouring into the United States in the late 19th century, and so convinced that they were undermining wages for his union members, that he penned an anti-Asian pamphlet entitled “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood Against Coolieism: Which Shall Survive?”

“Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others,” Gompers fulminated on another occasion, expanding his race-baiting from Asians to black people.

Gompers and the Tea Party have this in common: Both rose to prominence during times of tremendous economic inequality in America. Gompers was the most significant labor leader of the Gilded Age. The Tea Party is a nativist, populist reaction to our modern Age of Inequality. And both blamed immigrants for the nation’s distress.

The Gilded Age and today’s Great Divergence occurred when the nation’s foreign-born population was at historic highs. By contrast, America’s wealth has never been shared more broadly than it was in the late 1960s, at the end of a four-decade ban on immigrants. There is evidence that mass immigration lowers wages and widens the gap between the wealthy and the middle class. But don’t blame the immigrants. Blame the companies that exploit them as a source of cheap labor, and the laws that allow them to do so.

Consider what happened after the Civil War, when refugees from the peasant kingdoms of Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia began thronging the United States. Uneducated and accustomed to subservience, they were ideally suited for exploitation by the titans of the era. Andrew Carnegie (an immigrant himself, but from Scotland) used Hungarians and Slavs to break a strike by native-born coal miners in 1884. When the Hungarians and Slavs went on strike a few years later, he imported Italians. There were always newcomers willing to work for less.

Not surprisingly, Gompers and other labor leaders supported the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, an anti-immigrant law inspired by the same nativist backlash that had brought about Prohibition. Through a system of quotas restricting the number of visas for each country to 2 percent of the nationality living in the U.S. in 1890, the act essentially cut off immigration for the next 40 years. While Great Britain (from which Gompers himself had emigrated) was entitled to 34,000 visas a year, as a reflection of America’s British stock, Italy was limited to 3,800. Chinese and Japanese were banned entirely.

In the first decade of the 20th century, 8.2 million immigrants arrived in the United States. From the 1930s through the 1960s, only 7.2 million came here. 

It is not surprising that immigration is a focus of the Tea Party’s populist resentment. Non-college-educated whites may always be skeptical of mass immigration — and of politicians who support it. Their opposition to immigration isn’t just about race. It’s about money, too.

So, if banning immigration drove up wages in the 20th century, why don’t we do it again? For one thing, no matter the wishes of today’s nativists, a new Johnson-Reed Act would be impossible to pass, or enforce. It was an isolationist measure that has no place in a globalized world. We could, theoretically, cut off immigration from Africa, Europe and Asia, but the United States shares a border with a much poorer neighbor, which provides a constant supply of unskilled labor. Latino communities are now so well established in American cities that they have the political influence to demand open immigration policies. In Northern cities, Latinos are nowhere close to being the “foreigners” they were in the 1920s.

“In many of these [low-wage] occupations and industries, vulnerable immigrants cannot exercise their labor rights or speak out against unfair or illegal working conditions without the fear of retaliation,” said Jose Mejia of the California State Council of Laborers.

We could also repeal the ban on immigrants collecting SNAP and Medicaid benefits during their first five years in the United States. Passed as part of the 1996 welfare reform, the ban reduces immigrants’ economic options, and thus their ability to refuse the worst jobs.

If the Tea Party really wants to reduce the impact of immigration on American wages, they should lobby for laws that make life easier for immigrants, not laws that aim to drive them out of the country.

The Founders' Blue Print for Fighting Wealth Disparities

As America slides back into a Gilded Age society and with Republicans and the conservatives on the Supreme Court waging a constant war on the working and middle classes, it is noteworthy that the Founding Fathers recognized that wealth concentrations in the few was not a good thing for the future or the nation's economy.  Perhaps it was their living experience with the wealth inequalities in Great Britain and the deference given to aristocrats, but whatever the motivation, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton and others sought to strengthen the average American financial, not strip them of benefits and property to aid the few.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at some of the actions of the Founders that are diametrically opposed to the policies of the GOP.  Here are some highlights:

Current approaches to addressing rising inequality—raising the minimum wage, expanding higher education, increasing the power of unions, widening the national focus on high technology, aiming for a national renaissance in manufacturing—have not shown any evidence of reversing the concentration of income and wealth. There is one potential solution that could appeal to both pro-labor liberals and free-market conservatives, which has its roots in the philosophies of the Founding Fathers, and is already being practiced in parts of the economy today: employee shares in companies. The idea is to make every citizen a capitalist through citizen shares of corporations.  A story from President George Washington points the way.

