Winter – Off The Air

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

US launches first satellite into orbit; Libyan intelligence officer convicted of Pan Am 103 bombing; US Soldier executed for desertion during World War II; Norman Mailer born; Franz Schubert born.

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.

Stewart Udall

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Gah- it’s an abbreviation for Oklahoma stupid spellcheck!

Anyway, in Some More News–

Somebody comes into our country, they touch one foot on the ground, and we have to catch them. It’s called “Catch.” We take their names and we bring them to court – can you believe this? – and we release them.

And they go into our country, and then you announce – These are the Laws – then you say, “Come back in three years for your trial.” Telll me, what percentage of people come back? No, you’re a little off. Like, how about two percent?

And those people, you almost don’t want, because they can not be smart. Two percent. Two percent. Two percent come back. Those two percent are not going to make America great again, that I can tell you. Crazy.

It is well to remember that all this brinksmanship with holding funding the Government, and now, the Debt Ceiling (which, just to see the world burn, will tank Financial Markets in an Apocalyptic way- days of Maximum Downs limited only by Circuit Breakers) hostage to the Vanity Project Penis Wall O’ Racism that Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio simply used as a symbolic reminder to appeal to the Racist Bigots that are the Republican Party.

You know what solves it? When the Economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have a…, you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.

You know who else believed that?

Charles Manson.

Trump Taxi

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Tet Offensive begins:Nazi leader Adolf Hitler becomes Germany’s chancellor; Franklin D. Roosevelt is born;Hindu extremist assassinates Mahatma Gandhi;as “Bloody Sunday” begins;”The Lone Ranger” airs

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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Umm… Yes.

First, Institutional Democrats overestimate the importance of the Independent/Third Party Vote. They did it with John Anderson, they did it with Ross Perot, they did it with Ralph Nader, and they did it with Jill Stein. Blaming your failures on Third Parties, Gerrymandering, and Foreign Interference are simply excuses for under performance and unpopular policy. Don’t get me wrong, Gerrymandering, and Foreign Interference are real problems, crimes actually, and should be addressed. Third Party Candidates are mostly an annoyance unless they are tapping into a popular agenda that the Party is ignoring.

More importantly there is no such animal as a swing voting “Centrist” Independent. People who are registered Independent are overwhelmingly (80%+) simply disaffected from their Party of choice because of hypocrisy, corruption, and cronyism. If you can get them to the polls they will reliably follow their inclinations.

Among this universe Democrats hold a 2 to 1 advantage (if you could call it that). The reason Democrats lose elections is that this pool of potential voters is scorned and despised by Candidates and the Institutional Party. Is it any wonder they go Third Party or, more often, don’t turn out at all?

Big Tent Republicans with a ‘(D)’ may be content to ignore their constituents in favor of their contributors because they are primarily Greedheads who mouth mere words about “Social Justice” while practicing Identity Politics of division, but their money amplified messaging is falling on deafer and deafer ears.

The concept that Howard Schultz, another bungling Billionaire running on a Platform of No Labels Status Quo Centrism, is any threat against a Democrat that believes in and articulates the Principles of the Party is a chimera of craven cowardice. The only need he serves is as a Fig Leaf for Republicans who pretend they’re not Racists, simply Greedheads. They’re a Minority of a Minority- why do we need them? To win Elections? Time after time we have proven that sufficiently motivated Independents who are not and never have been “Centrists” (the largest Party by the way) can make them appear the insignificant statistical blip they are, almost a rounding error.

Give them the truth Harry. They’ll think it’s hell.

Address at the National Convention Banquet of the Americans for Democratic Action, May 17, 1952

Now the time has rolled around again when you folks have the problem of trying to pick and choose a candidate to support. You are not the only ones who have that problem, and I assure you I am fully aware that it can be a very perplexing problem indeed.

But we are lucky in having a number of good presidential candidates in the field, and some of them are here tonight. I am sure that the ADA will find a candidate who expresses in his philosophy and in his record the things that this organization stands for. Obviously, such a man would have to be a Democrat.

