We have mistaken a temper tantrum for democracy. In these midterm elections, the rant of mad men passes for political discourse. The person who shouts the loudest on television or says the most inane things is considered a “spokesperson,” and the media thinks that balanced reporting requires that voices of moderation and reason are paired against people who think the President is not an American or a Christian.
The seething popular resentment in this election is not bubbling from the ground up, but trickling from the top down. It has been fed by Fox News and vicious attack ads secretly funded by anonymous corporate contributors.
The result of all this crazy talk is that it is impossible to have a serious discussion about anything. Democrats, no less than Republicans, fail to offer a coherent argument for their political program. Instead, real issues are eclipsed by charges about whether a candidate is a witch or whether another candidate employed an undocumented housekeeper or whether lying on one’s resume is a disqualification.
Is this how our founding fathers imagined our democracy?
Pollsters, pundits, and political operatives are driving our democracy in a bad direction. Winning elections is all about destroying your opponent and turning complex issues into simplistic slogans. And neither party is innocent.
What is the cost to our democracy? In California, for example, we have an election for Governor between two uninspiring figures: on one side, a career politician whose shelf life expired when he left the Governor’s mansion three decades ago and who cannot speak plain English, and on the other side, a former CEO, who has never expressed any interest in public affairs and hasn’t even bothered to vote, but who is now trying to buy the Governor’s mansion for $120 million on her way presumably to the White House. No fair-minded neutral observer could listen to them debate and feel anything other than panic that neither one is prepared to manage the world’s seventh-largest economy. Is this really the best we can do in a state with 35 million people?
Our elections scare off anyone with intelligence, talent, and integrity. For the pundits, it is all very entertaining, and it makes great copy. But who will be left to govern us?
In the eighteenth century people understood the distinction between civil marriage as a legally enforceable economic contract and holy matrimony, which was more or less forever. Nowadays, most people only discover the first principle when they forget the second. Modern brides and grooms are too busy planning their wedding to pay attention to the fine print in their marriage licenses until divorce. That’s when it hits them that when you say, “I do,” you are consenting to an enforceable contract with real financial burdens.
The intensity of the debate over same-sex marriage comes from a profound misunderstanding about the distinction between the civil and religious aspects of marriage. You could choose to marry without the church; or you could have a church wedding without any state-issued marriage license. One form of marriage does not necessarily entail the other.
But most opponents and proponents of same-sex marriage treat the issue of civil marriage as if the state were conferring its “blessing” on same-sex couples or otherwise “consecrating” their marital vows. Why in the world would anyone care whether the yahoos in state government approved or disapproved of your marriage?
The benefits of a civil marriage are clear. It imposes a legal obligation on both parties to support each other and any children of the marriage, and it makes it awfully sticky to leave the marriage. It also allows you to claim certain insurance benefits, inheritance rights, property rights, etc. These are all nice things to have, which is why so many gay and lesbian couples are making such a fuss about being denied them.
Opponents of same-sex marriage express the fear that their churches will be “forced” to perform such marriages, which of course, isn’t true. The first amendment defines the separation of church and state. No federal judge or state legislature can force a church to marry someone against the beliefs of its congregants.
Opponents of same-sex marriage also claim that somehow if Ben can marry Jerry than Jack’s marriage to Jill is somehow cheapened. Blaming gay couples for the problems of heterosexual couples is like blaming the French for the taste of British cuisine.
The country seems poised to have an insurrection over this question, but why? The question before Federal District Court Judge Walker in San Francisco was “What is the public interest in prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying?” The Judge found no rational justification for denying same-sex couples the right to marry. Even if you don’t agree with the Judge, ask yourself whether the public interest is better served by encouraging same-sex couples to pursue monogamy and to take economic responsibility for themselves and their children. Would we really prefer if gay couples leap-frog from one relationship to the next?
Judge Walker’s decision this past week to strike down proposition 8 in California is a deeply conservative decision in two respects. First, the Judge did not impose a higher level of scrutiny or infer some wholly new fundamental right from the Constitution. Instead, he considered point-by-point all of the evidence and found that there was no rational basis for denying same-sex marriage. Second, by re-affirming that marriage itself is a fundamental right guaranteed by our Constitution as the Supreme Court has said many times, Judge Walker elevated the dignity of all marriages in the eyes of the law.
We learn very young that Benjamin Franklin with charm and cunning forged the Franco-American alliance that won our Independence.
That’s what we were taught, anyway. But it’s not true.
