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[Dec 23, 2010] Adventus Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force...

Hat Tip to Jesse's Café Américain
November 27, 2006 | rmadisonj.blogspot.com

Just saw the movie "Bobby," which I can strongly recommend. Yes, it's a typical Hollywood melodrama wrapped around the inevitable (no one goes to this movie not knowing how it ends). But it's an enjoyable movie, and it reminds us of what this country was once like, or once tried to be like.

It reminded me, too, why politicians appear on TV and in very carefully controlled situations, and why we rely more and more on pundits and images to tell us who we are voting for. It wasn't TV that made politicians shy away from crowds. It was us. It was 1968. It was violence.

RFK's assassination couldn't happen today; because of RFK's assassination.

But the movie ends with photos of the Kennedy family, and RFK's public career. Over those photos, and the credits, this speech plays. It is worth reading, if only to realize that giants once walked among us; and not all politicians exploit fear of violence to gain power.

On the Mindless Menace of Violence

City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio April 5, 1968

"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies - to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear - only a common desire to retreat from each other - only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember - even if only for a time - that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

Robert F. Kennedy
Cleveland City Club
April 5, 1968

[Dec 23, 2010] Sustainable Recovery

Hat Tip to Jesse's Café Américain
"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies - to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear - only a common desire to retreat from each other - only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is now what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember - even if only for a time - that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

Robert F. Kennedy
Cleveland City Club
April 5, 1968

How to Be President in a Fact-Free America

December 16, 2010 | The Nation

Gary Younge:

I am black and British. This is not a lifestyle choice. My parents were part of the great migration from the global South when the empire, demographically speaking, struck back. It's the historical hand I was dealt. And it's not a bad hand. These are not the most interesting things about me. But at certain moments in the eight years I've lived in the United States, they have been the most confusing to others.

Shortly before I first came here some fifteen years ago, I asked a local how people would react to a black man with a British accent. "When they hear your voice, they'll add twenty points to your IQ," he said. "But when they see your face, they won't."

With some white conservatives, I've noticed, the gulf between what they see and what they hear can widen into an unbridgeable chasm. The affect of Englishness-hauteur, refined behavior and aristocracy (none of which I possess)-is something they aspire to, or at least appreciate. Blackness, on the other hand, is not.

And so when I introduce myself as a journalist from England I occasionally prompt a moment of synaptic dysfunction. The overwhelming majority get over it. But every now and then they say, "Really? I don't hear an accent."

"If you beat your head against the wall," the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once wrote, "it is your head that breaks, not the wall."

To avoid an almighty headache I try to shut the conversation down: "Well, I can't explain that. But let's get on with the interview."

But they won't let it go. "Where in England?" "Were you born there?" "How long have you been here?"

The sad truth is that even when presented with concrete and irrefutable evidence, some people still prefer the reality they want over the one they actually live in. Herein lies one of the central problems of engaging with those on the American right. Cocooned in their own mediated ecosystem, many of them are almost unreachable through debate; the air is so fetid, reasonable discussion cannot breathe. You can't win an argument without facts, and we live in a moment when whether you're talking about climate change or WMD, facts seem to matter less and less.

I'm not referring to false consciousness here (insisting that people don't know what's best for them, which doesn't seek to understand but to infantilize them) but instead the persistent, stubborn, willful refusal to acknowledge basic, known, verifiable facts and the desire to make misinformation the cornerstone of an agenda.

The examples are legion. Most of those who believe that Obama is a Muslim (roughly one in three Republicans) also loathe his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But Muslims don't have pastors. They also claim that Obama's 1981 trip to Pakistan as a student is evidence of his Islamic militancy and his dubious beginnings: he must have used a foreign passport, since the country was on a "no-travel list" at the time. It wasn't. In fact, in August that year the US consul general in Lahore encouraged Americans to visit, and before that, on June 14, the New York Times Travel section had run a 3,400-word piece explaining that Americans could get thirty-day visas at airports and border crossings.

That these falsehoods are proxies for racism is true but beside the point. After all, the right Swiftboated John Kerry and Whitewatered the Clintons before him. Obama's race and ethnicity merely provide an easier target, and the growing strength of Fox, the web and talk-radio mean that these slings and arrows travel faster and farther. But if Obama can't convince the right of these basic facts, what hope does he have of persuading them to support his economic and foreign policies?

The principle of compromise is fine and, given the recent election, inevitable. But you can negotiate only with those who engage in good faith. In the absence of that, Obama should expend less effort trying to win the right over and more trying to win us back.

For these fabrications gain currency only when real change proves elusive. The number who believe Obama is a Muslim has leapt 50 percent since before his election, during which time the economy has lagged. Meanwhile, whatever the inadequacies of the healthcare reform, once it passed all talk of "death panels" ceased.

Faced with the option of believing something that's not true or gaining tangible benefits like a job or healthcare, most people will take the latter. However petulant, ignorant or gullible people might be, most would prefer to hold on to their jobs, homes and health than their illusions. The problem is that Obama's failure to deliver gives little incentive to exchange fiction for fact.

Now more than ever the only way for Obama to bring about progressive change is by mobilizing his base. If the right can surge when Democrats have the presidency and both houses of Congress, there is no reason the left can't just because the GOP has the House. Indeed, now that Republicans have some power, they're easier to expose. That's what makes Obama's "compromise" on tax cuts such a strategic blunder. There will rarely be a better opportunity to lay bare the GOP's class priorities (let alone the sketchiness of its deficit-busting credentials).

"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue," wrote George Orwell in his essay "In Front of Your Nose." "And then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Obama needs to get out there and fight.

jedi_mindtrick:

American Roadkill

"…as much as I admire The Nation magazine for so many important contributions to the needed dialogue, I am deeply disappointed by the lack of an organized, orderly resistance to the sort of "Mind-F#ck" that we are being subjected to as American citizens, including by a largely complicit Democratic Party establishment."

Interesting post by "drjz" at 1:46pm.

He or she is on to the heart of the matter in many respects. We live in an age of advanced propaganda techniques and manipulation of public opinion essentially in the interest of a small clique of wealthy elites. It "worked" for a while when the liberal class functioned as a check on the powerful via a host of public and private institutions from unions and the universities to churches and a reasonably functioning free press. Those institutions have atrophied over the last several decades and the Democratic Party that was supposed to embody the aspirations of the common man and woman was co-opted beginning at least as early as the late 70's and early 80's with a final capitulation occurring under Presidents Clinton and now Obama.

jedi_mindtrick:

My purpose in blogging here at The Nation is in the hope of firing positive dialogue, or at minimum triggering some thoughtfulness in the minds of readers.

All is not lost of course, at this point, but we do appear to be entering the late stages of an American Empire collapse due to a toxic mixture of bureaucratic calcification, imperial hubris, and denial with a capital D.

I see an Age of Incoherence developing in our political landscape, and combined with the fact that too many American citizens are living in myriad, fragmented distraction bubbles pumped full with misinformation and tricked out with the latest video games and "social networking" devices, we are an entire society now transfixed in the headlights of a machine of our own making. We are destined for road kill status in short order if we do not snap out of it.

jedi_mindtrick:

Interestingly, there are occasional glimmers of hope that appear almost at random from day to day. For instance, yesterday I perused the comments section of this Yahoo! Lookout column regarding the new WaPo piece detailing the FBI's rather haphazard database creation of selected American's vital information "of interest":

http://tinyurl.com/2d8tcv8

I was pleasantly surprised by the large volume of comments that seemed to intelligently understand very sharply the danger that is posed by our growing "security state". Another less prominent but significant bit of hope arrived via a C-Span Book TV discussion moderated by Hendrik Hertzberg of a new book by Thomas Geoghegan, "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?", in which a pointed discussion of American capitalism in light of German and Chinese models cast light on how harsh and non-participatory-not to mention, cut-throat-our own economic system has become:

http://tinyurl.com/2bq9xl2

jedi_mindtrick:

In closing, as much as I admire The Nation magazine for so many important contributions to the needed dialogue, I am deeply disappointed by the lack of an organized, orderly resistance to the sort of "Mind-F#ck" that we are being subjected to as American citizens, including by a largely complicit Democratic Party establishment. This is the basic thrust of the main arguments in the latest must read book by Chris Hedges, "Death of the Liberal Class"-- http://tinyurl.com/2b7peko . Yet, The Nation apparently cannot find it in itself to even publicize the recent protest of our endless stupid wars at the White House-http://www.stopthesewars.org --, let alone publicize Hedges' superb book.

Progressive readers here should demand more of The Nation. As it currently stands we can get nearly equal coverage of the causes that matter to us at common sites like Yahoo! or Google.

hotrod:

I give this article a C-

Just two facts (visit to pakistan and the muslim/wright thing, which isn't really a fact)
Last night, on the NPR show "the connection" out of WBUR in Boston, I heard T Friedman, the mighty columnist of the Times, complain about how the US is an irreplaceable force for good; his specific example was that China sends aid and money to bad guys like...Saudi Arabia (the connection host didn't pick up on the obvious absurdity of this, while we allow the saudis to buy arms, etc etc)

Darin_TBFRWOVF_Palin_Cuz_Shes_Hot:

Here's a point I've made repeatedly here, but our author has never read:

Facts and reason are tools one can use to achieve an objective or goal; however, politics is how groups of people choose between competeing objective or goals. The choise of goals is informed by values and opinions, not facts or logic.

Here's an example. If raising the US population's IQ was a goal, we could execute everyone with an IQ below, say, 75.

Now, that offends my values, and in my opinion, the benefit of a higher population IQ isn't worth the human cost of executing the dumb, but there can be absolutely no question that as a matter of FACT executing the dumb will without question increase the population IQ.

I doubt that politics will agree on this goal any time soon. So as you liberal mistakenly believe you have conered the market on facts, please realize that you are simply not smart enough to recognize where the debate on values ends and the use of facts start.

OneVote:

Gary - you ought to realize that the Republican Party is faith based, not a fact based organization. But, those who pass the collection plate around don't believe that God will provide - you've got to grease the wheels with real life flesh and blood, here and now - 'to get glory - you've got to give.'

dbtexas2010:

Mr. Pontificus, A simple question please? If the Republicans can take credit for shoving fiscal responsibility down the throat of a Democratic president, creating a balanced budget and a reduced deficit, how do you explain those items disappearing when the Republicans gained complete control with the election of a Republican president? Your commentary is fallacious at best, absolute comedy at worst.

drjz:

Freud and his French predecessor, Jacques Lacan expressed that a primary function of the ego is to lie and deceive, both others and oneself. Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, came to Madison Ave. in the 30's and started the manipulations and deceptions of the ad industry, capitalizing on Freud's insights.

The republicans have institutionalized lies and deception.

Clearly listen to some of the republican "leaders," most of whom have illustrated their covert racism covered by screeching false statements about Obama's citizenship, Muslim connections and if this constitutional law scholar lacks the qualifications to be president.

Listen to folks like Haley Barbor actually defend his racist past. The disingenous deceit of Boener and McConnell, talking out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.

Listen to the deceitful, republican representative, Rohrabacher from California's right wing Orange County, expressing the usual false indignance when confronted with his use of political influence to award his friends by taking them on a junket to Honduras, when he is a vehement, racist, anti-immigrant whose words in Honduras sought to undermine Obama and the administration foreign policy inititiaves in that country, by creating his own "foreign policy."

He should be impeached and charged with treason. At the very least be charged with an ethics violation. But with the white republican takeover, nothing will be said, unless Eric Holder investigates. As a...

Arlen Specter's Deliciously Bitter Farewell to Fellow Senators You're a Bunch of Cannibals! The Nation

No one expected Arlen Specter, the grouchiest member of the Senate, to leave the chamber quietly-or, for that matter, gracefully.

But who would have thought that the Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat would exit the Senate calling his colleagues a bunch of "cannibals"

Referring not just to the intense partisanship that has come to characterize the chamber in recent years but also to the internal ideological wrangling that forced him from the Republican Party in 2009-only to be defeated in a Democratic primary in 2010-the senior senator used his valedictory address Tuesday to declare: "Eating or defeating your own is a form of sophisticated cannibalism."

Dismissing specific colleagues, particularly South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, the Tea Party Republican who has sought to impose ideological purity tests on the GOP, as destructive players, Specter growled in a 2,600-word valedictory speech that:

"Collegiality can obviously not be maintained when negotiating with someone out to defeat you, especially in your own party. In some quarters, compromising has become a dirty word… Politics is no longer the art of the possible when senators are intransigent in their positions."

The was the general tenor of Specter's remarkable farewell address, which was characterized at some points by a refreshingly angry, bitter and at times mean-spirited tone, and at others by a sort of mourning for the decay of the Senate into a chamber of horrors.

"The days of lively debate, of many members on the floor, are all gone," Specter bluntly announced.

Decrying abuses of Senate rules in general, and the filibuster in particular, Specter grumbled: "That's not the way it was when (retiring Connecticut Senator) Chris Dodd and I were privileged to enter the world's greatest deliberative body."

Specter is, of course, correct. The Senate is dysfunctional. And his proposals to reform it are spot on:

Specter's reform proposals are essentially sound, as is his bitterness about the decline of the Senate.

But I would debate his "sophisticated cannibalism" reference.

While the "cannibal" reference is appropriate enough with regard to DeMint, there really is nothing sophisticated about the senator from South Carolina. His political flesheating is as unrefined as it is brutal.

And if the decent defeat over extending Bush-era tax cuts offers any indication, most senators are better described as "zombies."

bench rest

It is ironic that only after they face their political death and loss of power do they gain perspective.

Strange how that works.

Good riddance.

"If you beat your head against the wall," the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once wrote, "it is your head that breaks, not the wall."

[Dec 11, 2010] Ron Paul's Nine Questions

Ron Paul's Nine Questions

In case you missed Ron Paul's passionate speech on Wikileaks please watch. this video.

With a tip of the hat to From The Old here are the questions Ron Paul asked in his speech.

Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?

Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?

Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?

Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?

Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?

Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised 'Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed'

Please note the common sense discussion of Ron Paul vs. the completely hysterical (as well as totally misguided) reaction of Sarah Palin: "Assange is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"

[Dec 11, 2010] Ron Paul's Nine Questions

Ron Paul's Nine Questions

In case you missed Ron Paul's passionate speech on Wikileaks please watch. this video.

With a tip of the hat to From The Old here are the questions Ron Paul asked in his speech.

Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?

Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?

Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?

Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?

Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?

Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised 'Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed'

Please note the common sense discussion of Ron Paul vs. the completely hysterical (as well as totally misguided) reaction of Sarah Palin: "Assange is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"

Bonus 10th Question

Here is a key 10th question Ron Paul failed to ask: Since when does the US have the right to impose its laws on the rest of the world?

The answer, no matter what neocons may think, is "we don't".

Sarah Palin cannot think clearly, she just reacts, perpetually grubbing for attention. The simple truth of the matter is she is not fit for office no matter how much media attention she receives. Hopefully Republicans come to their senses regarding her electability before it's too late.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

[Dec 10, 2010] Paul Krugman Obama's Hostage Deal

There is no any real countervailing force for Repugs right now. We might argue is Obama Bush III or Clinton II but distinction between Democrats and Republicans is an illusion that is carefully maintained by MSM. This is just two wings of the same party of Oligarchy.
Economist's View

Richard H. Serlin:

Really the whole thing is just ugly looking.

I could see this kind of thing if it substantially decreased the odds of a President Palin in 2012, or any Republican. Then, we're getting these tax cuts anyway, and with a few trillion on top for the rich. But the whole package decreases unemployment by only a half percent or less in 2011, depending on the forecaster, and may increase it in 2012.

At least Obama could look like he tried with this package, as opposed to passing nothing, but the nothing could clearly be blamed on the Republicans for voting against. And anyway, the bad economy gets blamed on the party that holds the Whitehouse very strongly, so it's really an issue of how is the economy, or as Krugman pointed out what the trend is. Based on the forecasts, this package does little or nothing for either.

And no one anywhere has discussed whether the Fed would add less stimulus as a result of this one trillion. Why? Anyone want to explain why this seems to so obviously not be an influence on their behavior that no one mentions it?

Now, there's a number of nasty scary things about this package:

1) Obama yet again gives in to, and reinforces, the Republican narrative and ideology – the package is almost all tax cuts. This reinforces with the public an ideology which is extremely harmful, as we've seen over the past generation. Reagan, on the other hand, constantly tried to change the narrative and ideology, but Obama is always scared to do this.

2) He demoralizes the base and looks wimpy yet again, and that certainly hurts his chances in 2012.

3) If the economy is still bad in 2012 Republicans will scream, you can't raise taxes in a bad economy, and will have a lot of leverage, and perhaps success.

4) If the economy is a lot better in 2012, then they will scream, look tax cuts work, government spending of any kind doesn't and is bad. This will result in very harmful misleading of the public. And they will also scream tax cuts got us this recovery, raising taxes, and electing a Democrat who will raise taxes, will wreck the recovery.

5) Very ugly and inefficient way to stimulate the economy, almost all tax cuts, with small multipliers and little or no investment value. If you spend one trillion on mansions, yachts, and big screen TVs and vacations, that trillion disappears and you have one trillion in debt. If you instead stimulated the economy with one trillion in infrastructure, education, basic scientific research, etc., then you have trillions in additional income that those investments generate in the future. The short term stimulus really doesn't even cost you any money, because it makes you more money in the future than it costs you, in fact with a return a lot higher than the government's rock bottom borrowing rates today.

6) Krugman wrote in a post today, "On the straight economics, the tax deal is worth doing." This can really be misinterpreted. It depends what happens after the deal. If taxes will just be raised back up again to net it to zero after the slump ends then yes, it's better than doing nothing. But there's a good chance this won't happen. It will just stay added to the government's debt, decade after decade making it higher than it would otherwise be, and crowding out investment when the economy is not in a slump. Or, it could result in us balking about doing big things like free universal preschool and bachelor's degree or a "moon shot" in alternative energy, or just any high return government investment. All of this could far outweigh the half or quarter point less in unemployment in 2011, and it certainly would if there was little, no, or negative difference in saving us from a Republican president in 2011.

And this list is certainly not meant to be exhaustive.

ReallyNow:

What, pray tell, gives you the impression that the big O was "forced" to accept anything? All of the evidence suggests he has done what he has wanted all along, not withstanding his demonstrably false statements to the contrary.

To wit, the secret negotiations in the WH with health insurers and subsequently allowing them to write the "reform" in the Senate (look up, e.g. Liz Fowler, former and likely future Wellpoint VP) as one major example.

Obama in deeds and often in words has demonstrated he is effectively a trojan horse in the thin shell that has remained of FDRs Democratic Party.

More and more people are starting to realize that Obama is a right winger. You're obviously not one of them. If you start looking beyond your wishful thinking, that might change. When enough people wake up, the electoral changes you speak of may indeed come about. While Hope (heh) springs eternal, I'm not holding my breath.

ilsm:

The US does not tax too much, that is not the problem.

The US spends too much on the wrong things: War is wrong.

War takes resources away from productive uses.

Europe, where the kind of war the US likes to pay for originated like the Maginot Line (Star Wars) and colonies, devotes less than one third of government outlays as the US.

If the spending side were reduced by $400B, the US would still out spend its 12 largest allies, there would be huge tax cuts.

And the resources freed would go to fixing the issues the country needs to address.

This broohaha is diverting attention from the real issue and that is the militarists pillaging the US.

anne

ILSM:

The US does not tax too much, that is not the problem. The US spends too much on the wrong things: War is wrong. War takes resources away from productive uses.

[We really need to think this through carefully, there has been some work on the relative loss of productive work in the wake of war, but not nearly enough. *

* http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/military_spending_2007_05.pdf

May, 2007

The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending
By Dean Baker ]

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/military_spending_2007_05.pdf

May, 2007

The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending
By Dean Baker

Executive Summary

There has been relatively little attention paid to the Iraq War's impact on the U.S. economy. It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. This is not generally true in most standard economic models. In fact, most models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.

In order to get an approximation of the economic impact of the recent increase in military spending associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight to run a simulation with its macroeconomic model. It produced a simulation of the impact of an increase in annual U.S. military spending equal to 1 percent of GDP, approximately the actual increase in spending compared with the pre-war budget. We selected the Global Insight model for this analysis because it is a commonly used and widely respected model. Global Insight produced a set of projections that compared a scenario with an increase in annual military spending equal to 1.0 percent of GDP (current about $135 billion) relative to its baseline scenario. This is approximately equal to the increase in defense spending that has taken place compared with the pre-September 11th baseline.

The projections show that:

• After an initial demand stimulus, the effect of higher defense spending turns negative around the sixth year. After 10 years of higher defense spending, payroll employment would be 464,000 less than in the baseline scenario. After 20 years the job loss in the scenario with higher military spending rises to 668,100 compared to the baseline scenario.

• Inflation and interest rates would be considerably higher in the scenario with higher military spending. In the first five years, the annual inflation rate would be on average 0.3 percentage points higher in the scenario with higher military spending. Over the full twenty year period, inflation averages approximately 0.5 percentage points more in the high defense spending scenario. After five years, the interest rate on 10-Year Treasury notes is projected to be 0.7 percentage points higher than in the baseline scenario. After ten years, this gap is projected to rise to 0.9 percentage points, and after twenty years to 1.1 percentage points.

• Higher interest rates are projected to lead to reduced demand in the interest sensitive sectors of the economy. After five years, annual car and truck sales are projected to go down by 192,200 in the high military spending scenario. After ten years, the drop is projected to be 323,300 and after twenty years annual sales are projected to be down 731,400.

• Annual housing starts are projected to be 17,900 lower in the high military spending scenario after five years, 46,200 lower after ten years, and 38,500 lower after twenty years. The cumulative projected drop in housing starts over the twenty year period is 530,000. The drop in annual existing home sales is projected to be 128,400 after five years, 247,900 after ten years and 286,500 after twenty years.

• Higher interest rates are projected to raise the value of the dollar relative to foreign currencies. This makes imports cheaper, causing people in the United States to buy more imports and makes U.S. exports more expensive for people living in other countries, leading to a drop in exports. The model projects that in the high military spending scenario, high imports and weak exports causes the current account deficit to increase (become more negative) by $90.2 billion (2000 dollars) after five years, compared to the baseline scenario. The current account deficit is projected to be $72.5 billion higher after ten years and $112.8 billion higher (both in 2000 dollars) after twenty years. The cumulative effect of higher imports and weaker exports over twenty years is projected to add approximately $1.8 trillion (in 2000 dollars) to the country's foreign debt.

• Construction and manufacturing are the sectors that are projected to experience the largest shares of the job loss. While construction is projected to have a net gain of 8,500 jobs after five years, it is projected to lose 144,200 jobs after ten years and 211,400 jobs after twenty years in the high military spending scenario. Manufacturing is projected to lose 44,200 after five years, 95,200 jobs after ten years, and 91,500 jobs after twenty years in the high military spending scenario. Two-thirds of the projected job loss is in the durable goods sector.

The paper notes that military spending is not generally perceived to cost jobs, however, in standard economic models, its impact can be thought of in the same way as spending on the environment, which is generally believed to cost jobs. While tax and emission restrictions are often used to achieve environmental ends, it is also possible to reach environmental targets by paying people to do things that will reduce pollution. For example, it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by paying people to buy more fuel efficient cars and appliances, or paying them to install insulation and other energy saving devices.

In the case of both increased military spending and paying people to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, resources would be pulled away from their market directed uses. In standard economic models, this redirection of resources will cause the economy to operate less efficiently and therefore lead to slower growth and fewer jobs. In the scenario modeled in this exercise, higher interest rates are the mechanism that slows the economy and leads to fewer jobs.

In policy debates, it is important to recognize the potential job loss from military spending. The potential economic costs are often a factor in debates over environmental policy. Economic costs should also be recognized in debates over military policy. It would be useful to have the Congressional Budget Office produce its own projections of the economic impact of a sustained increase in defense spending.

[Currently basic military spending is running $830.8 billion yearly, which 18 months later is $93.5 billion more than was spent under President Bush in 2008.]

[Dec 10, 2010] Paul Krugman Obama's Hostage Deal

There is no any real countervailing force for Repugs right now. We might argue is Obama Bush III or Clinton II but distinction between Democrats and Republicans is an illusion that is carefully maintained by MSM. This is just two wings of the same party of Oligarchy.
Economist's View

Richard H. Serlin said...

Really the whole thing is just ugly looking.

I could see this kind of thing if it substantially decreased the odds of a President Palin in 2012, or any Republican. Then, we're getting these tax cuts anyway, and with a few trillion on top for the rich. But the whole package decreases unemployment by only a half percent or less in 2011, depending on the forecaster, and may increase it in 2012.

At least Obama could look like he tried with this package, as opposed to passing nothing, but the nothing could clearly be blamed on the Republicans for voting against. And anyway, the bad economy gets blamed on the party that holds the Whitehouse very strongly, so it's really an issue of how is the economy, or as Krugman pointed out what the trend is. Based on the forecasts, this package does little or nothing for either.

And no one anywhere has discussed whether the Fed would add less stimulus as a result of this one trillion. Why? Anyone want to explain why this seems to so obviously not be an influence on their behavior that no one mentions it?

Now, there's a number of nasty scary things about this package:

1) Obama yet again gives in to, and reinforces, the Republican narrative and ideology – the package is almost all tax cuts. This reinforces with the public an ideology which is extremely harmful, as we've seen over the past generation. Reagan, on the other hand, constantly tried to change the narrative and ideology, but Obama is always scared to do this.

2) He demoralizes the base and looks wimpy yet again, and that certainly hurts his chances in 2012.

3) If the economy is still bad in 2012 Republicans will scream, you can't raise taxes in a bad economy, and will have a lot of leverage, and perhaps success.

4) If the economy is a lot better in 2012, then they will scream, look tax cuts work, government spending of any kind doesn't and is bad. This will result in very harmful misleading of the public. And they will also scream tax cuts got us this recovery, raising taxes, and electing a Democrat who will raise taxes, will wreck the recovery.

5) Very ugly and inefficient way to stimulate the economy, almost all tax cuts, with small multipliers and little or no investment value. If you spend one trillion on mansions, yachts, and big screen TVs and vacations, that trillion disappears and you have one trillion in debt. If you instead stimulated the economy with one trillion in infrastructure, education, basic scientific research, etc., then you have trillions in additional income that those investments generate in the future. The short term stimulus really doesn't even cost you any money, because it makes you more money in the future than it costs you, in fact with a return a lot higher than the government's rock bottom borrowing rates today.

6) Krugman wrote in a post today, "On the straight economics, the tax deal is worth doing." This can really be misinterpreted. It depends what happens after the deal. If taxes will just be raised back up again to net it to zero after the slump ends then yes, it's better than doing nothing. But there's a good chance this won't happen. It will just stay added to the government's debt, decade after decade making it higher than it would otherwise be, and crowding out investment when the economy is not in a slump. Or, it could result in us balking about doing big things like free universal preschool and bachelor's degree or a "moon shot" in alternative energy, or just any high return government investment. All of this could far outweigh the half or quarter point less in unemployment in 2011, and it certainly would if there was little, no, or negative difference in saving us from a Republican president in 2011.

And this list is certainly not meant to be exhaustive.

ReallyNow said...

What, pray tell, gives you the impression that the big O was "forced" to accept anything? All of the evidence suggests he has done what he has wanted all along, not withstanding his demonstrably false statements to the contrary.

To wit, the secret negotiations in the WH with health insurers and subsequently allowing them to write the "reform" in the Senate (look up, e.g. Liz Fowler, former and likely future Wellpoint VP) as one major example.

Obama in deeds and often in words has demonstrated he is effectively a trojan horse in the thin shell that has remained of FDRs Democratic Party.

More and more people are starting to realize that Obama is a right winger. You're obviously not one of them. If you start looking beyond your wishful thinking, that might change. When enough people wake up, the electoral changes you speak of may indeed come about. While Hope (heh) springs eternal, I'm not holding my breath.

ilsm:

The US does not tax too much, that is not the problem.

The US spends too much on the wrong things: War is wrong.

War takes resources away from productive uses.

Europe, where the kind of war the US likes to pay for originated like the Maginot Line (Star Wars) and colonies, devotes less than one third of government outlays as the US.

If the spending side were reduced by $400B, the US would still out spend its 12 largest allies, there would be huge tax cuts.

And the resources freed would go to fixing the issues the country needs to address.

This broohaha is diverting attention from the real issue and that is the militarists pillaging the US.

anne

ILSM:

The US does not tax too much, that is not the problem. The US spends too much on the wrong things: War is wrong. War takes resources away from productive uses.

[We really need to think this through carefully, there has been some work on the relative loss of productive work in the wake of war, but not nearly enough. *

* http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/military_spending_2007_05.pdf

May, 2007

The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending
By Dean Baker ]

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/military_spending_2007_05.pdf

May, 2007

The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending
By Dean Baker

Executive Summary

There has been relatively little attention paid to the Iraq War's impact on the U.S. economy. It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. This is not generally true in most standard economic models. In fact, most models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.

In order to get an approximation of the economic impact of the recent increase in military spending associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight to run a simulation with its macroeconomic model. It produced a simulation of the impact of an increase in annual U.S. military spending equal to 1 percent of GDP, approximately the actual increase in spending compared with the pre-war budget. We selected the Global Insight model for this analysis because it is a commonly used and widely respected model. Global Insight produced a set of projections that compared a scenario with an increase in annual military spending equal to 1.0 percent of GDP (current about $135 billion) relative to its baseline scenario. This is approximately equal to the increase in defense spending that has taken place compared with the pre-September 11th baseline.

The projections show that:

• After an initial demand stimulus, the effect of higher defense spending turns negative around the sixth year. After 10 years of higher defense spending, payroll employment would be 464,000 less than in the baseline scenario. After 20 years the job loss in the scenario with higher military spending rises to 668,100 compared to the baseline scenario.

• Inflation and interest rates would be considerably higher in the scenario with higher military spending. In the first five years, the annual inflation rate would be on average 0.3 percentage points higher in the scenario with higher military spending. Over the full twenty year period, inflation averages approximately 0.5 percentage points more in the high defense spending scenario. After five years, the interest rate on 10-Year Treasury notes is projected to be 0.7 percentage points higher than in the baseline scenario. After ten years, this gap is projected to rise to 0.9 percentage points, and after twenty years to 1.1 percentage points.

• Higher interest rates are projected to lead to reduced demand in the interest sensitive sectors of the economy. After five years, annual car and truck sales are projected to go down by 192,200 in the high military spending scenario. After ten years, the drop is projected to be 323,300 and after twenty years annual sales are projected to be down 731,400.

• Annual housing starts are projected to be 17,900 lower in the high military spending scenario after five years, 46,200 lower after ten years, and 38,500 lower after twenty years. The cumulative projected drop in housing starts over the twenty year period is 530,000. The drop in annual existing home sales is projected to be 128,400 after five years, 247,900 after ten years and 286,500 after twenty years.

• Higher interest rates are projected to raise the value of the dollar relative to foreign currencies. This makes imports cheaper, causing people in the United States to buy more imports and makes U.S. exports more expensive for people living in other countries, leading to a drop in exports. The model projects that in the high military spending scenario, high imports and weak exports causes the current account deficit to increase (become more negative) by $90.2 billion (2000 dollars) after five years, compared to the baseline scenario. The current account deficit is projected to be $72.5 billion higher after ten years and $112.8 billion higher (both in 2000 dollars) after twenty years. The cumulative effect of higher imports and weaker exports over twenty years is projected to add approximately $1.8 trillion (in 2000 dollars) to the country's foreign debt.

• Construction and manufacturing are the sectors that are projected to experience the largest shares of the job loss. While construction is projected to have a net gain of 8,500 jobs after five years, it is projected to lose 144,200 jobs after ten years and 211,400 jobs after twenty years in the high military spending scenario. Manufacturing is projected to lose 44,200 after five years, 95,200 jobs after ten years, and 91,500 jobs after twenty years in the high military spending scenario. Two-thirds of the projected job loss is in the durable goods sector.

The paper notes that military spending is not generally perceived to cost jobs, however, in standard economic models, its impact can be thought of in the same way as spending on the environment, which is generally believed to cost jobs. While tax and emission restrictions are often used to achieve environmental ends, it is also possible to reach environmental targets by paying people to do things that will reduce pollution. For example, it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by paying people to buy more fuel efficient cars and appliances, or paying them to install insulation and other energy saving devices.

In the case of both increased military spending and paying people to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, resources would be pulled away from their market directed uses. In standard economic models, this redirection of resources will cause the economy to operate less efficiently and therefore lead to slower growth and fewer jobs. In the scenario modeled in this exercise, higher interest rates are the mechanism that slows the economy and leads to fewer jobs.

In policy debates, it is important to recognize the potential job loss from military spending. The potential economic costs are often a factor in debates over environmental policy. Economic costs should also be recognized in debates over military policy. It would be useful to have the Congressional Budget Office produce its own projections of the economic impact of a sustained increase in defense spending.

[Currently basic military spending is running $830.8 billion yearly, which 18 months later is $93.5 billion more than was spent under President Bush in 2008.]

[Dec 04, 2010] Shining a Light on Sociopaths by Doug Casey

Antiwar.com

From a realpolitik point of view, it makes sense for the North to occasionally kill a few South Koreans, make threatening noises, and keep the "us vs. them" rhetoric hot. It provides an excuse for their extraordinarily low standard of living, and a reason for having a police state. They use nationalism and patriotism very effectively to prop up their pathetic regime. In that regard, they are like most governments, just more extreme. But I consider the chances of an actual war to be slim.

... ... ....

L: Hm. Sarah Palin apparently does not agree with you about WikiLeaks. She's reported as going on record saying that WikiLeaks personnel should be treated like terrorists."> Sarah Palin apparently does not agree with you about WikiLeaks. She's reported as going on record saying that WikiLeaks personnel should be treated like terrorists.

Doug: And people thought I was being too hard on the Tea Party movement. This is exactly the sort of knee-jerk conservative reaction that shows that such people really don't care about freedom at all. I suspect Palin is cut from the same cloth as Baby Bush – ignorant, unintelligent, thoughtless, reactionary, and pig-headed. She belongs on reality TV, not in a position where she could damage the lives of billions of people.

L: In an interesting counterpoint, Reuters reports that Hillary Clinton defended WikiLeaks, even as she arrived in Kazakhstan at the same time as the embarrassing assessment of Kazakh leadership was leaked. Sometimes liberals do defend liberal ideas, like freedom of the press.

Doug: Sometimes. But not if it's politically incorrect press. You can rely on them only to make government larger and more expensive at every turn – that you can rely upon like a Swiss train. Hillary – like any Secretary of State – is a skilled and enthusiastic liar. Her stock in trade is deception. Everything she says is intended to forward her drive to be the President. I wonder if she'd be worse than Palin? But that's like asking if Nero would be worse than Caligula.

L: No argument from me on that. And you know I agree with you on the watchdog principle, but what if they go after private-sector entities? CNN reports that WikiLeaks' next target is a major U.S. bank.

Doug: It's a mistake to think of banks in the U.S. as being private sector entities. U.S. banks got into bed with the state decades ago, and got even more closely entwined via the latest set of regulations, and bailouts.

At this point they're really parasitical entities.

Plus, I'd guess that whatever whistle-blowing WikiLeaks is planning, it probably has to do with the bailouts or other government interactions with the banks anyway – exactly the type of thing that needs to be exposed.

[Dec 04, 2010] Philip Giraldi " Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi discusses the theory that WikiLeaks is carrying out the agenda of a foreign power, the State Department engaging in CIA-style espionage, the US/Israeli 5-part plan for regime change in Iran and why Bradley Manning's (alleged) exposure of government-gone-wild is laudable but should be prosecuted.

