NSA Document Admits ET Contact
Kevin W. Smith
Submitted by Robert D Morningstar
Mon, 04/25/2011
http://www.ufodigest.com/article/official-et-disclosure-nsa-document-admits-et-contact-kevin-w-smith
On October 21, 2004, the NSA approved for release to the public a portion of their NSA Journal Vol. XIV No. 1. This is a report of a presentation given to the NSA by Dr. Howard Campaigne regarding the decoding of extraterrestrial messages that had been received “form outer space”. Apparently, these messages had actually been received via the Sputnik satellite, but no one had any idea how to decode them at the time.
At some time, unspecified in the document, Dr. Howard Campaigne and some other NSA super mathematicians in the crypto department had been given the task of decoding the messages. There were a total of 29 messages to be decoded—quite an undertaking.
It is curious, to say the least, that this document was cleared for release on October 21, 2004. Why was that? Because the NSA did not release it into public information until April 21, 2011. Though cleared for release, the NSA had been stonewalling it along with hundreds of other NSA documents about contact with UFOs and extraterrestrials until they lost the lawsuit brought by Peter Gersten, a lawyer from Arizona. When they well and truly lost, the judge’s order had to be carried out, and the documents had to be released.
Dr. Howard Campaigne's “Extraterrestrial Signals”
The document, as I stated, is Dr. Campaigne’s presentation to the NSA on the decoding of those messages. It was actually published by the NSA in their own internal NSA Journal. Yet, they were also forced to publish a list of search terms from FOIA requests for which they had found no NSA documents. In that list is “Extraterrestrial Signals”. The title of this document, which they published themselves is “Key To Extraterrestrial Messages”.
Quite obviously, they conveniently split hairs here in reporting they had no information about “Extraterrestrial Signals”. They knew for sure they had this document, and that it was about what was being requested in the FOIA request. They knew it, flaunted the technicality of wording, and continued to stonewall.
Who is Dr. Howard Campaigne?
Dr. Campaigne is one of the top cryptologists on the planet with years and years of service to Naval Security Group, Army Security Agency, National Security Agency, and a couple of other such alphabet organizations.
Howard H. Campaigne started his crypto career for the government during World War II and has been a key and integral part of our U.S. security and intelligence ever since. In other words, he is part of a very small, very select group who are considered the cream of the crop in Cryptology.
Dr. Campaigne’s presentation to the NSA on decoding the extraterrestrial messages was not a hypothetical exercise. I contacted someone who is formerly associated with the NSA and still has TS clearance, and asked him to view the document. I asked him to give me his take on it. There was no question about its authenticity since it was published in the NSA Journal, and was released by the NSA on their web site. What I wanted to know was whether this document had any particular impact or importance (other than its startling revelations) for someone familiar with the inner workings of the NSA. It did.
My contact told me that he was blown away by the wording of the document. He said that NSA communications are filled with words like “possibly” , “allegedly”, and “thought to be”.
He said, “This document has none of the normal NSA disclaimer words in it. They just come out and say ‘we received messages from outer space’ and this is the way to decode those messages.”
I asked, “What does that mean to you?”
His reply was instant.
“Disclosure, pure and simple. They aren’t making any fanfare about it, but there it is. They have just made open disclosure.”
But what do the messages say?
Dr. Campaigne focused on a set of information in a couple of the messages that turn out to be some mathematical equations. They also contain the listing of all the elements in our Periodic Table. I suppose those equations may make some sense to a physicist or engineer, but do not mean anything to me. I clearly understand how Dr. Campaigne came to the translation since he explains it very well. But, as to what the meaning of the equations are, I could not venture a guess.
It is curious, though, that during his presentation Dr. Campaigne mentions there are “words” that they have translated, and some “words” they have not yet begun to understand. He gives an example of a connective word that he knows is connective (joining two or more statements) but does not yet understand the translation of that word.
Debunkers are scared as hell of the release of this information as it proves beyond any doubt that they are, and always have been, dead wrong. Their careers as debunkers are finished in light of the revelation of this material. They are already using the only possible “tool” left to them by saying, “That’s old information. It’s been out there for years.”
As usual, they are either just uninformed, or outright lying. It is true the document was cleared for release on October 21, 2004. It is true that date is from “years”. But it is also true that it WAS NOT released until April 21, 2011.
"No, Virginia, that information has not been available for years."
Researching this development for my show, I have found a great deal of other information that constitutes what most people would call open disclosure.
This is truly blockbuster information. No one from the government has stepped in front of the cameras and come clean about ET reality as yet. But, here we have the most secret intelligence organization in the U.S.A. , the National Security Agency, disclosing openly that there has been contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. Not only that, we have decoded their messages.
http://www.kevinsmithshow.com/
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Taking Back the Los Angeles Dodgers
Dave Zirin http://www.thenation.com/blog/160162/taking-back-los-angeles-dodgers
On Friday, I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times that put forward a common-sense solution to the current ownership disaster that is the Dodgers franchise: public ownership. Last week, Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball took the unprecedented step of seizing the team from bankrupt chief executive Frank McCourt.
In my column, I asked the question: instead of now selling off this historic franchise to the highest bidder, why not allow the fans to be the new bosses? What if Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball pursued the solution—that has been so successful for the Green Bay Packers—public ownership? The Dodgers faithful could buy shares in the squad. Then—like in Green Bay—60% of concessions could go to local charities, premium tickets could be made affordable to working class Angelenos, and one of baseball’s most storied teams could repair its ruptured relationship with an alienated fan base. Let Los Angeles be a baseball town again. Let them truly be the people’s team.
It’s unlikely that Major League Baseball or the sclerotic Selig would want any of this. After all, since 1961, it’s been written explicitly in the league’s bylaws that fan ownership is as forbidden as the spitball or aluminum bats. Selig sees his number one job as protecting the profits and interests of ownership—not safeguarding the best interests of the game. Proclaiming to the world that fans can own a team and sports owners are superfluous creatures runs counter to Selig’s very DNA. In other words, I didn’t expect the suggestion to gain much traction at MLB central.
But I also didn’t expect Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn to step up to the plate and swing for the cause. Hahn, the daughter of former City Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, is now running for US Congress. The day following publication, Hahn cited my piece in the LA Times on her campaign website and issued the following statement: “The Dodgers have been previously owned by FOX and the McCourt family, it is clear that the only ones who have the teams best interest at heart are the fans. If elected to Congress, I will introduce an amended version of the ‘Give Fans A Chance Act’ which would allow Major League Baseball teams to be owned and operated by their fans, much like the Green Bay Packers are structured today.”
This is an idea whose time has come. Major League Baseball for years has relied on public subsidies to make mountainous profits. We have collectivized the debt and privatized the profit for years in operating the National Pastime. But now, as our states face historic cuts, it’s time for payback.
I spoke to 12th grade LA public school teacher Sarah Knopp, and she said,
"Just a percentage of the revenue from merchandise sales could help save the hundreds of art and music teachers being pink-slipped right now. At my small school for at-risk kids, art is one of the main tools that keeps students engaged and practicing higher-order thinking. And we're losing our art teacher. Then there’s physical education. Maybe Dodger revenue could help us to develop world-class sports programs, rather than cutting them. When I was a public school student, girls' sports were crucial for me during those formative years of self-esteem development. I'm scared that a whole generation of girls (and boys) will suffer the effects of not having those opportunities."
The only way this option could be pursued is with a tremendous amount of pressure. This pressure needs to be of two kinds: popular, fan-based pressure on Major League Baseball, and political pressure on—and through—the political powers in LA and California. People should rally, fans should hold up signs, politicians should be questioned, and every union in greater Los Angeles, should back Councilwoman Hahn's call. The Bud Selig alternative involves selling off the team to the highest bidder, with no guarantees this broken franchise would even stay in Los Angeles. Today Selig announced, that former member of the George W. Bush inner circle and Ambassador to Japan J. Thomas Schieffer would be running the team. This is not the right direction for the team or the city. The answer lies not in Bush-Land, but Green Bay.
It should be noted that this franchise was founded when it was stolen from the people of Brooklyn, Then the actual Dodgers Stadium was built on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. At that time, Chavez Ravine was a beloved residential community of Chicanos known to all as “the poor man’s Shangri La”. Shangri-La was seized by the state and handed over to owner Walter O’Malley. Second base now sits on what was once someone’s house. It’s long past time we take the team back. Doing so would rectify the past, aid the present, and maybe play a part in changing the future.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
On Friday, I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times that put forward a common-sense solution to the current ownership disaster that is the Dodgers franchise: public ownership. Last week, Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball took the unprecedented step of seizing the team from bankrupt chief executive Frank McCourt.
In my column, I asked the question: instead of now selling off this historic franchise to the highest bidder, why not allow the fans to be the new bosses? What if Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball pursued the solution—that has been so successful for the Green Bay Packers—public ownership? The Dodgers faithful could buy shares in the squad. Then—like in Green Bay—60% of concessions could go to local charities, premium tickets could be made affordable to working class Angelenos, and one of baseball’s most storied teams could repair its ruptured relationship with an alienated fan base. Let Los Angeles be a baseball town again. Let them truly be the people’s team.
It’s unlikely that Major League Baseball or the sclerotic Selig would want any of this. After all, since 1961, it’s been written explicitly in the league’s bylaws that fan ownership is as forbidden as the spitball or aluminum bats. Selig sees his number one job as protecting the profits and interests of ownership—not safeguarding the best interests of the game. Proclaiming to the world that fans can own a team and sports owners are superfluous creatures runs counter to Selig’s very DNA. In other words, I didn’t expect the suggestion to gain much traction at MLB central.
But I also didn’t expect Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn to step up to the plate and swing for the cause. Hahn, the daughter of former City Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, is now running for US Congress. The day following publication, Hahn cited my piece in the LA Times on her campaign website and issued the following statement: “The Dodgers have been previously owned by FOX and the McCourt family, it is clear that the only ones who have the teams best interest at heart are the fans. If elected to Congress, I will introduce an amended version of the ‘Give Fans A Chance Act’ which would allow Major League Baseball teams to be owned and operated by their fans, much like the Green Bay Packers are structured today.”
This is an idea whose time has come. Major League Baseball for years has relied on public subsidies to make mountainous profits. We have collectivized the debt and privatized the profit for years in operating the National Pastime. But now, as our states face historic cuts, it’s time for payback.
I spoke to 12th grade LA public school teacher Sarah Knopp, and she said,
"Just a percentage of the revenue from merchandise sales could help save the hundreds of art and music teachers being pink-slipped right now. At my small school for at-risk kids, art is one of the main tools that keeps students engaged and practicing higher-order thinking. And we're losing our art teacher. Then there’s physical education. Maybe Dodger revenue could help us to develop world-class sports programs, rather than cutting them. When I was a public school student, girls' sports were crucial for me during those formative years of self-esteem development. I'm scared that a whole generation of girls (and boys) will suffer the effects of not having those opportunities."
The only way this option could be pursued is with a tremendous amount of pressure. This pressure needs to be of two kinds: popular, fan-based pressure on Major League Baseball, and political pressure on—and through—the political powers in LA and California. People should rally, fans should hold up signs, politicians should be questioned, and every union in greater Los Angeles, should back Councilwoman Hahn's call. The Bud Selig alternative involves selling off the team to the highest bidder, with no guarantees this broken franchise would even stay in Los Angeles. Today Selig announced, that former member of the George W. Bush inner circle and Ambassador to Japan J. Thomas Schieffer would be running the team. This is not the right direction for the team or the city. The answer lies not in Bush-Land, but Green Bay.