The true story is that in 1775 the Continental Congress decided to send someone on a secret mission to persuade France to arm them against Britain. Franklin proposed a Yankee shopkeeper named “Silas Deane”. Deane had never left Connecticut in his life, could not speak a word of French, and knew nothing about diplomacy. Franklin thought that Deane was such an improbable spy the British would never suspect him.
With nothing but the worthless paper money printed by the Continental Congress, Deane arrived in France in July, 1776, unaware that Congress had just declared Independence. He was, in effect, our first emissary to Europe, and for the next six months without any diplomatic instructions, he improvised. He succeeded in his mission with the help of the French comic playwright, Beaumarchais, who wrote, “The Marriage of Figaro,” and “The Barber of Seville.”
Beaumarchais was a dashing and brilliant bon vivant who invented the wrist watch, designed the modern harp, and built the Paris water system. He was also an arms dealer on the side.
Together Deane and Beaumarchais shipped all the arms and supplies for the Continental Army even before Franklin set foot in France.
None of this secret dealing would have been possible without the unwitting help of the French ambassador to London, the Chevalier d’Eon. D’Eon was a famous military hero, an accomplished diplomat, and a French spy. He was also blackmailing Louis XVI, and the King had asked Beaumarchais to try to negotiate with D’Eon.
When D’Eon met Beaumarchais he was instantly drawn to the handsome playwright and confessed that he was, in fact, secretly a woman. D’Eon told Beaumarchais that her father had preferred a son and raised her as a boy and that in her male disguise she found opportunities to succeed that no woman ever had.
Beaumarchais offered to marry d’Eon in exchange for her abandoning both her blackmail threat and her male persona. Beaumarchais’ reward for neutralizing the threat to Louis XVI was that the King agreed to give Beaumarchais the arms for the Americans.
Thus, d’Eon’s decision to come out as a woman provided the catalyst that forged the Franco-American alliance and won our independence.
This Independence Day let’s remember our debt not just to Silas Deane, Beaumarchais, and France, but also to the cross-dressing spy who made it all possible.
Is California Greece with better wine? California and Greece both have massive public debts, shrinking economies, and declining bond ratings that have made it difficult for them to continue to borrow.
But California’s budget deficit of $20 billion is only about 1% of the state’s nearly $2 trillion economy. By contrast, the Greek deficit is around $43 billion equal to about 13% of its GDP. So perhaps we can relax in California.
Comparing the size of our relative deficits misses the real point of comparison. The current crisis in Greece was triggered by rising interest rates as a result of falling bond ratings. The same phenomenon is underway in California. Both California and Greece wracked up this enormous indebtedness under conservative governments that refused to raise taxes or cut expenditures. Both economies simply lack the political will to act. The Greeks have a left-wing coalition government threatened with a revolt by the communists and the labor unions. California’s Republican governor is threatened with a revolt by right-wing ideologues in the state legislature. What most commentators describe as an “economic crisis” is in fact a “political crisis” in both California and Greece. And unfortunately for Californians, Governor Schwarzenegger is no George Papandreou.
The E.U. has demonstrated an embarrassing lack of unity in responding to this crisis, even as it spreads to Portugal, Spain, and Italy. The Europeans are unwilling to stand with Greece and provide sufficient credit to keep the Greek economy afloat. The other European governments blame the Greeks for their profligacy — disguising the extent of their debts, evading income taxes, and supporting a bloated state bureaucracy that dominates 40% of the national economy and offers benefits like two extra months of pay for public employees,and retirement pensions for workers in their 50’s.
We are told that California need not worry; that if California was close to defaulting on its massive debt we could surely depend on Congress to rescue it. Really? I’m not so sanguine. It’s hard not to imagine senators filibustering any bill to assume California’s debt.
The responsibility for paying our debts ultimately lies with ourselves. We Californians need to mend our ways. That has to include budget cuts, structural reform, and increased taxes.
Our state legislature is unwilling to consider tax increases. Instead, the legislature has tried to trim little bits of the deficit by slashing public schools and quadrupling tuition at public universities. These school cuts and tuition increases are burdening the state’s future and driving people out of California. The University of California has long been the engine of the state’s economy. Without it California is just Nevada with a coastline. But unfortunately, the same folks who are unwilling to tax income have no trouble voting to tax potential.
Nobody likes to pay taxes, but the reality is that Californians are under-taxed compared to other major industrial economies that provide the kinds of social services and protection that we expect in California. With the governor’s race now on, you won’t be hearing much serious talk about raising taxes from any of three candidates. Perhaps the catastrophe that Greece now faces will persuade some of our leaders that it’s time to make hard choices and take responsibility – and stop passing the burden onto our kids.
