Year: 2011

Scientist Tim Flannery ties Darwinian myths to politics of selfishness and myth of free markets

Posted on by Marc Jampole

From time to time, I analyze pop science and pop psychology articles that try to infer in current mores the echoes of primordial genes trying to propagate themselves through the selfish behavior of the animals containing them.  On any number of occasions I have demonstrated that these little Darwinian myths or fairy tales are pure speculations that reflect the belief system of the writer and by implication of the publication.  These myths always uphold conventional beliefs, e.g., that men like to play around while women want one mate or that women find dumb but athletic men more sexually attractive.  See for example, my blogs of December 22, 2009,  February 25, 2011 and November 17, 2009.

Tim Flannery, the Australian scientist and global warming activist makes the same point in his latest book, Here on Earth, when writing about Richard Dawkins, who was the first to propose the concept of the selfish gene, i.e., the idea that we are just shells for the replication of our genes, which are engaged in a brutish battle for survival with all other genes and therefore always act selfishly. 

Here is Flannery’s entire paragraph:

We have a tendency to use ideas such as selfish gene theory to justify our own selfish and socially destructive practices. It’s significant, I think, that Dawkin’s book received wide acclaim on the eve of the 1980s—the era when greed was seen as good, and when the free market was worshipped. As our experience with social Darwinism illustrates, we need to be eternally on guard against the siren song of self-interest if we wish to live in a fair and equitable society.”  

Compare Flannery’s paragraph with what I posted on OpEdge earlier this year: “The first thing we notice is that selfishness is equated with both the natural and the good.  Selfishness is the reigning spirit of state-supported capitalism and justification for an inequitable distribution of wealth.  Thus the hidden ideology of all Darwinian myths is the glorification of free-market capitalism.  It is no coincidence that the proliferation of these Darwinian myths in English and American popular science began around the time Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took office.  It was, and unfortunately remains, the zeitgeist.”

I’ll take Flannery on my side of an issue any day.  He is one of the most articulate and right-thinking scientists around, and I’m surprised that he hasn’t taken over the Carl Sagan role of “Mr. Science” in the mainstream news media.  Perhaps it’s because the mainstream news media is so in thrall to the right-wing that it really doesn’t want to call attention to science by having a universally recognized expert. 

I recommend any of Flannery’s books to anyone, but in particular, The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America, which plays out the history of North America as a long series of successive invatisions from other parts of the earth, each invasion dramatically changing the ecosystem of the continent.

As usual, I can’t criticize the pop science of Darwinian myths without stating unequivocally that I believe in the theory of evolution because all the facts support it.  What I object to is the attempt by some to spin scientific myths in support of ideology and in particular the false ideology of selfishness.  I’m delighted that Flannery agrees with me about both the theory of evolution and its ideological misuse.  

Santorum tells torture victim John McCain that McCain doesn’t understand how torture works

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Torture supporters keep repeating the big lie that torture helped to find Osama bin Laden not just to re-spark the debate on the value of torture, but also to twist its terms in a way that assumes that it’s legal.  Which it isn’t.

The latest torturista to make the false claim that torture led to the identification of ObL’s location is former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum.

The story starts in the middle of last week, when John McCain wrote an OpEd piece in the Washington Post saying that torture had nothing to do with finding ObL.  The next day on the floor of the Senate, McCain condemned former U.S. Attorney General Mike Mukasey for promoting the false view that torture helped to get the terrorist.

This morning’s news now brings Santorum’s absurd claim that McCain doesn’t know anything about torture.   Santorum embarrassed himself to no end by proposing that he, who never served a day in the military and specialized in domestic issues as a Senator, knows more about torture than long-time member of the Senate Arms Service Committee  John McCain, who suffered 5 1/2 long years as a prisoner of the Vietnamese and may have himself been a victim of torture. 

Santorum looked foolish, to be sure, but he accomplished his objective: to keep the idea that torture works in the mainstream media. 

Other than Santorum, up to this point, the only people to say that torture led to the capture of ObL 1) were part of the torture bureaucracy; 2) have been out of a position to know for years; and 3) have not seen the current evidence first-hand.   Santorum does share characteristic 2 and 3 with the likes of Dick Cheney, Mike Mukasey, John Yoo and Peter King.

