The Revolution Begins at Home: A Clarion Call to Join the Wall Street Protests

We all need to go down and join the occupation — and not just by “liking” it on Facebook, signing a petition or retweeting protest photos.

September 27, 2011  |

What is occurring on Wall Street right now is truly remarkable. For over 10 days, in the sanctum of the great cathedral of global capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.

They have created a unique opportunity to shift the tides of history in the tradition of other great peaceful occupations, from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the democratic uprisings across the Arab world and Europe today.

While the Wall Street occupation is growing, it needs an all-out commitment from everyone who cheered the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, said “We are all Wisconsin,” and stood in solidarity with the Greeks and the Spaniards. This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or health care, or thinks they have no future.

Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. Perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

At some point the number of people occupying Wall Street — whether that’s 5,000, 10,000 or 50,000 — will force the powers that be to offer concessions. No one can say how many people it will take or even how things will change exactly, but there is a real potential for bypassing a corrupt political process and for realizing a society based on human needs, not hedge fund profits.

After all, who would have imagined a year ago that Tunisians and Egyptians would oust their dictators?

At Liberty Park, the nerve center of the occupation, more than 500 people gather every day to debate, discuss and organize what to do about our failed system that has allowed the 400 richest Americans at the top to amass more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom.

It’s astonishing that this self-organized festival of democracy has sprouted on the turf of the masters of the universe, the men who play the tune that both political parties and the media dance to. The New York Police Department, which has deployed hundreds of officers at a time to surround and intimidate protesters, is capable of arresting everyone and clearing Liberty Plaza in minutes. But they haven’t, which is also astonishing.

That’s because assaulting peaceful crowds in a public square demanding real democracy — economic and not just political — would remind the world of the brittle autocrats who brutalized their people demanding justice before they were swept away by the Arab Spring. And the state violence has already backfired. After police attacked a Saturday afternoon march that started from Liberty Park the crowds only got bigger and media interest grew.

The Wall Street occupation has already succeeded in revealing the bankruptcy of the dominant powers — the economic, the political, media and security forces. They have nothing positive to offer humanity, not that they ever did for the Global South, but now their quest for endless profits means deepening the misery with a thousand austerity cuts.

Even their solutions are cruel jokes. They tell us that the “Buffett Rule” would spread the pain by asking the penthouse set to sacrifice a tin of caviar, which is what the proposed tax increase would amount to. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to sacrifice health care, food, education, housing, jobs and perhaps our lives to sate the ferocious appetite of capital.

That’s why more and more people are joining the Wall Street occupation. They can tell you about their homes being foreclosed upon, months of grinding unemployment or minimum-wage dead-end jobs, staggering student debt loads, or trying to live without decent health care. It’s a whole generation of Americans with no prospects, but who are told to believe in a system that can only offer them “Dancing With the Stars” and pepper spray to the face.

Yet against every description of a generation derided as narcissistic, apathetic and hopeless they are staking a claim to a better future for all of us.

That’s why we all need to join in. Not just by “liking” it on Facebook, signing a petition at Change.org or retweeting protest photos, but by going down to the occupation itself.

There is great potential here. Sure, it’s a far cry from Tahrir Square or even Wisconsin. But there is the nucleus of a revolt that could shake America’s power structure as much as the Arab world has been upended.

Instead of one to two thousand people a day joining in the occupation there needs to be tens of thousands of people protesting the fat cats driving Bentleys and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of champagne with money they looted from the financial crisis and then from the bailouts while Americans literally die on the streets.

To be fair, the scene in Liberty Plaza seems messy and chaotic. But it’s also a laboratory of possibility, and that’s the beauty of democracy. As opposed to our monoculture world, where political life is flipping a lever every four years, social life is being a consumer and economic life is being a timid cog, the Wall Street occupation is creating a polyculture of ideas, expression and art.

Yet while many people support the occupation, they hesitate to fully join in and are quick to offer criticism. It’s clear that the biggest obstacles to building a powerful movement are not the police or capital — it’s our own cynicism and despair.

Perhaps their views were colored by the New York Times article deriding protestors for wishing to “pantomime progressivism” and “Gunning for Wall Street with faulty aim.” Many of the criticisms boil down to “a lack of clear messaging.”

But what’s wrong with that? A fully formed movement is not going to spring from the ground. It has to be created. And who can say what exactly needs to be done? We are not talking about ousting a dictator; though some say we want to oust the dictatorship of capital.

There are plenty of sophisticated ideas out there: end corporate personhood; institute a “Tobin Tax” on stock purchases and currency trading; nationalize banks; socialize medicine; fully fund government jobs and genuine Keynesian stimulus; lift restrictions on labor organizing; allow cities to turn foreclosed homes into public housing; build a green energy infrastructure.

But how can we get broad agreement on any of these? If the protesters came into the square with a pre-determined set of demands it would have only limited their potential. They would have either been dismissed as pie in the sky — such as socialized medicine or nationalize banks — or if they went for weak demands such as the Buffett Rule their efforts would immediately be absorbed by a failed political system, thus undermining the movement.

That’s why the building of the movement has to go hand in hand with common struggle, debate and radical democracy. It’s how we will create genuine solutions that have legitimacy. And that is what is occurring down at Wall Street.

Now, there are endless objections one can make. But if we focus on the possibilities, and shed our despair, our hesitancy and our cynicism, and collectively come to Wall Street with critical thinking, ideas and solidarity we can change the world.

How many times in your life do you get a chance to watch history unfold, to actively participate in building a better society, to come together with thousands of people where genuine democracy is the reality and not a fantasy?