Since the publication of UNLIKELY ALLIES, many readers have encouraged me to write a screenplay about how a merchant, a playwright and a spy saved the American Revolution. So last week I found myself in Napa at the Northern California Screenwriters Expo pitching UNLIKELY ALLIES to Hollywood producers.
Surrounded by other aspiring screenwriters I felt more than a little intimidated. There were so many people from all walks of life full of inspiration and hope. As we waited to pitch our ideas to the jaded Hollywood crowd, I sat with a grey-haired single mom nervously paging through a script on her lap about a middle-aged divorcee struggling to raise a family. I talked to a cheerful homeless man who had scrapped together just enough money to pay his registration fee so that he could pitch an idea for a sci-fi movie. I met a young man with a brilliant smile who had travelled up from Mexico with a terrific idea for a romantic comedy.
We discovered that the film business has never been tougher. In the Great Recession Hollywood isn’t taking any chances. Dramas, science fiction, and romantic comedies are too risky to try to sell to audiences overseas or to the “target U.S. demographic”: 16-24-year-old boys. All Hollywood wants to see is another Avatar – something with lots of action that doesn’t require much of its audience and can be easily translated into Spanish or Chinese. That’s why you can’t find anything worth watching at the Cineplex on a Saturday night.
Yet, despite the chilly reception we received from the Hollywood crowd, what struck me was how hopeful these aspiring writers felt even in the face of slim odds. Was there ever a country so populated by dreamers? What is it about our national character that we grow up believing that anyone can win the lottery?
The founders of our nation declared the inalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness.” What other country was founded on such a promise? What the founders meant was the right to pursue one’s aspirations to better oneself and to provide greater economic opportunities for one’s family. Is the pursuit of happiness still possible in America?
Even before the Great Recession began the economic opportunities for most Americans have been closing. Over the last thirty years the average income of Americans has come up only 12% in real terms. At the same time, the average income of the wealthiest .01% of Americans has risen 400%. During the Bush years 8 million Americans lost their jobs, and now unemployment remains stuck at 9.7%. Today, one in four American homes is worth less than the outstanding mortgage.
The American Dream had been on life support for at least a decade. That may explain the fascination with shows like American Idol that hold out the hope that anyone can realize their dreams in America. Against all odds we still grasp onto the founders’ promise.
President Obama’s health insurance reform bill is a small step in the direction of trying to help the average family survive the vicissitudes of life so that they can pursue their dreams. More must be done quickly to generate jobs and open up educational opportunities if we are to preserve our American tradition.
As for UNLIKELY ALLIES the movie, well, we’ll see. But if you have a friend in the business let me know. I still haven’t given up on the pursuit of happiness.
President Obama has proposed a $266 billion jobs bill that contains tax credits for small businesses that hire more workers, an increase in the federal highway fund to patch our crumbling infrastructure, and a short-term extension on the federal unemployment benefits. It’s a boost to the economy, but it’s not nearly enough to put 15 million Americans back to work.
Last year Congress approved $787 billion stimulus package, mostly in tax cuts and aid for “shovel-ready” projects at the state and local level. For most of us $787 billion sounds like an awful lot of money, but when you look closely, it was far less than it appeared.
Much of the stimulus was spent to “patch” the alternative minimum tax ($70 billion), which Congress routinely spends every year with or without a recession. Another $100 billion was appropriated for infrastructure projects that will take a decade to complete. More significantly, while the federal government was trying to expand the economy, state and local governments were forced to cut spending and raise taxes, fees, and tuition for public universities. In fiscal 2010, 48 state governments had budget deficits totaling $162 billion, and when you toss in the debt of municipalities, the total debt is well above $200 billion. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office when you net out the effect of state and local governments cutting programs and raising taxes, the real federal stimulus averaged only about $126 billion annually for 2009 and 2010. That’s less than 1% of our GDP.
What that means is that while the feds were trying to hire more road crews and contractors, states and municipalities were laying off cops and teachers. The feds were rowing in the direction of expanding the economy, while the states were rowing towards constricting the economy. Small wonder that 15 million Americans are still out of work, 25% of homes are worth less than the outstanding mortgage, and the number of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and failed banks are near record levels.
The President’s modest jobs bill is not going to work unless the federal government does something to relieve the burden on state and local government.