It should be noted that this franchise was founded when it was stolen from the people of Brooklyn, Then the actual Dodgers Stadium was built on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. At that time, Chavez Ravine was a beloved residential community of Chicanos known to all as “the poor man’s Shangri La”. Shangri-La was seized by the state and handed over to owner Walter O’Malley. Second base now sits on what was once someone’s house. It’s long past time we take the team back. Doing so would rectify the past, aid the present, and maybe play a part in changing the future.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Baseball's blues: It's not just the Dodgers
Dave Zirin
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zirin-dodgers-20110422,0,4297920.story
Three years ago, I spoke at Fremont High School in South-Central Los Angeles and asked a room of 50 teenagers how many of them had ever been inside Dodger Stadium. One intrepid student raised his hand. To understand why Major League Baseball had to seize the storied franchise this week, look no further than this moment. But it's a moment that could be replicated in cities across the country.
The league takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers is more than just a comment on owner Frank McCourt's financial problems or the McCourt divorce drama. It's more than a black eye for the onetime franchise of Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax and Fernando Valenzuela. It's more than a comment on a club that from 1973 to 1986 led the major leagues in attendance every year except one. It is a commentary on the rotten economic state of Major League Baseball.
As has been widely reported, attendance is significantly down, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. For years, owning a baseball team was like having a license to print money. Public subsidies, luxury boxes and cable deals filled the coffers of owners. Ownership subsidized the lavish conspicuous consumption of Frank and Jamie McCourt. It also created enterprises that are overleveraged sinkholes dependent on tax dollars while pricing out working-class fans.
The evidence isn't pretty, and it goes well beyond Frank McCourt's needing a personal loan from Fox Broadcasting to make the team's payroll. Last year, the World Series-bound Texas Rangers were bought at a bankruptcy bidders' auction in the middle of the season. This season, the New York Mets — playing in the game's largest market — started the year as a husk of a franchise. The team allegedly had been used by owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz as a cash register to invest with disgraced financier Bernard Madoff. Now they're being sued for every cent they have by the trustee for Madoff's victims and are looking to unload a piece of the franchise.
These are the most dramatic examples of an industrywide squeeze as the old revenue streams, in these tight economic times, are running dry.
Two years ago, Michigan's then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm described automakers as "a healthcare provider that happened to make cars." For a generation now, baseball has been a highly leveraged real estate urban development plan in which men happen to play a game. Now, young fans are disconnected from the game, and a franchise such as the Dodgers, with all its history and dazzling brilliance, is in receivership. The L.A. Chamber of Commerce has worried that in a worst-case scenario, the team would leave Los Angeles. Although this might provoke cheers in Brooklyn, it would be a tragedy for the game.
MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the league have no answers about the future of the Dodgers or even baseball in Los Angeles. They don't seem as if they have any long-term answers at all. This unprecedented, jarring response to simply seize the team can only be read as a panic move. Like someone who just throws out everything in the attic rather than sort through the debris, it reads like a reactive response to everything: the McCourt divorce, the inability of a league owner to meet his payroll, questions about security after the tragic near-fatal beating of a rival team's fan on opening day and the need to bring in showboating security specialist and former LAPD Chief William J. Bratton.
It's long been said — whether about steroids, realignment, the All-Star game — that Selig's nickname is "Mr. Reaction." This will do nothing to allay that criticism of his tenure.
The answer to the Dodgers' problems is a somewhat simple one, although enacting it flies in the face of the bylaws of Major League Baseball. The answer isn't found in the glittering Hollywood Hills but in the sparsely populated tundra of Green Bay, Wis. The NFL's Green Bay Packers offer an alluring alternative that couples winning with community connection. The Packers have no embarrassing owners like the McCourts. In fact, they have more than 112,000 owners.
The team is owned by the fans, the only publicly owned, not-for-profit major professional team in the United States. This has created a relationship between team and community unlike any in the NFL. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response.
Could this work in Los Angeles with the Dodgers? Would the fans pony up to make sure that the franchise doesn't leave the City of Angels? Would fan ownership also translate into a deeper connection between the city and the team?
Those are tantalizing questions. But without profound public and political pressure, it's doubtful that Angelenos will get the chance to find out. Considering the generations of civic love bestowed on this team, the people of Los Angeles certainly have a greater claim on the team than Major League Baseball. But then this is also a team founded on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. Maybe the chickens have just come home to roost.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zirin-dodgers-20110422,0,4297920.story
Three years ago, I spoke at Fremont High School in South-Central Los Angeles and asked a room of 50 teenagers how many of them had ever been inside Dodger Stadium. One intrepid student raised his hand. To understand why Major League Baseball had to seize the storied franchise this week, look no further than this moment. But it's a moment that could be replicated in cities across the country.
The league takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers is more than just a comment on owner Frank McCourt's financial problems or the McCourt divorce drama. It's more than a black eye for the onetime franchise of Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax and Fernando Valenzuela. It's more than a comment on a club that from 1973 to 1986 led the major leagues in attendance every year except one. It is a commentary on the rotten economic state of Major League Baseball.
As has been widely reported, attendance is significantly down, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. For years, owning a baseball team was like having a license to print money. Public subsidies, luxury boxes and cable deals filled the coffers of owners. Ownership subsidized the lavish conspicuous consumption of Frank and Jamie McCourt. It also created enterprises that are overleveraged sinkholes dependent on tax dollars while pricing out working-class fans.
The evidence isn't pretty, and it goes well beyond Frank McCourt's needing a personal loan from Fox Broadcasting to make the team's payroll. Last year, the World Series-bound Texas Rangers were bought at a bankruptcy bidders' auction in the middle of the season. This season, the New York Mets — playing in the game's largest market — started the year as a husk of a franchise. The team allegedly had been used by owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz as a cash register to invest with disgraced financier Bernard Madoff. Now they're being sued for every cent they have by the trustee for Madoff's victims and are looking to unload a piece of the franchise.
These are the most dramatic examples of an industrywide squeeze as the old revenue streams, in these tight economic times, are running dry.
Two years ago, Michigan's then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm described automakers as "a healthcare provider that happened to make cars." For a generation now, baseball has been a highly leveraged real estate urban development plan in which men happen to play a game. Now, young fans are disconnected from the game, and a franchise such as the Dodgers, with all its history and dazzling brilliance, is in receivership. The L.A. Chamber of Commerce has worried that in a worst-case scenario, the team would leave Los Angeles. Although this might provoke cheers in Brooklyn, it would be a tragedy for the game.
MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the league have no answers about the future of the Dodgers or even baseball in Los Angeles. They don't seem as if they have any long-term answers at all. This unprecedented, jarring response to simply seize the team can only be read as a panic move. Like someone who just throws out everything in the attic rather than sort through the debris, it reads like a reactive response to everything: the McCourt divorce, the inability of a league owner to meet his payroll, questions about security after the tragic near-fatal beating of a rival team's fan on opening day and the need to bring in showboating security specialist and former LAPD Chief William J. Bratton.
It's long been said — whether about steroids, realignment, the All-Star game — that Selig's nickname is "Mr. Reaction." This will do nothing to allay that criticism of his tenure.
The answer to the Dodgers' problems is a somewhat simple one, although enacting it flies in the face of the bylaws of Major League Baseball. The answer isn't found in the glittering Hollywood Hills but in the sparsely populated tundra of Green Bay, Wis. The NFL's Green Bay Packers offer an alluring alternative that couples winning with community connection. The Packers have no embarrassing owners like the McCourts. In fact, they have more than 112,000 owners.
The team is owned by the fans, the only publicly owned, not-for-profit major professional team in the United States. This has created a relationship between team and community unlike any in the NFL. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response.
Could this work in Los Angeles with the Dodgers? Would the fans pony up to make sure that the franchise doesn't leave the City of Angels? Would fan ownership also translate into a deeper connection between the city and the team?
Those are tantalizing questions. But without profound public and political pressure, it's doubtful that Angelenos will get the chance to find out. Considering the generations of civic love bestowed on this team, the people of Los Angeles certainly have a greater claim on the team than Major League Baseball. But then this is also a team founded on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. Maybe the chickens have just come home to roost.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Repossess the Mets!
Dave Zirin
http://nyr.kr/hqi4B6
Growing up in New York City, I was a Mets fan down to the marrow of my bones. I’d stand outside of the old Shea Stadium, pleading for autographs, and eventually my baseball glove had more names on it than the cast on a third grader’s broken arm: Mookie Wilson, Ron Darling, Kevin Mitchell—any Met who’d stop for me. My bedroom was a shrine to the team; posters of Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, and Keith Hernandez watched over me as I slept. I loved those teams of the nineteen-eighties. I always talked about them using the pronoun ”we,” as in, “We are going to win it all this year.” (In 1986, we did—and I was there for game six.) That’s why it’s been so ineffably painful, over the past several months, to see the ugly truth unveiled: the Mets aren’t my team, or New York’s team. They are Bernie Madoff’s team.
When I was reading William Grieder’s piece on Madoff in the Nation—where I’m the sports editor—I couldn’t help but think that there is no criminal statute against using and abusing an entire fan base. We now know that the owners of the Mets, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, were financial partners with the Babe Ruth of swindlers. They allegedly used Madoff’s portfolio as a sort of personal bank, with the team being both their collateral and their cash register. Now they are facing anywhere from three hundred million to a billion dollars in lawsuits from an assembly of Madoff victims. As a lawsuit filed by the victims’ trustee, Irving Picard, states, Wilpon and Katz “made so much easy money from Madoff for so long” that, despite the myriad red flags, they “chose to simply look the other way…. There are thousands of victims of Madoff’s massive fraud. But Saul Katz is not one of them. Neither is Fred Wilpon.”
According to the lawsuit, Wilpon was using his Madoff-made gains to pay off as much as half a billion dollars in debt he accrued in building the team’s new stadium, Citi Field. (It is somehow telling that the field would be named for a bank.) In response, Wilpon and Katz said in a statement:
The trustee’s lawsuit is an outrageous “strong arm” effort to try to force a settlement by threatening to ruin our reputations and businesses, which we have built for over fifty years.
That statement, and many others like it, is up on the Mets Web site, making it even harder to cordon off one’s feelings for the team. (“To see business owners so misjudge their audience is solar-eclipse-black humor,” Jeff Passan, a Yahoo sports columnist, wrote.) Wilpon and Katz are now looking to sell anywhere from a twenty-five-per-cent stake to the entire team. One hopes they will. The team has already received a twenty-million-dollar loan from Major League Baseball after running through the seventy-five-million-dollar line of credit available to all teams in financial distress. And they owe a few players, some of them disastrous signings, a tremendous amount of money.
Mets Nation is owed something, too. Not just because their trust was so flagrantly violated—their blue and orange entangled in a Ponzi scheme—but because the taxpayers of New York paid for two hundred million of the six hundred million it took to build Citi Field. Maybe we are owed the team. Why shouldn’t the Mets follow the model of the Green Bay Packers and allow fans to buy shares? In Green Bay, people buy a piece of their beloved Pack and all they get in return is a piece of paper saying that they are part owners. This is a model worth emulating, especially given the Packers’ recent success. Over the past twenty years, the Wilpons have careened from one embarrassment to the next.