Because this is an election year, I would like to talk to you a little bit about politics.
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The first thing I will say about the Republican Party, believe it or not, is an expression of gratitude. I want to thank them for the way they help the Democrats win elections. Under the liberal policies of the Democratic administration, our country has grown strong and prosperous. And this has been true for such a long time now that people tend to forget what things were like under the Republicans. They criticize the mistakes the Democrats make, but they take for granted all the benefits we have brought them. Every 4 years it begins to look as if the people had forgotten what a Republican administration would mean to the country. And the Republicans go around convincing themselves that they cannot possibly lose the presidential election. I have heard it happen 4 times.

But it is just at this point, when things look darkest for the Democrats, that you can count on the Republicans to do something that will save the day–that is, it will save the day for us. You can always count on the Republicans, in an election year, to remind the people of what the Republican Party really stands for. You can always count on them to make it perfectly clear before the campaign is over that the Republican Party is the party of big business, and that they would like to turn the country back to the big corporations and the big bankers in New York to run it as they see fit. They are just not going to do it.

Just leave them alone, and the Republicans will manage to scare the daylights out of the farmer and the wage earner and the average American citizen. They always do that.

I had the best time I ever had in my life going up and down this country, telling the people the truth, and when they found out what the truth was, you know what they did. And I am here to say to you that when a man in politics, if he is a leader. has the right ideas, the people are willing to listen to what he has to say. It is a matter of salesmanship.

And that’s the reason the pollsters are wrong, whenever you have a candidate who will go out and say what is good for the people–they will believe him; but they go down the street and meet the first three or four people, and ask them who you are for and why you are for him. “Oh,” they say, “I’m for this fellow. Of course some article in the paper said this or that about him.” And they don’t know anything about them, really. That is really what makes leadership in politics. You have got to go out and sell yourself, and what you stand for. And we are going to get a candidate like that, and he is going to win.

Now, the Republicans in 1948, in that 80th Congress of theirs, they went after organized labor with their Taft-Hartley law. They went after all wage earners by their attacks on the social security program. They went after the farmer by tampering with price supports and by failing to provide grain storage.

This year they are at it again. The Republicans think they have been so successful with their campaign of smears and character assassination that they have the Democrats on the run. And they just can’t restrain themselves enough to hide their true colors until after the election. They are too impatient. First one way and then another they are giving themselves away. Take this steel dispute.

I am not going to talk about constitutional issues here tonight; they are before the Supreme Court. I just want to bring out a few facts about the economics of this dispute in the steel industry.
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The Republican leaders could have taken a calm, judicious attitude and weighed both sides and decided where the merits lie. But that is not the way the Republican leaders act; it never is–thank goodness.

They rushed into the fray at once. They took it up in Congress, and they made speeches up and down the Nation. They demanded four or five new investigations. They threatened to wreck price control, and they’re doing their best to do it. And what is the purpose of all this? The purpose is to preserve high profits for the steel companies and prevent wage increases for the steelworkers.

That shows exactly where the Old Guard stands. It shows that their hearts lie with the corporations and not with the working people. It proves that the old Republican leopard hasn’t changed a single spot. It ought to serve as a big, glaring danger sign to the voters of this country of what to expect if they turn the administration of the country over to the Republicans who are now in control of that party.
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The main body of the Republican leaders are doing just what they do every election year. They are making it good and plain to the American people that so far as domestic policies are concerned, the Republican Party is the party of reaction and the party of special privilege–just as I proved in 1948, and the people believed me; and they will yet.
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(J)ust a few weeks ago. Senator Wiley, the ranking Republican Member of the foreign Relations Committee in the Senate, made a speech to the newspaper editors on April 19. I had a press conference for those editors, and had more fun than I have had in a long time. He said there was a great deal in our international relations of which every American could be proud. He said that the Republican Party should not engage in unjustified criticism of our foreign policy, but should play a constructive role. And he asked us all to remember that, and I quote Senator Wiley verbatim, “We are first and last of that breed called Americans.”

It was a good speech, and it was an honest one.
…
Well, what happened? … They sneered at him, they jeered at him, they distorted his words, they cross-questioned him. They gave him to understand that this was an election year, and that it was the duty of every Republican to attack the foreign policy of his country. They made it clear that first and last, when it came to foreign policy, they were of that breed called Republicans, and Senator Wiley ought to be likewise. In other words, they are Republicans before they are Americans.

