America has a mass shooting problem.

You won't see this on Fox "News"

Beyond Big Bird

Why Government Should Support the Arts

March 6, 2014

by Nick Paleologos

In the half century since its founding, the National Endowment for the Arts has been an island of creativity in an ocean of indifference. Even President Obama took more than a year to nominate the estimable Jane Chu as the NEA’s next chair. If confirmed, Dr. Chu will be the latest in a baker’s dozen of American arts czars since 1965. But the sea is rising around her, and the beach is eroding at an alarming rate.

In today’s movie theaters, George Clooney and Matt Damon may be saving the world’s art treasures from the Nazis, but in Washington we’re still arguing over Big Bird vs. Bad Art.

Welcome aboard Jane. I don’t envy your task.

By the time we pull out of Afghanistan later this year we will have scrapped, destroyed or left behind $7 billion worth of taxpayer-funded military vehicles and equipment — in less than one year.

Think about that for a second. Half a world away, over the next nine months, America will dump into some desert hole — voluntarily and largely without debate — literally billions more tax dollars than the total amount of money the NEA has spent in the last 50 years.

Out here in the hinterlands, we have become very clever and practiced in the art of couching our cultural advocacy in the language du jour. You know what I’m talking about: “economic development,” “community revitalization” and my personal favorite, “R.O.I. (return on investment).” Nobody bothers to ask about the R.O.I. on $7 billion worth of equipment that we’re handing over to Afghan President Hamid Karzai as we hightail it out of his country. But I digress.

One of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary films is called “The Square.” It’s a fascinating account of a revolution that began in the heart of Cairo and resulted in the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. This Egyptian-made film is banned in Egypt.

A few weeks ago in Sochi, during the Olympics, the Pussy Riot punk group gave an impromptu public performance – one that probably would have gone unnoticed in Times Square. In Russia, however, six group members — five women and one man — were horsewhipped and pepper sprayed in broad daylight by Cossack militia.

Because artists speak truth directly to our hearts and souls, they are under relentless assault around the world. Truth-tellers are the most vulnerable and yet the most essential members of any society. Their unique gift as artists is to remind us of our common humanity. With every note, brushstroke, word or gesture, they transcend all artificial barriers of nationality, race and religion.

The NEA was originally established in America to “encourage and assist artists and enable them to achieve wider distribution of their works.” As arts advocates, we are quick to celebrate the individual artist as both creator of beauty and catalyst for community development. We readily acknowledge their work as both food for the soul and fuel for the economy.

But in today’s America — where the loudest voices with the deepest pockets dominate most discussions, and fear of retribution leaves too many citizens with no place to turn — doubling down on the artist as truth-teller is the single most important thing the NEA can and should be doing.

In a speech to students at Amherst College two years before the NEA was even created, and only one month before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy gave us perhaps the most cogent rationale for a robust national arts agency in any democracy:

“The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state … the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.”

Truth as a return on investment? That’s good enough for me.

What conservatives should be saying.

John Elway doesn’t believe in safety nets. 
Here’s why he should.

by Nick Paleologos 

A few weeks ago, ex-Denver Bronco quarterback John Elway shared his political philosophy with Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “I don’t believe in safety nets,” declared Elway — who is currently executive vice president of football operations for the Denver Broncos. Elway seems like a really nice guy. But he should know better.

The taxpayers of Denver paid $300 million for the stadium his team calls home. Which is a whopping 75 percent of the cost of construction. As a result, Elway’s team owns 100 percent of a beautiful stadium for which they paid only a 25 percent share to build. The money the Broncos saved (courtesy of Denver taxpayers) would have helped underwrite Elway’s $4 million-a-year salary when he was their quarterback — 20 years ago.

Even now — by foregoing any ownership interest in the stadium, those same taxpayers continue to subsidize Elway’s executive salary — not to mention Peyton Manning’s $15 million annual paycheck. After fleecing fans for $7 bucks a beer at Bronco home games, the least Elway could do is stop adding insult to injury by begrudging unemployment insurance to the out-of-work in Orange Crush nation.

Elway must also realize that the “safety net” he’s dismissing (for people who actually need it) is currently cushioning the corporate coffers of more companies than just his beloved Broncos. The National Football League grossed more than $9 billion last year and paid zero taxes. In fact the NFL has never paid any taxes at all because it is a “non-profit” organization — unlike either the NBA or Major League Baseball.

