Author: JLG

Between 1951 and 1963, individuals in the top federal tax bracket were subject to a marginal tax rate of over 90%.

While there is no chance that those in the top income bracket will suffer any such indignities in 2017, there is at least one group that will be subject to forking over about 90% of their total income to the government.  And these are some of the poorest paid workers in the country — graduate students.

Graduate students often work half time as teaching or research assistants, and their salary is barely enough for a single person to scrape by on.  However, as part of their deal, they are typically given tuition remission, which, at private institutions, is likely to be worth a good deal more than their actual salary.

The tuition remission is not currently deemed to be income according to the tax code.  That may be about to change.

Let’s see how this affects a Ph.D. student at, say, the University of Chicago.  Without tuition remission, the student pays $48,000 a year to the university.  Say that the student earns $12,000 over eight months as a TA.  If the tuition remission is considered income, that leads to a tax bill of $8,054.  Toss in Illinois tax of $2,865, and the poor (literally) student gets to see about 10 cents of every dollar earned.

It’s obvious that a revenue-neutral tax bill that cuts the rates of the richest individuals is going to have to increase the rates of many people who aren’t among the richest in the country.  If the bill is written cleverly enough, it can shift as much of that burden as possible to groups of people who tend to vote for Democrats.  (That principle was put to work in Wisconsin recently when a special tax was imposed on Prius owners.)

This also seems to be part of a general attack on higher education in this country.  Campuses started to be viewed in the 1960s as hot-beds of radicalism, and the “Make America Great Again” voter of 2016 is the anti-intellectual heir of the “America, Love It or Leave It” voter of 1968.

“Thank you for joining us this morning.  I know it’s been a long night for you.”

The senior Romney adviser nodded, “That’s for sure.”

“So, what exactly happened last night.”

“Well, the Obama people had their firewall in place, but it turned out to be a Maginot Line.”  (This was a slip.  Of course, in staff sessions, they always referred to the Obama firewall strategy as the Maginot Line, but to say it in public was something of a gaffe, since carrying the analogy forward cast the Republicans as the Nazis.)  “We always thought we could outflank them.”
The night had begun well enough, from the standpoint of Obama’s supporters.  The early returns from Virginia looked good, and much more important, so did Ohio.  North Carolina went for Romney, which was disappointing, but not unexpected.  With Obama’s leads in Wisconsin and Iowa holding, and Nevada comfortably in the Obama column, things were looking excellent.  Colorado took a while to fall in place, but it too went for Obama.  The firewall held, and then some.  There were just those three states that were still too close to call.

“We always figured that the election would be decided in the last 48 hours.  We knew we’d have a lot of money to spend on a last minute ad blitz.”  (Was that another slip?  What was it with all these Nazi words.  Really, I need to get home and get some sleep, thinks the Romney guy.)

“But you’ve been running ads for months now.  Why did you think that ads in the last few days would suddenly make a difference?”  

“Well, you see, we felt that the maximum effectiveness of a late ad campaign would be to sway two and a half or three percent of the voters.  So if we could stay within five or six percentage points in the final weekend, we could pull it out.  But there were two conditions for us to achieve that level.”

“Two conditions?  What were those?”

“Well, it had to be a state that didn’t have early voting.  If you run ads and half your audience has already voted, those ads aren’t going to be as effective as they should be.  And, most important, it had to be a state where we hadn’t run a lot of ads before.  After a while, people just tune them out.”

“And you hadn’t been running ads in Michigan and Pennsylvania?”

“No, we hadn’t.  We pulled our ads in those states in September.  And everybody thought that we were giving up on those states, but we weren’t.  We knew that if we pulled our ads, the Obama campaign would allocate their resources to their firewall states, and we could come back into those states on the last weekend, and clean up.”

“And clean up you certainly did.  We called both Michigan and Pennsylvania for Romney this morning at about 4 am.  And what about Florida?”

“Well, we always knew Florida was going to be close.  We just hoped that we’d end up on top.”

“Any special strategy there?”

“Not really.  Governor Scott did some good work, though.”