For too long our minds have been chained by fear, by division, by impotence. The one thing the elite fear most is a great awakening. That day is here.

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.” That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.

Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless. Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public. I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.

Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He’s said this for years, but he’s a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires.

Thus did The Wall Street Journal editorial page call on Buffett to “let everyone else in on his secrets of tax avoidance by releasing his tax returns.”

Somehow, the Journal did not think to ask its friends who battle vigorously for low taxes on capital gains to release their tax returns, too. But aren’t they just as engaged in this argument as Buffett is? Shouldn’t accountability go both ways? Nor, by the way, did the Journal suggest that the Koch brothers could serve the public interest by releasing a full accounting of all their political spending.

Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth that conservatives want to keep covered up: Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people who make their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate than those who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor. That’s when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (For joint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28 percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.

So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by 2 points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn’t apply to capital gains, or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than the wealthy.

No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor; (2) the fact that in comparison to middle- or upper-middle class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and (3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.

And it’s worth noticing that while conservatives who talk about religion get a lot of coverage—and I will always defend their freedom to speak of faith in the public square—what really get the juices flowing on the right these days are tax rates. I’m not sure that a politician who renounced the Almighty would get nearly the attention Buffett has received for his renunciation of low capital gains taxes.

Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful. Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes, are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort. We are all lucky to have been born in—or, for immigrants, been admitted to—a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.

Wealthy people, by definition, have done better out of this system than other people have. They ought to be willing to join Buffett and Edwards in arguing that for this reason alone, it is common sense, not class jealousy, to ask the most fortunate to pay taxes at higher tax rates than other people do. It is for this heresy that Buffett is being harassed.
E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

© 2011, Washington Post Writers Group

Why Can’t the Congressional Black Caucus Be More Like the Tea Party?

Three reasons why the CBC falls short of the Tea Party’s influential status:

The Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference began this week in Washington, D.C. celebrating its 41st year. President Obama is scheduled to speak, as he did last year, at the closing dinner. One thing is for certain, and that’s Obama’s audience at this dinner will be one of the most approving, and least challenging, crowds he’s faced all year. And that probably shouldn’t be the case.
It’s a sincere question to wonder why the Black Caucus isn’t the Democratic equivalent of the Tea Party. Few other Congressional caucuses can lay claim to having a singular voice that represents Democrat strongholds throughout the country and puts the disenfranchised — including minorities — at the forefront of their agenda.
Like the CBC, the Tea Party’s power isn’t really in numbers. Poll after poll has shown that the Tea Party’s popularity ebbed a long time ago and mainstream America doesn’t support them. Instead, the Tea Party has focused on something far more effective: intimating to legislators the power they have at the primary ballot.
The Tea Party’s power can be attributed to three things: simple messaging, unwavering leadership, and being a disruptive force in political landscape. And here’s three reasons why the Black Caucus isn’t measuring up in the same way:

 
1. Wrong message
The Tea Party showed that there is tremendous power in a cohesive voice, whether it be informed or not. While the CBC is indeed focused on issues affecting black citizens, they have not a particular issue that black voters can rally around.
The jobs tour was popular simply because people are out of work. And it did gain attention and attract 30,000 jobseekers. But was it enough to be a catalyst for change in the way people will vote? The jobs tour may have just been about that: helping folks to get jobs. But the CBC isn’t a headhunter or a career services station at your local university. While they should be focused on jobs – as all politicians should be at this point – they should be looking for solutions that enable the public and private sectors to make large scale investments in hiring workers. In other words, legislative solutions.

2. Wrong Leader
Not to slight CBC Chair Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, but steadfast leadership isn’t synonymous with invisible. While Cleaver is known as an even-keeled, good-hearted, intelligent leader, that just may not cut it at this time with black unemployment at nearly 18%, the highest it’s been in 27 years. Where’s the Tea Party outrage? Where’s the Tea Party emotion? Cleaver did recently make the statement that if the jobs problem was like this under a white president, that black people would be marching on the White House. But he’s not the first CBC member to say something like that. The bigger question is if he has the follow-through on those marching orders like the Tea Party has.
  
Cleaver’s leadership style is even more ironic when you consider that the CBC is putting more pressure on President Obama’s administration than they have in the past. Rep. Maxine Waters even confronted an administration official at an event on camera questioning why he couldn’t say the Tea Party was behind efforts to block jobs bills. So if the Administration’s style is too passive for the CBC’s liking, how is Cleaver’s any better?

3. Not Disruptive Enough
The CBC must disrupt the normal course of business in Democratic politics if it wants to have an outsized influence. You can’t ask for power; you have to take it. And by that I mean hit the Democratic party where it hurts: Wherever they need black votes the most. Start in North Carolina, Mississippi, and other areas where the Democratic Party absolutely needs high African-American turnout to win.
“Given where the enormous rise in Democratic turnout and where those turnout increases occurred, it is virtually certain that African Americans were a major factor in Democratic turnout increase and Democratic victories in Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia,” said Curtis Gans, director of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate.
This will only become more evident in places like North Carolina where black voters already make up 38% of all Democratic voters.

This isn’t for the purpose of breaking the Democratic Party. Clearly the efforts of the CBC align with Democrats more than any other party. And if voters believe the party speaks to the issues and their concerns the way the party should, then support them. If not, stay home. The CBC must be willing to influence voters to the point where some may stay home and a GOP candidate may win as a result. That’s a short-term loss. The long-term gain is that the Democratic party bears witness to a powerful organization that might as well be their double-edged sword: passionate advocate or principled adversary.