One way to give the economy a strong jolt would be for the federal government to open a line of credit to every state and locality. If the feds extended credit to state and local governments up to $1000 per resident at super-low interest for 30 years, why would any state or local politician refuse? We could strengthen our first-responders, improve our schools, lower tuition costs, and keep state and local taxes from rising. That would put more Americans to work, increase tax revenues, and eventually help to pay down the deficit.
I know what you’re thinking. The Republicans will accuse the Democrats of being tax-and-spend liberals. But if they do, the Republicans will be shouted down by the chorus of local and state government officials who do not want to be forced to make choices between raising taxes or cutting essential services.
We need jobs. But the President’s job bill will not succeed unless we have the federal, state and local governments all rowing in the same direction at once.
The election of the forty-first Republican and the first nudie model to the U.S. Senate has the pundits chattering. Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts senate race is being read as a dark omen of what the Democrats will face in the mid-term election. Does Scott Brown’s election really signal the emergence of the Tea Party as a powerful new reactionary force on the American political scene? Does his election foretell the end of the Democratic majority? Is it a turning point in American politics?
We can’t know for sure, but history is never so predetermined. It’s more than likely that the pundits are wrong. After all these are the same pundits who predicted last year that the Democratic majority would rule for a generation – before they predicted that Obama was unelectable and Hillary Clinton had the Democratic nomination sewn up.
Here’s another interpretation: Scott Brown defeated an indifferent Democratic politician who didn’t even bother to campaign. The handful of voters who showed up at a special election in the middle of winter were motivated by frustration and anger – not necessarily directed at President Obama – but at the local Democratic machine politicians who took them for granted and run Massachusetts like a one-party state.
The media’s penchant for reading too much into Scott Brown’s election is a common phenomenon. Looking backward we often attribute significance to events that might be merely random localized occurrences. On the other hand, sometimes random occurrences can alter the course of history. We learn in school that history is determined by great leaders, big ideas, or broad social movements. But sometimes, history is determined by accident.
The success of the American Revolution, for example, has been attributed to a wide-range of causes: the brilliant leadership of our founding fathers, the ideology of civic republicanism, and the social mobility of American colonists. But a more likely explanation is the particular timing of France’s intervention on the side of the colonies.
Why did Louis XVI agree to aid the American revolutionaries when they appeared to be losing? The conventional explanation is that Benjamin Franklin charmed the French monarchy into providing all of the arms, ammunition and supplies for the Continental Army. But, in reality, Franklin had nothing to do with it.
In January 1776, long before Franklin arrived in France, he sent an unknown Connecticut shopkeeper, Silas Deane, on a secret mission to persuade Louis XVI to arm the Americans. Deane had never left Connecticut in his life, could not speak a word of French, and knew nothing about diplomacy. But Franklin thought that Deane was such an improbable emissary that the British spies would never suspect him.
Deane succeeded with the help of two Frenchmen: the comic playwright Caron de Beaumarchais and the French ambassador to London Chevalier d’Eon. This improbable trio are the subject of my new book, UNLIKELY ALLIES: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution.
Beaumarchais was one of the most interesting men of the nineteenth century. Though he is best remembered as the author of the original plays, “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” he also invented the wristwatch, designed the modern harp, performed and taught music, built the Paris water system with the Perrier brothers, spied for the French King, and traded arms on the side. Deane and Beaumarchais together smuggled all of the arms, ammunition, uniforms, tents, blankets, and boots for an army of 30,000 men passed a swarm of British spies and through a British blockade to the Continental Army. The arms were sent before Franklin even set foot in France, and they arrived just in time to sway the outcome of the Battle of Saratoga, the turning point of the American Revolution.
None of this would have been possible without the leavening influence of the flamboyant Chevalier d’Eon. D’Eon was a decorated French war hero, an accomplished diplomat, and a brilliant spy, who was also blackmailing the French king. Louis XVI sent Beaumarchais on a secret mission to London to persuade d’Eon to surrender the incriminating documents. The dashing playwright ended up seducing d’Eon, who admitted to Beaumarchais that he was in fact – a woman.
D’Eon’s decision to come out as a woman after forty years disguised as a male soldier, diplomat and spy set in motion a series of events that provided the catalyst that convinced Louis XVI to arm the Americans against the British. How and why that happened is the story of UNLIKELY ALLIES.
The point of my book is that history isn’t just hammered out by great leaders or great ideas or great social movements; the arc of history is just as often bent by random events, peripheral characters, and strange coincidents. History, like weather, is subject to the famous “butterfly effect.”