So let’s be clear: All the evidence that has been released shows no connection between our torture and the identification of ObL. 

All the people who have looked at the evidence say that there is no link.

On one side we have this mass of evidence and on the other side the ostensibly lame attempts by the opposition to claim a little credit for what they could not do despite their torture, illegal rendition and the establishment of a worldwide gulag of prisons.  

Yes, to the average person, those supporters of the torture-found-ObL theories look pretty ridiculous, and especially Santorum.

But look what they have accomplished: the debate on torture is alive again and the issue at hand is: does it work or not.

The issue should never be “Does torture work or not?” (By the way, it doesn’t.)  Torture was and is illegal in the United States and goes against our basic humanistic principles as a country.  We do not argue about the efficacy of killing men who don’t pay alimony and child support and then giving their estates to their ex-wives.  And we don’t argue about the efficacy of selling our children to institutions of higher learning when they turn 12 to work as day laborers in return for a free education and emancipation at the age of 25.  Even if these policies did work, we wouldn’t implement them because they break our laws.  And torture breaks our laws and our shared convictions, as well.

As a society, we can not avoid being dragged into a battle with the torture-found-ObL crowd, because if we are silent, the lie passes.  In his recent comments, John McCain has not forgotten to stress that torture is wrong and illegal.  I don’t like most of his politics, but I salute the old soldier for reminding us that we shouldn’t shift the debate to “does it work or doesn’t it.” Because it doesn’t matter. It just ain’t right.

It was okay for Facebook to hire PR pros to go after Google until they started to lie and conceal the client’s name

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Don’t be shocked by the news that Facebook hired public-relations agency Burson-Marsteller to plant negative stories about Google ‘s social-networking feature, Social Circle.  Companies, governments and politicians try to plant stories and create Internet buzz all the time in an effort to shape public opinion or influence elected officials and regulators.  They also establish support groups and foundations, fund research, commission experts to write articles and distribute video news releases to TV stations.

I’ve been involved in these kinds of issues management public relations campaigns from time to time.  I want to share one example that concerns a now defunct supermarket company, The Penn Traffic Company, which at one time made the Fortune 500 list of largest companies by sales volume.  A stitching together of several regional supermarket chains across upstate New York, New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, Syracuse-based Penn Traffic’s business eroded over two decades for a number of reasons, one of which was Wal-Mart.  The Northeast was the last U.S. market to which Wal-Mart expanded and wherever Wal-Mart went in upstate New York and Pennsylvania, it seemed to run into a Penn Traffic store.  Wal-Mart always has looked first to small towns and that’s where Penn Traffic was strongest.

Now when Wal-Mart opens a store in a small town like Rome, New York or DuBois, Pennsylvania, the local downtown stores usually die quickly, and money in the form of profit flows out of town to Wal-Mart corporate headquarters.  That’s why soon after an announcement of Wal-Mart’s plans to build, many local small businesses band together to try to stop the behemoth.  And guess who provided financing to these anti-Wal-Mart groups in the towns where Penn Traffic had supermarkets?  Yes, Penn Traffic did.

And there was nothing wrong with it, for two reasons:

  1. We (Penn Traffic and its PR agency, Jampole Communications, Inc.) never lied.
  2. We never tried to conceal what we were doing.

Over the course of several years, reporters from various local newspapers may have asked me a dozen times if Penn Traffic was funding a specific group, and I always answered with some version of the following, ”That’s right, we support these groups and are proud of it.  Wal-Mart will take business away from our store, because every new supermarket takes business away from the existing supermarkets; Food Marketing Institute numbers show that half of food sales go to the new nearest supermarket, and every new supermarket becomes the nearest one.  But we are also very concerned about the negative impact of Wal-Mart on small towns.  Everywhere Wal-Mart has gone, it has cannibalized local and regional businesses owned and operated by residents, turning smaller cities into ghost towns.  We are more concerned about what Wal-Mart will do to our community than we are about its impact on our business, which is large and thus able to respond to competitive challenges.”

I would also make sure that reporters understood that although many articles identified me as a Penn Traffic spokesperson, I was in fact an outside consultant hired by the company.

Contrast this attempt to influence the public and regulators to what Facebook/Burson-Marsteller (BM) did: The posts that BM employees made contended Google Social Circle violated user privacy and may have broken federal regulations. Two USA Today reporters uncovered that many of these claims were false.  When asked about its involvement, BM at first refused to name the client. 