MP3 here. (18:05)

Jlord :

I was a tad troubled by this interview, especially given what I would consider to be the generally good work of Giraldi. I would have liked to see Scott challenge him a bit more on this, what seems to me, bizarre theory that the leaks are some kind of plot.

Further, Giraldi's belief that Manning should be prosecuted with the fullest extent of the law isn't really surprising considering his past history I suppose, but still I find his belief that what Manning did was essentially wrong to be more than disturbing.

The diplomatic cables themselves cannot be used to verify fact, since they are, as a previous commentor noted, simply based on the viewpoints of US diplomats. Working for the US government suggests a certain world view that will create perceptions and assertions through these cables that don't necessarily hold true. What certain cables ay about Iran, for example that the Saudi's want war to me only shows how retarded the Saudi's are and how the satellits of Empire are attempting to control US foreign policy.

Further, if there seems to be a pattern about the documents themselves in terms of content, well, wikileaks did say they would be releasing them in segments so that they could be reported on properly. Perhaps some of these holes will be filled in upon the next segment, or the one after.

I don't know, I just found the whole interview a tad strange.

Phil Giraldi:

I knew some would be disturbed by my comments, but I do believe that any government has an obligation to protect SOME secrets. A true whistleblower reveals criminal behavior in the knowledge that he will probably be prosecuted.

If Manning, who agreed to protect classified information, believed that he had the right to make the decision to expose 250,000 documents he has to expect that there will be consequences.

And, while it is right to expose specific criminal activity, it is wrong to reveal great masses of information that demonstrate no such thing. Why should anyone have the right to know what US diplomats think after their confidential exchanges with foreign leaders?

That goes beyond wanting to root out criminal activity, which to me is the justification for whistleblowing.

Rob:

I respect and agree with Mr. Giraldi that it's always good to keep a certain level of healthy skepticism on everything, and we shouldn't dismiss every conspiracy theory on the grounds that it sounds too far-fetched because such conspiracies actually do exist (I'm sure sometimes truth is stranger than fiction), but there are some good reasons to give Wikileaks the benefit of the doubt.

1 : The extensive government secrecy is such a huge problem - whether it being finding excuses for us going to war and destroying Iraq or other such lies which can have disastrous consequences - that any negative effects resulting from the Wiki dumps are surely a lesser evil. Glenn Greenwald talked about this in a recent article, and I agree with him. Whatever mistakes they have made, it is much more urgent to uncover far more egregious goings-on, which people have the right to know about, regardless of any laws which protect secret government documents from being reviewed by the general population.

2 : We have only seen a couple hundred documents, so there will surely be more cables bearing on people like Mubarak, Netanyahu.

3 : The whole deal on Iran seems like a complete misconception to me. The fact that certain Arab leaders have called for military / drastic action against Iran in order to thwart any imaginary weapons program is IN NO WAY in my mind proof of any support for it, on the contrary. Support from whom? The majority of the population in Arab countries is against it, overwhelmingly, so why is so much emphasis being put on what these corrupt rulers think, or are saying in order to curry favor with American diplomats? This is a total disregard for any democratic principles, to imply that they truly represent their populations. They don't.

[Dec 04, 2010] WikiLeaks Archive - Dim View of Russia and Putin

NYTimes.com
By C. J. CHIVERS

Early in 2009, as recession rippled around the world, the United States Embassy in Moscow sent to Washington a cable summarizing whispers within Russia's political class. Prime Minister President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev, have called a "reset" in relations.

But scores of secret American cables from recent years, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, show that beneath the public efforts at warmer ties, the United States harbors a dim view of the post-Soviet Kremlin and its leadership, and little hope that Russia will become more democratic or reliable.

The cables portray Mr. Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build.

Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr. Putin's Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.

Throughout the internal correspondence between the American Embassy and Washington, the American diplomats in Moscow painted a Russia in which public stewardship was barely tended to and history was distorted. The Kremlin displays scant ability or inclination to reform what one cable characterized as a "modern brand of authoritarianism" accepted with resignation by the ruled.

Moreover, the cables reveal the limits of American influence within Russia and an evident dearth of diplomatic sources. The internal correspondence repeatedly reflected the analyses of an embassy whose staff was narrowly contained and had almost no access to Mr. Putin's inner circle.

In reporting to Washington, diplomats often summarized impressions from meetings not with Russian officials, but with Western colleagues or business executives. The impressions of a largely well-known cadre of Russian journalists, opposition politicians and research institute regulars rounded out many cables, with insights resembling what was published in liberal Russian newspapers and on Web sites.

The cables sketched life almost 20 years after the Soviet Union's disintegration, a period, as the cables noted, when Mr. Medvedev, the prime minister's understudy, is the lesser part of a strange "tandemocracy" and "plays Robin to Putin's Batman." All the while, another cable noted, "Stalin's ghost haunts the Metro."

Government Corruption

In the secret American description, official malfeasance and corruption infect all elements of Russian public life - from rigging elections, to persecuting rivals or citizens who pose a threat, to extorting businesses.

The corruption was described as a drag on the nation of sufficient significance to merit the attention of Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin, who, paradoxically, benefited from cronies who orchestrate graft but support the Kremlin.

A cable describing the government and style of Yuri M. Luzhkov, then the mayor of Moscow, presented the puzzle.

Since 2008, Mr. Medvedev has been the face and cheerleader for the nation's supposed anti-corruption campaign. Yet a veritable kaleidoscope of corruption thrived in Moscow, much of it under the protection of a mayor who served at the president's pleasure.

The embassy wrote of a "three-tiered structure" in Moscow's criminal world, with the mayor at the top, the police and intelligence officials at the second tier and those regarded as a municipality's predators - "ordinary criminals and corrupt inspectors" - at the bottom.

In this world the government effectively was the mafia. Extortion was so widespread, the cable noted, that it had become the business of the Interior Ministry and the federal intelligence service, known by their initials in Russian, the M.V.D. and the F.S.B.

"Moscow business owners understand that it is best to get protection from the MVD and FSB (rather than organized crime groups) since they not only have more guns, resources and power than criminal groups, but they are also protected by the law," the cable noted, citing a Russian source. "For this reason, protection from criminal gangs is no longer so high in demand."

The cable further described a delicate balance.

On one hand, the prime minister and the president benefited from votes Mr. Luzhkov delivered to the country's ruling party, and perhaps from corruption that one embassy source said was so profligate that witnesses saw suitcases, presumably full of cash, being carried into the Kremlin under armed guard.

On the other, the corruption and a flagrantly rigged election in 2009 for the city's legislature had raised the question of whether Mr. Luzhkov was worth the trouble.

The cable ended on a prescient note. "Ultimately, the tandem will put Luzhkov out to pasture," it said. Eight months after this cable was written, Mr. Medvedev dismissed Mr. Luzhkov.

The embassy's consistent assessments left little hope that removing one person would be enough. Russian corruption, the cables said, was structural.

One foreign citizen, whom the embassy described as having "made a fortune in Russia's casino business," said in 2009 "that the 'levels of corruption in business were worse than we could imagine' and that after working here for over 15 years and witnessing first-hand the behavior of GOR [government of Russia] officials at all levels, he could not imagine the system changing."

The same cable noted that even if the government wanted to change it might not be able to, given that "in 2006 - at the height of Putin's control in a booming economy - it was rumored within the Presidential Administration that as many as 60 percent of his orders were not being followed."

Secretive Business Deals

In Russia, the separation between the most important businesses and government officials runs from blurry to nonexistent. The cables rendered darkly how Russian companies - often relying on what one cable called "secretive deals involving intermediary companies with unknown owners and beneficiaries" - conducted their affairs.

The cables also detailed two separate but related concerns about Russia's oil and gas sectors: a lack of modern management and capital-improvement programs, and a tendency in Mr. Putin's circle to see energy resources as political levers.

One prominent Western oil executive told Ambassador Beyrle that the inefficiencies "are so huge" that "a well that would take ten days to drill in Canada would take 20" in Russia.

"Multiply that by hundreds or thousands and you can start to imagine the costs to the economy," the cable quoted the executive as saying.

The embassy's 2009 assessment of state-owned Gazprom, Russia's largest company, was similar. "Gazprom, it said, "must act in the interests of its political masters, even at the expense of sound economic decision-making."

The cables also showed how bureaucratic, national and economic power often all converged in the Kremlin, and how the state's suitors grasped that access often equaled results.

The summary of a meeting between an Italian and American diplomats in Moscow documented the Italian diplomat's exasperation with Mr. Putin and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, who had gained Russia's ear.

The diplomat said that the pair enjoyed such a close relationship that they shared a "direct line," and that the Italian Foreign Ministry and Embassy "only learn of conversations" between the premiers "after the fact, and with little detail or background."

The diplomat then "explained that while the close relationship is not ideal from the bureaucracy's perspective and more detrimental than beneficial, it can be useful at times.

"He cited," the cable added, "the case of the sale to Gazprom by Italian energy giant ENI of its 20 percent share in Gazprom's oil subsidiary Gazpromneft. He said Gazprom had insisted on paying far below the market price, but that it ultimately paid the market price after Berlusconi weighed in with Putin."

Other cables described how Western businesses sometimes managed to pursue their interests by personally engaging senior Russian officials, including President Medvedev, rather than getting lost in bureaucratic channels.

The experience in late 2009 of the Intel Corporation, which hoped to import 1,000 encrypted computers for its Russia offices, offered insights into the benefits of courting the top.

"Several high-level Intel officers, including CEO Craig Barrett, and other officials, such as American Chamber of Commerce President Andrew Somers, highlighted to the GOR interlocutors, including President Medvedev, the role Intel plays in employing over 1,000 Russian engineers," a cable said.

"This high-level lobbying secured Intel a meeting with key FSB officials to explain its needs," it continued. "Intel was able to demonstrate the reasonableness of its request and, as a result, by-passed the current extensive licensing requirement."

Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman, said that the meetings were not about one shipment of computers; they created an expedited process for importing such equipment, not only for Intel but for their customers and distributors. "We didn't get this as a one-time thing," he said.

The cables further revealed how the nexus of business and state interests among Russia's ruling elite had fueled suspicions in Washington that Mr. Putin, in spite of his vigorous denials, had quietly amassed a personal fortune.

A confidential cable pointedly mentioned the Swiss oil-trading company Gunvor, as being "of particular note."

The company, the cable said, is "rumored to be one of Putin's sources of undisclosed wealth" and is owned by Gennadi N. Timchenko, who is "rumored to be a former K.G.B. colleague of Putin's." One estimate said the company might control half of Russian oil exports, potentially bringing its owners billions of dollars in profit.

Gunvor's profits were especially high, the cable claimed, because in one of the few deals in which details were known, a source said that the firm included a surcharge of $1 per barrel of oil. More competitive traders, the source said, might mark up a barrel by only a nickel.

The cables provide no evidence to support the allegations about Gunvor and Mr. Luzhkov, the former Moscow mayor; neither has been charged with any crimes.

Patience Unrewarded

If two words were to summarize the secret American assessment of its relations with the Kremlin, it would be these: suspicion and frustration.

A cornerstone of Washington's approach to the relationship has been patience. Privately, American diplomats have described the hope that by moderating public criticism of Russia and encouraging market principles, Russia's government and important companies might with time evolve.

The cables underscore how frustrating the patience has been.

A summary in November 2009 of the security dialogue between the United States and Russia coolly stated that in spite of warm words between Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Obama and the establishment of a new military-to-military working group, there remained "challenges in effecting real, substantive and ongoing" dialogue.

The Defense Ministry, the cable said "has not changed its modus operandi for information exchange nor routine dialoguing since the end of the Cold War."

Russian attendees at meetings, the cable said, "are closely monitored by their Military Intelligence (GRU) handlers," and are reluctant "to engage in any dialogues outside of tightly controlled statements recited from prepared texts."

When diplomats did meet Russian officials who chose to be candid, the message they heard was sometimes blunt.

In June 2009 a delegation of Washington analysts who were accompanied by diplomats met with Aleksandr Y. Skobeltsyn of Russia's Department for Military-Technical Cooperation to discuss American concerns about sales of anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles.

The latter are a special worry in the West, where security officials fear terrorists could fire them at passenger jets.

Mr. Skobeltsyn said that Russia "shared U.S. concerns about re-transfer vulnerabilities, noting that Latin America and Middle East were especially sensitive areas."

"But, he argued, if Russia did not provide these weapons to certain countries, then 'someone else' would."

Outright distrustful relations between the Kremlin and the Soviet Union's former vassals were also evident in the records. At an appearance in Washington in 2009, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski of Poland said that American forces would be welcome in Poland "to protect against Russian aggression."

The comment, unwelcomed by Russia and the United States alike, ignited a minor flare-up. In a cable after Mr. Sikorski's appearance, the American Embassy said that Poland had established a Bureau of European Security, which "Polish diplomats jokingly refer to as the 'Office of Threats from the East.' "

The back-channel quip eventually provided insight into the diplomatic climate in Moscow. A Polish official, formerly posted to Moscow, noted that Russia's Foreign Ministry "threw this moniker back at him during a meeting."

He told his American colleagues that the "only way" that Russia's Foreign Ministry could have known of the nickname "was to have been listening in on his phone conversations with Warsaw" - a clear suggestion that his office in Russia had been bugged.

DMZ, NJ

Excellent overview of corruption in the USA. Now, how does corruption work in Russia?
lomtevas. New York, N.Y.December 1st
No one asked me my opinion of Putin and Medvedev's government. I believe the U.S. is way off the mark in describing Russia and its leaders.

comraderoger, Moscow

From the article:

"In Russia, the separation between the most important businesses and government officials runs from blurry to nonexistent. The cables rendered darkly how Russian companies - often relying on what one cable called "secretive deals involving intermediary companies with unknown owners and beneficiaries" - conducted their affairs."

Can the same not be said about the US government and companies such as Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater [Xe] and so on? All those no bid contracts, the billions of dollars that disappeared, the blatant corruption in the entire process.

And with the recent election, the first after the Citizen's United decision, the US government has only become even more beholden to its corporate benefactors.

FredJ, KNY
6:48 pm"The United States harbors a low view of the Russian leaders and little hope that Russia will become more democratic or reliable."

As a citizen of the United States, I have grown to harbor that same low view of my own country.

harry, michigan
nd how is this any different then america;venezula;china or any other country. Instead of suitcases of cash american political figures get their money via contributions or donations. Can you name any country where there is no corruption? Why do we feel that nautural resources need to be controlled by a few and not that particular countries natural asset to be shared by their entire citizenry, because human beings are vile and greedy. I guess if you keep your greed within some defined limits you can call yourself a democracy, but hey we can't even do that much.
Jason Atchley, Austin, TXDecember 1st
6:49 pmIt is very interesting to see the inner workings of diplomacy and how it "really" works. I understand it might not be the best situation for our Nation but it is compelling reading nonetheless.

Jason Atchley

Haitch76, NYC
Give up on this democracy business, for God's sake. Everyone preaches democracy but no one practices it. It's like the "free market"--never free, always controlled. Way back when, Madison thought that having one representative for 30,000 people was a sure sigh that the majority would never rule. Now we have 500,000 plus. Here in the good ole USA, we have oligarchy, ditto for Russia.
Tobias Weisserth, Hamburg, Germany
The weird thing is that the Russian authorities are actually acting outraged about the cables' contents. The information about Russia in the cables is already common knowledge among the general public in Europe for a long time. Everybody KNOWS Russia is a corrupt non-ethical state that is dominated by gangsters and doesn't have a functioning legal system. All you had to do to come to that conclusion a long time ago was to follow the regular news.

Isn't it funny how those leaked cables manage to embarrass both the US and Russia at the same time?

I hope state leaders keep their calm now.

LynneBoston, MA
This is so counter productive. I cannot believe there are any of us who do not speak about other expecting some sort of confidentiality. Childishness to assume otherwise. Destructive to believe you are a hero for exposing private conversations that absolutely hurt our standing in the world. I guess this administration will leave the US in worse standing than the last.
Cathy Kayser, San Jose, Costa Rica
Given the fact that Russia has been less than competely helpful in dealing with Iran, is it any wonder that US diplomatic officials consider their motives suspect?
Sebastien, P.Rocky Point, NY

Why can't Putin and Medvedev and the politician in Russia be simply bribed right in the open, like American Congress? Russian mafia would be called "lobbyists" instead and everything would be fine.

David, Sao Paulo
All very interesting. No doubt, Russia is corrupt. The US is also corrupt, in many of the same ways. Are sweetheart deals that shovelled billions into Halliburton and Blackwater any different than Russian corruption? Putin might well be disengaged. Bush was incredibly disengaged and frequently working from home in Crawford. Sharing the spoils of corruption is a challenge for the Russians, just as it is for the Americans. AIG, Goldman and other elite vampire squid have been inhaling all that is not nailed down as aggressively as Russian businesses attack their own treasury. The common man's only real recourse is to invest in those companies who seem most likely to benefit from the cronyistic farce we pretend is market capitalism.
AmatureHistorian, NYC
So what? At least things gets done over there if you have the connection or money. Russian has been complaining for years that agreement reached with American official/envoy is useless because the president/congress often decides to tag on their pork. There is even an instance where the official pretends to speak for Bush Sr. when he is in fact speaking for himself. Moscow follow through with the agreement and ended up protesting to Washington about breach of understanding.
Nightwood, MI
Please oh please, tell me something new. Maybe our super intellectual or mystic George Bush could look into Putin's eyes and see an upright, decent person ready to work for the common good. Nobody, nobody that i know has ever completely trusted Russia. There have been times when we have been hopeful, but it has always been a wary sort of hopeful, never firmly grounded in reality.
Ron Bannon, Newark, NJ
Good! Our government has consistently pried into our private/secret lives, and it's about time that we the people pried into theirs.
Frunobulax, Chicago
The rackets that run the US write checks to politicians and lobbyists. I'd take the Russian rackets any day: at least there's no pretence that they're criminals.
lisztian, San Diego, CA
So many of the contents of the cables are so easily available from public sources that it's hard to see why many of them were made restricted-access. The only surprise would have been if our diplomats had ever shared--or never lost--Bush's rosy-eyed initial perception of Putin's soul.

I'm also sure that every country's embassy in DC sends similarly jaundiced reports home about politics and personalities here. Ally or adversary, you need to know the weaknesses of your counterparts. Now, when will Wikileaks unveil a trove of Russian, Chinese or British diplomatic correspondence?

Casual Observer, Los Angelest
Putin is what he is and anyone who does not imagine that he knows what everyone else thinks of him underestimates the kind of person needed to survive in post-U.S.S.R. Russia.

Russia is the victim of centuries of autocracy or anarchy and so has never been able to enjoy the benefits available to stable and egalitarian societies. If that was not bad enough, Russia proved that Marx was a great writer but a poor designer of social systems in just seventy years, leaving it with a strangely incompetent assembly of dysfunctional subsystems that completely controlled the entire society. There was no state that could be reoriented to a more legalistic and democratic form of government. On top of that most all of the participants in the ruling class were highly intelligent and realized that they had a very screwed up country.

Enter the helpful products of Professor Friedman's Chicago Day Glo Mysterious Free Market Players ensemble to encourage the most screwed up redistribution of wealth and enterprise in human history, creating nothing so remarkable as oligarchial control of the Russian economy.

Only a former top officer of the KGB could ever figure out what is going on in Russia, so Putin or somebody like him was destined to replace first more democratically inclined leaders following Gorbachev.

Dick Bloom, West Chester, PA
We had our chance under Boris Yeltsin and blew it. We helped overthrow the old regime and then stood and watched while the Russian economy self-destructed. Putin knows what the US appears unable to fathom: that his semi-planned economy is a temporary expedient until the country fully embraces the free market system, just as he is. The taste for free enterprise isn't necessarily inherited, you know, even though you feel it is. For millennia now, Russians, according to scholar Richard Pipes, have inherited just the opposite--the desire to be told what to do. But that Putin's Russia doesn't meet our high standards of freedom is our own damned fault: had we handled the 1990s differently, we'd not only have a true friend in the Kremlin but an equal and opposite trading partner, with markets so unimaginably vast they'd keep the rest of the world busy until Putin was no longer needed. But we blew it.
Jeff, L.A.
A serious student of American history and the Cold War will understand that although the U.S. was victorious in terms of surviving the Cold War it broke our political system resulting in a right wing coup against President Kennedy. The coup leaders considered Kennedy a traitor, because he sought to lessen tensions with the Soviet Union, deescalate Vietnam and no doubt because he supported civil rights legislation and regulation of business at home. The template for the coup involved allowing all aspects of American society to continue to function as before, including the press, with the hidden hand of the security apparatus influencing opinion and guiding policy while rewarding those institutions directly related to the coup such as the CIA, FBI, military industrial complex, and right wing fascist billionaires.

Putin, when faced with the civil and economic anarchy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and being a long term KGB agent was fully aware of the American coup, and used it as a rough template to order Russian society, meaning the security service would be the power behind the throne, and the media would self censor etc.

Since Russia has no tradition of democracy the template eroded over time into a kleptocracy that attempts to appear benign and meet the basic needs of the Russian consumer as does the United States. The key difference is the disproportionate power corporations have in the United States.

George Xanich, Bethel, Maine
Russia's, then the Soviet Union, past is based on paranoia of the West, as history has shown Russia victimize by foreign invaders. From the Muscovite empire to Napoleon onto WWII, Russia has always made self sacrifices to preserve its autonomy. These leaks show Russia and its leaders in less than a stellar view. Because of Russia's xenophobia the leaks only adds to their paranoia of the west!

thomas, nyc

the frog is calling the lizard ugly......we have the highest percentage of incarcerations to population on the planet....including Russia & China....democracy indeed!

marcchi, IL

The really important news in the current wikileaks release is that gates, clinton, and possibly obama --if he did micromanage the honduras coup and its aftershocks-- committed a felony by conspiring to undermine the enforcement of an american law and by suppressing a well-argued and documented denunciation by a usa government official, in the honduras embassy of the usa, that a fact punished by american law, a coup d'etat against a democracy, had taken place.

because of their behavior after the honduras coup, gates, clinton, and possibly obama have made themselves *impeachable* for violating their oath to defend the american constitution and make any possible effort to respect and enforce the laws of the usa. [and congrats to lanny davis!]

karlmarx, Boston MA
The whole Wikileaks episode is real interesting, this has happened a number of times before. How come there are no French, German, or as Friedman was want to say Chinese Wikileaks? How come we don't post secret communiques of Al Quaeda. The evidence like that of 9/11 suggests widespread incompetence. Rather than worry about the content of these leaks a more productive idea is to understand the totally lax security that brought us 9/11 and now this. Can't the U.S. government keep anything secret.

RefugeeUS

Clearly, the pot (US gov) is calling the kettle (Russian Gov) BLACK (corrupt oligarchy).

With a little editing of the article, our current state of affairs does not look much better than our "frieds" (frenemy?) across the Bering Strait:

"In [the US], the separation between the most important [corporations] and government officials runs from blurry to nonexistent. [Wars, bailouts, elections, and high court decisions] rendered darkly how [US] companies - often relying ... "secretive deals involving [lobbyists] with []known [clients] and beneficiaries" - conducted their affairs."

John Aronson, Hampshire County, MA
We here in the US should find it disturbing that our State Department appears to believe there are only two kinds of people in the world; contemptible fools and contemptible toadies.
awhitdsan francisco
So the Embassy staff is contained. How many of them speak fluent Russian? How many have social relations with ordinary Russians?
Scottsdale Jack, Scottsdale, AZ
7:44 pmOh, the Russians aren't "reliable"? What does that mean? They don't automatically support every crusade the US elite decides to engage in (attack on Iraq, pressure on Iran, mindless support for Israel, etc.?).

News flash: lots of us peons here in the US don't support these things either.

Mr. Spock, NYC
i've read all the comments and i find the knee-jerk cynicism equating the US corruption to Russian corruption interesting. Americans don't travel enough. I've spent extensive time in Eastern Europe and Russia, the differences between corruption there and here is not just in magnitude but in kind. No comparison. Every level of govt. is corrupt. Most frighteningly, the police. Profoundly corrupt.

These comments that want to equate the problems in the US with those in Russia simply can't fathom what it is like over there. The US has its problems, especially in the systemic corruption of congress and the fund raising of elected officials, but it isn't close to Russia.

Refugee, US
@30 (anonymous from WA). While your love of your new country is commendable, your anger towards those who critique the US govt/system by comparing it to the Russian govt/system appears misplaced. There is nothing ignorant nor ungrateful in criticizing the US system, especially when it strays far from ideals such as fairness, honesty, dignity, etc. In fact, each American is granted the right to do so by the First Amendment of the United States constitution and should exercise such right freely.

There is a difference between the American ideals (such as freedom, democracy, balance of powers, a middle class) and reality. I grew up in a very corrupt system (the Philippines) and have traveled many times to Russia, so I understand what living in a corrupt system looks like. One gets a little concerned when actions, procedures, roadblocks, etc of American agencies and large corporations are becoming as absurd, irrational, pointless, and self-interested as those in the Filipino and Russian systems.

momma methane, luzerne
Putin's swiss oil interests don't sound too much different than Corbett's ties to Dutch Shell vis a vis the sale of Marcellus Shale access by East Resources in here in PA. Penn's woods aren't so sylvan, and Harrisburg ain't that much different from Moscow....
satyasampurnaKota
Going by the track record, the corruption at high level exist even in American government. The findings of prefrential allotment of business to certain influential politician companies post Iraq war is the best example.
Paul I. Adujie, New York, United States
The Pentagon Papers are the precursors or progenitors of WikiLeaks and Mr. Julien Assange ... I do fervently and passionately believe that Mr. Assange and his coterie of associates and facilitators stand for truth and honesty in public discourse.

Conspiracies, falsehoods and deceits, are the stock of diplomats, politicians and government officials... it seems... from these revelations by WikiLeaks ... conspiracies, falsehoods and deceits are the tools of injustices worldwide... and this is what WikiLeaks have exposed again and again...

The world should starve politicians, diplomats and other charlatans of secrecy which enable them to engage in shenanigans!

WikiLeaks and The New York Times stand for public good, our common good.

Andre Shoumatoff, Park City, Utah
Very insightful article detailing the depth of corruption in Russia. This means that WikiLeaks may have actually caused some benefit as it may perhaps serve as a wake-up call to some officials in Russia. It is sad to see this country having gone this direction when it so-recently had so much potential.

[Dec 04, 2010] Shining a Light on Sociopaths by Doug Casey

Antiwar.com

From a realpolitik point of view, it makes sense for the North to occasionally kill a few South Koreans, make threatening noises, and keep the "us vs. them" rhetoric hot. It provides an excuse for their extraordinarily low standard of living, and a reason for having a police state. They use nationalism and patriotism very effectively to prop up their pathetic regime. In that regard, they are like most governments, just more extreme. But I consider the chances of an actual war to be slim.

... ... ....

L: Hm. Sarah Palin apparently does not agree with you about WikiLeaks. She's reported as going on record saying that WikiLeaks personnel should be treated like terrorists."> Sarah Palin apparently does not agree with you about WikiLeaks. She's reported as going on record saying that WikiLeaks personnel should be treated like terrorists.

Doug: And people thought I was being too hard on the Tea Party movement. This is exactly the sort of knee-jerk conservative reaction that shows that such people really don't care about freedom at all. I suspect Palin is cut from the same cloth as Baby Bush – ignorant, unintelligent, thoughtless, reactionary, and pig-headed. She belongs on reality TV, not in a position where she could damage the lives of billions of people.

L: In an interesting counterpoint, Reuters reports that Hillary Clinton defended WikiLeaks, even as she arrived in Kazakhstan at the same time as the embarrassing assessment of Kazakh leadership was leaked. Sometimes liberals do defend liberal ideas, like freedom of the press.

Doug: Sometimes. But not if it's politically incorrect press. You can rely on them only to make government larger and more expensive at every turn – that you can rely upon like a Swiss train. Hillary – like any Secretary of State – is a skilled and enthusiastic liar. Her stock in trade is deception. Everything she says is intended to forward her drive to be the President. I wonder if she'd be worse than Palin? But that's like asking if Nero would be worse than Caligula.

L: No argument from me on that. And you know I agree with you on the watchdog principle, but what if they go after private-sector entities? CNN reports that WikiLeaks' next target is a major U.S. bank.

Doug: It's a mistake to think of banks in the U.S. as being private sector entities. U.S. banks got into bed with the state decades ago, and got even more closely entwined via the latest set of regulations, and bailouts.

At this point they're really parasitical entities.

Plus, I'd guess that whatever whistle-blowing WikiLeaks is planning, it probably has to do with the bailouts or other government interactions with the banks anyway – exactly the type of thing that needs to be exposed.

[Dec 04, 2010] Philip Giraldi " Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi discusses the theory that WikiLeaks is carrying out the agenda of a foreign power, the State Department engaging in CIA-style espionage, the US/Israeli 5-part plan for regime change in Iran and why Bradley Manning's (alleged) exposure of government-gone-wild is laudable but should be prosecuted.

MP3 here. (18:05)

Jlord :

I was a tad troubled by this interview, especially given what I would consider to be the generally good work of Giraldi. I would have liked to see Scott challenge him a bit more on this, what seems to me, bizarre theory that the leaks are some kind of plot.

Further, Giraldi's belief that Manning should be prosecuted with the fullest extent of the law isn't really surprising considering his past history I suppose, but still I find his belief that what Manning did was essentially wrong to be more than disturbing.

The diplomatic cables themselves cannot be used to verify fact, since they are, as a previous commentor noted, simply based on the viewpoints of US diplomats. Working for the US government suggests a certain world view that will create perceptions and assertions through these cables that don't necessarily hold true. What certain cables ay about Iran, for example that the Saudi's want war to me only shows how retarded the Saudi's are and how the satellits of Empire are attempting to control US foreign policy.

Further, if there seems to be a pattern about the documents themselves in terms of content, well, wikileaks did say they would be releasing them in segments so that they could be reported on properly. Perhaps some of these holes will be filled in upon the next segment, or the one after.

I don't know, I just found the whole interview a tad strange.

Phil Giraldi:

I knew some would be disturbed by my comments, but I do believe that any government has an obligation to protect SOME secrets. A true whistleblower reveals criminal behavior in the knowledge that he will probably be prosecuted.

If Manning, who agreed to protect classified information, believed that he had the right to make the decision to expose 250,000 documents he has to expect that there will be consequences.

And, while it is right to expose specific criminal activity, it is wrong to reveal great masses of information that demonstrate no such thing. Why should anyone have the right to know what US diplomats think after their confidential exchanges with foreign leaders?

That goes beyond wanting to root out criminal activity, which to me is the justification for whistleblowing.

Rob:

I respect and agree with Mr. Giraldi that it's always good to keep a certain level of healthy skepticism on everything, and we shouldn't dismiss every conspiracy theory on the grounds that it sounds too far-fetched because such conspiracies actually do exist (I'm sure sometimes truth is stranger than fiction), but there are some good reasons to give Wikileaks the benefit of the doubt.

1 : The extensive government secrecy is such a huge problem - whether it being finding excuses for us going to war and destroying Iraq or other such lies which can have disastrous consequences - that any negative effects resulting from the Wiki dumps are surely a lesser evil. Glenn Greenwald talked about this in a recent article, and I agree with him. Whatever mistakes they have made, it is much more urgent to uncover far more egregious goings-on, which people have the right to know about, regardless of any laws which protect secret government documents from being reviewed by the general population.

2 : We have only seen a couple hundred documents, so there will surely be more cables bearing on people like Mubarak, Netanyahu.

3 : The whole deal on Iran seems like a complete misconception to me. The fact that certain Arab leaders have called for military / drastic action against Iran in order to thwart any imaginary weapons program is IN NO WAY in my mind proof of any support for it, on the contrary. Support from whom? The majority of the population in Arab countries is against it, overwhelmingly, so why is so much emphasis being put on what these corrupt rulers think, or are saying in order to curry favor with American diplomats? This is a total disregard for any democratic principles, to imply that they truly represent their populations. They don't.

[Dec 04, 2010] WikiLeaks Archive - Dim View of Russia and Putin

NYTimes.com
By C. J. CHIVERS

Early in 2009, as recession rippled around the world, the United States Embassy in Moscow sent to Washington a cable summarizing whispers within Russia's political class. Prime Minister President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri A. Medvedev, have called a "reset" in relations.

But scores of secret American cables from recent years, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, show that beneath the public efforts at warmer ties, the United States harbors a dim view of the post-Soviet Kremlin and its leadership, and little hope that Russia will become more democratic or reliable.

The cables portray Mr. Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build.

Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr. Putin's Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.

Throughout the internal correspondence between the American Embassy and Washington, the American diplomats in Moscow painted a Russia in which public stewardship was barely tended to and history was distorted. The Kremlin displays scant ability or inclination to reform what one cable characterized as a "modern brand of authoritarianism" accepted with resignation by the ruled.

Moreover, the cables reveal the limits of American influence within Russia and an evident dearth of diplomatic sources. The internal correspondence repeatedly reflected the analyses of an embassy whose staff was narrowly contained and had almost no access to Mr. Putin's inner circle.

In reporting to Washington, diplomats often summarized impressions from meetings not with Russian officials, but with Western colleagues or business executives. The impressions of a largely well-known cadre of Russian journalists, opposition politicians and research institute regulars rounded out many cables, with insights resembling what was published in liberal Russian newspapers and on Web sites.

The cables sketched life almost 20 years after the Soviet Union's disintegration, a period, as the cables noted, when Mr. Medvedev, the prime minister's understudy, is the lesser part of a strange "tandemocracy" and "plays Robin to Putin's Batman." All the while, another cable noted, "Stalin's ghost haunts the Metro."

Government Corruption

In the secret American description, official malfeasance and corruption infect all elements of Russian public life - from rigging elections, to persecuting rivals or citizens who pose a threat, to extorting businesses.

The corruption was described as a drag on the nation of sufficient significance to merit the attention of Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin, who, paradoxically, benefited from cronies who orchestrate graft but support the Kremlin.

A cable describing the government and style of Yuri M. Luzhkov, then the mayor of Moscow, presented the puzzle.

Since 2008, Mr. Medvedev has been the face and cheerleader for the nation's supposed anti-corruption campaign. Yet a veritable kaleidoscope of corruption thrived in Moscow, much of it under the protection of a mayor who served at the president's pleasure.

The embassy wrote of a "three-tiered structure" in Moscow's criminal world, with the mayor at the top, the police and intelligence officials at the second tier and those regarded as a municipality's predators - "ordinary criminals and corrupt inspectors" - at the bottom.

In this world the government effectively was the mafia. Extortion was so widespread, the cable noted, that it had become the business of the Interior Ministry and the federal intelligence service, known by their initials in Russian, the M.V.D. and the F.S.B.

"Moscow business owners understand that it is best to get protection from the MVD and FSB (rather than organized crime groups) since they not only have more guns, resources and power than criminal groups, but they are also protected by the law," the cable noted, citing a Russian source. "For this reason, protection from criminal gangs is no longer so high in demand."

The cable further described a delicate balance.

On one hand, the prime minister and the president benefited from votes Mr. Luzhkov delivered to the country's ruling party, and perhaps from corruption that one embassy source said was so profligate that witnesses saw suitcases, presumably full of cash, being carried into the Kremlin under armed guard.

On the other, the corruption and a flagrantly rigged election in 2009 for the city's legislature had raised the question of whether Mr. Luzhkov was worth the trouble.

The cable ended on a prescient note. "Ultimately, the tandem will put Luzhkov out to pasture," it said. Eight months after this cable was written, Mr. Medvedev dismissed Mr. Luzhkov.

The embassy's consistent assessments left little hope that removing one person would be enough. Russian corruption, the cables said, was structural.

