More Chutzpah from Liars for Truth

October 26, 2011 By 34 Comments

You may remember James O’Keefe. He’s the disciple of lefty consequentialist Saul Alinsky who, rather like Boromir, has decided that it’s okay to take the One Ring and lie for Gondor because when he lies, it’s good. A year ago last summer, he got caught doing some extremely weird stuff involving attempted seduction of a CNN reporter, which he attempted to justify with various lame-o excuses that made him look, well, kinda crazy.

Turns out he’s back now, offering highly edited versions of conversations with OWS folk for something called, with great chutzpah, “Project Veritas” (Note: a bit of NSFW language here).

So. A proven liar is telling me to trust him that his highly edited “expose” of OWS demonstrates that OWS and similar protests have nothing to be concerned about and that everything is just fine.

What we actually know about James O’Keefe is that he is a proven liar. Sure, he’s prolife. Being prolife does not wash away sins. The blood of Christ does that. Being prolife does not guarantee that the project of shooting fish in a barrel by finding a few OWS ninnies and interviewing them is proof positive that the real and growing problems in our system of state-sponsored welfare for the incredibly rich (aka bailouts) is a wise and sound system, nor that the increasing disparities between rich and poor and concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few are just.

It would be interesting if, in addition to the de rigeur coverage of the ninnies, there would  interviews with dirty smelly hippies like this guy:

A reasonable point, given that one million of the men and women our ruling classes sent off to fight their wars of Empire are out of work.

HT: Caelum et Terra

Sooner or later, the Prophet Chesterton gets a hearing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized 34 Comments
  • Frank Weathers

    I’m with Faramir on this one. –the unnamed hobbit extra

  • Andy

    I am not sure that Mr. O’Keefe is pro-life as much as he is pro-O’Keefe. He continues to try and help people screw up so he can make his fame and fortune as a hard-hitting conservative news-creature. Trusting him is like trusting Sauron. I will now go looking for the Shire as there at least know how to party and work.

  • Peggy R

    I am no O’Keefe fan. However, he’s not the only one to go out to OWS and other places and obtain foolish, unintelligent responses from the denizens of these tent cities. Two young people came on to the local CBS radio affiliate and uttered utter nonsense. If the interviewed folks aren’t foolish, they are clearly advocating marxism & marxist ideas.

    That said, I can’t decide whether it’s worthwhile to go chart by chart and respond. Yes, the nexus between “big business” and “big government” and the bail-outs are a huge problem that the tea party objects to as well. The concern that some people earn more than others, however, will never go away unless we decide to regulate every one’s income so we’re all the same. Some people are gifted, willing to take risks, and obtain unusually higher incomes as a result. Yes, the highest incomes also include inherited wealth, corporate execs (blame BoD’s here) and those who work in financial markets. There are also people who are unable or unwilling to work and are govt dependents. Their incomes are highly regulated and limited to what is (estimated to be) needed to live. We don’t want to make it profitable to be dependent upon taxpayers. These incomes as well as incomes a bit higher such as unskilled labor and union labor are regulated by minimum wage laws, union contracts, or they increase according to inflation. Sometimes an exceptional worker will earn above average growth in wages. Those few people to take great risks or have great exceptional skills experience higher growth rates in their income. This is why, over time, considering inflation as well, that higher incomes will become increasing greater than the lower incomes, that just won’t grow as much. No one is stealing in this regard. The fact that a few people can become really rich doesn’t keep any one else, in a society with economic liberty, from attaining wealth either. And the people who were the highest earners 10, 20 years ago, are not likely to be the same individuals today. Some might be. The tech boom of the last 15 years provided new opportunities to new people.
    As for tax rates, so what if wealthy people are paying less than in the past? The problem is that the middle class don’t usually have as many deductions and are too “rich” to qualify for benefits for the “poor” that the taxpayers fund. What would govt do with that money anyway? Do we want them to have anymore? And finally, the lower half of tax filers pay less than 5% of the total income tax receipts of the federal government. And, for some people, filing taxes is a profitable exercise. Blew me away when I learned that.
    Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

    • Peter

      Thank you for your comment. It makes a lot of sense to me.

