The Commentariat -- July 11, 2012
CW: I won't be doing much today. I have a crew here ripping out my so-called master bathroom, & I have to "attend to" them.
My column in the New York Times eXaminer is titled "David Brooks on Why the Maid's Daughter Can't Get a Good Job." ...
... The NYTX front page is here. A rather fabulous entry on the page: Patrick Somerville's "Thank You for Killing My Novel."
"GOP to the Uninsured: Drop Dead." Matt Miller of the Washington Post: "The Republican message to uninsured Americans in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent ruling couldn't be clearer: You're on your own." CW: Miller is fairly conservative (he's one who advocated for a third-party presidential candidate), so this both fairly damning -- & accurate.
Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post: "Americans paid the lowest tax rates in 30 years to the federal government in 2009, due in part to tax cuts sought by President Obama to combat the Great Recession, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday."
Presidential Race
New York Times Editors: "Mr. Romney has resisted all demands for more [financial] disclosure, leading to growing criticism from Democrats that he is trying to hide his fortune and his tax schemes from the public. Given the troubling suspicions about his finances, he needs to release many more returns and quickly open his books to full scrutiny." A pretty good rundown of Mitt's shady shelters.
News Ledes
New York Times: "Waging old battles with new zeal, the House passed a bill on Wednesday to repeal President Obama's health care overhaul law less than two weeks after the Supreme Court upheld its major provisions as constitutional. The bill was approved by a vote of 244 to 185, with five Democrats supporting repeal. It has no chance of approval in the Senate and would face a veto from Mr. Obama if it ever got to him."
Washington Post: Mitt Romney's "speech [in Houston, Texas] before the NAACP drew him the most hostile reception from any campaign audience so far this year and Romney appeared visibly unsettled by three rounds of loud boos from the crowd."
AP: "A federal judge on Wednesday continued to block a state law that threatened to shut down Mississippi's only abortion clinic and make it nearly impossible for a woman to get the procedure in the state. U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III temporarily blocked the law July 1 and extended that order Wednesday, though he did not say when he would rule on the clinic's request to put the law on hold for a longer period. If he grants that request, the case eventually would go to trial."
Washington Post: "About 2.3 million Northern Virginia residents were without emergency 911 telephone service for several days last week after a backup generator failed following severe thunderstorms in the region, a senior Verizon official told government leaders Wednesday. The outage, which prevented hundreds, perhaps thousands, of calls for help from getting through to emergency responders, was among the worst public safety fallouts from the June 29 storm...."
Washington Post: House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) "joined other lawmakers Wednesday in calling on Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) to disclose more details about his absence from Congress since June 10. Jackson's wife also said she hoped doctors would soon release information about the lawmaker, while some Democrats said again that the congressman should be permitted to sort out his personal issues beyond the public spotlight." ...
... ABC News Update: "Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., who took a mysterious leave of absence from Capitol Hill last month is being treated for a 'mood disorder,' his physician said Wednesday."
AP: "The president of Florida A&M University submitted his resignation Wednesday, the same day the university was sued by parents of a drum major who died during a hazing. It was unclear if the two events were related. James Ammons announced the resignation, which takes effect Oct. 11, in a letter to the chairman of the university's governing board."
New York Times: "In a case that is part parable of high-society travail and part police-beat mystery, investigators awaited the outcome on Wednesday of further tests to discover what killed American-born Eva Rausing, one of Britain's richest women, after her body was discovered at her upmarket home and her husband arrested." More on the troubled lives of Rausing & her husband Hans Kristian Rausing from the Guardian.
Share Article
Reader Comments (6)
I also posted this on NYTX.
Maybe there really IS a God–and HE has not yet turned the power back on in David Brooks’ new Cleveland Park mansion, because (clearly) David is not thinking clearly. Oh wait……he never thinks clearly? Maybe he should go back and rewrite “Bobos in Paradise” as a memoir.
I didn't read the Brooks column until you gave the dunderhead another nod. Can handle him only once a month or so when I check in to see if someone slipped some sanity into his morning coffee. Needless to say, I'm seldom surprised that no one has. Besides, it's much more fun just reading Marie on Brooks, as unfair as it is: his deadly earnestness is no match for your humor. Not to mention that time and again he's flat wrong. Today, another case in point.
On jobs and the absence of social mobility, once again Brooks takes a dimwitted sociological approach, which he presents as coherent analysis. He writes about behaviors as if what people do is unrelated to their circumstance, as if their economic birthright has no influence on the choices they make and what they do. When he does get to economics (after an uncomfortable and muddled acknowledgement of "class"), he points the finger of blame for our declining social mobility in a random direction, tho' one that comports with his ideology: eliminate the social safety net, leaving even more people in dire economic straits, a solution which would seem exactly contrary to his announced intent. But there I go again, trying to make sense where there is none to be made.