One foreign citizen, whom the embassy described as having "made a fortune in Russia's casino business," said in 2009 "that the 'levels of corruption in business were worse than we could imagine' and that after working here for over 15 years and witnessing first-hand the behavior of GOR [government of Russia] officials at all levels, he could not imagine the system changing."

The same cable noted that even if the government wanted to change it might not be able to, given that "in 2006 - at the height of Putin's control in a booming economy - it was rumored within the Presidential Administration that as many as 60 percent of his orders were not being followed."

Secretive Business Deals

In Russia, the separation between the most important businesses and government officials runs from blurry to nonexistent. The cables rendered darkly how Russian companies - often relying on what one cable called "secretive deals involving intermediary companies with unknown owners and beneficiaries" - conducted their affairs.

The cables also detailed two separate but related concerns about Russia's oil and gas sectors: a lack of modern management and capital-improvement programs, and a tendency in Mr. Putin's circle to see energy resources as political levers.

One prominent Western oil executive told Ambassador Beyrle that the inefficiencies "are so huge" that "a well that would take ten days to drill in Canada would take 20" in Russia.

"Multiply that by hundreds or thousands and you can start to imagine the costs to the economy," the cable quoted the executive as saying.

The embassy's 2009 assessment of state-owned Gazprom, Russia's largest company, was similar. "Gazprom, it said, "must act in the interests of its political masters, even at the expense of sound economic decision-making."

The cables also showed how bureaucratic, national and economic power often all converged in the Kremlin, and how the state's suitors grasped that access often equaled results.

The summary of a meeting between an Italian and American diplomats in Moscow documented the Italian diplomat's exasperation with Mr. Putin and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, who had gained Russia's ear.

The diplomat said that the pair enjoyed such a close relationship that they shared a "direct line," and that the Italian Foreign Ministry and Embassy "only learn of conversations" between the premiers "after the fact, and with little detail or background."

The diplomat then "explained that while the close relationship is not ideal from the bureaucracy's perspective and more detrimental than beneficial, it can be useful at times.

"He cited," the cable added, "the case of the sale to Gazprom by Italian energy giant ENI of its 20 percent share in Gazprom's oil subsidiary Gazpromneft. He said Gazprom had insisted on paying far below the market price, but that it ultimately paid the market price after Berlusconi weighed in with Putin."

Other cables described how Western businesses sometimes managed to pursue their interests by personally engaging senior Russian officials, including President Medvedev, rather than getting lost in bureaucratic channels.

The experience in late 2009 of the Intel Corporation, which hoped to import 1,000 encrypted computers for its Russia offices, offered insights into the benefits of courting the top.

"Several high-level Intel officers, including CEO Craig Barrett, and other officials, such as American Chamber of Commerce President Andrew Somers, highlighted to the GOR interlocutors, including President Medvedev, the role Intel plays in employing over 1,000 Russian engineers," a cable said.

"This high-level lobbying secured Intel a meeting with key FSB officials to explain its needs," it continued. "Intel was able to demonstrate the reasonableness of its request and, as a result, by-passed the current extensive licensing requirement."

Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman, said that the meetings were not about one shipment of computers; they created an expedited process for importing such equipment, not only for Intel but for their customers and distributors. "We didn't get this as a one-time thing," he said.

The cables further revealed how the nexus of business and state interests among Russia's ruling elite had fueled suspicions in Washington that Mr. Putin, in spite of his vigorous denials, had quietly amassed a personal fortune.

A confidential cable pointedly mentioned the Swiss oil-trading company Gunvor, as being "of particular note."

The company, the cable said, is "rumored to be one of Putin's sources of undisclosed wealth" and is owned by Gennadi N. Timchenko, who is "rumored to be a former K.G.B. colleague of Putin's." One estimate said the company might control half of Russian oil exports, potentially bringing its owners billions of dollars in profit.

Gunvor's profits were especially high, the cable claimed, because in one of the few deals in which details were known, a source said that the firm included a surcharge of $1 per barrel of oil. More competitive traders, the source said, might mark up a barrel by only a nickel.

The cables provide no evidence to support the allegations about Gunvor and Mr. Luzhkov, the former Moscow mayor; neither has been charged with any crimes.

Patience Unrewarded

If two words were to summarize the secret American assessment of its relations with the Kremlin, it would be these: suspicion and frustration.

A cornerstone of Washington's approach to the relationship has been patience. Privately, American diplomats have described the hope that by moderating public criticism of Russia and encouraging market principles, Russia's government and important companies might with time evolve.

The cables underscore how frustrating the patience has been.

A summary in November 2009 of the security dialogue between the United States and Russia coolly stated that in spite of warm words between Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Obama and the establishment of a new military-to-military working group, there remained "challenges in effecting real, substantive and ongoing" dialogue.

The Defense Ministry, the cable said "has not changed its modus operandi for information exchange nor routine dialoguing since the end of the Cold War."

Russian attendees at meetings, the cable said, "are closely monitored by their Military Intelligence (GRU) handlers," and are reluctant "to engage in any dialogues outside of tightly controlled statements recited from prepared texts."

When diplomats did meet Russian officials who chose to be candid, the message they heard was sometimes blunt.

In June 2009 a delegation of Washington analysts who were accompanied by diplomats met with Aleksandr Y. Skobeltsyn of Russia's Department for Military-Technical Cooperation to discuss American concerns about sales of anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles.

The latter are a special worry in the West, where security officials fear terrorists could fire them at passenger jets.

Mr. Skobeltsyn said that Russia "shared U.S. concerns about re-transfer vulnerabilities, noting that Latin America and Middle East were especially sensitive areas."

"But, he argued, if Russia did not provide these weapons to certain countries, then 'someone else' would."

Outright distrustful relations between the Kremlin and the Soviet Union's former vassals were also evident in the records. At an appearance in Washington in 2009, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski of Poland said that American forces would be welcome in Poland "to protect against Russian aggression."

The comment, unwelcomed by Russia and the United States alike, ignited a minor flare-up. In a cable after Mr. Sikorski's appearance, the American Embassy said that Poland had established a Bureau of European Security, which "Polish diplomats jokingly refer to as the 'Office of Threats from the East.' "

The back-channel quip eventually provided insight into the diplomatic climate in Moscow. A Polish official, formerly posted to Moscow, noted that Russia's Foreign Ministry "threw this moniker back at him during a meeting."

He told his American colleagues that the "only way" that Russia's Foreign Ministry could have known of the nickname "was to have been listening in on his phone conversations with Warsaw" - a clear suggestion that his office in Russia had been bugged.

DMZ, NJ

Excellent overview of corruption in the USA. Now, how does corruption work in Russia?
lomtevas. New York, N.Y.December 1st
No one asked me my opinion of Putin and Medvedev's government. I believe the U.S. is way off the mark in describing Russia and its leaders.

comraderoger, Moscow

From the article:

"In Russia, the separation between the most important businesses and government officials runs from blurry to nonexistent. The cables rendered darkly how Russian companies - often relying on what one cable called "secretive deals involving intermediary companies with unknown owners and beneficiaries" - conducted their affairs."

Can the same not be said about the US government and companies such as Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater [Xe] and so on? All those no bid contracts, the billions of dollars that disappeared, the blatant corruption in the entire process.

And with the recent election, the first after the Citizen's United decision, the US government has only become even more beholden to its corporate benefactors.

FredJ, KNY
6:48 pm"The United States harbors a low view of the Russian leaders and little hope that Russia will become more democratic or reliable."

As a citizen of the United States, I have grown to harbor that same low view of my own country.

harry, michigan
nd how is this any different then america;venezula;china or any other country. Instead of suitcases of cash american political figures get their money via contributions or donations. Can you name any country where there is no corruption? Why do we feel that nautural resources need to be controlled by a few and not that particular countries natural asset to be shared by their entire citizenry, because human beings are vile and greedy. I guess if you keep your greed within some defined limits you can call yourself a democracy, but hey we can't even do that much.
Jason Atchley, Austin, TXDecember 1st
6:49 pmIt is very interesting to see the inner workings of diplomacy and how it "really" works. I understand it might not be the best situation for our Nation but it is compelling reading nonetheless.

Jason Atchley

Haitch76, NYC
Give up on this democracy business, for God's sake. Everyone preaches democracy but no one practices it. It's like the "free market"--never free, always controlled. Way back when, Madison thought that having one representative for 30,000 people was a sure sigh that the majority would never rule. Now we have 500,000 plus. Here in the good ole USA, we have oligarchy, ditto for Russia.
Tobias Weisserth, Hamburg, Germany
The weird thing is that the Russian authorities are actually acting outraged about the cables' contents. The information about Russia in the cables is already common knowledge among the general public in Europe for a long time. Everybody KNOWS Russia is a corrupt non-ethical state that is dominated by gangsters and doesn't have a functioning legal system. All you had to do to come to that conclusion a long time ago was to follow the regular news.

Isn't it funny how those leaked cables manage to embarrass both the US and Russia at the same time?

I hope state leaders keep their calm now.

LynneBoston, MA
This is so counter productive. I cannot believe there are any of us who do not speak about other expecting some sort of confidentiality. Childishness to assume otherwise. Destructive to believe you are a hero for exposing private conversations that absolutely hurt our standing in the world. I guess this administration will leave the US in worse standing than the last.
Cathy Kayser, San Jose, Costa Rica
Given the fact that Russia has been less than competely helpful in dealing with Iran, is it any wonder that US diplomatic officials consider their motives suspect?
Sebastien, P.Rocky Point, NY

Why can't Putin and Medvedev and the politician in Russia be simply bribed right in the open, like American Congress? Russian mafia would be called "lobbyists" instead and everything would be fine.

David, Sao Paulo
All very interesting. No doubt, Russia is corrupt. The US is also corrupt, in many of the same ways. Are sweetheart deals that shovelled billions into Halliburton and Blackwater any different than Russian corruption? Putin might well be disengaged. Bush was incredibly disengaged and frequently working from home in Crawford. Sharing the spoils of corruption is a challenge for the Russians, just as it is for the Americans. AIG, Goldman and other elite vampire squid have been inhaling all that is not nailed down as aggressively as Russian businesses attack their own treasury. The common man's only real recourse is to invest in those companies who seem most likely to benefit from the cronyistic farce we pretend is market capitalism.
AmatureHistorian, NYC
So what? At least things gets done over there if you have the connection or money. Russian has been complaining for years that agreement reached with American official/envoy is useless because the president/congress often decides to tag on their pork. There is even an instance where the official pretends to speak for Bush Sr. when he is in fact speaking for himself. Moscow follow through with the agreement and ended up protesting to Washington about breach of understanding.
Nightwood, MI
Please oh please, tell me something new. Maybe our super intellectual or mystic George Bush could look into Putin's eyes and see an upright, decent person ready to work for the common good. Nobody, nobody that i know has ever completely trusted Russia. There have been times when we have been hopeful, but it has always been a wary sort of hopeful, never firmly grounded in reality.
Ron Bannon, Newark, NJ
Good! Our government has consistently pried into our private/secret lives, and it's about time that we the people pried into theirs.
Frunobulax, Chicago
The rackets that run the US write checks to politicians and lobbyists. I'd take the Russian rackets any day: at least there's no pretence that they're criminals.
lisztian, San Diego, CA
So many of the contents of the cables are so easily available from public sources that it's hard to see why many of them were made restricted-access. The only surprise would have been if our diplomats had ever shared--or never lost--Bush's rosy-eyed initial perception of Putin's soul.

I'm also sure that every country's embassy in DC sends similarly jaundiced reports home about politics and personalities here. Ally or adversary, you need to know the weaknesses of your counterparts. Now, when will Wikileaks unveil a trove of Russian, Chinese or British diplomatic correspondence?

Casual Observer, Los Angelest
Putin is what he is and anyone who does not imagine that he knows what everyone else thinks of him underestimates the kind of person needed to survive in post-U.S.S.R. Russia.

Russia is the victim of centuries of autocracy or anarchy and so has never been able to enjoy the benefits available to stable and egalitarian societies. If that was not bad enough, Russia proved that Marx was a great writer but a poor designer of social systems in just seventy years, leaving it with a strangely incompetent assembly of dysfunctional subsystems that completely controlled the entire society. There was no state that could be reoriented to a more legalistic and democratic form of government. On top of that most all of the participants in the ruling class were highly intelligent and realized that they had a very screwed up country.

Enter the helpful products of Professor Friedman's Chicago Day Glo Mysterious Free Market Players ensemble to encourage the most screwed up redistribution of wealth and enterprise in human history, creating nothing so remarkable as oligarchial control of the Russian economy.

Only a former top officer of the KGB could ever figure out what is going on in Russia, so Putin or somebody like him was destined to replace first more democratically inclined leaders following Gorbachev.

Dick Bloom, West Chester, PA
We had our chance under Boris Yeltsin and blew it. We helped overthrow the old regime and then stood and watched while the Russian economy self-destructed. Putin knows what the US appears unable to fathom: that his semi-planned economy is a temporary expedient until the country fully embraces the free market system, just as he is. The taste for free enterprise isn't necessarily inherited, you know, even though you feel it is. For millennia now, Russians, according to scholar Richard Pipes, have inherited just the opposite--the desire to be told what to do. But that Putin's Russia doesn't meet our high standards of freedom is our own damned fault: had we handled the 1990s differently, we'd not only have a true friend in the Kremlin but an equal and opposite trading partner, with markets so unimaginably vast they'd keep the rest of the world busy until Putin was no longer needed. But we blew it.
Jeff, L.A.
A serious student of American history and the Cold War will understand that although the U.S. was victorious in terms of surviving the Cold War it broke our political system resulting in a right wing coup against President Kennedy. The coup leaders considered Kennedy a traitor, because he sought to lessen tensions with the Soviet Union, deescalate Vietnam and no doubt because he supported civil rights legislation and regulation of business at home. The template for the coup involved allowing all aspects of American society to continue to function as before, including the press, with the hidden hand of the security apparatus influencing opinion and guiding policy while rewarding those institutions directly related to the coup such as the CIA, FBI, military industrial complex, and right wing fascist billionaires.

Putin, when faced with the civil and economic anarchy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and being a long term KGB agent was fully aware of the American coup, and used it as a rough template to order Russian society, meaning the security service would be the power behind the throne, and the media would self censor etc.

Since Russia has no tradition of democracy the template eroded over time into a kleptocracy that attempts to appear benign and meet the basic needs of the Russian consumer as does the United States. The key difference is the disproportionate power corporations have in the United States.

George Xanich, Bethel, Maine
Russia's, then the Soviet Union, past is based on paranoia of the West, as history has shown Russia victimize by foreign invaders. From the Muscovite empire to Napoleon onto WWII, Russia has always made self sacrifices to preserve its autonomy. These leaks show Russia and its leaders in less than a stellar view. Because of Russia's xenophobia the leaks only adds to their paranoia of the west!

thomas, nyc

the frog is calling the lizard ugly......we have the highest percentage of incarcerations to population on the planet....including Russia & China....democracy indeed!

marcchi, IL

The really important news in the current wikileaks release is that gates, clinton, and possibly obama --if he did micromanage the honduras coup and its aftershocks-- committed a felony by conspiring to undermine the enforcement of an american law and by suppressing a well-argued and documented denunciation by a usa government official, in the honduras embassy of the usa, that a fact punished by american law, a coup d'etat against a democracy, had taken place.

because of their behavior after the honduras coup, gates, clinton, and possibly obama have made themselves *impeachable* for violating their oath to defend the american constitution and make any possible effort to respect and enforce the laws of the usa. [and congrats to lanny davis!]

karlmarx, Boston MA
The whole Wikileaks episode is real interesting, this has happened a number of times before. How come there are no French, German, or as Friedman was want to say Chinese Wikileaks? How come we don't post secret communiques of Al Quaeda. The evidence like that of 9/11 suggests widespread incompetence. Rather than worry about the content of these leaks a more productive idea is to understand the totally lax security that brought us 9/11 and now this. Can't the U.S. government keep anything secret.

RefugeeUS

Clearly, the pot (US gov) is calling the kettle (Russian Gov) BLACK (corrupt oligarchy).

With a little editing of the article, our current state of affairs does not look much better than our "frieds" (frenemy?) across the Bering Strait:

"In [the US], the separation between the most important [corporations] and government officials runs from blurry to nonexistent. [Wars, bailouts, elections, and high court decisions] rendered darkly how [US] companies - often relying ... "secretive deals involving [lobbyists] with []known [clients] and beneficiaries" - conducted their affairs."

John Aronson, Hampshire County, MA
We here in the US should find it disturbing that our State Department appears to believe there are only two kinds of people in the world; contemptible fools and contemptible toadies.
awhitdsan francisco
So the Embassy staff is contained. How many of them speak fluent Russian? How many have social relations with ordinary Russians?
Scottsdale Jack, Scottsdale, AZ
7:44 pmOh, the Russians aren't "reliable"? What does that mean? They don't automatically support every crusade the US elite decides to engage in (attack on Iraq, pressure on Iran, mindless support for Israel, etc.?).

News flash: lots of us peons here in the US don't support these things either.

Mr. Spock, NYC
i've read all the comments and i find the knee-jerk cynicism equating the US corruption to Russian corruption interesting. Americans don't travel enough. I've spent extensive time in Eastern Europe and Russia, the differences between corruption there and here is not just in magnitude but in kind. No comparison. Every level of govt. is corrupt. Most frighteningly, the police. Profoundly corrupt.

These comments that want to equate the problems in the US with those in Russia simply can't fathom what it is like over there. The US has its problems, especially in the systemic corruption of congress and the fund raising of elected officials, but it isn't close to Russia.

Refugee, US
@30 (anonymous from WA). While your love of your new country is commendable, your anger towards those who critique the US govt/system by comparing it to the Russian govt/system appears misplaced. There is nothing ignorant nor ungrateful in criticizing the US system, especially when it strays far from ideals such as fairness, honesty, dignity, etc. In fact, each American is granted the right to do so by the First Amendment of the United States constitution and should exercise such right freely.

There is a difference between the American ideals (such as freedom, democracy, balance of powers, a middle class) and reality. I grew up in a very corrupt system (the Philippines) and have traveled many times to Russia, so I understand what living in a corrupt system looks like. One gets a little concerned when actions, procedures, roadblocks, etc of American agencies and large corporations are becoming as absurd, irrational, pointless, and self-interested as those in the Filipino and Russian systems.

momma methane, luzerne
Putin's swiss oil interests don't sound too much different than Corbett's ties to Dutch Shell vis a vis the sale of Marcellus Shale access by East Resources in here in PA. Penn's woods aren't so sylvan, and Harrisburg ain't that much different from Moscow....
satyasampurnaKota
Going by the track record, the corruption at high level exist even in American government. The findings of prefrential allotment of business to certain influential politician companies post Iraq war is the best example.
Paul I. Adujie, New York, United States
The Pentagon Papers are the precursors or progenitors of WikiLeaks and Mr. Julien Assange ... I do fervently and passionately believe that Mr. Assange and his coterie of associates and facilitators stand for truth and honesty in public discourse.

Conspiracies, falsehoods and deceits, are the stock of diplomats, politicians and government officials... it seems... from these revelations by WikiLeaks ... conspiracies, falsehoods and deceits are the tools of injustices worldwide... and this is what WikiLeaks have exposed again and again...

The world should starve politicians, diplomats and other charlatans of secrecy which enable them to engage in shenanigans!

WikiLeaks and The New York Times stand for public good, our common good.

Andre Shoumatoff, Park City, Utah
Very insightful article detailing the depth of corruption in Russia. This means that WikiLeaks may have actually caused some benefit as it may perhaps serve as a wake-up call to some officials in Russia. It is sad to see this country having gone this direction when it so-recently had so much potential.

[Nov 28, 2010] Tax Hikes, Status Competitiveness, and Social Stratification

naked capitalism

Hugh

I think there is this whole mythology about money, that it was one of the primordial constituents of the universe, that if the rich get their hands on it, it is rightfully theirs, but if any of the rest of us do, our ownership of it is highly conditional and negotiable.

Money is nothing more than tokens that give access to resources. Most of us would have no problem with the idea that a society should be able to distribute its resources in a fair and equitable manner. But substitute the word "money" into the above phrase, and you will elicit every hackneyed argument we have all heard a million times about how money is some indissolvable part of our being and that the loss of a limb or possibly two would be preferable to any reduction in wealth, even if with such a reduction, you still would be able to live comfortably.

This mythology of money is all political, class oriented, and class generated propaganda. You can quibble about the exact figures but roughly speaking the top 1% own 1/3 of the country and the top 10% own 2/3 of it. A democratic society and this degree of wealth inequality are antithetical to each other. The wealthy tell us that any mitigation of this inequality will be tantamount to theft and will ruin the country.

If we turn back to the resource perspective though, we see the opposite is true. What is ruining the country is the out of whack distribution of resources, and no group in a society should be able to hoard society's resources at the expense of society as a whole. That is what we are really talking about here.

Now I am sure some (the corporatists, plutocrats, kleptocrats, however you wish to call them) will say that if we support a redistribution of the nation's resources, the government is likely to take them and misspend them. Well, yes. But why is this so? It's so because our government is bought by the those very same corporatists, plutocrats, and kleptocrats. It is like they have a sockpuppet on each hand, and the sockpuppet on the left hand is warning us that the sockpuppet on the right hand can't be trusted.

And that's what this comes down to. We need both economic and political solutions that will restore the use of society's resources to society and remove the corporatist/kleptocratic stranglehold on our political process. This is not an either/or. It is a sine qua non.

kievite

Hugh,

I think you are missing one important dimension: the ability to use those allocated tokens for resources. That make your point of view way too simplistic and historically belonging to pre-Marx thinking about the problem. Ability to use capital productively is a skill that is unequally distributed.

There is a huge difference between spending those tokens on girls and drinks and building a company that produces a new, useful product. So the society as a whole is interested in allocation of those tokens to "right people".

After all this unequal allocation has a natural limit of approximately 80 years. That's why I think the inheritance tax is so important, but unequal distribution of "tokens" can be tolerated in democratic societies.

Allen C:

Ultimately, a society is worse off when many folks collect handsome incomes compared to their relative contribution. The declining numbers of truly productive are unwilling and/or unable to run for public office. Societal decay is a multi-generational phenomenon requiring both recognition and process in order to prevent its otherwise certain outcome.

Unfortunately, we are unable to bring back our Founding Fathers for a revision. It may be impossible to craft a societal governance model that inherently prevents decay.

[Nov 28, 2010] "FDR, Reagan, and Obama"

Obama is essentially a center-right President.
Obama is a "captive of right-wing mythology":

FDR, Reagan, and Obama, by Paul Krugman: Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." I was among those who found this deeply troubling - because the idea that Reagan brought a transformation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation - but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).

All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.

But are you so sure about that now?

And here's this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying

We didn't actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear. What actually happened was that during the interregnum between the 1932 election and the1933 inauguration - which was much longer then, because the inauguration didn't take place until March - Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this.

But Obama buys the right-wing smear.

More and more, it's becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts.

And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth.

sam

I repeat myself yet again on this blog, but if you actually examine what Obama has done and wants to do he is essentially a center-right President. For example, if you read in to the recently passed Health Care legislation it's almost identical to what McCain and Orin Hatch proposed in the nineties.

It seems the Democratic Party believes without having sufficient evidence that the country, in general, has shifted right when in fact most polls show that most Americans, while claiming to be Republican or conservative, hold beliefs similar to the views of Democrats who believe that the government has an important role to play in society besides transferring income from the very bottom to the highest top.

[Nov 28, 2010] Tax Hikes, Status Competitiveness, and Social Stratification

naked capitalism

Hugh

I think there is this whole mythology about money, that it was one of the primordial constituents of the universe, that if the rich get their hands on it, it is rightfully theirs, but if any of the rest of us do, our ownership of it is highly conditional and negotiable.

Money is nothing more than tokens that give access to resources. Most of us would have no problem with the idea that a society should be able to distribute its resources in a fair and equitable manner. But substitute the word "money" into the above phrase, and you will elicit every hackneyed argument we have all heard a million times about how money is some indissolvable part of our being and that the loss of a limb or possibly two would be preferable to any reduction in wealth, even if with such a reduction, you still would be able to live comfortably.

This mythology of money is all political, class oriented, and class generated propaganda. You can quibble about the exact figures but roughly speaking the top 1% own 1/3 of the country and the top 10% own 2/3 of it. A democratic society and this degree of wealth inequality are antithetical to each other. The wealthy tell us that any mitigation of this inequality will be tantamount to theft and will ruin the country.

If we turn back to the resource perspective though, we see the opposite is true. What is ruining the country is the out of whack distribution of resources, and no group in a society should be able to hoard society's resources at the expense of society as a whole. That is what we are really talking about here.

Now I am sure some (the corporatists, plutocrats, kleptocrats, however you wish to call them) will say that if we support a redistribution of the nation's resources, the government is likely to take them and misspend them. Well, yes. But why is this so? It's so because our government is bought by the those very same corporatists, plutocrats, and kleptocrats. It is like they have a sockpuppet on each hand, and the sockpuppet on the left hand is warning us that the sockpuppet on the right hand can't be trusted.

And that's what this comes down to. We need both economic and political solutions that will restore the use of society's resources to society and remove the corporatist/kleptocratic stranglehold on our political process. This is not an either/or. It is a sine qua non.

kievite

Hugh,

I think you are missing one important dimension: the ability to use those allocated tokens for resources. That make your point of view way too simplistic and historically belonging to pre-Marx thinking about the problem. Ability to use capital productively is a skill that is unequally distributed.

There is a huge difference between spending those tokens on girls and drinks and building a company that produces a new, useful product. So the society as a whole is interested in allocation of those tokens to "right people".

After all this unequal allocation has a natural limit of approximately 80 years. That's why I think the inheritance tax is so important, but unequal distribution of "tokens" can be tolerated in democratic societies.

Allen C:

Ultimately, a society is worse off when many folks collect handsome incomes compared to their relative contribution. The declining numbers of truly productive are unwilling and/or unable to run for public office. Societal decay is a multi-generational phenomenon requiring both recognition and process in order to prevent its otherwise certain outcome.

Unfortunately, we are unable to bring back our Founding Fathers for a revision. It may be impossible to craft a societal governance model that inherently prevents decay.

[Nov 28, 2010] "FDR, Reagan, and Obama"

Obama is essentially a center-right President.
Obama is a "captive of right-wing mythology":

FDR, Reagan, and Obama, by Paul Krugman: Some readers may recall that back during the Democratic primary Barack Obama shocked many progressives by praising Ronald Reagan as someone who brought America a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." I was among those who found this deeply troubling - because the idea that Reagan brought a transformation in American dynamism is a right-wing myth, not borne out by the facts. (There was a surge in productivity and innovation - but it happened in the 90s, under Clinton, not under Reagan).

All the usual suspects pooh-poohed these concerns; it was ridiculous, they said, to think of Obama as a captive of right-wing mythology.

But are you so sure about that now?

And here's this, from Thomas Ferguson: Obama saying

We didn't actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

As Ferguson explains, this is a right-wing smear. What actually happened was that during the interregnum between the 1932 election and the1933 inauguration - which was much longer then, because the inauguration didn't take place until March - Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this.

But Obama buys the right-wing smear.

More and more, it's becoming clear that progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion. Once you got past the soaring rhetoric you noticed, if you actually paid attention to what he said, that he largely accepted the conservative storyline, a view of the world, including a mythological history, that bears little resemblance to the facts.

And confronted with a situation utterly at odds with that storyline … he stayed with the myth.

sam

I repeat myself yet again on this blog, but if you actually examine what Obama has done and wants to do he is essentially a center-right President. For example, if you read in to the recently passed Health Care legislation it's almost identical to what McCain and Orin Hatch proposed in the nineties.

It seems the Democratic Party believes without having sufficient evidence that the country, in general, has shifted right when in fact most polls show that most Americans, while claiming to be Republican or conservative, hold beliefs similar to the views of Democrats who believe that the government has an important role to play in society besides transferring income from the very bottom to the highest top.

[Nov 16, 2010] Chris Hedges Death of the Liberal Class

See also American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America The deeply un-Christian ideology of the Christian "dominionists" (about 7% of Christians) with the behavior and belief systems that were part and parcel of fascism. . The author tries to answer the questions: How is it that well intentioned churches and their members have come to believe that homosexuality is THE problem facing the U.S. today? How can self-professed Christians become unabased cheerleaders for war? How do Christians get so caught up in television personality cults masquerading as Christian ministries? Seel also the_best_and_the_brightest_have_led_america_off_a_cliff
November 16, 2010 | naked capitalism
Don't expect the so-called experts to fix it either. They can't. They are loyal to the decaying political and financial systems that empowered them.

Kevin de Bruxelles:

In most countries, the "liberal class" is to the right of center. In these countries the working classes would never be foolish enough to put their faith in a liberal class. Instead they built up workingmen's social democratic and labour parties to represent their interests. In America a relatively high standard of living (compared to the rest of the world) was achieved and the sacrifices required to have a socialist party (higher taxes for example) were rejected by the American working classes and they are now reaping the results.

The liberal class does do a good job in looking after their own narrow class interests. They dominate higher education; move effortlessly within the corporate elites; are able to protect many of their identity politics clients, all while sneering down on the unwashed mass of working class peasants. They are able to avoid the fallout of their failed policies by living in wealthy enclaves and sending their children to private schools. Since looking out for the working classes would in fact hit at some of their privileges and/or mean curbing some of the more outrageous demands of their identity clients, there is not one reason liberals should change what they are doing.

What does need to change is working class people thinking the liberals (or conservatives for that matter) are going to look after working class interests. Of course limited between a choice of the disdain of the liberal class versus the crass emotional appeals of conservatives, the working classes all too often fall for the latter.

Hedges is able to occupy the high moral ground of a social critic only at the price of rejecting power. While that is fine for him – and social critics are certainly valuable – it is a bit like a priest rejecting the sinful world of reality and retreating to a monastery from where he can issue morally indisputable proclamations. The working classes need to develop a political identity that is hungry for power and everything that goes along with it.

The problem is that there is a deep hatred of the working classes within liberal circles. Who can deny that one of the strongest forces working against civil rights were the white working classes? The same thing goes for many of the identity clients so beloved by Liberals. Gays, feminism, illegal immigration, diversity in general, etc are all things looked at with suspicion at best within the working classes.

But the working classes are now so overwhelmed by non-stop entertainment, especially sports, that they have little to no time for any sort of political thinking outside of emotional reactions to the latest race-based topic. But it is only they who can advance their class interests. Only when they put down the remote control and start organizing themselves the way their European cousins did a century ago will American working classes start to reverse their steady 40 years of decline. Waiting for some sort of reformed Liberal class to do it for them will just lead to even more decades of despair.

Death of the Liberal Class

October 21, 2010

Thomas King:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling analysis of the threat to democracy in America

In THE DEATH OF THE LIBERAL CLASS, Chris Hedges makes the case that the liberal class -- which historically has spoken for the interests of the poor and middle classes -- has largely been devastated, or at least co-opted, by a corporate elite that is relentlessly driving the country toward oligarchy. The liberal class has abandoned its traditional role in democracy and has instead endorsed unfettered capitalism and globalization as well as profit driven wars, and as a result, any realistic check on the power of corporate interests has been obliterated. Hedges effectively uses his own experiences, and those of others, to show how journalism -- even at elite "liberal" publications like the New York Times -- is being increasingly distorted and controlled by those with money and power.

As Hedges points out, the real division in America today is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between average citizens and the corporate and financial elite. Addressing -- or even discussing -- the problem is nearly impossible because doing so involves transgressing the taboo of class warfare and invoking the "vocabulary of Marx." Without a robust liberal voice to engage in this debate, there is a very real danger that things will degrade into violence as the middle and working classes become increasingly disenfranchised, angry and confused.

The final chapter of the book talks about the impact of the Internet and how, rather than being a medium for broad-based, enlightened discourse, if often results in increased "balkanization" and hardening of views. The Internet is also destroying the livelihood of much of the creative class that has traditionally been one of the pillars of liberalism.

Hedges is correct to recognize the role that technology is playing -- but the future impact is likely to be far greater than most people imagine. It is not just about the Internet. All forms of information technology are accelerating, and the next decade is likely to see unprecedented advances in areas like job automation as well as in technologies that further enable the offshoring of work. The result will be even more dramatic inequality of both income and power as wages are further depressed and unemployment rises. For an overview of how technology is likely to impact the future economic and social landscape, I would strongly recommend this book:

The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future

As Hedges points out, the liberal class has been swept aside and the social safety nets for the middle and working classes are being relentlessly destroyed -- and it is happening just as we will have the most need for those safety nets. To understand the full extent of the danger we will soon face, read both "The Death of the Liberal Class" (for political perspective) and "The Lights in the Tunnel" (to understand the coming impact of technology).

[Nov 16, 2010] Chris Hedges Death of the Liberal Class

See also American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America The deeply un-Christian ideology of the Christian "dominionists" (about 7% of Christians) with the behavior and belief systems that were part and parcel of fascism. . The author tries to answer the questions: How is it that well intentioned churches and their members have come to believe that homosexuality is THE problem facing the U.S. today? How can self-professed Christians become unabased cheerleaders for war? How do Christians get so caught up in television personality cults masquerading as Christian ministries? Seel also the_best_and_the_brightest_have_led_america_off_a_cliff
November 16, 2010 | naked capitalism
Don't expect the so-called experts to fix it either. They can't. They are loyal to the decaying political and financial systems that empowered them.

Kevin de Bruxelles:

In most countries, the "liberal class" is to the right of center. In these countries the working classes would never be foolish enough to put their faith in a liberal class. Instead they built up workingmen's social democratic and labour parties to represent their interests. In America a relatively high standard of living (compared to the rest of the world) was achieved and the sacrifices required to have a socialist party (higher taxes for example) were rejected by the American working classes and they are now reaping the results.

The liberal class does do a good job in looking after their own narrow class interests. They dominate higher education; move effortlessly within the corporate elites; are able to protect many of their identity politics clients, all while sneering down on the unwashed mass of working class peasants. They are able to avoid the fallout of their failed policies by living in wealthy enclaves and sending their children to private schools. Since looking out for the working classes would in fact hit at some of their privileges and/or mean curbing some of the more outrageous demands of their identity clients, there is not one reason liberals should change what they are doing.

What does need to change is working class people thinking the liberals (or conservatives for that matter) are going to look after working class interests. Of course limited between a choice of the disdain of the liberal class versus the crass emotional appeals of conservatives, the working classes all too often fall for the latter.

Hedges is able to occupy the high moral ground of a social critic only at the price of rejecting power. While that is fine for him – and social critics are certainly valuable – it is a bit like a priest rejecting the sinful world of reality and retreating to a monastery from where he can issue morally indisputable proclamations. The working classes need to develop a political identity that is hungry for power and everything that goes along with it.

The problem is that there is a deep hatred of the working classes within liberal circles. Who can deny that one of the strongest forces working against civil rights were the white working classes? The same thing goes for many of the identity clients so beloved by Liberals. Gays, feminism, illegal immigration, diversity in general, etc are all things looked at with suspicion at best within the working classes.

But the working classes are now so overwhelmed by non-stop entertainment, especially sports, that they have little to no time for any sort of political thinking outside of emotional reactions to the latest race-based topic. But it is only they who can advance their class interests. Only when they put down the remote control and start organizing themselves the way their European cousins did a century ago will American working classes start to reverse their steady 40 years of decline. Waiting for some sort of reformed Liberal class to do it for them will just lead to even more decades of despair.

