Herbert on "The Stranger in the Mirror"

Bob Herbert's NYT column on "The Stranger in the Mirror" captures well the moral black hole at the center of Bush's policies, which was picked up by Colin Powell in his letter to the Senate regarding treatment of prisoners. Among other things, Herbert says:

There was a time, I thought, when there was general agreement among Americans that torture was beyond the pale....

The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many “have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.”

Even fewer care.

Brooks On Bush Failures

David Brooks' column on "Ends without Means" cuts both ways on Bush's administration. He seems to say that W has the "vision thing" that his father, 41, lacked, but W doesn't have the means to carry out the vision, in Iraq in particular, but in other areas as well. On the PBS Newshour, Brooks seemed to be less supportive of Bush than he normally is. For example, he said:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I would say it's something about the political situation here, mostly on the Republican side. You have a lot of Republicans who believed in the war at the start and who have hung with Bush and with the war while growing increasingly depressed over these three years. And now you're beginning to see a lot of them say it's irreparably lost.

All Holocaust All the Time 3

Just another reminder of the omnipresence of the Holocaust. The Washington Post (and many others) report the ordination of the first rabbis in Germany since World War II. You'd think this would no longer be news, 60 years after the war. The war is no longer news, but the Holocaust is.

NYT on Income Inequality

The NYT editorializes that the latest 4.9% blip in labor costs was caused by increases in executives' fat bonuses and stock options, not increases in workers' wages and salaries. Meanwhile, letters to the editor comment on David Brooks' "Populist Myths on Income Inequality," one saying, " listen to Mr. Brooks and his 'let's get skills' message. Mr. Krugman's message of 'let's get 'em' will lead only to further social polarization."

The problem is that if income inequality is not related to education, more education won't help. Some good paying jobs do require education -- engineer, pilot, journalist, professor. But the jobs that pay the really big bucks -- corporate CEO, entrepreneur -- don't require that much education. Bill Gates never finished college. The big bucks jobs that are producing the income inequality require greed, not education. Better education, especially for high school dropouts, might keep some people from sinking below the poverty level, but it's not going to cure income inequality caused by corporate chieftans who keep the bulk of the profits for themselves and don't share with their employees. For that you need government policies like progressive taxation of income and estate taxes, forcing them to share the wealth.

When progressive tax rates were really high -- 75 to 90% -- people complained that there was no incentive to earn more money. Then I thought that was bad, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe we should encourage the fat cats to go spend their ill gotten gains and let someone else start to earn the big bucks.