By spreading falsehoods instead of speaking the truth and by not identifying who was paying for the message, Facebook/BM crossed a very clear and clean ethical line.  It is shameful and gives other corporations and their propagandists a bad name.

The broader issue if course is whether or not it’s okay to hire professional communicators to pass on truthful information, assuming that it’s relevant to the issues at hand.  I think it is okay, because not to allow the free dissemination of truthful information is a form of censorship. 

Who cares what politicians do in their private lives as long as they don’t condemn the same in others

Posted on by Marc Jampole

One of the major themes in the news lately has been the sex life of Republican candidates for President.  Will Newt Gingrich’s standing with “values” voters suffer because he was “dating” his current wife while his then-wife was recovering from an illness in the hospital, or will his current wife be an asset to him?   And what will the voters think about Mitch Daniels, whose wife left him with the kids for two years to shack up with another man?

I for one never cared about Clinton’s peccadilloes and I don’t care about what Gingrich, Daniels, Nikki Haley (who has been accused of getting around a bit), Donald Trump, or any other Republican candidate does in his or her private life.  And I don’t care what Democratic candidates do, either.

There are, however, two exceptions:

  1. When candidates condemn what they themselves are doing, as Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig did by condemning homosexuality while trolling airport men’s rooms for quickie gay sex.  As most of us know, Newty dallied while condemning President Clinton for his liaison with Monica Lewinsky.
  2. When the private actions suggest a pattern of wrong-doing that goes beyond adultery, such as sexual harassment, nonconsensual sex, pedophilia or, as in the case of Senator John Ensign, bribery.

As an adjunct to this “live and let live” philosophy, I am also not ready to condemn the adulterer who lies about his or her adultery, as long as there is no proof that he or she lied about anything else.  Just as you can’t score a home run without touching home plate, most adultery involves lying.  The “act” of lying is part of the “sin” of adultery, and not a separate sin. 

It would be great if all our politicians and public figures were saints, but they’re not.  Who is any of us to define sainthood for other people anyway?  And no one can get inside a couple’s marriage and really know what it’s like in there.

I would rather see the news media focus our attention on these factors:

  • The candidates’ past actions in elected office and past record of accomplishments and stands on issues.
  • What the candidate is currently advocating.
  • How often the candidate follows the line of his or her party and if that party line conforms to what you want.

The news media does a disservice to the voters by wasting time on speculation about the private lives of any candidate, again, unless that candidate’s private life involves illegal activity or demonstrates hypocrisy. 

The only people who benefit from House Republican axe to Medicaid are those with insurance and without hearts

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The Kaiser Foundation and Urban Institute today released their analysis of what happens if the Republic House budget is passed, and it’s real bad: 44 million more Americans will lose Medicaid health insurance coverage.

Who could possibly benefit from 44 million poor and indigent people suddenly not having protection against illness and medical bills?

Let’s start by taking a look at who doesn’t benefit:  first and foremost, the 44 million  who are now getting a modicum of health care protection and will suddenly be without any.  The saddest part is that even though the people on Medicaid are virtually all poor, they are still allowed to vote, and yet many don’t.

But groups other than the indigent losing coverage also suffer.

For example, health insurance companies will suffer, because they serve as administrators and claims processors for state Medicaid programs, a fact that those who tout privatization conveniently never mention.  The Medicaid insurance carriers will have fewer Medicaid customers, and only a fool would think that all or even a majority of people who are kicked off Medicaid rolls will buy private insurance.

Those physicians who still treat Medicaid patients will find their practices shrink.

Hospitals who accept indigent patients will find their beds filled with nonpayers, and these nonpayers will be far sicker than they would have been if they had been on Medicaid, because all pertinent surveys demonstrate that people without insurance forgo preventive care and wait to go to the doctor until an illness or condition is truly critical. 

Then there are the people who can afford insurance who have compassion towards their fellow men.  After all, 44 million men, women and children will now not be able to afford to go to the doctor or to get a prescription filled.  Many of these people will suffer excruciating pain, miss work or be unable to work and die younger than they have to die.   It’s true that those with insurance may pay less in taxes, but only the truly wealthy are getting a significant tax break, say those making more than $150,000 or $200,000 a year or those with at least a few million in investments.

