Why Romney can’t defend capitalism
When Fox News worries out loud that Mitt Romney’s failure to account for his time at Bain and his personal tax affairs may represent his Swiftboat moment, it is plain the Republican presidential bid has careened offtrack. The Bain attacks are “part of a strategy by Team Obama to turn Romney’s biggest perceived strength – his business experience – into his biggest weakness,” writes Fox’s Juan Williams. “Romney needs to come clean or his hopes of being president will end long before Election Day.”
How has Romney come so close to bungling his big chance, even before he has been nominated by his party? He appeared to be in an ideal position to turn his experience as a businessman into a winning political narrative. During these jobless economic doldrums, Romney might have become a champion of capitalism, explaining how private enterprise works and how it creates jobs.
His problem is that his time at Bain is not a classic story of heroic capitalism at work. Instead of an old-school entrepreneur with a good idea who raises funds to employ Americans to make a product that sells successfully around the world, Romney took distraught companies, charged them hefty fees, fired workers, and set the stumbling enterprise off in a new direction, laden with debt. Some companies prospered, some failed. Some gave Americans new jobs, some sent jobs overseas.
Romney’s tax embarrassment follows a similar arc. No one likes paying taxes, but conservatives have made tax dodging a religion, so Romney was in prime position to explain how taxing people too much can drag an economy down and how the rich, if lightly taxed, spend freely and create jobs. But the intricacies of Romney’s vast wealth are far from simple and his personal tax avoidance measures beyond ingenious.
There may be good reasons to hold a bank account in a tax haven like the Caymans, but most Americans don’t have reason to resort to such ruses. They suspect that those who help avoid the payment of taxes due in America are unpatriotic, even un-American. So how does Romney set minds at rest on his tax record? He doesn’t; he insists he will only issue two tax returns.
Many have a visceral dislike of Romney and his kind of well-heeled Republican. He is too rich, too smooth, too handsome. His family is too large and their vacations too extravagant. His privilege since birth has set him apart from ordinary Americans. His business at Bain was largely slaughterman’s work, taking unsentimental decisions about shedding jobs, incurring debt and closing plants. His private fortune is so substantial he employs armies of accountants to pick holes in the tax laws. He is prepared to say and do anything to get elected. Except for one thing: He won’t – or can’t – explain why capitalism is good.
Preaching the virtues of capitalism red in tooth and claw (to paraphrase Tennyson) is a hard sell at any time. Right now, in the midst of the most prolonged recession since the Great Depression, capitalism is in the self-immolating period Joseph Schumpeter cheerily dubbed “creative destruction.” If you believe what’s on the label, stronger, leaner companies will emerge from the wreckage, better fitted to the new competitive marketplace.
Room for bigot chicken
In New York City, when a developer wants to do something controversial like, say, build an Islamic cultural center over what was once a Burlington Coat Factory store somewhat near where the World Trade Center stood, the mayor wisely defers to the local zoning board. Michael Bloomberg took the high road in 2010, effectively telling opponents of the development to get over it. They may never, but the project continues at the pace its budgeting will allow, and it’s not something New Yorkers discuss much anymore.
Two years later, the Chick-Fil-A restaurant chain, controlled by the billionaire Cathy family, which also portrays itself as uniformly conservatively Christian, is the big urban development controversy. The 1,600-restaurant Bible Belt chain is trying to go national, but has found itself unwelcome.
Boston Mayor Thomas Mennino sent the Cathys a letter saying: “There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it.” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said that “Chick-Fil-A values are not Chicago values,” in support of a city alderman who promises not to permit the restaurant to open in his district. Many devout Muslims also oppose same-sex marriage; but this is no reason to oppose the construction of mosques or restaurants.
All of this because Chick-Fil-A’s owners, long public supporters of conservative political causes, told us what we already know, which is that they don’t believe that same-sex couples should be allowed to wed. The public breaking of a toy licensing agreement with the Jim Henson Co brought the issue back to the forefront. Henson’s heirs want nothing to do with the chain, as is their right. Same-sex marriage supporters are talking boycotts, as they should. But Mennino and Emanuel aren’t just criticizing the Cathys, they’re exiling them, and exile is a step too far.