These are tough times, when tightening budgets have led to historic attacks on schools, hospitals, and public services. Why shouldn’t the Mets help subsidize all that? Imagine how it would be if every time you saw a kid in a David Wright jersey, you knew that the proceeds would help to keep the city afloat.
We should repossess the Mets. Once we do, I will be first in line to buy my shares of the club. Then the Mets really will be “our team” again, and I can resume the passion of youth, with the confidence that my love isn’t just an asset in the Madoff-Wilpon-Katz portfolio.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
http://nyr.kr/hqi4B6
Growing up in New York City, I was a Mets fan down to the marrow of my bones. I’d stand outside of the old Shea Stadium, pleading for autographs, and eventually my baseball glove had more names on it than the cast on a third grader’s broken arm: Mookie Wilson, Ron Darling, Kevin Mitchell—any Met who’d stop for me. My bedroom was a shrine to the team; posters of Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, and Keith Hernandez watched over me as I slept. I loved those teams of the nineteen-eighties. I always talked about them using the pronoun ”we,” as in, “We are going to win it all this year.” (In 1986, we did—and I was there for game six.) That’s why it’s been so ineffably painful, over the past several months, to see the ugly truth unveiled: the Mets aren’t my team, or New York’s team. They are Bernie Madoff’s team.
When I was reading William Grieder’s piece on Madoff in the Nation—where I’m the sports editor—I couldn’t help but think that there is no criminal statute against using and abusing an entire fan base. We now know that the owners of the Mets, Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, were financial partners with the Babe Ruth of swindlers. They allegedly used Madoff’s portfolio as a sort of personal bank, with the team being both their collateral and their cash register. Now they are facing anywhere from three hundred million to a billion dollars in lawsuits from an assembly of Madoff victims. As a lawsuit filed by the victims’ trustee, Irving Picard, states, Wilpon and Katz “made so much easy money from Madoff for so long” that, despite the myriad red flags, they “chose to simply look the other way…. There are thousands of victims of Madoff’s massive fraud. But Saul Katz is not one of them. Neither is Fred Wilpon.”
According to the lawsuit, Wilpon was using his Madoff-made gains to pay off as much as half a billion dollars in debt he accrued in building the team’s new stadium, Citi Field. (It is somehow telling that the field would be named for a bank.) In response, Wilpon and Katz said in a statement:
The trustee’s lawsuit is an outrageous “strong arm” effort to try to force a settlement by threatening to ruin our reputations and businesses, which we have built for over fifty years.
That statement, and many others like it, is up on the Mets Web site, making it even harder to cordon off one’s feelings for the team. (“To see business owners so misjudge their audience is solar-eclipse-black humor,” Jeff Passan, a Yahoo sports columnist, wrote.) Wilpon and Katz are now looking to sell anywhere from a twenty-five-per-cent stake to the entire team. One hopes they will. The team has already received a twenty-million-dollar loan from Major League Baseball after running through the seventy-five-million-dollar line of credit available to all teams in financial distress. And they owe a few players, some of them disastrous signings, a tremendous amount of money.
Mets Nation is owed something, too. Not just because their trust was so flagrantly violated—their blue and orange entangled in a Ponzi scheme—but because the taxpayers of New York paid for two hundred million of the six hundred million it took to build Citi Field. Maybe we are owed the team. Why shouldn’t the Mets follow the model of the Green Bay Packers and allow fans to buy shares? In Green Bay, people buy a piece of their beloved Pack and all they get in return is a piece of paper saying that they are part owners. This is a model worth emulating, especially given the Packers’ recent success. Over the past twenty years, the Wilpons have careened from one embarrassment to the next.
These are tough times, when tightening budgets have led to historic attacks on schools, hospitals, and public services. Why shouldn’t the Mets help subsidize all that? Imagine how it would be if every time you saw a kid in a David Wright jersey, you knew that the proceeds would help to keep the city afloat.
We should repossess the Mets. Once we do, I will be first in line to buy my shares of the club. Then the Mets really will be “our team” again, and I can resume the passion of youth, with the confidence that my love isn’t just an asset in the Madoff-Wilpon-Katz portfolio.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Stern-Cold: Losing the N.B.A.
Dave Zirin
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/04/david-stern-nba.html
“I don’t know where you were raised, but I lived with rats. I used to kill rats. We had a .22 rifle and we would lay in the kitchen and shoot them on the floor. One thing my grandmother taught me was that if you got a rat trapped, you’ve got to give his ass a way out, because he will fight you if he has to. If you don’t give us a way out, a chance for a compromise, you’re going to get a fight.” An American labor leader made the previous statement last month. It wasn’t a Teamster, United Autoworkers official, or anyone from the public-sector battles in the Midwest. The union in question is the National Basketball Players Association, and the man who promised “a fight” was their executive director, Billy Hunter.
Hunter was referring to the stalled negotiations over a new collective-bargaining agreement for the N.B.A. The current labor deal expires at the end of June; if no progress is made before then—and there hasn’t been much in several months—the league could join the N.F.L. as the second major American sports league whose players (and, of course, fans) are locked out.
There is an extra lacquer of anger and mistrust in the N.B.A. because of the particular commissioner with whom Billy Hunter is negotiating: David Stern. For thirty years, Stern has been arguably the most successful commissioner in all of sports. Having Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan in his league certainly helped, but Stern has taken the N.B.A. from a second-tier attraction to a global phenomenon. In recent years, however, another, utterly implacable side of Stern has emerged.
Fans in the greater Seattle area, who didn’t want to spend three hundred million dollars on a new, publicly funded stadium and lost their team, are familiar with Stern’s vindictive side. (The Sonics were moved to Oklahoma City, where they are now the Thunder.) But never has Stern seemed as unbending, isolated, or arrogant as he does now. Players are warned; complaining coaches are silenced; and negotiating partners are enemies.
Stern, speaking to a room full of N.B.A. stars during All-Star weekend, reportedly said that he knew where “the bodies are buried” in the league—presumably because he had buried some of them himself. “It was shocking,” the Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose told Yahoo! Sports. “I was taking off my gear, and when he said that, I just stopped and thought, ‘Whoa…’ I couldn’t believe that he said it.”
Then, on April 7th, the N.B.A. referees union announced that they were complaining to the National Labor Relations Board that Stern and the N.B.A. had violated federal law by engaging in unfair labor practices. Their filing includes accusations relating to an “obscene expression” that Stern directed at union negotiators in a January 24th meeting. According to the report, Stern stormed out of the meeting in a rage when the stenographer refused to take his obscenity out of the record.
And there’s the tale of Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy. When Van Gundy told reporters that Stern doesn’t allow dissenting opinions, the commissioner responded, “We won’t be hearing from him for the rest of the season.” He then said of Van Gundy, “I see somebody whose team isn’t performing, whose star player was suspended, who seems to be fraying.”
Most fans could care less about Stern’s attitude—but his state of mind is a problem for the sport of basketball. If he’s not willing to negotiate in a way that shows respect, then there likely won’t be a season in 2011. Stern is pursuing a strategy similar to the one N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell has adopted: demanding wage cuts and claiming financial hardship, while offering players, at best, a limited look at the books. But Stern’s demands extend further. Stern and the owners also want teams to be able to retain players at their discretion, even if their contracts have run their course. This would effectively end free agency and turn back the clock on sports labor relations by decades.
“That’s a dealbreaker,” Billy Hunter told me. “I’m dead set against it, and most players would be as well. This would oppress players. Why was free agency fought for and achieved? You take that away if you have a franchise player tag. We will be just as adamant as not accepting it as we would about not accepting a hard salary cap…. If they continue to put forth the same demands, we are going to find ourselves in the same situation as the N.F.L.P.A.”—the football players, who are still locked out.
In a season where ratings and interest are up, and players like Chicago’s Rose and the L.A. Clippers’ forward Blake Griffin are leaving a new generation of fans breathless, David Stern is practicing his own version of the extreme austerity. But, just as there are no schools without teachers and no fire stations without firefighters, there is no league without the players. No one buys an N.B.A. ticket to watch David Stern. This seems to be a reality he has forgotten—no matter where the bodies are buried.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/04/david-stern-nba.html
“I don’t know where you were raised, but I lived with rats. I used to kill rats. We had a .22 rifle and we would lay in the kitchen and shoot them on the floor. One thing my grandmother taught me was that if you got a rat trapped, you’ve got to give his ass a way out, because he will fight you if he has to. If you don’t give us a way out, a chance for a compromise, you’re going to get a fight.” An American labor leader made the previous statement last month. It wasn’t a Teamster, United Autoworkers official, or anyone from the public-sector battles in the Midwest. The union in question is the National Basketball Players Association, and the man who promised “a fight” was their executive director, Billy Hunter.
Hunter was referring to the stalled negotiations over a new collective-bargaining agreement for the N.B.A. The current labor deal expires at the end of June; if no progress is made before then—and there hasn’t been much in several months—the league could join the N.F.L. as the second major American sports league whose players (and, of course, fans) are locked out.
There is an extra lacquer of anger and mistrust in the N.B.A. because of the particular commissioner with whom Billy Hunter is negotiating: David Stern. For thirty years, Stern has been arguably the most successful commissioner in all of sports. Having Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan in his league certainly helped, but Stern has taken the N.B.A. from a second-tier attraction to a global phenomenon. In recent years, however, another, utterly implacable side of Stern has emerged.
Fans in the greater Seattle area, who didn’t want to spend three hundred million dollars on a new, publicly funded stadium and lost their team, are familiar with Stern’s vindictive side. (The Sonics were moved to Oklahoma City, where they are now the Thunder.) But never has Stern seemed as unbending, isolated, or arrogant as he does now. Players are warned; complaining coaches are silenced; and negotiating partners are enemies.
Stern, speaking to a room full of N.B.A. stars during All-Star weekend, reportedly said that he knew where “the bodies are buried” in the league—presumably because he had buried some of them himself. “It was shocking,” the Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose told Yahoo! Sports. “I was taking off my gear, and when he said that, I just stopped and thought, ‘Whoa…’ I couldn’t believe that he said it.”
Then, on April 7th, the N.B.A. referees union announced that they were complaining to the National Labor Relations Board that Stern and the N.B.A. had violated federal law by engaging in unfair labor practices. Their filing includes accusations relating to an “obscene expression” that Stern directed at union negotiators in a January 24th meeting. According to the report, Stern stormed out of the meeting in a rage when the stenographer refused to take his obscenity out of the record.
And there’s the tale of Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy. When Van Gundy told reporters that Stern doesn’t allow dissenting opinions, the commissioner responded, “We won’t be hearing from him for the rest of the season.” He then said of Van Gundy, “I see somebody whose team isn’t performing, whose star player was suspended, who seems to be fraying.”
Most fans could care less about Stern’s attitude—but his state of mind is a problem for the sport of basketball. If he’s not willing to negotiate in a way that shows respect, then there likely won’t be a season in 2011. Stern is pursuing a strategy similar to the one N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell has adopted: demanding wage cuts and claiming financial hardship, while offering players, at best, a limited look at the books. But Stern’s demands extend further. Stern and the owners also want teams to be able to retain players at their discretion, even if their contracts have run their course. This would effectively end free agency and turn back the clock on sports labor relations by decades.