Roger’s Reality Show
Sep 25, 2011 10:00 AM EDT

First, Ailes dialed back the Tea Party talk. Now he’s turning the GOP race into a political X-Factor—and steering the election agenda one more time.

It was part political spectacle, part American Idol, part YouTube extravaganza, a pure Roger Ailes production—and the latest sign that the Fox News chairman is quietly repositioning America’s dominant cable-news channel.
Hours before last week’s presidential debate in Orlando, Ailes’s anchors sat in a cavernous back room, hunched over laptops, and plotted how to trap the candidates. Chris Wallace said he would aim squarely at Rick Perry’s weakness: “How do you feel about being criticized by some of your rivals as being too soft on illegal immigration? Then I go to Rick Santorum: is Perry too soft? “That’s going to get some fireworks going,” said managing editor Bill Sammon, grinning.

When showtime arrived, producer Marty Ryan choreographed the action from a crowded trailer outside the convention hall: he called for a two-shot when Wallace invited Mitt Romney to criticize Perry’s immigration stance, so the audience could watch both men’s agitated expressions. But Ryan barked, “Let’s just be on Perry,” as the Texas governor demanded to know whether Santorum had ever been to the Mexican border, capturing the moment. Afterward, Ailes phoned a top lieutenant: “Tell the team we’ve been kicking ass in these debates.”

Ailes has always been a master showman—he even gave advice on triple-checking the audio—and Fox’s partnership with Google produced striking videos, graphics, and a backstage smoothie bar. But the real eye-opener was the sight of his anchors grilling the Republican contenders, which pleases the White House but cuts sharply against the network’s conservative image—and risks alienating its most rabid right-wing fans.
More than 40 years after helping to elect Richard Nixon, Ailes is more in demand than ever as the man to see for Republicans with designs on the White House. Perry stopped by his midtown Manhattan office a few months back, Newsweek has learned, when he was still weighing whether to make a run, and confided that he was worried about being able to raise the big bucks. “Money will find you if people believe in your message,” Ailes assured him. Afterward, Ailes concluded that Perry had a look that “if he tells people he’s gonna kick their ass, he might actually do it, which is useful for a president.”

Three weeks after dropping out of the race, Tim Pawlenty showed up to ask for a gig at Fox. But there was a complication: Pawlenty was on the verge of endorsing Romney. “I’m not sure I want to sign you as a paid spokesman for Romney,” Ailes said.
When Romney himself sought out Ailes for a pasta dinner, the Fox chief was struck by a sense of humor rarely displayed in public. “You ought to be looser on the air,” he said while dropping off the former Massachusetts governor at his hotel.
The left has long branded Fox a propaganda arm for Ailes’s pugnacious conservatism, and while his journalists maintain they play it straight, the network has certainly provided ample fodder for liberal detractors. But as President Obama’s popularity has plummeted and the country has grown increasingly sick of partisan sniping, something unexpected happened. Roger Ailes pulled back a bit on the throttle.

He calls it a “course correction,” quietly adopted at Fox over the last year. Glenn Beck’s inflammatory rhetoric—his ranting about Obama being a racist—“became a bit of a branding issue for us” before the hot-button host left in July, Ailes says. So too did Sarah Palin’s being widely promoted as the GOP’s potential savior—in large measure through her lucrative platform at Fox. Privately, Fox executives say the entire network took a hard right turn after Obama’s election, but, as the Tea Party’s popularity fades, is edging back toward the mainstream.

While Fox reporters ply their trade under Ailes’s much-mocked “fair and balanced” banner, the opinion arm of the operation has been told to lower the temperature. After the Gabrielle Giffords shooting triggered a debate about feverish rhetoric, Ailes ordered his troops to tone things down. It was, in his view, a chance to boost profits by grabbing a more moderate audience.
As he embarks on his last hurrah—Ailes’s contract is up in 2013—he is acting not like a political operative but as a corporate chieftain who knows that fostering friction and picking fights make for good television—and good business. Next fall’s election could well pivot on whether Ailes is more interested in scoring political points or ramping up ratings and revenue.
The 71-year-old Ailes ambles toward a conference room, where 15 Fox executives await his arrival. Balding and heavyset, he is not an imposing presence; his voice is a low rumble. But when he takes his seat at the head of the table, there is no doubt about who is in charge.

Told that the network has secured an interview with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Ailes mentions that he’s been chatting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—and insists Abbas should be asked about the extent of the U.S. commitment to Israel.
The talk turns to terrorism. Ailes is angry about an Associated Press report that 29 worshipers were killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad’s largest Sunni mosque during prayers. “How do we know they were worshiping?” he demands. “I think the AP is so far over the hill, they’ve become left wing, antiwar. Gotta watch their copy.”
The topics bounce from CNBC’s weekend ratings (“They have shows about hookers and stuff, don’t they?”) to Fox’s own security (“Listen, one out of every 25 people in America is a psychopath”). Ailes raises a Fox initiative that he cooked up: “Are our producers on board on this ‘Regulation Nation’ stuff? Are they ginned up and ready to go?” Ailes, who claims to be “hands off” in developing the series, later boasts that “no other network will cover that subject … I think regulations are totally out of control,” he adds, with bureaucrats hiring Ph.D.s to “sit in the basement and draw up regulations to try to ruin your life.” It is a message his troops cannot miss.