Chick-Fil-A describes itself as “an equal opportunity employer” that “does not discriminate in employment decisions based on any factor protected by federal, state or local law.” The Federal government has not taken any action to dispute that claim, though some individuals have sued the company over the years. The chain also has not been accused of discriminating against homosexual customers, which would violate federal law. Were those lines to be crossed, Mennino and Emanuel would have a point. Mennino and Emanuel object not to the conduct of the business, but to the ideas of its owners.
Mennino and Emanuel are not going to change the minds of socially conservative businesspeople. At best, they might get some of them to hide their beliefs, in much the same way that homosexual members of the military had to hide their lifestyles under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It took decades to get DADT out of the Pentagon. Progressive mayors shouldn’t be trying to resurrect the idea in civilian life, even inadvertently.
The slippery slope here is obvious. Social conservatives have the right to do business. If we try to bar them all from the marketplace, we will have to ban oil companies and pizza companies and entertainment companies. Our politicians have to accept that people have different ideas about stuff. It’s hard enough to plan an economy without disqualifying all of the people who adhere to disagreeable moral positions.
If the chicken people agreed with equal treatment under the law for everybody, there would be no debate.
At some point… people of good will have to stand up and be counted. Even if that means a few confederate fast food restaurants aren’t built in the union north.
Who’d want to host the Olympics?
Londoners are greeting the Olympics with all the enthusiasm of a child awaiting a root canal. The government has warned those unable to book coinciding holidays not to travel anywhere beyond walking distance of home as Communist-style “Olympic lanes” whisk dignitaries past the interminable traffic the Games cause. During the Olympics, London will be run under a curious kind of corporate martial law. Thousands of troops will handle security to make up for private contractor G4S’s staffing “shambles”; missiles have been placed atop public housing; an Orwellian “brand police” is sweeping the city to ensure no businesses other than 11 official sponsors use words like “gold,” “silver,” “bronze” and even “London.”
Putting up with this misery is supposedly justified by the commercial windfall, tourist bonanza and enhanced prestige the Olympics create. One Tube station poster depicts a man who, having identified alternative transport routes, is jauntily reading a newspaper as he whizzes past an escalator logjammed with athletes: The headline is “London 2012 Games a huge success, save British economy.”
But as Wednesday’s woeful economic data confirmed Britain’s slide into a double-dip recession, it’s worth questioning whether hosting the Olympics is worth the $14.5 billion cost. In strict financial terms none ever actually make money. Some host cities have turned profits since Los Angeles was the first to do so in 1984, escaping the crippling public debt incurred by cities like Montreal and Vancouver. But, as a recent report by Goldman Sachs points out, “most countries … have treated the cost of constructing facilities and infrastructure, together with security and other ancillary costs, as being separate from the cost of running the Games themselves.”
In other words, it’s possible to declare an operating profit while incurring huge losses on major expenditures that may not be recovered for decades. Beijing trumpeted a $171 million profit made on operating costs, while neglecting to mention the $40 billion-dollar infrastructure buildup it made ahead of the 2008 Games. The $5 billion to $6 billion the London Olympics earn will not even begin to cover the cost of infrastructure and security alone. Even if it did, half of revenue is split among International Olympic Committee members.
Like many major sporting tournaments, the Olympic Games often create embarrassing white elephants. Beijing’s Bird’s Nest remains largely unused. The Olympic stadium in Montreal proved such a drag on city finances that the Quebec government imposed a $2 billion tobacco tax to help pay it off – and that took 30 years. Facilities often have no conceivable use beyond the two weeks of the Games, like Athens’ softball stadium and sailing marina. Since the world seems likely to remain in the economic doldrums for some time, chances of future facilities being purchased or converted are low: The London village already looks like a combination of a garish British seaside holiday resort and Pripyat, the Ukrainian ghost town abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster.
There’s even less evidence that the Olympics or other major sporting events drive tourism long term. Regular tourists are kept out for the duration of the tournament, and host cities are usually either known well enough to potential visitors and investors – London is probably more beholden to foreign capital than any other major Western city – or lack the attractions to make them a viable destination in the first place, like the Ukrainian mining town of Donetsk, host of several Euro 2012 soccer matches.