      • Peggy R

        Thank you! Thank you! I despair that common sense and mathematics (compounding growth rates over time increases the gap in incomes) may not get through here.

        I appreciate the comments below here by Loyd Petre raising questions about the veracity of the various tables. My comments are subject to presuming the tables are reasonably accurate.

    • Karen LH

      I’d like to second Peter’s comment. Peggy, your comments are always a breath of fresh air.

  • Lloyd Petre

    For starters, I would love to interview the “dirty smelly hippie” in the Marine Corp uniform. What’s his name?
    I went to the Opensecrets website you named as the source of the political contributions 2010 graph that looks so scary. The labor numbers are for labor unions who represent an almost trivial percentage of non-government workers. In the introductory paragraphs it admits that the numbers for business are “somewhat overstated” and those for “labor” are “somewhat understated”. That is; In spite of using numbers accurate to nine digits these numbers are made up.
    The unsourced graph showing a ratio of 1723/1 for CEO salary/worker wages in 2006. Please. according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics June 2007 the average U.S. worker made $19.29 per hour. Well $19.29x40hrs.x52wks.x1723 equals $69,132,273.60.
    According to Forbes April 30, 2008 there were in 2007 exactly 13 CEOs whose total compensation package exceeded this number. Given that the graph specifies salaries we are, again, talking about made up numbers.
    As regards the unsourced graph you use for real family income by quintile is a graph of quintiles not people. The bottom quintile has a lot of unemployed people in it who will rocket out as soon as a job is found.
    The unsourced graph you use showing the bailout numbers? Couldn’t agree more-they should both be zero.

    • Confederate Papist

      I also noticed that they did not break out as to whom the political contributions went at that time, either. I have read that much of the WS “bazillionaires” contributed to mainly democratic candidates like ODL-O. Just because they ended up on Wall Street instead of Penn Ave doesn’t mean they are capitalists…these tend to be other other side of the “internal improvements” equation of crony capitalism and corporate welfare.

  • The Deuce

    So, Mark, what’s the correct share of income that the upper 1% should have? And what should be done to reduce their income until it reaches that amount?

    Also, which is better: an economy where the poor have a relatively good standard of living even though income inequality is high, or an economy where there is no income inequality but the poor have a high standard of living? Does it diminish you or anyone else that some people have higher incomes?

    There is a real problem in the economy, but the growing income inequality is a *symptom* and indicator of the real problem, not the problem itself. The fact that the OWS folks, and people like you, can’t see past the politics of envy and your anger that some people have more, causes you to miss the real problem and to propose solutions that would make things worse.

    • The Deuce

      That should read “or an economy where there is no income inequality but the poor have a low standard of living?”

      • Andy

        Your comments and several others remind me of Jk Galbreth’s comment about conservatives “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” The disparity is not a matter of envy it is a matter of survival for many. But lets continue doing the same thing over and over again – let the rich grow richer and if you can’t grow rich it is your fault.
        I really do not envy anyone who is rich, my wife and children and I are doing OK – but I am also struck by a comment made any years ago during one of the strikes in baseball – a player said “no one know how hard it is to live on “1,000.000 a year.” This person was right, but why does anyone need $1,000,000 a year?

        • The Deuce

          “The disparity is not a matter of envy it is a matter of survival for many.”

          No, it’s not. Somebody else’s richness doesn’t hurt you in any way unless they *took* it from you. And in that case, the problem isn’t that they’re rich. It’s that they’re thieves.

          • Andy

            The richness of someone else when it interferes with making a living wage or when the masters of money rely on my taxes to bail them out of their own self-created problems. THis makes them thieves. The “richness” of other matters when they pretend to care and say anyone can be rich if only they work at it – yet history especially the history of the Gilded Age we are repeating belies that fact. A lie – this makes them liars. Also I would suggest that we look not at the 1% and their riches, but at the destruction of the 99% when their median income has dropped considerably while the 1% are reaping untold wealth. Again I think of Galbreth’s quote and see nothing in your comments that says you are not searching for a reason to make selfishness moral.

