Forget gay marriage. America's real problem is in its boardrooms

America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.

It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.



We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

American Snobbery

As a Brit from a working-class family, raised in a northern working-class town, who attended (at taxpayer expense) a fine quasi-private school and then went to Oxford, I'm interested in snobbery. It's a trait I despise. I've seen plenty of it in my time, though there's far less in Britain than there used to be.

As a young man I aspired to live and work in the US because I wanted to be part of a thriving classless society. Of course that was naive. America is not a classless society. I'm not talking about the 1% and the 99%, and I'm not talking about mainstream America and the underclass (shocking though that gulf is). I'm talking about elite disdain for a much larger segment of the country. It's a cultural thing: American snobbery.

"Indeed, it could be argued that the unprecedented level of socioeconomic segregation in America is actively promoted by an elite that is continually attempting to create and inflate behavioural and cultural distinctions between itself and the rest of society. What is important about its lifestyle is not so much the values that it invokes, but that it is different in every detail from those obese, junk-food eating, gas-guzzling, gun-obsessed, fundamentalist Joe Sixpacks. The elite project of 'raising awareness' serves as a form of self-flattery, through which the upper classes can highlight their moral superiority to the rest of society."

New cable network: Destination America

From Animal Planet to TLC to the Science Channel, it seems Discovery has a pretty strong hold on our cable boxes.

This month Discovery's empire will expand further when it introduces a new network, Destination America. The channel is touted as "the first network to celebrate the people, places, and stories of the United States"...

America's Idiot Rich

Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Here’s a brief list of insane things that are apparently common knowledge among the billionaire class:

• That President Obama and the Democratic Party have treated wealthy finance industry titans maliciously and unfairly.
• That the fact that they are perversely wealthy and growing richer during a period of mass unemployment and staggering debt is a sign that the economy is functioning correctly.
• That poor people, and not the finance industry, are responsible for the financial crisis and subsequent recession.
• That the ultra-wealthy are wealthy because they are smarter and work harder than everybody else, and that they are resented for their success.
• That the ultra-wealthy in general, and finance industry executives in particular, are the victims of widespread prejudice akin to that faced by ethnic minorities.

There can be no reasoning with people this irrational. Any attempt to do so will fail, as Barack Obama, whose main goal is to maintain, not upend, the system that made these people so disgustingly wealthy, is learning. It’s growing harder and harder to pretend that the fantastically wealthy have a sophisticated understanding of politics — or math, or economics, or cause-and-effect.

The rich are not intrinsically more virtuous or hardworking than the masses. They are also, decidedly, not any smarter. And they receive their news, and their political opinions, from the exact same organs as everyone else. They may be more likely to read the Wall Street Journal than the New York Post, but both of those Murdoch-owned newspapers carry similar lies on their editorial pages. In other words, they actually believe their bullshit. They honestly believe that mean Democrats invented “Occupy Wall Street” in order to make them scapegoats for a crisis that they feel no responsibility for. People who are in the business of extracting fees and interest from consumers, or moving rich people’s money around, unironically think of themselves as “job creators.”



America's Future, A Choice in Black and White

One thing makes this current depression, as economist Paul Krugman calls it, different from the Great Depression. The moral dimension has been left out. All the talk is about numbers. In the current debate over which priority is best for the economy, the right and left both promise job growth and reduced deficits. But almost no one is addressing the moral dimension, which focuses on doing good.

The Great Depression was different. The plight of the little guy was starkly presented by bread lines and soup kitchens. Photographers and writers gave us heartrending portrayals of social suffering. Solidarity mattered. It wasn't just a numbers game. The nation's conscience was seared. Right now, there are moral issues that cry out to be solved on the same scale - everyone's conscience should be seared.

The overall picture is of a harsh, punitive society where divisions have become black and white. I'm not speaking entirely of race, although Afro-Americans bear the brunt of almost every misery. But so do poor people in general. Life expectancy has risen steadily in America, but only for the upper half of the income split. Among the lower half you find the bulk of obesity, smoking, and diseases that shorten people's lives, exacerbated by lack of affordable health care.

 

To the reactionary mindset, none of this really matters. As long as property and privilege are protected up above, the lower half of society exists to be exploited - hence the blind eye that well-off people turn to the current setup. Hence the decimation of pensions and benefits without regard to its unfairness. Enron used to be a scandal for abandoning its workers; it turned into the wave of the future. Corporations met the recession by cutting jobs, squeezing maximum production from a minimal workforce, amassing huge profits for shareholders and executives only, and sending jobs abroad. Soon the have/have not split will extend to seniors as caring for them skyrockets. It will infect long-term unemployment as laid-off workers from the manufacturing sector as well as those with only high school degrees coalesce into something America has never experienced: a permanently unemployable class.