If anything, the Olympic spectacle is often so grotesque that it brings out the worst aspects of its hosts. London 2012 is exposing to the world traditional British foibles like nightmarish transport infrastructure, overzealous policing and failed privatization schemes. Beijing did the same for China’s aggressive nationalism and choking air pollution. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics will need a lot more than a Romneyesque crusade to shed the image of a rampantly corrupt Russia: One road has cost $7 billion, which Russian Esquire calculated was enough to cover the same 48-kilometer stretch with 9 centimeters of Louis Vuitton bags or 21 centimeters of foie gras.
for Remant, I am happy that people like you dont want to come to Europe, being UK or anywhere else, we dont need arrogant ignorants like you.
I think this article miss a big point, in many cases hosting the Olympics is a great way to bring youngsters closer to sports with great social and economics benefits.
it s also a shame that the organizers missed that point too with tickets far too expensive and too many tickets allocated to corporate entertainement.
Let 17-year-olds vote
LOWELL, Mass.—We are teenagers – 17-year-old teenagers – and at a time of increasing voter apathy, we want to vote. We’ve come up with a way to encourage our peers to become good life-long voters and combat decreased voter turnout – by lowering the voting age to 17 in our hometown’s municipal elections here in Lowell.
Our bill, currently in a statehouse committee, would provide for a city ballot question in November 2013 to let Lowell voters decide whether or not 17-year-olds can vote in its municipal elections, and only its municipal elections. If yes, 17-year-olds will be able to vote in 2015, for the first time anywhere in the country. Lowell has led in historic efforts before: from the Industrial Revolution to Mill Girl strikes to having the first co-ed high school in the country. We are ready to lead again.
We started the voting age movement after a 2009 youth-led city council candidates’ forum held by a nonprofit youth development organization, the United Teen Equality Center (better known as UTEC, where we serve as youth organizers). Before the forum, teens surveyed hundreds of their peers to find out what the top issues were. Youth representation was among the top three issues. All city council candidates were asked if they would support lowering the voting age to 17 in our local elections; 18 out of 19 said yes.
In 2010, the Lowell City Council successfully passed a home-rule petition that was sent to the Statehouse. With its favorable passage from the Joint Committee on Election Laws, our bill has now made it further than any other bill of its kind. Now our bill has to go through both the House and Senate floor to reach the governor’s desk by July 31. After the governor receives our bill, it will come back to Lowell for a final vote.
It seems illogical for 18 to be the voting-age threshold. Eighteen-year-olds are either starting work or going to college, often in a city far from home. At best, they find that their first opportunity to vote locally is by mailing in an absentee ballot. Seventeen-year-olds are still at home, likely still in school and definitely still affected by their local politics. They are directly impacted by local policies affecting our schools and community. Seventeen-year-olds are surrounded with the support they need to be coached through practicing their civic rights. They are in the last stage of their lives before they leave and begin adulthood. It is at this age that the next generation should be taught and guided through voting.
There’s evidence that 17-year-olds are intellectually ready to vote. A research study done in 2011 by Rutgers University at Camden professors Daniel Hart and Robert Atkins found that 16- and 17-year-olds score the same on questions about political knowledge as 21-year-olds. Seventeen-year-olds are usually seniors in high school and have usually completed their history or civics requirements. They have a leadership role in their schools and are busy preparing for their futures; voting should be built into this stage in life.
The question is not who should have the right to vote. The question is whether people are wise enough to vote.
There is nothing unreasonable about requiring people to have adult experience before voting. When the 21 year limit was enshrined in the 18th century it was not unusual for people to get get married at 14. Many were self supporting at 14. By that standard, since most people are not self supporting until 20 or 22, making the age for voting 27 would be quite reasonable.
Where is Obama’s promised minimum-wage hike?
During the 2008 campaign, presidential candidate Barack Obama made a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2011. Promises like this one inspired a generation of young voters, excited long-neglected progressive voters and gave hope to millions of his supporters across the country.
President Obama ran a campaign of soaring rhetoric and uplifting ideas. Amidst two unpopular wars, a rapidly deteriorating financial crisis and the wildly unpopular presidency of George W. Bush, Americans were desperate for a change. He was viewed as a “transformational” candidate, a president who would turn the page on the stagnant politics of Washington.