“That’s a dealbreaker,” Billy Hunter told me. “I’m dead set against it, and most players would be as well. This would oppress players. Why was free agency fought for and achieved? You take that away if you have a franchise player tag. We will be just as adamant as not accepting it as we would about not accepting a hard salary cap…. If they continue to put forth the same demands, we are going to find ourselves in the same situation as the N.F.L.P.A.”—the football players, who are still locked out.
In a season where ratings and interest are up, and players like Chicago’s Rose and the L.A. Clippers’ forward Blake Griffin are leaving a new generation of fans breathless, David Stern is practicing his own version of the extreme austerity. But, just as there are no schools without teachers and no fire stations without firefighters, there is no league without the players. No one buys an N.B.A. ticket to watch David Stern. This seems to be a reality he has forgotten—no matter where the bodies are buried.
Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
9 Things The Rich Don't Want You To Know About Taxes
April 13th, 2011
http://wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html
Taxes For three decades we have conducted a massive economic experiment, testing a theory known as supply-side economics. The theory goes like this: Lower tax rates will encourage more investment, which in turn will mean more jobs and greater prosperity—so much so that tax revenues will go up, despite lower rates. The late Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist who wanted to shut down public parks because he considered them socialism, promoted this strategy. Ronald Reagan embraced Friedman’s ideas and made them into policy when he was elected president in 1980.
For the past decade, we have doubled down on this theory of supply-side economics with the tax cuts sponsored by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, which President Obama has agreed to continue for two years.
You would think that whether this grand experiment worked would be settled after three decades. You would think the practitioners of the dismal science of economics would look at their demand curves and the data on incomes and taxes and pronounce a verdict, the way Galileo and Copernicus did when they showed that geocentrism was a fantasy because Earth revolves around the sun (known as heliocentrism). But economics is not like that. It is not like physics with its laws and arithmetic with its absolute values.
Tax policy is something the framers left to politics. And in politics, the facts often matter less than who has the biggest bullhorn.
The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.
As millions of Americans prepare to file their annual taxes, they do so in an environment of media-perpetuated tax myths. Here are a few points about taxes and the economy that you may not know, to consider as you prepare to file your taxes. (All figures are inflation-adjusted.)
1. Poor Americans do pay taxes.
Gretchen Carlson, the Fox News host, said last year “47 percent of Americans don’t pay any taxes.” John McCain and Sarah Palin both said similar things during the 2008 campaign about the bottom half of Americans.
Ari Fleischer, the former Bush White House spokesman, once said “50 percent of the country gets benefits without paying for them.”
Actually, they pay lots of taxes—just not lots of federal income taxes.
Data from the Tax Foundation show that in 2008, the average income for the bottom half of taxpayers was $15,300.
This year the first $9,350 of income is exempt from taxes for singles and $18,700 for married couples, just slightly more than in 2008. That means millions of the poor do not make enough to owe income taxes.
But they still pay plenty of other taxes, including federal payroll taxes. Between gas taxes, sales taxes, utility taxes and other taxes, no one lives tax-free in America.
When it comes to state and local taxes, the poor bear a heavier burden than the rich in every state except Vermont, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated from official data. In Alabama, for example, the burden on the poor is more than twice that of the top 1 percent. The one-fifth of Alabama families making less than $13,000 pay almost 11 percent of their income in state and local taxes, compared with less than 4 percent for those who make $229,000 or more.
2. The wealthiest Americans don’t carry the burden.
This is one of those oft-used canards. Sen. Rand Paul, the tea party favorite from Kentucky, told David Letterman recently that “the wealthy do pay most of the taxes in this country.”
The Internet is awash with statements that the top 1 percent pays, depending on the year, 38 percent or more than 40 percent of taxes.
It’s true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.
Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. That’s because, once you reach $106,800 of income, you pay no more for Social Security, though the much smaller Medicare tax applies to all wages. Warren Buffett pays the exact same amount of Social Security taxes as someone who earns $106,800.
3. In fact, the wealthy are paying less taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service issues an annual report on the 400 highest income-tax payers. In 1961, there were 398 taxpayers who made $1 million or more, so I compared their income tax burdens from that year to 2007.
Despite skyrocketing incomes, the federal tax burden on the richest 400 has been slashed, thanks to a variety of loopholes, allowable deductions and other tools. The actual share of their income paid in taxes, according to the IRS, is 16.6 percent. Adding payroll taxes barely nudges that number.
Compare that to the vast majority of Americans, whose share of their income going to federal taxes increased from 13.1 percent in 1961 to 22.5 percent in 2007.
(By the way, during seven of the eight George W. Bush years, the IRS report on the top 400 taxpayers was labeled a state secret, a policy that the Obama administration overturned almost instantly after his inauguration.)
4. Many of the very richest pay no current income taxes at all.
John Paulson, the most successful hedge-fund manager of all, bet against the mortgage market one year and then bet with Glenn Beck in the gold market the next. Paulson made himself $9 billion in fees in just two years. His current tax bill on that $9 billion? Zero.
Congress lets hedge-fund managers earn all they can now and pay their taxes years from now.
In 2007, Congress debated whether hedge-fund managers should pay the top tax rate that applies to wages, bonuses and other compensation for their labors, which is 35 percent. That tax rate starts at about $300,000 of taxable income—not even pocket change to Paulson, but almost 12 years of gross pay to the median-wage worker.
The Republicans and a key Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, fought to keep the tax rate on hedge-fund managers at 15 percent, arguing that the profits from hedge funds should be considered capital gains, not ordinary income, which got a lot of attention in the news.
What the news media missed is that hedge-fund managers don’t even pay 15 percent. At least, not currently. So long as they leave their money, known as “carried interest,” in the hedge fund, their taxes are deferred. They only pay taxes when they cash out, which could be decades from now for younger managers. How do these hedge-fund managers get money in the meantime? By borrowing against the carried interest, often at absurdly low rates—currently about 2 percent.
Lots of other people live tax-free, too. I have Donald Trump’s tax records for four years early in his career. He paid no taxes for two of those years. Big real-estate investors enjoy tax-free living under a 1993 law President Clinton signed. It lets “professional” real-estate investors use paper losses like depreciation on their buildings against any cash income, even if they end up with negative incomes like Trump.
Frank and Jamie McCourt, who own the Los Angeles Dodgers, have not paid any income taxes since at least 2004, their divorce case revealed. Yet they spent $45 million one year alone. How? They just borrowed against Dodger ticket revenue and other assets. To the IRS, they look like paupers.
In Wisconsin, Terrence Wall, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2010, paid no income taxes on as much as $14 million of recent income, his disclosure forms showed. Asked about his living tax-free while working people pay taxes, he had a simple response: Everyone should pay less.
5. And (surprise!) since Reagan, only the wealthy have gained significant income.
The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and similar conservative marketing organizations tell us relentlessly that lower tax rates will make us all better off.
“When tax rates are reduced, the economy’s growth rate improves and living standards increase,” according to Daniel J. Mitchell, an economist at Heritage until he joined Cato. He says that supply-side economics is “the simple notion that lower tax rates will boost work, saving, investment and entrepreneurship.”
When Reagan was elected president, the top marginal tax rate (the tax rate paid on the last dollar of income earned) was 70 percent. He cut it to 50 percent and then 28 percent starting in 1987. It was raised by George H.W. Bush and Clinton, and then cut by George W. Bush. The top rate is now 35 percent.
Since 1980, when Reagan won the presidency promising prosperity through tax cuts, the average income of the vast majority—the bottom 90 percent of Americans—has increased a meager $303, or 1 percent. Put another way, for each dollar people in the vast majority made in 1980, in 2008 their income was up to $1.01.
Those at the top did better. The top 1 percent’s average income more than doubled to $1.1 million, according to an analysis of tax data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The really rich, the top one-tenth of 1 percent, each enjoyed almost $4 in 2008 for each dollar in 1980.
The top 300,000 Americans now enjoy almost as much income as the bottom 150 million, the data show.
6. When it comes to corporations, the story is much the same—less taxes.
Corporate profits in 2008, the latest year for which data are available, were $1,830 billion, up almost 12 percent from $1,638.7 billion in 2000. Yet, even though corporate tax rates have not been cut, corporate income-tax revenues fell to $230 billion from $249 billion—an 8 percent decline, thanks to a number of loopholes. The official 2010 profit numbers are not added up and released by the government, but the amount paid in corporate taxes is: In 2010 they fell further, to $191 billion—a decline of more than 23 percent compared with 2000.
7. Some corporate tax breaks destroy jobs.
Despite all the noise that America has the world’s second-highest corporate tax rate, the actual taxes paid by corporations are falling because of the growing number of loopholes and companies shifting profits to tax havens like the Cayman Islands.
And right now America’s corporations are sitting on close to $2 trillion in cash that is not being used to build factories, create jobs or anything else, but acts as an insurance policy for managers unwilling to take the risk of actually building the businesses they are paid so well to run. That cash hoard, by the way, works out to nearly $13,000 per taxpaying household.
A corporate tax rate that is too low actually destroys jobs. That’s because a higher tax rate encourages businesses (who don’t want to pay taxes) to keep the profits in the business and reinvest, rather than pull them out as profits and have to pay high taxes.
The 2004 American Jobs Creation Act, which passed with bipartisan support, allowed more than 800 companies to bring profits that were untaxed but overseas back to the United States. Instead of paying the usual 35 percent tax, the companies paid just 5.25 percent.
The companies said bringing the money home—“repatriating” it, they called it—would mean lots of jobs. Sen. John Ensign, the Nevada Republican, put the figure at 660,000 new jobs.
Pfizer, the drug company, was the biggest beneficiary. It brought home $37 billion, saving $11 billion in taxes. Almost immediately it started firing people. Since the law took effect, Pfizer has let 40,000 workers go. In all, it appears that at least 100,000 jobs were destroyed.
Now Congressional Republicans and some Democrats are gearing up again to pass another tax holiday, promoting a new Jobs Creation Act. It would affect 10 times as much money as the 2004 law.
8. Republicans like taxes too.
President Reagan signed into law 11 tax increases, targeted at people down the income ladder. His administration and the Washington press corps called the increases “revenue enhancers.” Reagan raised Social Security taxes so high that by the end of 2008, the government had collected more than $2 trillion in surplus tax.
George W. Bush signed a tax increase, too, in 2006, despite his written ironclad pledge never to raise taxes on anyone. It raised taxes on teenagers by requiring kids up to age 17, who earned money, to pay taxes at their parents’ tax rate, which would almost always be higher than the rate they would otherwise pay. It was a story that ran buried inside The New York Times one Sunday, but nowhere else.
In fact, thanks to Republicans, one in three Americans will pay higher taxes this year than they did last year.
First, some history. In 2009, President Obama pushed his own tax cut—for the working class. He persuaded Congress to enact the Making Work Pay Tax Credit. Over the two years 2009 and 2010, it saved single workers up to $800 and married heterosexual couples up to $1,600, even if only one spouse worked. The top 5 percent or so of taxpayers were denied this tax break.
The Obama administration called it “the biggest middle-class tax cut” ever. Yet last December the Republicans, poised to regain control of the House of Representatives, killed Obama’s Making Work Pay Credit while extending the Bush tax cuts for two more years—a policy Obama agreed to.
By doing so, Congressional Republican leaders increased taxes on a third of Americans, virtually all of them the working poor, this year.