Last year, the Republicans in Wisconsin passed the most sweeping and controversial legislation in many a decade, the bill that ended collective bargaining for most state employees.  The reverberations of the legislation go on, and the upcoming recall elections may be seen by many as an opportunity to restore worker rights in the state.  In fact, the election, important as it is, provides no such opportunity, and the closest that Wisconsin voters will ever get to having an election that revolves around the collective bargaining issue came and went with this week’s Democratic primary.
Scott Walker did not run on a platform of ending collective bargaining.  It is a matter of dispute whether he barely mentioned it or did not mention it at all when he was running for governor, but it can safely be said that collective bargaining was not a key issue in the 2010 gubernatorial race.

More surprisingly, the issue won’t be much discussed in the recall elections either.  The ads so far have all been about the economy.  Barrett ads emphasize that Wisconsin has suffered the worst job losses of any state in the country over the last year.  Republican ads will tout the increase in Milwaukee’s unemployment rate since Barrett became mayor.  Nobody is talking about collective bargaining.

It’s very odd.  The months of demonstrations in Madison, the entire impetus for the recall effort — it was all about collective bargaining rights.  But now that the recall race is in full swing, the issue has snuck off and vanished.  Why?  I think it is because the issue is settled.  Collective bargaining is gone and won’t be coming back.

There are a lot of reasons for that.  One is that with Republicans controlling the State Assembly, there is no prospect of repealing last year’s legislation.  And with the Republican redistricting now in place, there is no prospect of Democrats controlling the State Assembly any time in the next decade.

Also, Barrett is not known as a friend of the unions.  While protests were in high gear in Madison, Barrett was keeping a low profile in Milwaukee.  And, the dirty little secret is that if Barrett becomes governor, he will probably be grateful to Scott Walker for getting rid of the unions.  Barrett will have budgets to balance as well, and he isn’t going to get tax increases through a Republican legislature.  It’s going to be a tough job, and getting the unions out of the picture makes it a little less tough.

I believe, though, that the deepest reason why collective bargaining is no longer being debated is that Republicans have won the argument, and I want to examine the case they made, and why it has worked.

The fundamental argument against public employee unions is actually plausible.  The argument is that unions funnel money to their candidates who, if elected, then return the favor by approving overly generous contracts.  When the union’s candidates are finally defeated, the good government party steps in to end this corruption.  

That is the argument that the Republicans have used, and I think it’s been accepted by the majority of the public.  This is in spite of the fact that it bears no resemblance to anything that actually occurred in Wisconsin.  For the last 50 years, the Wisconsin legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, have routinely been approving contracts negotiated with public employee unions.  The provisions of these contracts were never controversial until Scott Walker politicized the process.

The second reason that the Republicans won this issue has to do with the Wisconsin economy in general.  Wisconsin was one of the states that had a strong manufacturing sector, and that sector has been in decline for decades.  A lot those jobs used to be union jobs, and those jobs have gone to Asia or Latin America.  The manufacturing jobs that remain have survived only because unions made huge concessions in order to keep the factories from closing down.  So the good union job, which used to be commonplace in the Wisconsin economy, is largely a thing of the past.  Most workers have lousy health plans that they pay a lot of money for.  They probably don’t have a retirement plan at all.  Now the argument the Republicans use is this:  “The teachers, they have a nice pension plan, and they get the summers off besides.  And who is paying for it?  You are!  You don’t have your own pension plan, but you are contributing to somebody else’s, somebody who doesn’t even work the whole year!”  So, the Republicans have been able to capitalize on the resentment of a lot of underpaid Wisconsin workers.

Finally, the Republicans have been successful for a reason that would not have occurred to me — the negative feelings that people harbor toward teachers.  When collective bargaining was revoked for most state workers, the police and fire fighters were excluded.  I thought at the time that that was because police and fire fighter unions are more likely to contribute to Republican candidates than other public employee unions, but there is a deeper reason for the exclusion.  Police and fire fighters are popular.  Teachers are a different story.  Most adults have horrible memories of school.  Education consists of large stretches of boredom punctuated by the periodic imposition of anxiety and humiliation.  All orchestrated by teachers.  Students hate their teachers most of the time.  Parent don’t like teachers either.  The teachers aren’t doing enough for their kids.  Or the teachers are telling the kids stuff that undermines what the parents are telling them at home.  Going on the offensive against teachers was a real winner for Scott Walker.