And there wasn’t a single Republican who got up on his feet and said Senator Wiley was right.

Nobody ought to be in doubt, now. That was the Republican answer to the latest plea, from one of their own members, for a bipartisan foreign policy. That was their answer to a fellow Republican who dared to stand up and say that our country is doing a good thing when it cooperates with other countries, in Europe and in the far East, to hold back aggression.

Isolationism is not dead. Far from it. Even if the Republicans get a presidential candidate with a good record in foreign affairs, he will not be able to drown out the raucous isolationist outcries of the rest of the party. And that prospect is beginning to scare the voters–and it ought to scare them.

Now, we can always rely on the Republicans to help us in an election year, but we can’t count on them to do the whole job for us. We have got to go out and do some of it ourselves, if we expect to win.

The first rule in my book is that we have to stick by the liberal principles of the Democratic Party. We are not going to get anywhere by trimming or appeasing. And we don’t need to try it.

The record the Democratic Party has made in the last 20 years is the greatest political asset any party ever had in the history of the world. We would be foolish to throw it away. There is nothing our enemies would like better and nothing that would do more to help them win an election.

I’ve seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the Fair Deal, and says he really doesn’t believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.

But when a Democratic candidate goes out and explains what the New Deal and Fair Deal really are–when he stands up like a man and puts the issues before the people–then Democrats can win, even in places where they have never won before. It has been proven time and again.

We are getting a lot of suggestions to the effect that we ought to water down our platform and abandon parts of our program. These, my friends, are Trojan horse suggestions. I have been in politics for over 30 years, and I know what I am talking about, and I believe I know something about the business. One thing I am sure of: never, never throw away a winning program. This is so elementary that I suspect the people handing out this advice are not really well-wishers of the Democratic Party.

More than that, I don’t believe they have the best interests of the American people at heart. There is something more important involved in our program than simply the success of a political party.

The rights and the welfare of millions of Americans are involved in the pledges made in the Democratic platform of 1948 and in the program of this administration. And those rights and interests must not be betrayed.
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We stand for better education, better health, greater opportunities for all. We stand for fair play and decency, for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and the cherished principle that a man is innocent until he is proved guilty.

Taken together, these principles are the articles of the liberal faith. I am sure that the liberal faith is the political faith of the great majority of Americans. It sometimes happens that circumstances of time and place combine to deny its expression. But the faith is there, and the reactionaries can never hope to have any but temporary advantage in this country.

That is why the Fair Deal program will not be weakened by compromise. That is why the Democratic Party will nominate a liberal for President. – Harry Truman

Now this is the kind of pissing contest I like. Hard on the heels of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% marginal Income Tax on Incomes over $1 Million, Professor Senator Elizabeth Warren is proposing a Wealth Tax on Net Worth over $50 Million.

The difference between Income and Wealth is that Income is what you get in new revenue and Wealth is your stuff.

Wait ek! You can’t possibly be proposing taking away people’s stuff!

Indeed I am. What’s more is it’s completely Constitutional.

Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal is constitutional, experts say — and necessary
By Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times
Jan 25, 2019

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a newly declared presidential candidate, has turbocharged the progressive attack on income inequality with a proposal for a “wealth tax” aimed at Americans with net worth of more than $50 million.

Warren herself hasn’t issued many details of her plan. But according to UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who advised her on the proposal, the tax would be 2% on net worth above $50 million and another 1% on net worth above $1 billion. They say it would affect about 75,000 U.S. households, or less than 0.1% of the total, and raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years. That’s about 0.1% of gross domestic product per year.

Warren’s announcement, made Thursday via Twitter, is certain to be met with two big questions: Is a wealth tax constitutional, and is it necessary? Legal scholars say the answer to the first is yes, and economists (and the evidence of your own eyes) say the answer to the second also is yes.

The notion that a wealth tax is unconstitutional derives from a provision of the Constitution prohibiting “direct” taxation unless it’s “apportioned among the states.” That’s generally taken to mean that the amount raised from each state must be proportionate to its population.