As a result, of the 155 million households in the tax system, 51 million will pay an average of $129 more this year. That is $6.6 billion in higher taxes for the working poor, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated.
In addition, the Republicans changed the rate of workers’ FICA contributions, which finances half of Social Security. The result:
If you are single and make less than $20,000, or married and less than $40,000, you lose under this plan. But the top 5 percent, people who make more than $106,800, will save $2,136 ($4,272 for two-career couples).
9. Other countries do it better.
We measure our economic progress, and our elected leaders debate tax policy, in terms of a crude measure known as gross domestic product. The way the official statistics are put together, each dollar spent buying solar energy equipment counts the same as each dollar spent investigating murders.
We do not give any measure of value to time spent rearing children or growing our own vegetables or to time off for leisure and community service.
And we do not measure the economic damage done by shocks, such as losing a job, which means not only loss of income and depletion of savings, but loss of health insurance, which a Harvard Medical School study found results in 45,000 unnecessary deaths each year.
Compare this to Germany, one of many countries with a smarter tax system and smarter spending policies.
Germans work less, make more per hour and get much better parental leave than Americans, many of whom get no fringe benefits such as health care, pensions or even a retirement savings plan. By many measures the vast majority live better in Germany than in America.
To achieve this, unmarried Germans on average pay 52 percent of their income in taxes. Americans average 30 percent, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
At first blush the German tax burden seems horrendous. But in Germany (as well as in Britain, France, Scandinavia, Canada, Australia and Japan), tax-supported institutions provide many of the things Americans pay for with after-tax dollars. Buying wholesale rather than retail saves money.
A proper comparison would take the 30 percent average tax on American workers and add their out-of-pocket spending on health care, college tuition and fees for services, and compare that with taxes that the average German pays. Add it all up and the combination of tax and personal spending is roughly equal in both countries, but with a large risk of catastrophic loss in America, and a tiny risk in Germany.
Americans take on $85 billion of debt each year for higher education, while college is financed by taxes in Germany and tuition is cheap to free in other modern countries. While soaring medical costs are a key reason that since 1980 bankruptcy in America has increased 15 times faster than population growth, no one in Germany or the rest of the modern world goes broke because of accident or illness. And child poverty in America is the highest among modern countries—almost twice the rate in Germany, which is close to the average of modern countries.
On the corporate tax side, the Germans encourage reinvestment at home and the outsourcing of low-value work, like auto assembly, and German rules tightly control accounting so that profits earned at home cannot be made to appear as profits earned in tax havens.
Adopting the German system is not the answer for America. But crafting a tax system that benefits the vast majority, reduces risks, provides universal health care and focuses on diplomacy rather than militarism abroad (and at home) would be a lot smarter than what we have now.
Here is a question to ask yourself: We started down this road with Reagan’s election in 1980 and upped the ante in this century with George W. Bush.
How long does it take to conclude that a policy has failed to fulfill its promises? And as you think of that, keep in mind George Washington. When he fell ill his doctors followed the common wisdom of the era. They cut him and bled him to remove bad blood. As Washington’s condition grew worse, they bled him more. And like the mantra of tax cuts for the rich, they kept applying the same treatment until they killed him.
Luckily we don’t bleed the sick anymore, but we are bleeding our government to death.
David Cay Johnston is a columnist for tax.com and teaches the tax, property and regulatory law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management. He has also been called the “de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States” because his reporting in The New York Times shut down many tax dodges and schemes, just two of them valued by Congress at $260 billion. Johnston received a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for exposing tax loopholes and inequities. He wrote two bestsellers on taxes, Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch. Later this year, Johnston will be out with a new book, The Fine Print, revealing how big business, with help from politicians, abuses plain English to rob you blind.
Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland
Manning Marable’s rendition of Malcolm X’s life should be read very carefully, so as not to confuse Malcolm’s evolving worldview with the late Columbia University professor’s left-reformist politics. “Marable tries to convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist political path in his mind, if not in practice.” The author’s mission is to discredit revolutionary Black nationalism as outdated and primitive. Black Democratic Party activism and support for President Obama are hyped as the new Black Power.
Wed, 04/27/2011
BAR executive editor Glen Ford
http://blackagendareport.com/content/dragging-malcolm-x-obamaland
“Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become ‘race-neutral.’”
In packaging the life of Malcolm X for a wide audience, the late Dr. Manning Marable has presented us with an opportunity to reignite the debate over the meaning of Black self-determination, a discussion-through-struggle that effectively ended when the Black Freedom Movement became no longer worthy of the name. Unfortunately, it appears this was not Dr. Marable’s intention, since Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is largely an attempt to render useless the vocabulary of Black struggle. Essential terms such as “self-determination,” “Black nationalism,” “revolutionary” and “empowerment” lose their meaning, abused and misused in order to portray the great Black nationalist leader as inexorably evolving into a “race-neutral” reformer on the road to Obamaland.
This article does not address the complaints of those angered by Marable’s insistence that Malcolm X had a youthful homosexual relationship with an affluent white man, although it is shocking that Marable would throw this in the mix based on wholly inferential evidence and the author’s own psychological speculations. Our overarching concern is that Malcolm’s politics have been distorted by often clumsy, sometimes clever manipulation of the language of struggle, so that the politics of today’s left-reformers and Obama supporters, like Marable, appear vindicated.
Marable’s interventions in Malcolm’s mental processes begin in earnest on page 285, in the “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” chapter. It is early 1964, and Malcolm is contemplating a final break with the Nation of Islam. Marable takes over as the Black icon’s muse, deconstructing Black Muslim theological doctrine, as he speculates Malcolm must have struggled to do, and concluding that “a new religious remapping of the world based on orthodox Islam would not necessarily stigmatize or isolate the United States because of its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Instead of a bloody jihad, a holy Armageddon, perhaps America could experience a nonviolent, bloodless revolution.”
“Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody.”
While Malcolm was certainly questioning the catechism of inevitable, white man-scorching, Allah-directed Armageddon, it is another thing entirely to have Malcolm pondering a “bloodless revolution” in America. Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody, and he was speaking in secular, not religious, terms. His best-known speech on the subject is “Message to the Grassroots,” October 10, 1963.
“There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. [The] only kind of revolution that’s nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”
Malcolm never did accept the notion of revolution as bloodless, nor did he recognize the fight against segregated public accommodations as revolutionary. But Marable tries to convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist political path in his mind, if not in practice. This is William Styron-style biography, as Morgan State University’s Dr. Jared Ball has suggested, with Malcolm forced to play Styron’s Nat Turner.
By 1964 Malcolm had made a strategic decision to support Black integrationist efforts, at least rhetorically, but there is nothing that leads us to think that integration had become his end-goal, or that he believed integration was revolutionary. He had decided to become part of the broad “movement,” in order to both influence and benefit from it. Marable would have us believe (page 298) that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations, or that he thought voting equals or leads to African American self-determination –some very faulty logic. Revolutionary Marxists have also seen the value in electoral politics at certain junctures, but that didn’t mean they stopped preparing for the forceful overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, Marable tells us that Malcolm’s movement activities “marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system.”
“Marable would have us believe that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations.”
The clear inference is that Malcolm was wilting in his desire to wipe “the existing system” off the map. What existing system does Marable refer to, precisely? White supremacy? Capitalism? Bourgeois electoral pay-for-play democracy? Marable keeps Malcolm’s mind vague and cloudy, although in his actual historical voice the “evolving” Malcolm hates capitalism and U.S. imperialism more intensely than did the “old,” Nation Of Islam Malcolm. Marable also introduces his trick word “empowered,” which he will use repeatedly in the book to confuse, rather than clarify. Blacks “could someday become empowered within the existing system” – to do what? To determine their collective destinies? To defy white majorities? To push aside the rule of capital? Marable tries to cage Malcolm, while assuring us that the revolutionary Black nationalist was “tentatively” becoming a liberal reformer.
Gratuitous, non-defensive violence, in Malcolm’s NOI talks, always came from the hand of Allah. Malcolm never rejected the right of self-defense; otherwise, he would not have become Malcolm the icon. Marable knew this, so he again invades Malcolm’s mind (page 302). “By embracing the ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.”
What kind of violence was Malcolm rejecting? Certainly, not defensive violence. And Malcolm had never publicly urged Blacks to commit unprovoked aggressions against whites. The purpose of Marable’s sentence can only be to show alleged movement by Malcolm toward some state of non-volatility, which we are expected to associate with political moderation: reform.
Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become “race-neutral.” On May 21, 1964, Malcolm spoke at Chicago’s Civic Opera House, telling a crowd of 1,500 people, “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-America, nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods toward his real end – respect as a human being.” Malcolm went on the say: “Unless the race issue is quickly settled, the 22 million American Negroes could easily adopt the guerilla tactics of other deprived revolutionaries.” Not that he necessarily advocated that. (wink)
“Obamites cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are.”
Three days before he was assassinated, Malcolm said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now.” But, not to worry, Dr. Marable has the vision and the answer. He concluded that Malcolm had “made his race-neutral views clear in Chicago….” There is no rational basis for Marable’s amazing interpretation, other than he thought it moved his political story line on Malcolm’s evolution (or race-neutralization) forward.
The opposite of race-neutral, Malcolm lived and died a Race-Man, meaning simply that he put the Race first. As he wrote to an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood luminary who was disappointed that Malcolm was so decidedly non-race-neutral, “As a black American, I do feel that my first responsibility is to my twenty-two million fellow black Americans.” (page 368)
In the final “Reflections on a Revolutionary Vision” chapter, Marable speaks for himself – in the process confirming that he has been sneaking his own words, thoughts and politics into Malcolm’s head for four hundred pages. The Columbia University professor of African American Studies claims to know what Malcolm really, really wanted: “What Malcolm sought was a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States – not a violent social revolution, but radical and meaningful change nevertheless.”
Although the description is so vague, wishy-washy and – damnit!! – so soft and noncommittal as to bear no resemblance to any incarnation or developmental stage of Malcolm X, it fits the self-image of Manning Marable and his circle perfectly. They are the left Black Obamites, purported radicals who have a perpetual love affair with Power. Such people cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are, and are eager to graft their own vacillations and corruptions onto others, by rhetorical hook or literary crook.
If this assessment seems harsh, it is certainly not as outrageous as Marable’s gall in superimposing his politics on Malcolm X. Even when Marable speaks in his own voice, he manages to intimate that Malcolm would agree with him. “If legal racial segregation was permanently in America’s past,” wrote Marable on page 486, “Malcolm’s vision today would have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be ‘post-racial.’”
“Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power.”
Marable appears to think these are heavy questions, but they’re actually products of an unfocused, but deeply biased, mind. First of all, legal segregation was defeated before Malcolm’s death, and no sane person at the time thought it would be brought back. Malcolm had time to find out what life was like for Black southerners without state-sanctioned Jim Crow. Marable’s question is badly put. If he means, What would Malcolm think about today’s levels of segregation, then the answer would be that the northern cities would remain very familiar to him in their racial composition, and are in fact blacker than in Malcolm’s day – which might tend to indicate to Malcolm that self-determination was an even more critical concern.