I don’t think Tom Barrett will defeat Scott Walker next month, but even if he does, it will be a pyrrhic sort of victory.  The election that mattered was in 2010, and the effects of that election will always be with us in Wisconsin.

There is an anniversary today, and I thought somebody should write something about it.  One hundred years ago, Paul Goodman was born.  During his 60 years, Goodman was known as a sociologist, therapist, educational psychologist, political theorest, activist, urban planner, critic, and queer theorist (long before there was such a concept).  He wrote poetry, short stories, plays, and a novel.  I don’t think there has ever been any American intellectual quite like him for the breadth of his interests and contributions.

I am hesitant to post a diary on Goodman since there is so much of his work with which I am unfamiliar.  But perhaps most of Goodman’s readers are in that category.  Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that “only the dead know Brooklyn,” since Brooklyn was too vast and diverse for anyone to know it in a single lifetime.  I think the same can be said for Paul Goodman.
A few of his books remain in print.  From time to time, collections of his essays appear and are eagerly read by small audiences.  It’s not quite fair to say that Goodman has been forgotten.  But he’s been largely forgotten.  Goodman himself perceived the limits of his own fame when he whimsically imagined his obituary:

Were I still more industrious,
and didn’t get so sick and tired,
instead of half a column,
my obituary in the Times would run a column,
with an anecdote,
and a quotation from Growing Up Absurd

(I’ll be quoting from Goodman’s poems in this diary, but since I lent out my copy of his collected poems some time ago, and the book was never returned, the quotations are from memory and are likely not totally accurate.)

Growing Up Absurd was Goodman’s “big” book, and I don’t know how many people read it anymore.  The issue was how education is supposed to prepare us for life, and that’s hardly an issue that has lost its relevance.  But try to enter the book today, and you are caught off your guard, and likely repelled, by an expression which no one would use today, or for the last 35 years or so.  Goodman’s thesis is that society does not offer roles that are challenging, that require the full use of one’s talents to do something useful.  In other words, or, more specifically, in Goodman’s words, America at mid-century had ceased to provide the opportunity for “man’s work.”

It wasn’t until years after I read the book that I began to think that perhaps the expression “man’s work” was something other than an unfortunate anachronism.  Goodman the social critic was merging here with Goodman the psychologist (and his deepest contributions have probably been in the field of psychology, in being one of the developers of gestalt therapy).  And it was Goodman the psychologist who saw that overlaid on the more general social dilemma, there was the particular problem that men found the workplace to be emasculating. When Goodman writes about a jobs program in New York state to channel undereducated youth into productive activities (and out of criminal activities), and why such a program was doomed to failure, you come to realize that the choice of words “man’s work” was exact.

Goodman is not an easy author to read.  One gets the sense that he was constantly generating ideas.  Before he had succeeded in writing down one idea, other ones were popping into his head and struggling to get out, and the result is often disjointed and nonlinear.

In the last years of his life (he died in 1972), Paul Goodman was a major figure in the anti-war movement.  But the movement often exasperated him.  He faulted its leaders for intellectual laziness, and for distorting (or ignoring) the historical record.

He had his heroes in politics, among them Hugo Black and Adlai Stevenson, and I’d like to leave with poems he wrote about them shortly after their deaths.   Of Hugo Black, he wrote,

Thanks to a couple of rational decisions by the Court,
that struck down censorship and (brrrrr) its chilling effects,
I receive by mail a gentle stream of booklets of poetry,
by young men,
in love with each other,
good news I read with pleasure,
though, naturally, wistfully.

I used to write the same myself, a hundred years ago,
(my muse is hard to chill!)
but publishers and lin-o-typers
wouldn’t touch it with a tongs,
much less the post office.

Hugo Black it was,
the champion of Cupid.
Now he is dead and gone,
and cannot be replaced.

And of Stevenson, whose last post was as ambassador to the UN, where he had to defend the Johnson Administration’s Vietnam policies.

We told the old ambassador to quit.
“These brutal lies they make you tell defame us and you.”
“No, I am on the team,” he said,
and was unhappy saying it.
Now he has dropped down on a London street,
and everyone is weeping over him.
He said, “It’s not the way we play the game,
to quit to make a point.”

