Gatewood's 2005 Interview

Here's the audio for the 2005 interview. Sorry the audio is so bad, but the classic Gatewood passion makes it worth posting nonetheless. 

Gatewood Interview (2005)

Gatewood Spoke To Me

In law school, I had a radio show at WRFL, UK’s student-run radio station. Gatewood was a guest[1] on the show twice: in January of 2005 and in March of 2006. The audio from the 2006 interview is at the bottom of this post and the 2005 episode (which has really bad sound quality), is in a separate post.

In all of the remembrances and statements regarding Gatewood, one word keeps surfacing: “colorful”. That’s how the Kentucky Democratic Party described Gatewood in a tweet last week. 

This pisses me off. 

“Colorful” is a pretty obvious way of dismissing Gatewood as a loon when, in fact, he thought harder about government and its role–both positive and negative–in people’s lives than 100% of the people who now hold elected office in Kentucky. But, his actions were more important than his thinking. Gatewood acted upon his convictions and that’s what people loved about him. That, and the fact that he was easily and always the funniest person in the room.

Americans love authentic and Gatewood was 100% authentic. You know who doesn’t like authentic? Power. Gatewood’s authenticity scared powerful people. This is why they try to dismiss him and his legacy with chickenshit words like “colorful”.

At a time in Kentucky politics when both parties are owned by Big Money, Gatewood stood alone against the Petrochemical Pharmaceutical Military Industrial Transnational Corporate Fascist Elite SOBs.[2]

There is no question that Gatewood was charming enough and friendly enough and smart enough and well-credentialed enough to hold any public office he wanted in Kentucky–if he would have just gotten in line with the powerful. 

But, if he had done that, he wouldn’t have been Gatewood. 

At the end and throughout, Gatewood wasn’t colorful–he was himself. Despite the lure of power, despite the press of marketers and salesmen, despite the fact that people would try to remember him and dismiss him as “colorful”–he was himself.

People and parties who will describe an authentic, earnest, integral person as “colorful” clearly have no idea how hard it is to become and be and remain yourself. For those of us who do, the memory of Gatewood Galbraith will remind us that it is, indeed, still possible to live a real life in America in the 21st century. You can disagree with everything Gatewood said and stood for and still see him as “the last free man in America,” a truly courageous man, someone worth respecting and emulating. 

Gatewood deserves to rest in peace. The rest of us, however, have work to do. 

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1. That Gatewood would appear on a 7 a.m. college radio show tells you just about all you need to know about his passion and generosity.  ↩

2. A term that only Gatewood could have coined and that only Gatewood could deploy credibly. He uses it a few minutes into the 2006 Interview. By the way, the other interviewer is my buddy, Alex DeGrand. He’s the one asking the good questions.  ↩

Gatewood Interview (2006)

Why I Gave the Max to a Republican Campaigning for President

Yesterday, I did what I never thought I would do: donate the maximum to a Republican campaigning for President of the United States.

Buddy Roemer, former Governor and Congressman from Louisiana, gets it: money is rotting our political economy. He accepts no PAC money and will not accept individual donations larger than $100. He is, as far as I can tell, the only candidate that understands that before we can make any fair laws for the people of this country, we have to have representatives that were elected by the people, not curated by Big Money.

As a bonus, Buddy (@buddyroemer) owns a small bank (assets just under $1B) and understands the barrier the ongoing, unjust, and inequitable burden the foreclosure crisis places on our economic recovery. He talks about it a lot.

Buddy spoke with Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) on Chris’s show, Up with Chris Hayes, yesterday. If you want to know what I’m talking about, watch this segment where Buddy and Chris talk about the foreclosure crisis.[1] Buddy’s piece begins at 4:30.

Politicians, in general, are not concerned about the influence of Big Money, so long as they can get a taste. To me, that’s just about the only issue out there. If I can’t trust the process that elected my representatives, I don’t trust the laws they make. So, let's talk about that first. Buddy’s voice is a necessary voice; it reminds us that things don’t have to be this way. Things can’t continue to be this way.