(Remember that we currently have historically low income taxes for many, but especially for the wealthy.  I think I was the one of the first to point out this embarrassing fact, and also to recognize that massive budget cuts are what are paying almost dollar for dollar for the continuation of the temporary Bush II tax cuts.  But I’m delighted that many others are picking up the beat, including Michael Tomasky in his fine article titled “The Budget battles on Which His Reelection Depends” in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.)

Thus, virtually the only people to benefit are those whom the government is already subsidizing with historically low tax rates.  Those in the middle class are getting a minor subsidy, but the wealthier you are the greater the subsidy for two reasons: 1) you make more; and 2) the more money you make, the greater the difference in the rate you once paid and now pay.

But is the tax break enough money at any level to enable someone to feel good about themselves and their community knowing that 44 million more people are going without health care?

My conclusion: the only people to benefit from the Republican House proposal to cut Medicaid funding by one-third over the next 10 years are those who:

  • Have health insurance
  • Are enjoying the low tax regime of the last 30 years
  • Are pitiless and heartless Scrooges.

We’re a nation of Church, Mosque, Synagogue, Meeting and Hindu-Temple-goers, so I can’t imagine many people who will fit all three criteria.

But evidently those who do meet these criteria dominate the voters, and seem to dominate the small group of individuals and foundations feeding Republican and Democratic politicians a steady stream of cash.

I’m sure someone is going to believe the big lie about torture producing the evidence that found bin Laden.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Sometime this past Monday, the head of the House home land security committee, Republican Peter King of New York, made the claim on Fox TV that waterboarding and other torture led to the information that identified Osama bin Laden’s location.  (Readers may remember King for his support of Irish Republican terrorists or for his special hearings in which he effectively accused every Moslem living in the United States of suborning terrorism.) Former Vice President and current Prince of Darkness Dick Cheney also bragged on Fox that enhanced interrogation techniques contributed to finding ObL.   John Yoo, who wrote the legal memos that used tortuous reasoning and claimed new rights for the executive branch to justify torture, said that finding ObL proved that the Bush Administration’s torture policies worked.

Of course it was a supposition based on air, which is a nice way of saying that King, Cheney and others lied.  Whatever… In point of fact, no information leading to the location of ObL came from waterboarding or any other torture technique.  Even the Donald (and I mean Rumsfeld, who trumps the other Donald) stated unequivocally that torture did not lead to the locating of ObL.   

That hasn’t prevented Conservative media and websites from drinking the “torture worked” Kool-Aid.  

Moreover, there are four interlocking media phenomena at work that may keep alive the myth of torture finding ObL long after the news cycle ends:

  1. The vacuum of news:  Although we have more news outlets, we have fewer professionals gathering news.  As Pew research has demonstrated, most news starts with newspapers, and they’re getting smaller than ever.  But space and time must be filled, and into the online and broadcast vacuum rushes news commentary (much as your humble OpEdge does).  Into this vacuum rush lies like torture found ObL or the President was not born in this country, if for no other reason than that the repudiation of the lies can masquerade as news (while spreading the lie).
  2. The “Three Penny Opera mirror effect,” named so because a literature professor of mine once said that when this wonderful light opera first came out in Berlin in the late 20’s of the last century, all of the bourgeoisie loved it even though it was a socialist play that excoriated bourgeois values.  My professor said that the play became a mirror which substantiated the views of whoever was viewing it.  Applied to this situation, I mean to say that conservatives will believe the drool about water-boarding finding ObL, because they will believe anything the Kings and Cheneys of the world say; the more outrageous the statement to us, the more believable to the Mr. and Mrs. Rightwing Kool-aid Drinker.  In the same way, the believer will see those telling the truth as liars because of the believers’ previously fixed belief in the lie they believe.
  3. The fragmentation of the news media.  The Internet has led to the creation of more media outlets not tied to mainstream values.  The way people look for information on the Internet—in a directed, focused manner that zeroes in on exactly what is desired has infected how they view news.  It used to be that leafing through a newspaper or news magazine exposed someone to the full mainstream view of the issues of the day.  But now people can create their own little media worlds in which the only inhabitants are media that advocate only what they already believe and the only thing they see, even in online mainstream media, is fodder for their views.
  4. The “Matt Drudge gambit,” which enables media to proffer the most outrageous and scurrilous views by reporting what a disreputable reporter, media outlet or even politician, such as Matt Drudge, Michelle Bachmann or Glenn Beck, has said even if it’s almost assuredly false. In this case, mainstream and conservative media can keep the controversy alive by quoting King, Cheney and their ilk.  NPR played this game in its coverage of the so-called controversy yesterday evening. So did the New York Times this morning in a front-page article which starts with John Yoo’s assertion and then spends the rest of the story disputing it. 