With the debates, Fox has created a reality-TV show, with the built-in combat needed to win viewers. It’s working—Thursday night’s showdown was the best-watched debate of the year thus far—but Ailes’s approach has rankled the right. Following the network’s previous face-off in Iowa, Rush Limbaugh proclaimed that “Fox wants these people to tear each other up, ’cause they want approval from the mainstream media.” Ailes declares his love for Limbaugh before challenging the critics: “Because they see conservative thinking on our channel and don’t see it on any other channel, they think we’re in someone’s pocket.”
Ailes is exploiting the reality-TV tension—even as the contestants are seeking his advice. Perry is right to be wary of talking to news organizations, the chairman says: “They will set a trap for him and ask him who’s the leader of Uzbekistan and run with that for a week.” Michele Bachmann was clearly joking when she said God was sending a message with Hurricane Irene: “The way they’re playing it on the networks is that she’s a Jesus freak.” As for the longtime description of Romney as a weak frontrunner, that’s because “?‘weak’ is a word the mainstream press will give to all Republicans always, as a precursor to killing them off … It saddens me. America used to be able to get straight journalism.”

It may seem funny to hear the man who gave the world Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Beck lamenting the demise of straight journalism. But Ailes has brought in—and built up—anchors and correspondents who could succeed anywhere. Chris Wallace had been at ABC and NBC, where he moderated Meet the Press. Bret Baier worked his way up as a Pentagon and White House reporter.
Megyn Kelly, who had been a Washington lawyer, so dazzled the network that she was hired without a vacancy. She did a sultry photo shoot for GQ and exudes on-air feistiness, but was nervous that at the debate she would “blurt out something that’ll be a career killer” (Ailes called with a pep talk). Kelly missed the rehearsal because she was nursing her 5-month-old daughter.
The anchors spent hours getting ready. In one prep session, Kelly said she wasn’t afraid of Newt Gingrich’s strategy of bashing the media: “If I see him gearing up, I’ll say, ‘Are you going to yell at me?’?” Wallace, who had been denounced by the former House speaker for “Mickey Mouse” questions, dismissed the subject: “Let him be the crazy uncle in the attic if he wants to be.”
Ailes has a blunt rejoinder to those who say he runs a biased outfit: “Every other network has given all their shows to liberals. We are the balance.” Even MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, “tacks to the center,” Ailes complains, and “doesn’t act like a conservative.”

Ailes is a brawler, albeit one with a preference for lavender shirts, and he isn’t one to mince words. A mention of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg unleashes a tirade about the mayor’s latest health crusade. “I like Bloomberg, he’s a friend. But fuck him and the salt. I like salt. It’s not his business.”
He keeps his edge in part because after all these years, he still sees himself as an insurgent—an identity rooted in his blue-collar upbringing in Warren, Ohio. He likes to tell interns that he dug ditches as a teenager and was once fired for throwing a man off a loading dock. And then there was the time he got into a fistfight with a political consultant and “took him out.”
His outsider self-image is ironic, considering that he’s been an establishment power broker for decades, burnishing the images of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Rudy Giuliani before launching Fox 15 years ago. Now he earns as much as $23 million a year, and Rupert Murdoch calls him almost every day, often to gossip about politics. (Ailes picks his battles; he avoided offering advice about the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid.)

Fox, of course, still has its share of Obama bashers. Hannity’s show uses a logo that asks, “Can You Afford Four More?” Ailes calls him “predictable,” but Hannity says he’s not a party man: “I’m a registered conservative; I’m not a registered Republican.” O’Reilly, who chatted up Obama during this year’s Super Bowl, occasionally defends the president against harsh attacks. Ailes says O’Reilly has “moderated” his views and that “Beck scared him”—meaning Beck was so popular on the right that O’Reilly had to find a different niche.
For his part, O’Reilly says he supported most of George W. Bush’s policies and gave Obama’s economic plans a chance for 18 months—before opposing them as unworkable. “I took flak from the far right all day long. They attacked me viciously,” he says. He waves off any talk of moderation and insists he never worried about the now-departed Beck: “He’s a performer, I’m a journalist.”

(Ailes seems to relish the feuding among his stars, saying, “O’Reilly hates Sean and he hates Rush because they did better in radio than he did.”)
Ailes keeps a wary eye on anchor Shepard Smith, who occasionally backs aspects of the Obama record: “Every once in a while Shep Smith gets out there where the buses don’t run and we have a friendly talk.” And Ailes likes to tease O’Reilly: “You gonna suck up to Obama so you can get another interview at the next football game?” Democrats have noticed the change. Says former Obama aide Anita Dunn: “You have the sense that they’re trying to at least appear less of the hyper-partisan political network they had been.”

On the day that Obama is to deliver his jobs speech to Congress, Bret Baier attends a secret White House meeting. Over Dover sole in the Red Room, the president tries to sell his $450 billion plan to a handful of anchors. The earnest, square-jawed Baier is animated upon returning, briefing two news executives in the hallway.
Obama “painted a picture of a double-dip recession” and said if the bill “does not get through, I will blame Republicans” for their “irresponsible position,” Baier says, reading from his scribbled notes. Although the two men clashed during an interview last year in which Baier repeatedly interrupted the president, Obama made a point of praising the previous Fox debate, telling Baier: “By the way, you guys did a great job in Iowa.”

A producer calls to remind Baier that he is to preview the Obama speech on Kelly’s afternoon show. Baier begs off, saying it would be too “awkward” after the off-the-record luncheon. The phone rings again. Baier stands firm, saying it’s “ridiculous” for him to pretend he doesn’t know what’s in the speech. He is now a Washington insider.
It was Baier who led the aggressive questioning at last week’s debate, where the panelists orchestrated yet another round of sparring between Romney and Perry over health care, Social Security, and immigration. But after the debate, Romney, holding hands with his wife, Ann, strolled down the hall for the first of several candidate interviews with registered conservative Sean Hannity. In some ways, Fox is still Fox.

