Damn Straight, Your Eminance! Pope Calls for Massive Wealth Distribution

Right on, Father! Almost 20 years to the day after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pope Benedict XVI took aim at Communism's seeming polar opposite.

Sam Walton's children have more money than the Catholic Church. Seriously.

A more just and peaceful world requires "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth," said the Pontiff in a statement released on December 16th in preparation for World Peace Day. So is the Pope a Communist?

Hardly. Capitalism only appears to be the polar opposite of Communism. At the core of each ideology is a belief that tramples the individual while claiming to speak for the commoner. While Communism takes away the right of the individual under the State, capitalism takes away the right of the individual by way of the all mighty dollar.

Am I being overly dramatic? Maybe not, when you consider attempts to stifle freedom of expression via the Internet, or attempts to eliminate government meat inspection. Sure, a few people might die, but that would cost precious dollars!


E. Coli in hamburgers, poison pet food, led paint in children's toys. This is unregulated capitalism friends, and it ain't pretty. Unless you're at the very top, unrestrained capitalism doesn't enable life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Certainly not if you don't have health insurance. And if not for Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, along with massive tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance AND President Obama's recent reforms, most people in this country wouldn't be able to afford health insurance. They would simply be priced out of the market.

Pope Benedict called for--among other things--better education. Boy, this country sure does need it, because the uber-capitalists have actually led people to believe that the rich in this country are insufficiently rich. That's a theory that is beyond absurd.

Did you know that Sam Walton's children have more money than Warren Buffett or Bill Gates? Seriously, the four of them have a combined wealth of nearly $85 billion! And they can't pay their employees a living wage because?

The Pope has criticized unrestrained capitalism before. Perhaps with income inequality in the news courtesy of Occupy Wall Street, people will notice.

To be continued . . .

Paul Krugman doesn't begrudge people like Mitt Romney for destroying jobs--he should.

And so it has come to this: Paul Krugman, a prominent, self-identified liberal economics professor, Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist says he doesn't hold it against Mitt Romney for getting rich by taking away other people's source of income. Seriously. He said that. In last week's column titled All the G.O.P.'s Gekkos, the Princeton University Professor wrote:

Krugman should think and hard before being soft on Romney

"Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980."


Damn! Scathing criticism, right? But two paragraphs later, Krugman asks:

"So what do we learn from this story? Not that Mitt Romney the businessman was a villain. Contrary to conservative claims, liberals aren’t out to demonize or punish the rich. But they do object to the attempts of the right to do the opposite, to canonize the wealthy and exempt them from the sacrifices everyone else is expected to make because of the wonderful things they supposedly do for the rest of us."

Huh? It's okay to ship jobs overseas, cut wages and pay for remaining domestic workers, and get rich by producing absolutely nothing of value so long as such an individual pays a slightly higher tax rate? Sorry, Professor, but I'll have to disagree with on that one.

Perhaps Professor Krugman would be wise to examine the impending collapse of Slate.com, an online magazine that he once wrote for. The opinions and commentary webizine built up a steady readership with well-thought out, articulately reasoned online columns. Not two paragraph blog-brain farts, but actual columns. Like a newspaper. Just for the web.

Enter the Washington Post. I documented the slow destruction of Slate recently, so I will not recount all of that here, but the irony is overwhelming. The Washington Post increased its profits by laying off smart writers like Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer, and replaced the thoughtful, if not always correct Annie Lowrey with the sophomoric Matthew Yglesias.

Let's be frank: The Washington Post probably isn't paying Yglesias nearly what it paid Lowrey. And instead of paying staff writers, Slate currently leans heavily on reproducing news from the Associated Press to increase web traffic. And then there are the "guest contributions," paying some professor a fraction of the Post would pay a salaried writer to produce content.

Ironically, one of these guest columnists is an economics professor by the name of Robert Frank from Cornell University.  I say ironically because this Ivy League economics professor is laughably wrong in his prescription for America's current economic malaise. In a piece titled, "The Progressive Consumption Tax," Professor Frank identifies income inequality as a problem that can only be resolved by scrapping the income tax and replacing it with a progressive sales tax--that is, instead of a fixed tax rate on goods services, a rate on goods and services that would increase based on one's income. Incredibly, with the wealthiest Americans earning more money, Frank proposes that his progressive sales not be implemented at this time.

Clearly, Robert Frank is educated beyond his intelligence. After all, it is in the interest of the 99.9 percent of all Americans that the super-rich spend more money, not less. Spending keeps the economy going, and the Mitt Romeny's and Jamie Dimon's of the world have more money at their fingertips than they could ever possibly hope to spend. That's a problem, because with when corporations and super-wealthy individuals horde money into offshore savings account, such money has essential disappeared from the economy. Presto. Gone. Someone else has seen the fruit of his or her labor vanish, likely to never be seen again.

Where should Krugman and other self-proclaimed liberals go from here? Perhaps they should stand for more than just higher tax rates on the wealthiest one tenth of one percent and instead focus more on the root causes of income inequality. And believe me, they came from somewhere.

To be continued . . .

Slate Ain't What it used to be

It's a shame. Slate.com, a once respectable, opinions and commentary website, has devolved to unprecedented levels of shoddiness.