I’m going to go out on the limb a little to say that over the next two years one of the minor themes of the right wing will be to say that the finding of Osama bin Laden demonstrates the value of enhanced interrogation techniques.  It won’t be the top myth they spout, but it will be one of the right’s playing cards, especially when preaching to the choir.

I want to close with the words my cousin Marshall Dayan, an attorney who defends convicted prisoners on death row from state assassination, emailed me about the capture (and not the killing) of Osama bin Laden: “The manner in which he was located and caught proves that the appropriate response to the 9/11 bombings was a criminal justice response, not a military response.  He was located and identified by painstaking investigation used in the criminal justice model; he was not caught “on the battlefield.”  We spent trillions of dollars fighting wars that did not advance the search for and apprehension of Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11; they were all caught and killed using fairly straightforward criminal justice investigative techniques. 

Bin Laden dies, and where ignorance meets deviousness, you’re sure to find Tom Corbett

Posted on by Marc Jampole

First, my reaction to the breaking news:  I’m delighted that we caught Osama bin Laden, but dismayed that our troops killed him.  He should have lived to stand trial and after conviction, been sentenced to rot away his years in solitary confinement.  The images of people celebrating his death were quite disturbing to me.  No man’s death should please anyone.  In a humanitarian world, one without war, the world we hope to build—in this future world, the true enemy is death against which all men and women will fight together as brothers and sisters.  Didn’t bin Laden gleefully celebrate the destruction of 9/11?  Let’s despise Osama bin Laden and celebrate his capture, but let’s not stoop one nanometer to his level by applauding his death.  

Now we return you to your regular programming:

We’re used to hearing and reading lies from the right wing, such as the lie that gutting job-creating programs to cut taxes on the wealthy creates jobs.  Or the lie that providing unemployment benefits for too many weeks will lead to people staying at home instead of looking for work.  Or how about the lie that government never does anything as well as the private sector can do it, or that charter schools lead to better educational outcomes.

We’re also used to stupid statements from the right, such as the many factual errors of Sarah Palin or the absurd exaggerations of Michelle Bachman.  Or how about the Florida Tea-partite politico who said that 90% of Planned Parenthood’s work involves abortions.  

But Tom Corbett, newly elected governor of Pennsylvania, concocted an especially unheady brew of lying and ignorance late last week with his solution to the budget problems facing Pennsylvania’s public universities.  His idea is for the state schools to earn money by allowing companies to drill for natural gas below campus.

Let’s start with the lying part that underlies the idea:  The primary reason that Pennsylvania institutions of higher education face a critical funding shortfall is because Corbett’s new budget hacks $2.0 billion in state support to education and cuts aid to colleges and universities by 50%.  Corbett tells us that cutting aid to education is the best way to solve the budget crisis and free businesses to forge Pennsylvania’s economic future in an increasingly globalized and knowledge-thirsty world.   These cuts make little sense to anyone who has one or more child in college.

Corbett’s other lie that lurks behind his advice to public universities is his insistence that gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale becomes deregulated and remains relatively untaxed.  The lie of course is that the current price of oil and the impending shortage of the stuff isn’t enough to interest gas drillers in the Marcellus Shale.  We also have to let them sully the environment and not pay their fair share in taxes.

So after having had a major hand in creating the problem—immediate and critical budget shortfall—the Governor proposes his unshackled Marcellus behemoth as the savior.

Only one problem, and here’s where Tommy Boy’s ignorance comes into play: Under current law, none of the royalties from drilling on campus property would go to the universities.  The royalties would all go directly to Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Lease Fund.  In other words, Tommy Boy’s plan would provide no help to the colleges and universities now scrambling to pay for teachers, equipment, staff and building maintenance.