            • Pat B

              Income measurements are based on households. The number of households have increased along with the increase in single parent families. This is one reason for the slow increase in the median income of the non-wealthy.

              A side note: Please don’t tell people that they are searching for reasons to be selfish. You are debating with Catholics, not Objectivists.

              • Andy

                I am curious where your statistics come from – an increase in single parent families is tied to the
                decrease not slow increase of the median income. As to my quote I will stand by it – the fact that a person can make 18.5 million dollars is in itself a problem. Who needs that amount of money. I have yet to hear why that insane amount or any of the other equally idiotic amounts are justified. What I read are explanations why we are repeating the problems of the gilded age – I read that it is ok for these obscene amounts of money to be made because its part of capitalism. And since I see that capitalism in the US is based on greed and coveting what another person has – these are excuses for being selfish.

                • Pat B

                  I meant to write decrease, not increase. My mistake.

                  • Pat B

                    A further self-correction: I did in fact mean to say slow increase. I am kind of tired right now and I was sending off a reply without thinking. My point was that when the household income of the poor and middle class has risen, it has risen less quickly than it would otherwise because of single-parent households. That is not to say that it always is or is presently increasing.

              • Hezekiah Garrett

                “A side note: Please don’t tell people that they are searching for reasons to be selfish. You are debating with Catholics, not Objectivists.”

                Um, nonsense! Objectivists aren’t searching about for such reasons. Catholics grope about for such things quite constantly.

                Where better to place such a comment than on a catholic blog?

    • Mark Shea

      I’m curious to know what solutions you think I propose? I’m also curious to know why you think I’m envious. I’m doing okay. Not rich, but not poor either. I don’t want Donald Trump’s pile. I merely note that the obviously disparity is growing between rich and poor and that is unjust. Excusemakers for this are preternaturally swift to shout “envy!” when people point it out, because they have no other reply.

      • The Deuce

        How is it unjust? It’s only unjust if the rich *cheated* someone to make it that way. In fact, there has been cheating going on, but the monomaniacal focus on how “unfair” it is that some people are getting more relative to others is blinding people to the actual causes and to the specific people (not “the 1%” collectively) that have caused it.

      • Pat B

        It seems to me that income inequality is not in and of itself unjust. If an executive makes a large salary that could be spread out more fairly among his or her employees, that would be unjust. Consider that the 2010 salary of Wal Mart CEO Michael Duke was 18.5 million, including stock. There are about 1.2 million hourly Wal Mart employees. If Duke were to take his entire salary and divide evenly amongst his employees, they would only get an extra 15 bucks a year. I am not saying that Duke ought to be paid as much as he is, or that Wal Mart employees should be paid as little as they are, but I am just pointing out that something may look worse than it actually is.

        Also, the exponential growth in top earner’s income can be explained largely by the stock market. The volatility of the stock market means that top earners often lose their wealthy quickly. See this article:

        http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204346104576638981631627402.html?KEYWORDS=wealthy

        • Peggy R

          Exactly. Perhaps had TARP not passed, there might have been some adjustment in the income gap. It’s hard to say, however, not knowing who precisely the 1% are.

          • Confederate Papist

            Pat and Peggy – I think these arguments are lost on most of the people that now frequent this blog.

  • Joseph

    I remember thinking that, once the reality of the non-existence of WMD and a growing insurgency in Iraq hit, the democratic Bush crusade of the Middle East would become the next Vietnam.

    “A reasonable point, given that one million of the men and women our ruling classes sent off to fight their wars of Empire are out of work.”

    Looks like it has. The man in the picture was not a “Fortunate Son”.

  • SKay

    Blue ice falls from Air Force One -almost hits “Occupy Las Vegas” campsite.

    http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/41638#When:20:48:47Z

  • Dan C

    Envy is a clever vice tossed out in one of the attempts by libertarian-disposed conservatives and is part of the inflammatory vocabulary urged by opinion-makers of theses philosophies like Acton and others.

    It is just hot air.

    The Church stands differently. The PCJP document outs this, in much tne same way the Hoover Institute scholar this summer noted that he, as a capitalist and a libertarian, is an intellectual opponent of Benedict’s.