What Buddy is doing is important and not easy. It would be easier to rail against special interests while simultaneously accepting PAC money and large donations from individuals. It certainly would help his campaign’s bottom line. I admire a politician who does uneasy things. We are in an uneasy place.

I will donate[2] to encourage a politician to continue doing those uneasy things.

Even if he or she is a Republican. It’s that important.

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1. As an aside, Chris’s intro to this segment on the foreclosure crisis contained the best summary of the causes and connections of the crisis I have seen. Money quote: "They're vultures, essentially. And homes are their caracsses."  ↩

2. If you would like to donate, you can do so at Buddy’s website.  ↩

Eat the Young: Our Politics and the War on My Generation

The recent debate over the debt ceiling has highlighted a broader theme in American politics, one that I don’t hear a lot of other people talking about. Republicans accuse Democrats of attempting to wage class warfare (poor versus rich) while Democrats accuse Republicans of attempting (to my mind, more successfully) to wage class warfare (rich versus poor). What is happening in America today, however, is not a war between the classes, but rather a war between the generations.

So far, old people have been dominating this war, mostly, I think, because young people don’t realize they’re at war.

The Old Rich

That America is engaged in generational warfare should surprise no one. Old people disproportionately occupy our positions of power. The average age of a member of the House of Representatives is 57.2; Senators average 63.1 years. Policies created by old people for old people are not new. After all, Congress has always been older than the voting public. But, what seems to be new is how exclusively those policies benefit old people and how that benefit comes at a direct and enduring cost to the young.

The reason we don’t tax the rich is because it is the rich doing the taxing. Forty-four percent of our congress members are millionaires (about forty-four times the national average of 1%). Fifty (of the 535) members have a personal fortune of more than $10,000,000.

Where Congress is both old and rich, it can be difficult to determine whether it’s waging a class war with its policies or a generational war. The confusion arises because the rich are also the old—people who have been around long enough to benefit from the miracle of compound interest and pyramid schemes like law firm partnerships. The rich are the old. The old are the rich.

Nothing demonstrates the cravenness of our elders like deficit spending. Baby boomers have been writing checks for years that my generation’s collective ass will have to cash. What did we spend our money on while we were running up these deficits? We blew our wad on the Bush tax cuts (benefitting primarily the rich/old), two wars (in which young people died), and a prescription drug benefit for Medicare (which, by definition, benefits only the old). The prescription drug benefit alone will cost us more than $727,000,000,000 between 2009 and 2018.

I know Keynes. I understand that, at times, the cost of interest on our debt is worth the benefit of injecting additional demand into the economy. Dick Cheney wasn’t entirely wrong when he proclaimed, “Deficits don’t matter.” (Remember that, Tea Party?) But, the deficit spending shouldn’t be any larger than required. The deficits our country is running are larger than they need to be because we don’t tax the rich nearly enough in this country. Currently, individuals in the top income bracket are purportedly taxed at 39%. I say “purportedly” because we all know they actually pay far less. Warren Buffet, one of the richest old people in the country, has famously calculated that he pays less tax (as a percentage of his annual income) than his almost certainly younger secretary.

I’m with Robert Reich: we should raise the taxes of those making more than $15,000,000 to 70%. This is 20 percentage points less than what those in the top tax bracket paid under Republican Eisenhower. Those making between 5 and 15 million would pay 60% and those making between 500,000 and 5 million would pay a patriotic 50%. This plan would generate additional revenue each year while allowing a significant cut in the taxes paid by those making less than $100,000 (a demographic in which most young people find themselves).

I’m not the only person who believes various revenue-raising measures are the best way to get our fiscal house in order. I’m not even in the minority on this issue. 72% of all Americans believe we should reduce the national debt by raising taxes on those raising more than $250,000.

