On the cover of the Rolling Stone

I love it when serious political journalists write for Rolling Stone; this phenomenon creates some of the most fun (you are never going to see “screw” used as a verb in the Time Op-Ed pages) and smartest (yup) political reading out there.  Journalists just really let their hair down when they know they are writing for a bunch of teens and 20-somethings. 

One of the best articles I have ever read is David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba,” profiling John McCain in the 2000 presidential primaries.  (This article appears in a seriously unabridged version in Consider the Lobster.  If you are smart and funny, go out and get yourself a copy of that book for Christmakkah.)  And this month’s cover – in keeping with the pop-culture and smartipants juxtaposition that brought together Kurt Vonnegut and Christina Aguilera  - features the title of Paul Krugman’s* article, “How the Super-Rich are Screwing America” beside Snoop Dogg in a Santa hat.  If that doesn’t make you love American journalism, you’re just plain no fun.

The article is great, and it takes on one of the biggest baddest myths ever.  The one about the pie.  In case you slept through introductory economics, it goes like this:  The pie is wealth/money/the economy.  You should never ever worry about how the pie gets divided up.  Just make the pie as big as possible, and that way everyone will get lots of delicious pie.  If something cannot be measured in pie, it is deemed “intangible” (for which read “ignore it”), because pie is the only thing that matters.  If it seems that some people are starving while others are eating so much pie you can’t believe they haven’t gotten a raging case of type II diabetes, don’t worry!  The InvisibleWaitressHand divides and distributes the pie, and if the diner is efficient then she is all-knowing and infallible.

As Krugman points out, the pie has gotten big lately.  All of the officials ways to measure the economy – GDP, unemployment, etc. indicate that the economy is strong.  But Americans, when polled, disagree. 

“But how is this possible?  The economic pie is getting bigger – how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices?  The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much much bigger slices.”  That is the problem with the stupid pie analogy, it doesn’t allow for the fact that some people in the diner of America are fiendish pie-hounds; they own the ovens and the flour/sugar/fruit-filling supplies, and they pay off the waitresses.  Or as Krugman, who is a better writer than I am doesn’t get bogged down in analogies for no reason, puts it, “Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled.”

The article goes on to lay out tons of those statistics which you have heard before, about 1/3 of the Bush tax cuts going to 0.8%  (that is not a typo, my friends) of the population.  That would be the richest 0.8%, in case there was any confusion.  And how in 1970 the average CEO made 30x more than the average employee, and now the average CEO makes 300x more than the typical worker.  Want more?  There’s plenty, right here in the article.

Krugman also gives an interesting history of the distribution of wealth in American.  Between 1933 and 1945 the US underwent a period historians refer to as the Great Compression, in which the rich got poorer and the poor got richer.  Then in the 1970s inequality began to rise.  Reagan came into office and waged war on unions, while not raising the minimum wage.  Although the minimum wage was raised under Bush Senior and Clinton, the 2000 election of GW Bush brought about a new period in which policy drastically favors not just the wealthy, but the uber-rich.  Krugman writes,

“During the 2000 election, George W. Bush joked that his base consisted of the ‘haves and the have mores.’”

That’s not funny.  John Kerry gets a week of blanket media coverage for his stupid troops joke and we let this one go unpunished for 6 years?  Krugman also points out,

 ”Not only has the Bush administration favored the interests of the wealthiest efw Americans over those of the middle class, it has consistently shown a preference for people who get their income from dividends and capital gains, rather than those who work for a living.”

This, we all learned in our Ec class, is good though, because investing in the stock market is what makes the economy grow!  Taxing capital gains creates a disincentive for investment.  And if the super-rich cannot double their income in mutual funds, the economy will come crashing down around our heads.  Right?  Whatever.  The Bush tax cuts, well…. they are tax cuts.  Get me?  Not tax hold-steadies.  The rich had been raking in cash from the stock market; they were not disincentivized before the tax cuts.  Which leads to another question that Krugman raises and doesn’t have time for, “What were they doing cutting taxes yet again in the face of a huge budget deficit and an expensive war?  Never mind.”