That means a direct tax can raise the same amount from Connecticut as from Mississippi because they have roughly the same population (3 million), even though the first is the richest state in the union (with per capita income of more than $36,000) and the second is the poorest ($20,000).
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But two legal scholars say this constitutional interpretation is wrong. They’re Dawn Johnson of Indiana University and Walter Dellinger, a former U.S. solicitor general, of Duke University. Their analysis appeared last year, and is regarded as the leading work on the issue, though their position isn’t unanimously held.
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Johnson and Dellinger dismiss the constitutionality issue as “conventional wisdom” that is casually repeated but is the product of “faulty constitutional understanding.” It’s partially the result of a Supreme Court ruling in 1895 known as Pollock that was narrowly — and they say wrongly — decided, and that has been undermined by a string of subsequent Supreme Court decisions.

It’s also generally disdained by legal authorities. Among them is Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School, who wrote in 1999 that before Pollock, the court used a very narrow definition of “direct tax,” and has returned to that narrow view since. As a unanimous court declared in 1983, he noted, “Congress’ power to tax is virtually without limitation.”

The “direct tax” language in the Constitution, Johnson and Dellinger observe, was murky even to the drafters. The Constitution refers explicitly only to a “capitation” or head tax, which is levied on each individual and thus can be easily apportioned by population. The authors assert that the clause wasn’t the product of “any principled decision to limit Congress’s authority to tax income, property, or wealth.”

In any event, the court rejected Pollock only a few years later, by upholding an estate tax and a gift tax — that is, a tax on net worth. After the 16th Amendment, which declared an income tax constitutional, was ratified in 1913 as a response to Pollock, discussions of the constitutionality of taxes other than the head tax dropped off the Supreme Court docket.

That brings us to the question of whether a wealth tax is needed. The answer here is unmistakably yes. The concentration of wealth in America has reached levels that make the gilt of the 19th century Gilded Age look like dross. There’s sound economic and social sense in taxing the hell out of excessive incomes and excessive wealth.

As Saez and Zucman observe, the top 0.1% today control almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Wealth disparity on this scale has a distinctly corrosive effect on society and democracy. As political economist Benjamin Friedman wrote in 2009, its “grave moral consequences” include “racial and religious discrimination, antipathy toward immigrants, [and] lack of generosity toward the poor” — all features of our current political landscape.

That’s not even to mention the economic consequences of placing so much wealth in the hands of people who can’t use it productively, while the majority of Americans struggle to make ends meet on working-class wages.

The Founding Fathers were unnerved by this very phenomenon. Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1785, “whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.”

In his autobiography, Jefferson wrote of the bills he had advocated or passed to form “a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.” His goal was to “prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth in select families.”
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The super-rich haven’t been shy about speaking up for their prerogatives. Asked at the Davos economic conference this week about the suggestion by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to raise the top marginal income tax rate to 70% on high incomes, computer tycoon Michael Dell dismissed it out of hand.

“Name a country where that’s worked. Ever,” Dell said. To which Erik Brinjolfsson of MIT, a member of Dell’s speaking panel, promptly replied: “The United States.” Brynjolfsson schooled Dell by informing him that from the 1940s through the 1960s the top rate on income ran as high as 94%. “Those were actually pretty good years for growth,” he said.

Dell also said he contributes to society via a family foundation, adding: “I feel much more comfortable with our ability as a private foundation to allocate those funds than I do giving them to the government.”

It’s proper to observe that Dell’s multibillion-dollar fortune is based on mail and online orders of computers — in other words, on infrastructure created and funded by the government he disdains.

The question boils down to whether you want society funded out of the whims of Michael Dell or the debated judgments of your elected representatives. Thomas Jefferson would vote for the latter, and the extinction of inherited wealth by taxation if necessary. Anti-tax crusaders who never tire of dragooning the Founding Fathers into their arguments should take that one to heart.

Even Herr Doktor Professor (who has a Nobel by the way) thinks it’s a good idea.

Elizabeth Warren Does Teddy Roosevelt
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Jan. 28, 2019

(T)here was a time when leading American politicians were proud to proclaim their willingness to tax the wealthy, not just to raise revenue, but to limit excessive concentration of economic power.

“It is important,” said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, “to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes” — some of them, he declared, “swollen beyond all healthy limits.”