No doubt the NFL’s army of expensive lawyers, lobbyists and PR flacks will insist that taxpayers are supporting a worthy cause — like subsidizing the $44 million annual salary package of their commissioner, Roger Goodell. He too seems like a really nice guy. They’re all nice guys.

Few people have thrown a football better than John Elway. God bless him. And Goodell — son of a U.S. senator, three-sport athlete at Bronxsville High School, and graduate in economics from Washington & Jefferson College — is probably worth every penny of his $44 million taxpayer-subsidized salary.

Don’t get me wrong, they all should earn as much money as their talent and initiative allows. But please at least have the plain old-fashioned American decency to acknowledge that those huge salaries are made possible because of a taxpayer-supported infrastructure. Dare I say, a corporate “safety net”? Let’s just assume there are probably many good reasons why millions of taxpayers should help pump up the profits of a single company like the Denver Broncos. And let’s assume that it also makes good public policy sense for hundreds of millions of taxpayers to subsidize a non-profit corporation like the NFL.

Still, there’s something downright creepy in the soft-spoken, aw-shucks manner of some people who — while benefiting handsomely from taxpayer-subsidized businesses of their own — go out of their way to decry taxpayer support for things like universal healthcare and free public education which are essential building blocks of the very “opportunity society” they claim to want for everybody else.

Let’s face it.  The problem isn’t Ted Nugent, or even Ted Cruz. Most people recognize insanity when they see it.  The real problem comes when seemingly reasonable guys like John Elway start popping off about people on Social Security, or Medicare, or unemployment assistance, or public pensions.

Call me crazy but crapping on teachers and cops just doesn’t strike me as a classy thing to do.

My father-in-law, Ed Worth, is a rock-ribbed Republican and a very decent guy: retired Navy, devout Catholic — the whole nine yards. A peaceful family get together at his house usually means keeping the conversation focused on grandchildren and sports — that is, until John Elway opened his mouth.

So earlier this month, we got into it big time. And the results genuinely surprised me. I agreed with him that welfare and pension abuse should be ruthlessly rooted out of the system. He agreed with me that wealth should be taxed at the same rate as work. He even went a step further. He proceeded to lay out for me the “Ed Worth Tax Reform Plan.”

Whatever a family needs to live on — call it the first $50,000 of everybody’s income — should be tax-free. Every last dollar after that — whether from the sweat of your brow or the savvy of your broker — should be taxed at the exact same rate (say 20 percent). No caps. No exemptions. No exceptions.

Amen to that.

Now if only John Elway was listening, maybe we could actually get somewhere.

Profits are rising. Paycheck are flat. The Founding Fathers' solution:

Why Thomas Jefferson Favored Profit Sharing

By David Cay Johnston / February 4, 2014

President Obama's State of the Union speech last week focused on America's severe and growing inequality, but he stopped short of repeating the Founding Fathers' many warnings that this condition could doom American democracy.

The founders, despite decades of rancorous disagreements about almost every other aspect of their grand experiment, agreed that America would survive and thrive only if there was widespread ownership of land and businesses.

George Washington, nine months before his inauguration as the first president, predicted that America "will be the most favorable country of any kind in the world for persons of industry and frugality, possessed of moderate capital, to inhabit." And, he continued, "it will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people, because of the equal distribution of property."

The second president, John Adams, feared "monopolies of land" would destroy the nation and that a business aristocracy born of inequality would manipulate voters, creating "a system of subordination to all... The capricious will of one or a very few" dominating the rest. Unless constrained, Adams wrote, "the rich and the proud" would wield economic and political power that "will destroy all the equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamations of the people themselves."

James Madison, the Constitution's main author, described inequality as an evil, saying government should prevent "an immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches." He favored "the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigents towards a state of comfort."

Alexander Hamilton, who championed manufacturing and banking as the first Treasury secretary, also argued for widespread ownership of assets, warning in 1782 that, "whenever a discretionary power is lodged in any set of men over the property of their neighbors, they will abuse it."

Late in life, Adams, pessimistic about whether the republic would endure, wrote that the goal of the democratic government was not to help the wealthy and powerful but to achieve "the greatest happiness for the greatest number."

Professor Joseph R. Blasi and Douglas L. Kruse of Rutgers and Richard B. Freeman of Harvard gathered many of the founders' writings on this topic for their new book, The Citizen's Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy. Copies are currently circulating among congressional staffers in both parties as politicians brace themselves to face what polls show is a rapidly rising concern among voters over economic gains concentrating at the top.

