Ken

For five years before his election as president...

Submitted by Ken Watts on Thu, 03/17/2011 - 17:32
The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America

For five years before his election as president, Reagan had been regaling audiences with tales of "the welfare queen," the Chicago woman who he said "had eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veterans' benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. ... Her tax-free income is over $150,000" It was not just the baldest demagoguery but also a gross distortion of the facts. The woman, Linda Taylor, had been convicted in 1977 of using two aliases to collect checks totaling $8,000. But the anecdote was a powerful tool for arousing the anger of white working-class and middle-class voters who were coping with tough economic times. Indeed, Reagan found it so compelling that he continued using it in the White House, even after the press had revealed it to be a false-hood.

William Kleinknecht

The War on the Middle Class

Submitted by Ken Watts on Thu, 03/17/2011 - 16:48

IT'S INTERESTING TO NOTE that the week after Wisconsin Republicans railroaded a bill through their legislature destroying the rights of middle class workers they were in Washington collecting funding from big corporations.

Scott Walker has touted his approach in Wisconsin as a game plan for other states with Republican majorities, but in fact it's the same old bait-and-switch that's already being played out across the country, and in Congress, at the national level.

  1. Get elected by false promises to the middle class, using the advantage of the deep pockets of your backers.
  2. Use the power to give money to the super-wealthy, either as tax breaks or corporate welfare, paying back the people who funded your campaign.
  3. Use the budget crisis created by the giveaways as an excuse to screw the middle class—fulfilling the agenda of the people who paid for your campaign.

The tactics that were used in Wisconsin are from the same game book they've been using in Washington for the last thirty years.

Remember Ronald Reagan?

[T]he solution was liberalism...

Submitted by Ken Watts on Wed, 03/16/2011 - 16:37
The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule

[T]he solution was liberalism: it had rescued the nation from the mindless boom-and-bust cycle of laissez-faire; it had defeated fascism; and it was then, in 1965, delivering one of the greatest periods of prosperity in history. In that year, American GNP grew by 6.5 percent—in these glory days of the billionaire it barely gets over 2 percent—in line with the official, stated goal of American economic policy: "a growing abundance, widely shared." Taxes were high, and the richest man in the world was the oil baron J. Paul Getty, worth between two and four billion dollars and fond of grousing about how tough it was to be rich in an era when even the middle-class man had access to what had once been the exclusive privileges of great wealth.

Thomas Frank

Methinks They Protest Too Much

Submitted by Ken Watts on Wed, 03/16/2011 - 15:50

YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL what the right-wing is secretly up to by paying attention to where they attack liberals.

If a Newt Gingrich expresses outrage at Clinton's sexual behavior you can be sure he's having an affair himself.

If a Peter T. King commences McCarthy-like hearings on Islamic terrorism, you can be sure he supported terrorists in Ireland.

If a Larry Craig takes repeated legislative stands against gays...

You get the idea.

So I should have realized, about a month ago, what has become completely clear in the time since.

I posted about the repeated complaints from "conservative" pundits that liberals constantly invoke (and thereby "incite") "class warfare".

I pointed out two things:

Robert Wallace Watts (1923-2011)

Submitted by Ken Watts on Tue, 03/01/2011 - 17:57
bandstand

MY FATHER DIED peacefully early last Saturday morning.

Those who have read the daily mull for some years may remember his memoirs of a childhood spent in a small town in Iowa. (You can find them here.)

The following obituary, composed by my brother, captures him perfectly:

Robert Wallace Watts died at Ave Maria Village in Jamestown, ND, on February 26th, 2011. Robert was born on October 15th, 1923, in Barnes City, Iowa, to Kenneth Watts and Bertha Elizabeth Watts (Wallace).

He was the oldest of three sons. When Robert was one year old, the family moved to New Sharon, Iowa.

The Problem of Power

Submitted by Ken Watts on Wed, 02/23/2011 - 13:46

YESTERDAY, I BEGAN BY pointing out two facts which, taken together, are quite frightening.

The first was that Scott Walker's campaign, in Wisconsin, was so heavily funded by the billionaire Koch brothers and other big money interests that the only surprise in his election was that he won by a mere 5 points.

I've since learned that he did not promise, as a part of his campaign, to strip state unions of their bargaining rights—so any argument that this is what the people voted for is nonsense.

He basically got elected under false pretenses.

The second fact, or set of facts, had to do with the economic direction the United States of America has been taking during the last few decades.

Who gets the money

We have come to the place where about three-fourths of the country is owned by the 10% wealthiest, leaving 25% for the rest of us to share.

In terms of income, rather than ownership, the bottom 90%—those whose work actually produces the profit—have, on average, household incomes of about $31,000.

By contrast, the top 1% have household incomes of about a million dollars.

We're not talking about mere millionaires here—people who have over a million dollars—we're talking about people who add a million to their wealth every single year.

But it doesn't stop there.

Two Very Scary Facts

Submitted by Ken Watts on Tue, 02/22/2011 - 15:36

I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF composing a long and convoluted post about the interconnected theme running through the current events in

  • Wisconsin,
  • Egypt,
  • murderous attacks on doctors providing perfectly legal care for women,
  • the pretend "deficit crisis" in Washington,
  • the Citizen's United case,
  • etc., etc., etc...

...when I was brought up short by two facts—one that has been public knowledge forever, and a second which is not surprising, but which was new to me, at least.

I'll start with the second one.

Subscribe to Ken