It is now four years later, and there has been no increase to the minimum wage. There has been no congressional vote, much less a whisper from the White House on the minimum wage.
President Obama understood the importance of this issue in 2008. The merits of raising the minimum wage haven’t changed since then, but his political courage has. The inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage has been in decline since the 1960s, losing over 30 percent of its value and leaving hard-working Americans struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. At the same time, the cost of living has continued to rise steadily, further eroding the value of a minimum wage. Had the minimum wage kept pace with inflation since 1968, today it would be at $10.57 per hour, instead of the current federal minimum wage of $7.25.
Studies show that the minimum wage could help jump-start the economy and increase consumer spending. A 2011 study by the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank found that for every dollar increase to the hourly pay of a minimum wage worker, the result is $2,800 in new consumer spending from that worker’s household over the year. And a 2009 study from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that simply by raising the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour, $60 billion in additional spending would be added to the economy over a two-year period.
Opponents of raising the minimum wage claim that it would increase unemployment. In fact, most studies not funded by front groups show that raising the minimum wage has no or little impact on unemployment. Also, small business has already received 17 tax breaks during the Obama presidency.
The Barack Obama of the 2008 campaign would have stood up against these distortions. Instead, President Barack Obama’s absence of leadership on this issue is shameful. Four separate pieces of legislation have been introduced in the current Congress to raise the minimum wage, by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. (Illinois, 2nd District), Representative Al Green (Texas, 9th), Representative Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut, 3rd), and Senator Tom Harkin (Iowa). The Democratic leadership in Congress and the White House has ignored these bills.
Above I said “I don’t believe inflation is inevitable UNLESS I accept that governments are forever beyond the control of the people they theoretically “serve”. I can’t do that AND greet each day with hope in my heart for “the future”.”
Here’s a fascinating analysis of what has happened over the last century with wages, stocks and bonds, together with some logical speculation as to the near future.
http://pimco.com/EN/insights/pages/cult- figures.aspx
We need to make campaign finance a civil rights issue
Two Supreme Court decisions (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission and, later, American Tradition Partnership v. State of Montana) and an appellate court decision (SpeechNow v. Federal Election Commission) are fundamentally transforming our political system and our democracy to a degree we may not grasp until the results of this year’s elections become clear. Never has our electoral process been more captive to vast – and mostly anonymous – sums of money from a handful of large corporations and wealthy individuals.
For all the scorn rightfully heaped on Citizens United, however, it’s actually SpeechNow v. Federal Election Commission that has been most destructive. SpeechNow allows not-for-profit organizations to accept unlimited contributions from individuals for independent expenditures, and this decision birthed both “super PACs,” which can accept unlimited contributions but must disclose donors, and “tax-exempt organizations” which are not subject to the disclosure requirements that apply to candidates, parties, PACs and super PACs.
Under these recent court decisions, a handful of immensely wealthy individuals and CEOs and boards of directors of large corporations now legally direct tens of millions of dollars to funding an overwhelming stream of political ads on behalf of candidates from whom they obviously expect some sort of fealty once the candidates are in office.
Before we as a nation succumb to the complete abandonment of fairness and balance in our election process, we need to stop the bleeding. Institutional investors, policymakers and voters alike should demand administrative policies, legislative action and voluntary steps by corporations to dramatically limit corporate political spending.
To start, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in conjunction with the FEC, should use its existing powers to force public disclosure of all corporate political contributions and lobbying expenses. The SEC is obligated to compel public companies to disclose whatever expenditures are material to the companies and, under its same public interest doctrine, to similarly compel disclosure of actions which might materially affect shareholders’ decisions to invest. While political contributions might not be material measured against the totality of earnings, their disclosure, I would argue, are material items of disclosure for the investing public. This disclosure requirement should also include contributions made through a “bundler” or intermediary.
Separate and apart from any regulatory action the SEC might take, executives should be pushed to not use company funds to influence elections. The obvious voices to help advance this cause are the nation’s public pension funds.
Unfortunately, I have become convinced that no combination of this current Congress, the SEC and aggrieved shareholders will be enough to sufficiently rein in corporate political contributions and their undue influence. The potential payoff for these corporations in preferential tax breaks and weakened regulations and oversight is simply too great.
