UPDATE: See Edge dot org for its consensus document on “The New Science of Morality” complete with dissenters, all smart stuff. More on this later, I feel sure!
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New today but not really news, is it?
“The Super Rich Get Richer, Everyone Else Gets Poorer, and the Democrats Punt”:
“For example, Charles and David Koch, the energy magnates who are pouring vast sums of money into Republican coffers and sponsoring tea partiers all over America, each gained $5.5 billion of wealth over the past year. Each is now worth $21.5 billion.
Wall Street continued to dominate the list; 109 of the richest 400 are in finance or investments.
From another survey we learn that the 25 top hedge-fund managers got an average of $1 billion each, but paid an average of 17 percent in taxes (because so much of their income is considered capital gains, taxed at 15 percent thanks to the Bush tax cuts).
The rest of America got poorer, of course. . .”
Remember homeschooling math whiz dad Rolfe Schmidt?
Just imagine the good jobs that would be created, the innovation we would see, the wealth that would be created if we actually funneled all these banker giveaways into science, the arts, and education.
But no, it is more important to preserve the status quo, preserve income inequality, and do what we can to make debt slaves out of our populace.
Cock of the snook to Rolfe both for his vision last year and for something else new but not news, “Amazing arrogance, gall, chutzpah and unmitigated effrontery”:
Charles Munger, the billionaire vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., defended the U.S. financial-company rescues of 2008 and told students that people in economic distress should “suck it in and cope.”
“You should thank God” for bank bailouts, Munger said. . .
“Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.”
OTOH, at least the Dems did let us have Elizabeth Warren as our consumer gladiator. She’s one smart lady and sounds pretty determined. So the super-rich will have to exert a bit of new effort to steal what we’ve got left.
The fact that my DH’s salary is taxed at a much higher rate than our friends in the venture capital & private equity sectors who make double or triple (or more) absolutely infuriates me. I don’t agree with a lot of what the President and the Democrats are trying to do regarding tax policy (since it will hit the upper-middle-class as well as the truly wealthy) but this is one area where I agree with them 100%.
I’ve had the real-people morality of economic/money policy on my mind a lot, as all us Americans argue over which taxes and profits and business strategies are actually “good for us” — wish I saw it as more important in the debate and the voting. I’m casting about for ways to bring that out, in case that’s not obvious from my recent posts.
All the way back to this discussion, at least . . .
So the GOP “Pledge to America” comes out,and I’ve got morality on the mind with every point and every response to every point. As much as politics is about winning, we need to finish the sentence: it’s supposed to be about winning — what? I believe winning the opportunity to do good for (all) the people, to serve on our behalf. The most blatantly immoral politics is self-enriching while plotting no-good for others.
Some modestly moral reforms to health care are kicking in. The cable news “Education Nation” week starts tomorrow with Brian Williams hosting a two-hour town hall, as the film “Waiting for Superman” exposes tragic, shameful immorality to real children in education policy. A 26-year-old billionaire hardly anyone knows, goes on another billionaire’s tv showcase (someone EVERYONE knows) to announce he’s giving the New Jersey public schools a hundred million dollars to do things his way.
(Oprah like many successful business leaders these days,cut out the government-of-the-people altogether, just gave up on American education and took her money out of America where she could be both benefactor and live-in benevolent dictator in her own created world, like Walt Disney, without any pesky public rules or regulation to respect.)
Such billionaires aren’t ordinary citizens nor legitimate moral leaders nor legitimate elected or appointed leaders in any academic discipline or public interest field. Their expertise is specifically entrepreneurial, but these days they run our world anyway. And these are what we might think of as the “good” billionaires, never mind the Koch brothers literally raping the planet to make more billions and buying off the federal government with a fraction of it they don’t even miss. What about the current crop of billionaire candidates for governorships and senate seats. Would it be wise of us to ask for evidence that they do public good, rather than just extremely well privately?
Look what we’ve wrought by equating public education reform with bringing business practices and profit motives into how we think about and deliver children’s learning; I dare anyone to tell me it’s good morally, or at least how it’s good for us as a nation. Economically, as a matter of national defense, for our minds, bodies, spirits and our national goals of being a leader in all those ways for the rest of the world. How has it helped anybody large scale or small, except a few parasitic profiteers and politicians (a phrase becoming more redundant by the day) — in other words, those who war over and win obscenely more of everything, from more and more Americans who know and get less of everything?
Hmmm, I see my moral concerns about public education policy go back years further than noted above, see Culture Kitchen e.g.:
[shudder] . . . and I just saw this about the morality of big business money, via Valerie Moon:
Is there child slavery in your chocolate?
Via Pam Sorooshian, documentary on immorality in schooling:
Race to Nowhere
[...] how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby … That turns out to be [...]