Still, Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power. But self-determination, as a foundational principle of relations among peoples, requires no redefinition. Marable understands it as “the right of oppressed nations or minorities to decide for themselves their own political futures,” and he agrees that Malcolm “never abandoned” the “ideal.” Why then, would Malcolm in 2011 have to “redefine” self-determination and the “meaning of black power?” Because the political environment “appeared to many to be post-racial?” Who is it that thinks the environment appears post-racial? If Marable is speaking of white people, or any non-African American people, their opinions cannot be cause for “redefinition” of another people’s right. If he meant that Black people in the mass believe we live in a post-racial nation, he was a damn fool. But even if such Black folks existed, that would not require a redefinition of self-determination. African Americans would simply “determine” that they love post-racialism and want to do nothing to change it, as is their self-determinationist right.
Marable risks making himself look stupid simply to make the intended point that Malcolm and his Black Nationalism and self-determination talk are passé and should be dismissed except as historical artifacts. For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists. This is the purpose put to Malcolm by Peniel Joseph, the Tufts University professor of history and author of Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, which attempts to draw a straight-line historical connection between Malcolm X and the corporate politician in the White House.
“For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists.”
Manning Marable was up to the same trick. “Given the election of Barack Obama,” Marable writes on page 486, “it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens.” He does not explain why Black destinies have changed just because a Black Democrat who raised more corporate money than the Republican won a presidential election. How did that electoral fact entwine Black/white destinies in ways that did not previously exist? How were the Black masses empowered by Obama’s victory, and if they were somehow empowered, why would that draw them closer to whites?
It would have been better for Marable to have left out his last chapter of Reflections – it reflected badly on his powers of reasoning.
Finally, Marable attempts to create artificial space between Malcolm X and his direct political progeny, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. On page 403 he wrote:
“Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s.”
It is nearly impossible to conceive of a Black Panther Party had there not been a Malcolm X. Marable insults a generation of Blacks that came into political consciousness in the Sixties – a cohort to which he chronologically belonged. He substitutes his imagined, inferred, reinterpreted Malcolm for the man whose words and bearing called forth and virtually sculpted the youthful Party that debuted in the year following his death. Marable projects Malcolm as if he would be a stranger to the Panthers, with whom he would have to “negotiate,” when Malcolm’s life tells us it is far more likely that the emergence of a militant revolutionary nationalist youth movement that spoke his language – because they learned it largely from him – would compel Malcolm to take the struggle to an even “higher level.”
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Wed, 04/27/2011
BAR executive editor Glen Ford
http://blackagendareport.com/content/dragging-malcolm-x-obamaland
“Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become ‘race-neutral.’”
In packaging the life of Malcolm X for a wide audience, the late Dr. Manning Marable has presented us with an opportunity to reignite the debate over the meaning of Black self-determination, a discussion-through-struggle that effectively ended when the Black Freedom Movement became no longer worthy of the name. Unfortunately, it appears this was not Dr. Marable’s intention, since Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is largely an attempt to render useless the vocabulary of Black struggle. Essential terms such as “self-determination,” “Black nationalism,” “revolutionary” and “empowerment” lose their meaning, abused and misused in order to portray the great Black nationalist leader as inexorably evolving into a “race-neutral” reformer on the road to Obamaland.
This article does not address the complaints of those angered by Marable’s insistence that Malcolm X had a youthful homosexual relationship with an affluent white man, although it is shocking that Marable would throw this in the mix based on wholly inferential evidence and the author’s own psychological speculations. Our overarching concern is that Malcolm’s politics have been distorted by often clumsy, sometimes clever manipulation of the language of struggle, so that the politics of today’s left-reformers and Obama supporters, like Marable, appear vindicated.
Marable’s interventions in Malcolm’s mental processes begin in earnest on page 285, in the “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” chapter. It is early 1964, and Malcolm is contemplating a final break with the Nation of Islam. Marable takes over as the Black icon’s muse, deconstructing Black Muslim theological doctrine, as he speculates Malcolm must have struggled to do, and concluding that “a new religious remapping of the world based on orthodox Islam would not necessarily stigmatize or isolate the United States because of its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Instead of a bloody jihad, a holy Armageddon, perhaps America could experience a nonviolent, bloodless revolution.”
“Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody.”
While Malcolm was certainly questioning the catechism of inevitable, white man-scorching, Allah-directed Armageddon, it is another thing entirely to have Malcolm pondering a “bloodless revolution” in America. Malcolm derided those who conceived of revolution as anything other than bloody, and he was speaking in secular, not religious, terms. His best-known speech on the subject is “Message to the Grassroots,” October 10, 1963.
“There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. [The] only kind of revolution that’s nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”
Malcolm never did accept the notion of revolution as bloodless, nor did he recognize the fight against segregated public accommodations as revolutionary. But Marable tries to convince us that Malcolm must have contemplated a reformist political path in his mind, if not in practice. This is William Styron-style biography, as Morgan State University’s Dr. Jared Ball has suggested, with Malcolm forced to play Styron’s Nat Turner.
By 1964 Malcolm had made a strategic decision to support Black integrationist efforts, at least rhetorically, but there is nothing that leads us to think that integration had become his end-goal, or that he believed integration was revolutionary. He had decided to become part of the broad “movement,” in order to both influence and benefit from it. Marable would have us believe (page 298) that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations, or that he thought voting equals or leads to African American self-determination –some very faulty logic. Revolutionary Marxists have also seen the value in electoral politics at certain junctures, but that didn’t mean they stopped preparing for the forceful overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, Marable tells us that Malcolm’s movement activities “marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system.”
“Marable would have us believe that Malcolm’s public endorsement of desegregation and voter drives signified that he had scaled down his liberationist aspirations.”
The clear inference is that Malcolm was wilting in his desire to wipe “the existing system” off the map. What existing system does Marable refer to, precisely? White supremacy? Capitalism? Bourgeois electoral pay-for-play democracy? Marable keeps Malcolm’s mind vague and cloudy, although in his actual historical voice the “evolving” Malcolm hates capitalism and U.S. imperialism more intensely than did the “old,” Nation Of Islam Malcolm. Marable also introduces his trick word “empowered,” which he will use repeatedly in the book to confuse, rather than clarify. Blacks “could someday become empowered within the existing system” – to do what? To determine their collective destinies? To defy white majorities? To push aside the rule of capital? Marable tries to cage Malcolm, while assuring us that the revolutionary Black nationalist was “tentatively” becoming a liberal reformer.
Gratuitous, non-defensive violence, in Malcolm’s NOI talks, always came from the hand of Allah. Malcolm never rejected the right of self-defense; otherwise, he would not have become Malcolm the icon. Marable knew this, so he again invades Malcolm’s mind (page 302). “By embracing the ballot, he was implicitly rejecting violence, even if this was at times difficult to discern in the heat of his rhetoric.”
What kind of violence was Malcolm rejecting? Certainly, not defensive violence. And Malcolm had never publicly urged Blacks to commit unprovoked aggressions against whites. The purpose of Marable’s sentence can only be to show alleged movement by Malcolm toward some state of non-volatility, which we are expected to associate with political moderation: reform.
Marable grows so bold in pushing his back-to-the-future reformist fantasies, by page 333 he describes a Malcolm X who has become “race-neutral.” On May 21, 1964, Malcolm spoke at Chicago’s Civic Opera House, telling a crowd of 1,500 people, “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-America, nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods toward his real end – respect as a human being.” Malcolm went on the say: “Unless the race issue is quickly settled, the 22 million American Negroes could easily adopt the guerilla tactics of other deprived revolutionaries.” Not that he necessarily advocated that. (wink)
“Obamites cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are.”
Three days before he was assassinated, Malcolm said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now.” But, not to worry, Dr. Marable has the vision and the answer. He concluded that Malcolm had “made his race-neutral views clear in Chicago….” There is no rational basis for Marable’s amazing interpretation, other than he thought it moved his political story line on Malcolm’s evolution (or race-neutralization) forward.
The opposite of race-neutral, Malcolm lived and died a Race-Man, meaning simply that he put the Race first. As he wrote to an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood luminary who was disappointed that Malcolm was so decidedly non-race-neutral, “As a black American, I do feel that my first responsibility is to my twenty-two million fellow black Americans.” (page 368)
In the final “Reflections on a Revolutionary Vision” chapter, Marable speaks for himself – in the process confirming that he has been sneaking his own words, thoughts and politics into Malcolm’s head for four hundred pages. The Columbia University professor of African American Studies claims to know what Malcolm really, really wanted: “What Malcolm sought was a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States – not a violent social revolution, but radical and meaningful change nevertheless.”
Although the description is so vague, wishy-washy and – damnit!! – so soft and noncommittal as to bear no resemblance to any incarnation or developmental stage of Malcolm X, it fits the self-image of Manning Marable and his circle perfectly. They are the left Black Obamites, purported radicals who have a perpetual love affair with Power. Such people cannot imagine that others are not as enamored of Power as they are, and are eager to graft their own vacillations and corruptions onto others, by rhetorical hook or literary crook.
If this assessment seems harsh, it is certainly not as outrageous as Marable’s gall in superimposing his politics on Malcolm X. Even when Marable speaks in his own voice, he manages to intimate that Malcolm would agree with him. “If legal racial segregation was permanently in America’s past,” wrote Marable on page 486, “Malcolm’s vision today would have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political environment that appeared to many to be ‘post-racial.’”
“Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power.”
Marable appears to think these are heavy questions, but they’re actually products of an unfocused, but deeply biased, mind. First of all, legal segregation was defeated before Malcolm’s death, and no sane person at the time thought it would be brought back. Malcolm had time to find out what life was like for Black southerners without state-sanctioned Jim Crow. Marable’s question is badly put. If he means, What would Malcolm think about today’s levels of segregation, then the answer would be that the northern cities would remain very familiar to him in their racial composition, and are in fact blacker than in Malcolm’s day – which might tend to indicate to Malcolm that self-determination was an even more critical concern.
Still, Marable insists that Malcolm would be forced to redefine self-determination and its sibling, Black Power. But self-determination, as a foundational principle of relations among peoples, requires no redefinition. Marable understands it as “the right of oppressed nations or minorities to decide for themselves their own political futures,” and he agrees that Malcolm “never abandoned” the “ideal.” Why then, would Malcolm in 2011 have to “redefine” self-determination and the “meaning of black power?” Because the political environment “appeared to many to be post-racial?” Who is it that thinks the environment appears post-racial? If Marable is speaking of white people, or any non-African American people, their opinions cannot be cause for “redefinition” of another people’s right. If he meant that Black people in the mass believe we live in a post-racial nation, he was a damn fool. But even if such Black folks existed, that would not require a redefinition of self-determination. African Americans would simply “determine” that they love post-racialism and want to do nothing to change it, as is their self-determinationist right.
Marable risks making himself look stupid simply to make the intended point that Malcolm and his Black Nationalism and self-determination talk are passé and should be dismissed except as historical artifacts. For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists. This is the purpose put to Malcolm by Peniel Joseph, the Tufts University professor of history and author of Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, which attempts to draw a straight-line historical connection between Malcolm X and the corporate politician in the White House.
“For Marable and his Black left Obamites, Malcolm’s only other use is to somehow authenticate today’s reformers – and even President Obama! – as heirs to yesterday’s revolutionary Black nationalists.”