If we are going to forbid large corporations the right to voice opinions, we should forbid the media the right to voice opinions. There is no logical reason to give Westinghouse the right to voice political opinions through it’s subsidiary CBS and forbid Ford Motor Company to right to buy political ads.
Terror born from rage
Thus far, nothing of reliable note has been revealed about the motives of James Holmes, the arrested suspect behind the Dark Night Massacre, where a dozen people were murdered and others injured at an after-midnight premiere of the latest Batman movie. What we do know suggests intricate planning, and the planning suggests a rationale, irrational though it may be.
Holmes carried a shotgun, a high-powered pistol, an assault rifle and a knife. He was reportedly costumed in body armor and might even have employed smoke or tear gas grenades. Holmes’s apartment was deftly booby trapped, stymieing police search efforts. In custody, the suspect has so far been unrevealing.
The explanation here might be as simple as a psychotic break with reality, as when Jared Lee Loughner murdered six people and shot 19 in Tucson as he attempted to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords last year. Or there might be more of a narrative behind this, as there was with high school outcasts Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 13 people during an assault on Columbine High School in 1999.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not believe Holmes has any connection to terrorism, but for 71 people shot and hundreds who were at risk, terror is no longer just a synonym for radical Islam. Holmes fits the Bureau of Justice Statistics definition of a “spree killer,” which would include all workplace and school shooters, or highway snipers like John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, convicted of a Capitol-area killing spree in 2002.
Writer Mark Ames is the co-founder (with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi) of The eXile, the first alternative newspaper in Moscow, formed in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As an underground journalist in the era of Russia’s oligarch-fueled transition toward capitalism, he witnessed all manner of criminality and violence. In 2005 he wrote Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond. Ames contends that what he calls rage killings amount to acts of rebellion against a callous and uncaring society, where the perpetrators of these crimes have been subjected to lives of humiliation and unrewarded sacrifice.
To Ames, the frequent rage killings since the 1980s are symptoms of a sick society. Schools and workplaces have been the focus of most, and this is no surprise. These are places where people feel compelled to go and where the hierarchies of our society are made the most personal. For example, he tells us about Joseph Wesbecker, who killed eight co-workers and himself in a rage assault on the Standard Gravure printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky. Contemporary accounts dismissed Wesbecker as somebody who had snapped. Ames dug into the story and interviewed former colleagues years later to reveal that the unpopular Wesbecker had been purposefully assigned to work a dangerous and noxious piece of equipment called “the folder,” which emitted fumes that were causing his physical health to deteriorate. Wesbecker was assigned this task because he was the least popular man in the office. He was, by some accounts, tortured because his co-workers didn’t like him. In Ames’s telling, Wesbecker earns some understanding, if not sympathy.
What turned Ames onto writing about this topic was the reaction of his own friends to the Columbine killings. There was some surprise, he recalled during an AlterNet interview about his book, that something like Columbine hadn’t happened sooner. Bullied and berated adolescents can only take so much, particularly if they feel like they are looking forward to adulthoods with more of the same. Might Wesbecker have been Dylan Klebold three decades later, trapped in social and professional isolation?
I wonder if the rage comes from being a collaborative monkey. As Viktor Frankl observed most of us are nice, a few on the other hand are nasty enough to end up “persona non-grata”. The uncle we don’t talk about because of his beastly nature. For the nice collaboration is a powerful competitive force for our species. Predators, both intra-species (those destined to be persona non-grata) and inter-species tend to shy away from small ad-hoc teams of nice people. Both, intra and inter species predators, see a lone person as easy prey. Our intra-species predators find 12 and more safe prey. For us nice there is safety in numbers and that number is about 5. Fairness is key to this collaborative advantage as a species. It allows more than two to work together and not be at all concerned about sharing the spoils of the effort. Again this does not scale up in numbers. It has to be small, 4 or 5 and maybe as much as 6. But fairness is key, not that every one agrees with what is fair. This is a very late in the evolutionary process forward. And some are not fair at all. So our DNA goes berserk if in perceives an unfair act. It will commit its host to suicide to do damage to what it believes is the intra-species predators actions. This can be easily faked by liars, those who should be persona non grata but instead get paid $1,000 an hour, who use false flags type tactics to get the DNA of nice people doing what they can not do on a sustained basis, kill. Only those nasty types, that Frankl saw rising the occasion, can kill on a sustained basis. Fairness is our species competitive advantage that is exploited by our intra-species predators, nasty people they are. The nasty are here for the good of the species, should we need an intra-species cull. It is their nature. That is their lot. You can read about them in Robert Hare’s book “Snakes in Suits, when psychopaths go to work, as Oil Executives and Cable News types with the highest ratings.