I rarely write blistering posts, but the moral shame we have all passively - or actively - participated in isn't minor. An uncaring society is degraded and degrading. If the founding principle of this country was the pursuit of happiness, that principle has been undermined severely, leaving behind a vast swath of society to stagnate as a few percentiles prosper mightily. And those few percentiles are encouraged by reactionary forces to shrug off immorality. With over 50% of profits coming from the financial sector, the very people who brought down the economy, the great malefactors have been rewarded while the small are consigned to misery.

The reality needs to be laid out in black and white. Is this the America you want to live in and leave behind? Until you and I ask the question, we can't expect anyone else to bring change.

Ohio can deliver a message that can be heard across the country

As Ohioans, we're proud of our diverse state.  We have great cities, some of the most productive farming communities in America and growing suburban neighborhoods. In the past few weeks I have been in steel mills outside Cleveland and in the hills of Appalachia along the Ohio River.

Our state's diversity also extends to politics. Ohio is not what they call a Blue state or a Red state: it's a purple state with nearly equal proportions of Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

This political diversity leads to close elections, and in a country that is pretty much equally divided, Ohio often plays a key role in national elections. In fact, it has all come down to our state in two of the last three presidential races.  

That explains why President Obama will be on the campaign trail in Ohio again this week, and why we'll see the two major candidates so often in the months to come.

The stakes are high in November. Our state and our nation are confronting a stagnant economy that isn't creating the jobs we badly need. Here in Ohio, nearly half a million of our friends and neighbors are out of work. Meanwhile, the price of gas has nearly doubled since the president took office and we continue to suffer from high foreclosure rates and a housing market that hasn't turned the corner.

Nationwide, we have now endured more than three straight years of unemployment above 8 percent – the longest stretch since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, youth unemployment is twice that high. A record number of women are living in poverty. Too many veterans come home from serving our nation to find that no jobs await them. Too many families in Ohio and across America are seeing their household budgets squeezed like never before.

And what have we seen from Washington in the last three years? The largest government since World War II. A federal balance sheet spinning out of control with trillion dollar-plus deficits and record debt. New regulations and red tape that create layers of bureaucracy while killing jobs – including jobs right here in Ohio. A federal takeover of health care that raises taxes and gives government an even bigger role in the economy.

American families are worried. Many are hurting. Most of our fellow citizens feel that America is on the wrong track. As parents we are concerned that the country we leave for our children and grandchildren won't be as prosperous or secure as the one we inherited.

Joy M. Kiser on 'America's Other Audobon'



Years of sleuthing by Washington-area writer Joy M. Kiser have uncovered a uniquely American tragedy while resurrecting some of the most beautiful pictures of birds’ nests ever produced in this country.  

The story started with a broken heart.

Genevieve Jones grew up in Circleville, Ohio, around the time of the Civil War. She often accompanied her father, a country doctor and amateur naturalist, on his rounds, and became fascinated with birdlife.  Gennie was schooled at home and easily mastered subjects from calculus to Greek and French. Tall and perhaps intellectually intimidating, she had few suitors, but when she was about 30, a somewhat older man began courting her. He was brilliant—a musician and literary critic.

He also had a drinking problem, which didn’t sit well with Gennie’s parents. Her mother was quite active in the American Temperance Society. Although the couple wanted to marry, her father eventually forbade it. Gennie was apparently shattered.

While visiting relatives in Philadelphia, she chanced to attend an exhibition featuring a copy of John James Audubon’s hand-painted engravings from his massive “Birds of America” collection. Seeing them reignited a long-held desire to complete the task he had started: He’d drawn the birds, but not the nests.

She had spoken of wanting to fill that gap, but her family had balked because of the enormous cost of producing such a book. After her broken engagement, her father, perhaps feeling guilty because he’d blocked the marriage, relented. Her brother offered to gather nests and eggs. Friends offered to help with the drawing and hand-tinting.

Her father sold subscriptions to the works that Gennie completed. Among those who signed up were Rutherford B. Hayes, the former president, and Theodore Roosevelt, then a student. Soon, Gennie and her helpers were circulating lithographs of such quality and precision that some top American ornithologists took notice.

In 1879, shortly after the project was launched, Gennie died of typhoid fever. She was 32. Her one-time suitor committed suicide with morphine.

Astonishingly, family and friends committed to the staggering labor to complete the project. About 90 copies of the lithographs, printed on the best paper, were eventually produced. Most of them have vanished.

One set, however, chanced to be on display in 1995, when Kiser showed up for her first day of work at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. She was transfixed. Over the next 15 years, she scoured libraries, worked with a Smithsonian Institution curator and interviewed Jones family members.

 Her labor of love has now been published as a book, “America’s Other Audubon”