The flag is at half mast in Springfield.
A bombadier loudly reasons for us in Asia.
Our sons will be commanded to the senseless war
but many will not go.
This does not change, generation after generation.
This has been no worse, but there may be no more.

————-

I’ll add one more poem, because I like it and because it shows Goodman’s whimsical side, and because it memorializes my hometown, and we are so happy not to be ignored that we revel even in putdowns:

“Man, I’m shook to see you in a commercial.
I thought you was opposed to advertising.”
“This isn’t advertising, this is newscasting, dammit.
These are good.
National Biscuits Triscuits
(crunch crunch)
Not so good as nooky or Vivaldi
(crunch crunch)
But better than Ingmar Bergman or any academic friends that I
(crunch crunch crunch crunch)
ever made in Milwaukee”

I wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon or so blatantly, but I wasn’t really that surprised when the Administration pulled the plug on EPA ozone regulations.  

Why did this happen. and what does it all mean?
I think we can dismiss the possibility that the issue was decided on the merits, that the Administration became convinced by the Republicans’ contention that the way to stimulate the economy is to increase hospitalizations for respiratory disease.  The move was political in intent.  Perhaps the Republicans’ argument was polling well, and the Administration wanted to coopt the issue.  That’s not really plausible, either.  If you are doing something because the polls show it is popular, you don’t do it, in classic bad news fashion, on the Friday before a holiday weekend.

What has happened is that the environmental movement has become politically irrelevant.  And it goes back to the last election.

I think that the 2010 election will be recognized as the most significant election since 1860.  There is an optimistic analysis of the election, which I don’t really buy, that there are two electorates now — a large, liberal leaning electorate that shows up in Presidential years, and a smaller, right-wing electorate that votes in the midterms.  Even if you believe this, you have to deal with the consequences of the 2010 election, which are that the winners rewrite the rules for elections.  So when the quadrennial voters show up next time, many will find that they have been stripped of their right to vote, and those who can still vote will discover that their votes no longer have any impact on who controls the House or their state legislatures, because of aggressive redistricting.

Here is how I think about what happened in 2010.  A third party, which had not existed before, became the majority party, by taking over the party that had been the minority party, driving it to the right ideologically, and somehow in the process increasing that party’s support.  It doesn’t make any sense that such a thing could occur, but it did.

And something else happened as well.  The party that was the majority party, in fact, the party that had achieved the largest legislative majority of any party in more than a generation, ceased to exist.  There had since the late sixties been a party that supported strong environmental laws and widespread consumer protections.  That party had also been, from long before the sixties, the party that supported the labor movement.  That party, the majority party in the country, simply disappeared after the 2010 elections.

What changed everything, what made 2010 possible, was the Citizens United decision.  There can no longer be a majority party that supports positions that industry opposes.  And since majority parties want to regain the majority after an electoral reversal, the choice between corporate contributions and the support of environmental activists becomes a no-brainer.

The environmental movement has become politically irrelevant.  There can be a scientific consensus on what levels of ozone are harmful to human health.   Such inconvenient truths, along with others, are best ignored if they are likely to be harmful to a party’s political health.

But there is no getting around this inconvenient truth  — for environmentalists, the party is truly over.

Wisconsin has become the focus of national attention because the Governor used the budget process to try to dismantle public employee unions.  Had he not done so, and had only used the budget process to make spending cuts, Wisconsin would have remained unremarkable.  Lots of states have budget deficits.  Programs are being cut all over.

But I wanted to focus on the budget cuts themselves.  And particularly how they affect Scott Walker’s core supporters.  It’s easy to see that the cuts will be devastating for people who rely on state services.  But those are mostly poor people, not people who were likely to have voted for Scott Walker last November.
Instead, we look at a Scott Walker family, two adults, two kids, nice house in a suburban community, family income of about $125,000.  The main issue for them?  Taxes.  They pay too much.  They won’t stand for paying any more. Scott Walker’s their man.

So, lately they have been hearing about the effect of the cuts in the state budget.  At first, there is some unbelief.  What, you mean government services will have to be cut?  But I thought the budget deficit was because of those unions extorting money from the legislature.  I thought we just fixed that problem.