Manning Marable was up to the same trick. “Given the election of Barack Obama,” Marable writes on page 486, “it now raises the question of whether blacks have a separate political destiny from their white fellow citizens.” He does not explain why Black destinies have changed just because a Black Democrat who raised more corporate money than the Republican won a presidential election. How did that electoral fact entwine Black/white destinies in ways that did not previously exist? How were the Black masses empowered by Obama’s victory, and if they were somehow empowered, why would that draw them closer to whites?
It would have been better for Marable to have left out his last chapter of Reflections – it reflected badly on his powers of reasoning.
Finally, Marable attempts to create artificial space between Malcolm X and his direct political progeny, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. On page 403 he wrote:
“Had Malcolm continued to mainstream his views, it is unclear how he would have negotiated relations a few years later with the Black Panthers, a group born of much of the intellectual framework Malcolm had assembled in the early to mid-1960s.”
It is nearly impossible to conceive of a Black Panther Party had there not been a Malcolm X. Marable insults a generation of Blacks that came into political consciousness in the Sixties – a cohort to which he chronologically belonged. He substitutes his imagined, inferred, reinterpreted Malcolm for the man whose words and bearing called forth and virtually sculpted the youthful Party that debuted in the year following his death. Marable projects Malcolm as if he would be a stranger to the Panthers, with whom he would have to “negotiate,” when Malcolm’s life tells us it is far more likely that the emergence of a militant revolutionary nationalist youth movement that spoke his language – because they learned it largely from him – would compel Malcolm to take the struggle to an even “higher level.”
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Unequal Protection: Jefferson Versus the Corporate Aristocracy
Tuesday 19 April 2011
Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protection-jefferson-versus-corporate-aristocracy/1303196400
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
— Samuel Webster, 1777
Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.
The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.
The First Glimpses of a Powerful American Company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the Founders never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of George R. T. Hewes’s “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before the House of Representatives on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as the great staple of America. He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”1
In a National Gazette article on March 3, 1792, Madison wrote,
The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.2
The first large privately owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801 to 1809) and Madison (1809 to 1817) was the Second Bank of the United States. By 1830 the bank was one of the largest and most powerful private corporations and, to extend its own power, was even sponsoring its directors and agents as candidates for political office.
In President Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1833, he explicitly demanded that the bank cease its political activities or receive a corporate death sentence—revocation of its corporate charter. He said, “In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.”3
Jackson succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of all federal funds from the bank that year, putting it out of business. Its federal charter expired in 1836 and was revived only as a state bank authorized by the State of Pennsylvania. It went bankrupt in 1841.
Although thousands of federal, state, county, city, and community laws of the time restrained corporations vastly more than they are today, the presidents who followed Jackson continued to worry out loud about the implications if corporations expanded their power.
In the middle of the thirty-year struggle, on March 10, 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue:
With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable....they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.4
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the U.S. Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans
Shortly after George Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)
The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government and led to the creation—by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President John Adams (among others, including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay)—of the Federallist Party.
Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves Democrats and Republicans. Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party (which dropped the word Republican from its name in the early 1830s, today known as the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest and longest-lived political party), united in their opposition to the Federalists’ ideas of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.
During the Washington and Adams presidencies, however, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.
In 1794 independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”5
The whiskey distillers tarred and feathered a tax collector and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders and sent in General Henry Lee, commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To demonstrate his authority as commander in chief, Washington rode at the head of the soldiers in their initial attack.
The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the power of the Federalists wasn’t questioned again until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party won, in a contest referred to as the Second American Revolution or the Revolution of 1800.
In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans; and by 1832, as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized that they ceased to exist as an organized party, being largely replaced by the short-lived Whigs, who were themselves replaced by today’s Republican Party, organized in the 1850s.
Jefferson and Natural Rights
Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of “natural rights,” an idea that was at the core of the writings and the speeches of most of the Revolutionary-era generation, from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.
In Jefferson’s mind “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1690, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke put forth one of the most well-known definitions of the natural rights that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote, “All men by nature are equal...in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...”
As to the role of government, Locke wrote, “Men being...by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living...in a secure enjoyment of their properties...”
This natural right was asserted by Jefferson first in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, in which he wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all Men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”6
Individuals asserted those natural rights in the form of a representative government that they controlled, and that same government also protected their natural rights from all the forces that in previous lands had dominated, enslaved, and taken advantage of them.
The Three Threats
Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first and institutions were second. In his day Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans’ natural rights:
•Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elite groups like the Federalists)
•Organized religions* (he rewrote the New Testament to take out all the “miracles” so that in The Jefferson Bible—which is still in print—Jesus became a proponent of natural rights and peace)
•Commercial monopolies and the “pseudo aristoi,” or pseudo aristocracy (in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations)
Instead he believed it was possible for people to live by self-government in a nation in which nobody controlled the people except the people themselves. He found evidence for this belief both in the cultures of Native Americans such as the Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, which he studied extensively; in the political experiments of the Greeks; and in histories that documented the lives of his own tribal ancestors in England and Wales.
Jefferson Considers Freedom against Monopolies a Basic Right
Once the Revolutionary War was over and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn’t explicitly stipulate the natural rights of the new nation’s citizens, and it didn’t protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.
On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said bluntly that it was deficient in several areas:
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.7
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Alexander Donald, on February 7, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”8
Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the Constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large that they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government.
On February 12, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the U.S. Constitution was about to be ratified, but he also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw:
With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.9
By midsummer of 1788, things were moving along, and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison,
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.10
The following year, on March 13, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson about continuing objection to monopolies:
You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist....What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.11
All of Jefferson’s wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all of his views were shared universally.
The Rise of an American Corporate Aristocracy
Years later, on October 28, 1813, Jefferson would write to John Adams about their earlier disagreements over whether a government should be run by the wealthy and powerful few (the pseudo-aristoi) or a group of the most wise and capable people (the “natural aristocracy”), elected from the larger class of all Americans, including working people:
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.12
Adams and the Federalists were wary of the common person (who Adams referred to as “the rabble”), and many subscribed to the Calvinist notion that wealth was a sign of certification or blessing from above and a certain minimum level of morality. Because the Senate of the United States was appointed by the states (not elected by the voters, until 1913) and made up entirely of wealthy men, it was mostly on the Federalist side. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans disagreed strongly with the notion of a Senate composed of the wealthy and powerful.
“Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in the next paragraph of that 1813 letter, still arguing for a directly elected Senate:
Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves....I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
Jefferson’s vision of a more egalitarian Senate—directly elected by the people instead of by state legislators—finally became law in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, promoted by the Populist Movement and passed on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the political process by giant corporations.
Almost all of Jefferson’s visions for a Bill of Rights—all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army— were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified on December 15, 1791.
But the Federalists fought hard to keep “freedom from monopolies” out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arguably brought our nation and much of the world many blessings.
But as we’ll see in the way things have unfolded, some of those same principles have also given unexpected influence to the very monopolies Jefferson had argued must be constrained from the beginning. The result has sometimes been the same kind of problem the Tea Party rebels had risked their lives to fight: a situation in which the government protects one competitor against all others and against the will of the people whose money is at stake—along with their freedom of choice.
As the country progressed through the early 1800s, corporations were generally constrained to act within reasonable civic boundaries. In the next chapter, we examine how Americans and their government viewed the role of corporations, up to the time of the Civil War and its subsequent amendments.
Notes:
The First Amendment protected citizens from the predations of churches by guaranteeing freedom of religion in a new nation that still had states and cities that demanded obedience to and weekly participation in state-recognized churches or religious doctrine. The Ninth Amendment was a direct and clear acknowledgement of Jefferson’s concept of the natural right of humans to hold all personal powers that they haven’t specifically and intentionally given to their government of their own free will. It reads, in its entirety, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, April 9, 1789, in James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 5., ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900): 342–45.
James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=875&chapter=63884&layout=html&Itemid=27.
Andrew Jackson, fifth annual message to Congress, December 3, 1833, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3640.
James Madison to James K. Paulding, March 10, 1827, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1940&chapter=119324&layout=html&Itemid=27.
A statement by Albert Gallatin, who later became secretary of the Treasury after the Federalists lost power.
This early draft of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=306.
Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a7s12.html.
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Dumas, February 12, 1788.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 31, 1788, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=998.
Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl75.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl223.htm.
Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
Want a copy of the book? Receive "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became 'People' - And How You Can Fight Back" as a thank-you gift with a donation of $35 or more to Truthout.
Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protection-jefferson-versus-corporate-aristocracy/1303196400
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
— Samuel Webster, 1777
Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.
The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.
The First Glimpses of a Powerful American Company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the Founders never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of George R. T. Hewes’s “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before the House of Representatives on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as the great staple of America. He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”1
In a National Gazette article on March 3, 1792, Madison wrote,
The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.2
The first large privately owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801 to 1809) and Madison (1809 to 1817) was the Second Bank of the United States. By 1830 the bank was one of the largest and most powerful private corporations and, to extend its own power, was even sponsoring its directors and agents as candidates for political office.
In President Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1833, he explicitly demanded that the bank cease its political activities or receive a corporate death sentence—revocation of its corporate charter. He said, “In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.”3
Jackson succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of all federal funds from the bank that year, putting it out of business. Its federal charter expired in 1836 and was revived only as a state bank authorized by the State of Pennsylvania. It went bankrupt in 1841.
Although thousands of federal, state, county, city, and community laws of the time restrained corporations vastly more than they are today, the presidents who followed Jackson continued to worry out loud about the implications if corporations expanded their power.
In the middle of the thirty-year struggle, on March 10, 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue:
With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable....they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.4
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the U.S. Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans
Shortly after George Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)
The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government and led to the creation—by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President John Adams (among others, including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay)—of the Federallist Party.
Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves Democrats and Republicans. Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party (which dropped the word Republican from its name in the early 1830s, today known as the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest and longest-lived political party), united in their opposition to the Federalists’ ideas of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.
During the Washington and Adams presidencies, however, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.
In 1794 independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”5
The whiskey distillers tarred and feathered a tax collector and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders and sent in General Henry Lee, commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To demonstrate his authority as commander in chief, Washington rode at the head of the soldiers in their initial attack.
The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the power of the Federalists wasn’t questioned again until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party won, in a contest referred to as the Second American Revolution or the Revolution of 1800.
In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans; and by 1832, as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized that they ceased to exist as an organized party, being largely replaced by the short-lived Whigs, who were themselves replaced by today’s Republican Party, organized in the 1850s.
Jefferson and Natural Rights
Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of “natural rights,” an idea that was at the core of the writings and the speeches of most of the Revolutionary-era generation, from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.
In Jefferson’s mind “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1690, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke put forth one of the most well-known definitions of the natural rights that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote, “All men by nature are equal...in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...”
As to the role of government, Locke wrote, “Men being...by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living...in a secure enjoyment of their properties...”
This natural right was asserted by Jefferson first in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, in which he wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all Men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”6
Individuals asserted those natural rights in the form of a representative government that they controlled, and that same government also protected their natural rights from all the forces that in previous lands had dominated, enslaved, and taken advantage of them.
The Three Threats
Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first and institutions were second. In his day Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans’ natural rights:
•Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elite groups like the Federalists)
•Organized religions* (he rewrote the New Testament to take out all the “miracles” so that in The Jefferson Bible—which is still in print—Jesus became a proponent of natural rights and peace)
•Commercial monopolies and the “pseudo aristoi,” or pseudo aristocracy (in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations)
Instead he believed it was possible for people to live by self-government in a nation in which nobody controlled the people except the people themselves. He found evidence for this belief both in the cultures of Native Americans such as the Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, which he studied extensively; in the political experiments of the Greeks; and in histories that documented the lives of his own tribal ancestors in England and Wales.
