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Mitt Romney’s Plan for the Suffering 12 Million
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By Llewellyn King I jumped on an airplane for London this week. I could do it because of something of inestimable value in my pocket: a passport. Most people take passports very much for granted, except those who have ever been without one. They know how confining it is to be without the right paperwork. They know what it's like to take the first step into the ghastly limbo of statelessness; a ghoulish existence outside of the law and its protections, outside of normal society, and outside of the right to earn a living. This sub-societal life, where at least 12 million people reside in the United States, is a place too far for Mitt Romney to comprehend. His immigration proposals have the irrationality of ignorance and the cruelty of those who are committed to not knowing. Evelyn Waugh, the British writer, talked about the morbid lack of curiosity of colonial settlers in Africa to the indigenous populations. Romney and his cohorts have a morbid lack of interest in the 12 million or so illegal immigrants who live on the fringes of our society, often doing its dirtiest work. Statistics never tell the story; in their way, they obfuscate it. They don't tell of decency, generosity, kindness and nobility or despair, hurt and suffering. They tell us that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, but that is just a statistic. To comprehend the horror, you must walk around Auschwitz or some other camp to see where the deeds were done; to see the hair and shoes of the children; and to know, in my case, that these toddlers were my contemporaries. You have to extract the individual from the data, and look him or her in the eyes. Not for Romney and other Republican savants. For them, the 12 million are just people who have broken laws – laws they choose to treat as immutable. They are less than human and should be denied education, employment, medical treatment. These people live in the fear of being rounded up and deported, often to countries they don't know and sometimes where they don't speak the language. The children, a small minority of those who are here illegally, who the DREAM Act sought to help, are among those that the immigration fanatics would punish for a crime committed by their parents: wanting a better life. The sins of the fathers will be vested on the sons. The life of the illegal, the stateless person, is one of degradation, exposure to exploitation and fear. My late friend, Johnny Prokoff, who was a much-loved bartender at the National Press Club in Washington, used to tell his own life story of the vulnerability and suffering of the stateless. Prokoff left Lithuania at a time when there was so much poverty that there was a small industry in killing lice in garments with a hammer. The trick, he told me, was to kill the vermin without damaging the garment. It was a necessity induced by poverty. The young Prokoff stowed away on a ship and began a seven-year odyssey as the property of various ruthless captains. Sometimes they would demand sex, always they would make stowaways work, and never would they let them land on any shore. Also, they would sell them to other captains – slaves, in fact. Eventually, Prokoff jumped ship in Mexico, made his way to the United States, married an American and was able finally to live a legitimate life. Multiply him by 12 million. Some walked here, some came on visitors' visas and never left, and some were brought by lovers, parents or spouses. If they cannot find low-grade work as domestics, chicken-factory employees, dog washers, they must contemplate a life of crime or prostitution; creating a statistic that politicians can advertize to prove that these people are no good. I went through a period of not having a passport, although I had a green card. Other journalists romped around the world — I stayed at home. It's a violation that one doesn't forget. Tell the 12 million about Romney's cruel and innovative idea: self-deportation. Walk to where, Mitt? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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On Tax Cuts, GOP Should Think like Business
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Mythology in Washington holds that when it comes to economics, Republicans know best. The root of this myth is another myth, which goes like this: When it comes to business, especially small business, Republicans know best.
All of this doesn’t matter until you get to taxes, when the Republicans, buttressed by their mythological understanding of these things, believe they know best.
And what the Republicans believe they know best is that when you cut taxes, everything gets better: Government shrinks, business booms and tax revenues go up.
It’s not that there aren’t shards of truth here; it’s just that everything has to be in the right conjunction to get one or all of these benefits.
Business doesn’t go along with these myths but, like everyone else, it hates paying taxes, so by and large it endorses the Republican position.
The thing is, business believes in a more durable truth: price.
Price means revenue, and business, therefore, believes and practices aggressive pricing. When business needs to exceed the gap between cost and revenue, it increases the price. If the market refuses to pay the price, business exits that market or fails.
Sometimes, however, and increasingly in these hard times, business pulls a con. It lowers or maintains the price, but adds other charges to gain income. The airlines are doing this. The banks make as much or more on fees than they do on consumer loans. Catalog companies do it with “shipping and handling” fees.
Publishers have experimented more with price than most businesses, and their conclusion is to stay on the high side. If the market rejects your high-priced publication, so be it.
I’ve spent a lifetime studying pricing in publishing. All I’ve learned is this: Defend your price.
In London, Rupert Murdoch engaged his Times in a costly price war with Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph. In the middle of fierce cost-cutting, Murdoch’s camp, with more resources, was triumphant.
Cheap papers were selling.
But when it was all over, the relative positions of the publications had not changed by much and millions of British pounds had been lost. The hope had been that the victor, Murdoch’s papers, would gain so many more readers that they could make up the circulation revenue losses with higher advertising rates. It didn’t work.
Taxes are different, the GOP has averred. Not really. If they’re too high, they will stifle business, choke enterprise and cause businesses to go offshore. Clearly, marginal rates that exceed some magic number (well south of 50 percent) would stifle business.
At one point after World War II, they reached 90 percent in Britain with disastrous results and a few comical ones. The titled, moneyed families fled to Kenya and Rhodesia and the show-business types took up residence in Switzerland. Actor David Niven and playwright Noel Coward were among these.
Now that the tax cuts enacted in the early days of the George W. Bush administration are about to expire, it may behoove us to examine these with a question: What would business do? Things looked pretty bright when these cuts were enacted with the prospect of years of surpluses. But that was before 9-11, two big wars and a recession.
Therefore, if you looked at the tax issue from a boardroom point of view, the unanimous decision would be to go for the revenue and review the result later. Boardroom-loving Republicans ought to know this.
In business, they laugh at people who believe that lower prices automatically will produce compensating revenue. The joke goes something like losing a little on everything and making up with volume.
Many years ago, I had lunch with George Will and Trent Lott. All three of us were speakers at the American Petroleum Institute’s annual meeting in Houston. At the time, Lott and Will agreed that we were an under-taxed country, given the demands on government.
Back then, Republicans thought like business people.
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The lost art of debate — and other wordy topics
February 6th, 2012
Guests: Aram Bakshian, author and critic; Atul Singh, Fair Observer
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses; the Internet
January 23rd, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Sirius XM Radio; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California; Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report
A discussion of Shirley’s book, “December 1941: 31 Days That Saved America and Changed the World”
January 16th, 2012
Guest Craig Shirley, author
World events as the U.S. elections get fully underway
January 9th, 2012
Guests Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrei Sitov, Itar-Tass; Al Leeds, The Washington Post
The Joys of Transportation
January 2nd, 2012
Guests Bill Gouse, Transportation Consultant – Originally Broadcast October 16, 2011