Howard Kurtz is The Daily Beast and Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, and writes the Spin Cycle blog. He also hosts CNN’s weekly media program Reliable Sources on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET. The longtime media reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, Kurtz is the author of five books.

Ten years ago, a New York real estate developer named Bruce Ratner fell in love with a building site at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn. It was 22 acres, big by New York standards, and within walking distance of four of the most charming, recently gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn — Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Clinton Hill, and Fort Greene. A third of the site was above a railway yard, where the commuter trains from Long Island empty into Brooklyn, and that corner also happened to be where the 2, 3, 4, 5, D, N, R, B, Q, A, and C subway lines all magically converge. From Atlantic Yards — as it came to be known — almost all of midtown and downtown Manhattan, not to mention a huge swath of Long Island, was no more than a 20-minute train ride away. Ratner had found one of the choicest pieces of undeveloped real estate in the Northeast.

But there was a problem. Only the portion of the site above the rail yard was vacant. The rest was occupied by an assortment of tenements, warehouses, and brownstones. To buy out each of those landlords and evict every one of their tenants would take years and millions of dollars, if it were possible at all. Ratner needed New York State to use its powers of “eminent domain” to condemn the existing buildings for him. But how could he do that? The most generous reading of what is possible under eminent domain came from the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Kelo v. New London case. There the court held that it was permissible to seize private property in the name of economic development. But Kelo involved a chronically depressed city clearing out a few houses so that Pfizer could expand a research and development facility. Brooklyn wasn’t New London. And Ratner wasn’t Pfizer: All he wanted was to build luxury apartment buildings. In any case, the Court’s opinion in Kelo was treacherous ground. Think about it: What the Court said was that the government can take your property from you and give it to someone else simply if it believes that someone else will make better use of it. The backlash to Kelo was such that many state legislatures passed laws making their condemnation procedures tougher, not easier. Ratner wanted no part of that controversy. He wanted an airtight condemnation, and for that it was far safer to rely on the traditional definition of eminent domain, which said that the state could only seize private property for a “public use.” And what does that mean? The best definition is from a famous opinion written by former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor:

Our cases have generally identified three categories of takings that comply with the public use requirement. … Two are relatively straightforward and uncontroversial. First, the sovereign may transfer private property to public ownership — such as for a road, a hospital, or a military base. See, e.g., Old Dominion Land Co. v. United States, 269 U. S. 55(1925); Rindge Co. v. County of Los Angeles, 262 U. S. 700 (1923). Second, the sovereign may transfer private property to private parties, often common carriers, who make the property available for the public’s use — such as with a railroad, a public utility, or a stadium.

A stadium. The italics are mine — or rather, they are Ratner’s. At a certain point, as he gazed longingly at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush, a light bulb went off inside his head. And he bought the New Jersey Nets.

Earlier this year, NBA commissioner David Stern was interviewed by Bloomberg News. Stern was expounding on his favorite theme — that the business of basketball was in economic peril and that the players needed to take a pay cut — when he was asked about the New Jersey Nets. Ratner had just sold the franchise to a wealthy Russian businessman after arranging to move the team to Brooklyn. “Is it a contradiction to say that the current model does not work,” Stern was asked, “and yet franchises are being bought for huge sums by billionaires like Mikhail Prokhorov?”

“Stop there,” Stern replied. “… the previous ownership lost several hundred million dollars on that transaction.”

This is the argument that Stern has made again and again since the labor negotiations began. On Halloween, he and the owners will dress up like Oliver Twist and parade up and down Park Avenue, caps in hand, while their limousines idle discreetly on a side street. And at this point, even players seem like they believe him. If and when the lockout ends, they will almost certainly agree to take a smaller share of league revenues.

But Stern’s success does not change how strange the NBA position is. There is first of all the hilarious assumption that owning a basketball franchise is a business — at least as that word is used outside of, say, the president’s mansion in Pyongyang.¹ But beyond that is a second, equally ridiculous assumption, which is that the economics of basketball teams are principally about basketball. As it turns out, they are not.

Bruce Ratner’s original plan for the Atlantic Yards site called for 16 separate commercial and residential towers and a basketball arena, all designed by the superstar architect Frank Gehry. The development would be home to roughly 15,000 people, cost in excess of $4 billion, total more than eight million square feet, and make his company — by some calculations — as much as $1 billion in profit. To put that in perspective, the original Rockefeller Center — one of the grandest urban developments in American history — was seven million square feet. Ratner wanted to out-Rockefeller the Rockefellers.

Ratner knew this would not be easy. The 14 acres he wanted to raze was a perfectly functional neighborhood, inhabited by taxpaying businesses and homeowners. He needed a political halo, and Ratner’s genius was in understanding how beautifully the Nets could serve that purpose. The minute basketball was involved, Brooklyn’s favorite son — Jay-Z — signed up as a part-owner and full-time booster. Brooklyn’s borough president began publicly fantasizing about what a professional sports team would mean for his community. The Mayor’s office, then actively pursuing an Olympic bid, loved the idea of a new arena in Brooklyn. Early on, another New York developer, Gary Barnett, made a competing play for the railway yard. Barnett’s offer was, in many ways, superior to Ratner’s. He didn’t want the extra 14 acres, so no land would have to be expropriated from private owners. He wasn’t going to plunk a small city down in the middle of an already crowded neighborhood. And he tripled the value of Ratner’s offer. Barnett lost. He never had a chance. He wanted to build apartments. Ratner was restoring the sporting glory lost when the Dodgers fled for Los Angeles. As Michael Rikon, one of the attorneys who sued to stop the project, ruefully concluded when Ratner’s victory was complete: “It is an aphorism in criminal law that a good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. With regards to condemnations in New York, it can fairly be said that in New York a condemnor can condemn a Kasha Knish.”²Especially if the kasha knish is being eaten to make way for a professional basketball arena.