While deficit spending is the most obvious example of generational warfare, the ruling generation’s failure to address the unemployment crisis is causing the most immediate damage to younger generation’s ranks. 23.1% of 18–19 year olds are unemployed. Those are the people with a high school education (or less) who are not attending college. Among those between 20 and 24, the rate is still 14.6%. Young people can’t find their first job. They can’t begin to build the skills they need to find their second, better job. And, when they do find a job, it’s almost certainly not at a factory with a strong wage and a pension plan. It’s at the mall. Selling shoes. Selling Chinese-made shoes.

Despite the private-sector’s failure to create jobs and opportunities for young people, the government has not passed any meaningful legislation that would either a) provide those jobs through a WPA or CCC-like program or b) incentivize employers to hire people, especially young people.

If Congress were committed to preserving tax breaks for the super-wealthy while we only wage two wars and unemployment hovers around 9%, I might agree that this is a straightforward case of class warfare.[1] But, that’s not what’s happening. While the rich and old tax themselves at fantastically low rates, our government is failing at its most basic duties to the next generation: educating them and providing them with the infrastructure (technological, economic, and physical) they need to continue to innovate and create. That’s generational warfare.

We are not doing what we need to do. We are not doing what we need to do because we don’t have the money to do it. And, the things we are not doing are largely those things that hurt young people. Everybody should be taxed as little as possible. But, everyone should be taxed as much as necessary.

A Pocketful of Lint

One fall, when I was a kid, I found a $10 bill in the pocket of my winter jacket. Six months earlier, I had forgotten it there and discovering it felt like winning the lottery. I liked the feeling so much that I still put money in my winter coat before storing it for the summer.

The gifts we leave for future generations are not much different. When the Baby Boomers came into power, they found the Hoover Dam, the Interstate Highway system, and a vibrant system of public education in the pocket of their winter jacket. Gifts from their parents.

When it’s my generation’s turn to govern, we will find in our pocket some lint and a receipt from our parents’ bar tab charged to our credit card.

The current government’s failure in education is the most salient example of generational warfare. Where I live, 25% of the students who enter high school will not graduate. In other words, 25% of the young people will not have even the most basic skills needed to work, earn, or think critically as a citizen. Until our dropout rate falls dramatically, I think we should be talking about tax increases, not tax decreases. Anything less is generational warfare.

The government’s treatment of college students isn’t any better.

We just emerged, barely and temporarily, from a manufactured crisis over the previously-routine decision to raise the country’s debt ceiling. I am all for reducing the deficit—I get that I am going to have to repay the money my parents’ generation is borrowing. I am offended, however, by Congress’s approach. Republicans refused to entertain any “revenue raising” measures as a part of a negotiated plan to reduce the deficit.

Instead of reducing the deficit by raising rates on the mega-rich, Tea Party members of Congress hoped to reduce the deficit by cutting $17,000,000,000 in Pell Grants to low-income, mostly minority college students. They ultimately did not cut Pell Grants (this time), opting instead to just eliminate federally-subsidized student loans for America’s six million graduate students.

The federal government is cutting student aid for a generation of students while most lawmakers were happy to benefit from previous generations’ generous support of higher education. Just 25 years ago in Kentucky, a resident could go to UK for $1,228 a semester ($2,408 adjusted for inflation).[2] Today’s student pays 89% more per semester ($4,564). A law student in 1986 paid $1,645 a semester ($3,226 adjusted for inflation); today, that student pays $16,021—a 400% increase.

Why?

Declining support from the government for public education.

In other words, Baby Boomers don’t want to tax themselves enough to keep prices for public education stable and affordable in Kentucky. They would rather burden their children’s generation with more and larger student loan debt. The University of Louisville just raised tuition 6%. In the past 11 years, Frankfort has cut Louisville’s budget 11 times with cuts totaling $150,000,000. That’s money Frankfort didn’t want to tax and that young people will now have to pay (with interest). That’s generational warfare.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that with rising tuition and a poorer job market, default rates on (non-discharageable, mind you) student loans has doubled recently to almost 9%.