I imagine, though, that Corbett’s idea delights his true constituency, the oil and gas companies that see the Marcellus Shale as a potential goldmine, especially if they can drill everywhere (like on the many campuses of college-rich western Pennsylvania), with little regulation and a light tax burden.

No wonder that surveys show that Corbett’s popularity has plummeted since he took office. He was elected to create jobs, but instead cares more about ramming through the right-wing soak-everyone-but-the-rich-and-poison-the-environment agenda. Like Tea-partites and their fellow travelers everywhere, his brand of lies and ignorance plays well until people actually see it in action.

You can ignore the royal wedding, but not the overwhelming presence of celebrity culture

Posted on by Marc Jampole

It all seems so trivial, the growing focus of our mass culture on the upcoming wedding of a young man of fairly middling accomplishments who represents one of the most odious ideas ever invented by humans-that some people are inherently better than others.  Yet so far, it’s been relatively easy to ignore the royal hubbub.   

Yes, there are a large number of TV new programs and entertainments dedicated to the royal wedding.  Yes, even the New York Times is increasing its coverage of the upcoming nuptials.  But we easily can skip over those articles, flip away when the nightly news starts to gush over Kate’s dress and bridesmaids, and completely ignore the specials.

But what is increasingly impossible to do is ignore celebrity culture, which seeps into every crack and corner of mass communications nowadays. 

My on-the-fly definition of celebrity culture is the preoccupation with the lives and activities of actors, popular singers, other entertainers, very rich people and those who happen to gain notoriety on TV or the Internet.  Reporting on celebrity culture drives out other news.  Charitable causes and social trends are advanced or retarded based on their relationship to celebrities; e.g., when Angelina Jolie gets involved in a cause, that cause suddenly becomes news.   And when a wide range of publications, including Parade, Cosmopolitan, AARP, People and even The Times and The Wall Street Journal cover a trend, cause or nonprofit organization, they often do so through the eyes of the celebrities who have become involved.

Key to understanding the pernicious influence of celebrity culture is to examine that part of celebrity lives that mass culture covers: the stories primarily show these people living the “jet set” life of what Thorsten Veblen once called conspicuous consumption.  We are not only are told to value the celebrity over the person who has actually accomplished something of worth, we are directed to what is most admirable about the celebrity-the fact that he or she is able and ready to spend so much more than we can on goods and services.

Perhaps one of the worst effects of celebrity culture is that it establishes celebrities—again, primarily entertainers, rich folk and lucky do-nothings such as characters on “Jersey Shore”—as the aspirational heroes and heroines of the culture, the people that we are teaching both our children and our adults to admire most, respect most and most want to emulate.  I don’t think I have to spend any time demonstrating that it’s bad for society when everyone wants to grow up to be Kim Kardashian or Charlie Sheen instead of the paleontologist Tim Flannery or Hikaru Nakamura, a 23-year-old who is currently the best U.S. chess player.

Today I want to explore one little cog in the celebrity culture machine—the list of birthdays that appear in the daily newspapers and elsewhere, and which a number of other periodicals use as filler at the front or back of publications or as regular features on websites.

Let’s start with AARP, the slick bi-monthly publication of the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), which gives financial, relationship, legal and other advice to those who belong to the organization, all 40 million or so of whom are 50 years of age or older.

AARP has a feature on its last page called “The Big 5-Oh,” which displays a large photo of a famous person turning 50 in the next two months and some short comments that take up the top two-thirds of the page.  In the bottom third are 6 more photos with short blurbs or people turning 50, 60, 70, 80 and sometimes even 90.

Here is a list of the 21 people featured in the first three issues of AARP in 2011 in alphabetical order.  I have put in bold, italics and underlining to indicate all the non-celebrities.  In the non-celebrity group I include athletes (not because I think we should focus more on them, but because very few of them ever become part of “celebrity culture,” that is, followed not for their accomplishments but because of their celebrity):

Alley, Kirstie (60)

Ann-Margret (70)

Boyle, Susan (50)

Channing, Carol (90)

Clooney, George (50)

Etheridge, Melissa (50)

Gretsky, Wayne (50)

Jones, James Earl (80)

Lopez, George (50)

Louis-Dreyfus, Julia (50)

Mays, Willie (80)

Murphy, Eddie (50)

Nimoy, Leonard (80)

Nolte, Nick (70)

O’Neal, Ryan (70)

Reed, Ralph (50)

Ride, Sally (60)

Russell, Kurt (60)

Sullenberger, Chelsey (6)

Thomas, Richard (60)

Will, George (70)

Only 6 out of 21 (or about 29%) are not actors or entertainers, and of those 6, two are athletes.  Of the remaining four, two are modern heroes: a former astronaut and the pilot who belly-landed a plane on the Hudson River.  BTW, the two political figures,  Ralph Reed and George Will, are of the extreme right, which may suggest that AARP, long a proponent of a humanitarian social net for senior and others and a big backer of health care reform, may be tacking rightward.

