Bob Lord

It’s one thing when a right-wing cable station is pumping out propaganda. Well, it’s actually a really bad thing, but at least its impact is contained to the looney viewers who watch it.

It’s quite another when the country’s leading newspaper is doing so.

I’ve been paying reasonably close attention to the situation in the Ukraine over the past year and change. The situation itself is disturbing, but the news coverage is far more so. If I relied only on the New York Times for my information, I’d believe Vladimir Putin is the devil incarnate and the crisis in the Ukraine is entirely of Russian creation.

But I’ve of course consulted other sources and, having done so, find the analogy to Orwell’s 1984 in Robert Parry’s Truth-out post, The New York Times’ Orwellian View of Ukraine, depressingly accurate. Parry picks up on the Times’ insistence on total demonization of any country or leader not 100% aligned with the U.S.:

Read more

One of the best lines I’ve heard in a presidential debate came from Dennis Kucinich, at the only debate I ever attended live. Other candidates were explaining (that is, rationalizing) their earlier support for the Iraq war, and how their positions had changed. They had just gone through a similar exercise on another issue, so, when it finally was his turn to speak (and he wasn’t getting many turns) Kucinich asked the audience: “Wouldn’t you prefer a President who gets it right the first time?”

Kucinich’s intended takeaway from his line was not that he was smarter than the other candidates about the Iraq war or any other issues of the day. Rather, it was that when the “issue of tomorrow,” arose, as it inevitably would, he would be most likely to get it right.

So, in the euphoria over the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision, I wonder how many of those engaged in the early goings of the contest for the Democratic Party’s nomination have noticed this: Sanders: I was ahead of the curve on gay rights. In 1996, Sanders cast one of the few no votes on the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the more odious pieces of anti-gay legislation, which ultimately was held unconstitutional.

When you compare the Democratic candidates on the issues of the day, their similarities greatly outweigh their differences, although Hillary’s expression of her positions tends to be more carefully scripted. But what about the issues of tomorrow? You know, those issues that we don’t see coming, but which will smack us in the face in the next few years.

Here’s the thing about the Presidency:

Read more

What do wealthy Americans do after they’ve finished eating the poor? They start on the middle class, of course. So goes the ugly process of wealth and income redistribution in America.

A little background. A while back I wrote about the process by which income in America concentrates at the top in Inequality’s Final Victims: The Affluent 9 Percent. In that post, I described what I called the “proportionate sharing pattern.” Although it’s not a precise formula, the distribution of income in America follows a general pattern where the share of the top 10% in our total income is roughly equal to the share of the top 1% in the income of the top 10%, which in turn is roughly equal to the share of the top .1% in the income of the top 1%, and so on. So, for example, if 50% of our national income is flowing to the top 10%, which happens to be close to today’s reality, then about 50% of that, or about 25%, will be flowing to the top 1%, and 50% of that, or about 12.5%, will be flowing to the top .1%.

As I described in that post, once we reach a 50% sharing pattern, the income share of the bottom 9% of the top 10%, which I referred to as the “affluent 9%”, no longer is increasing, and most of the increase in the income share of the top 1% is flowing to the top .1%.

Okay, that’s the clinical side of it. Here’s the real life side, which is far uglier:

Read more

Cross posted from Inequality.org

[Note to readers: This one is from earlier in the week, but because of travel I’m just now able to post it.]

It sounds crazy, but a major distraction in our debate about inequality in America today is inequality itself.

I’m referring here to the concept of inequality in the abstract. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe inequality is necessary to a well-functioning society. Without inequality, the logic goes, there would be insufficient incentives for hard work, innovation, and education.

Once this frame of logic enters the debate, it’s hard to move beyond it. Current levels of inequality do get aired, but the discussion often gets mired in questions of relative morality. Yes, $100 billion is a ton of wealth for one family, the Waltons, to control, but what about all those savings their business model brought to tens of millions of Americans? From that perspective, is it unfair?

On top of that, there’s an emotional distraction. Many Americans who are not super-rich themselves nonetheless dream of being super-rich one day. To them, inequality is not only necessary; it’s beneficial.

Want to remove these distractions from the debate?

Read more