Ratner has been vilified — both fairly and unfairly — by opponents of the Atlantic Yards project. But let’s be clear: What he did has nothing whatsoever to do with basketball. Ratner didn’t buy the Nets as a stand-alone commercial enterprise in the hopes that ticket sales and television revenue would exceed players’ salaries and administration costs. Ratner was buying eminent domain insurance. Basketball also had very little to do with Ratner’s sale of the Nets. Ratner got hit by the recession. Fighting the court challenges to his project took longer than he thought. He became dangerously overextended. His shareholders got restless. He realized had to dump the fancy Frank Gehry design for something more along the lines of a Kleenex box. Prokhorov helped Ratner out by buying a controlling interest in the Nets. But he also paid off some of Ratner’s debts, lent him $75 million, picked up some of his debt service, acquired a small stake in the arena, and bought an option on 20 percent of the entire Atlantic Yards project. This wasn’t a fire sale of a distressed basketball franchise. It was a general-purpose real estate bailout.

Did Ratner even care that he lost the Nets? Once he won his eminent domain case, the team had served its purpose. He’s not a basketball fan. He’s a real estate developer. The asset he wanted to hang on to was the arena, and with good reason. According to Ratner, the Barclays Center (the naming right of which, by the way, earned him a cool $400 million) is going to bring in somewhere around $120 million in revenue a year. Operating costs will be $30 million. The mortgage comes to $50 million. That leaves $35 million in profit on Ratner’s $350 million up-front investment, for an annual return of 10 percent.³ ”That is pretty good out of the box,” Ratner said in a recent interview. “It will increase as time goes on.” Not to mention that the rental market in Brooklyn is heating up, the first of Ratner’s residential towers is about to break ground, and his company also happens to own two large retail properties directly adjacent to Atlantic Yards, which can only appreciate now that there’s a small city going up next door. When David Stern says that the “previous ownership” of the Nets lost “several million dollars” on the sale of the team, he is apparently not counting the profits on the arena, the eminent domain victory, the long-term value of that extra 14 acres, or the appreciation of Ratner’s adjoining properties. That is not a lie, exactly. It is an artful misrepresentation. It is like looking at a perfectly respectable kasha knish and pretending it is a ham sandwich.

And let’s not forget Mikhail Prokhorov. How does he feel about buying into the financial sinkhole that is professional basketball? The blog NetsDaily⁴ recently dug up the following quotation from a 2010 interview Prokhorov did with the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti:

“We have a team, we’re building the arena, we’ve hired professional management, we have the option to buy into another large project, the building of an office center. For me, this is a project with explosive profit potential. The capitalization of the team will be $700 million after we move to Brooklyn. It will earn approximately 30 [million]. And the arena will be worth around $1 billion.”

Let us recap. At the very moment the commissioner of the NBA is holding up the New Jersey Nets as a case study of basketball’s impoverishment, the former owner of the team is crowing about 10 percent returns and the new owner is boasting of “explosive” profits. After the end of last season, one imagines that David Stern gathered together the league’s membership for a crash course on lockout etiquette: stash the yacht in St. Bart’s until things blow over, dress off the rack, insist on the ’93 and ’94 Cháteau Lafite Rothschilds, not the earlier, flashier, vintages. For rich white men to plead poverty, a certain self-discipline is necessary. Good idea, except next time he should remember to invite the Nets.

One of the great forgotten facts about the United States is that not very long ago the wealthy weren’t all that wealthy. Up until the 1960s, the gap between rich and poor in the United States was relatively narrow. In fact, in that era marginal tax rates in the highest income bracket were in excess of 90 percent. For every dollar you made above $250,000, you gave the government 90 cents. Today — with good reason — we regard tax rates that high as punitive and economically self-defeating. It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design. For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame. In the end, this is the lesson of the NBA lockout. A man buys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips the franchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then — as both parties happily count their winnings — what lesson are we asked to draw? The players are greedy.

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Tipping Point, Blink,Outliers and most recently, What the Dog Saw. He is a consulting editor for Grantland.

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:-Knowing when to come in out of the rain; – Why the early bird gets the worm;- Life isn’t always fair; – And maybe it was my fault. Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies, don’t spend more than you can earn and adults, not children, are in charge.

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault. Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife Discretion, his daughter Responsibility, and his son, Reason. He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, & I’m A Victim.Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, do nothing

9 Policies Conservatives Were For Long Before They Were Against Them

Before the memory-hole swallows them up, consider 9 ideas that Republicans had long championed, which when picked up by Democrats, became suddenly toxic to the GOP.

September 21, 2011  |

In 2001, the GOP’s budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, was excited for the opportunity to vote for Bush’s “temporary” tax cuts. “I think we ought to have this income tax cut fast … to make sure we get a good punch into the economy, juice the economy to make sure that we can avoid a hard landing,” he said at a committee hearing. “The economy has soured,” he continued. “And it is my concern that if we keep waiting and seeing we won’t give the economy the boost it needs right now.”

