Category Archives: Politics

Want to Read Something Really Depressing About America?

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Journalist George Packer’s new book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, has been compared to the U.S.A. Trilogy, the novels in which John Dos Passos used experimental techniques to capture the state of our union in the early 20th century. Except that The Unwinding is nonfiction.

To quote the publisher:

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown … (Packer) journeys through the lives of several Americans, (interweaving) these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era’s leading public figures … and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics….The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.

Packer summarizes his view of the past 30 years in the newspaper column below: “Decline and Fall: How American Society Unravelled”. He doesn’t meet Marx’s challenge in these few paragraphs to change the world (not merely understand it): such as explaining how to get more people to vote intelligently, how to overcome the power of money in our democracy, how to avoid a race to the economic bottom in a global economy. But maybe more of us need to clearly understand what’s happened before we can do something about it.

(Or should we simply get out of the way, relying on our children and their children to do what needs to be done? Like the man said: “Your old road is rapidly agin’, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand, for the times they are a-changin’ .”)

When we talk about America’s decline, it’s tempting to wonder if the situation is as bad as it seems. Packer’s book and the column below are honorable attempts to counter that temptation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled

The Bogus IRS Scandal, with Biblical Commentary

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The new director of the IRS has issued a report and provided documentation showing that the IRS targeted a number of groups for special attention based on their names. Among them were groups whose names included the words “Occupy”, “Progressive” and “Israel”, not just “Tea Party” or “Patriots”, as previously reported.

Some right-wingers, who love seeing themselves as victims, claim that this is the biggest political scandal since Watergate. Where do these people come from?

For relevant political commentary:

“I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 1:14, New Revised Standard Version)

Or:

“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” (King James Bible)

You said it, brother!

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/24/irs_chief_tea_party_wasnt_ the_only_group_inappropriately_targeted_ap/

Periodic Update from Krugman the Indispensable

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Paul Krugman was right about Bush’s tax cuts and the Iraq War. He was right about the 2009 stimulus. He’s been right about Europe’s austerity program. I’m sure he’s right about this too:

“The latest projections [from the Congressional Budget Office] show the combined cost of Social Security and Medicare rising by a bit more than 3 percent of G.D.P. between now and 2035, and that number could easily come down with more effort on the health care front. Now, 3 percent of G.D.P. is a big number, but it’s not an economy-crushing number. The United States could, for example, close that gap entirely through tax increases, with no reduction in benefits at all, and still have one of the lowest overall tax rates in the advanced world.

But haven’t all the great and the good been telling us that Social Security and Medicare as we know them are unsustainable, that they must be totally revamped — and made much less generous? Why yes, they have; they’ve also been telling us that we must slash spending right away or we’ll face a Greek-style fiscal crisis. They were wrong about that, and they’re wrong about the longer run, too.

The truth is that the long-term outlook for Social Security and Medicare, while not great, actually isn’t all that bad. It’s time to stop obsessing about how we’ll pay benefits to retirees in 2035 and focus instead on how we’re going to provide jobs to unemployed Americans in the here and now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/opinion/krugman-the-geezers-are-all-right.html

Squeaky Right-Wing Wheels and the Noise They Make

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Jon Stewart and his writers do a very good job making fun of right-wing fools and knaves. Stephen Colbert and his writers do an even better job. You’d think that if the people they make fun of ever saw themselves being made fun of, they’d mend their ways. But that doesn’t happen.

There is a popular left-wing website called Daily Kos that features an almost continuous stream of news and commentary, much of which calls attention to the ridiculous behavior of right-wing fools and knaves. There are many positive stories, but I often end up reading the negative ones. So I get to learn a lot about Fox News and Mitch McConnell.

The problem is that I’d rather know a lot less about Fox News, Mitch McConnell and their ilk. They are a blight on our nation. So I’ve stopped watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and I’m trying to stop looking at Daily Kos. 

You could argue that it’s my responsibility as an American citizen to stay informed about current events, so it would be better to pay attention to what the right-wing knaves and fools are saying. But what these people and organizations do is mainly generate noise, which distracts us from more important things.

For example, it’s more important to know that the incredibly wealthy Koch Brothers want to buy the Los Angeles Times and turn it into a right-wing propaganda machine than it is to hear the latest stupid remark from Michele Bachmann, sponsor of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act. 