Scott Brown’s election is another chance occurrence. Perhaps he will change the trajectory of political history. But I doubt it. Right now, the forty-first Republican has nothing coherent to offer except his rigid opposition to health reform. Between now and the next election there will be many more butterflies that none of us can anticipate. We should be cautious about reading too much into a special election.
I’m not saying that Brown’s election is completely irrelevant. Maybe someday Brown will look no less significant in American history than that cross-dressing French spy who revealed herself. But for now all we can say for sure about Brown is that the senator has no clothes.
Cross-posted at http://www.acslaw.org/node/15336
This week the Obama Administration, after a year of perseverating, finally came forward with a modest proposal to tax big financial institutions, and Republican leaders reacted as if the President were proposing to nationalize the banks.
What President Obama has proposed is a relatively modest tax on the assets of the largest banks in the country. It’s not much different in form than the tax you pay on your property. The President argues that the tax would ensure that the banks pay back the government for the financial rescue package. But the more important reason for taxing bank assets is that big banks have behaved recklessly with the confidence that they were too big for the government to allow them to fail. The Bush Administration handed out cash to rescue the banks with the same lack of accounting that they handed out cash in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one insisted that taxpayers were entitled to any share in the bank’s profits after the crisis passed.
In a system in which companies are regarded as too big to fail the rules are stacked for the big banks: heads the bank win; tails the taxpayer loses.
Without a tax on bank assets we have subsidized record bank profits, and now Wall Street is handing out billions in bonuses to reward their executives for surviving the financial crisis they created. It’s not just the taxpayers who are being ripped off. Even the banks’ own shareholders have been short changed.
But the big banks weren’t the big story this week. The big story was the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse a century of established law and strike down limits on corporation spending in political campaigns. The case before the Supreme Court involved the narrow question whether a television film financed by a corporation that disparaged Hillary Clinton on the eve of a presidential primary should be regarded as a political expenditure subject to limitations on corporate spending. Even Justice Scalia had to admit that of course the film was a political attack ad.
But the Court didn’t stop by ruling on the nature of the ad. Instead of just deciding the case, the five activist conservative justices reached out to strike down any limits on corporate expenditures. They reasoned that corporations have the same free speech rights as anyone else.
The difficulty with corporate speech is that corporations can outspend anyone else by a huge magnitude and thereby intimidate officeholders from supporting legislation against the interests of big business. Imagine now the difficulty the President will have getting any legislation through Congress taxing big banks or regulating health insurers. Any representative who votes against big business will face a tidal wave of attack ads.
Competitive free enterprise is a great thing, but corporations are what lawyers call a “legal fiction.” Corporations are created under state law for the purpose of allowing shareholders to aggregate their investments and create greater wealth for themselves and the nation. Corporations are not political parties.
I don’t want my pension funds invested in a company that supports political candidates. I want my money invested productively, and when my company earns big profits, I don’t want to share my profits with either corporate executives who reward themselves with bonuses or politicians.
What can be done now after the Supreme Court’s decision? Congress can use its power to regulate commerce to require that companies must disclose to their shareholders all of their political expenditures in advance and obtain their shareholders’ approval before spending company assets on political causes. But who will be willing to stand up in Congress and propose such legislation against the implied threat of millions of dollars of attack ads financed by big business?
At long last the Zeroes are over. The Lost Decade that began with a stolen election and a mass murder and ended with a ruinous series of economic scandals, financial crises, and political debacles has left us less secure and less wealthy, but perhaps wiser.
Here are some modest resolutions for the Teenie Decade ahead:
Let’s resolve never to vote for someone again just because we would prefer to have a beer with him rather than with his opponent.
Let’s decide not to invade small countries just on the off chance they might someday maybe have weapons of mass destruction.
Let’s agree that if a money manager says he can offer us returns that are too good to be true he is telling the truth.
Let’s insist that politicians who offer us the government’s largesse also must show us how they intend to pay for it.
Let’s tax wealth and not potential; let’s not cut education to finance tax breaks.
Let’s not make our own government the enemy.
Let’s read newspapers instead of blogs and books instead of tweets.
Let’s actually vet candidates before we nominate them for vice-president.
Let’s resolve that health care is a human right.
Let’s give our veterans the honor – and the benefits – they earned.
Let’s tax bankers when they pay themselves bonuses they didn’t earn.
Let’s worship our Creator by respecting His creation and reducing our carbon footprints.
And let’s all spend a lot more time dancing.
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