Fast forward 10 years, to this August. President Obama was poised to call for an extension of a payroll tax break — and an additional break for businesses — and Ryan began singing a very different tune. “Those things are all temporary,” he told Fox News. “They are demand-sided. And they are proven not to work and they still facilitate uncertainty for businesses.” Suddenly, tax cuts — the GOP’s answer to every economic issue of the past four decades — were “proven not to work.”

“What’s plaguing our economy today,” he said, is “the amount of uncertainty as to what the future holds for them on regulations, on taxes, on interest rates and all of those things.” He said that the temporary nature of the cuts “exactly exacerbates those problems.”

Obama had made a point of the fact that the proposals contained in his jobs package had all been embraced by Republicans in the past, but that didn’t prevent them from bashing it, just as they had decried many other erstwhile conservative ideas as so much misguided “socialism” when proposed by Democrats.

Before the memory-hole swallows them up, consider nine other ideas that Republicans had long championed, and were then picked up by Democrats and became toxic within the GOP caucus. They tell us not only how serious Republicans are about undermining the administration, but also how far both parties have lurched to the right — the Democrats are offering inherently conservative proposals to deal with the problems we face, and today’s Right considers those policies to be way out in left field.

1. The Health-Care Mandate

Late last year, when a federal judge ruled against the mandate (two other courts disagreed, and the Supreme Court will end up deciding the question), Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, rejoiced. “Today is a great day for liberty,” he said. “Congress must obey the Constitution rather than make it up as we go along.” It was an odd testament to freedom, given that Hatch himself co-sponsored a health-care reform bill built around an individual mandate in the late 1990s.

Journalist Steve Benen noted that while “the record here may be inconvenient for the right … it’s also unambiguous: the mandate Republicans currently hate was their idea.”

It was championed by the Heritage Foundation … Nixon embraced it in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush kept it going in the 1980s. For years, it was touted by the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Scott Brown, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Judd Gregg, and many other … notable GOP officials.

According to NPR, the mandate was the Right’s response to progressive proposals to establish a single-payer system. Mark Pauly, the conservative economist widely credited with the idea, explained that ”a group of economists and health policy people, market-oriented, sat down and said, ‘Let’s see if we can come up with a health reform proposal that would preserve a role for markets but would also achieve universal coverage.’”

2. Cap and Trade

A central tenet of traditionally conservative economic thinking is that you tax activities you want to deter as an alternative to regulating them out of existence. This was the thinking behind “cap and trade” policies to control pollution — it was the “free market” approach.

The ideas had been floating around for some time in broad terms, but it was the Reagan White House that developed the first proposals for a cap and trade program. It gained momentum during the first Bush administration when, according to a history of the concept in Smithsonian Magazine, George H. W. Bush decided that “cap-and-trade still beats command-and-control regulation.” Cap and trade is decidedly business-friendly, as Smithsonian noted:

The cap-and-trade system continues to let polluters figure out the least expensive way to reduce their acid rain emissions. As a result, the law costs utilities just $3 billion annually, not $25 billion, according to a recent study in the Journal of Environmental Management; by cutting acid rain in half, it also generates an estimated $122 billion a year in benefits from avoided death and illness, healthier lakes and forests, and improved visibility on the Eastern Seaboard.

Today, some 20 years later, this signature, market-based, business-friendly alternative to “Big Government” regulations is just another “job-killing tax” according to a significant majority of Republicans.

The “Pledge to America: the 2010 Republican Agenda” promised to “oppose attempts to impose a national ‘cap and trade’ energy tax.”

3. Small Business Tax Credits

Perhaps the most blatant flip-flop on policy was Republicans’ sudden concerns that a bill that would have provided $30 billion to encourage banks to lend to small businesses and another $12 billion in tax credits targeted directly at them was a form of “government overreach.” But last July, Reuters reported that “some Republicans have cast the small-business proposal as part of what they consider government overreach by the Obama administration.” They ended up blocking passage of the proposal because they were angry that “Democrats shut them out from amending the package.”

4. Infrastructure Bank

In the not-at-all-distant past, this was another idea for a market-based, “public-private” partnership that virtually everyone could get behind. “A national infrastructure bank is a great place to start securing the funding we need to increase our mobility, create jobs and enhance our global competitiveness,” said Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue — not known as a socialist — last year. “With a modest initial investment of $10 billion, a national infrastructure bank could leverage up to $600 billion in private investments to repair, modernize and expand our ailing infrastructure system.”

Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a conservative senator from Texas, and senator James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, among the most conservative members of Congress, have each co-sponsored legislation to set up an infrastructure bank in just the past two years. A recent study found that 85 percent of Republicans, 84 percent of self-identified conservatives and 80 percent of Tea Party fans favored more public-private partnerships to tackle the nation’s problems, and two-thirds of voters “say that making improvements in infrastructure is very important.”

But now that it’s a centerpiece of Obama’s jobs plan, conservatives have come to view an infrastructure bank as, in the words of the Heritage Foundation, “one idea that…progressives have been flogging for the past few years… [that] would do little to spur the economic recovery–and nothing to create new jobs.”

5. Supplier-Side Cuts to Medicare

For two years, the GOP has made a big issue of $500 billion in “Medicare cuts” contained in the Dems’ health-care reform bill — a claim that is “misleading” at best. The cuts come from reforms in the way Medicare providers are compensated, not out of beneficiaries’ hides.

The GOP-controlled House then passed a budget along party lines with those very same cuts, but they nonetheless continue to blast them. During a recent GOP presidential debate, Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, said that seniors “know in Obamacare the president of the United States took away $500 billion — a half-trillion dollars — out of Medicare, shifted it to Obamacare to pay for younger people.”