The Wisconsin budget deficit has been estimated at $3.6 billion, over the next two years, which comes to about $300 per capita per annum.  Since the per capita income of Wisconsin is over $30,000, this could be raised by an increase in state income tax rates of 1%.  But, of course, that is unthinkable.  Our suburban family of four couldn’t possibly absorb an additional tax bill of $1200.

But what, exactly, will be the impact of these cuts on these typical Walker voters.  The cuts will be especially deep for the University of Wisconsin system.  Now, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is among the better state universities around.  That isn’t likely to be true much longer.  Our family wants their kids to get a quality education, and because it will affect the entire future of their children, they will spend whatever it takes to give their children a quality education.  If, when their kids are ready for college, UW-Madison turns out to no longer be the quality college it once was, that means sending the kids to out-of-state schools.  About $25,000 extra per year, or $200,000 more than a UW-Madison would cost for both of their children to get an undergraduate degree.  Ouch!

But that’s a bit in the future.  Let’s say the daughter, Brianna, is a freshman in high school, and the son, Justin, is in middle school.  The state budget will cut grants to local governments.  There is a summer recreational program at the local high school that the children used to enjoy, but it looks like that’s being cut.  Well, that’s a shame, but the children were getting too old for that anyway.

Oh, and it likes the local library is going to be closing.  That’s too bad, but we can order books on-line if we need them.

Brianna has been in the school band, but that’s going to be cut as well.  And, what’s this?  The high school is cutting out foreign language instruction?  That’s outrageous!  Brianna was taking Spanish, and Justin seemed interested in his heritage language (which is German — this is Wisconsin, after all).  The parents write a letter to their school board representative, complaining about the cuts to foreign language.  In response, they learn that the school board is committed to providing quality education to all the students of the district, and that it was a painful decision to cut the foreign language programs, but they had to work within their budgetary constraints.  The school board member went on to commend the children for their interest in learning another language, and suggested that the parents might purchase Rosetta Stone software packages for them.

Not having a better alternative, and wishing to encourage their children in their educational pursuits, the parents order the Spanish and German packages from Rosetta Stone, adding about $1200 to their credit card balance.  But, wait.  Wasn’t that the amount that they would have been taxed to balance the budget?  And for that $1200, wouldn’t they have had an actual language teacher for their kids, and a high school band, and a local library, and a summer rec program?

Scott Walker won by promising to create jobs.  The only jobs I see created in this story are perhaps at the Rosetta Stone headquarters, but that’s in Virginia.  The funny thing about Wiscnson tax revenue is that for the most part, it gets spent in Wisconsin.

What game were we playing when the health bill was making its way through Congress?  Was it eleven-dimensional chess?  I lose track of the number of dimensions.  I’m still trying to solve Rubik’s cube, myself.  But the game, whatever it was, was won.  At least in the dimension that consists of passing legislation.

However, in the other ten dimensions, the game was lost.  Let’s check out what happened or is likely to happen in some of those dimensions.
The Invisible Dimension

The Obama administration dedicated most of its political capital and a year or so of its time to passing the health reform bill.  That commitment of resources meant that other things were not being done.  At the end of the day, there was a health care bill, a tangible and substantial achievement.  But what we won’t ever see is everything that might have been done had that effort been spent elsewhere.  There could have been more popular or more important legislation, things like a bigger stimulus or a bill addressing global warming.  (And if there are historians around in 100 years, the one question that they will ask about the Congress that is about to expire is, How could they have ignored climate change?  In hindsight, the decision to push health care and ignore global warming will be viewed as an instance of world-historical lunacy.)

The Political Dimension

November wasn’t supposed to turn out the way it did.  Sure, the Democrats were going to lose seats in the House, that was a given.  But losing control of the House wasn’t supposed to happen, and a year ago nobody thought it was going to happen.  In the Senate, given the luck of the draw of what seats were up this round, it wasn’t certain that the Democrats would lose any seats at all.

The health reform bill had a particular toxicity to it.  It was a bill that was grudgingly accepted by its supporters and loathed by its detractors.  Not a good combination.  And the longer the bill was debated, the less popular it became.  What killed the Democrats in November was the much remarked upon enthusiasm gap.  Health reform wasn’t the only reason that Democrats went down, but it would hard to find a single issue in which the enthusiasm gap was more starkly exhibited.