Note that there are no scientists, no historians, no chess players, no film directors (who after all create the films in which actors merely play a role), no Directors of the Centers for Disease Control or the National Labor Relations Board, no governors, no literary authors.

The daily newspaper is no better.  For decades, most dailies have had lists of birthdays of the day, which is typically supplied by the Associated Press wire service. 

Here’s who is on the AP birthday list today: “Movie director-writer Paul Mazursky is 81. Songwriter Jerry Leiber (LEE’-buhr) is 78. Actor Al Pacino is 71. Rock musician Stu Cook (Creedence Clearwater Revival) is 66. Singer Bjorn Ulvaeus (ABBA) is 66. Actress Talia Shire is 65. Actor Jeffrey DeMunn is 64. Rock musician Michael Brown (The Left Banke) is 62. Rock musician Steve Ferrone (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) is 61. Country singer-songwriter Rob Crosby is 57. Actor Hank Azaria is 47. Rock singer Andy Bell (Erasure) is 47. Rock musician Eric Avery (Jane’s Addiction) is 46. Country musician Rory Feek (Joey + Rory) is 46. TV personality Jane Clayson is 44. Actress Renee Zellweger is 42. Actress Gina Torres is 42. Actor Jason Lee is 41. Actor Jason Wiles is 41. Actress Emily Bergl is 36. Actress Marguerite Moreau is 34. Singer Jacob Underwood is 31. Actress Sara Paxton is 23. Actress Allisyn Ashley Arm is 15.”

(I do admit that I got a little nostalgic twinge reading that it was the birthday of someone involved with the making of the 1966 pop hit, “Walk Away, Renee.”  After all, it is one of the dozen 45 RPM vinyl records that I still own.)

Of the 25 people on the list, the only non-actor, non-entertainer is the film director Paul Mazursky.  Among those left off AP’s list of April 25 birthdays were two other film directors, the former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl , the horribly right-wing yet significant propagandist Dinesh D’Souza and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn. 

This active crowding out of those who have real accomplishments is a small part of the larger imperatives of mass culture, which tell us to organize our emotional lives around commercial transactions, and not around achievement and service to others, and establishes as our role models those who are famous because they either represent or are extreme participants in mindless consumption.

Let’s change tax policy to favor only those capital gains going to productive ends.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

A capital gain, according to Investopedia, is “an increase in the value of a capital asset (investment or real estate) that gives it a higher worth than the purchase price. The gain is not realized until the asset is sold.”  Investments in this context include stocks, bonds, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETF).

Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than other income like salary, taxable benefits and interest income.  Capital gains are also exempt from Social Security and Medicare taxes (also called FICA or payroll taxes). 

The federal government gives special tax treatment to capital gains to encourage people to take risks with their money by investing in ventures that could produce jobs and wealth for society.  The government distorts the marketplace by lowering the cost to invest.  It does so to help our society by encouraging the creation of jobs and wealth.

All well and good, but what does most of the buying of stocks and all of the trading in investment hedges like puts and calls have to do with creating jobs?

When you buy the stock of General Electric or a bond of Wells Fargo Bank you are not helping the company one bit, unless you buy it directly from the company.  But most stock is bought on secondary markets such as the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ.  In all trading of stocks and bonds and all hedging strategies, you buy from someone else or sell to someone else.  The company gets no additional money.

Now companies do from time to time issue stock or float bonds, and the people who buy them deserve a tax break for helping companies expand or develop new products, all of which create jobs and wealth and meet societal needs.  And even before a stock is public, people invest privately, usually buying shares or loaning money.  These people all deserve a tax break.  I have no problem with that.