But as Jill Lawrence noted, the rhetoric represents “a dizzying role reversal from the days when Republicans used to recommend the same types of reductions in future Medicare spending.”

In 1995, for instance, Republicans proposed cutting $270 billion over seven years. In 1997, McConnell and McCain were among the Republicans voting for a Balanced Budget Act that cut Medicare by $115 billion over five years. And in his 2008 presidential campaign, McCain proposed combined Medicare and Medicaid cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years.

Lawrence notes that McCain later, “led the fight against the Democrats’ plans to trim Medicare.”

6. Financial Disclosure Laws

Lawrence also noted that “prominent Republicans have often made the case that transparency — not limits on campaign spending or contributions — is the best antidote to corruption.”

“Republicans are in favor of disclosure,” Sen. Mitch McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in 2000. Seven years later, on the same program, House GOP leader John Boehner declared: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

But, she adds, those same Republicans voted against the DISCLOSE Act last year. According to the current GOP line, requiring companies to disclose their contributions “is a punitive measure for associations of persons who choose to exercise their right to free political speech as guaranteed by the Constitution, and affirmed in the Citizens United v. FEC case.”

7. Encouraging Low-income Home Ownership

As I noted last year, perhaps the most pernicious right-wing lie of late is that the Wall Street hustlers who came close to bringing the global economy to its knees in 2008 were just innocent victims of government-sponsored programs that forced them to lower lending standards in a misguided effort to increase home ownership among the poor (read: dark-skinned).

It’s an alluring story line for those who are ideologically predisposed to blame “inner city” people instead of MBAs in suits roaming the executive suite. It’s also patent nonsense–a Big Lie that has nonetheless become an object of almost religious belief for some on the Right.

But it’s not just that the story isn’t in any way grounded in objective reality. What makes it even more disgraceful is that conservatives have long argued that efforts to increase home ownership among low-income families and communities of color was the “free market” thing to do (and have, to some degree, negated the need for a decent social safety net). It was George W. Bush, not Vladimir Lenin, who said in a 2002 speech, “We have a problem here in America…a homeownership gap,” and added, “We’ve got to work together to close [the gap] for the good of our country.”

The New York Times reported, “From his earliest days in office, Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own homes with his conviction that markets do best when left alone.”

Bush pushed hard to expand home ownership, especially among minority groups, an initiative that dovetailed with both his ambition to expand Republican appeal and the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

This stuff was standard American Enterprise Institute-quality conservative fare until it became a handy way of diverting blame away from the titans of Wall Street. Then it became the root cause of the Great Recession.

8. The Fairness Doctrine

Beginning in the 1970s, deep-pocketed conservative donors started investing in their own dedicated, ideologically driven media to counteract what they perceived as “liberal bias” in the corporate media. In the 1980s, those efforts began to bear fruit, and at about the same time, right-wingers came to dominate the talk-radio airwaves.

The Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters taking advantage of public airwaves to present both sides of political controversies, was abandoned in 1987, but that didn’t stop the GOP from freaking out about it when Obama was elected. “Freedom of speech is under attack in this country,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina. “I am just committing today to use every rule, every tactic that we have at our disposal to keep the Fairness Doctrine from moving in Congress or to overrule it if it is implemented by the FCC.”

“Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine today would amount to government control over political views expressed on the airwaves,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana.

But as First Amendment attorney Robert Corn Revere notes, with so much hostility toward the fairness doctrine coming from the Right, “it is easy to forget that many prominent conservatives championed the doctrine before its demise.”

Phyllis Schlafly was a vocal proponent of the Fairness Doctrine because of what she described as “the outrageous and blatant anti-Reagan bias of the TV network newscasts,” and she testified at the FCC in the 1980s in support of the policy “to serve as a small restraint on the monopoly power wielded by Big TV Media.”

Senator Jesse Helms was another long-time advocate of the Fairness Doctrine, and conservative groups Accuracy in Media and the American Legal Foundation actively pursued fairness complaints at the FCC against network newscasts.

More recently, a Republican controlled FCC under Kevin Martin has advocated far more extensive controls over broadcast and cable programming, including news and public affairs. These proposed regulations include requirements governing local programming, restrictions on the use of video news releases, and other new rules that would extend content controls beyond broadcasting.

9. Judicial Restraint

It wouldn’t be fair to say that conservatives were before judicial activism before they were against it. More accurately, most people don’t grasp what the term means, and they’ve come to use it as a euphemism for “court rulings we really don’t like.”

But it is true that they constantly rail against judges “legislating from the bench.” And it’s also true that it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to do so than those of a liberal bent. The charge is pure projection.

That is what several studies have concluded. Media Matters offered a run-down of a couple of prominent ones:

A 2005 study by Yale University law professor Paul Gewirtz and Yale Law School graduate Chad Golder showed that among Supreme Court justices at that time, those most frequently labeled “conservative” were among the most frequent practitioners of at least one brand of judicial activism — the tendency to strike down statutes passed by Congress. Those most frequently labeled “liberal” were the least likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress.

A 2007 study published by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein… used a different measurement of judicial activism: the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies. Sunstein and Miles found that by this definition, the Supreme Court’s “conservative” justices were the most likely to engage in “judicial activism” while the “liberal” justices were most likely to exercise “judicial restraint.”

There you have it: from eschewing the “magic” of market-based solutions to opposing tax credits for businesses, we see in the conservative coalition an almost perfect ideological flexibility. The only constant is that whatever policies Democrats propose — even those conservatives previously championed — are foreign and beyond the pale.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.