Reading List

It is a good thing to be married to a librarian. Our local system has a web-accessable catalog where I can put a book on hold. Depending on how many people are waiting for the book, in a few days to a few months, my wife comes home with the book I've requested. I was reading "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market" by John Allen Paulos. It is the kind of book that makes mathematics of investing accessable to non-mathematical types (and some of us mathematical folks as well), even as he tells the story of his failed love affair with Worldcom stock.

Of course, I set this aside as soon as I got in "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" by Joe Conason. This book takes all of the distortions of the right-wing media, the Bush-Cheney administration, and the Republican "conventional wisdom", and proceeds to refute them, citing facts chapter and verse.

I think this book is great. But I've got a problem with it, and others of its niche. We've got many books from the left cataloging the perfities and dishonesties of the Bush administration and Republicans in general. But these are not appealing to the mass audience. They're useful in energizing the faithful against Bush, but they don't offer a competing vision for the United States. We need to go beyond this, start laying out our vision and maybe we'll get those folks who've become fence-sitters back on our side. Because we won't be able to get many sales with a negative message. It may be a hell of a lot of fun for the faithful, but it won't get us those "moderates" in the middle, the people who would believe the way we do, if we just told them about it without allowing the damn liar in the White House to get us angry.

Let's start out with this: "My fellow Americans, we've been had. We're getting hosed by folks who don't know work, but don't want us to get overtime. We're getting screwed by an administration that talks about privatizing Social Security and cutting taxes on the very rich people, but doesn't even have enough money to meet its future obligations. We need to stand up, say 'I'm not going to get screwed by you rich folks. My daddy needs Social Security, he's too old to work. I'm not going to take more time away from my wife and kids to work overtime without getting paid for it.' And if you call this 'class warfare', you're damn right, you declared war on my class, and the class of all working men and women in this country. You're taking this country in the wrong direction. You want tax cuts, give them to the low income people on their payroll taxes. You want to address work, let's look at unionizing service industries. You want higher productivity from the workers? Let's look at cutting the cost of higher education, not driving it ever upward."

You want to know how much you'd have to make to be in the top one percent of income in this country? $313,469 in 2000. And I know I will never get there, and 99 percent of everybody else won't either. Why isn't anyone citing this number? Let's start laying out some sensible, pro-regular American ideas. Give the progressive movement a positive message, one of universal health care, Social Security, and inexpensive higher education. And as an aside, show what the administration is doing with this money instead, in the form of corporate welfare and tax cuts so their buddies can by $13,000 umbrella stands.