Predatory Parenting

In a new and diabolical twist to generational warfare, old people have figured out a way to charge young people even more for higher education and sell stock in their student debt. Most students who graduate from proprietary schools (for-profit schools) will emerge with a debt load ($30,000) more than three times larger than a student who went to a public institution. Almost 90% of the revenue from these profit-seeking, publicly-traded companies comes from student loans. The percentage would be higher except for a federal law mandating that at least 10% of the tuition come from private sources. So, most of these institutions make private loans to its students for the final 10%, often at high interest rates. Said another way, in proprietary schools old people (investors) have found a way to capitalize, literally, on the loans young people take out. Remember: these schools exist because old people have failed to adequately support a public system of higher education system that includes community colleges. This profiteering is sinful—there are other words I could use, but none more accurate.

(For the full skinny on the evils of proprietary schools, here is the National Consumer Law Center’s report: “Piling It On: The Growth of Proprietary School Loans and the Consequences for Students.” NCLC is the best.)

The existence of for-profit schools is the best and most depressing evidence of generational warfare. These schools cost multiples more than their state-supported counterparts and graduate their students at a much lower rate than their state-supported counterparts. Contrasting proprietary schools with their “state-supported counterparts” is not even accurate, however, for these proprietary schools depend on public support in the form of federal student loans for almost 90% of their budgets. That is, these for-profit institutions are far more dependent upon state support then their state-supported counterparts.

According to the Government Accountability Office, after four years, 23.3% of students who attended a proprietary school are in default on their student loans. Compare this to 9.5% for public school students and 6.5% for students who attended private, non-profit institutions student. In other words, a student is between two and four times more likely to default on her loans if she gets suckered into going to a proprietary school. Our government’s continued tolerance of support for proprietary schools is a new form of equity-stripping, except, amazingly, old people have devised a way to divest my generation of our equity before we even have any. Parents are not stripping equity, but rather debt from their children.

Proprietary schools exist primarily as a front to shovel our tax revenue ( in the form of federal student aid) into the hands of investors (and by “investors” I mean rich people and by “rich people” I mean old people.) According to the NCLC report, one of the country’s largest for-profit education companies, Education Management Corporation (EDMC), is owned by Goldman Sachs, the company that has raised funneling tax dollars into its bottom line into an art form. Goldman Sachs took EDMC public in 2009. It has a market cap of 2.3 billion dollars and is currently trading at 17 bucks a share.

It’s not just federal money going into proprietary schools; it’s also the student’s own money—often money the student doesn’t yet have in the form of privately-funded (generously provided by the school itself) student loans. These loans, along with the federal student loans, are generally not dischargeable in bankruptcy. No matter what, these young people will be saddled with this debt forever.

Our officials (and by “officials” I mean old people) have failed to support higher education despite having benefited themselves from previous generations’s generous support of higher education. Worse, they have allowed a dysfunctional, predatory system of for-profit education to capitalize, literally, on their own failure. As a result, many students today emerge from college today as little more than indentured servants. For European immigrants during colonial times, a period of indentured servanthood typically lasted 7 years. For people in my generation, it could last a lifetime. 

This is What Happens

The generational warfare is not just limited to dismantling public education and capitalizing on student debt. It extends to the ruling generation’s failure to invest in new sources of energy, failure to maintain and expand the infrastructure we need for a 21st century economic revival, failure to pass the DREAM Act (a bill which only affects young people), and their failure to pass a jobs bill (any jobs bill) despite an unemployment rate of 23% for 18–19 year olds and 14.6% for 20–24 year olds. (Compare these double-digits to unemployment rates of 7.3% and 6.9% for Americans 45–54 and 55–64, respectively.) It is evident in their willingness to reform entitlements such that younger generations get less while their generation’s benefits are preserved. I will leave it to other writers to explore the full implications of generational warfare on these fronts.

