"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
Abraham Lincoln: "In my present
position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice
against this approach of returning despotism. It is not needed nor fitting here
that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but
there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to
which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal
footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed
that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors
unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to
labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital
shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy
them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is
naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call
slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is
fixed in that condition for life. Now there is no such relation between capital
and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for
life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and
all inferences from them are groundless. Labor is prior to and independent of
capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if
labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves
much the higher consideration." Read more: State of the Union
Address: Abraham Lincoln (December 3, 1861) Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/t/hist/state-of-the-union/73.html#ixzz17XlRsbev
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/abraham-lincoln-on-relationship-between.html
The Party Of Lincoln Should Be Ashamed For Calling Themselves The Party Of Lincoln
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-party-of-lincoln-should-be-ashamed.html
"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Not one Republican in a thousand has the courage (and honesty) to communicate the above passage to another Republican. In the current GOP psyche, to do so would inspire as much disgust as necrophilia-porn.
The Party Of Lincoln Should Be Ashamed For Calling Themselves The Party Of Lincoln
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-party-of-lincoln-should-be-ashamed.html
"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Not one Republican in a thousand has the courage (and honesty) to communicate the above passage to another Republican. In the current GOP psyche, to do so would inspire as much disgust as necrophilia-porn.
"Plutocracy Triumphant"
Cartoon Compendium
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts: Plutocracy, Economic Inequality & Collapse Of Conservatism
Pope Francis: Quotations On Finance, Economics, Capitalism And Inequality
Teddy Roosevelt: "Malefactors Of Great Wealth... Are Curses To The Country"
Why Are Americans So Poorly Paid. This One Chart Will Even Shame The 1%
http://paxonbothhouses.
Inequality: Joseph Stiglitz Brilliant Reflection On Obama's State Of The Union Address
Teddy Roosevelt: "Malefactors Of Great Wealth... Are Curses To The Country"
Why Are Americans So Poorly Paid. This One Chart Will Even Shame The 1%
http://paxonbothhouses.
Inequality: Joseph Stiglitz Brilliant Reflection On Obama's State Of The Union Address
"Of The 1%, By The 1%, For The 1%,"
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz
It's Not About Income. "It's About Net Worth, Stupid!"
It's Not About Income. "It's About Net Worth, Stupid!"
***
Excerpt: "In the anti-government
column, the Ryan budget, which House
Republicans enthusiastically adopted,
would cut taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and halve the share of spending on
every domestic, non-entitlement program. It would decimate
education, transportation and funding for college students and scientific
research. It would bring the nation down to the developmental level of the
anti-tax, anti-public-investment Southern states of yore. The ghosts of Dixie —
of the Scopes Trial and the
underfunding of public education — also pop up in Republicans’ willful
resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism. Global warming?
Evolution? Homosexuality’s causation? How babies get made? Find a robust
scientific conclusion and you can find a significant number of Republicans —
adducing pseudo-science and faith — who oppose it. What’s remarkable is not
that a significant number of Republicans harbor these beliefs but that these
beliefs have come to dominate the party. Veteran politicians of the more
pluralistic GOP that was around as recently as half a decade ago, including
Orrin Hatch and Romney himself, have had to repudiate their past as thoroughly
as China’s communist apparatchiks did during the Cultural Revolution. An
empiricist? Not me, buddy.
- Harold Meyerson
- Opinion Writer
In modern GOP, the old South returns
No other party in U.S. history has done such a 180. Founded as the party of the anti-slavery North and committed to deep governmental involvement in spurring the economy (land-grant colleges, the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railway), today’s GOP is the negation of Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans. It is almost entirely white — 92 percent, compared with just 58 percent of Democrats. It is disproportionately Southern — 49 percent of Republicans live in the South vs. 39 percent of Democrats.
824
Comments
The beliefs of the white South dominate Republican thinking. As the white share of the U.S. population shrinks and the Latino share rises, Republicans have passed draconian anti-immigrant laws and opposed legislation enabling immigrants brought here as children to gain legal status. They also exploit racist resentments in a way not seen since the Willie Horton spot of 1988. Consider the Romney campaign’s ads falsely attacking President Obama for gutting welfare reform. “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job,” proclaims one suchcommercial. “They just send you a welfare check.” Obama’s plan, as several mediafact-checking monitors have noted, does nothing of the sort. The spot clearly seeks to resurrect the kind of resentment of African Americans that the GOP exploited back in the days when welfare was a major program. The Romney campaign has evidently concluded, since virtually its entire pool of potential voters is white, that it must rouse the sometime voters among them with such expedients — which explains why it is running more of these ads than any others.
In the anti-government column, the Ryan budget, which House Republicans enthusiastically adopted, would cut taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and halve the share of spending on every domestic, non-entitlement program. It would decimate education, transportation and funding for college students and scientific research. It would bring the nation down to the developmental level of the anti-tax, anti-public-investment Southern states of yore.
The ghosts of Dixie — of the Scopes Trialand the underfunding of public education — also pop up in Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism. Global warming? Evolution? Homosexuality’s causation? How babies get made? Find a robust scientific conclusion and you can find a significant number of Republicans — adducing pseudo-science and faith — who oppose it.
What’s remarkable is not that a significant number of Republicans harbor these beliefs but that these beliefs have come to dominate the party. Veteran politicians of the more pluralistic GOP that was around as recently as half a decade ago, including Orrin Hatch and Romney himself, have had to repudiate their past as thoroughly as China’s communist apparatchiks did during the Cultural Revolution. An empiricist? Not me, buddy.
But how is it that the South has come North in today’s GOP? The fact that Barack Obama is our first black president coincides with the United States’ transformation from a majority-white nation to a multiracial country no longer destined to remain the world’s hegemon. Augmented by an intractable recession rooted in a crisis of capitalism, this epochal shift has summoned the shades of racial resentment. To the extent that Republicans can depict government as the servant of this rising non-white America (precisely the purpose of Romney’s ads), the South’s antipathy toward government can find a receptive audience in other regions.
This transformation of the GOP has also been spurred by the Southernization of the economy. The U.S. economy’s dominant sector is no longer the unionized manufacturing of the Northeast and Midwest, whose leaders included such Republican moderates as George Romney, and whose white working-class employees were persuaded by their unions to back Democratic candidates. Instead, the economy is dominated by a mix of the low-wage, nonunion retail and service sectors, and by high finance, which has shown itself fiercely opposed to regulation and taxation, happy to reap and shield its profits abroad at the expense of U.S. workers, and willing to invest plenty in a party that does its bidding.
That party is meeting in Tampa this week. Cut through its self-justifying rhetoric and we’re left with a GOP whose existential credo is, “We’re old, we’re white and we want our country back.” The rest, as the sages say, is commentary.