Today we are once again living in an era of extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people, with the net worth of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans almost equal to that of the bottom 90 percent combined. And this concentration of wealth is growing; as Thomas Piketty famously argued in his book “Capital in the 21st Century,” we seem to be heading toward a society dominated by vast, often inherited fortunes.

So can today’s politicians rise to the challenge? Well, Elizabeth Warren has released an impressive proposal for taxing extreme wealth. And whether or not she herself becomes the Democratic nominee for president, it says good things about her party that something this smart and daring is even part of the discussion.

The Warren proposal would impose a 2 percent annual tax on an individual household’s net worth in excess of $50 million, and an additional 1 percent on wealth in excess of $1 billion. The proposal was released along with an analysis by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley, two of the world’s leading experts on inequality.

Saez and Zucman found that this tax would affect only a small number of very wealthy people — around 75,000 households. But because these households are so wealthy, it would raise a lot of revenue, around $2.75 trillion over the next decade.

Make no mistake: This is a pretty radical plan.

I asked Saez how much it would raise the share of income (as opposed to wealth) that the economic elite pays in taxes. His estimate was that it would raise the average tax rate on the top 0.1 percent to 48 percent from 36 percent, and bring the average tax on the top 0.01 percent up to 57 percent. Those are high numbers, although they’re roughly comparable to average tax rates in the 1950s.

Would such a plan be feasible? Wouldn’t the rich just find ways around it? Saez and Zucman argue, based on evidence from Denmark and Sweden, both of which used to have significant wealth taxes, that it wouldn’t lead to large-scale evasion if the tax applied to all assets and was adequately enforced.

Wouldn’t it hurt incentives? Probably not much. Think about it: How much would entrepreneurs be deterred by the prospect that, if their big ideas pan out, they’d have to pay additional taxes on their second $50 million?

It’s true that the Warren plan would limit the ability of the already incredibly wealthy to make their fortunes even bigger, and pass them on to their heirs. But slowing or reversing our drift toward a society ruled by oligarchic dynasties is a feature, not a bug.

And I’ve been struck by the reactions of tax experts like Lily Batchelder and David Kamin; while they don’t necessarily endorse the Warren plan, they clearly see it as serious and worthy of consideration. It is, writes Kamin, “addressed at a real problem” and “goes big as it should.” Warren, says The Times, has been “nerding out”; well, the nerds are impressed.

But do ideas this bold stand a chance in 21st-century American politics? The usual suspects are, of course, already comparing Warren to Nicolás Maduro or even Joseph Stalin, despite her actually being more like Teddy Roosevelt or, for that matter, Dwight Eisenhower. More important, my sense is that a lot of conventional political wisdom still assumes that proposals to sharply raise taxes on the wealthy are too left-wing for American voters.

But public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for raising taxes on the rich. One recent poll even found that 45 percent of self-identified Republicans support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion of a top rate of 70 percent.

By the way, polls also show overwhelming public support for increasing, not cutting, spending on Medicare and Social Security. Strange to say, however, we rarely hear politicians who demand “entitlement reform” dismissed as too right-wing to be taken seriously.

And it’s not just polls suggesting that a bold assault on economic inequality might be politically viable. Political scientists studying the behavior of billionaires find that while many of them push for lower taxes, they do so more or less in secret, presumably because they realize just how unpopular their position really is. This “stealth politics” is, by the way, one reason billionaires can seem much more liberal than they actually are — only the handful of liberals among them speak out in public.

The bottom line is that there may be far more scope for a bold progressive agenda than is dreamed of in most political punditry. And Elizabeth Warren has just taken an important step on that agenda, pushing her party to go big. Let’s hope her rivals — some of whom are also quite impressive — follow her lead.

Make no mistake, this is an outright rejection of the NeoLib New Dem DLC Blue Dog policy the Republicans with a ‘(D)’ have adopted in the last 40 years.

Ronald Reagan is dead dudes.

Illusion – Off The Air

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

President George W. Bush warns terrorists still threaten United States;bomb rocks an abortion clinic in Birmingham;”The Raven” is first published; Ty Cobb named hall of famer;Oprah Winfrey is born

The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.

Thomas Paine

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