I want to spend the rest of the essay exploring what to do about this war.

There is really nothing to do but fight.

I don’t have any new solutions or novel advice.

I think the first step is for my generation to recognize that they are under assault. I know that we feel a mounting pressure, a growing sense that our shared future may be growing dimmer. But, this foreboding has remained a nameless and veiled dis-ease. Let’s name it: it’s generational warfare. Naming a thing is the first step of gaining power over it.

Beyond that, ending the generational war is really is as simple and complex as caring a lot, voting, getting other young people to vote, getting involved in local party politics, helping people get elected, and getting elected yourself.

In this fight, the first thing we must recognize is that this is not a partisan war. This is not Democrat v. Republican. It’s young v. old. Both parties, dominated by old people, are waging this war against young people. Just because this is beyond partisan doesn’t mean young people shouldn’t recognize their allies.

My thesis is, given our annual deficits and inability to invest in the next generation, government doesn’t tax the rich (old) enough. Lawmakers (from both sides) would rather write checks my generation will have to cash. All but six federally elected Republicans have signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never, under any circumstances raise a single dollar of additional revenue; Republicans will be ineffective allies in a generational war. (I recognize that some Republicans have, at times, shown a willingness to break from Norquist’s orthodoxy. Rather, we must acknowledge that the intra-party systems that exist in the Republican Party will make it more difficult for Republican lawmakers to support the kind of tax increases on the old-rich we need.)

In a two-party system, that leaves the Democrats. As a party, Democrats have folded so often on issues critical to the success of the young—from weak-kneed regulations on proprietary schools, to the extension of the Bush tax cuts, to the cuts to federal student aid. More broadly and more catastrophically, Democrats have allowed Republicans to define for the American public the terms of the debate over deficits, taxation, and the proper role of government in vouchsafing our collective future. Democrats’s failure on this front makes any policy change more difficult than it otherwise might be.

But, as much as the Democrats as a party have failed, Democratic officials individually seem to get these issues. Democrats advocated revenue-raising measures in the recent debt ceiling debate; many support the DREAM Act; they are committed to maintaining and expanding public infrastructure. Fundamentally, Democrats view government as having a positive role to play in creating the conditions in young people’s lives for individual and collective achievement.

Democrats have shown a willingness to try and solve the most immediate crisis for young people: the lack of jobs. John Larson (D-CT) wants to create a supercommittee on jobs with the goal of eliminating unemployment by 2021. This probably should have been part of the debt ceiling debate, but late is better than never… . Rep. Jan Schakowsky has introduced legislation that proposes to create 2.3 million jobs (teachers, firefighters, police, health care, housing rehab, etc.). She pays for the $227 billion bill by raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires and oil and gas corporations. This is what I am talking about. This is what punching back in the generational war looks like.

The ruling class has spent their time in power frittering away the gifts of previous generations. They seem content to eat the seed corn. When I say “seed corn,” you should know by now I mean “the young.” The rich-old are maintaining their power and standard of living by eating their young. No examples exist in nature of a species that eats its own offspring—those species extincted themselves long ago—but that’s what’s happening in American politics today. It’s unnatural, it’s cannibalism, it’s disgusting.

We, the young, need to stop them. Now.

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1. This is not to say that the rich are not also and simultaneously waging a two-front war against both the young and the poor. This is not an either-or proposition. I am not naive enough to underestimate the ruling class’s ability to wage both a generational war and a class war. Conveniently, the young are often the poor; this fact makes a war against both more straightforward. To some extent, a generational war is a class war.

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2. Excel spreadsheets for these numbers can be found here.

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A New Quality of Life

People in the chattering class are finally starting to realize what my generation has known for a few years now: young people today will not have the same quality of life as older Americans enjoyed and are enjoying.

When people fret over some future quality of life benchmark we are supposed to achieve, it is clear that what they envision is “more of what we’ve got.” They want my generation to enjoy more of what they’ve enjoyed. A “better quality of life” for these hand-wringers just means jamming down the accelerator.