Gender, capital and ‘the crowd’
It’s an old, and at this point weary, tale that women entrepreneurs receive far less venture capital than men. Women currently own 46 percent of all American small businesses, generate $1.3 trillion in revenue and employ 7.7 million people. Yet Dow Jones Venture Source says that of the U.S.-based companies that received a round of venture capital financing in 2010, roughly 6 percent had a female CEO and 7 percent had a female founder.
Against this backdrop, it is interesting to look at a new crowdfunding law that was passed as a provision of the JOBS Act in April. The law, which will be effective in early 2013, is an exemption to existing securities law that for nearly a century has enabled only wealthy individuals or banks to offer entrepreneurial capital. Kevin Lawton argues against the arcane securities law in his book, The Crowdfunding Revolution, saying that it stymies the democratization of investing.
The crowdfunding law frees entrepreneurs to accept capital from “the crowd.” Under the new law, people who earn less than $100,000 in annual income may invest up to $2,000, or 5 percent of their income (whichever is greater), in businesses of their choosing via approved intermediaries. People who earn more than $100,000 can invest up to 10 percent of their income.
The power of the crowd has demonstrably attracted women already. I recently polled the three preeminent crowdfunding websites: Kickstarter, Crowdrise and Indiegogo, to find out how many women-led projects their sites host. Crowdrise, a platform that raises money exclusively for charities, estimates that about half of its users are women. Kickstarter told me they don’t have the information. Indiegogo had more to say, pointing out that in 2010, 42 percent of its successfully funded ventures were led by women.
These online platforms offer “gifts” in return for their investments – things like, at Kickstarter, “a copy of what’s being made, a limited edition or a custom experience”. Investors under the new crowdfunding law will actually receive equity in the businesses they support.
While we cannot know if women entrepreneurs will also pursue support from the crowd until the JOBS Act is effective next year, there is evidence that they may be inclined to do so. The essence of crowdfunding — seeking financial support from a broad base of individuals — is inherent to nonprofit fundraising, a sector where women dominate. According to the Association of Fundraising Professionals, women make up 75 percent of all nonprofit fundraisers.
There is also evidence that women political candidates prefer to rely on the crowd to raise money for their campaigns. “Clean election” laws that have been enacted in numerous states throughout the country require candidates running for state office to raise $5 contributions from as many registered voters as possible to qualify for matching funds from their state. Those candidates who desire to circumvent the need for wealthy political donors have chosen this fundraising route. One study shows that women candidates opt into clean elections programs at higher rates than male candidates.
I totally agree with the fact that women are less present in the entrepreneurship, crowdfunding and VC scene.
I think there should be more women trying to enter it.
Women should be determined and motivated to reach their goal.
And if the project is innovative and viable, I don’t see why not to invest in it when the co-founder is a woman. At least , it is how we think at MyMicroInvest (http://mymicroinvest.com/). We are a new equity-based crowdfunding platform and we don’t care if the entrepreneur is a woman or a man.
Letters reveal a troubling side of Alistair Cooke
Alistair Cooke was the epitome of the civilized man. His English voice, redolent with informed nonchalance, enchanted millions who heard his Letter from America over BBC radio. His observations of American life were cool, witty, empathetic and insightful. He typed them up wherever he was in America, and for 58 years, until he was 95, unfailingly read his words into a microphone in such a beguiling manner it was as if you and he had just struck up a friendly conversation. He enhanced his reputation for authority about his adopted country as the television host successively of the CBS arts program Omnibus, PBS’s Masterpiece Theater, and the BBC’s America and with his best-selling book Alistair Cooke’s America. His range was extraordinary. He seemed to know every region and every rascal in it. He was the American Oracle.