Jefferson Considers Freedom against Monopolies a Basic Right
Once the Revolutionary War was over and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn’t explicitly stipulate the natural rights of the new nation’s citizens, and it didn’t protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.
On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said bluntly that it was deficient in several areas:
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.7
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Alexander Donald, on February 7, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”8
Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the Constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large that they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government.
On February 12, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the U.S. Constitution was about to be ratified, but he also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw:
With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.9
By midsummer of 1788, things were moving along, and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison,
I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.10
The following year, on March 13, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson about continuing objection to monopolies:
You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist....What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.11
All of Jefferson’s wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all of his views were shared universally.
The Rise of an American Corporate Aristocracy
Years later, on October 28, 1813, Jefferson would write to John Adams about their earlier disagreements over whether a government should be run by the wealthy and powerful few (the pseudo-aristoi) or a group of the most wise and capable people (the “natural aristocracy”), elected from the larger class of all Americans, including working people:
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.12
Adams and the Federalists were wary of the common person (who Adams referred to as “the rabble”), and many subscribed to the Calvinist notion that wealth was a sign of certification or blessing from above and a certain minimum level of morality. Because the Senate of the United States was appointed by the states (not elected by the voters, until 1913) and made up entirely of wealthy men, it was mostly on the Federalist side. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans disagreed strongly with the notion of a Senate composed of the wealthy and powerful.
“Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in the next paragraph of that 1813 letter, still arguing for a directly elected Senate:
Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves....I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
Jefferson’s vision of a more egalitarian Senate—directly elected by the people instead of by state legislators—finally became law in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, promoted by the Populist Movement and passed on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the political process by giant corporations.
Almost all of Jefferson’s visions for a Bill of Rights—all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army— were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified on December 15, 1791.
But the Federalists fought hard to keep “freedom from monopolies” out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arguably brought our nation and much of the world many blessings.
But as we’ll see in the way things have unfolded, some of those same principles have also given unexpected influence to the very monopolies Jefferson had argued must be constrained from the beginning. The result has sometimes been the same kind of problem the Tea Party rebels had risked their lives to fight: a situation in which the government protects one competitor against all others and against the will of the people whose money is at stake—along with their freedom of choice.
As the country progressed through the early 1800s, corporations were generally constrained to act within reasonable civic boundaries. In the next chapter, we examine how Americans and their government viewed the role of corporations, up to the time of the Civil War and its subsequent amendments.
Notes:
The First Amendment protected citizens from the predations of churches by guaranteeing freedom of religion in a new nation that still had states and cities that demanded obedience to and weekly participation in state-recognized churches or religious doctrine. The Ninth Amendment was a direct and clear acknowledgement of Jefferson’s concept of the natural right of humans to hold all personal powers that they haven’t specifically and intentionally given to their government of their own free will. It reads, in its entirety, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, April 9, 1789, in James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 5., ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900): 342–45.
James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=875&chapter=63884&layout=html&Itemid=27.
Andrew Jackson, fifth annual message to Congress, December 3, 1833, http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3640.
James Madison to James K. Paulding, March 10, 1827, http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1940&chapter=119324&layout=html&Itemid=27.
A statement by Albert Gallatin, who later became secretary of the Treasury after the Federalists lost power.
This early draft of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=306.
Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a7s12.html.
Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Dumas, February 12, 1788.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 31, 1788, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=998.
Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl75.htm.
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl223.htm.
Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc.
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Harry Houdini exhibit to appear at Skirball Cultural Center
This is the first major art show to explore the showman. Props and devices from all of Houdini's major tricks are on hand. The exhibit will include contemporary art inspired by the escape artist.
Barbara Isenberg, Special to the Los Angeles Times
April 24, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-houdini-20110424,0,2265092.story
Reporting from New York —— Ehrich Weiss, the Budapest-born son of an immigrant family, ran away from home at 12 to join the circus. Not the least bit interested in becoming a rabbi like his father, he wanted to be an entertainer.
Although Weiss was already an accomplished trapeze artist in a neighborhood circus, he soon turned around and headed back home. But it was only a matter of time before the whole world knew who he was. Reinventing himself as Harry Houdini, the rabbi's son became a celebrity as an escape artist, and, by the time of his death in 1926 — on Halloween — a legend.
Handcuffed, chained, manacled, put in a straitjacket or locked within small containers, the nimble Houdini was dropped into water, dangled in the air and even stuffed into a coffin and buried. A master of marketing, he often performed for free in front of newspaper offices to enormous crowds — and newspaper photographers — on the eve of his paid performances.
He would even hire his own cameramen to film his escapes for use in his lectures, says art curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport.
"In his day, Houdini was so famous not only because he was a master showman on stage but also because he was able to promote his work to a broad public," says Rapaport. "His significance endures because of the visual record — the posters, photographs, film and magic apparatus — that we have today."
Highlights of that documentation constitute "Houdini: Art and Magic," opening at the Skirball Cultural Center on April 28. Organized by the Jewish Museum in New York, where it closed March 27, and guest curated by Rapaport, it is the first major art museum show to explore the life and legacy of showman Houdini. Props and devices from all of Houdini's major tricks are on hand, including his straitjacket and water torture cell, plus photos, paintings, posters, pamphlets, books, travel diaries and even a family bible.
The exhibition weaves together Houdini then and now. "The photographs, posters and films of Houdini's era are extraordinary," says Rapaport, an independent art curator. "I knew that artist Matthew Barney had used Houdini as a muse and alter ego in his work, and I began to wonder if other artists working today were also inspired by Houdini. When I visited artist studios, talked to dealers and did archival research, I discovered several other artists working today who also found Houdini a very important source."
So in addition to Art Nouveau-era posters and promotional materials from Houdini's time, Rapaport has brought in Houdini-inspired contemporary art from such artists as Allen Ruppersberg, Matthew Barney, Raymond Pettibon, Christopher Wool and Whitney Bedford. Film footage made by or starring Houdini is augmented by movie clips of the icon portrayed by such stars as Tony Curtis, Guy Pearce, Paul Michael Glaser and Harvey Keitel as well as Norman Mailer.
Few lives lend themselves so well to the screen. Immigrating to the U.S. in 1878 with his family, Houdini's father fared poorly as a rabbi in Appleton, Wis., and the family moved several times as Rabbi Weiss sought work. The Weiss family landed in New York in 1887, where teenage Ehrich took on various jobs, including uniformed messenger boy and a necktie cutter. It was at the necktie factory that Ehrich, by then 17, and a fellow employee formed a magic act, calling themselves the Brothers Houdini.
Just a few years later, the partner was gone and newly named Harry Houdini went on to meet and marry fellow performer Bess Rahner. The newlyweds, now known as the Houdinis, traveled America launching, among other things, Houdini's famous metamorphosis act: Houdini would be bound and locked into a trunk, then escape to be onstage as the trunk was opened and Bess was found inside. It wasn't long until vaudeville impresario Martin Beck discovered their act, and Bess started moving into the background. Houdini, "The King of Handcuffs," was on his way.
Small and muscular, Harry Houdini created more and more demanding feats as he became the superhero familiar to readers of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime" or Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" — and to museum-goers. Borrowed from the Hammer Museum for this exhibition, for instance, is artist Whitney Bedford"s painting "Houdini (Upside Down)," a life-size portrait of Houdini's straitjacket trick, which Bedford says is done with unstable oil and ink that will eventually disappear into the unprimed paper she used to create it.
Key to any exhibition of Houdini, of course, is the apparatus he used for his escapes, and Skirball galleries will display the many objects of his obsession, nearly all of them the originals. "His peers were using exotic props and showgirls, and Houdini used things his audience immediately recognized," says Rapaport. "He took common, mundane objects like needle and thread, a steamer trunk and milk can and endowed those everyday objects with showmanship and mystery. He as the performer gave the objects great relevance to magic."
Taking a visitor through the exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Rapaport indicates she's mounting an art exhibition, not giving away any Houdini secrets. At the Skirball, as at the Jewish Museum, Houdini's milk can, water torture cell, packing trunk and other devices will be shown on stage-like pedestals, each of them centered in a theatrically inspired pool of light. "We wanted to provide drama by putting the light on them, "says Rapaport, smiling. "It's what Houdini would have done."
Houdini's feats were often symbolic to the huge numbers of immigrants and working class people flocking to see him, adds Rapaport. "When we look at his performances, he is constantly escaping from handcuffs or prison cells or some other constraint. You can imagine that immigrants to America who would have escaped and left their homelands due to racial or religious or social oppression could only think of those performances as somebody getting free of constraints. Not only would that have been a very powerful symbol to these new Americans, but the fact that Houdini was himself an immigrant was additionally powerful."
He also came across as a man of the people, says biographer Kenneth Silverman, author of "Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss." "Houdini was a terrific democrat — he played to everybody. He would come onstage in his shirtsleeves and talk to the audiences. He performed free for giant crowds; there were 100,000 people watching him in St. Louis when he did his straitjacket escape in front of the newspaper building there."
Film footage of such escapes will be prominent in the Skirball show, with archival footage projected onto walls. The straitjacket escape will be done on an enormous canvas sheet hung from the Skirball gallery's high ceiling and visible from the exhibition's very front.
At the Skirball, as at the Jewish Museum, there will be references to magicians like Penn and Teller, Doug Henning and others who Rapaport says talk openly of their admiration for Houdini. Teller, along with novelist Doctorow and others, is also quoted extensively in interviews with Rapaport in the show's accompanying book, "Houdini Art and Magic": "If you ask magicians which magicians matter, they'll mention Houdini's namesake, [Jean Eugene] Robert-Houdin," Teller says. "But for the public, if you say, 'Name a magician,' they'll name Houdini, even though he's been dead since 1926."
The Skirball is also originating a companion exhibition, "Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age."
"Far from the only Jewish magician, Houdini represents an avenue of employment that minorities were able to pursue with extraordinary success," says sleight-of-hand artist and historian Ricky Jay, author of the forthcoming book, "Celebrations of Curious Characters" and a lender to the show. "By the end of the 19th century, many of the most celebrated magicians in the world were Jewish."
"Masters of Illusion" has about as many objects in it as the Houdini show, says Skirball curator Erin Clancey, but will be in a smaller gallery.
"We're creating a very dense and saturated environment much like a magic parlor itself," says Clancey. "It is designed to honor and highlight magicians whose stories are not so well known as Houdini's. Many of these magicians were quite celebrated and successful in their time."
To keep the project manageable, Clancey has zeroed in on about 30 magicians, including Houdini as well as his friends, colleagues and competitors. Introductory materials go back as far as the 16th century, says Clancey, but the core of the show "narrows in on magic's golden age from 1875 to 1948 in part to give context to the Houdini story and in part because it's the most interesting time. After about 1920, movies, radio and television began to eclipse the earlier touring illusions and stage shows."
But visitors shouldn't expect to leave the Skirball with privileged information about how Houdini and company crafted their illusions. "These are carefully guarded secrets," says Clancey. "The taboo against sharing secrets with the general public was taken very seriously by magicians in the golden age and is so today. In our exhibitions, there will be no secrets revealed."
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