Death of the Liberal Class

October 21, 2010

Thomas King:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling analysis of the threat to democracy in America

In THE DEATH OF THE LIBERAL CLASS, Chris Hedges makes the case that the liberal class -- which historically has spoken for the interests of the poor and middle classes -- has largely been devastated, or at least co-opted, by a corporate elite that is relentlessly driving the country toward oligarchy. The liberal class has abandoned its traditional role in democracy and has instead endorsed unfettered capitalism and globalization as well as profit driven wars, and as a result, any realistic check on the power of corporate interests has been obliterated. Hedges effectively uses his own experiences, and those of others, to show how journalism -- even at elite "liberal" publications like the New York Times -- is being increasingly distorted and controlled by those with money and power.

As Hedges points out, the real division in America today is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between average citizens and the corporate and financial elite. Addressing -- or even discussing -- the problem is nearly impossible because doing so involves transgressing the taboo of class warfare and invoking the "vocabulary of Marx." Without a robust liberal voice to engage in this debate, there is a very real danger that things will degrade into violence as the middle and working classes become increasingly disenfranchised, angry and confused.

The final chapter of the book talks about the impact of the Internet and how, rather than being a medium for broad-based, enlightened discourse, if often results in increased "balkanization" and hardening of views. The Internet is also destroying the livelihood of much of the creative class that has traditionally been one of the pillars of liberalism.

Hedges is correct to recognize the role that technology is playing -- but the future impact is likely to be far greater than most people imagine. It is not just about the Internet. All forms of information technology are accelerating, and the next decade is likely to see unprecedented advances in areas like job automation as well as in technologies that further enable the offshoring of work. The result will be even more dramatic inequality of both income and power as wages are further depressed and unemployment rises. For an overview of how technology is likely to impact the future economic and social landscape, I would strongly recommend this book:

The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future

As Hedges points out, the liberal class has been swept aside and the social safety nets for the middle and working classes are being relentlessly destroyed -- and it is happening just as we will have the most need for those safety nets. To understand the full extent of the danger we will soon face, read both "The Death of the Liberal Class" (for political perspective) and "The Lights in the Tunnel" (to understand the coming impact of technology).

[Nov 13, 2010] "Money and the Midterms- Are the Parties Over- Interview with Thomas Ferguson"

But in fact, American political parties are mostly bank accounts. What you are told is the voice of the people is usually the sound of money talking.

First posted at New Deal 2.0

Lynn Parramore: What do you make of the 2010 Election?

Thomas Ferguson: The 2010 election was not like others. It was certainly not simply 2006 in reverse, this time with the Republicans winning by a landslide. There is an obvious cumulative process at work here, with first one party and then the other receiving lopsided votes of no confidence from voters. The U.S. economy is barely moving; millions of Americans are looking for work and struggling to find ways to salvage their life savings and pensions; the international position of the U.S. is sliding; and the government is largely paralyzed on issues that voters care about most. We have clearly been in a political crisis for some years; the meaning of the 2010 election is that this crisis is becoming much deeper, moving into an entirely different stage. The parallels to the Great Depression are eerie: At that time, in many countries, voters seem to have followed an "in-out," "out-in" rule. But that process does not go on forever. As the Depression deepened with no solutions, all kinds of strange creatures started creeping out of the shadows. The U.S. seems to be entering that stage.

Lynn Parramore: You're implying the political system failed in some serious way. How so?

Thomas Ferguson: 2008 had all the earmarks of a classic realigning election, as my old colleague Walter Dean Burnham describes them. In the wake of the financial collapse, it looked for all the world like voters were ready for, even demanding, major reforms. They had elected a Democratic President on a promise of "Change," with both houses of Congress solidly Democratic. That's why many people were thinking that Obama was going give us a modern New Deal. They really believed him when he promised change. Instead, Obama's failure on the economy has discredited the whole idea of the activist state. The dimensions of this failure were spectacular: he didn't move aggressively to combat unemployment, the economic stimulus was half as large as it needed to be, and he didn't deal with the mortgage crisis. So unemployment stayed way up, and many people remain in danger of losing their homes or are underwater on their mortgages, with the whole housing sector stalling out. To make matters worse, the administration lavished aid on the financial sector. The spectacle of the government aiding bankers, who turned around and paid themselves record bonuses, has just been unbearable for millions of people.

What the election really shows is not that the parties can't agree - Democrats and most of the GOP leadership finally agreed on the bank bailouts, for example - but that the American people will not accept the policies that leaders in both parties prefer. In 2006 and 2008, the population voted no-confidence in the Republicans on the war and the economy. They have just now presented the Democrats with another resounding a no-confidence vote. What makes the current situation intractable is the fundamental reason for these serial failures. It's obvious: big money dominates both major parties. The Obama campaign's dependence on money and personnel from the financial sector was clear to anyone who looked, even before he won the nomination, promoted Geithner, brought Summers back, and reappointed Bernanke. For years I've promised people that I'll tell you who bought your candidate before you vote for him or her, by simply applying my "investment theory of political parties." When I analyzed the early money in Obama's campaign in March, 2008, it was impossible not to see that many of the people responsible for the financial crisis were major Obama supporters. As I wrote for TPM, serious financial reform would not be on President Obama's agenda.

Lynn Parramore: Lots of people point out that the banks have paid back the bailout funds and that the government actually made money on the deal. Can Obama at least claim that this policy was good for the American people?

Thomas Ferguson: The bailout was originally not Obama's but George Bush's, though Obama supported it during the campaign. The "banks-paid-us-back" story is mostly Treasury propaganda. The claim is really based on a narrow accounting of TARP funds. In fact, a lot of that aid has not been paid back. AIG, for example, is still heavily owned by the government. Secondly, the aid was way, way underpriced - meaning that the federal government got very little for its money. If you want to see what market-driven terms you could get for aiding banks at the height of the crisis, just look at what Warren Buffett received for buying into Goldman Sachs. Most importantly of all, the banks actually got far more help than the direct TARP monies. They received sweeping FDIC guarantees on their debt and truly gigantic amounts of aid from Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and the Federal Reserve. All three of these entities have supported the market for mortgage-backed securities that the banks own. They bought huge amounts of them, taking the risks right out of banks, putting it on taxpayers, and in the process handing handsome profits to banks. Regulators allowed the banks to rip off their depositors and credit and debit card holders, while the Fed handed out virtually free money to banks. To add insult to injury, the regulators have allowed the bankers to use the profits from all these government subsidies to award themselves huge, indeed, record-setting bonuses. Those funds should have been used to strengthen the balance sheets of the banks. And if all this weren't enough, regulators also permitted the banks to hide the true value of their bad loans and they let it be known that the largest ones were Too Big To Fail, which allows them to borrow funds more cheaply than smaller banks. The net result of these big bank-friendly "forbearance" policies is that we have all paid to make these banks fabulously profitable, yet they still remain very weak institutions and are not lending. The resemblance to Japan's "lost decade" is obvious.

Lynn Parramore: Was there ever a chance that Obama could be a new FDR?

Thomas Ferguson: People who were hailing Obama as a new FDR were viewing American politics through the wrong lens. They were treating public policy as the result of the will of voters. But in fact, American political parties are mostly bank accounts. What you are told is the voice of the people is usually the sound of money talking.

Much of my research has been devoted to showing how both parties are dominated by blocs of large investors. The policy choices political parties present to the public on Social Security, macroeconomic policy, campaign finance reform, and indeed nearly every other policy area save a handful of hot-button "social issues" are basically dominated by big money. The consequences are disastrous: Neither party can level with the American people in crises. They cannot diagnose problems like the financial crisis with any honesty and they can't make any detailed case for why the policies they do sponsor would actually benefit ordinary Americans. What we get instead are pseudo-explanations, myths, and sometimes, obvious mendacity. Political discussions in the media, where they are not distorted by the plain interests of the concerns themselves, are dominated by denizens of the "think tank" and "policy institute" world. Most of these institutions are heavily driven by, surprise, surprise, big money in the form of donors. As Robert Johnson and I documented in our paper for last year's INET Conference, growing inequality in the United States complicates this dismal picture by converting regulatory agencies into recruiting grounds for would be millionaires via the revolving door, while at the same time permitting the financial sector to substitute virtually untraceable stock tips for direct contributions.

Lynn Parramore: Where do you see politicians making up policy myths right now?

Thomas Ferguson: On the Republican side, you again have people claiming that the problems of the Great Recession can be solved by reapplying the policies of Herbert Hoover. Surely this is amazing; they are plumping for going straight back to the deregulated market economy that brought you the 2008 disaster. It's simply crazy, for example, to even consider leaving financial houses free to decide on their own level of leverage, to sell derivatives on exchanges that are not fully transparent, or to sell junk securities to their own customers without telling them. But the Republicans are threatening to roll back even the anemic Dodd-Frank financial "reform" legislation, though, to be fair, they will have plenty of Democratic support for some of this.

And it's obvious that neither party wants to address the problem of campaign finance reform. Instead, the Democrats spent part of the campaign talking up dangers from "foreign" money. It's not as though the problems of the system of American political financing come from foreign money. The problem is mostly domestic money. And the Supreme Court has made everything worse with its Citizens United decision. But, note well, the tragedy of big money in the Democratic Party was clear long before that Supreme Court ruling or even before Obama started running for president. Just look at the earlier cases I analyzed in my Golden Rule.

Fundamentally, the problem of money and politics is very simple: campaigning is costly, much more costly than classical democratic theory has acknowledged. Some way has to be found to pay for it. We may take it as an axiom that those who pay for the campaign will control it. So the choices boil down to just two: either we all pay a little, through public financing of campaigns, or a relative handful of the super-rich end up controlling the system because they pay for the campaign.

Lynn Parramore: Does the financial sector give more to Democrats or Republicans?

Thomas Ferguson: We've all seen the staggering statistics on lobbying and political contributions by the financial sector over the last couple of years. More recently, we've also heard about how finance is supposed to have turned against the Democrats. There's something to this: bank contributions to the Republicans increased when discussions of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started as the House began considering Dodd-Frank. Contributions to the GOP swelled when the White House panicked after Scott Brown won the special election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts and endorsed the so-called "Volcker Rule", just as public indignation about bank bonuses was at its height. But the size of the shift toward Republicans has been exaggerated. If you look at total political contributions from securities and investment firms over the entire 2009-2010 election cycle, you will see that more money still flowed to the Democrats. Commercial banks, a narrower sub-group of the financial sector, gave more to Republicans, but only by about 60-40.

Lynn Parramore: So where does all this leave the American political system?

Thomas Ferguson: I think the answer is pretty clear: The political system is disintegrating, probably heading toward a real breakdown of some sort. The striking thing is that if you look beneath the surface of the victorious Republican Party, it is about as contentiously divided as the Democrats. The Tea Party's distrust of the party establishment is apparent, but the divisions within the GOP predated the Tea Party's emergence. They were obvious in 2008. At that time, it was pretty clear that a majority of the party did not want McCain. But there was no consensus on an alternative. 2012 is looking like a repeat of 2008: All kinds of people are eyeing the race, including several would-be candidates who can probably raise large war chests. In the end, somebody is going to win - my dark horse candidate is Haley Barbour, probably the Republican politician who is most closely connected to big business - but the whole party is unlikely to unite around him or her. In all probability, the GOP primaries will turn into a demolition derby, tending to discredit everyone involved. I also doubt that the Republican governors who are now promising to cut state budgets will find the public nearly as receptive to deep cuts as they think it will be, as people watch essential social services disappear, prisons empty, and see educational institutions trashed out that are in many cases the only hope of lagging states. Nor do I believe there is any popular majority for cutting Social Security, which is clearly emerging as a major issue just as we speak. And parts of the health care legislation are really popular, so that just saying no is going to look pretty foolish after some months.

The key to the future of American politics is the course of unemployment, though that is linked vitally to housing markets and how you deal with people's lost pensions and savings. If unemployment stays high, I would not be surprised to see some intra-party challenges to President Obama, even though right now everyone dismisses that possibility. The unions went down the line with Obama for the last two years and they have little to show for it; some of them are already scouting other possibilities. It is also interesting to speculate about Jerry Brown - just watch his star rise if he succeeds in overcoming the California fiscal crisis. Were Brown to defeat Obama in a few primaries, then the temptation for Hillary Clinton to come in would be intense. And right now the United States is mired down in two shooting wars that are not going very well.

Even more interesting are the possibilities of a third party candidacy - the obvious entrant is Mayor Bloomberg. He's plainly considering it. I notice that he does not appear to have folded the network of organizations that quietly talked up his candidacy in 2008. That tells you plenty.

Lynn Parramore: So is American politics fated to be all doom and gloom?

Thomas Ferguson: If you want a happy ending, you probably shouldn't follow our system too closely in the next few years. Instead, go see a Disney movie, unless perhaps Tim Burton is making it. Bloomberg, Brown, or Hillary Clinton, though, are all known quantities. But the experience of the Great Depression was that as things failed to improve the swamp creatures got their chance. And when the economic situation shook out, the geopolitics became more sinister. It would be a rash person indeed who counted on a happy ending to this mess.

Selected Comments

attempter

This is a pretty good synopsis. It gives a good one-paragraph summary of the Bailout and correctly pegs these facts:
  1. The people are rejecting both parties; all recent elections were rejections, not affirmations.
  2. The only exception to that was the extent to which people really did believe Obama's lies about "change".

While the "progressives" themselves look incorrigible, the fact that the masses in general believed in this fraudulent campaign simply reflects their desperation for real Change. It was enough for them to look upon Obama as a kind of de facto "alternate" candidate. (The 2010 election demonstrates how they realized their error. The Dems are eternally Dems and are just as worthless and criminal as the Reps.)

(The same would obviously be true of a pseudo-alternative run by Bloomberg, who would represent more of the neoliberal same. At best maybe it would result in more gridlock, if a rich pseudo-"independent" became president.)

3. We can have American elections again only if America takes back control of them, including financial control. All elites are unified in trying to prevent this. Citizens United was a formal ratification of the general anti-democratic conspiracy.

So Ferguson is right in saying that whoever pays for the election will receive value from it. If you want democracy, you need full public funding and to purge large-scale private funding. If, on the other hand, you allow large private bribes and "corporate speech", then you receive kleptocracy, and that's implicitly what you always wanted.

You want to will an end, you have to will the means. You will a means, you implicitly will the end those means guarantee.

That's a law of life.

(BTW, to achieve a real transformation in Argentina 10 years ago required, among other things, basically getting rid of and replacing the existing, irremediably corrupt supreme court. Just saying.)

I think, however, that the returns are in and the evidence proves that "representative democracy" itself is just pseudo-democracy, and cannot be "reformed". Even without a rogue supreme court validating direct corporate purchase of elections, that would go on constantly anyway. It's the same war of attrition that regulators can never win so long as the rackets exist at all.

So it follows that if we want democracy, we have to completely rid ourselves of the rackets, of corporate power itself. (That's just one of many, many reasons to do so.)

And we know that one part of how organized crime was able to seize power in the first place was through its control of these "representatives". We know that the whole point of setting up a "republic" in the first place was to ensure that the elites could most effectively rule a divided people. (Cf. Federalist #51.)

So again, if we will liberty and democracy, it follows that we must recognize representative pseudo-democracy as an inadequate means and relegate it to history's trash heap with the rest of the systems which have been proven inherently criminal. We must institute the only mode of polity and economy which has been proven to work on a practical level, to safeguard the people's sovereignty, and to give adequate scope to our positive freedom imperative: Direct democracy, true federalism, and the cooperative stewardship economy.

kievite
While I myself periodically write posts in this style something is definitely wrong with your approach to the problem. Let me play Devil Advocate here.

First of all there is no evidence that money played less role in the USA politics in the past. Elections were always extremely corrupt. Two party system was always a trick to prevent emergence of the third party and, in essence, just an improved and more sophisticated variant of the USSR one party system. So what exactly you are complaining about ? :-)

The key problem is the we deal with the transformation of capitalism into financial (casino) capitalism and this process trumps other factors. There is little that can be done after train left the station under Reagan or even earlier. Events just run their natural course and it was not bad years at all, if you think about them. I would say that 1970-2010 was probably the most prosperous 50 years in the USA history. Almost each family has a car, most have separate housing, enough food, superabundant amount of clothing, electronics (computer, cell-phones after 2000, Internet access, etc), etc, can enjoy traveling during vacations, etc. Is not this a paradise for common people?

If you think about logical complexity of providing peaceful coexistence of 300 million people for 50 years, this is a really an achievement or ruling elite and the such a nation can be called (borrowing the term from our Republican friends) a blessed nation. One big danger - nationalism - the force the blow up the USSR is almost completely absent. In this sense too, the USA can be called a blessed nation.

History shows that each economic regime comes to a natural end. I think we might be close to a logical end of casino capitalism stage. The current regime may slump another several miles but I doubt that it will survive. The real question here is what next ?

My feeling is that this failed bet on financial institutions providing revenue from foreign operations on the scale enough to sustain the economy on the strength of the dollar as reserve currency was doomed from the very beginning and became really self-defeating after emergence of euro.

Financial institutions tried their best to grow but in a process became far more reckless gamblers then is healthy due to disappearance of the regulation (everybody and his brother wanted them to grow and prosper) and put nation well-being into question.

Now there is a zugzwang situation: if you demolish financial institutions you will lose the dubious advantages of building them up for the last 30 years and associated foreign operations revenue streams.

If you let them survive, the cost of keeping them afloat is sinking everything else. Essentially in the current form they impose a tax on the economy that suppresses growth of other sectors. The extent of this effect is debatable but that's how I see it.

"Peak everything" does not help in this situation either and that's a huge difference with Great Depression. Another big different is disappearance of the Communist Block which helped indirectly to provide a countervailing force to excessive greed and as such played important positive role in the USA economic development.

I think this framework is more productive way to look at the current political and economic problems than any fixation on elections and (illusive) two party system.

attempter
November 13, 2010 at 9:59 am If you read the OP you'd see it was largely about elections, therefore I focused on them in the .

As a general rule I regard them as a detail. As I said, pseudo-democracy is an irremediable scam.

Although the criminals certainly like when you repeat their talking points for them: "Nothing's changed, this is just a doldrum. It's always been like this at times."

Of course if you really understand "peak everything", then you know why it's never remotely been like this.

As for what's really in store unless we fight, I've written extensively about that, but here's my best crystallization:

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/part-4-the-full-fury-of-the-new-feudal-war-the-intended-end-state/

DownSouth
November 13, 2010 at 11:39 am •

kievite

First of all there is no evidence that money played less role in the USA politics in the past. Elections were always extremely corrupt. Two party system was always a trick to prevent emergence of the third party and, in essence, just an improved and more sophisticated variant of the USSR one party system. So what exactly you are complaining about ?

This is way too heavy-handed an interpretation of American history. As George Orwell asserted in "England Your England": "All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as not bread." For, as Orwell went on to point out (the year was 1941), "In England such concepts as justice, liberty, and objective truth are still believed in."

Are these concepts still believed in within the United States? I don't know. There has certainly been a well orchestrated campaign by leading Universities and think-tanks over the last 50 years to destroy these ideals. And assertions like yours, by making it sound like there was never a time in history when these concepts were believed in, only aids and abets the right-wing.

Recommended reading here is Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy. In the first great contest between the Whigs (Jeffersonians) and the Tories (Federalists/Hamiltonians) on the American stage, the Tories were thoroughly routed. Here's Phillips:

Hamilton's use of government banking and debt to reward a wealthy elite trespassed on the Revolutionary credo, as did the excise taxes so anathemous to farmers…

Wealth and aristocracy remained a target through 1800 as the rich-poor gap widened in the major cities. The share of assets held by the top 10 percent in New York City climbed from 54 percent in 1789 to 61 percent by 1795, while much the same thing occurred in Philadelphia. New York and Pennsylvania were also the hotbeds of conspicuous speculation, and Pennsylvania farmers were the angriest over Federalist taxes. When the elections of 1800 gave Jefferson twenty of the two states' combined twenty-seven electoral votes, the Virginian beat John Adams, and no Federalist ever again held the presidency.

There are other counterfactuals to your sweeping generalization that "Elections were always extremely corrupt."

kievite
"I would say that 1970-2010 was probably the most prosperous 50 years in the USA history…. Is not this a paradise for common people? ….. this is a really an achievement or ruling elite and the such a nation can be called (borrowing the term from our Republican friends) a blessed nation."

The period from 1970-2007 was a period of declining fortunes for the bottom two quintiles of US society, treading water for the middle two quintiles, and improving fortunes for only the upper quintile, and this very heavily weighted to the top 1%. Beginning in 2008, all quintiles except the upper quintile, and perhaps even the top 10%, went into a tailspin.

kievite
"My feeling is that this failed bet on financial institutions providing revenue from foreign operations on the scale enough to sustain the economy on the strength of the dollar as reserve currency was doomed from the very beginning and became really self-defeating after emergence of euro."

"Sustain the economy" for whom? The distribution of the rewards of imperialism, whether of the traditional kind (acquire raw materials and resources on the cheap and export expensive manufactured goods) or the new kind (neo-imperialism or financial imperialism, the alliance of neoliberalism with neoconservatism whereby capital, finance and financial products are the export product) , are always highly skewered toward the rich and the powerful of the empire.

kievite
"…if you demolish financial institutions you will lose the dubious advantages of building them up for the last 30 years and associated foreign operations revenue streams."

Who cares, other than the economic and political overlords? The economic benefits from these financial institutions flow only to a very select portion of the population. Why should the 99% who don't receive any benefit care whether they live or die?

Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio
I think you would agree that Federalist #51 is a continuation of Federalist #10.

If ever there was a more explicit, honest explanaton of how to thwart majority rule and why doing so was necessary, Madison penned it in #10. Reading both #10 and #51 and then reading the US Constitution should dispel any illusions of "democracy" extolled in Civics 101. Couple these writings with the historical context – French Revolution abroad and Whiskey Rebellion here – in which they were written and the fact that the Founding Elites were not "democrats" is no surprise.

Blaming it all on money is too simplistic! And to assert that the political system is disintegrating, as opposed to undergoing transformation, is a bit of a stretch. If it is then the outcome is likely to be a right-wing authoritarianism of the kind that will likely find many of us "disappearing" into the void of cyberspace with no identity or record of ever having existed outside of immediate family and friends. Los desaparecidos nuevos!

Such thinking absolves the "left" of any culpabillity or responsibilty for this failure. Or at least it fails to explain the resurgence of the reactionary right – a process that began in 1964, if not sooner, and its growing domination of American politics since the late 60s. The eclipse/rout of the "left" in this country since then is what requires explanation. Then how the situation can be reversed, if at all.

With the "left" demonized, its ideas discredited, and balkanization fragmenting it into nonsignifcance since the late 60s, any attempt to equate Obama with FDR was pure hype and ahistorical. Conditions in 2007-08 were vastly different from those in 1929-32. Back then, there was a fairly well organized LEFT to the left of FDR. Banks were mistrusted, if not hated, and stuffing money in the mattress was taken literally. Moreover, the very existence of the Soviet Union made many a capitalist willing to "share the wealth" to "prove" that capitalism works for everyone rather than confront the red alternative head on. It is no concidence that the demise of the Soviet Union, death of the New Deal Coalition, and resurgence of the RIGHT in this country have coincided. Naomi Klein has documented this in DISASTER CAPITALISM.

Obama himself is a product of this counterrevolution [1968-present] and his purported "radicalism" has to be examined in this light. His capture by the "leftwing" of the bankers is hardly surprising. Nor is their investment and susbequent payback. A generational groupthink shared by ruling elites of either persuasion, but with the fundamentals of the "American Consensus" agreed upon by all.

With the New Deal Coalition dead, organized labor a vague memory, and the electorate fragmented into competing factions, the Left simply has no leverage. Unable to disrupt the machine, yet alone shut it down, there's nothing to push/pull Obama left. There is no permanent base, but rather, a fluid amalgam of competing factions. Ironically, the sustainable majority able to capture all three branches of government over time envisioned by Madison in Fed #10 and #51 has been built. But it's on the RIGHT. How sustainable is debatable, but for now…

Even Keynesianism, the economic orthodoxy of the Left for much of the postwar period has been found wanting. Once "progressive" it is now one side of a reactionary coin that limits debate on economics to how much capitalism is in the offing. Complete laissez-faire versus regulated laissez-faire! There's simply no discussion of any alternative to capitalism. That is a significant difference between the 1930s and the present.

Taking money out of politics will only matter if the Left can create a sustainable majority to supplant the current one. Otherwise, let's not kid ourselves any longer with overly simplistic monocausal explanations of what is wrong with the American political system. The hour is getting late…

attempter
I have no idea where you people are getting this "monocausal" stuff from my comment. I reiterate, I went with the example from the OP.

I could write a hundred comments using a hundred different examples to reach my conclusion, and as I said above elections are not one of my main examples.

I specified #51 because I've often had occasion lately to think about this quote:

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority - that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.

So I kind of had it on the brain.

I wrote more extensively on both:

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/federalism-and-the-corporate-gangs-madisons-federalist-10/

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/madisons-federalist-51-corporate-power-vs-the-naked-citizen/

I agree completely that the Professional Left, i.e. the corporate liberals, are a traitor cadre, while what used to be called the real Left have been airbrushed out of the media existence. We're in the "sphere of deviance", to use one term of art from analysis of the MSM. (And this even though polls consistently show that America is a center to center-left country, and therefore far to the left of the economic elites, political class, and MSM.)

But the left-right spectrum is no longer useful anyway, in part because of that gaping lacuna and total abdication.

The real spectrum runs democrat/citizen to elitist. Both conservatives and liberals are far to the elitist end of the spectrum by now, especially on economic matters.

Which leads to the great specific faultline which splits all issues and defines all positions no matter what they are: corporatism vs. anti-corporatism.

skippy
November 13, 2010 at 8:22 pm Welcome to Whop Whop

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120491/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0mDGxWC2VQ

Skippy…if you can't buy them off…chain them.

Roger Bigod
I agree with your diagnosis, and I'm open to the idea that radical reform is a good idea. But I couldn't understand any of your last sentence. I have no idea what any of the terms mean or how the institutions would work.

The Constitution relies on Common Law notions of the 3 branches, and there were 13 working examples at the state level, so anyone reading it knew exactly what they were being asked to ratify. There was a theory of institutions in the work of Montesquieu.

For a radical revision of our political machinery, there is no comparable intellectual substrate. We are exhorted to organize, to become activist. But where are the guidelines, the goals, the practical steps to take next?

attempter
It's some of the same substrate. Read Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution for an extended discussion of the heritage and connotations of concepts/terms like rights, consent, representation, constitution, and sovereignty.

The book itself is something of a whitewash of the many of the founders, but however much they actually did cherish those ideals, here we learn what those ideals really meant.

So if the goal were to be put in terms of resuming the long-neglected and/or hijacked American Revolution, that's one source which can help us to understand what we're really talking about.

As for what I meant by my sentence:

We must institute the only mode of polity and economy which has been proven to work on a practical level, to safeguard the people's sovereignty, and to give adequate scope to our positive freedom imperative: Direct democracy, true federalism, and the cooperative stewardship economy.

Direct democracy is government by local councils, or in American history, in some places at least, town halls. These councils could be organized along any number of lines – at the workplace, by profession, or by economic region, or by community, some combination of these, and there are probably other possibilities I'm not thinking of.

True federalism means power is exercised at the level from whence it arises in the first place, among the people in their workplaces and/or communities. Authority is delegated upward, e.g. to regional councils, only on a provisional, mostly consultative basis, and all representatives are subject to instant recall. All significant decision-making, of course, remains in the hands of the local councils.

(This is also the proper manifestation of sovereignty, which always and only reposes in the people, and can only be conditionally delegated to any smaller and/or "higher" group.)

A cooperative economy is one where sovereignty would be properly organized economically. Since no one can legitimately "own" land, natural resources, or the socially constructed infrastructure, i.e. the means of production, such resources and infrastructure would be either cooperatively worked and self-managed by the worker council, and/or distributed on the basis of useful possession or productive stewardship, or any similar term one preferred.

This is the only way to not abrogate economic sovereignty and to ensure the most effective production. Since all rents would be purged, this would be by far the most equitably productive economy. That's what I was referring to when I referred to its unique practicality. (Although I also meant that the Spanish collectives of the Civil War accomplished prodigies of production under the most free circumstances any communities and workers have known, until they were destroyed by the combined treachery and violence of liberals, communists, and fascists.)

What to do to accomplish this? Any constructive economic relocalization action is worthwhile, but especially increasing local food production and rationalizing its local distribution. Getting involved in local politics on behalf of this relocalization goal is also needful, but I think the political action probably needs to follow the established economic (or other practical) action.

That's just a few thoughts for now.

nilys
Ferguson starts with a good premise that "both parties are dominated by blocs of large investors", but fails to develop it. I got excited, expecting to read about different blocs, their hidden interests and disagreements and struggles with one another, and how these interests of a particular group of "money bags" are packaged and sold to the public as a good public policy. Instead, Ferguson went on to talk about personalities – and all the familiar faces – Hillary, Jerry, Haley, Bloomberg – who cares who of these figure heads wins? Personalities and petty personal feuds are mistaken for politics and especially deep politics. Even Ferguson can't help but fall into the personality cult. Indeed, no happy ending…
hermanas
I was stunned to hear that America was the world's "oldest democracy" the other day. 234 years, in all the thousands of years of political institutions, democracy doesn't seem to have any legs.
Tom Crowl
You're sadly right…

No democracy has been able to overcome the creeping problem of cronyism (rooted in the boundaries of biological alt-ruism).

In fact, all such systems… while implicitly recognizing the issue… (that's what's behind things like a House of Commons and the use of sortition (juries), etc.)…

Have not recognized the need to evolve with changing circumstances. Instead they allow the self-worship of their own eventually-mythologized institutions to render them incapable of reform and easily gamed… and control fraud grows.

How Would Hunter-gatherers Run the World? (Psst… They DO!) http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunter-gatherers-run-world.html

Ayn Rand & Alan Greenspan: The Altruism Fly in the Objectivist Ointment http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/10/ayn-rand-alan-greenspan-altruism-fly-in.html

Tom Crowl
November 13, 2010 at 9:13 am suppose its obvious but I meant to say:

"Have NOT recognized the need…"

Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio
November 13, 2010 at 11:02 am The United States is not a "democracy" but rather a republican form of representative government designed to thwart the will of the majority. The latter can manifest itself only when all three branches of government have been captured by it over time. If anything, the separation of powers and checks and balances enumerated in the US Constitution and built into the political system are little more than a divide-and-conquer strategy to prevent the majority of propertyless from "confiscating" the property of the minority.

For as James Madison stated explicitly in Federalist #10:

"the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribuion of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

And that Mr. Madison and the other Founding Fathers were decidely "those who held [property]" should put paid any pretense at democracy. Indeed, the paradox in need of explanation would seem to be how the Founding Fathers deemed human nature evil and corrupted by self-interest then miraculaously and magnanimously opted to set up a government that did not promote THEIR collective self-interest?

It may not be the fairytale taught in civics courses from day one, but the United States is not a DEMOCRACY by any stretch of the imagination.

i on the ball patriot
November 13, 2010 at 1:01 pm Mickey - you are on fire as of late - good comments all.

Regarding this …

"And that Mr. Madison and the other Founding Fathers were decidely "those who held [property]" should put paid any pretense at democracy. Indeed, the paradox in need of explanation would seem to be how the Founding Fathers deemed human nature evil and corrupted by self-interest then miraculaously and magnanimously opted to set up a government that did not promote THEIR collective self-interest?'

No paradox at all, what they set up did promote their collective self interests, it was a representative republic and of course not a direct democracy, but it was indeed a step along the way TOWARDS direct democracy. They were slave owners, women did not vote and the Indian population at the time were demonized as heathens, etc. So they have no corner on magnanimity but are rather a function OF THEIR TIME.

But you used a term that should be brought center stage and always held up as a guide and a lens in examining the status quo and the need for change and formulating that change. That is the term COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST, for in the end it is the collective self interest of groups that is the glue of those groups, and the fewer groups that a society has that do not contribute to that collective self interest the stronger that society is.

But before making those observations consider first that we are far more ready for direct democracy than at the inception of our constitution. Physical chain slavery is gone (yes, debt slavery has taken over but that is another issue), women now have the right to vote (I know some that want to give it back), Indians have been assimilated into the culture (poorly and painfully, yes, but they are not as heavily demonized and exploited), etc., in short, the time for direct democracy is at hand.

So … if one views the present scene through that COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST LENS one can make some observations about the groups that our society is comprised of and whether or not each identifiable group strengthens or weakens that glue. If a society sets; fairness, equality, sustainability, individual freedom, Free Speech, religious freedom, prudence, etc. as highest ideals, then one can see that …

Excessive income wealth and excessive asset wealth are unfair and not in the collective self interest and must be regulated as they deprive the rest of the group a fair share. No pigs allowed in the new constitutional rewrite!

Excessive privately owned media conglomerations, especially those that use the public commons for transmittal, that create an overly loud voice with the volume to drown out other voices denies those others their Free Speech and are therefore not in the collective self interest of the group and should be downsized. Bye Bye megaphone rich folks!

Etc. …

The point here Mickey is that it is a good term, and a good lens of analysis to use because it keeps to the forefront of our thinking that the balance of both the individual and the group, THE COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST, of the group, is the glue that binds us all together and strengthens us. And so it should be woven more into the dialog. Reclaiming the language will be key to moving forward all of our collective self interests!

Are we ready for election boycotts yet? I think they will be in our collective self interests as they would help move direct democracy along.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

reslez
November 13, 2010 at 3:39 pm I frequently see people suggest election boycotts. What I have never seen is a convincing explanation that links election boycotts to actual progress. Maybe you support boycotts because you believe the act of voting supports a corrupt system, or it causes voters to become complicit. This seems more like a position based on hollow moral consistency than something that would actually lead to change.

The country needs more action and energy, not more apathy and abstention. At any rate action and energy should be attempted. But the psychology of non-voting means non-voters are actually less likely to take other forms of action. They already believe they have no voice. If people were swarming the ballot box to vote for the Rent Is Too D*mn High party or any other third party they prefer, the existing system would be cratered. Even if - or because - those third party candidates would fail to change the system. Their failure would be revelatory.

For the vast majority, abstention is a form of sleepwalking. I'm not saying people who are already Awake should waste time with the existing political system, I'm saying most people are Asleep and will only awaken once they stop Dreaming that the system works or non-voting is anything other than abdication.

i on the ball patriot
Yes, I support election boycotts because voting DOES legitimize and validate a corrupt system, and yes, lending your good name to the corrupt process makes you complicit with the gangster government that corrupt process produces and their gangster actions. There is nothing morally inconsistent about it.

Election boycotts are "not more apathy and abstention" as you claim (the system line I might point out) but rather they are an active rejection of the system - a 'vote of no confidence' in the entire government. And they can be made even more active by writing to one's supervisor of elections explaining why one is opting out. In addition they are, and can be more of if better organized, a force outside of the system to rally around and discuss the formulation of a constitutional rewrite for a new government that is more responsible to the collective self interest of the people.

Ferguson claims this election was a resounding 'vote of no confidence' in democrats. He makes that absurd claim based on a miserably low 42% turnout, and completely disregards the greater 'vote of no confidence' in the entire government - 58% of the electorate BOYCOTTED the elections. This in spite of the worst economy in years, a fact that should have swamped the voting booths but did not, and the over the top corrupt system spent almost FOUR BILLION getting out the vote to validate the scam …

"Midterm election spending approaches $4 billion"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-campaign-finance-20101028,0,5077420.story

Those people that are asleep will awaken sooner when they realize their power. When they realize that a 58% boycott of the scam electoral process is a number that they should celebrate and build on. It is an exciting and an enormous expression of 'no confidence' in this gangster government. Run with this good news and shout it out to the world! rally around it! 58% of scamericans rejected their crooked government! Whoopee!!!!

And that four billion dollars wasted on the validation scam would have fed a lot of homeless people!