There is a corner on 5th Avenue, where there’s a Tiffany’s, a Harry Winston, a Louis Vuitton, and some other wildly expensive luxury store.  When you stand on the corner there, blinded by all the diamonds glittering in your peripheral vision, you can sort of feel the buzz of the platinum card transactions whizzing past you in the ethers.  It’s either really fun, or really weird, depending on what mood you’re in.  The first time I encountered that corner, there was a little old lady – a homeless lady - probably 70 years old and weighing in at 90 pounds, laying on the ground wrapped in a blanket and looking like she was about to die on the sidewalk in front of Harry Winston’s.  It was like Karl Marx had put her there for a photoshoot.  This was really striking to me; I had just moved to New York and wasn’t yet used to the juxtaposition of billionaires and the homeless.  Unfortunately, I am now.  If I stopped to notice every time a trust-fund baby and a member of the working poor were sitting beside each other on the subway, I’d never get anything done.

Krugman’s article is striking and important.  And it’s not proposing some kind of pinko redistribution of wealth, it’s just calling to your attention to the redistribution of wealth that has been taking place for the last several years, under the banner of “corporate profits.”  Kudos for saying it out loud, and on the cover of the Rolling Stone.  Gonna buy five copies for my mother.

* Dear Paul Krugman, I liked this article so much that you are officially invited into the circle of celebrities on whom I have crushes.  You are in very good company, as DFW, Jonathan, and Barack can attest.

Dear Jonathan Franzen,

We met this week at your reading with Donald Antrim at the 92nd Street Y.  Of course, you may not remember our meeting, since I was in a line of several dozen people whose books you signed.  Be that as it may, I was very excited to finally meet you.

I admit to having a literary crush on you for several years.  After reading The Corrections, I (flattering myself) decided that you and I have a lot in common, and were destined to be together.  I could tell that we see things the same way.  I admired your expansive style of writing, your wit and intellect.  I also assumed that you were about 5-10 years older than me.

The age assumption turned out to be wrong.  I confess to sitting through a reading of yours last year (you read your essay on birding from How To Be Alone), mostly doing mental calculations of your age and trying to determine if my affections for you were entirely age innapropriate, and if so to what degree.  I confess to doing much the same thing during your reading this week at the Y. 

I had planned to say something clever when we met after the reading to make you see our cosmic connection, which is so clear to me.  I planned to mention some passage from Strong Motion that I found particularly memorable, or ask some insightful question that you wouldn’t have time to answer with all those other people waiting in line, and you would be so intrigued and want so much to continue our conversation that you would have to call me later and we would go for a drink to finish our chat.  Unfortunately, the clever line I chose to get your attention was, “I’m a big fan.”  Do you remember the scene in Dirty Dancing when Baby says, “I carried a watermelon,” and then stands on the pathway by herself and repeats, “I carried a watermelon?”?  It was pretty much like that.

Perhaps that is all for the best, since I have finished reading your memoir and have learned several important things.  First, you are just as smart and funny as I always thought.  My crush on you is as intense as ever, especially after learning all about your Midwestern boyhood.  I imagine we could spend most of our first date talking about growing up in Missouri and moving to New York.  But I also realized that my suspicions about our age difference were true:  that you are in fact 22 years my senior.  And that I, as a 24 year old, am dangerously close to actually being A Woman Half Your Age.  Which doesn’t bother me, really, but I can imagine it would make things difficult for us while attending dinner parties with your 40-something friends who would not be able to resist passing judgment.