Can it really be the same Alistair Cooke whom we hear again in a new collation of half a century of Letters, this time focused on race relations? In The Custom of the Country, he acquiesces in the denial of certain inalienable rights for one-tenth of the U.S. population, the black citizens. Can the broadcaster known for celebrating American freedom have been a closet reactionary? In a sense we feel we are eavesdropping when we hear our hero express misgivings about the implications of the seminal 1954 Supreme Court ruling desegregating schools:
And when you start with mixed and equal schooling, in a society where the school is also the meeting house, the club, the dance hall – the very focus of young life – how do you prevent people from approaching and at last accepting the final equality of love and marriage?
The Custom of the Country, edited by David Meghan, is absorbing because the reporting is so vivid, but it is also disturbing because it is so honest. We see into the mind of an educated, liberally disposed humanitarian confronted by the daily life of people in the South who happen to be black. About 165 of the original letters touch on race relations between 1946 and 2003. The editor has selected 47 here, of which 44 have not previously been available in book form. As he writes in his discerning introduction to the selection, some observers might have ducked the ugly truth of racial injustice in the South. Alistair Cooke does not. Some of his admirers will wish he had. Cooke’s abiding love of the romance of the South collides with the realities of Jim Crow. He indicts the sins of white supremacists whose segregationist policies are “conceived in hate and spawn illiteracy”; he condemns the “evil delinquents” who spat on the black schoolgirl entering Little Rock; but he exhibits an excess of understanding for the South’s historic excuses. He adopts, as his own, the position of the ruling elites that if the critics would just leave them alone, they’d gradually enter the civilized world. Instead of a cry of pain at the manifold oppressions over decades, we get from Cooke an eloquent cry for tolerance of the intolerable.
These are not sentiments that would win Cooke the sophisticated following he had in his heyday – but that is precisely why this collation is so valuable. Cooke’s own feelings are a remarkable portrait of white liberal opinion at the time – North as well as South. I know his observations to be right on the mark because I followed in Cooke’s footsteps. He was a native of Lancashire in the north of England who won a Harkness Fellowship, a kind of reverse Rhodes scholarship, for two years of study and travel in the U.S. Me, too. Cooke began his travels in the mid-thirties, when pictures of Franklin Roosevelt were the only decoration in the sharecroppers’ tarpaper shacks. I started across the country 20 years later. In economic terms, the ebullient (“I like Ike”) fifties were wholly different from the Depression era of Cooke’s travels; in human terms, the country had not changed at all. The black population in the South was still stuck where it had been since Reconstruction, suppressed in one-party white dictatorships dedicated to white supremacy in 17 Southern and Border States. Negroes, as they were still called, had access only to degraded services and employment, segregated in schools, colleges, hospitals, churches, parks, swimming pools, restaurants, restrooms, streetcars, waiting rooms, elevators, theaters, cinemas, libraries, beauty parlors, bowling alleys, prisons and cemeteries. In many parts of the Deep South they risked their lives if they wanted to vote, and were certain to be convicted of anything a white man alleged against them.
Most Americans, decade after decade, never gave a moment’s thought to the indignities and injustices. Ralph Ellison’s introspective novel The Invisible Man, which came out in 1952, described what it was like to be looked through as if you were as transparent as air. White Americans, north and south, did not “see” the national predicament of the Negro when they hailed a graying “boy” for their bags at the hotel, never noticed that there wasn’t a single black face in the church and on the sports field. They weren’t all racists. They were just oblivious, as Cooke was oblivious in his early years in America. The empathy thought characteristic of his work was absent for people in what he chose to call “darktown.”