Deception is the strongest political force on then planet.

skippy
I voted with my feet, by not using them, by showing my backside.

No Obama's, no Palings, no religious backed, billionaire, thinktankistan, military industrial, health care cough oxymoron, financial innovator, moneyed special interest lobbyist, no right or left animal will ever receive my stamp ever again, out of a lack, of a human candidate.

James
And the alternative to boycotts given the fact that the status quo sucks is what?

On second thought, asked and answered. Think about it.

Siggy

Our contract for government specifies that which is a Federal Republic, not a democracy!

What has been eroded is the Federal Republic in favor of something that represents itself as a democracy. It's time to consider making a choice, which shall you have: A republic or a democracy?

Do you want free markets or fair markets? Do you want a currency that maintains its purchasing power? Or, do you want easy credit and unprosecuted financial fraud?

Make a list, vote it.

Richard Kline
I would be happy indeed if Ferguson's consideration of a real implosion of the two-handed one party system was in any way imminent, but I have no such optimism. One function of Ferguson's discussion of personalities for 2012 is his engagement with the reality that there are no substantive alternatives in the offing. No 'personality' alternatives; no structural alternatives; that election cycle is two years away. That is a function of the failure of organizing. The stasis we have no can easily, quite easily, slink along for several decades. Consider the politics of, say, France, between the Great Wars. Nothing, exactly nothing, changed in their broad social and geopolitical program despite the messy inefficacy and frank unpopularity of all significant political parties. Britain didn't look much better. Germany only got change you can get dead from from outside the system. You see, folks, stasis is GOOD for the oligarchy: they don't need functioning government beyond a false front level. Indeed, one could well say that stasis is the _policy_ of the oligarchy because it is the environoment in which they thrive, at the expense of everyone else, literally in our case since we are paying them directly out of government monies to rule us for themselves. Sick . . . .

But I also think the analysis that 'voters are rejecting both parties' is at best half true. This seems to be crowdsource consensus of the past election, but it really wasn't what happened. Voters unhappy because of unemployment 'thought out the Democrats?' Bunk. Yes, bunk; read the returns. Areas with high unemployment which had Democrats mostly kept them. And to a degree rightly so. Every poll of the last two plus years shows that the public as a whole understands exactly what the Republican economic program is, dislikes it totally, and has at least a little more confidence in the Democratic program (to oversimplify and concede, wrongly, that the Democrats even have a program). So voters unemployed chose the party which, with a patina of sanity, might do them some good. Democratic losses were heavy in areas that in recent years have been Republican leaning. That is, two years ago those areas through out Republicans to punish them, but now in the hope that the Repubs are sufficiently chastened voted them back in. The turn to Democrats there was largely due to independent swing votes moving more or less tactically rather than in any way in preference for Democrats. What we are really seeing is that long-standing voter preferences are _hardening_ not loosening in their respective areas. Independent voters are notoriously fickle in American history, and they are, with great and perhaps justified cynicism, shopping their votes cycle by cycle to whomever they think will pay them out the most. I mean Dubya bought the independents for $450 a head, outbidding Gore (anyone remember _that_ execrable stinkfest). The Democrats had a superb opportunity to cement themselves in office for multiple cycles by actually delivering some reform but they couldn't trample that opportunity fast enough in their efforts to pay out to the oligarchy enough to win their favor, failing there too.

We are likely to see stasis of much the present structure for _years_, and quite possibly for several decades. The only break in that would be the successful organizing of an actual reformist party, revolution, or a major asterioid impact, all of which are on similar orders of magnitude in probability in my view. -And public discontent will be met with repression. At this point, Americans are such a cowed lot it won't take very much repression to get them back in their cubicles either. Stasis in decine can last a remarkably long time. Four generations is not unusual historically, though I wouldn't see that as the likely term here now.

Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio
Well said and succinct, especially the last paragraph!

"The only break in that would be the successful organizing of an actual reformist party, revolution, or a major asterioid impact, all of which are on similar orders of magnitude in probability in my view. -And public discontent will be met with repression."

Careful, you might be mistaken for a "defeatist" rather than a realist. The "Great Awakening" is upon US. Can't you see it?

What irks me is the subjectivist, chiliastic, millenarian wishful thinking of so many on the Left that believe it's merely a question of waking up – not successful organizing and getting dirty, down in the mud. Even if the people have woken up, it's a long march to successful organizing before any appreciable difference will be noticed. I may not like your odds… but they are accurate.

John Strong
I think is mention of "swamp creatures" is very instructive. We have become immune to some very inflammatory in-group/out-group rhetoric that has the whiff of serious conflict to those of us old enough to remember it. Add to this that the dialogue (and increasingly policy) is to a greater extent than ever controlled by the commentariat, and you really have the potential for cultural upheaval. If I were Canada or Mexico, I'd be getting a little nervous.

jake chase
All talk about voter "decisions" is nonsense. The percentage of voters who consider anything resembling information cannot be as high as five percent.

The remainder relies exclusively upon received ideas, preconceptions susceptible to clever propaganda, and comes to the table knowing nothing whatsoever about how things actually work. To expect anything good to result from our system is akin to Einstein's view of insanity.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Unfortunately, Ferguson bemoans the fact that not all of the TARP money was "paid back" to the government, and that the government "lost money" on the deal. He does not realize that money "paid back" to the government is the same as a tax. .

When GM proudly trumpeted it had paid back $8.1 billion of government loans, it really should have said, "We just paid $8.1 billion in taxes, which removed $8.1 billion from the economy, thereby slowing the economy accordingly. We could have used that $8.1 billion to hire people or to expand in other ways, but instead we chose just to throw it on a bonfire."

A monetarily sovereign government never should lend money to its citizens. It only should give money. But Ferguson does not understand the implications of monetary sovereignty. He thinks the federal government's finances are like yours and mine, and that somehow the federal government needs tax money.

That false belief is the cause of much of our current problems.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

James
Well then, WHY, pray tell, doesn't the Treasury just credit the bank accounts of the unemployed? Problem solved, yes? Instant stimulus applied exactly where it's needed the most.
reslez
Well then, WHY, pray tell, doesn't the Treasury just credit the bank accounts of the unemployed?

This is only a mystery if you haven't been paying attention. Anything that would benefit the people - the unemployed, homedebtors - is politically impossible. Anything that would benefit the banks is achieved instantly and with the minimum possible debate.

James
This is only a mystery if you haven't been paying attention.

Granted, but the question was meant to be rhetorical and leading, thank you very much.

To the larger question, these MMT'ers always imply, if not state outright, that there truly is a free lunch when it comes to sovereigns and monetary policy. What I'd like to know is what's the limit to this foolishness? Especially knowing full well that if Washington ever comes to embrace this stuff wholeheartedly the debt will surely know no bounds.

If taxation's only purpose is to reinforce the need for the sovereign's currency in the first place, why not reduce the tax rate to say 5% across the board (yeah right, see how long that last before the GOP is calling for even MORE tax cuts!) and be done with it? And if debt really doesn't matter and it doesn't have to actually be debt in the first place, why even keep track of it in the first place, except purely as a measure of the size of the overall economy? For that matter, why are we even using the Fed as a debt based currency issue mechanism, other than the obvious answer: to make rich bankers even richer.

These are serious questions, I'm not merely being facetious. So go ahead one of you econophiles, go ahead and 'splain it to me please.

JTFaraday
November 13, 2010 at 8:43 pm "Well then, WHY, pray tell, doesn't the Treasury just credit the bank accounts of the unemployed? Problem solved, yes? Instant stimulus applied exactly where it's needed the most."

Anyone over 60 who got rolled should be given their social security benefits early. If a society sees fit to involuntarily retire people early, it should back it up.

We're opening the SS discussion shortly. Time to reform the system.

"And if debt really doesn't matter and it doesn't have to actually be debt in the first place, why even keep track of it in the first place, except purely as a measure of the size of the overall economy?"

Because if they conceded it didn't matter then everyone under 60 will likewise want instant credits to their account so they can pursue their creative interests and then there will be no one left to scrub John Thain's golden toilet.

And, needless to say, we can't have that.

reslez
November 13, 2010 at 2:52 pm You're right of course on the economics, but you miss the point. The propaganda claim "government made a profit on TARP" is intended to reassure voters that money was not given away to banks. A monetarily sovereign government can certainly give away money to whatever groups it chooses, but that it chooses to support wealthy oligarchs instead of the people is simply obscene.

Tom Crowl
November 13, 2010 at 8:55 am American politics IS broken. And money is a central branch of the problem. However the root is cronyism ( and this is rooted in the boundaries of biological altruism).

"Big" money is dominating and distorting political decision to the detriment of this (and historically eventually ALL) representative systems. It's also behind of problems in credit creation, btw.

I don't believe that public financing of elections will solve this problem. I fear it will lead to only 'government approved' candidates and government approved parties… and result in a whole new industry designed to game that as much as they game the military-industrial relationship and the Wall Street-Washington unholy alliance.

Approximately $4 billion was spent on this last campaign I understand. That's less than the price of a video game on sale for each of the 130 million registered voters.

Of course most never actually give to a cause or campaign.

I believe that can and will change (and it must… personal involvement is critical for a capable electorate… "Capability ENABLES Responsibility… government funded elections will lead to LESS participation).

The Commons-dedicated Account concept… by offering BOTH the capability for the micro-contribution as well as the capability for charitable contribution through the same system…

Eventually results in a stable and ubiquitous user-base. Since an account does NOT need to be continuously funded and has utility even when un-funded…

This 'facebook'-like network offers opportunities for 'empowered' local political association not currently available.

Further the existence of a 'scalable' platform (unlike a facebook page, a User's can have multiple pages focused on differing levels of political jurisdiction.

Here we then have opportunities for outreach and campaigning on a MUCH cheaper basis as well as the capability for LOCAL enterprises to engage their communities at the level at which they operate. This system will drastically LOWER the cost of campaigns and (I believe) eventually and paradoxically REDUCE the influence of money in politics.

This is a sketchy and quick synopsis but this is just a comment.

The account mechanism is patented (I still need $2005 for final bill to attorney and patent fees by Dec 7 if any want to be helpful and smart investors) and I'd really appreciate the chance to get this going.

I'm not the religious type. But I always have felt that what the 'historical' Jesus was talking about with "the meek shall inherit the earth"… is that the only chance this planet has is for regular people to stand up and take responsibility for it. To 'inherit' is not to be given something and be able to abandon responsibility for it… its just the opposite.

We've been given the right of self-governance… but have NOT taken up the responsibility.

Why Politics MUST be Localized http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-politics-must-be-localized.html

Empowering the Commons: The Dedicated Account (Part I) http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/08/empowering-commons-dedicated-account.html

LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/culturalengineer

Demo & FAQ http://www.Chagora.com

I'm neither a businessman nor a politician. I'm a citizen. I take the role seriously.

Jackrabbit
Many thanks to Tom Ferguson and others (Yves, Reich, Black, etc.) for speaking out. And thanks to attempter, Richard Kline, i_on_th_ball_patriot and many others that have written such illuminating comments on this blog and others. Some day these heroic efforts will be better understood and appreciated by a wide audience.

As the economy deteriorates, the banks and the super-wealthy have more and more difficulty covering the corruption. Any real reform could be a long time coming, though, as the system works to bamboozle people into playing along with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).

Writing that last sentence reminds me of the song lyrics: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

john
Can we please stop talking about "campaign finance reform" and start a serious discussion with real language about re-criminalizing bribery? To be considered a "serious candidate" in our entirely corrupt system one must first systematically solicit bribes and succeed. Advertisements on TV should be viewed as confessions of the prior crime of solicitation of bribery. Journalist should be a name reserved for reporters who show us how the corrupt serve their pay masters.

Money is not delivering progress, but we are still using its market tested language to talk about it. Use real language, please. There are no criminals in the current disasters because our entirely corrupt system was used to first de-criminalize innumerable crimes. Lets start calling fraud fraud, bribery bribery, theft theft. Yves is pretty good here about calling looting looting.

Roger Bigod
hermanas:

The fragility of democracy has been known for some time. Aristotle thought there was a cycle of chaos -> monarchy -> aristocracy -> democracy -> chaos.

The Founders had read the history of ancient Greece and Rome, and some of their letters show that there were trying to set up institutions that would resist the processes of decay. Much of the Constitution is plumbing, designed to control and direct the flow of political power to the proper channels at the Federal level. Problems of democracy v. aristocracy are punted to the states.

It's easy to imagine the Founders as considering grand principles in the light of history's sweep and exercising amazing foresight. But all this was secondary to the main goal of cobbling together something that the self-interested, bickering states would ratify.

A revealing exchange occurred one day in the Convention when the delegates got into a long, emotional discussion of the franchise, including the question of restricting it to those with property. Gouverneur Morris, who spoke the most during the proceedings, was silent. Finally, he got up and told them that they were wasting their time because no matter what the written rules said, the rich would find a way to control the outcome if their interests were seriously threatened. He didn't say he approved, just that the real world operated that way.

When Morris was Ambassador to France during the Revolution, someone asked him about the possibility of a written constitution on the US model. His was that the US Constitution worked when applied by the US electorate, but that if the French electorate were put in charge, it would result in disaster. So he did have some trust in "the people". In fact, since the final document is almost all his final working draft, we have him to thank for its one emotionally evocative sentence, the to-do list that begins "We, the People".

In the civics class mythology, the Founders were inspired by Divine Wisdom to produce a supernaturally perfect document. But it didn't look that way to them. Around 1812, Morris decided that the Constitution had been a failure and should be scrapped. It looks like the US was in better shape at the time than it is today, so it's natural to wonder what he would think. Put the French electorate in charge?

hermanas
On a return flight from Paris to New York many years ago, after the meal was served, passengers went aft to smoke per regulation. The pilot, having diffulty controlling pitch requested everyone return to their seats where flight attendants said they could not smoke. French passengers rose and went back aft. When the pilot came back to plead with them, their response was "we smoke or we crash". The pilot said, "O.K. fine", and we arrived safely in NYC. But my luggage was lost.

hermanas
And thank you, Roger, for your educated response.

DownSouth
Tom Ferguson said: The political system is disintegrating, probably heading toward a real breakdown of some sort.

[….]

But the experience of the Great Depression was that as things failed to improve the swamp creatures got their chance. And when the economic situation shook out, the geopolitics became more sinister. It would be a rash person indeed who counted on a happy ending to this mess.

Here's a visual metaphor for what we have. We have an inverted pyramid, both in our political life and our economic life. Those who should be on top of the structure are instead at the bottom doing a "balancing act" by using, as Ferguson put it, "pseudo-explanations, myths, and sometimes, obvious mendacity." The structure is highly unstable and, as the video shows, the entire structure can be brought down by the slightest disturbance.

I would say our political and economic overlords opted for this inverted pyramidal structure beginning in the 1960s. It began with all the lies used to justify the Vietnam War, and the trend has been downhill ever since. So I would agree with Ferguson that our current crisis was a long time in the making.

We could say we are currently in Act X on the national stage. Act IX was the period from 1929 to the 1960s. During Act IX our national and economic overlords opted for more or less a pyramidal structure. Governmental, religious, media, educational and other institutions enjoyed a high level of legitimacy and broad support from the governed. The economic and political overlords didn't engage in the barrage of "pseudo-explanations, myths, and sometimes, obvious mendacity" to near the extent that they do now.

Act XIII on the American stage was the period that began shortly after the Civil War and lasted until 1929, when the political and economic structure came tumbling down. Act XIII was very much like Act X, our current act, in that it was a highly unstable inverted pyramid. The perfidy and treachery of our economic and political overlords knew no bounds.

As Ferguson makes clear, the really interesting part will come when the current inverted pyramid comes tumbling down, when "the swamp creatures" get "their chance." In the 1930s, the United States dodged lightening. The "swamp creatures" were held at bay and the nation experienced a revival and reawakening of the Jeffersonian ideals of equal justice, equal treatment before the law and popular democracy. Thus we had a renewal of important themes during Act I of our national drama.

Germany, however, wasn't so lucky.

Siggy
Interesting point of view. Could you clarify just what popular democracy is? Are you suggesting that we dispense with the Federal Republic? Then again it seems that over time and by various events we've already thrown it out; e.g., the repeal of Glass-Steagell.

The earlier reference to Federalist #10 and #51 is very apt. I find it encouraging that there is some knowledge of those two essays. They examine the necessity and essence of balancing the interests of the landed class with those of the rentier class.

I very much agree with Mr. Ferguson and would like to see him address the issue of just when is it that we shall have some inquisitions and prosecutions. My sense is that unless and until we have some prosecutions, the cancer will continue to destroy our Federal Republic.

DownSouth
Siggy,

When I talk about "popular democracy," I'm talking about elections like the one that occurred in 1800 when Jefferson prevailed over the Federalists (for more explanation see my 11:39 a.m. comment above). The flip side of this would be the type of elections that predominated in the late 19th century during the zenith of the Gilded Age, such as described here:

The Richmond County methods in Georgia and Alabama--wholesale ballot-box stuffing, open bribery, various forms of intimidation, and massive voting by dead or fictitious Negroes. The Richmond County methods of Georgia were almost precisely duplicated in the "Harrison County methods" used in East Texas to defeat "Cyclone" Davis. Indeed, in Texas the phrase "Harrison County methods" became the standard term defining the most effective Democratic campaign technique of the Populist era. Even on the face of the returns, and including in the total the controlled vote of South Texas, the Populist vote jumped from the 23 per cent of 1892 to almost 40 per cent in 1894. The "official" statewide total showed Nugent had been defeated for the governorship by 230,000 to 160,000, though a number of steps were taken to ensure that the real outcome would be forever beyond recovery. –The Populist Moment, Lawrence Goodwyn

And I agree that "the earlier reference to Federalist #10 and #51 is very apt" and "find it encouraging that there is some knowledge of those two essays." However, the way in which these documents were used in the comments above lacks subtlety. What it boils down to is that now, in response to the myth of American Exceptionalism, comes the counter myth. Malicious intent is ascribed to the Founding Fathers that did not exist.

To begin with, to evaluate the Founding Fathers by today's standards gives a highly distorted picture. Take Elvis Presley, for instance. In his day he was a highly innovative, and extremely controversial, figure. But in comparison to Mick Jagger, or even more so to some of today's popular musicians, he hardly seems radical. Yet no one would even remotely think of dethroning Elvis as "The King of Rock and Roll." Yet there are those who would rob the Founding Fathers of their place in political and economic history, even though in their day they were quite radical, and extremely controversial.

There's a book that everyone should read called The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History. It serves as a strong antidote and counterweight to some of the Marxist- and constructivist-inspired histories written by the likes of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

The Founding Fathers were not so much interested in examining "the necessity and essence of balancing the interests of the landed class with those of the rentier class" as they were finding a way to deal with "the tyranny of the majority" or "an excess of democracy." And their concerns were not limited to the material world--property. They included the spiritual world as well--oppressive religious majorities. Wherever "a majority are united by a common interest or passion," Madison concluded, "the rights of the minority are in danger." And as Madison went on to explain:

That diabolical, Hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some, and to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such business. This vexes me the most of anything whatever. There are…in the adjacent country not less than 5 or 6 well meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox.

As Lance Banning in his essay in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom explains:

Madison was deeply dedicated to the Revolutionary principle that governments derive their just authority from popular consent and must remain responsive to people's will. He was dedicated, too, to "justice," by which he meant equality before the law and scrupulous respect by government for natural law and natural rights. However obvious it seems to us that the desire to reconcile these two commitments is the fundamental paradox of every liberal democracy, early revolutionary thinkers did not necessarily anticipate a conflict.

In his 10:11 a.m. comment above Mickey alleges "Such thinking absolves the 'left' of any culpabillity or responsibilty for this failure. Or at least it fails to explain the resurgence of the reactionary right – a process that began in 1964, if not sooner, and its growing domination of American politics since the late 60s."

Personally, I think much of the "culpability or responsibility" for the failures of the left and "the resurgence of the reactionary right…and its growing domination of American politics since the late 60s" is to be found not in someone else's thinking, but in Mickey's.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs)" goes the creed popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. But what percentage of any general population really believes in that manifesto. How many people really desire "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," or equality in other words? I would say a minority, and quite a small minority.

The great Mexican painter Diego Rivera thought he had found in the ancient indigenous civilizations of Western Mexico examples of the egalitarian paradises of the past conceived by the Marxist ideology he embraced. The clay figures he collected from those cultures, after all, were so utterly human, capturing the empathetic expressions of everyday people in their daily communal life. Later studies, however, such as those in Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past, revealed something very different. The very clay figures Rivera collected in the belief that they were emblems of equality served just the opposite purpose. They were created and used as high-status objects that conveyed prestige and rank to their owners. Only the tribal elite owned these artistic creations.

Studies of extant primitive cultures reveal similar phenomenon, as is discussed in Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. No one starves in these primitive tribal societies, so the "needs" of all members of the tribe are met. However, the most productive hunters and gatherers are showered with adoration and prestige. They are the ones who rise to leadership positions within the tribe. Conversely, slackers and free-riders are shunned and ridiculed.

So there is something to this "natural law" that Madison spoke of after all (and which I think our reigning plutocrats are fixin' to learn about--and maybe the hard way). Most people desire hierarchy, but a hierarchy ordered on merit, performance, excellence and achievement. What a majority of people want is "justice," by which is meant "equality before the law and scrupulous respect by government for natural law and natural rights." This is something very different from a desire that everyone be equal, and herein lays one of the great miscalculations of the today's American left.

i on the ball patriot
November 13, 2010 at 5:00 pm You suddenly sound like a libertarian …

DownSouth says; "Studies of extant primitive cultures reveal similar phenomenon, as is discussed in Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. No one starves in these primitive tribal societies, so the "needs" of all members of the tribe are met. However, the most productive hunters and gatherers are showered with adoration and prestige. They are the ones who rise to leadership positions within the tribe. Conversely, slackers and free-riders are shunned and ridiculed."

Yes, just like today in scamerica slackers and free riders are "shunned and ridiculed." Is this what you go on to say, and appear to advocate, when you say below, "So there is something to this "natural law" that Madison spoke of after all (and which I think our reigning plutocrats are fixin' to learn about--and maybe the hard way)." …

http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&rls=ig&newwindow=1&q=homeless+people&sa=N&start=20&ndsp=20&biw=1020&bih=619

DownSouth says further; "So there is something to this "natural law" that Madison spoke of after all (and which I think our reigning plutocrats are fixin' to learn about--and maybe the hard way). Most people desire hierarchy, but a hierarchy ordered on merit, performance, excellence and achievement. What a majority of people want is "justice," by which is meant "equality before the law and scrupulous respect by government for natural law and natural rights." This is something very different from a desire that everyone be equal, and herein lays one of the great miscalculations of the today's American left."

Yes, there is something to natural law, it is Darwinian cannibalistic and civilized societies strive to rise above it in pursuit of the COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST of the society.

Most people do not desire hierarchy, rather they recognize that it is imposed upon them by simply being born as a cannibalistic organism (those that are really perceptive), and further magnified in intensity by being born into a hierarchical environment that reflects again that cannibalistic dog eat dog nature that has skewed and colored that environment that they are born into.

People are not born "slackers and free riders" as you claim. That is pure bullshit! People are made into slackers and free riders trying to cope with those who celebrate their cannibalistic Darwinian nature and act on it in an unbridled fashion. That is the nature celebrated in the artifacts you describe made in a PRIMATIVE culture, one that we must strive to rise above.

Those who claim that there is something to this "natural Law", and then use that something to justify taking far more than what would be a just share in a fair society, and then using that wealth to further shape the Darwinian dog eat dog cannibalistic world that we are all born into, in to a far greater Darwinian world, are full of self aggrandizing deceptive crap.

It is they who have created the aggregate generationally corrupted environment that comes with the imposition of a crooked FED and a scam 'rule of law'.

"SLACKERS AND FREE RIDERS" ARE NOT NATURAL, THEY ARE A PRODUCT OF, AND ARE CREATED BY, THEIR ALREADY FURTHER DARWINIZED ENVIRONMENT THAT THEY ARE BORN INTO - as in - you are what you have been through, but now and the future are up to you.

What most people really want is security and an opportunity to grow their human spirit/life force to its fullest potential. Perceptive people recognize that comes from recognizing "natural law" - yes, the pecking ordered competitive hierarchal system thrust upon us - but then rising above it by limiting that system, not because we "desire" it, but rather because we are forced by being born into it to honor it.

The balance that best serves the COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST is the balance that will best do the job for all in the society and at the same time best serve evolution. If evolution is unhappy, as she appears to be with the present lop sided societal arrangement (just look around you globally for proof of that) she will give us a well deserved boot into the dust bin of unrecorded history.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

DownSouth
November 13, 2010 at 8:53 pm i on the ball patriot,

You and I must be using very different definitions of "natural law." And I don't suppose that's surprising, because the concept of natural law has been under concerted attack for several decades now by economists (most notably those from the Chicago School) and by the New Atheists (who hail from other disciplines of the social sciences).

Here's how Thomas Jefferson described natural law:

Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct in short…impelling us to virtuous actions, and warning us against those which are vicious.

Here's David Little talking about Jefferson and moral law in his essay in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

He tried to demonstrate that once the common moral denominator of all religions has been isolated, it is then possible to detach and dispense with the respective "dogmas" of the different traditions. Religious dogmas are, declared Jefferson, "totally unconnected with morality."

And here's Jefferson again in a letter to Thomas Law in 1814:

Some have made the love of God the foundation of morality… [But] if we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist[s]? … Their virtue must have some other foundation."

C.S. Lewis also wrote extensively about the Law of Nature in Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe:

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature.

[….]

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought every one knew it be nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy wee in the wrong unless right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called "The Abolition of Man," but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admire for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might as well try to imagine a country where two and two make five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to--whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself firs. Selfishness has never been admired.

[….]

The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean 'what Nature, in fact, does'. But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean 'what human beings, in fact, do'; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.

As to your assertion that "most people do not desire hierarchy," there is no empirical data whatsoever to support that assertion. It's a utopian concept that Marx dreamed up. In simpler societies, people rise in the hierarchy because of what they can do for the society. Here's an example from Moral Sentiments and Material Interests:

There are also large differences in hunting ability among men. For example, there is a five-fold difference in the long-term average hunting returns between the best and worst hunter in the sample of Ache men. Similar discrepancies in hunting ability across men have been found among the !Kung, Hadza, Hiwi, Gunwinggu, Agta, and Machiguenga. Therefore, even among men of the same age, there must be net transfers over the long term from families producing a surplus to families producing a deficit.

Why do superior performers continue to outperform and give their excess production away? Well certainly many of the potential returns are not material, but have to do with the striving for prestige, status and adulation:

Costly signaling theory provides the basis for arguing that generosity--incurring the costs of providing collective goods--is one means by which individuals and coalitions compete for status, and ultimately for the material and fitness-enhancing correlates of status (such as possible power, mates, and economic resources). The quality-dependent cost of providing the collective good guarantees the honesty of the signaler's claim to such qualities as resource control, leadership abilities, kin-group solidarity, economic productivity, or good health and vigor--information that is useful to the signaler's potential mates, allies, and competitors.

Here's another example of the same phenomenon:

Because the first medieval rulers had been barbarians, most of what followed derived from their customs. Chieftains like Ermanaric, Alaric, Attila, and Clovis rose as successful battlefield leaders whose fighting skills promised still more triumphs to come. Each had been chosen by his warriors, who, after raising him on their shields, had carried him to a pagan temple or a sacred stone and acclaimed him there… Lesser tribesmen were grateful to him for the spoils of victory, though his claim on their allegiance also had supernatural roots.

[….]

[T]he chieftains had been chosen for merit, and early kings wore crowns only ad vitam aut culpam--for life or until removed for fault.

In the United States we have taken this concept and turned it on its head. Our political and financial overlords have not been elevated to the top of the hierarchy because of what they do for society. Quite the opposite, they think in terms of what society can do for them. That's why I say the inverted pyramid is a perfect metaphor for current US society. And it's unstable because it flies in the face of perhaps a million years of human evolution, all but the last 10,000 years or so lived in small hunter-gatherer societies in which the "law of nature" evolved.

skippy
Natural selection is the process by which traits become more or less common in a population due to consistent effects upon the survival or reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution.

The natural genetic variation within a population of organisms may cause some individuals to survive and reproduce more successfully than others in their current environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection

Skippy….Concur, whom made the environment…own it.

PS. do the poor have so many kids, as to hope, for one successful functioning psychopath (cough professional) to make the family proud?

DownSouth
i on the ball patriot,

And one other thing. Maybe I wasn't clear when I used the term "slackers and free-riders." Not only low producers, but high prodcers in primitive societies can also find themselves on the outs if they aren't sufficiently generous. Here's Moral Sentiments again:

Those who do not produce or share enough are often subject to criticism, either directly or through gossip and social ostracism. Anecdotes of shirkers being excluded from distributions until they either boosted their production or sharing levels are found among the Maimande, Pilaga, Gunwinggu, Washo, Machiguenga, Agta, and Netsilik Eskimo.

ceasley7
Maybe I'm crazy but I consider the crooks running the show now to be the swamp creatures. Illegal wars, no rule of law ….
Ignim Brites
Well a pretty dreary piece. My take on the current political situation is based on the idea that there will not be another mega bailout. The party with the best program for dealing with the TBTF banks will seize the popular imagination for a decade. It could be quite exciting if Bernanke and Geithner try an end run around Congress. The possibility of spectacle of the these two in chains is not to be dismissed.
Hugh
Most of what Ferguson is saying is what many of us here and elsewhere have been saying for an age. Is swamp creatures some oblique reference to Huey Long? Or to radicals in general. Because it was those radicals who pushed FDR and the Establishment into those actions for which they now get, deservedly, so much credit.

But seriously Jerry Brown? Governor Moonbeam? For a political scientist and historian, Ferguson is showing a real lapse of memory. As for Barbour, possible, but he is a founder of the big lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers, that and being governor of the poorest state in the country are hardly recommendations. I mean what is he going to run on "Vote for me and I will make the rest of the country as poor as Mississippi"? Yeah, that'll work.

ZeroInMyOnes
November 13, 2010 at 3:18 pm That leaves Hillary.
craazyman
November 13, 2010 at 4:53 pm Sarah Palin his a nicer butt.
F. Beard
But the experience of the Great Depression was that as things failed to improve the swamp creatures got their chance. Thomas Ferguson

And why not? Are our problems so big that a $1 million check sent to every American adult citizen from the US Treasury would not solve them?

There's a huge political prize for the first political party to realize it is almost that simple. The other parties will kick themselves to death for being so blind.

lark
The reason this country has worked, despite all the negatives that Ferguson describes so well, is because it has provided a powerful 'jobs machine'.

Globalization and outsourcing ended all that. I think the balance that we took for granted has disintegrated – and the center has disintegrated, with that.

It is interesting that the Tea Party and the unions agree on stopping globalization.

This international economic order is going to bite the dust. That may even be good for ordinary Americans, because we will manufacture more of what we consume.

[Nov 13, 2010] "Money and the Midterms- Are the Parties Over- Interview with Thomas Ferguson"

But in fact, American political parties are mostly bank accounts. What you are told is the voice of the people is usually the sound of money talking.

First posted at New Deal 2.0

Lynn Parramore: What do you make of the 2010 Election?

Thomas Ferguson: The 2010 election was not like others. It was certainly not simply 2006 in reverse, this time with the Republicans winning by a landslide. There is an obvious cumulative process at work here, with first one party and then the other receiving lopsided votes of no confidence from voters. The U.S. economy is barely moving; millions of Americans are looking for work and struggling to find ways to salvage their life savings and pensions; the international position of the U.S. is sliding; and the government is largely paralyzed on issues that voters care about most. We have clearly been in a political crisis for some years; the meaning of the 2010 election is that this crisis is becoming much deeper, moving into an entirely different stage. The parallels to the Great Depression are eerie: At that time, in many countries, voters seem to have followed an "in-out," "out-in" rule. But that process does not go on forever. As the Depression deepened with no solutions, all kinds of strange creatures started creeping out of the shadows. The U.S. seems to be entering that stage.

Lynn Parramore: You're implying the political system failed in some serious way. How so?

Thomas Ferguson: 2008 had all the earmarks of a classic realigning election, as my old colleague Walter Dean Burnham describes them. In the wake of the financial collapse, it looked for all the world like voters were ready for, even demanding, major reforms. They had elected a Democratic President on a promise of "Change," with both houses of Congress solidly Democratic. That's why many people were thinking that Obama was going give us a modern New Deal. They really believed him when he promised change. Instead, Obama's failure on the economy has discredited the whole idea of the activist state. The dimensions of this failure were spectacular: he didn't move aggressively to combat unemployment, the economic stimulus was half as large as it needed to be, and he didn't deal with the mortgage crisis. So unemployment stayed way up, and many people remain in danger of losing their homes or are underwater on their mortgages, with the whole housing sector stalling out. To make matters worse, the administration lavished aid on the financial sector. The spectacle of the government aiding bankers, who turned around and paid themselves record bonuses, has just been unbearable for millions of people.

What the election really shows is not that the parties can't agree - Democrats and most of the GOP leadership finally agreed on the bank bailouts, for example - but that the American people will not accept the policies that leaders in both parties prefer. In 2006 and 2008, the population voted no-confidence in the Republicans on the war and the economy. They have just now presented the Democrats with another resounding a no-confidence vote. What makes the current situation intractable is the fundamental reason for these serial failures. It's obvious: big money dominates both major parties. The Obama campaign's dependence on money and personnel from the financial sector was clear to anyone who looked, even before he won the nomination, promoted Geithner, brought Summers back, and reappointed Bernanke. For years I've promised people that I'll tell you who bought your candidate before you vote for him or her, by simply applying my "investment theory of political parties." When I analyzed the early money in Obama's campaign in March, 2008, it was impossible not to see that many of the people responsible for the financial crisis were major Obama supporters. As I wrote for TPM, serious financial reform would not be on President Obama's agenda.

Lynn Parramore: Lots of people point out that the banks have paid back the bailout funds and that the government actually made money on the deal. Can Obama at least claim that this policy was good for the American people?

Thomas Ferguson: The bailout was originally not Obama's but George Bush's, though Obama supported it during the campaign. The "banks-paid-us-back" story is mostly Treasury propaganda. The claim is really based on a narrow accounting of TARP funds. In fact, a lot of that aid has not been paid back. AIG, for example, is still heavily owned by the government. Secondly, the aid was way, way underpriced - meaning that the federal government got very little for its money. If you want to see what market-driven terms you could get for aiding banks at the height of the crisis, just look at what Warren Buffett received for buying into Goldman Sachs. Most importantly of all, the banks actually got far more help than the direct TARP monies. They received sweeping FDIC guarantees on their debt and truly gigantic amounts of aid from Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and the Federal Reserve. All three of these entities have supported the market for mortgage-backed securities that the banks own. They bought huge amounts of them, taking the risks right out of banks, putting it on taxpayers, and in the process handing handsome profits to banks. Regulators allowed the banks to rip off their depositors and credit and debit card holders, while the Fed handed out virtually free money to banks. To add insult to injury, the regulators have allowed the bankers to use the profits from all these government subsidies to award themselves huge, indeed, record-setting bonuses. Those funds should have been used to strengthen the balance sheets of the banks. And if all this weren't enough, regulators also permitted the banks to hide the true value of their bad loans and they let it be known that the largest ones were Too Big To Fail, which allows them to borrow funds more cheaply than smaller banks. The net result of these big bank-friendly "forbearance" policies is that we have all paid to make these banks fabulously profitable, yet they still remain very weak institutions and are not lending. The resemblance to Japan's "lost decade" is obvious.

Lynn Parramore: Was there ever a chance that Obama could be a new FDR?

