Thursday, May 12, 2005

Al Franken, oi ve, at New Ruskin College

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

Lecture Notes: 05-04-05

The Dishonesty of Stewed Tomatoes Part III

“Stewed Tomatoes”, that is what Franken said the other day . . . to be continued . . .

Counselor: . . .

. . .

Counselor: . . . Well?

What?

Counselor: Franken explains why he said we should not have to bribe the upper classes in order to provide an old age pension for the poor and now you don’t care?

So what?

Counselor: For two weeks you have been going on about “the coward” Franken, and now when he responds to you, your questioning him about “bribe” you don’t care? Why have you been going on about it for all this time?

It helps distract me as my time runs out. Anyway he didn’t say anything directly. Nothing directly about me.

Counselor: Well how about his “nightmare” in the opening monolog? You know, “some people are living in a nightmare,” that was pretty direct? . . . No?

Nightmare? This is not an apparition. A fantasy. A dream.

This is my life.

When I first told my sister that I thought Yvonne [deletion] was working with people at the public broadcasting station, KQED, betraying my confidence, playing “mind games” with me, and then a few days later one of the on air radio bitches shouted into the microphone, “Mind games? Well, this is Live! Radio!”, that was no nightmare. My sister betrayed me too.

She was my only contact with my family. The only one I saw regularly. How to explain? Yvonne did after all, years later, try to explain herself. (see Yvonne’s Story in the Stolen Notebook at the Moynihan) But my sister never made any attempt. I can not put into words how . . . empty . . . desolation . . . just this great emptiness in my heart . . . I thought it undignified for two adult children to involve our aged parents in such . . . such . . . what? Disgrace? (Anyway they could have believed their son, who believed the people on the radio were spying on him and sending him coded messages, or their daughter who said, “I don’t know what he is talking about.”)

Ironically after I am dead her paintings will become more valuable. ‘The artist is the one who betrayed her brother, you know, that one who blew his brains out in front of the KQED building.’ And someone in the gallery will overhear and will whisper, ‘Oh, yes, she worked with the marriage counselor and some others, I forget the details, but he killed him self in front of the theater, or at um, someplace, it was a scandal.’ And so it goes.

Yes, helping to drive her brother to his death could be very good for her market.

It is nightmarish, I’ll give him that.

Counselor: So . . . what about the stewed tomatoes?

Oh, it is a small point. He was being dismissive. If you adopt a “Jewish” accent you can avoid having to be serious. That is one of the great advantages of being the proverbial “outsider.” You never have to take responsibility for anything. Everything, Iraq, taxes, smog, is the fault of the goyim.

(You know I don’t think it was Hertzberg who recently said “I believe in progressive taxation.” I think it was E. J. Dionne.

Counselor: See, and Franken quoted E. J. ----

Yvonne.

Counselor: What?

This is my parenthesis. You are in my parenthesis.)

Counselor: Sorry.

Can’t I get any privacy?

Counselor: Go on.

Yes he said that E. J. Dionne helped clarify, I think he said “crystallize” his own views. First he said that he still agrees with progressive indexing, but says it should start at 40k a year not 20k. (But Dionne’s own numbers are 35k to 60k in the very article that Franken claims “crystallized” his views.) Then he says he agrees with Dionne that the Democrats should “get up from the table” and not negotiate because Bush is acting in “bad faith.” (Bad Faith? Franken says progressive indexing should start at 40k, Dionne says it would start at 35k to 60k, but because Posen (a Democrat) apparently once mentioned the 20k bracket as possibly being affected, now Franken concludes Bush is acting in “bad faith.”) And he says that the Democrat should “get up from the table.” As if they have been sitting in long all night conferences on how to ‘save Social Security.’ (He advocates that the Democrats should stop ‘negotiating’ and he claims that Bush is the one acting in bad faith.)

And this is what gives politics and public discourse a bad name. This is what drives good people away, and ---

Counselor: And to kill themselves?

Yes, exactly.

You see it is not Social Security. What we are looking at is the human condition. The lies. The basic dishonesty. The utter alienation of the human being, one from the other.

Franken thinks we are talking about Social Security. Dionne thinks he can “get up from the table.” We are not. He can not.

Counselor: Unless he kills himself.

Yes, exactly. Otherwise you are in the game.

For example, Franken called Social Security an annuity. But this misstatement explains why socialism failed. Because people are fundamentally dishonest. The market keeps them honest. They actually have to part with money to buy something. They can not game it. Bottom line: They have to pay.