    This is all good. It is time to end use of such inflammatory language as class warfare, envy, and accusations of covetousness by the right wing when one is suggesting a return to Reagan era tax and regulatory structures. These have no place in the discussion when it is clear that right wing economics is nitbexactly what the magisterium has in mind. Not exactly by a long shot.

  • Dan C

    Peggy R’s subtle dismissal of discussions of income disparity as a trivial worry about how much someone else makes is not exactly addressing the point. The income disparity concern is about concentrating wealth and power thusly in the hands of too few. Such disparities do affect the common good negatively. These disparities have compounded, and, if continuing, will dramatically affect democracy in America more than it currently does.

    I listened to several Occupy talks the other day-one espoused communitarian subsidiarity. Another discussed an embrace of anti-materialism. The last suggested that the language of the 99% needs to change to include the other 1% and draw them into “the Beloved Community.” These were imperfect thoughts, but not malicious or toxic and were without alienating rhetoric. And not all points were bad.

    • Peggy R

      Dan C,

      Money and politics is complicated. We all have a right to be heard before our government. The concentration of power is surely a concern. If the government followed the constitution, we’d be better served. It might even resemble the Catholic idea of subsidiarity.

      As for wealth, new wealth can be created. There is no zero sum of wealth or income in (even partial) market economies.

      —Karen LH above. Thank you also. Your comments are appreciated too!

    • Dan C

      (I promise to try to keep borders as far on the left side of the screen as possible.)

      I think the Constitution is useful, but only evolved over time to work to the advantage of common men and women. The Constitution is and was a tool for governance and used to conquer and oppress Natives to this continent, wage unjust wars, disallow voting for several groups of folks, and promote slavery. Hamilton, whose handiwork is through the Constitution, had no love for common democracy or common folk. This government founded by Calvinists and Deists, will fall in history’s wake.

      As such, to stay true to God, one must heed the prophets who, mostly, insisted on Israel’s return to care for its poor. To turn back to God, and care for its poor.

      The PCJP document and other such declarations have withinthem the preferential option for the poor as the key need to bind up when one discusses economics. They aren’t secondary in the exercise of an economic system, but central. The poor aren’t just to be managed by amateurs in the parish soup kitchen but need to be core participants, actors, and direct beneficiaries of one’s economic system.

      • Confederate Papist

        Your comments on the USC and Hamilton are pretty spot on. Jefferson and Madison did not intend for the central goverment to be as powerful as it is today. Hamilton, Henry Clay and “Honest” Abe Lincoln were advocates of big government, corporate welfare and centralised banking….all opposed by the majority of attendees of the Contstititional Convention…yet, by the late 1850′s this philosophy was very strong and the main planks in the new Republican party as the old Whigs flocked to it. The election of 1860 was the end of the United States of America as the founders knew it and the beginning of the USA, Inc., embraced by both political parties of today.

  • http://www.debatingobama.blogspot.com Greg Metzger

    Great charts and graphs. You might like my new blog on the Vatican’s new document. http://debatingobama.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-are-vatican-and-elizabeth-warren.html

  • http://catholiclight.stblogs.org/ Richard C.

    Mark, your pieces about economics would begin to be credible if the charts weren’t sourced from left-wing think-tanks like CBPP.org (the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities). CBPP is funded by the Democracy Alliance, an organization launched by liberal activists and donors, including George Soros and officials from the SEIU, so I have no reason to expect anything but partisan spin from them.

    Can’t you find some actual scholar out there who knows something about economics to vet these things before you publish them — or better, to take the subject off your hands and write about it himself, competently? From here, it looks like you are just a sucker for any graph with pretty colors, no matter how vague the labels on it are.

    • Pat B

      While one needn’t be an expert to comment on economic matters (I’m certainly no expert) it is good to do some research beyond simple graphs. Econometrics can be used to promote just about any position. To quote Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

      However, it is good to keep in mind the acceptable range of opinion. While one may disagree with some of Mark’s ideas, they are perfectly orthodox. Likewise, those of us who disagree with Mark are not necessarily dissenters.

      • Pat B

        Richard C: In other words, I agree.