This didn't happen overnight. Rather, it started slowly. A small, rather innocent journalistic experiment in which reporters would not hide their biases, but rather share their opinions based on facts. It made for brilliant arguments (like Tim Noah's analysis on American health care coverage), thought provoking insight (ie, anything from Christopher Hitchens), and probing questions about human nature, taking politics out of the equation. And sometimes interesting commentary on sports, or media, or some other facet of American politics or culture. It was interesting, and it resided strictly in the fact-based community.

No longer. Microsoft had no need for this little thought experiment in 2004, and the opportunistic, money-losing Washington Post showed a rare display of financial acumen by purchasing the online entity. Over time, inferior journalists started writing guest columns that looked more like deceptive industry p.r. pieces than any legitimate journalistic endeavor. New "reporters" started to fill the bandwidth with CNN-style fluff, writing about whether or not a certain candidate will go up or down in the polls, as opposed to whether or not a policy proposal does or does not make sense.

The final nail in the coffin, perhaps, was when the Washington Post laid off Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer. Why? To what end? What industry in its right mind would lay off its best employees?

The future One World Trade Center

The Post, like most daily newspapers, probably isn't making a lot of money. It is probably losing money, or breaking even. So what did the wizards of finance over at accounting decide to do? Cut the payroll from the Online publication that is actually making money!

That's absurd. And it's probably why its "Moneybox" columnist, Matthew Yglesias is so laughably clueless about anything having to pertain with anything related to economic matters.

No more than two days ago, this Magna Cum Laude Harvard graduate posted a rather sophomoric brain-fart theory about economic development on Manhattan island (sorry about the harsh language, the university I went to in New Haven was on the wrong side of the tracks).

 Apparently, real estate in Manhattan would be cheap, if only the city of New York would remove the height restriction in certain neighborhoods. Is Yglesias aware that a new luxury high-rise goes up virtually every fort-night in midtown? Or that construction workers are currently building the largest office tower in the human history downtown?

It would be a waste of words to correct every wrong that Yglesias theorizes, but the man clearly doesn't understand that economics is demand-side. As long as Manhattan is populated with the richest people in the country, it will be an expensive place to live.

Not to outdo himself, Yglesias went off the rails again today, this time taking aim at Miley Cyrus for making a music video in support of "Occupy" protests across the globe. In Yglesias's warped world, Cyrus owes her wealth to income inequality and therefore, shouldn't empathize people struggling financially.

Yglesias doesn't stop there. He cites rising incomes in China and India as a reason for Cyrus's great wealth. The trouble with this logic is that when poor people start earning money, that decreases income inequality. Yglesias offers no explanation, though, as to why Miley's wealth should correlate with other people's hardship. Why is that?

There was a time when the more lucid writers of Slate would have something sensible to say (before they got fired, of course.) After all, no one who works should be poor. The rent wouldn't be too damn high if certain workers didn't make too much money. Why should a hedge fund manager make 20,000 times as much money as a pediatrician? Why should a health care CEO make make more money in an hour than a paramedic earns in an entire year? Why should some entertainers become millionaires when other people who do actual work (concert technicians, broadband installers, manufacturers of music equipment, airline pilots who fly Cyrus and other super-rich entertainers to concerts, etc) face financial hardship?

It is oddly fitting that a real economist (and former Slate columnist), Paul Krugman, published a real, coherent argument about salary and fiscal policy on the same day. It is somewhat tangential, but there is a reason why we tax wealth. And there is nothing wrong with someone who is wealthy suggesting that more people should have good jobs.

So it goes. I lament what is lost, and I refuse to stoop to level of my "professional" peers. I will continue investigating and writing informative online columns to fill the void that once was something.


Until next time, good night--and good luck.

Something I am thankful for.

I hope you all had a very good Thanksgiving this year. Today was an enjoyable time with family for me, but also a day of deep reflectiveness and contemplation. I was still saddened with the recent passing of an elementary school friend, Rachael Verdicchio-Morris. In spite of the fact that a great light went out far too soon, I still feel I have much to be thankful for.

One of Racheal's many beautiful illustrations. Check out her catalog at http://rachealanilyse.com/

Racheal is a hero to me, and I do not use that term lightly. There aren't very many human beings who can brighten your mood simply by the look of her smile, the glean her eye, or the tone of her voice. Racheal did this things so easily that it is a privilege to have known her and gone to school with her.

On simple human terms, she was an exemplary human being. Her accomplishments in life made her exceptional. Her list of accomplishments as an artist are impressive; the works themselves, phenomenal. What is most amazing is that she was able to achieve so much while living with epidermolysis bullosa, a very rare connective tissue disease that leaves the individual with very fragile skin. A simple hug can do a world of damage.

That didn't stop Rachael from living her life. I remember standing around on Prospect Street in Wethersfield, watching a parade, when I heard a familiar voice say, "Hi, Kevin!"

I turned around just in time to Rachael zip by me on her roller skates. At the time, I myself had only tried to roller skate a few times in my life--with very, very poor results. But there she was, unafraid and doing fine. That's inspiration. That's courage. That's heroism.

Some years back, Racheal testified on behalf of other individuals suffering from EB to the Connecticut General Assembly. As recently as 2009, insurance companies in the state of Connecticut were not required to cover wound care for individuals with the disease. To those who doubt the capacity of the democratic process in these troubled times, the bill passed and was signed into law.

Thank you Racheal. You will continue to be an inspiration to us all, now and forever.

Amen.