But.

People in my generation, understanding that we aren’t going to go where our parents have been, are beginning to ask each other, “What if we didn’t want to go there anyway?” What if we’re better than what our parents had planned for us? What if our parents’ “quality of life” is a pig in a poke?

Here is what our parents’ generation has enjoyed and overseen during its heyday:

• Obesity and an explosion of first-world health problems (diabetes, heart disease, cancer).

• They’ve fallen into the two-income trap —their “quality of life” based on the inherently tenuous proposition of both partner’s incomes being necessary to making the family’s nut each month. Many in the financial services sector have profited from pushing (or at least covering up) the two-income trap. Beyond that, their “quality of life” has been based on the availability of cheap debt and fanciful home values.

• They’ve allowed many in their generation to be bankrupted by medical debt by failing to build an affordable health insurance infrastructure in this country.

• They’ve watched America’s infrastructure crumble and allowed our education system to become second-class, even while building up massive amounts of government debt for their children to pay off.

• They’ve participated in an erosion of community organizations and civic spirit; their cynicism erodes our politics.

Upon examination, it appears that pundits have been eulogizing a “quality of life” that never was alive to begin with. They might as well eulogize Huck Finn or John Galt.

Fewer and fewer people in their own generation enjoy the “quality of life” advertised on Cialis and retirement commercials (sailboats, surfing, vineyards, bicycling, granite countertops). Growing income inequality in their own ranks means that “quality of life” more often includes payday loan sharks, putting $10 in the tank, and using the Emergency Room as a first (and last) resort.

Their “quality of life” is a fifty year-old man swinging a sign along a busy road that screams, “We Buy Gold and Silver!” The string on the sign rests on his neck like a guillotine’s blade.

Their “quality of life” is a passing driver desperate enough to consider selling.

Indeed, much of the hand-wringing going on about diminishing prospects at achieving the same “quality of life” as our parents arises not from declining American greatness, but of an awakening from the older upper class from their fantasy. Having invested heavily into the idea that selfishness is a virtue, the Baby Boomers are beginning to recognize that the products of selfishness are not worth producing.

They have chosen enormous debt (both personal and communal), ecological devastation, growing inequality. They have demonstrated an inability to solve (or even confront) big problems (opting instead to grab what they could for themselves), and have overseen the growing power and influence of big money business interests in search of a sanitized, atomized, commoditized, isolated existence.

My generation has watched our parents grow up. We have watched their generation believe the advertisements that told them that if they were just a little less bald, had a little more money, had a little smoother ride, had a little less bacteria on the countertop… then…. then they would be be secure, be safe, be admired, be loved.

Our parents have mistaken comfort for security.

That fantasy has played out.

The generation coming of age now, graduating from college now, the ones who are looking for jobs in the worst economy in living memory, they know that a comfortable security is a myth, that love and admiration cannot be bought. They have witnessed the emptiness of materialism and turned away. Young people today understand that something fundamental has shifted in America, that the old paradigms have crumbled before new paradigms have been built.

They know it is up to them to build those paradigms. Young people want desperately to do something that matters. They want to give gifts to the world, even as they have less money in their pockets, fewer health benefits, and no pension plans.

Young people today understand that security comes from living in the world, not trying to rise above it, defy it, insulate yourself from it. It is an uncomfortable security because it accepts the limitations of human existence, it confronts the pain of life and attends to it.

In the face of titanic economic failures, young people have developed a kind of stoic faith that if they just keep doing the right things, the universe will take care of them. Though they will not express it this way, they have the kind of faith Jesus urges in Matthew 6:24–34:

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. …But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

Young people have learned (beyond all odds) that people matter, community matters, communities matter. They know that love comes from loving, not buying. They know that if we are to reach some gentle, golden promised land, we will all get there together.

We will not enjoy the same quality of life as our parents’ generation did.

Thank God.