A few days ago, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote about Rep. Bachmann’s decision not to run for re-election next year:

In honor of her departure, Michele-watchers around the country rolled out their favorite Bachmann quotes. Mine was her contention that the theory of evolution was disputed by “hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes.”

We may not see her like again. Or, if one shows up, we may decide not to pay attention.

Collins often writes entertaining but depressing columns about the latest Republican offense against justice or rationality. But wouldn’t it be better if she and we paid less attention (not no attention, but less attention) to what right-wing fools and knaves have to say?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/collins-michele-heres-the-bell.html

Understanding the I.R.S. “Scandal”

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Journalists without a political ax to grind have been trying to explain what actually happened at the Cincinnati I.R.S. office. After reading some of these articles and looking at the official report issued by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General (see the links below), it’s reasonable to conclude that the so-called “scandal” amounts to some relatively over-worked, relatively low-level bureaucrats (aka accountants) trying to do their job (what Congress told them to do) but not quite following the rules (which are hard to understand).

Every application to be considered a tax-exempt “social welfare” organization under Federal tax code section 501(c)(4) is reviewed by the I.R.S. There are a few thousand such applications every year. One of the benefits of being granted this tax-exempt status is that an organization’s donors don’t need to be made public.

Some of these applications receive extra attention, often because they are suspected of being political groups masquerading as social welfare groups. A 501(c)(4) organization is allowed to engage in more political activity than a 501(c)(3) group like the Red Cross, but isn’t supposed to be “primarily engaged” in political activity (note the vagueness of the phrase “primarily engaged”).

In trying to figure out which 501(c)(4) applications needed extra attention, I.R.S. employees in Cincinnati devised some criteria to “be on the lookout for” (i.e. to help determine whether the group would be “primarily engaged” in politics or not).

Since the number of applications was steadily increasing, and there were lots of applications coming from groups associating themselves with the Tea Party and Glenn Beck, the criteria included references to “Tea Party”, “Patriots” and “9/12 Project” (a group created by Beck). The criteria for further review also included references to government spending, debt and taxes; educating the public by advocacy or lobbying to “make America a better place to live”; and statements “criticizing how the country is being run”.

So the immediate question is whether using these criteria would tend to identify groups whose main purpose was “political” rather than “social welfare”. Common sense suggests that the answer is “Yes”.

Roughly 1/3 of the applications that received extra attention included the terms “Tea Party”, “Patriots” or “9/12 Project”. The extra reviews took a long time and sometimes featured burdensome questions from the I.R.S., but the principal issue, according to the Inspector General’s report, was that:

“The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention.”

One might argue that referring to yourself as a Tea Party or Project 9/12 group or claiming that your main purpose is to fight government spending is a good indication that you might be spending most of your time trying to affect political campaigns, especially in an election year. But, according to the Inspector General’s report, this wasn’t the correct way to identify such groups.

I’m not sure how the I.R.S. accountants are supposed to  predict which 501(c)(4) groups will primarily engage in improper political activity. At any rate, all of the applications getting this questionable special attention were ultimately approved or are still being evaluated.

This is the “scandal” that some foolish and/or unscrupulous politicians and journalists are making such a big deal about. The especially noxious Peggy Noonan recently claimed that this, along with some right-wing contributors being audited, is the biggest scandal since Watergate (the I.R.S. audits between 1 and 2 million individual tax returns every year, so it isn’t surprising that some of the taxpayers involved are right-wing contributors).

What should be a scandal receiving Congressional and media attention is that several 501(c)(4) groups, such as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, spend millions of dollars intervening in political campaigns, but (apparently because they can afford talented lawyers) don’t pay taxes and don’t have to say who their donors are. 

It’s politics as usual in the Greatest Country in the World.

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Those links I promised:

The differences between 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4) and political organizations:

http://www.mffh.org/mm/files/AFJ_Comparison-of-501C3S-501C4S.pdf 

The Inspector General report:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/15/us/politics/15irs-inspector-report.html

What went on in Cincinnati:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/us/politics/at-irs-unprepared-office-seemed-unclear-about-the-rules.html?hp

Some context and commentary from the Columbia Journalism Review:

http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/the_other_irs_scandal.php?page=all