But in politics, public policy, you can say one thing while believing something entirely different.

What Franken’s “annuity” discloses to us is that he is dishonest. I now know that he knows the difference between an old age pension program intended to keep the elderly out of abject poverty, which is subject to the control, discretion, of Congress, (this fact has been tested two times before the U. S. Supreme Court and both times the Court has set out that Social Security is not a guaranteed “right”, an annuity, but a government program, like any other,) and a real annuity. And Franken knows this.

We are not examining Social Security, but rather Franken, Dionne, and everyone else in the discussion. We are seeing inside them. Social Security, the discussion, is like an x-ray of their souls, their hearts. His use of annuity shows is heart is damaged.

Social Security is in “trouble.” It has greater obligations than ability to pay. But it really does not matter what we do. Progressive indexing would be more equitable than simply cutting back everyone’s payments. Fairer, if that is important to you. But we do not “have” to do anything.

But fairness may not be important to you. That millions of people rely on Social Security to organize their lives, to reassure themselves, also may not be important to you. You can wait until the last minute, wait to see if the Congress authorizes the transfer of money into the account so the checks can be mailed. The tumult and commotion, the anxiety not just of the pensioners who are waiting on those checks to pay the rent, or buy food, but also of all the other people who are watching the spectacle of the “government” in action, all of the emotions may be useful to you.

Perhaps you have calculated that your party will be advantaged by the political controversy. You may be looking several moves ahead, seeing deeply into the swirling mix of public opinion, fear and loathing, a dozen years into the future. Or perhaps you also are planning to blow your brains out. Is that it?

One of the theories we examine at the Army Navy Club is the possibility that the elite knows we are heading into a meteor shower that will destroy the Earth, or that bio-warfare is inevitable and will destroy the biosphere. We theorize that they have simply given up but do not tell us so as not to panic us. (Our recommendation is that the elite should in that case, nonetheless, appear to be working these problems for if they go on carrying on as they are, piling on unbelievable national debt that mortgages the lives of future generations, failure to build nuclear power stations, failure to exploit technology for education, etc. etc. all this may cause a global panic as soon as the people realize that the elite has given up, and then infer the reason why.)

So for Franken to call Social Security an annuity only makes since if he does not care if we know he is not telling the truth. Maybe he does not care because he has his own plans to blow his brains out of his skull, or because he thinks his listeners are too stupid to know what an annuity is, or, or, or, who cares. He is a liar.

Ironic because he regularly angrily shouts this at others: He is a Liar! Oi ve. See you can use oi ve anytime. Repeatedly call Social Security an annuity. Just go, “Oi ve, I am a simple Jewish boy, what can you expect? Oi ve.’

His dishonesty comes up again and again:
1, He complains that the IOUs in the Social Security’s filing cabinet in West Virginia “Are not worthless.” Really? The paper could be recycled but the cost of taking the paper to the recycling location exceeds the value of the paper.

The dishonesty here is that he continues to assert that the paper, the promise to pay, is valuable. But the promise is illusory. For, as the Supreme Court has twice upheld, the payments of Social Security are subject to the will of Congress. It is not an annuity. The IOUs are meaningless because Congress could decide to cut the top 20% of retirees, who with the others in their class, as a class, control 50% of the national income and 60% of the national financial wealth. (Or it could decide to cut everyone’s check by 20%, (which some have actually advocated.))

Those IOUs are a con. But Franken persists in saying they are real assets.

2, So one lie leads to the next. Today he advocated raising the interest on those “bonds”, (IOUs in West Virginia), to 4.75% (note the use of detail, not 5%!), and this added interest payments on the bonds would more than offset the shortfall!

Before I have thought him too uninformed to be a liar. But this lie is so obvious, the scheme so fantastic, that he must know it is a lie.

Interest payments? Why Congress could just issue new “bonds.” Ten trillion more! Back them with rights to real estate on the moon!

Because it is not an annuity all this paperwork is illusory. In the end taxes must be raised to make the payments to the rich so they can take not 4 cruises but 8. Poor workers, with 30k jobs, and 95 IQ points, trying to cope with a society that is . . . . like this . . . will be taxed 13% payroll, and now an increase in their income tax to pay those IOUs, and as we know, the prices they have to pay will be going up, as others who are being taxed raise their prices in response.