Thomas Ferguson: People who were hailing Obama as a new FDR were viewing American politics through the wrong lens. They were treating public policy as the result of the will of voters. But in fact, American political parties are mostly bank accounts. What you are told is the voice of the people is usually the sound of money talking.

Much of my research has been devoted to showing how both parties are dominated by blocs of large investors. The policy choices political parties present to the public on Social Security, macroeconomic policy, campaign finance reform, and indeed nearly every other policy area save a handful of hot-button "social issues" are basically dominated by big money. The consequences are disastrous: Neither party can level with the American people in crises. They cannot diagnose problems like the financial crisis with any honesty and they can't make any detailed case for why the policies they do sponsor would actually benefit ordinary Americans. What we get instead are pseudo-explanations, myths, and sometimes, obvious mendacity. Political discussions in the media, where they are not distorted by the plain interests of the concerns themselves, are dominated by denizens of the "think tank" and "policy institute" world. Most of these institutions are heavily driven by, surprise, surprise, big money in the form of donors. As Robert Johnson and I documented in our paper for last year's INET Conference, growing inequality in the United States complicates this dismal picture by converting regulatory agencies into recruiting grounds for would be millionaires via the revolving door, while at the same time permitting the financial sector to substitute virtually untraceable stock tips for direct contributions.

Lynn Parramore: Where do you see politicians making up policy myths right now?

Thomas Ferguson: On the Republican side, you again have people claiming that the problems of the Great Recession can be solved by reapplying the policies of Herbert Hoover. Surely this is amazing; they are plumping for going straight back to the deregulated market economy that brought you the 2008 disaster. It's simply crazy, for example, to even consider leaving financial houses free to decide on their own level of leverage, to sell derivatives on exchanges that are not fully transparent, or to sell junk securities to their own customers without telling them. But the Republicans are threatening to roll back even the anemic Dodd-Frank financial "reform" legislation, though, to be fair, they will have plenty of Democratic support for some of this.

And it's obvious that neither party wants to address the problem of campaign finance reform. Instead, the Democrats spent part of the campaign talking up dangers from "foreign" money. It's not as though the problems of the system of American political financing come from foreign money. The problem is mostly domestic money. And the Supreme Court has made everything worse with its Citizens United decision. But, note well, the tragedy of big money in the Democratic Party was clear long before that Supreme Court ruling or even before Obama started running for president. Just look at the earlier cases I analyzed in my Golden Rule.

Fundamentally, the problem of money and politics is very simple: campaigning is costly, much more costly than classical democratic theory has acknowledged. Some way has to be found to pay for it. We may take it as an axiom that those who pay for the campaign will control it. So the choices boil down to just two: either we all pay a little, through public financing of campaigns, or a relative handful of the super-rich end up controlling the system because they pay for the campaign.

Lynn Parramore: Does the financial sector give more to Democrats or Republicans?

Thomas Ferguson: We've all seen the staggering statistics on lobbying and political contributions by the financial sector over the last couple of years. More recently, we've also heard about how finance is supposed to have turned against the Democrats. There's something to this: bank contributions to the Republicans increased when discussions of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started as the House began considering Dodd-Frank. Contributions to the GOP swelled when the White House panicked after Scott Brown won the special election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts and endorsed the so-called "Volcker Rule", just as public indignation about bank bonuses was at its height. But the size of the shift toward Republicans has been exaggerated. If you look at total political contributions from securities and investment firms over the entire 2009-2010 election cycle, you will see that more money still flowed to the Democrats. Commercial banks, a narrower sub-group of the financial sector, gave more to Republicans, but only by about 60-40.

Lynn Parramore: So where does all this leave the American political system?

Thomas Ferguson: I think the answer is pretty clear: The political system is disintegrating, probably heading toward a real breakdown of some sort. The striking thing is that if you look beneath the surface of the victorious Republican Party, it is about as contentiously divided as the Democrats. The Tea Party's distrust of the party establishment is apparent, but the divisions within the GOP predated the Tea Party's emergence. They were obvious in 2008. At that time, it was pretty clear that a majority of the party did not want McCain. But there was no consensus on an alternative. 2012 is looking like a repeat of 2008: All kinds of people are eyeing the race, including several would-be candidates who can probably raise large war chests. In the end, somebody is going to win - my dark horse candidate is Haley Barbour, probably the Republican politician who is most closely connected to big business - but the whole party is unlikely to unite around him or her. In all probability, the GOP primaries will turn into a demolition derby, tending to discredit everyone involved. I also doubt that the Republican governors who are now promising to cut state budgets will find the public nearly as receptive to deep cuts as they think it will be, as people watch essential social services disappear, prisons empty, and see educational institutions trashed out that are in many cases the only hope of lagging states. Nor do I believe there is any popular majority for cutting Social Security, which is clearly emerging as a major issue just as we speak. And parts of the health care legislation are really popular, so that just saying no is going to look pretty foolish after some months.

The key to the future of American politics is the course of unemployment, though that is linked vitally to housing markets and how you deal with people's lost pensions and savings. If unemployment stays high, I would not be surprised to see some intra-party challenges to President Obama, even though right now everyone dismisses that possibility. The unions went down the line with Obama for the last two years and they have little to show for it; some of them are already scouting other possibilities. It is also interesting to speculate about Jerry Brown - just watch his star rise if he succeeds in overcoming the California fiscal crisis. Were Brown to defeat Obama in a few primaries, then the temptation for Hillary Clinton to come in would be intense. And right now the United States is mired down in two shooting wars that are not going very well.

Even more interesting are the possibilities of a third party candidacy - the obvious entrant is Mayor Bloomberg. He's plainly considering it. I notice that he does not appear to have folded the network of organizations that quietly talked up his candidacy in 2008. That tells you plenty.

Lynn Parramore: So is American politics fated to be all doom and gloom?

Thomas Ferguson: If you want a happy ending, you probably shouldn't follow our system too closely in the next few years. Instead, go see a Disney movie, unless perhaps Tim Burton is making it. Bloomberg, Brown, or Hillary Clinton, though, are all known quantities. But the experience of the Great Depression was that as things failed to improve the swamp creatures got their chance. And when the economic situation shook out, the geopolitics became more sinister. It would be a rash person indeed who counted on a happy ending to this mess.

Selected Comments

attempter

This is a pretty good synopsis. It gives a good one-paragraph summary of the Bailout and correctly pegs these facts:
  1. The people are rejecting both parties; all recent elections were rejections, not affirmations.
  2. The only exception to that was the extent to which people really did believe Obama's lies about "change".

While the "progressives" themselves look incorrigible, the fact that the masses in general believed in this fraudulent campaign simply reflects their desperation for real Change. It was enough for them to look upon Obama as a kind of de facto "alternate" candidate. (The 2010 election demonstrates how they realized their error. The Dems are eternally Dems and are just as worthless and criminal as the Reps.)

(The same would obviously be true of a pseudo-alternative run by Bloomberg, who would represent more of the neoliberal same. At best maybe it would result in more gridlock, if a rich pseudo-"independent" became president.)

3. We can have American elections again only if America takes back control of them, including financial control. All elites are unified in trying to prevent this. Citizens United was a formal ratification of the general anti-democratic conspiracy.

So Ferguson is right in saying that whoever pays for the election will receive value from it. If you want democracy, you need full public funding and to purge large-scale private funding. If, on the other hand, you allow large private bribes and "corporate speech", then you receive kleptocracy, and that's implicitly what you always wanted.

You want to will an end, you have to will the means. You will a means, you implicitly will the end those means guarantee.

That's a law of life.

(BTW, to achieve a real transformation in Argentina 10 years ago required, among other things, basically getting rid of and replacing the existing, irremediably corrupt supreme court. Just saying.)

I think, however, that the returns are in and the evidence proves that "representative democracy" itself is just pseudo-democracy, and cannot be "reformed". Even without a rogue supreme court validating direct corporate purchase of elections, that would go on constantly anyway. It's the same war of attrition that regulators can never win so long as the rackets exist at all.

So it follows that if we want democracy, we have to completely rid ourselves of the rackets, of corporate power itself. (That's just one of many, many reasons to do so.)

And we know that one part of how organized crime was able to seize power in the first place was through its control of these "representatives". We know that the whole point of setting up a "republic" in the first place was to ensure that the elites could most effectively rule a divided people. (Cf. Federalist #51.)

So again, if we will liberty and democracy, it follows that we must recognize representative pseudo-democracy as an inadequate means and relegate it to history's trash heap with the rest of the systems which have been proven inherently criminal. We must institute the only mode of polity and economy which has been proven to work on a practical level, to safeguard the people's sovereignty, and to give adequate scope to our positive freedom imperative: Direct democracy, true federalism, and the cooperative stewardship economy.

kievite
While I myself periodically write posts in this style something is definitely wrong with your approach to the problem. Let me play Devil Advocate here.

First of all there is no evidence that money played less role in the USA politics in the past. Elections were always extremely corrupt. Two party system was always a trick to prevent emergence of the third party and, in essence, just an improved and more sophisticated variant of the USSR one party system. So what exactly you are complaining about ? :-)

The key problem is the we deal with the transformation of capitalism into financial (casino) capitalism and this process trumps other factors. There is little that can be done after train left the station under Reagan or even earlier. Events just run their natural course and it was not bad years at all, if you think about them. I would say that 1970-2010 was probably the most prosperous 50 years in the USA history. Almost each family has a car, most have separate housing, enough food, superabundant amount of clothing, electronics (computer, cell-phones after 2000, Internet access, etc), etc, can enjoy traveling during vacations, etc. Is not this a paradise for common people?

If you think about logical complexity of providing peaceful coexistence of 300 million people for 50 years, this is a really an achievement or ruling elite and the such a nation can be called (borrowing the term from our Republican friends) a blessed nation. One big danger - nationalism - the force the blow up the USSR is almost completely absent. In this sense too, the USA can be called a blessed nation.

History shows that each economic regime comes to a natural end. I think we might be close to a logical end of casino capitalism stage. The current regime may slump another several miles but I doubt that it will survive. The real question here is what next ?

My feeling is that this failed bet on financial institutions providing revenue from foreign operations on the scale enough to sustain the economy on the strength of the dollar as reserve currency was doomed from the very beginning and became really self-defeating after emergence of euro.

Financial institutions tried their best to grow but in a process became far more reckless gamblers then is healthy due to disappearance of the regulation (everybody and his brother wanted them to grow and prosper) and put nation well-being into question.

Now there is a zugzwang situation: if you demolish financial institutions you will lose the dubious advantages of building them up for the last 30 years and associated foreign operations revenue streams.

If you let them survive, the cost of keeping them afloat is sinking everything else. Essentially in the current form they impose a tax on the economy that suppresses growth of other sectors. The extent of this effect is debatable but that's how I see it.

"Peak everything" does not help in this situation either and that's a huge difference with Great Depression. Another big different is disappearance of the Communist Block which helped indirectly to provide a countervailing force to excessive greed and as such played important positive role in the USA economic development.

I think this framework is more productive way to look at the current political and economic problems than any fixation on elections and (illusive) two party system.

attempter
November 13, 2010 at 9:59 am If you read the OP you'd see it was largely about elections, therefore I focused on them in the reply.

As a general rule I regard them as a detail. As I said, pseudo-democracy is an irremediable scam.

Although the criminals certainly like when you repeat their talking points for them: "Nothing's changed, this is just a doldrum. It's always been like this at times."

Of course if you really understand "peak everything", then you know why it's never remotely been like this.

As for what's really in store unless we fight, I've written extensively about that, but here's my best crystallization:

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/part-4-the-full-fury-of-the-new-feudal-war-the-intended-end-state/

DownSouth
November 13, 2010 at 11:39 am •

kievite

First of all there is no evidence that money played less role in the USA politics in the past. Elections were always extremely corrupt. Two party system was always a trick to prevent emergence of the third party and, in essence, just an improved and more sophisticated variant of the USSR one party system. So what exactly you are complaining about ?

This is way too heavy-handed an interpretation of American history. As George Orwell asserted in "England Your England": "All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as not bread." For, as Orwell went on to point out (the year was 1941), "In England such concepts as justice, liberty, and objective truth are still believed in."

Are these concepts still believed in within the United States? I don't know. There has certainly been a well orchestrated campaign by leading Universities and think-tanks over the last 50 years to destroy these ideals. And assertions like yours, by making it sound like there was never a time in history when these concepts were believed in, only aids and abets the right-wing.

Recommended reading here is Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy. In the first great contest between the Whigs (Jeffersonians) and the Tories (Federalists/Hamiltonians) on the American stage, the Tories were thoroughly routed. Here's Phillips:

Hamilton's use of government banking and debt to reward a wealthy elite trespassed on the Revolutionary credo, as did the excise taxes so anathemous to farmers…

Wealth and aristocracy remained a target through 1800 as the rich-poor gap widened in the major cities. The share of assets held by the top 10 percent in New York City climbed from 54 percent in 1789 to 61 percent by 1795, while much the same thing occurred in Philadelphia. New York and Pennsylvania were also the hotbeds of conspicuous speculation, and Pennsylvania farmers were the angriest over Federalist taxes. When the elections of 1800 gave Jefferson twenty of the two states' combined twenty-seven electoral votes, the Virginian beat John Adams, and no Federalist ever again held the presidency.

There are other counterfactuals to your sweeping generalization that "Elections were always extremely corrupt."

kievite
"I would say that 1970-2010 was probably the most prosperous 50 years in the USA history…. Is not this a paradise for common people? ….. this is a really an achievement or ruling elite and the such a nation can be called (borrowing the term from our Republican friends) a blessed nation."

The period from 1970-2007 was a period of declining fortunes for the bottom two quintiles of US society, treading water for the middle two quintiles, and improving fortunes for only the upper quintile, and this very heavily weighted to the top 1%. Beginning in 2008, all quintiles except the upper quintile, and perhaps even the top 10%, went into a tailspin.

kievite
"My feeling is that this failed bet on financial institutions providing revenue from foreign operations on the scale enough to sustain the economy on the strength of the dollar as reserve currency was doomed from the very beginning and became really self-defeating after emergence of euro."

"Sustain the economy" for whom? The distribution of the rewards of imperialism, whether of the traditional kind (acquire raw materials and resources on the cheap and export expensive manufactured goods) or the new kind (neo-imperialism or financial imperialism, the alliance of neoliberalism with neoconservatism whereby capital, finance and financial products are the export product) , are always highly skewered toward the rich and the powerful of the empire.

kievite
"…if you demolish financial institutions you will lose the dubious advantages of building them up for the last 30 years and associated foreign operations revenue streams."

Who cares, other than the economic and political overlords? The economic benefits from these financial institutions flow only to a very select portion of the population. Why should the 99% who don't receive any benefit care whether they live or die?

Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio
I think you would agree that Federalist #51 is a continuation of Federalist #10.

If ever there was a more explicit, honest explanaton of how to thwart majority rule and why doing so was necessary, Madison penned it in #10. Reading both #10 and #51 and then reading the US Constitution should dispel any illusions of "democracy" extolled in Civics 101. Couple these writings with the historical context – French Revolution abroad and Whiskey Rebellion here – in which they were written and the fact that the Founding Elites were not "democrats" is no surprise.

Blaming it all on money is too simplistic! And to assert that the political system is disintegrating, as opposed to undergoing transformation, is a bit of a stretch. If it is then the outcome is likely to be a right-wing authoritarianism of the kind that will likely find many of us "disappearing" into the void of cyberspace with no identity or record of ever having existed outside of immediate family and friends. Los desaparecidos nuevos!

Such thinking absolves the "left" of any culpabillity or responsibilty for this failure. Or at least it fails to explain the resurgence of the reactionary right – a process that began in 1964, if not sooner, and its growing domination of American politics since the late 60s. The eclipse/rout of the "left" in this country since then is what requires explanation. Then how the situation can be reversed, if at all.

With the "left" demonized, its ideas discredited, and balkanization fragmenting it into nonsignifcance since the late 60s, any attempt to equate Obama with FDR was pure hype and ahistorical. Conditions in 2007-08 were vastly different from those in 1929-32. Back then, there was a fairly well organized LEFT to the left of FDR. Banks were mistrusted, if not hated, and stuffing money in the mattress was taken literally. Moreover, the very existence of the Soviet Union made many a capitalist willing to "share the wealth" to "prove" that capitalism works for everyone rather than confront the red alternative head on. It is no concidence that the demise of the Soviet Union, death of the New Deal Coalition, and resurgence of the RIGHT in this country have coincided. Naomi Klein has documented this in DISASTER CAPITALISM.

Obama himself is a product of this counterrevolution [1968-present] and his purported "radicalism" has to be examined in this light. His capture by the "leftwing" of the bankers is hardly surprising. Nor is their investment and susbequent payback. A generational groupthink shared by ruling elites of either persuasion, but with the fundamentals of the "American Consensus" agreed upon by all.

With the New Deal Coalition dead, organized labor a vague memory, and the electorate fragmented into competing factions, the Left simply has no leverage. Unable to disrupt the machine, yet alone shut it down, there's nothing to push/pull Obama left. There is no permanent base, but rather, a fluid amalgam of competing factions. Ironically, the sustainable majority able to capture all three branches of government over time envisioned by Madison in Fed #10 and #51 has been built. But it's on the RIGHT. How sustainable is debatable, but for now…

Even Keynesianism, the economic orthodoxy of the Left for much of the postwar period has been found wanting. Once "progressive" it is now one side of a reactionary coin that limits debate on economics to how much capitalism is in the offing. Complete laissez-faire versus regulated laissez-faire! There's simply no discussion of any alternative to capitalism. That is a significant difference between the 1930s and the present.

Taking money out of politics will only matter if the Left can create a sustainable majority to supplant the current one. Otherwise, let's not kid ourselves any longer with overly simplistic monocausal explanations of what is wrong with the American political system. The hour is getting late…

attempter
I have no idea where you people are getting this "monocausal" stuff from my comment. I reiterate, I went with the example from the OP.

I could write a hundred comments using a hundred different examples to reach my conclusion, and as I said above elections are not one of my main examples.

I specified #51 because I've often had occasion lately to think about this quote:

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority - that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.

So I kind of had it on the brain.

I wrote more extensively on both:

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/federalism-and-the-corporate-gangs-madisons-federalist-10/

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/madisons-federalist-51-corporate-power-vs-the-naked-citizen/

I agree completely that the Professional Left, i.e. the corporate liberals, are a traitor cadre, while what used to be called the real Left have been airbrushed out of the media existence. We're in the "sphere of deviance", to use one term of art from analysis of the MSM. (And this even though polls consistently show that America is a center to center-left country, and therefore far to the left of the economic elites, political class, and MSM.)

But the left-right spectrum is no longer useful anyway, in part because of that gaping lacuna and total abdication.

The real spectrum runs democrat/citizen to elitist. Both conservatives and liberals are far to the elitist end of the spectrum by now, especially on economic matters.

Which leads to the great specific faultline which splits all issues and defines all positions no matter what they are: corporatism vs. anti-corporatism.

skippy
November 13, 2010 at 8:22 pm Welcome to Whop Whop

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120491/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0mDGxWC2VQ

Skippy…if you can't buy them off…chain them.

Roger Bigod
I agree with your diagnosis, and I'm open to the idea that radical reform is a good idea. But I couldn't understand any of your last sentence. I have no idea what any of the terms mean or how the institutions would work.

The Constitution relies on Common Law notions of the 3 branches, and there were 13 working examples at the state level, so anyone reading it knew exactly what they were being asked to ratify. There was a theory of institutions in the work of Montesquieu.

For a radical revision of our political machinery, there is no comparable intellectual substrate. We are exhorted to organize, to become activist. But where are the guidelines, the goals, the practical steps to take next?

attempter
It's some of the same substrate. Read Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution for an extended discussion of the heritage and connotations of concepts/terms like rights, consent, representation, constitution, and sovereignty.

The book itself is something of a whitewash of the many of the founders, but however much they actually did cherish those ideals, here we learn what those ideals really meant.

So if the goal were to be put in terms of resuming the long-neglected and/or hijacked American Revolution, that's one source which can help us to understand what we're really talking about.

As for what I meant by my sentence:

We must institute the only mode of polity and economy which has been proven to work on a practical level, to safeguard the people's sovereignty, and to give adequate scope to our positive freedom imperative: Direct democracy, true federalism, and the cooperative stewardship economy.

Direct democracy is government by local councils, or in American history, in some places at least, town halls. These councils could be organized along any number of lines – at the workplace, by profession, or by economic region, or by community, some combination of these, and there are probably other possibilities I'm not thinking of.

True federalism means power is exercised at the level from whence it arises in the first place, among the people in their workplaces and/or communities. Authority is delegated upward, e.g. to regional councils, only on a provisional, mostly consultative basis, and all representatives are subject to instant recall. All significant decision-making, of course, remains in the hands of the local councils.

(This is also the proper manifestation of sovereignty, which always and only reposes in the people, and can only be conditionally delegated to any smaller and/or "higher" group.)

A cooperative economy is one where sovereignty would be properly organized economically. Since no one can legitimately "own" land, natural resources, or the socially constructed infrastructure, i.e. the means of production, such resources and infrastructure would be either cooperatively worked and self-managed by the worker council, and/or distributed on the basis of useful possession or productive stewardship, or any similar term one preferred.

This is the only way to not abrogate economic sovereignty and to ensure the most effective production. Since all rents would be purged, this would be by far the most equitably productive economy. That's what I was referring to when I referred to its unique practicality. (Although I also meant that the Spanish collectives of the Civil War accomplished prodigies of production under the most free circumstances any communities and workers have known, until they were destroyed by the combined treachery and violence of liberals, communists, and fascists.)

What to do to accomplish this? Any constructive economic relocalization action is worthwhile, but especially increasing local food production and rationalizing its local distribution. Getting involved in local politics on behalf of this relocalization goal is also needful, but I think the political action probably needs to follow the established economic (or other practical) action.

That's just a few thoughts for now.

nilys
Ferguson starts with a good premise that "both parties are dominated by blocs of large investors", but fails to develop it. I got excited, expecting to read about different blocs, their hidden interests and disagreements and struggles with one another, and how these interests of a particular group of "money bags" are packaged and sold to the public as a good public policy. Instead, Ferguson went on to talk about personalities – and all the familiar faces – Hillary, Jerry, Haley, Bloomberg – who cares who of these figure heads wins? Personalities and petty personal feuds are mistaken for politics and especially deep politics. Even Ferguson can't help but fall into the personality cult. Indeed, no happy ending…
hermanas
I was stunned to hear that America was the world's "oldest democracy" the other day. 234 years, in all the thousands of years of political institutions, democracy doesn't seem to have any legs.
Tom Crowl
You're sadly right…

No democracy has been able to overcome the creeping problem of cronyism (rooted in the boundaries of biological alt-ruism).

In fact, all such systems… while implicitly recognizing the issue… (that's what's behind things like a House of Commons and the use of sortition (juries), etc.)…

Have not recognized the need to evolve with changing circumstances. Instead they allow the self-worship of their own eventually-mythologized institutions to render them incapable of reform and easily gamed… and control fraud grows.

How Would Hunter-gatherers Run the World? (Psst… They DO!) http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunter-gatherers-run-world.html

Ayn Rand & Alan Greenspan: The Altruism Fly in the Objectivist Ointment http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/10/ayn-rand-alan-greenspan-altruism-fly-in.html

Tom Crowl
November 13, 2010 at 9:13 am suppose its obvious but I meant to say:

"Have NOT recognized the need…"

Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio
November 13, 2010 at 11:02 am The United States is not a "democracy" but rather a republican form of representative government designed to thwart the will of the majority. The latter can manifest itself only when all three branches of government have been captured by it over time. If anything, the separation of powers and checks and balances enumerated in the US Constitution and built into the political system are little more than a divide-and-conquer strategy to prevent the majority of propertyless from "confiscating" the property of the minority.

For as James Madison stated explicitly in Federalist #10:

"the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribuion of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

And that Mr. Madison and the other Founding Fathers were decidely "those who held [property]" should put paid any pretense at democracy. Indeed, the paradox in need of explanation would seem to be how the Founding Fathers deemed human nature evil and corrupted by self-interest then miraculaously and magnanimously opted to set up a government that did not promote THEIR collective self-interest?

It may not be the fairytale taught in civics courses from day one, but the United States is not a DEMOCRACY by any stretch of the imagination.

i on the ball patriot
November 13, 2010 at 1:01 pm Mickey - you are on fire as of late - good comments all.

Regarding this …

"And that Mr. Madison and the other Founding Fathers were decidely "those who held [property]" should put paid any pretense at democracy. Indeed, the paradox in need of explanation would seem to be how the Founding Fathers deemed human nature evil and corrupted by self-interest then miraculaously and magnanimously opted to set up a government that did not promote THEIR collective self-interest?'

No paradox at all, what they set up did promote their collective self interests, it was a representative republic and of course not a direct democracy, but it was indeed a step along the way TOWARDS direct democracy. They were slave owners, women did not vote and the Indian population at the time were demonized as heathens, etc. So they have no corner on magnanimity but are rather a function OF THEIR TIME.

But you used a term that should be brought center stage and always held up as a guide and a lens in examining the status quo and the need for change and formulating that change. That is the term COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST, for in the end it is the collective self interest of groups that is the glue of those groups, and the fewer groups that a society has that do not contribute to that collective self interest the stronger that society is.

But before making those observations consider first that we are far more ready for direct democracy than at the inception of our constitution. Physical chain slavery is gone (yes, debt slavery has taken over but that is another issue), women now have the right to vote (I know some that want to give it back), Indians have been assimilated into the culture (poorly and painfully, yes, but they are not as heavily demonized and exploited), etc., in short, the time for direct democracy is at hand.

So … if one views the present scene through that COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST LENS one can make some observations about the groups that our society is comprised of and whether or not each identifiable group strengthens or weakens that glue. If a society sets; fairness, equality, sustainability, individual freedom, Free Speech, religious freedom, prudence, etc. as highest ideals, then one can see that …

Excessive income wealth and excessive asset wealth are unfair and not in the collective self interest and must be regulated as they deprive the rest of the group a fair share. No pigs allowed in the new constitutional rewrite!

Excessive privately owned media conglomerations, especially those that use the public commons for transmittal, that create an overly loud voice with the volume to drown out other voices denies those others their Free Speech and are therefore not in the collective self interest of the group and should be downsized. Bye Bye megaphone rich folks!

Etc. …

The point here Mickey is that it is a good term, and a good lens of analysis to use because it keeps to the forefront of our thinking that the balance of both the individual and the group, THE COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST, of the group, is the glue that binds us all together and strengthens us. And so it should be woven more into the dialog. Reclaiming the language will be key to moving forward all of our collective self interests!

Are we ready for election boycotts yet? I think they will be in our collective self interests as they would help move direct democracy along.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

reslez
November 13, 2010 at 3:39 pm I frequently see people suggest election boycotts. What I have never seen is a convincing explanation that links election boycotts to actual progress. Maybe you support boycotts because you believe the act of voting supports a corrupt system, or it causes voters to become complicit. This seems more like a position based on hollow moral consistency than something that would actually lead to change.

The country needs more action and energy, not more apathy and abstention. At any rate action and energy should be attempted. But the psychology of non-voting means non-voters are actually less likely to take other forms of action. They already believe they have no voice. If people were swarming the ballot box to vote for the Rent Is Too D*mn High party or any other third party they prefer, the existing system would be cratered. Even if - or because - those third party candidates would fail to change the system. Their failure would be revelatory.

For the vast majority, abstention is a form of sleepwalking. I'm not saying people who are already Awake should waste time with the existing political system, I'm saying most people are Asleep and will only awaken once they stop Dreaming that the system works or non-voting is anything other than abdication.

i on the ball patriot
Yes, I support election boycotts because voting DOES legitimize and validate a corrupt system, and yes, lending your good name to the corrupt process makes you complicit with the gangster government that corrupt process produces and their gangster actions. There is nothing morally inconsistent about it.

Election boycotts are "not more apathy and abstention" as you claim (the system line I might point out) but rather they are an active rejection of the system - a 'vote of no confidence' in the entire government. And they can be made even more active by writing to one's supervisor of elections explaining why one is opting out. In addition they are, and can be more of if better organized, a force outside of the system to rally around and discuss the formulation of a constitutional rewrite for a new government that is more responsible to the collective self interest of the people.

Ferguson claims this election was a resounding 'vote of no confidence' in democrats. He makes that absurd claim based on a miserably low 42% turnout, and completely disregards the greater 'vote of no confidence' in the entire government - 58% of the electorate BOYCOTTED the elections. This in spite of the worst economy in years, a fact that should have swamped the voting booths but did not, and the over the top corrupt system spent almost FOUR BILLION getting out the vote to validate the scam …

"Midterm election spending approaches $4 billion"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-campaign-finance-20101028,0,5077420.story

Those people that are asleep will awaken sooner when they realize their power. When they realize that a 58% boycott of the scam electoral process is a number that they should celebrate and build on. It is an exciting and an enormous expression of 'no confidence' in this gangster government. Run with this good news and shout it out to the world! rally around it! 58% of scamericans rejected their crooked government! Whoopee!!!!

And that four billion dollars wasted on the validation scam would have fed a lot of homeless people!

Deception is the strongest political force on then planet.

skippy
I voted with my feet, by not using them, by showing my backside.

No Obama's, no Palings, no religious backed, billionaire, thinktankistan, military industrial, health care cough oxymoron, financial innovator, moneyed special interest lobbyist, no right or left animal will ever receive my stamp ever again, out of a lack, of a human candidate.

James
And the alternative to boycotts given the fact that the status quo sucks is what?

On second thought, asked and answered. Think about it.

Siggy

Our contract for government specifies that which is a Federal Republic, not a democracy!

What has been eroded is the Federal Republic in favor of something that represents itself as a democracy. It's time to consider making a choice, which shall you have: A republic or a democracy?

Do you want free markets or fair markets? Do you want a currency that maintains its purchasing power? Or, do you want easy credit and unprosecuted financial fraud?

Make a list, vote it.

Richard Kline
I would be happy indeed if Ferguson's consideration of a real implosion of the two-handed one party system was in any way imminent, but I have no such optimism. One function of Ferguson's discussion of personalities for 2012 is his engagement with the reality that there are no substantive alternatives in the offing. No 'personality' alternatives; no structural alternatives; that election cycle is two years away. That is a function of the failure of organizing. The stasis we have no can easily, quite easily, slink along for several decades. Consider the politics of, say, France, between the Great Wars. Nothing, exactly nothing, changed in their broad social and geopolitical program despite the messy inefficacy and frank unpopularity of all significant political parties. Britain didn't look much better. Germany only got change you can get dead from from outside the system. You see, folks, stasis is GOOD for the oligarchy: they don't need functioning government beyond a false front level. Indeed, one could well say that stasis is the _policy_ of the oligarchy because it is the environoment in which they thrive, at the expense of everyone else, literally in our case since we are paying them directly out of government monies to rule us for themselves. Sick . . . .

But I also think the analysis that 'voters are rejecting both parties' is at best half true. This seems to be crowdsource consensus of the past election, but it really wasn't what happened. Voters unhappy because of unemployment 'thought out the Democrats?' Bunk. Yes, bunk; read the returns. Areas with high unemployment which had Democrats mostly kept them. And to a degree rightly so. Every poll of the last two plus years shows that the public as a whole understands exactly what the Republican economic program is, dislikes it totally, and has at least a little more confidence in the Democratic program (to oversimplify and concede, wrongly, that the Democrats even have a program). So voters unemployed chose the party which, with a patina of sanity, might do them some good. Democratic losses were heavy in areas that in recent years have been Republican leaning. That is, two years ago those areas through out Republicans to punish them, but now in the hope that the Repubs are sufficiently chastened voted them back in. The turn to Democrats there was largely due to independent swing votes moving more or less tactically rather than in any way in preference for Democrats. What we are really seeing is that long-standing voter preferences are _hardening_ not loosening in their respective areas. Independent voters are notoriously fickle in American history, and they are, with great and perhaps justified cynicism, shopping their votes cycle by cycle to whomever they think will pay them out the most. I mean Dubya bought the independents for $450 a head, outbidding Gore (anyone remember _that_ execrable stinkfest). The Democrats had a superb opportunity to cement themselves in office for multiple cycles by actually delivering some reform but they couldn't trample that opportunity fast enough in their efforts to pay out to the oligarchy enough to win their favor, failing there too.

We are likely to see stasis of much the present structure for _years_, and quite possibly for several decades. The only break in that would be the successful organizing of an actual reformist party, revolution, or a major asterioid impact, all of which are on similar orders of magnitude in probability in my view. -And public discontent will be met with repression. At this point, Americans are such a cowed lot it won't take very much repression to get them back in their cubicles either. Stasis in decine can last a remarkably long time. Four generations is not unusual historically, though I wouldn't see that as the likely term here now.

Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio
Well said and succinct, especially the last paragraph!

"The only break in that would be the successful organizing of an actual reformist party, revolution, or a major asterioid impact, all of which are on similar orders of magnitude in probability in my view. -And public discontent will be met with repression."

Careful, you might be mistaken for a "defeatist" rather than a realist. The "Great Awakening" is upon US. Can't you see it?

What irks me is the subjectivist, chiliastic, millenarian wishful thinking of so many on the Left that believe it's merely a question of waking up – not successful organizing and getting dirty, down in the mud. Even if the people have woken up, it's a long march to successful organizing before any appreciable difference will be noticed. I may not like your odds… but they are accurate.

John Strong
I think is mention of "swamp creatures" is very instructive. We have become immune to some very inflammatory in-group/out-group rhetoric that has the whiff of serious conflict to those of us old enough to remember it. Add to this that the dialogue (and increasingly policy) is to a greater extent than ever controlled by the commentariat, and you really have the potential for cultural upheaval. If I were Canada or Mexico, I'd be getting a little nervous.

jake chase
All talk about voter "decisions" is nonsense. The percentage of voters who consider anything resembling information cannot be as high as five percent.

The remainder relies exclusively upon received ideas, preconceptions susceptible to clever propaganda, and comes to the table knowing nothing whatsoever about how things actually work. To expect anything good to result from our system is akin to Einstein's view of insanity.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Unfortunately, Ferguson bemoans the fact that not all of the TARP money was "paid back" to the government, and that the government "lost money" on the deal. He does not realize that money "paid back" to the government is the same as a tax. .

When GM proudly trumpeted it had paid back $8.1 billion of government loans, it really should have said, "We just paid $8.1 billion in taxes, which removed $8.1 billion from the economy, thereby slowing the economy accordingly. We could have used that $8.1 billion to hire people or to expand in other ways, but instead we chose just to throw it on a bonfire."

A monetarily sovereign government never should lend money to its citizens. It only should give money. But Ferguson does not understand the implications of monetary sovereignty. He thinks the federal government's finances are like yours and mine, and that somehow the federal government needs tax money.

That false belief is the cause of much of our current problems.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

James
Well then, WHY, pray tell, doesn't the Treasury just credit the bank accounts of the unemployed? Problem solved, yes? Instant stimulus applied exactly where it's needed the most.
reslez
Well then, WHY, pray tell, doesn't the Treasury just credit the bank accounts of the unemployed?

This is only a mystery if you haven't been paying attention. Anything that would benefit the people - the unemployed, homedebtors - is politically impossible. Anything that would benefit the banks is achieved instantly and with the minimum possible debate.

James
This is only a mystery if you haven't been paying attention.

Granted, but the question was meant to be rhetorical and leading, thank you very much.

To the larger question, these MMT'ers always imply, if not state outright, that there truly is a free lunch when it comes to sovereigns and monetary policy. What I'd like to know is what's the limit to this foolishness? Especially knowing full well that if Washington ever comes to embrace this stuff wholeheartedly the debt will surely know no bounds.