The Dimension of Time

The Democrats have particularly bad timing.  This was not a good year to lose an election, particularly not to lose an election massively on a national scale.  What is about to happen is unprecedented.  Software has been around for a few years to make partisan redistricting virtually an exact science.  There has never been a wave election in a redistricting year when this technology existed.  Going into this year’s election, the map tilted against the Democrats.  A 50-50 split of the national House vote already meant that the Republicans would come out with a majority.  That tilt will become quite a bit more pronounced.  The Democrats didn’t just lose the House for 2 years.  They lost it for a decade, minimum.

The Pyrrhic Dimension

OK, so a lot of Democrats lost their seats.  At least, they lost it for a good cause.  They achieved something that eluded us for half a century.  

Well, sort of.  Except that the health reform bill that was passed probably could have been passed 40 years ago.  The unsuccessful efforts over the decades were attempts to get better bills passed than the Obama bill.

OK, but it’s still something, and it’s something significant.  Except that it may never take effect.  As we have learned, the bill had no severability clause to permit specific sections of the bill to be struck down by the courts, without jeopardizing the entire bill.  This is incredible.  Isn’t this boilerplate language?  Isn’t it in any bill of any signficance?  And earlier versions of the bill had a severability clause, which was somehow stripped out before final passage.

Moreover, the bill doesn’t take effect until after Obama’s current term ends.  It is entirely possible, maybe even likely, that both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch will be controlled by Republicans at that time.  The bill could well be repealed before it even takes effect.

A Paradoxical Dimension:  No Politics is Local

Wisconsin is a pretty middle-of-the-road state.  It’s generally a toss-up state in presidential elections, and no Republican since Reagan has received Wisconsin’s electoral vote.

What happened in 2010 is extraordinary.  Wisconsin essentially overnight became a Tea Party state.  Extremely conservative Republicans were elected in the statewide races for senator and governor.  The races had completely different issues, but the results, broken down county by county, were essentially identical.  It was as if voters had just ignored all the issues and all the candidates, and just voted D or R.

Moreover, both houses of the Wisconsin legislature, which had been under Democrat control, shifted massively to the Republicans.  Wisconsin voters who were angry about the health reform bill came out in droves to vote against Obama.  Except that Obama wasn’t on the ballot.  So they voted against every Democrat in sight, be it Russ Feingold or their Democratic state rep.

And once again, the loss of Wisconsin can’t be reversed.  I don’t know if Wisconsin has ever had a partisan redistricting.  There hasn’t been one recently, as Wisconsin is the sort of state where power doesn’t gravitate too strongly to either side.  That’s over now.  The district lines will be drawn so that barring some dramatic change in political affiliations, the Republicans will have essentially permanent control of the state legislature.

A One-Point Dimension

There are people who live in the lost dimensions.  I am one such person.  Next week, when Wisconsin’s government is handed over to the Republicans, there will be dramatic changes.  The people who will be immediately affected are the state employees.  The governor-elect has made it clear that he intends to cut the benefits of state employees.

There are different numbers floating around.  The governor-elect has discussed making state employees pay for 12% of their health benefits.  He has also said that the state will recoup a certain number of millions of dollars from reducing health benefits of state employees.  The math doesn’t work.  A 12% contribution would not come anywhere close to providing the budget reductions the governor has suggested he would realize.

Suppose you take the governor’s figure of how many actual dollars would be taken away from employee health benefits, and divide that by the number of state employees.  The result is a reduction of benefits so dramatic that Wisconsin state employees like me will be reduced to Walmart employees.  Wisconsin will be offering its employees a health benefit at a cost that few of them can afford on the salaries they are being paid.  The practical effect is that state employees will be stripped of their health insurance.

So how does it look in my personal dimension?  Before health reform, I had health insurance.  As an indirect result of the bill, I may lose that insurance.  

I can’t handle eleven-dimensional chess.  I’m going back to my Rubik’s cube.

Booman wrote a thoughtful piece on this site some time ago about winning the argument (I don’t remember if that’s exactly what he called it).  But the point was that there are certain issues, like voting rights, that were once hotly debated, and are now settled.  And Booman’s point was that eventually these issues are settled in the favor of the liberal viewpoint.

