Saturday, January 25, 2014

David Brooks Continues To Beg America



To stop - please, for love of God stop -- talking about the predatory antics of the rich people he shills for as if they have anything whatsoever to do with the plight of the Poors or the Soon-To-Be-Poors:
...
Inequality is certainly widening. Mobility is something we have to think about as Americans. It is the American dream. But as a frame, it is a very broad frame. What Mark talked about, the concentration of wealth at the top, is caused by one set of problems, middle-class wage stagnation caused by another set of problems, what is happening in the lower 20 or 40 percent caused by a different set of problems.

So you have got a whole bunch of problems all intermingled. And my viewing, the political system I don't think can deal with all these different problems all layered on top. If I were President Obama doing the State of the Union address next week, I would say, where is the greatest injustice? Where is the greatest harm?

And I would say that's at the bottom 20 percent or the bottom 40 percent...
Definitely!

Let's all "think about" this stuff.  

As Americans.  

Because something something the American Dream.

Meanwhile - Look over here!  Look over here! -- please for God's sake lets get back to talking about unwed teenage mothers and stuff:
...You take kids, what do they have to do to have a pretty -- chance of a decent life? Graduate from high school at age 19 with maybe a 2.5 GPA, not get convicted of anything, not get pregnant. Only 37 percent of kids at the bottom 20 percent income scale are doing that, only 37 percent.
For the record, without too much effort, any competent citizen from Paul Krugman to my sainted mother can incinerate Mr. Brooks' increasingly frantic and transparent attempt to decouple 30 years of aggressively pro-plutocrat, anti-labor, anti-equality policies of the Right from any discussion of income inequality...

...which is so much of out mainstream is devoted to keeping fragile Conservatives like Mr. Brooks as carefully protected and climate-controlled as any hothouse orchid, and the Hell away from competent citizens.

But if you find it entertaining to watch someone just punch this whole, stupid line of claptrap right out of the ring, check out David Cay Johnston at about the 10:35 mark of this video from the Melissa Harris-Perry show (if you have the time, the whole thing is worth watching):




And for extra laughs, your Moment of Zen comes courtesy of David Brooks -- the man with the new, $1.3M Cleveland Park mansion *$4M Cleveland Park mansion, who began his career making a buck shilling for one horrid brand of Conservative snake-oil after another and who now jets all over the planet on the New York Times' dime -- expressing his bafflement about why anyone would do stupid, terrible things in pursuit of money and status:
What is mystifying about this couple [the McDonnells] is the fascination with Rolexes and Ferraris. I have like a $80 watch or something like that. Why do you need a $6,500 watch? What are you getting out of it? He needs status. I guess he wants a Rolex.
*Thanks to alert reader marindenver for correcting my failing memory.

6 comments:

Cirze said...

I'd like a closer look at that $80 watch owned by Brooks. Seems not to really go with a $1.3M house.

But it could be a small million-dollar house, I guess.

the cheese eater said...

Why anyone would regularly watch the MHP show is beyond me. Of all her panelists it is painfully obvious that only David Cay Johnston has anything intelligent to say about the subject and that his presence and prescience makes those around him uncomfortable. So why would he force feed such a great big both sides shit sandwich down the throats of Americans in this clip? (He makes these both sides shit sandwiches all the time.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhNosiPKaoA#t=98

It really is a great clip. I just love "tricky" Dick Durbin's reasoning!

Like what you hear from DCJ? This is a 90 minute lecture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTJtRQxH2Eo

marindenver said...

It's worse than that DG - he sold his old place for $1.6 million. The Cleveland Park cottage with "vast spaces for entertaining" cost just under $4 million. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/post/surreal-estate-david-brooks-moves-from-bethesda-to-cleveland-park/2012/05/06/gIQAs27Q6T_blog.html

Hypocrisy, thy name is Bobo Brooks. (Along with a lot of other things.)

steeve said...

"The defining issue of our time" is something we solved decades ago. That's pathetic. "Let's all put on our thinking caps. How can we possibly do what we already did? This will take a lot of study."

In what other field (besides economics, which is really politics, and journalism, which is really politics) do we not know what we know?

Part of the reason i can't debate republicans is because i checked out of day-to-day news years ago. What's the point? Just solve the solved problems. Idiots.

Anonymous said...

Good morning, Mr. Glass.

"That leads to there are a lot of especially men who are not worth marrying, because they don't have incomes, they don't have wages."

Oh, the follow-up questions that could arise from that statement...

Enjoy your day.

---Kevin Holsinger

Mark Weiss said...

Education is no longer the great equalizer, the criminal justice system is.

In general, you have people who destroyed the world economy getting richer. A person who is arrested for smoking a joint or petit shoplifting and enters the criminal justice may never again be able to enter the real economy.

No amount of education can cure this deflection.