3, Franken, a detail man, complained that the commissions were too high in a program of individual accounts, but he felt if the assets in the accounts were held in a common fund, (as was proposed by Billy Clinton), then the fees and risk would be spread out more fairly. I submit for you considerations that Franken is here, as he likes to say, “blowing it out his ass.” He has no idea what the fees or risk would be in either system. (Commonly held or individually held assets.) First he decides he does not like Bush, then that he does not like Bush’s individual accounts, and only then does he focus on the fees and risk. (Dr. Greenspan prefers Bush’s plan to the earlier proposal put forward by Billy Clinton.) And what is blowing it out your ass but another way of saying lie?

4, Earlier we explained Ludwig von Mises’ dictum that there is no such thing as capital there are only capital goods. Franken took this idea up and said that he could therefore agree that the government “bonds” in West Virginia were not real capital. (Note that government bonds that are held by individuals have value as a promise to pay. The IOUs in 2 above are promises by the government to pay itself. As the government can at any time reorganize Social Security the promise is illusory. And the failure of Franken to admit this point is another his lies.) So taking Ludwig von Mises’ advise Franken proposed putting the Social Security trust funds in “stewed tomatoes.”

Now the dishonesty here is manifold. Again recall that we are not really looking at Social Security. We are looking at Franken’s heart, at his dishonesty. See here how he misdirects his audience. If they are to have a “guaranteed” account, an annuity, the money must be put into some productive asset. Here he uses his “good ol’Jewish boy” routine to ridicule the dictum of Ludwig von Mises. As we have seen so many times before he does not try to explain the underlying economics, but rather postures and misleads. His audience is thus mislead and disadvantaged. Later when they repeat these silly ideas in serious discussion they will be shown to be wrong.

(In politics you never know what people are really doing. Possibly Franken and others are calculating that the destruction of Social Security will lead to some “greater good” for their party.)

Now if you have been able to follow the discussion this far you can gain an insight into Economics from here. What would Franken’s best argument have been if he had had the wit to articulate it instead of his “good ol’Jewish boy” routine?

This: Ludwig von Mises says there is no such thing as capital there are only capital goods. Therefore the government IOUs in West Virginia are not “capital” because there is nothing behind them except the government promise to pay itself. (At anytime the government could decide to cut Social Security, therefore to the retirees the IOUs are worthless.)

But what if we say the money has been invested in productive assets? What if we say we invested in ourselves? All those schools, all those roads and airports, harbors! We have built a nation with all those tax dollars! America! This is our ‘productive asset! We, us, America!

Not bad. . . . the money was collected from the people and invested in the people. Good.

Just one question? How would we know if you invested wisely? How would we know if you invested the money or squandered it?

This is the shortfall. If your investment had paid off, America would be generating so much income that you were able to meet your obligations in Social Security, Medicare, pensions, healthcare generally, education, . . . oh, and foreign aid for those children in the picture above.

But that is why we have the problem in Social Security, Medicare, etc. etc.

You did not build those nuclear power stations to power your nation. You did not build the buildings and factories. You failed to provide health care for the children so parents chose not to have the additional child, or three, or four.

Mrs. Feinstein and Barbara Boxer down zoned the Bay Area creating scarcity. (How did it first come up in conversation that we should make small apartments illegal? I mean crime, education, transportation, there were a lot of issues to deal with, how did they even find time to outlaw small apartments?)

Franken’s best argument proves how wrong you have been.

You never created the Open University of the United States. You never shipped those laser disk based courses to Mexico, or Zambia.

Franken will never admit it. But it can be seen that his best argument shows this truth: the failure of Social Security shows the failure of American development policies for the last fifty years.

But you are all very good at cover ups. You have covered up for each other for years so I suppose you can cover up Franken’s dishonesty, and the problems with Social Security, and America.

But tell me, what was Jeb Babbin talking about?

In 2003 I sent the following email when I still thought that there was a chance.
(see email out box archive at the Moynihan (http://www.newruskincollege.com/moynihanmemoriallibrarynewruskincollegecom/id3.html))

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 00:50:09 -0400
pliniodesignori@newruskincollege.com>
Don’t you just love riddles? ‘Some stories are too good not to tell, even if they are stories about our neighbors. It seems that with astronomy, as with politics, all astronomy is local.’ ABC Nightly News. 08-27-03 “Now, tell me (Mrs. Jack Swanson) what does the planet Mars have to do with the recall election?” ---Jed Babbin, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense and now columnist with National Review and American Prowler. On KSFO 08-28-03

Peter Jennings, I call on you, what was going on at ABC News? You are not alone.

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

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