I want to make a distinction that is seldom made between liberalism and progressivism and to argue that the opposite is true about the progressive viewpoint.  The argument is settled, and the progressives lost.
The heydey of progressivism was the era from the 1880s to the end of the Wilson Administration.  There were different issues which were tossed together to characterize progressive positions, but the defining character of progressivism was an attitude toward large corporations that ranged from distrust to loathing.  This is the attitude that united politicians as disparate as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Bob LaFollette.

2010 should have been a banner year for progressives.  It is hard to conceive of a more perfect storm.  There was the overriding issue of the continuing economic mess that had been brought about by grossly irresponsible corporate behavior.  Then the BP oil rig blew up, causing the greatest environmental disaster in American history.  And as the cherry on the sundae, the CEO of BP turned out to be a clownish caricature of corporate insensitivity.

And yet, I found myself wondering all summer, where is the outrage.  If you run the highlight reel of anti-BP outrage, it consists of a single episode of a now-unseated Congressman (and a Republican at that) pointing out to the CEO that if his company had been named Japanese Petroleum, he would have been obligated to perform seppuku.  Just compare the level of outrage this year against BP and against ACORN, and that will tell you all you need to know about the state of the progressive movement in Americn politics.

So, in a year tailor-made for a progressive, anti-corporate argument, that argument was never advanced in any congressional race of which I am aware.

The argument, basically, has been lost.  Lost in a final sort of way, the way that the argument in favor of Prohibition has been lost (although whatever the evils of alcohol were in 1910 are no less present a century later).  The very idea of a corporation suggests to me environmental degradation, underpaid workers, corruption of the political process, destruction of community-based businesses, and a host of other evils.  But I am so far out of the mainstream on this that my views are no consequence in a political sense.  

The prevailing view of the corporation is that the corporation produces wonderful goods (I find even the use of the word “goods” to describe things like Big Macs to be suspect, but what can you do?).  They create jobs.  They have made America innovative, prosperous, and strong.  In the story that we tell ourselves, the good corporations were hounded by the evil unions and evil regulators who made it impossible for the corporations to function anymore, and so they had to send their jobs out of America.

Where I live, in Wisconsin, the biggest issue this year was a railroad line that the Federal government wanted to build between Madison and Milwaukee.  Imagine this:  In a state with alarmingly high unemployment, an infrastructure project that Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd could only dream of falls into the lap of the state, promising an influx of hundreds and millions of dollars and thousands of jobs, and the voters wanted no part of it.  If the mantra of Republicans in the 80s was “No New Taxes,” today it has become “No New Infrastructure.”

Let’s do a little thought experiment.  Suppose that it turned out that high-speed rail was actually profitable, and some large corporation was going to invest a billion dollars or so to build this very rail system.  Does anybody doubt that the response would have been totally different?   People would be ecstatic, they would be jumping over each other to praise the corporation and welcome them to Wisconsin and hand out any tax breaks they could come up with.

Any politician who takes the progressive, anti-corporation line of argument is going to be marginalized.  The only national figure to make the progressive case in contemporary politics is Ralph Nader, who is not only marginalized, but has become perhaps the most reviled figure in politics.

I put the score at 534-1 because of Bernie Sanders.  Maybe you could count Kucinich and make it 533-2.  Maybe there are a few others hiding in the woodwork.  It doesn’t really matter.  A progressive today is a fringe and ineffectual figure.  The argument has been lost.

Reading Booman today, I came to the realization that a normal lifespan is long enough for a person to lose everything.   The world changes in such a way and at such a pace that one is bound to witness the disappearance of whatever makes living in this world interesting and rewarding.
So, I learned here that one of our large public universities SUNY-Albany has decided to scrap Classics, French, Russian, and Theater.  Universities everywhere are in financial distress.  They are dumping unneeded ballast so they can stay afloat.  That unneeded ballast, though, happens to be the university’s soul.

I attended college in the seventies, and then dropped out, and finally dropped back in and got my degree two years ago.  So my perspective covers some ground.  And I found that both times I was in college, the most exciting courses were in the Classics Department.  I don’t think that this is a coincidence.  The people who devote their lives to that type of scholarship acquire a mindset that is critical, incisive, insightful, and playful all at once.  There was nothing in my college experience to match the intellectual excitement of being led through a text by Plato or Euripides in the original.  And I was not a Classics major.