Instead of blaming the tattered safety net, I would look in another direction. For the last thirty years, we have worked hard to eviscerate our economy and we have done a mighty fine job. Responding to this morning's NYTimes discussion of the need (or not) for expanded job training, I wrote suggesting that much handwringing about American jobs simply misses the major points.
Workers go begging for jobs for any number of simple reasons, I said.
Most companies have no social conscience. The bottom line they worship dictates their decision to seek cheap labor and lower costs. If that means outsourcing, dropping pension plans, expecting others to train their workers at no cost to themselves, so be it.
Because most large employers are transnational, national governments can do little to control their behavior. As the global economy has grown with help from trade agreements that offer little protection for American workers, corporations have been handed even more power to decide through their purchased people in Congress most economic policy, which is, of course, in their favor.
Also, as our productivity has increased primarily due to robotics and cheap energy, vastly subsidized by the federal government (wars for oil, cheap oil leases, the Price-Anderson Act that makes nuclear power possible, the list goes on), fewer workers are necessary to provide the food and goods people actually need. It's just arithmetic.
Capitalism calls this efficiency and it is--for the businesses. For the nation, which has to bribe the companies with tax breaks and subsidize the unemployed, a class that will only grow as long as current business and governments behaviors are allowed to continue, not so much.
Not much pop sociology in that. Maybe that's why Brooks can't write about it. And it seems he doesn't much like subsidizing the growing underclass (there's that darn word again) of unemployed either.
Re: Marie on maids, money and marriage. Jez, Marie if tearing out the master bath results in that good of a column rebuttal on Mr. Brooks I say demo the kitchen next.
@JJG: did that already. The kitchen here came with those plastic-clad MDF cabinets & I wanted solid wood with NO MDF or particleboard. Also, I didn't like the layout & wanted to extend the kitchen into the next room which was sort of an office office. So I tore out all the cabinets, had the locations of the stove & fridge moved, added a wall oven, bought flatpack cabinets & built some of my own from scratch (like the cabinet for the wall oven & a center island, a fridge surround & walk-in food pantry). Didn't do any of my own plumbing & wiring, & we're all safer for that.
Then, ever the recycler, I took most of the crappy cabinets & hung them in the kitchen I built from scratch at my lake cottage. There I put up or laid down all the walls, floors, ceiling (what a pain in the neck!), tho I had a handyman do the plumbing & wiring there, too. And we're all safer for that.
David Brooks was not a factor.
But I did all that before I turned 65, & I swore I wasn't going to do any more major building projects after I turned 65. So no more kitchens for me. Now I'm the helper/meddler. It's way easier.
I so enjoyed Patrick Somerville's piece in the NYTX. Imagine an editor exchanging emails with a character from a novel––quite extraordinary. Janet Maslin is married to Ben Cheever, John Cheever's son, and the latter's problems with editors, publishing houses, and critics were legendary. When he was struggling with his first novel and wanted an extra $$ to hold him over, his publishers suggested he write more short stories; his reply: "I want to write more short stories like I want to fuck a chicken."
I’ve pretty much given up reading Brooks directly. I’m not unhappy to read Marie (or Krugman) smacking him around because at least the bullshit will be named as such and the outrageous intellectual dishonesty appropriately dispensed with.
Some time ago I concluded that Brooks (very much like The Mustache of Wisdom, Tom Friedman) writes the same column over and over again with small variations. The formula is wearyingly familiar.
Take an event (Supreme Court decision, Springsteen concert, Tea Party Rally) or some little known book from the right-wing sociology or armchair psychology remainder bins, deconstruct event or book according to pre-approved conservative academic ideological guidelines with plenty of haughty sniffs from the ivory tower, add a healthy dose of finger wagging and sad head shaking regarding the loss of morals in the west, especially those of liberals and their allies, dirty pot-smoking, sexually active hippies, apportion blame for any problems equally to Democrats and Republicans. Shake head several more times. Wonder to oneself how on earth anyone would get through the day without reading one’s words of wonder. Close door and retreat back into study, well insulated from real world, assured that moral superiority and conservative values are the only bulwarks against precipitous and imminent decline of American virtue. Send steaming pile of dung while still warm to NY Times. Cash enormous check. Repeat twice a week.
Easy, isn’t it? Next on the agenda, go on NPR and PBS and any other media outlet that needs differing opinions (but doesn’t want any rabid ankle biting by the Krauthammers and Kristols) by inviting a conservative who presents himself as a moderate, professorial, slightly effete snobby know it all (oh….wait, isn’t that George Will?). Regurgitate column. More head shaking. Cash more checks.
The life of a conservative pundit. Spin bullshit. Get paid. Repeat as needed.
This is why, like Ken, I can only stomach Brooks in small doses from afar. So thanks, Marie, for tilting at and regularly puncturing this pompous, pettifogger. How you can stand the noisome stench that seeps out of the holes is beyond me.