On February 16, 1792, Washington signed into law a bill from the U.S. Congress that cut taxes for ship owners and sailors in the American cod fishery, in an effort to revive the failing industry. However, the tax cut was conditioned on a broad-based profit sharing arrangement between shipowners and the crews—a centuries-long custom of sharing the profits made from every catch. The legislation was supported by two politicians who typically agreed on very little: Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was responsible for negotiating America’s interests in the fisheries.

Hamilton’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Tench Coxe. Coxe supplied Jefferson with evidence from the leading Philadelphia shipper, Joseph Anthony, that the cod ships with profit sharing were more productive than those with fixed wages.  In the end, Washington’s law not only required a written contract between captain and crew to practice broad-based profit sharing as a condition to receive the tax cuts, and it also said that the tax credits would be paid five-eighths to the crew and three-eighths to the shipowners. The credits relieved the sailors and owners of tariffs, essentially tax payments they had to make on supplies for the fishery.  This is the first documented case in American history where the government made citizen shares—a form of inclusive capitalism—a condition for receiving a tax break.

The cod fishery law reflected the beliefs of many of the Founders that a representative republic required broad-based property ownership—typically land, or, in the case of the cod fishery, shares of profits—and a thriving middle class if the nation was to have a future based on real political liberty.

John Adams repeatedly sounded the alarm on inequality—specifically that he believed the concentration of wealth in property ownership would lead to the concentration of political power, which would undo a republic.

Washington asked Jefferson to draft a liberal approach to the sale of public lands to citizens which commenced, albeit with some complications. They moved against the institution of primogeniture, a key plank of European feudalism, and with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, they all agreed to abolish servitude in what would become Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota, so that citizens could easily acquire land in that part of the young country (though slavery would remain a terrible evil for many decades to come in other parts of the nation).

For more than a half-century, up to the Civil War, federal leaders’ approach to land sales generally allowed low prices, installments, and credits in order to facilitate the wide sale of public land shares to citizens. Homesteads were the most popular economic policy of the 19^th century across the political spectrum after being pushed by senior Democrats. Politicians who argued for selling land to the highest bidder and using the funds for the federal budget were drowned out. Finally, in 1862, after definitively accepting the position that land capital was for the people, Republican President Abraham Lincoln said he was for “the greatest good for the greatest number” and he signed The Homestead Act into law.

[I]t is time for our leaders to develop a hopeful and positive agenda to address the future of the American middle class. What better way than to go back to the American egalitarian tradition of broad-based property ownership of capital in a private market economy? Middle class families have faced relatively flat household incomes for decades and have little access to capital ownership, capital income, and capital gains to expand their wealth.

It is time for new thinking on how to democratize access to capital in ways that remain consistent with our principles. Both progressives and conservatives can turn to their respective icons among America’s leaders to light their way forward.

Madison did not favor redistribution of wealth. His proposed plan, as spelled out in a 1792 article in the National Gazette, was to “withhold unnecessary opportunities from the few to increase the inequality of property” in order to avoid an “unmerited accumulation of riches.” He wanted laws that, “without violating the rights of property,” would “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity”—meaning a robust middle class. 

Using Washington’s cod fishery legislation as a model and Madison’s ideas as a guide, we can explore a restructuring of the tax code to condition any business tax incentive on having some type of share plan for all employees—whether it’s broad-based profit sharing or an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. No business would be required to implement shares, but every business would at least have a serious incentive to consider the idea and decide if it made sense for their organization. Another proposal could involve a tax credit for any corporation that provides broad-based stock options or grants of stock to all of its workers. Silicon Valley would jump at such a proposal.

Would that today's GOP would remember the concepts of the Founders rather than supporting a return to the Gilded Age.