If taxation's only purpose is to reinforce the need for the sovereign's currency in the first place, why not reduce the tax rate to say 5% across the board (yeah right, see how long that last before the GOP is calling for even MORE tax cuts!) and be done with it? And if debt really doesn't matter and it doesn't have to actually be debt in the first place, why even keep track of it in the first place, except purely as a measure of the size of the overall economy? For that matter, why are we even using the Fed as a debt based currency issue mechanism, other than the obvious answer: to make rich bankers even richer.

These are serious questions, I'm not merely being facetious. So go ahead one of you econophiles, go ahead and 'splain it to me please.

JTFaraday
November 13, 2010 at 8:43 pm "Well then, WHY, pray tell, doesn't the Treasury just credit the bank accounts of the unemployed? Problem solved, yes? Instant stimulus applied exactly where it's needed the most."

Anyone over 60 who got rolled should be given their social security benefits early. If a society sees fit to involuntarily retire people early, it should back it up.

We're opening the SS discussion shortly. Time to reform the system.

"And if debt really doesn't matter and it doesn't have to actually be debt in the first place, why even keep track of it in the first place, except purely as a measure of the size of the overall economy?"

Because if they conceded it didn't matter then everyone under 60 will likewise want instant credits to their account so they can pursue their creative interests and then there will be no one left to scrub John Thain's golden toilet.

And, needless to say, we can't have that.

reslez
November 13, 2010 at 2:52 pm You're right of course on the economics, but you miss the point. The propaganda claim "government made a profit on TARP" is intended to reassure voters that money was not given away to banks. A monetarily sovereign government can certainly give away money to whatever groups it chooses, but that it chooses to support wealthy oligarchs instead of the people is simply obscene.

Tom Crowl
November 13, 2010 at 8:55 am American politics IS broken. And money is a central branch of the problem. However the root is cronyism ( and this is rooted in the boundaries of biological altruism).

"Big" money is dominating and distorting political decision to the detriment of this (and historically eventually ALL) representative systems. It's also behind of problems in credit creation, btw.

I don't believe that public financing of elections will solve this problem. I fear it will lead to only 'government approved' candidates and government approved parties… and result in a whole new industry designed to game that as much as they game the military-industrial relationship and the Wall Street-Washington unholy alliance.

Approximately $4 billion was spent on this last campaign I understand. That's less than the price of a video game on sale for each of the 130 million registered voters.

Of course most never actually give to a cause or campaign.

I believe that can and will change (and it must… personal involvement is critical for a capable electorate… "Capability ENABLES Responsibility… government funded elections will lead to LESS participation).

The Commons-dedicated Account concept… by offering BOTH the capability for the micro-contribution as well as the capability for charitable contribution through the same system…

Eventually results in a stable and ubiquitous user-base. Since an account does NOT need to be continuously funded and has utility even when un-funded…

This 'facebook'-like network offers opportunities for 'empowered' local political association not currently available.

Further the existence of a 'scalable' platform (unlike a facebook page, a User's can have multiple pages focused on differing levels of political jurisdiction.

Here we then have opportunities for outreach and campaigning on a MUCH cheaper basis as well as the capability for LOCAL enterprises to engage their communities at the level at which they operate. This system will drastically LOWER the cost of campaigns and (I believe) eventually and paradoxically REDUCE the influence of money in politics.

This is a sketchy and quick synopsis but this is just a comment.

The account mechanism is patented (I still need $2005 for final bill to attorney and patent fees by Dec 7 if any want to be helpful and smart investors) and I'd really appreciate the chance to get this going.

I'm not the religious type. But I always have felt that what the 'historical' Jesus was talking about with "the meek shall inherit the earth"… is that the only chance this planet has is for regular people to stand up and take responsibility for it. To 'inherit' is not to be given something and be able to abandon responsibility for it… its just the opposite.

We've been given the right of self-governance… but have NOT taken up the responsibility.

Why Politics MUST be Localized http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-politics-must-be-localized.html

Empowering the Commons: The Dedicated Account (Part I) http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/08/empowering-commons-dedicated-account.html

LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/culturalengineer

Demo & FAQ http://www.Chagora.com

I'm neither a businessman nor a politician. I'm a citizen. I take the role seriously.

Jackrabbit
Many thanks to Tom Ferguson and others (Yves, Reich, Black, etc.) for speaking out. And thanks to attempter, Richard Kline, i_on_th_ball_patriot and many others that have written such illuminating comments on this blog and others. Some day these heroic efforts will be better understood and appreciated by a wide audience.

As the economy deteriorates, the banks and the super-wealthy have more and more difficulty covering the corruption. Any real reform could be a long time coming, though, as the system works to bamboozle people into playing along with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).

Writing that last sentence reminds me of the song lyrics: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

john
Can we please stop talking about "campaign finance reform" and start a serious discussion with real language about re-criminalizing bribery? To be considered a "serious candidate" in our entirely corrupt system one must first systematically solicit bribes and succeed. Advertisements on TV should be viewed as confessions of the prior crime of solicitation of bribery. Journalist should be a name reserved for reporters who show us how the corrupt serve their pay masters.

Money is not delivering progress, but we are still using its market tested language to talk about it. Use real language, please. There are no criminals in the current disasters because our entirely corrupt system was used to first de-criminalize innumerable crimes. Lets start calling fraud fraud, bribery bribery, theft theft. Yves is pretty good here about calling looting looting.

Roger Bigod
hermanas:

The fragility of democracy has been known for some time. Aristotle thought there was a cycle of chaos -> monarchy -> aristocracy -> democracy -> chaos.

The Founders had read the history of ancient Greece and Rome, and some of their letters show that there were trying to set up institutions that would resist the processes of decay. Much of the Constitution is plumbing, designed to control and direct the flow of political power to the proper channels at the Federal level. Problems of democracy v. aristocracy are punted to the states.

It's easy to imagine the Founders as considering grand principles in the light of history's sweep and exercising amazing foresight. But all this was secondary to the main goal of cobbling together something that the self-interested, bickering states would ratify.

A revealing exchange occurred one day in the Convention when the delegates got into a long, emotional discussion of the franchise, including the question of restricting it to those with property. Gouverneur Morris, who spoke the most during the proceedings, was silent. Finally, he got up and told them that they were wasting their time because no matter what the written rules said, the rich would find a way to control the outcome if their interests were seriously threatened. He didn't say he approved, just that the real world operated that way.

When Morris was Ambassador to France during the Revolution, someone asked him about the possibility of a written constitution on the US model. His reply was that the US Constitution worked when applied by the US electorate, but that if the French electorate were put in charge, it would result in disaster. So he did have some trust in "the people". In fact, since the final document is almost all his final working draft, we have him to thank for its one emotionally evocative sentence, the to-do list that begins "We, the People".

In the civics class mythology, the Founders were inspired by Divine Wisdom to produce a supernaturally perfect document. But it didn't look that way to them. Around 1812, Morris decided that the Constitution had been a failure and should be scrapped. It looks like the US was in better shape at the time than it is today, so it's natural to wonder what he would think. Put the French electorate in charge?

hermanas
On a return flight from Paris to New York many years ago, after the meal was served, passengers went aft to smoke per regulation. The pilot, having diffulty controlling pitch requested everyone return to their seats where flight attendants said they could not smoke. French passengers rose and went back aft. When the pilot came back to plead with them, their response was "we smoke or we crash". The pilot said, "O.K. fine", and we arrived safely in NYC. But my luggage was lost.

hermanas
And thank you, Roger, for your educated response.

DownSouth
Tom Ferguson said: The political system is disintegrating, probably heading toward a real breakdown of some sort.

[….]

But the experience of the Great Depression was that as things failed to improve the swamp creatures got their chance. And when the economic situation shook out, the geopolitics became more sinister. It would be a rash person indeed who counted on a happy ending to this mess.

Here's a visual metaphor for what we have. We have an inverted pyramid, both in our political life and our economic life. Those who should be on top of the structure are instead at the bottom doing a "balancing act" by using, as Ferguson put it, "pseudo-explanations, myths, and sometimes, obvious mendacity." The structure is highly unstable and, as the video shows, the entire structure can be brought down by the slightest disturbance.

I would say our political and economic overlords opted for this inverted pyramidal structure beginning in the 1960s. It began with all the lies used to justify the Vietnam War, and the trend has been downhill ever since. So I would agree with Ferguson that our current crisis was a long time in the making.

We could say we are currently in Act X on the national stage. Act IX was the period from 1929 to the 1960s. During Act IX our national and economic overlords opted for more or less a pyramidal structure. Governmental, religious, media, educational and other institutions enjoyed a high level of legitimacy and broad support from the governed. The economic and political overlords didn't engage in the barrage of "pseudo-explanations, myths, and sometimes, obvious mendacity" to near the extent that they do now.

Act XIII on the American stage was the period that began shortly after the Civil War and lasted until 1929, when the political and economic structure came tumbling down. Act XIII was very much like Act X, our current act, in that it was a highly unstable inverted pyramid. The perfidy and treachery of our economic and political overlords knew no bounds.

As Ferguson makes clear, the really interesting part will come when the current inverted pyramid comes tumbling down, when "the swamp creatures" get "their chance." In the 1930s, the United States dodged lightening. The "swamp creatures" were held at bay and the nation experienced a revival and reawakening of the Jeffersonian ideals of equal justice, equal treatment before the law and popular democracy. Thus we had a renewal of important themes during Act I of our national drama.

Germany, however, wasn't so lucky.

Siggy
Interesting point of view. Could you clarify just what popular democracy is? Are you suggesting that we dispense with the Federal Republic? Then again it seems that over time and by various events we've already thrown it out; e.g., the repeal of Glass-Steagell.

The earlier reference to Federalist #10 and #51 is very apt. I find it encouraging that there is some knowledge of those two essays. They examine the necessity and essence of balancing the interests of the landed class with those of the rentier class.

I very much agree with Mr. Ferguson and would like to see him address the issue of just when is it that we shall have some inquisitions and prosecutions. My sense is that unless and until we have some prosecutions, the cancer will continue to destroy our Federal Republic.

DownSouth
Siggy,

When I talk about "popular democracy," I'm talking about elections like the one that occurred in 1800 when Jefferson prevailed over the Federalists (for more explanation see my 11:39 a.m. comment above). The flip side of this would be the type of elections that predominated in the late 19th century during the zenith of the Gilded Age, such as described here:

The Richmond County methods in Georgia and Alabama--wholesale ballot-box stuffing, open bribery, various forms of intimidation, and massive voting by dead or fictitious Negroes. The Richmond County methods of Georgia were almost precisely duplicated in the "Harrison County methods" used in East Texas to defeat "Cyclone" Davis. Indeed, in Texas the phrase "Harrison County methods" became the standard term defining the most effective Democratic campaign technique of the Populist era. Even on the face of the returns, and including in the total the controlled vote of South Texas, the Populist vote jumped from the 23 per cent of 1892 to almost 40 per cent in 1894. The "official" statewide total showed Nugent had been defeated for the governorship by 230,000 to 160,000, though a number of steps were taken to ensure that the real outcome would be forever beyond recovery. –The Populist Moment, Lawrence Goodwyn

And I agree that "the earlier reference to Federalist #10 and #51 is very apt" and "find it encouraging that there is some knowledge of those two essays." However, the way in which these documents were used in the comments above lacks subtlety. What it boils down to is that now, in response to the myth of American Exceptionalism, comes the counter myth. Malicious intent is ascribed to the Founding Fathers that did not exist.

To begin with, to evaluate the Founding Fathers by today's standards gives a highly distorted picture. Take Elvis Presley, for instance. In his day he was a highly innovative, and extremely controversial, figure. But in comparison to Mick Jagger, or even more so to some of today's popular musicians, he hardly seems radical. Yet no one would even remotely think of dethroning Elvis as "The King of Rock and Roll." Yet there are those who would rob the Founding Fathers of their place in political and economic history, even though in their day they were quite radical, and extremely controversial.

There's a book that everyone should read called The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History. It serves as a strong antidote and counterweight to some of the Marxist- and constructivist-inspired histories written by the likes of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

The Founding Fathers were not so much interested in examining "the necessity and essence of balancing the interests of the landed class with those of the rentier class" as they were finding a way to deal with "the tyranny of the majority" or "an excess of democracy." And their concerns were not limited to the material world--property. They included the spiritual world as well--oppressive religious majorities. Wherever "a majority are united by a common interest or passion," Madison concluded, "the rights of the minority are in danger." And as Madison went on to explain:

That diabolical, Hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some, and to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such business. This vexes me the most of anything whatever. There are…in the adjacent country not less than 5 or 6 well meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox.

As Lance Banning in his essay in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom explains:

Madison was deeply dedicated to the Revolutionary principle that governments derive their just authority from popular consent and must remain responsive to people's will. He was dedicated, too, to "justice," by which he meant equality before the law and scrupulous respect by government for natural law and natural rights. However obvious it seems to us that the desire to reconcile these two commitments is the fundamental paradox of every liberal democracy, early revolutionary thinkers did not necessarily anticipate a conflict.

In his 10:11 a.m. comment above Mickey alleges "Such thinking absolves the 'left' of any culpabillity or responsibilty for this failure. Or at least it fails to explain the resurgence of the reactionary right – a process that began in 1964, if not sooner, and its growing domination of American politics since the late 60s."

Personally, I think much of the "culpability or responsibility" for the failures of the left and "the resurgence of the reactionary right…and its growing domination of American politics since the late 60s" is to be found not in someone else's thinking, but in Mickey's.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs)" goes the creed popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. But what percentage of any general population really believes in that manifesto. How many people really desire "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," or equality in other words? I would say a minority, and quite a small minority.

The great Mexican painter Diego Rivera thought he had found in the ancient indigenous civilizations of Western Mexico examples of the egalitarian paradises of the past conceived by the Marxist ideology he embraced. The clay figures he collected from those cultures, after all, were so utterly human, capturing the empathetic expressions of everyday people in their daily communal life. Later studies, however, such as those in Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past, revealed something very different. The very clay figures Rivera collected in the belief that they were emblems of equality served just the opposite purpose. They were created and used as high-status objects that conveyed prestige and rank to their owners. Only the tribal elite owned these artistic creations.

Studies of extant primitive cultures reveal similar phenomenon, as is discussed in Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. No one starves in these primitive tribal societies, so the "needs" of all members of the tribe are met. However, the most productive hunters and gatherers are showered with adoration and prestige. They are the ones who rise to leadership positions within the tribe. Conversely, slackers and free-riders are shunned and ridiculed.

So there is something to this "natural law" that Madison spoke of after all (and which I think our reigning plutocrats are fixin' to learn about--and maybe the hard way). Most people desire hierarchy, but a hierarchy ordered on merit, performance, excellence and achievement. What a majority of people want is "justice," by which is meant "equality before the law and scrupulous respect by government for natural law and natural rights." This is something very different from a desire that everyone be equal, and herein lays one of the great miscalculations of the today's American left.

i on the ball patriot
November 13, 2010 at 5:00 pm You suddenly sound like a libertarian …

DownSouth says; "Studies of extant primitive cultures reveal similar phenomenon, as is discussed in Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. No one starves in these primitive tribal societies, so the "needs" of all members of the tribe are met. However, the most productive hunters and gatherers are showered with adoration and prestige. They are the ones who rise to leadership positions within the tribe. Conversely, slackers and free-riders are shunned and ridiculed."

Yes, just like today in scamerica slackers and free riders are "shunned and ridiculed." Is this what you go on to say, and appear to advocate, when you say below, "So there is something to this "natural law" that Madison spoke of after all (and which I think our reigning plutocrats are fixin' to learn about--and maybe the hard way)." …

http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&rls=ig&newwindow=1&q=homeless+people&sa=N&start=20&ndsp=20&biw=1020&bih=619

DownSouth says further; "So there is something to this "natural law" that Madison spoke of after all (and which I think our reigning plutocrats are fixin' to learn about--and maybe the hard way). Most people desire hierarchy, but a hierarchy ordered on merit, performance, excellence and achievement. What a majority of people want is "justice," by which is meant "equality before the law and scrupulous respect by government for natural law and natural rights." This is something very different from a desire that everyone be equal, and herein lays one of the great miscalculations of the today's American left."

Yes, there is something to natural law, it is Darwinian cannibalistic and civilized societies strive to rise above it in pursuit of the COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST of the society.

Most people do not desire hierarchy, rather they recognize that it is imposed upon them by simply being born as a cannibalistic organism (those that are really perceptive), and further magnified in intensity by being born into a hierarchical environment that reflects again that cannibalistic dog eat dog nature that has skewed and colored that environment that they are born into.

People are not born "slackers and free riders" as you claim. That is pure bullshit! People are made into slackers and free riders trying to cope with those who celebrate their cannibalistic Darwinian nature and act on it in an unbridled fashion. That is the nature celebrated in the artifacts you describe made in a PRIMATIVE culture, one that we must strive to rise above.

Those who claim that there is something to this "natural Law", and then use that something to justify taking far more than what would be a just share in a fair society, and then using that wealth to further shape the Darwinian dog eat dog cannibalistic world that we are all born into, in to a far greater Darwinian world, are full of self aggrandizing deceptive crap.

It is they who have created the aggregate generationally corrupted environment that comes with the imposition of a crooked FED and a scam 'rule of law'.

"SLACKERS AND FREE RIDERS" ARE NOT NATURAL, THEY ARE A PRODUCT OF, AND ARE CREATED BY, THEIR ALREADY FURTHER DARWINIZED ENVIRONMENT THAT THEY ARE BORN INTO - as in - you are what you have been through, but now and the future are up to you.

What most people really want is security and an opportunity to grow their human spirit/life force to its fullest potential. Perceptive people recognize that comes from recognizing "natural law" - yes, the pecking ordered competitive hierarchal system thrust upon us - but then rising above it by limiting that system, not because we "desire" it, but rather because we are forced by being born into it to honor it.

The balance that best serves the COLLECTIVE SELF INTEREST is the balance that will best do the job for all in the society and at the same time best serve evolution. If evolution is unhappy, as she appears to be with the present lop sided societal arrangement (just look around you globally for proof of that) she will give us a well deserved boot into the dust bin of unrecorded history.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

DownSouth
November 13, 2010 at 8:53 pm i on the ball patriot,

You and I must be using very different definitions of "natural law." And I don't suppose that's surprising, because the concept of natural law has been under concerted attack for several decades now by economists (most notably those from the Chicago School) and by the New Atheists (who hail from other disciplines of the social sciences).

Here's how Thomas Jefferson described natural law:

Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct in short…impelling us to virtuous actions, and warning us against those which are vicious.

Here's David Little talking about Jefferson and moral law in his essay in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

He tried to demonstrate that once the common moral denominator of all religions has been isolated, it is then possible to detach and dispense with the respective "dogmas" of the different traditions. Religious dogmas are, declared Jefferson, "totally unconnected with morality."

And here's Jefferson again in a letter to Thomas Law in 1814:

Some have made the love of God the foundation of morality… [But] if we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist[s]? … Their virtue must have some other foundation."

C.S. Lewis also wrote extensively about the Law of Nature in Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe:

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature.

[….]

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought every one knew it be nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy wee in the wrong unless right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called "The Abolition of Man," but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admire for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might as well try to imagine a country where two and two make five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to--whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself firs. Selfishness has never been admired.

[….]

The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean 'what Nature, in fact, does'. But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean 'what human beings, in fact, do'; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.

As to your assertion that "most people do not desire hierarchy," there is no empirical data whatsoever to support that assertion. It's a utopian concept that Marx dreamed up. In simpler societies, people rise in the hierarchy because of what they can do for the society. Here's an example from Moral Sentiments and Material Interests:

There are also large differences in hunting ability among men. For example, there is a five-fold difference in the long-term average hunting returns between the best and worst hunter in the sample of Ache men. Similar discrepancies in hunting ability across men have been found among the !Kung, Hadza, Hiwi, Gunwinggu, Agta, and Machiguenga. Therefore, even among men of the same age, there must be net transfers over the long term from families producing a surplus to families producing a deficit.

Why do superior performers continue to outperform and give their excess production away? Well certainly many of the potential returns are not material, but have to do with the striving for prestige, status and adulation:

Costly signaling theory provides the basis for arguing that generosity--incurring the costs of providing collective goods--is one means by which individuals and coalitions compete for status, and ultimately for the material and fitness-enhancing correlates of status (such as possible power, mates, and economic resources). The quality-dependent cost of providing the collective good guarantees the honesty of the signaler's claim to such qualities as resource control, leadership abilities, kin-group solidarity, economic productivity, or good health and vigor--information that is useful to the signaler's potential mates, allies, and competitors.

Here's another example of the same phenomenon:

Because the first medieval rulers had been barbarians, most of what followed derived from their customs. Chieftains like Ermanaric, Alaric, Attila, and Clovis rose as successful battlefield leaders whose fighting skills promised still more triumphs to come. Each had been chosen by his warriors, who, after raising him on their shields, had carried him to a pagan temple or a sacred stone and acclaimed him there… Lesser tribesmen were grateful to him for the spoils of victory, though his claim on their allegiance also had supernatural roots.

[….]

[T]he chieftains had been chosen for merit, and early kings wore crowns only ad vitam aut culpam--for life or until removed for fault.

In the United States we have taken this concept and turned it on its head. Our political and financial overlords have not been elevated to the top of the hierarchy because of what they do for society. Quite the opposite, they think in terms of what society can do for them. That's why I say the inverted pyramid is a perfect metaphor for current US society. And it's unstable because it flies in the face of perhaps a million years of human evolution, all but the last 10,000 years or so lived in small hunter-gatherer societies in which the "law of nature" evolved.

skippy
Natural selection is the process by which traits become more or less common in a population due to consistent effects upon the survival or reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution.

The natural genetic variation within a population of organisms may cause some individuals to survive and reproduce more successfully than others in their current environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection

Skippy….Concur, whom made the environment…own it.

PS. do the poor have so many kids, as to hope, for one successful functioning psychopath (cough professional) to make the family proud?

DownSouth
i on the ball patriot,

And one other thing. Maybe I wasn't clear when I used the term "slackers and free-riders." Not only low producers, but high prodcers in primitive societies can also find themselves on the outs if they aren't sufficiently generous. Here's Moral Sentiments again:

Those who do not produce or share enough are often subject to criticism, either directly or through gossip and social ostracism. Anecdotes of shirkers being excluded from distributions until they either boosted their production or sharing levels are found among the Maimande, Pilaga, Gunwinggu, Washo, Machiguenga, Agta, and Netsilik Eskimo.

ceasley7
Maybe I'm crazy but I consider the crooks running the show now to be the swamp creatures. Illegal wars, no rule of law ….
Ignim Brites
Well a pretty dreary piece. My take on the current political situation is based on the idea that there will not be another mega bailout. The party with the best program for dealing with the TBTF banks will seize the popular imagination for a decade. It could be quite exciting if Bernanke and Geithner try an end run around Congress. The possibility of spectacle of the these two in chains is not to be dismissed.
Hugh
Most of what Ferguson is saying is what many of us here and elsewhere have been saying for an age. Is swamp creatures some oblique reference to Huey Long? Or to radicals in general. Because it was those radicals who pushed FDR and the Establishment into those actions for which they now get, deservedly, so much credit.

But seriously Jerry Brown? Governor Moonbeam? For a political scientist and historian, Ferguson is showing a real lapse of memory. As for Barbour, possible, but he is a founder of the big lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers, that and being governor of the poorest state in the country are hardly recommendations. I mean what is he going to run on "Vote for me and I will make the rest of the country as poor as Mississippi"? Yeah, that'll work.

ZeroInMyOnes
November 13, 2010 at 3:18 pm That leaves Hillary.
craazyman
November 13, 2010 at 4:53 pm Sarah Palin his a nicer butt.
F. Beard
But the experience of the Great Depression was that as things failed to improve the swamp creatures got their chance. Thomas Ferguson

And why not? Are our problems so big that a $1 million check sent to every American adult citizen from the US Treasury would not solve them?

There's a huge political prize for the first political party to realize it is almost that simple. The other parties will kick themselves to death for being so blind.

lark
The reason this country has worked, despite all the negatives that Ferguson describes so well, is because it has provided a powerful 'jobs machine'.

Globalization and outsourcing ended all that. I think the balance that we took for granted has disintegrated – and the center has disintegrated, with that.

It is interesting that the Tea Party and the unions agree on stopping globalization.

This international economic order is going to bite the dust. That may even be good for ordinary Americans, because we will manufacture more of what we consume.

[Nov 05, 2010] Paul Krugman - The Focus Hocus-Pocus

Mr. Obama's problem wasn't lack of focus; it was lack of audacity. At the start of his administration he settled for an economic plan that was far too weak. ... Mr. Obama ... could have chosen to be bold - to make Plan A the passage of a truly adequate economic plan, with Plan B being to place blame for the economy's troubles on Republicans if they succeeded in blocking such a plan.

But he chose a seemingly safer course: a medium-size stimulus package that was clearly not up to the task. ... Worse, there was no Plan B. ... Instead, he and his officials continued to claim that their original plan was just right, damaging their credibility ... as the economy continued to fall short.

Meanwhile, the administration's bank-friendly policies and rhetoric - dictated by fear of hurting financial confidence - ended up fueling populist anger, to the benefit of even more bank-friendly Republicans. Mr. Obama added to his problems by effectively conceding the argument over the role of government in a depressed economy.

I felt a sense of despair during Mr. Obama's first State of the Union address, in which he declared that "families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same." Not only was this bad economics ... it was almost a verbatim repeat of what John Boehner, the soon-to-be House speaker, said when attacking the original stimulus. If the president won't speak up for his own economic philosophy, who will?

So where, in this story, does "focus" come in? Lack of nerve? Yes. Lack of courage in one's own convictions? Definitely. Lack of focus? No.

And why would failing to tackle health care have produced a better outcome? The focus people never explain.

Of course, there's a subtext to the whole line that health reform was a mistake: namely, that Democrats should stop acting like Democrats and go back to being Republicans-lite. Parse what people like Mr. Bayh are saying, and it amounts to demanding that Mr. Obama spend the next two years cringing and admitting that conservatives were right.

There is an alternative: Mr. Obama can take a stand.

[Nov 05, 2010] Paul Krugman - The Focus Hocus-Pocus

Mr. Obama's problem wasn't lack of focus; it was lack of audacity. At the start of his administration he settled for an economic plan that was far too weak. ... Mr. Obama ... could have chosen to be bold - to make Plan A the passage of a truly adequate economic plan, with Plan B being to place blame for the economy's troubles on Republicans if they succeeded in blocking such a plan.

But he chose a seemingly safer course: a medium-size stimulus package that was clearly not up to the task. ... Worse, there was no Plan B. ... Instead, he and his officials continued to claim that their original plan was just right, damaging their credibility ... as the economy continued to fall short.

Meanwhile, the administration's bank-friendly policies and rhetoric - dictated by fear of hurting financial confidence - ended up fueling populist anger, to the benefit of even more bank-friendly Republicans. Mr. Obama added to his problems by effectively conceding the argument over the role of government in a depressed economy.

I felt a sense of despair during Mr. Obama's first State of the Union address, in which he declared that "families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same." Not only was this bad economics ... it was almost a verbatim repeat of what John Boehner, the soon-to-be House speaker, said when attacking the original stimulus. If the president won't speak up for his own economic philosophy, who will?

So where, in this story, does "focus" come in? Lack of nerve? Yes. Lack of courage in one's own convictions? Definitely. Lack of focus? No.

And why would failing to tackle health care have produced a better outcome? The focus people never explain.

Of course, there's a subtext to the whole line that health reform was a mistake: namely, that Democrats should stop acting like Democrats and go back to being Republicans-lite. Parse what people like Mr. Bayh are saying, and it amounts to demanding that Mr. Obama spend the next two years cringing and admitting that conservatives were right.

There is an alternative: Mr. Obama can take a stand.

[Nov 04, 2010] "Rules of Our Society Should Not Be Bought and Sold": Roosevelt Election Roundup

Round-up of verdicts on the US elections by the New Deal 2.0 team, assembled by Lynn Parramore, Editor of New Deal 2.0 and Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute

In the wake of a Democratic loss not seen in the House since 1938, upended Senate seats, and Republican gubernatorial wins, Roosevelt Institute Fellows weigh in. Was the vote a referendum on Democrats? What will it mean moving forward?

"The American people are voting against the political system. They are given the choice between the marketed vision of false hope and the vision of everyman financed by those who are attempting to take away vital services. Anger at the financial bailouts is understandable and a vote to cut off government from using our future tax burden to fortify the powerful is also quite sensible. The problem is that in the era of money politics, no coalition from either party can make good on the mirage of their marketed vision.

That both Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold were defeated after being ardent critics of the bailouts and the industry friendly financial regulatory reform is a clear warning that the money system can defeat the politician who represents the people's interest against powerful vested interests.

In an appearance on MSNBC and an interview with Salon.com, Grayson argued that the "enthusiasm gap" that prompted millions of liberal voters to stay home Tuesday happened because the Obama administration and congressional Democrats did not fight hard enough for progressive values.

"Our strategy for two years has been appeasement, and look where it got us," Grayson told MSNBC. "I think Democrats want to see a fighting leadership, they want to see a fighting president - somebody who actually accomplishes good things for constituents."

All of this points to the fundamental need for reform of government incentives in order to restore the power of votes relative to the power of money. And to the fact that reform is the precursor to limiting the domination of our state by concentrated money interests, both corporate and by wealthy individuals. The rules of our society should not be bought and sold."

-Robert Johnson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Project on Global Finance; Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking

"High unemployment and a housing market that's right out of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea would wreck any regime's reelection prospects. This was no communication failure: The administration had nothing to offer ordinary people. Facing a wave of secret money, you can't win elections by just saving banks."

- Tom Ferguson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow; Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston

"In my view, President Obama had one key mission: to prove the value of government. He and his defenders argue that he has achieved much. In particular, they cite health care reform, financial re-regulation, the Recovery Act of 2009, and some even claim he has a workable strategy in Afghanistan. All these were agenda items that needed addressing. Obama has been able to convince too few Americans that any of them were adequately addressed. In fact, they were not, and he never seemed to come to terms with that central fact. To the contrary, he seemed to bury his head in the sand. His claim was that we got so much done but no one really knew about it. This was not bad public relations. It was not failure of government. It was inadequate policy and the failure to own up to it. Obama said a few times he got seventy percent of his agenda done. He got something done, sure, but in no case did it solve the pressing problems they were addressing. This is a man who willfully has averted his eyes from reality, I fear, and the public knew it. And the stunning electoral losses - made a little more tolerable by the constant lowering of expectations - don't look like they will shake him up. Equanimity is his constant goal, even in the face of such adversity."

-Jeff Madrick, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and author of The Case for Big Government

"There was no mandate for the repeal of health care in this election, with Democrats who voted against the bill and for the bill equally joined in defeat, but that won't stop Republicans for claiming one. The Republicans will do all they can to terminate the biggest expansion of the social compact in decades, understanding that if health care reform is implemented, it will prove to Americans that government can actually work for them."

- Richard Kirsch, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and formerly National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now

"Barack Obama did not do what it took to pull the economy out of the doldrums. This is true for the fiscal stimulus, which was too small, too preoccupied with returning to a surplus as fast as possible, and contained too much lag. His banking bailout policies continued the Bush/Paulson approach and effectively reinforced the notion of government as an instrument of predatory capitalism, rather than an entity mobilizing resources for a broader public purpose. Obama didn't give us 'change we could believe in.' He instead used trillions of dollars in financial guarantees to sustain Wall Street (much more money than was spent on the stimulus) and consequently presided over one of the most regressive wealth transfers in American history. At a time when most Americans were experiencing stagnant or absolute declines in total wages, and Wall Street Robber Barons paid themselves even higher bonuses than before, the President was totally insensitive. He appeared to take pains to put down or ignore the aspirations of every single part of his base. And he wonders why there was an 'enthusiasm gap.'"

- Marshall Auerback, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow

"The most striking thing about the post-election landscape is the utter route of centrists Democrats. In the aftermath, as Chris Bowers notes, the Progressive Caucus is larger than the Blue Dog and the New Dems combined. Analysts will continue to go through the numbers, but right now there's nothing to suggest that 'liberal overreach' or a lack of centrist views was a factor. The truth is much worse: the ugly process of appeasing and buying off centrist Democrats on financial reform and health care turned what should have been landmark generational reform into a bitter, ugly view of corporate power and sleazy influence over our political system, the Senate and the political party that is supposed to defend the interests of working people."

- Mike Konczal, Roosevelt Institute Fellow

"Americans want bold ideas and a clear vision, not back-room deals and bank-centric policies. Until Democrats can offer these to voters, they will not succeed. For the next two years, those who would stand in the way of investing in jobs, schools, roads, bridges, and rebuilding the middle class will present even more obstacles to a prosperous future. But progressives are energized and see that the time for backing down and letting billionaires run the country is over. The fight for the future of ordinary Americans is on. Get the gloves off."

Truthdig - Apocalypse Again The Boom-and-Bust Cycle of Bipartisan Politics

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/apocalypse_again_the_boom-and-bust_bipartisan_political_cycle_20101102/

Posted on Nov 2, 2010

By Scott Tucker

Apocalypse is the big threat in every major election, and this forecast of doom proves useful to both corporate parties. Heaven or hell, it's a free country and it's your choice. Midterm elections are within spitting distance of Halloween, and the party started early with lawn signs portraying the other party's candidates as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, spreading plague and panic from sea to shining sea. Oh, your house has been foreclosed? No lawn signs for you, but you can wear tea bags from the brim of your camouflage helmet if you care to keep company with Rand Paul and Sarah Palin. We don't quite know from day to day whether the tea party movement is a real breakaway faction of "libertarians" and "independents," or just another front group for Republican CEOs.

Seriously, the Republican Party is scary. But there is this other creature in the living room we need to talk about, and it's a donkey, not an elephant. The Democratic Party has the bad habit of coming on to voters like the neighborhood mafia extortion team. The Democrats have the incurably bad breath of reliably broken promises. They collar and corner us with mobster charm, they pick our pockets while pretending to pick our brains. Then as the big election day draws near, they lean heavily upon us and whisper an almost romantic confession: "Sure, we spit in your faces and ask you to pretend it's rain. But the other guy is a real brute and would also break your arms."


If this does not seduce us, they try the next pickup line: "Politics is the art of the possible." If that gets old, they can still try this key to your heart: "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If all else fails, they try personal compliments: "Why would a nice boy or girl like you pick a date with some skanky Red or skeevy Green? You have such a beautiful mind, you can appreciate the finer things in life, you deserve a lifelong marriage with the Democratic Party." If you run screaming for the nearest exit, they will still chase you through the streets with this sweet love song: "We can light candles and burn incense in the inner sanctum, and no one else but you and me needs to see our lovely gilded idol of Franklin Roosevelt. Why can't that be our secret?"


Those deep romantic secrets finally count for nothing, since what counts in the realm of politics can only be public policy. The contents of Bill Clinton's heart, or Barack Obama's, or Nancy Pelosi's should remain as secret as the contents of their stomachs. What we really want to know is how they pick their friends and enemies in public life, and what battles they choose to fight before the whole world. I confess that I, too, was once a member of the Democratic Party. But like many other voters, I had to write that Dear John (or Dear Bill, or Dear Barack, or Dear Nancy) letter-you know, the one that spells out The End of Our Relationship: "I do not love you and I learned a lesson. Cheap dates get raw fucks."


Yes, I am free to go to the voting booth like a drunk to the local bar, and I can thank my lucky stars that the cheap gin is not actually arsenic. There's no accounting for taste? Oh, but there must be! The expensively groomed candidate of the Democratic Party must be a dry martini while the expensively groomed candidate of the Republican Party must be fermented cat piss.