Since 1993, almost a quarter of all income growth in the U.S. has gone to the top 1 percent of the 1 percent, about 16,000 households. At the same time, the bottom 90 percent, more than 280 million people, reported less total real income in 2012 than in 1993.

Among countries with modern economies and solid democratic traditions, America has by far the worst child poverty. Its distribution of income puts America far from European allies and Canada, but in the same zone as Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Venezuela.

The authors' most significant discovery may be that one of the first laws enacted by Congress, a 1792 subsidy to revive a cod fishing industry ravaged by the British Navy, directed most of the money not to the wealthy ship owners, but to a class of fisherman known as "sharesmen." They earned a portion of the profits, under contracts negotiated in advance, somewhat like modern unions bargaining with management.

Blasi learned of this during a brief 2006 stay at an old sea captain's cottage in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. "No electricity, no TV, but I found this old book that told this story, which I did not believe," says Blasi, who has studied worker ownership of businesses for four decades.

Years of digging through 18th century records fleshed out the story, showing the founders' sustained interest in promoting yeoman farmers who owned their land. Research commissioned by Thomas Jefferson found that, when fishermen bargained for their pay in advance and shared in the profits, the operations were highly efficient. (My research assistants at Syracuse University College of Law have for years dug into colonial era and late 18th century American business records, and they have made similar findings.)

 Washington and Jefferson recommended giving sharesmen five eighths of the subsidy, with the rest to ship owners. Owners who paid a fixed wage got nothing. It was a government carrot promoting both bargaining power for workers and more profitable enterprises.

Blasi suggests that Congress embrace that 1792 model. For example, he says Congress could allow accelerated depreciation - quickly writing off the cost of new buildings and equipment for tax purposes - only at companies that pay workers in part with a share or profits or shares of stock. Companies that declined would still get the full write-off, but it would take longer, costing them more taxes in early years.

Madison once extrapolated the U.S. population into the early 1900s and concluded that not everyone could farm. But he wrote that since no limit existed on businesses, government could encourage ownership shares to counter what he wrote were the "evils" of concentrated wealth.

Blasi and his co-authors show that in the late 19th century, paying workers a share of profits helped build the fortunes of many of the most successful businessmen. John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, William Cooper Procter of Procter & Gamble and grain merchant Charles A. Pillsbury all used profit-sharing to attract the best workers, discourage unions, reduce turnover and give employees a greater incentive to make their businesses prosper. "They did it, for sure, out of self-interest," Blasi says, "but it was an enlightened self-interest that benefitted society as a whole."Profit-sharing plans are rare these days and often meager. Except for some high-tech startups, few workers get stock as part of their compensation. Since the early 1990s, American companies have given almost 30 percent of stock options to their top five executives. "Nearly all of the rest of the options go to the top 2 percent or so of company employees," Blasi says.

There are nearly 140 million business employees in America, but just 19 million own stock in their companies, and most of that is as a match in a 401(k) plan. Management typically restricts the rights to these shares: Managers vote the shares and workers cannot sell before age 55 or leaving the company.

Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), created in 1956 in what is now Silicon Valley, are out of fashion, even though companies with ESOPs tend to be significantly more profitable. San Francisco financier Louis O. Kelso, who taught that every worker should be a capitalist, invented the ESOP. Critics called him a Marxist and worse. Kelso's lawyer, Robert Ashford, says that the idea of owning shares and sharing in profits has been lost on most Americans, although millions of them are grumbling that the economy is growing, but their paychecks are not.

Ashford, a professor at Syracuse's College of Law, teaches that if more Americans could buy stocks with the dividends paid by companies, the whole country would benefit. The wider distribution of capital, he says, would give most Americans a direct stake in the success of business.

And that, say Ashford and Blasi, is exactly the future envisioned by the framers more than two centuries ago - an America in which every worker is a capitalist.

Connect the dots people...

35 minutes with the great Pete Seeger.

In 1971, my friend Keith Sullivan and I were in upstate New York. We decided to check out the sloop Clearwater on the banks of the Hudson River. A gangly fifty-two year old guy in a Greek sailor's cap shinnied down the mast, stuck his hand out, and said, "Hi, I'm Pete" -- as if we didn't know who he was.

This interview by WBUR's Tom Ashbrook from ten years ago, with an 83 year old Pete Seeger, is worth a listen. A gentle soul. A huge loss. 

This Land is Your Land...and always will be.