But the crushing blow that your book dealt to my crush is the fact that you are, in fact, not single.  After some pretty serious googling, I discovered not only your girlfriend’s identity, but an article she wrote about your relationship as two writers of varying degrees of success.  It saddens me to say that the article was charming and insightful, making it difficult for me to write off your real-life relationship as I had hoped to do.    She writes humorous self-effacing sentences like, “It’s tempting to take comfort in generalizations, and I have,” and astute observations like, “What she envies is not something about being a writer, but something about being a man.”  It pains me to say it, but your girlfriend seems pretty great.

So, I suppose I am glad that you are in a relationship with such a smart and funny woman.  However, I am more than a little embarrassed at my failure to put my longstanding plan in to action.  If you do wind up breaking up, please publish an essay about it to let me know, and I’ll see you at your next reading.

Yours truly,

phonelesscord

obamamania: part 3

I know I have made my thoughts on Barack Obama abudantly clear already, but I have left out one major reason for my political crush on Senator Obama.  It’s actually one of the arguments that some people use against him:  his “lack of experience,” or “slim Washington portfolio,” if you are feeling poetic.

Tuesday night, Dick Cheney had an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, and when asked about the 2008 election, and specifically about my boyfriend, oops, I mean Senator Obama, he said:

“Barack Obama? Attractive guy — don’t know him well. Met him a few times. I think, at this stage, my initial take on it was he’s been here two years as a senator. I think people might want a little more experience than that, given the nature of the times that we live in.”

First of all, this is the first thing, to my knowledge, that Dick Cheney and I can agree on – Barack Obama Is Attractive.  Can a person’s appeal get any broader than that?  But I digress.

The point is, the only possible downside to Obama’s candidacy is his lack of experience in Washington.  But there are several reasons that this shouldn’t be held against him, and here they are:

It hasn’t stopped us before.  The current President served 6 years as Governor of TX.  Fine.  His curriculum vitae up to that point included: running for Congress and losing, buying an oil company and selling all his stock just before it went bankrupt, and buying a baseball team (he did not bankrupt it, just traded Sammy Sosa to Chicago).  Now, I’m not saying that President Bush is a good example of who to elect to the highest office in the land, I’m just pointing out his inexperience, and the fact that nobody was talking about his lack of Washington Experience in the 2000 election.   There is a major difference between Bush’s pre-White House experience and Obama’s, which leads me to my next point:

He actually isn’t that inexperienced.  Before being elected to the US Senate, Obama served 7 years in the Illinois State Legislature.  By 2008 he will have served in the US Senate for 4 years.   Before the state legislature he went to law school, was first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review, and worked for years as a community organizer.  He’s no stranger to the world of politics and policy.  It’s not like the man’s a sophomore in high school, for pete’s sake.  But sure, he is less of a Washington Insider than the other possible candidates, which brings me to my next point:

Look what happens when politicians do amass decades of Washington Experience.  Let’s take a look at Hilary Clinton, for starters (really do take a look at that link – it’s a great article from Salon.com about the evolution of HC).  I love 1992 Hilary.  I loved the Hilary who made the (gutsy and politically dangerous) comment that she wasn’t “just some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” .  Early Hilary worked for farm worker’s rights, championed universal health coverage, worked on behalf of underprivileged kids.  Over the years, as she gained crucial Washington Experience and got progressively more expensive haircuts, her politics evolved as well, and now they are almost unrecognizable.  Is the woman who I thought was a shining example of progressivism and feminism really now sponsoring anti-flag-burning legislation?  Did she really vote for the Iraq War twice?  Did that serious lawyer and champion of working women really write a book compiling the letters that children sent to the First Pets Sox and Buddy?  She did.  And you’ll have to excuse me if I liked her a lot better before her years of Washingon Experience sucked the idealism and liberalism right out of her. 

While we’re on the topic, I would also like to point out that as of 2006, President Bush has 6 years of not just Washington Experience, but actual White House experience, and it doesn’t seem to be doing any of us any good.

So get on the Barack Bandwagon.  He’s seasoned enough to know what he’s doing, he’s just inexperienced enough to not yet be jaded and compromised.  And Dick Cheney and I both think he’s cute.