For that reason, I propose that we change our tax law so that only when all the funds to buy the security go directly to the company (less fees to investment bankers, to be sure), will the investment qualify for the capital gains rate when the investment is sold. 

Many people are already paying taxes on capital gains at the rate of income taxes if they have traditional IRAs.  When you take money out of a traditional IRA (or exchange the IRA for a Roth IRA), you pay both the tax-deferred investment amounts and all capital gains as income, and not as capital gains.  I’m guessing that most people have all or almost all of their stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs in IRAs and so don’t care much about the capital gains tax break.  But because there are strict limits on how much income you can shelter in an IRA, the wealthier you are, the more gains you will likely have that are currently getting the capital gains tax break. 

Some will say that this move will kill the stock market and therefore make it harder for companies to find financing.  My response: “Horse feathers!”  People have to do something with their money, and so will still buy bonds and stocks on the secondary markets.  They’ll just pay more of their profit in taxes, and why not?  That money did not really help to create any jobs.

If we want to tax rich folk less for creating jobs, let’s at least make sure that they’re actually creating jobs with the extra money they have; for example, the extra billions our government leaders recently gave the wealthy by extending temporary tax breaks for another two years.  You know, that $38.5 billion ripped from social service, educational, mass transit and other important job-creating programs in the latest federal budget.

The idea that tax breaks for wealthy create jobs is hooey; in fact it’s taxing the wealthy that creates jobs.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I’m a little late to mention it, but the usually estimable Charles M. Blow added to the massive evidence that lowering taxes on the wealthy does not create jobs, nor build additional wealth, but in fact destroys jobs and wealth.

In his “charticle” (chart plus short article) titled “The Pirates of Capitol Hill,” first published in the New York Times of Saturday, August 16, Blow presents a chart that tracks the marginal tax rates on the highest incomes and gross domestic product (GDP) since 1913, a good start date for the modern industrial state in The United States.

The marginal tax rate, BTW, is the amount of tax paid on an additional dollar of income. The marginal tax rate is the highest rate, but people will only pay it on the amounts earned above the highest cut-off point, not on all their income.

In these past 98 years, whenever the marginal tax rate for the wealthy went up, so did GDP. Whenever marginal tax rates on the wealthy went down, so did GDP.  The only time that GDP has ever declined in this country coincides with the times that we have had the lowest marginal tax rates on the highest incomes. In other words, when the wealthy pay less in taxes, our rate of GDP growth takes a swan dive and we sometimes even get GDP shrinkage.

The explanation for the relationship between low taxes on the wealthy and poor economic performance is easy: For every dollar that the government spends, it will put 100% of it back into circulation, either as salary to its own employees, benefits to citizens or payments to its suppliers.  All this circulation of money back into the economy creates jobs either directly or indirectly.

But when someone who already is rich gets the money, that money is likely to exit the productive economy, because it will likely go into:

  • Traditional investments: The only time that buying a stock or bond significantly helps create jobs is when the bond or stock is a new issue, that is, when the money goes to the company to create the jobs.  When you buy existing stocks, no additional money goes to the companies whose stock it is, and therefore no additional jobs are created. 
  • Financial machinations, such as options and other hedging, which create no additional companies or jobs beyond a relatively few highly-paid financial whizzes.
  • Art work and other high-end goods for which the price of the object primarily represents non-productive added value that sits in the product rather than being circulated around the economy.  To put simply, when you buy a Picasso for $45 million it creates fewer jobs than when 4.5 million people pay $100 each for a nicely framed print of the painting. 

To those who say that the wealthy do in fact use a goodly portion of the additional money they have under low tax regimes, I respond in three ways:

  1. That’s not what the statistics say.
  2. But not as much as the government does, since the government spends 100% of what it takes in.
  3. Do they now? (Read with sarcasm!)  My analysis of 35 years of analyzing business news media has been that the wealthier one is, the more likely one will finance job-creating ventures with OPM—other people’s money.

Blow ends his article with “But the spurious argument that cutting taxes for the wealthy will somehow stimulate economic growth is not borne out by the data. A look at the year-over-year change in G.D.P. and changes in the historical top marginal tax rates show no such correlation. This isn’t about balancing budgets or fiscal discipline or prosperity-for-posterity stewardship. This is open piracy for plutocrats. This is about reshaping the government and economy to benefit the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless.

Amen, brother!