Of course, it all makes perfect sense.  Students need to get job skills, and don’t have time for much else.  The universities don’t want to spend limited resources on departments that nobody majors in.  So they disappear.  I expect the next to go will be the libraries.  Very expensive, and why keep them up?   Students do their research on the internet these days.  And what percentage of the volumes in the  libraries’ holdings are even taking off the shelves in a given year?  I’d guess less than 1%.

But universities can not exist — they make no sense — if they see their purpose as providing pre-professional training.  You don’t need the expense of dormitories and gyms to provide professional training.  You don’t need to have leaders in the field explaining basic concepts to 18-year-olds.  You don’t need a classroom for what can be provided just as well and much more cheaply on line.  By jettisoning precisely the services that only a university can provide, the university is abetting its own demise.

I’ve probably spent too much of my life learning languages so that I could read books that I thought were too important to me to read in translation — Plato, the Bible, Proust.  I don’t think students are wrong for wanting some payoff for the amount of money they have to spend for their education.  But I feel that the world is becoming narrower, and I feel sorry for the students who won’t experience the useless yet wonderful pleasures that lie in the texts they will not be given the opportunity to read.

If it turns out that there was sometime between 2001 and 2009 when global warming hit the point of no return, when humanity was doomed to extinction or a marginal existence because we made the planet uninhabitable, and that we could have saved ourselves if we had acted before that point, but that nothing could save us after we passed it, then we would know that George W. Bush was the worst President ever.  Of course, we wouldn’t know it for very long before we expired, but at least we’d know it.  Barring that, I don’t think we can consider Bush as bad as at least two of his predecessors.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a thread where people listed their choices of the six best Presidents.  That’s all well and good, but as a glass half empty kind of guy, I prefer to focus on the worst Presidents.  Moreover, I was taken aback that the two worst Presidents snuck into several of those lists of the good guys.  So, to set the record straight…..
Presidents who get us into needless and catastrophic wars go to the head of the list.  Bush, of course, meets this criterion, but there were worse… much worse.

1.  The worst President, by a clear margin, was Woodrow Wilson.  After campaigning for re-election in 1916 on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” Wilson wasted no time after his re-inauguration in getting us into that war that he kept us out of.  The war that was only the worst and most pointless bloodletting that the European continent ever indulged in.  Then, for good measure, he inflicted on the nation the most flagrant suppression of civil liberties of the 20th century.  Speaking out against the war was a ticket to prison.  See under Debs, Eugene V.

Wilson, though, was not just a bad war President.  He was an even worse peace President.  He went off to Paris in 1919 to become one of the principal architects of the Peace Treaty that paved the road to the hell that was most of the rest of the 20th century.

2.  The second worst President was Lyndon Johnson.  While the Vietnam War turned out not to have unleashed the sorts of world-historical cataclysms that unfolded in the aftermath of WWI, it was quite horrific enough in its own right.  And, like Wilson, Johnson got us deep into the war only after winning re-election by cynically campaigning as the peace candidate.

Of course, there was the Great Society, there was the civil rights legislation.  But those who argue that this exonerates LBJ are missing the point.  The mid 60s represented a unique moment in American history.  The inspirational leadership of JFK and Martin Luther King, combined with the legacy of the New Deal and the Marshall Plan, helped to create a liberal supermajority.  This was at just the time when a demographic bulge was coming of age, a generation that was better educated, more idealistic, and more commited to public service than previous generations.  The opportunity was there to transform American society.  And far from harnessing that opportunity, Lyndon Johnson smothered it in its cradle.

There is also Johnson’s role in the cover-up of the truth about the Kennedy assassination.  We now know that on his first full day on the job, LBJ received information from J. Edgar Hoover that almost certainly indicated that a conspiracy was behind the assassination.  (Hoover told Johnson that the FBI had tapes of someone impersonating Oswald who visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in September.)  So Johnson established the Warren Commission and got Allen Dulles and Richard Russell (among others) to work from the inside so that the country would not know the truth.  A thoroughly despicable Presidency.