Cooke recoils from bigotry and violence. He blames the outrages in the South on the “white trash”, and there were certainly a fair portion of goons among them, but he quite fails to appreciate that the mores and practices of society were set by the elites who charmed him as they charmed me so many years later. “Leave the South alone. We’ll solve our ‘problems’ in our own good time. We understand our ‘nigras’.” I heard it as frequently as he must have 25 years before. Their own “good time” had still not arrived. In the South, the distinctiveness of individuals and publications regarded as enlightened was not that they favored desegregation – they didn’t – it was that they were opposed to lynching and the poll tax. The business and community leaders in the White Citizens’ Councils forswore violence while they organized civil repression – the denial of work, credit, supplies, housing, and of course the vote. As for reform, everywhere in the country, north as well as south, the condescending assumption was that improvement in the condition of the black population would come as today’s good deed from white patronage. Almost no one in the mainstream anticipated that the blacks would lead a civil rights movement, whereupon even leading powers in America’s vaunted free press – North and South – got into a fret that their fellow citizens were demanding rights they themselves had always taken for granted as the air they breathed. They tended to deplore “extremism” on both sides, equating the white mob with the non-violent activists. The attitude began to change after the spectacular March on Washington in August 1963, followed the next month by the Birmingham church bombing.
“Perhaps the future will allow no room for cultural or national chauvinism?” I should have added: except on demand!
Mitt Romney, the Schrodinger’s Cat of private equity
Mitt Romney is a quantum CEO, the Schrödinger’s Cat of private equity: From 1999 to 2002, he both was and was not the chief executive officer and sole owner of a powerful Bain Capital investment fund. After that period, Romney’s surrogates explain, he “retroactively” retired from this post. But, as Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment reminds us, just because you find a retroactively dead cat doesn’t mean he wasn’t previously simultaneously alive and dead.
While the two presidential campaigns tussle over this paradox, the real shame is how willing Romney and his defenders are to tolerate this bending of the truth, heretofore confined to particle physics. It’s another insight into the increasingly murky culture of American capitalism.
While Romney has claimed at times he was retired from Bain Capital during the period, he also signed documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission attesting that he was the “sole stockholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director and President” of a multimillion-dollar investment fund.
Romney signed the filings because of a law passed by Congress in 1968 that tried to make financial markets more transparent. At the time, early corporate raiders – the progenitors of Romney and his colleagues at Bain – had been buying up stock in secret to seize control of public companies. They hoped to replace management and improve them enough to turn a profit. Like the similar efforts of Romney and other buyout specialists, some of the companies were run straight into bankruptcy, though rarely at a loss for the raiders.
The law attempted to balance the investors’ right to know who else owns a company with the economic benefit that comes from activist shareholders who prod management to become more effective. Thus, it required investors who own more than 5 percent of a given company to register publicly, explaining who they are and why they’re purchasing a large share of the publicly traded company.
The idea was transparency: Investors could learn a little bit about the people trying to buy up the company. The Romney campaign’s explanation is that the candidate, at the time he signed the documents, was busy saving the Olympics and thus not involved in the day-to-day management of the firm. It’s a believable claim, but Romney listing himself as the chief executive and primary stockholder of his fund when in fact he was not seems flatly misleading. While arguments about whether this move is illegal or not are moot – the statute of limitations has expired – it certainly raises questions about how conscientious he was about exercising his competing responsibilities.
This article is biased and we can all tell who Fernholz will vote for. I am disgusted and disappointed.
I suggest you look up the terms “power of attorney” and “silent partner” because they both apply to Romney’s situation, IMO… One can own a business 100% and not be physically present or able to manage it because of other obligations. Ergo, someone else would have to have POA to run Bain cuz Romney was NOT physically present… OMG, that explains why Romney was in UTAH, doesn’t it? LOL!
As for the stupid tax returns, Romney has supplied what is required of him every time he’s run for a political office. Do you mean to tell me that you can’t get access to his older tax records now? If you can’t, it must not be *legal* for them to remain public forever then, huh?
Let’s get real, folks. What about the economy and JOBS?
The typical scenario for Bain Capital and the like is to take over a troubled company whose management has put-off the hard decisions—operations need to be shut down, workers need to be laid off, etc. The takeover companies are then the bad guys when they do what is required to save the patient. Do takeover companies always do the right thing? Of course not.
Although not popular now, I fundamentally believe Capitalism and Joe Schumpeter are the right path. I have seen it work. (go to http://unrepentantcapitalist.blogspot.co m/ and look for the Aug 21, 2010 posting. Article is called ‘the US is losing too many jobs’)
I wish Romney could use his time in the spotlight to articulate why Capitalism is the right way forward, but I fear he can’t or won’t.
320 million people and these are the two best we can come up with?