Career politicians depend upon the biggest protection racket in this country, which is often called "our two-party system." Ours? Really? Certainly that system has no foundation whatsoever in the Constitution of the United States. Nor did we, the people, ever vote for a bipartisan lockdown of every major election.


We are assured by Ivy League economists that economic booms are chiefly the product of an elite group of entrepreneurs, while economic busts inevitably shed workers with yesterday's skills like dandruff. It's the best of all possible worlds, so do keep that in mind the next time you read an Op-Ed column telling you politics is the art of the possible. If you grow suspicious that the recurrent breakdowns of capitalism are not simply the Nature of Things, but rather the all too human result of human decisions, then you are well on your way to becoming a socialist. The boom-and-bust cycles of the corporate economy cannot be graphed directly upon the boom-and-bust cycles of corporate politics. That is asking for too much order and symmetry in the universe. But we also go too far if we pretend the regular breakdowns of this economic system bear only an accidental relation to the regular breakdowns of this political system.


Are we condemned to ping-pong matches between Fox News and MSNBC from now till kingdom come? It's easy to laugh at the blackboard lectures of Glenn Beck, who is busy making common nonsense of Thomas Paine and every other Founding Father. But if thinking youths get their politics from "The Rachel Maddow Show," they are not yet thinking. The introductory caption for Maddow on my cable system always advertises the fact that she holds a degree from Oxford, but what do we find when she then invites a Princeton professor on her show to talk politics? Lo and behold, we find that the political terrain is no bigger than the usual bipartisan sandbox and fits the television screen perfectly. Maddow is best when she reminds us of forgotten history, and worst when she reverts to the usual scorekeeping of spectator sports.


The sit-down comedians at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, never lack for great punch lines because the daily news is surreal when it is not truly sad. Their humor, however, would rarely make any Democrat break a sweat, while they give regular acid baths to Republicans. Their scripts are funny but predictably partisan. A comedian taking a wide view of our political system would need an anarchist free spirit as well as a tragic sense of life.


Partisan politics in the United States is a perennial game of Capture the Flag between Team Red and Team Blue. Sometimes as harmless as summer camp, sometimes as lethal as imperial adventures. If our political system is one big binary code, then choosing either Democratic or Republican candidates on Election Day is like typing forever in either Column A or in Column B. You don't get to create the political script, but you get to choose Dishwater Dull over Batshit Crazy, or maybe Hipster Dude over Has-Been War Hero. The job of career politicians is to convince you that you have a perfectly free choice to hit yourself on the head with a brick or a baseball bat.

So what would an apocalyptic far-right government do if the Republicans gain the balance of power in the nearing midterm elections? Let's assume the worst, since this is always the terrible possibility conjured up by their Democratic opponents.


Here is the truly apocalyptic Republican program in one paragraph (and we will revisit these issues when we examine how Democrats deal with them): Any moves to tax the rich fairly would be scrapped as the social engineering of socialists. The recent health care reform, though deeply compromised, would be dismantled. The unemployed would remain abandoned, and courts would drop the hammer on immigrant workers. Aid to the poor and homeless would be slashed. Women would be disabused of the notion that they have the freedom to choose abortion. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people would become political pariahs. Corporate overlords, imperial militarists and Christian fundamentalists would take power.


Why is this apocalypse so familiar? Because rage and fear from below were once married to calculated class politics from above. That was the reactionary coalition that swept to power in 1980, and we now call it the Reagan Revolution. Thirty years have passed, and what do we witness now? The same kind of class resentment from below, but all the more raw and volatile now because so many workers have no living memory of working-class power. Labor union local meetings are indispensable schools of class consciousness, but whole sectors of industry have been shipped offshore to cheaper labor markets.


The historical lesson here is that workers cannot rely on the hope of being shareholders in corporations when their share of capital was never great, much less their power in corporate offices. If workers are to become real stakeholders in the national economy, they will also need to create workplaces in open class conflict with the corporate state. This is still possible through direct action in some sectors of manufacture and of service industries. But even in cities and regions strip-mined and abandoned by capitalists in full flight across national borders, workers may still form new cells of mutual aid. Where two or three are gathered together, a new world comes into being.


Organized labor is not yet taking a truly independent path through this political wilderness. All too often the labor union leaders are simply arms of management, and tools of the corporate state. But all is not dark, all is not lost. The California Nurses Association proved to be a voice of reason against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it went on to join the Massachusetts Nurses Association in founding National Nurses United. Here is real hope for the sick and medical workers alike. Anyone who has spent time in a hospital bed knows that patients often trust nurses more than doctors, because nurses visit more often and can be the real lifelines during a crisis.


Another example of union strength was the recent shutdown of the ports in the Bay Area by longshore workers in solidarity with the late Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American young man shot in the back by a police officer on New Year's Day of 2009. Their common cause gives real meaning to that old, worn phrase the dignity of labor. For the cause here was not simply better wages and work conditions but a defense of all citizens against the armed power of the state. Any constitution is an empty contract unless we, the people, step up to public responsibilities. The longshore workers of ILWU Local 10 did so Oct. 23 and joined members of Grant's family in public protest. "An injury to one is an injury to all"-that is the motto of ILWU Local 10, and it should be the Golden Rule for any decent republic. Anyone who claims working people have no heart left for public life and struggle has just not been paying attention.


The ruling class remains fiercely class-conscious, and it commands the heights of political power. Whenever the Republicans claim that the Democrats are preaching class war, this is a classic case of political projection. Class divisions have deepened over the past 30 years, but only the most zealous Democrat would pretend that all blame lies with the Republicans. That is a "progressive" fiction that has regressive consequences in every major election, since it carries the hypnotic suggestion that voters can choose only between two corporate parties.


No one seriously claims that political parties alone determine economic surges and crashes. The causal order is rather the reverse: Objective economic forces bear down upon political systems, and then all kinds of ideological fractures come to the surface, and all kinds of ad hoc coalitions are formed across party lines. That means every election guarantees the relative stability of corporate rule, so long as the two big corporate parties maintain their lockdown on the electoral system. The very rich still remain much better represented in Congress than the working and middle classes.


What do we find on the ideological fever charts of this nation all through the previous century, and now into the first decade of the 21st as well? A perennial holy war not only against avowed red-blooded socialists, whether domestic or foreign, but also an attempt to paint the most panic-stricken liberals in shades of deepest pink. Republicans once crusaded against actually existing communism, whereas now they crusade against the utterly nonexistent "socialism" of the Democratic Party.


And how does the Democratic Party fight the charge of socialism?


The Democrats refuse to fight fair and square for a graduated income tax, proportionate to real wages and our actually existing class system. They maintain the pretense of defending "the middle class," an ideological middle ground in which labor unions are strictly for losers and philanthropy is the hobby of the rich.


The Democrats bungled health care reform very badly under the Clinton administration, and still worse under the Obama administration. None of the necessary lessons were learned the second time around, and indeed the insurance companies are already busy gaming the new system. This was predicted by the good doctors who founded Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). Home foreclosures are still a high-profile story; but the health care bills that are not covered by private insurance plans are what really force so many people into bankruptcy.


The Democrats have not given comprehensive aid to the unemployed, which would indeed require social democratic public programs. A public works program would do much good in repairing roads, tunnels and bridges, but the Democrats have their own interests in privatizing public services and public infrastructure.

The party line on abortion under the Clinton administration was that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," but that ideal can be secured only through real social democracy in health care, housing and education-namely, in all the public goods that advance the material and social well-being of women. The same administration, however, advanced a punitive program of "welfare reform," dismantling some remnants of the New Deal welfare state that gave shelter to the most exposed women and children.


Two of the signal concessions President Clinton made to the far right concerned the rights of gay people, namely, signing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) into federal law. Both laws have thrown long shadows over the political landscape at the state and local levels. Obama campaigned on a vague program of hope and change, and promised whatever he thought was necessary to any group of likely voters, including gay people. As a self-proclaimed "community organizer," he might have drafted genuine organizers from all the communities hoping for change. Instead, he hired Wall Street insiders and the usual partisan hacks of all races, religions and sexual persuasions.


Clinton had once been described as "the first black president," itself a projection of hope upon a Southern white career politician. An honest wish to transcend racist history is just not good enough. But Obama was, in fact, the first black president, and the same wishes and projections are shipwrecked once again on the rocks and reefs of class politics. The very idea of economic class is a poor abstraction unless it is grounded in social relations that are also racial, sexual and cultural. How does a class-divided culture really come to light? Only through the very social system that is saturated with the ruling ideas of a ruling class. The manifold reality of class is tested and proved in real time, and in searing events such as wars and epidemics. Before there is enlightenment there is heartbreak.


The epidemic of AIDS tracked heavily, though not exclusively, along lines of race, sex and class. Clinton discovered AIDS in earnest only when he left public office and began campaigning for the Nobel Prize. Nowadays Clinton would much rather deal with AIDS in Haiti (certainly a worthy cause) than with the class system that still burdens so many African-Americans with chronic illnesses, including AIDS.


Irony? But there can be no irony if we do not even remember history. Each president graduates from the White House into a kind of Ivy League of philanthropy, and into an alternate universe in which buildings, libraries and foundations bear their names. Besides being tasteless, such people have no sense of shame. There is an inconvenient truth buried in the foundation of all their well-publicized philanthropy. In the words of William Blake: "Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor, / And Mercy no more could be / If all were as happy as we."


Likewise, the only lesson Clinton learned from the economic counterrevolution led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was to make a hard-right U-turn toward deregulation, a kind of Keynesianism in reverse. In this realm, too, certain New Deal restraints on banks and the "free market" were abandoned. (I recommend a 1998 book by the economist Michael Meeropol, "Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution," and the recently published "The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street," by Robert Scheer.)


In Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party has used the courts as blunt instruments against the candidates of the Green Party. Using the "independent judiciary" as partisan brass knuckles may seem thuggish, but the bipartisan lockdown of elections can also be achieved by selling voters a false bargain. This is what happened when Proposition 14 was sold to Californians as a great electoral reform. It was nothing of the kind; it was designed to bump independent and insurgent parties off the ballot, and it may yet succeed. Recently, the Green gubernatorial candidate in California, Laura Wells, was denied the chance to debate the two corporate candidates at a public forum. When she tried to attend the event as a member of the audience, she was arrested. That story was then broadcast online and went over, under and around much of the traditional news media. Every such attack on basic democracy also speeds the day when career politicians hang themselves with their own rope.


War is more truly our national religion than the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, so making a class-conscious case for peace is rank heresy in many houses of worship and in both houses of Congress. Protestantism has largely devolved into the gospel of prosperity, and God has become the gatekeeper of a gated community- for in my Father's house there are many mansions.


The First Amendment to our Constitution forbids the establishment of any state religion, but the deism of Jefferson and other Founding Fathers is no better than atheism to Christian crusaders. For that matter, if the Bill of Rights can be neatly reduced to the right to own guns and form far-right militias, then the rest of the text is a damn nuisance. Much of our national history has not even been forgotten, since it was never learned or taught in the first place. This is why right-wing candidates for public office can invent any original intent they please for the Founding Fathers and not have any idea of the original text of our country's Constitution. The First Amendment was breaking news to Christine O'Donnell, a conservative Christian and a Republican candidate from Delaware for the U.S. Senate, during an Oct. 19 televised debate with her Democratic opponent .


If Abraham Lincoln were to rise from the grave and talk as plainly about labor and capital as he once did in Congress, many Democrats and Republicans would think he sounded like a socialist. That's not far wrong, since Lincoln was (within the limits of his time and place) a social democrat within the republican tradition. In other words, our devolved Democrats have long since abandoned plain talk about social democracy, even as our devolved Republicans have abandoned the constitutional ground of the republic.


Congress has become the front office of the ruling class, but the corporate-funded big media broadcast the official faction fights with all the frenzy of gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum. Those who truly fight and die do so in wars beyond our borders; but the American empire is justified as a horn of plenty, pouring forth democracy and all good things upon the world. If we happen to build our military bases near oil and mineral deposits, then any question raised about American morals and motives must be an outright slander against the soldiers who sacrifice limbs and lives. Career politicians do not just wrap themselves in the flag; they wrap themselves in the flags draped on the coffins of dead soldiers. For every John McCain or John Kerry who showed real courage in battle, however misguided the war, there are scores of politicians who never served in uniform and yet campaign for votes as professional militarists.


The bloody sacrifice of the young is enshrined in national rites and monuments, so the roots of the next war always extend far back into our immense military cemeteries; and the bloody fruits of empire seem always within reach. The partisan spectacle is a fact of public life, but just as surely a grand distraction. Once in a while the news breaks that criminals exist in executive offices; but the systematic criminality of the corporate state is a subject that never needs to be censored since it would never be raised in a bipartisan debate.


In the 1980s, the triumph of reaction was blamed not only on the Republican Party but also on feminists, gay people and anti-racist activists-namely, on people who were often fighting for our lives and for basic democracy. A whole crew of straight white men cranked out columns deriding "wedge issues" and "identity politics." Their common complaint was spelled out at greater length in books such as "The Twilight of Common Dreams" by Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky's "Left for Dead: The Life, Death and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America." Even Christopher Hitchens (who had not yet become a fellow traveler of the imperial right) was quoted in the February 1997 issue of The Progressive as saying, "I remember the first time I heard the slogan 'the personal is political.' I felt a deep, immediate sense of impending doom."


In "The Queer Question: Essays on Desire and Democracy" (South End Press, 1997) I suggested those writers were defending their own brand of identity politics. The danger of playing any identity as a trump card in a political poker game is real, but any claim to represent "the universal left" must also remain open to question. For the sake of brevity, I will summarize the case for a social democracy founded on social pluralism with a quote from Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew," written just after World War II:


"What we propose is a concrete liberalism. By that we mean that all persons who through their work collaborate toward the greatness of a country have the full rights of citizens of that country. What gives them this right is not the possession of a problematical and abstract 'human nature,' but their active participation in the life of the society. This means, then, that the Jews-and likewise the Arabs and the Negroes-from the moment that they are participants in the national enterprise, have a right to that enterprise; they are citizens. But they have these rights as Jews, Negroes, or Arabs-that is, as concrete persons."


If we are serious about the human dignity of "concrete persons," we must defend fair wages and all due legal protection for immigrant workers in our country today. There is an abysmal contradiction between exploiting the labor of immigrant workers and putting targets on their backs as alien invaders. But this contradiction also serves the interests of many employers, since a work force that must pass through barbed wire fences and police dogs will have a tougher time forming a labor union. In this way bosses can have their cake and take bread from workers, too.


True, a police raid on a restaurant kitchen or a tomato farm may be a problem for an employer on that very day. But this kind of random social terrorism is also money in the bank, since the long-term suppression of wages and labor organizing is not an accidental side effect. The lords of agribusiness have a working coalition with the local police chiefs. Otherwise we must explain why fruit and vegetables keep appearing so magically in supermarkets and on dinner plates. Or why so many front lawns and golf courses remain so well tended by landscape workers from Mexico or Guatemala. Or why so many hotels, hospitals and office buildings are cleaned by people who do not earn a living wage.


Here in the southwest region of the United States, this contradiction is a Grand Canyon between liberal ideals and actual ruling-class power. In reality, the number of undocumented workers crossing over our southern border has gone down. That is not surprising, given the deep recession and the recent political campaign to give police in Arizona the power to demand identity papers at will. Even so, the fantasy of a bunker state with an Iron Wall is a convenient exit from reality, since capitalism is an essentially porous and diffuse system of profit. Corporations (and politicians of both corporate parties) placed the mobility of capital above all other considerations.

Let's recall that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), pushed by President Clinton and implemented with bipartisan support in 1994, was a bill of rights for big business, but it was a hemispheric hurricane for the working class. Workers in the United States lost high-paying jobs in skilled manufacturing; Mexican workers swiftly lost wages before losing jobs entirely; and the culture of social democracy in Canada was deeply eroded. As Robert E. Scott wrote in his 2003 article "The high price of 'free' trade" on the Economic Policy Institute website:


"Further study of NAFTA by researchers in Canada and Mexico has shown that workers in all three countries have been hurt, but for different reasons (Faux et al. 2001). In Mexico, real wages have fallen sharply and there has been a steep decline in the number of people holding regular jobs in paid positions. Many workers have been shifted into subsistence-level work in the 'informal sector,' frequently unpaid work in family retail trade or restaurant businesses. Additionally, a flood of subsidized, low-priced corn from the United States has decimated farmers and rural economics. In Canada, a decade of heightened competition with the United States is eroding social investment in public spending on education, health care, unemployment compensation, and a wide range of other public services."


NAFTA was followed by the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005, which extended "the logic of the market" to five Central American nations and to the Dominican Republic. Jimmy Carter was an enthusiastic promoter of CAFTA, and if a more extensive South American Free Trade Agreement had been possible he would have supported that as well. But Carter did have the decency to state that the Venezuelan people had voted fair and square for an economic populist, Hugo Chavez. The working classes in Mexico, Central America and South America have often defied capitalist and outright fascist rulers in mass protests, but they have also suffered heavy losses through the jailing and killing of their bravest militants and labor leaders. To this day, workers from Juarez to Tierra del Fuego have long memories of political betrayals and outright repression. Generally, they do their best to settle accounts with ballots and not bullets. Anyone who argues that workers have no right to wage the class struggle beyond election days, however, is simply wishing that the working class would reduce itself to a passive production line on every other day of the year.


This is the ground of struggle, and this is the ground of solidarity. If socialists are not internationalists, we might as well join phony populists in the existing big corporate parties. The only internationalism recognized by demagogues such as Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly is the unrestricted mobility of capital over the whole planet. The price of this "free market" is the near feudal servitude of many millions of workers, and the imperial wars in which they die so young.


Patriotism of that kind is the false gospel of the ruling class. The sooner we break those mental chains, the better we are able to love our homeland. And what is any homeland but a wide sense of our neighborhood? If we do not want our streets filled with the tanks of a foreign power or our skies filled with deadly drones, then by what divine right do we inflict them on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan? These wars have long been an exercise of ruling-class power, waged in the domestic political realm by two political parties that serve the same corporate interests even as they play musical chairs in Congress.


"Our two-party system" is an ideological fiction, but this fiction has real political power. On the eve of the midterm elections, the Democratic Party is struggling to hold together the usual unstable coalition of Blue Dog Democrats, labor unions and corporate managers.


Whether the tea party movement is an appendage of the Republican Party or a mutant force that may break party ranks, we cannot yet predict. Tea party activists cover a spectrum of far-right causes, but at present the central and controlling idea seems to be free-market fundamentalism. In its purest form, this ideology is pure nonsense, since the irreducible price of every "free" market is the actual labor of human beings.


Granting "personhood" to corporations was a piece of godlike presumption on the part of Supreme Court justices in 1886, when they ruled in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment made any corporation a natural person under the U.S. Constitution. As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote 60 years later, "There was no history, logic, or reason to support that view."


That legal precedent of corporate personhood undermined our public life, yet it is consistent with the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case early this year (though it remains indefensible). The latter decision gives corporations a right to make unlimited campaign donations, and Congress has failed to impose disclosure requirements. Obama's noblest public moment came in his last State of the Union speech when he made a direct criticism of this Supreme Court ruling. But this president does not simply serve at the will of the people; he also serves at the will of the ruling class, and remains a member of that class in good standing so long as he presides loyally over a corporate state and imperial wars.


If every government depends on the consent of the governed, then every neighborhood and workplace is potentially a small republic of persons who are willing to say, "We do not consent." Do the capitalist parties depend upon your votes and donations? Deprive those parties of your moral and material support. Vote against the parties of war and empire every chance you get, and cast your vote for the parties of peace, economic democracy and ecological sanity. In this election, the Green Party of the United States represents not only our best hope of social democracy, but also our best chance to bring ecological common sense to our global economy.

[Nov 04, 2010] "Rules of Our Society Should Not Be Bought and Sold": Roosevelt Election Roundup

Round-up of verdicts on the US elections by the New Deal 2.0 team, assembled by Lynn Parramore, Editor of New Deal 2.0 and Media Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute

In the wake of a Democratic loss not seen in the House since 1938, upended Senate seats, and Republican gubernatorial wins, Roosevelt Institute Fellows weigh in. Was the vote a referendum on Democrats? What will it mean moving forward?

"The American people are voting against the political system. They are given the choice between the marketed vision of false hope and the vision of everyman financed by those who are attempting to take away vital services. Anger at the financial bailouts is understandable and a vote to cut off government from using our future tax burden to fortify the powerful is also quite sensible. The problem is that in the era of money politics, no coalition from either party can make good on the mirage of their marketed vision.

That both Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold were defeated after being ardent critics of the bailouts and the industry friendly financial regulatory reform is a clear warning that the money system can defeat the politician who represents the people's interest against powerful vested interests.

In an appearance on MSNBC and an interview with Salon.com, Grayson argued that the "enthusiasm gap" that prompted millions of liberal voters to stay home Tuesday happened because the Obama administration and congressional Democrats did not fight hard enough for progressive values.

"Our strategy for two years has been appeasement, and look where it got us," Grayson told MSNBC. "I think Democrats want to see a fighting leadership, they want to see a fighting president - somebody who actually accomplishes good things for constituents."

All of this points to the fundamental need for reform of government incentives in order to restore the power of votes relative to the power of money. And to the fact that reform is the precursor to limiting the domination of our state by concentrated money interests, both corporate and by wealthy individuals. The rules of our society should not be bought and sold."

-Robert Johnson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Project on Global Finance; Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking

"High unemployment and a housing market that's right out of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea would wreck any regime's reelection prospects. This was no communication failure: The administration had nothing to offer ordinary people. Facing a wave of secret money, you can't win elections by just saving banks."

- Tom Ferguson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow; Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston

"In my view, President Obama had one key mission: to prove the value of government. He and his defenders argue that he has achieved much. In particular, they cite health care reform, financial re-regulation, the Recovery Act of 2009, and some even claim he has a workable strategy in Afghanistan. All these were agenda items that needed addressing. Obama has been able to convince too few Americans that any of them were adequately addressed. In fact, they were not, and he never seemed to come to terms with that central fact. To the contrary, he seemed to bury his head in the sand. His claim was that we got so much done but no one really knew about it. This was not bad public relations. It was not failure of government. It was inadequate policy and the failure to own up to it. Obama said a few times he got seventy percent of his agenda done. He got something done, sure, but in no case did it solve the pressing problems they were addressing. This is a man who willfully has averted his eyes from reality, I fear, and the public knew it. And the stunning electoral losses - made a little more tolerable by the constant lowering of expectations - don't look like they will shake him up. Equanimity is his constant goal, even in the face of such adversity."

-Jeff Madrick, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and author of The Case for Big Government

"There was no mandate for the repeal of health care in this election, with Democrats who voted against the bill and for the bill equally joined in defeat, but that won't stop Republicans for claiming one. The Republicans will do all they can to terminate the biggest expansion of the social compact in decades, understanding that if health care reform is implemented, it will prove to Americans that government can actually work for them."

- Richard Kirsch, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and formerly National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now

"Barack Obama did not do what it took to pull the economy out of the doldrums. This is true for the fiscal stimulus, which was too small, too preoccupied with returning to a surplus as fast as possible, and contained too much lag. His banking bailout policies continued the Bush/Paulson approach and effectively reinforced the notion of government as an instrument of predatory capitalism, rather than an entity mobilizing resources for a broader public purpose. Obama didn't give us 'change we could believe in.' He instead used trillions of dollars in financial guarantees to sustain Wall Street (much more money than was spent on the stimulus) and consequently presided over one of the most regressive wealth transfers in American history. At a time when most Americans were experiencing stagnant or absolute declines in total wages, and Wall Street Robber Barons paid themselves even higher bonuses than before, the President was totally insensitive. He appeared to take pains to put down or ignore the aspirations of every single part of his base. And he wonders why there was an 'enthusiasm gap.'"

- Marshall Auerback, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow

"The most striking thing about the post-election landscape is the utter route of centrists Democrats. In the aftermath, as Chris Bowers notes, the Progressive Caucus is larger than the Blue Dog and the New Dems combined. Analysts will continue to go through the numbers, but right now there's nothing to suggest that 'liberal overreach' or a lack of centrist views was a factor. The truth is much worse: the ugly process of appeasing and buying off centrist Democrats on financial reform and health care turned what should have been landmark generational reform into a bitter, ugly view of corporate power and sleazy influence over our political system, the Senate and the political party that is supposed to defend the interests of working people."

- Mike Konczal, Roosevelt Institute Fellow

"Americans want bold ideas and a clear vision, not back-room deals and bank-centric policies. Until Democrats can offer these to voters, they will not succeed. For the next two years, those who would stand in the way of investing in jobs, schools, roads, bridges, and rebuilding the middle class will present even more obstacles to a prosperous future. But progressives are energized and see that the time for backing down and letting billionaires run the country is over. The fight for the future of ordinary Americans is on. Get the gloves off."

Truthdig - Apocalypse Again The Boom-and-Bust Cycle of Bipartisan Politics

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/apocalypse_again_the_boom-and-bust_bipartisan_political_cycle_20101102/

Posted on Nov 2, 2010

By Scott Tucker

Apocalypse is the big threat in every major election, and this forecast of doom proves useful to both corporate parties. Heaven or hell, it's a free country and it's your choice. Midterm elections are within spitting distance of Halloween, and the party started early with lawn signs portraying the other party's candidates as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, spreading plague and panic from sea to shining sea. Oh, your house has been foreclosed? No lawn signs for you, but you can wear tea bags from the brim of your camouflage helmet if you care to keep company with Rand Paul and Sarah Palin. We don't quite know from day to day whether the tea party movement is a real breakaway faction of "libertarians" and "independents," or just another front group for Republican CEOs.

Seriously, the Republican Party is scary. But there is this other creature in the living room we need to talk about, and it's a donkey, not an elephant. The Democratic Party has the bad habit of coming on to voters like the neighborhood mafia extortion team. The Democrats have the incurably bad breath of reliably broken promises. They collar and corner us with mobster charm, they pick our pockets while pretending to pick our brains. Then as the big election day draws near, they lean heavily upon us and whisper an almost romantic confession: "Sure, we spit in your faces and ask you to pretend it's rain. But the other guy is a real brute and would also break your arms."


If this does not seduce us, they try the next pickup line: "Politics is the art of the possible." If that gets old, they can still try this key to your heart: "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If all else fails, they try personal compliments: "Why would a nice boy or girl like you pick a date with some skanky Red or skeevy Green? You have such a beautiful mind, you can appreciate the finer things in life, you deserve a lifelong marriage with the Democratic Party." If you run screaming for the nearest exit, they will still chase you through the streets with this sweet love song: "We can light candles and burn incense in the inner sanctum, and no one else but you and me needs to see our lovely gilded idol of Franklin Roosevelt. Why can't that be our secret?"


Those deep romantic secrets finally count for nothing, since what counts in the realm of politics can only be public policy. The contents of Bill Clinton's heart, or Barack Obama's, or Nancy Pelosi's should remain as secret as the contents of their stomachs. What we really want to know is how they pick their friends and enemies in public life, and what battles they choose to fight before the whole world. I confess that I, too, was once a member of the Democratic Party. But like many other voters, I had to write that Dear John (or Dear Bill, or Dear Barack, or Dear Nancy) letter-you know, the one that spells out The End of Our Relationship: "I do not love you and I learned a lesson. Cheap dates get raw fucks."


Yes, I am free to go to the voting booth like a drunk to the local bar, and I can thank my lucky stars that the cheap gin is not actually arsenic. There's no accounting for taste? Oh, but there must be! The expensively groomed candidate of the Democratic Party must be a dry martini while the expensively groomed candidate of the Republican Party must be fermented cat piss.


Career politicians depend upon the biggest protection racket in this country, which is often called "our two-party system." Ours? Really? Certainly that system has no foundation whatsoever in the Constitution of the United States. Nor did we, the people, ever vote for a bipartisan lockdown of every major election.


We are assured by Ivy League economists that economic booms are chiefly the product of an elite group of entrepreneurs, while economic busts inevitably shed workers with yesterday's skills like dandruff. It's the best of all possible worlds, so do keep that in mind the next time you read an Op-Ed column telling you politics is the art of the possible. If you grow suspicious that the recurrent breakdowns of capitalism are not simply the Nature of Things, but rather the all too human result of human decisions, then you are well on your way to becoming a socialist. The boom-and-bust cycles of the corporate economy cannot be graphed directly upon the boom-and-bust cycles of corporate politics. That is asking for too much order and symmetry in the universe. But we also go too far if we pretend the regular breakdowns of this economic system bear only an accidental relation to the regular breakdowns of this political system.


Are we condemned to ping-pong matches between Fox News and MSNBC from now till kingdom come? It's easy to laugh at the blackboard lectures of Glenn Beck, who is busy making common nonsense of Thomas Paine and every other Founding Father. But if thinking youths get their politics from "The Rachel Maddow Show," they are not yet thinking. The introductory caption for Maddow on my cable system always advertises the fact that she holds a degree from Oxford, but what do we find when she then invites a Princeton professor on her show to talk politics? Lo and behold, we find that the political terrain is no bigger than the usual bipartisan sandbox and fits the television screen perfectly. Maddow is best when she reminds us of forgotten history, and worst when she reverts to the usual scorekeeping of spectator sports.


The sit-down comedians at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, never lack for great punch lines because the daily news is surreal when it is not truly sad. Their humor, however, would rarely make any Democrat break a sweat, while they give regular acid baths to Republicans. Their scripts are funny but predictably partisan. A comedian taking a wide view of our political system would need an anarchist free spirit as well as a tragic sense of life.


Partisan politics in the United States is a perennial game of Capture the Flag between Team Red and Team Blue. Sometimes as harmless as summer camp, sometimes as lethal as imperial adventures. If our political system is one big binary code, then choosing either Democratic or Republican candidates on Election Day is like typing forever in either Column A or in Column B. You don't get to create the political script, but you get to choose Dishwater Dull over Batshit Crazy, or maybe Hipster Dude over Has-Been War Hero. The job of career politicians is to convince you that you have a perfectly free choice to hit yourself on the head with a brick or a baseball bat.

So what would an apocalyptic far-right government do if the Republicans gain the balance of power in the nearing midterm elections? Let's assume the worst, since this is always the terrible possibility conjured up by their Democratic opponents.


Here is the truly apocalyptic Republican program in one paragraph (and we will revisit these issues when we examine how Democrats deal with them): Any moves to tax the rich fairly would be scrapped as the social engineering of socialists. The recent health care reform, though deeply compromised, would be dismantled. The unemployed would remain abandoned, and courts would drop the hammer on immigrant workers. Aid to the poor and homeless would be slashed. Women would be disabused of the notion that they have the freedom to choose abortion. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people would become political pariahs. Corporate overlords, imperial militarists and Christian fundamentalists would take power.


Why is this apocalypse so familiar? Because rage and fear from below were once married to calculated class politics from above. That was the reactionary coalition that swept to power in 1980, and we now call it the Reagan Revolution. Thirty years have passed, and what do we witness now? The same kind of class resentment from below, but all the more raw and volatile now because so many workers have no living memory of working-class power. Labor union local meetings are indispensable schools of class consciousness, but whole sectors of industry have been shipped offshore to cheaper labor markets.


The historical lesson here is that workers cannot rely on the hope of being shareholders in corporations when their share of capital was never great, much less their power in corporate offices. If workers are to become real stakeholders in the national economy, they will also need to create workplaces in open class conflict with the corporate state. This is still possible through direct action in some sectors of manufacture and of service industries. But even in cities and regions strip-mined and abandoned by capitalists in full flight across national borders, workers may still form new cells of mutual aid. Where two or three are gathered together, a new world comes into being.


Organized labor is not yet taking a truly independent path through this political wilderness. All too often the labor union leaders are simply arms of management, and tools of the corporate state. But all is not dark, all is not lost. The California Nurses Association proved to be a voice of reason against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it went on to join the Massachusetts Nurses Association in founding National Nurses United. Here is real hope for the sick and medical workers alike. Anyone who has spent time in a hospital bed knows that patients often trust nurses more than doctors, because nurses visit more often and can be the real lifelines during a crisis.


Another example of union strength was the recent shutdown of the ports in the Bay Area by longshore workers in solidarity with the late Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American young man shot in the back by a police officer on New Year's Day of 2009. Their common cause gives real meaning to that old, worn phrase the dignity of labor. For the cause here was not simply better wages and work conditions but a defense of all citizens against the armed power of the state. Any constitution is an empty contract unless we, the people, step up to public responsibilities. The longshore workers of ILWU Local 10 did so Oct. 23 and joined members of Grant's family in public protest. "An injury to one is an injury to all"-that is the motto of ILWU Local 10, and it should be the Golden Rule for any decent republic. Anyone who claims working people have no heart left for public life and struggle has just not been paying attention.


The ruling class remains fiercely class-conscious, and it commands the heights of political power. Whenever the Republicans claim that the Democrats are preaching class war, this is a classic case of political projection. Class divisions have deepened over the past 30 years, but only the most zealous Democrat would pretend that all blame lies with the Republicans. That is a "progressive" fiction that has regressive consequences in every major election, since it carries the hypnotic suggestion that voters can choose only between two corporate parties.


No one seriously claims that political parties alone determine economic surges and crashes. The causal order is rather the reverse: Objective economic forces bear down upon political systems, and then all kinds of ideological fractures come to the surface, and all kinds of ad hoc coalitions are formed across party lines. That means every election guarantees the relative stability of corporate rule, so long as the two big corporate parties maintain their lockdown on the electoral system. The very rich still remain much better represented in Congress than the working and middle classes.


What do we find on the ideological fever charts of this nation all through the previous century, and now into the first decade of the 21st as well? A perennial holy war not only against avowed red-blooded socialists, whether domestic or foreign, but also an attempt to paint the most panic-stricken liberals in shades of deepest pink. Republicans once crusaded against actually existing communism, whereas now they crusade against the utterly nonexistent "socialism" of the Democratic Party.


And how does the Democratic Party fight the charge of socialism?


The Democrats refuse to fight fair and square for a graduated income tax, proportionate to real wages and our actually existing class system. They maintain the pretense of defending "the middle class," an ideological middle ground in which labor unions are strictly for losers and philanthropy is the hobby of the rich.


The Democrats bungled health care reform very badly under the Clinton administration, and still worse under the Obama administration. None of the necessary lessons were learned the second time around, and indeed the insurance companies are already busy gaming the new system. This was predicted by the good doctors who founded Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). Home foreclosures are still a high-profile story; but the health care bills that are not covered by private insurance plans are what really force so many people into bankruptcy.


The Democrats have not given comprehensive aid to the unemployed, which would indeed require social democratic public programs. A public works program would do much good in repairing roads, tunnels and bridges, but the Democrats have their own interests in privatizing public services and public infrastructure.

The party line on abortion under the Clinton administration was that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare," but that ideal can be secured only through real social democracy in health care, housing and education-namely, in all the public goods that advance the material and social well-being of women. The same administration, however, advanced a punitive program of "welfare reform," dismantling some remnants of the New Deal welfare state that gave shelter to the most exposed women and children.


Two of the signal concessions President Clinton made to the far right concerned the rights of gay people, namely, signing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) into federal law. Both laws have thrown long shadows over the political landscape at the state and local levels. Obama campaigned on a vague program of hope and change, and promised whatever he thought was necessary to any group of likely voters, including gay people. As a self-proclaimed "community organizer," he might have drafted genuine organizers from all the communities hoping for change. Instead, he hired Wall Street insiders and the usual partisan hacks of all races, religions and sexual persuasions.


Clinton had once been described as "the first black president," itself a projection of hope upon a Southern white career politician. An honest wish to transcend racist history is just not good enough. But Obama was, in fact, the first black president, and the same wishes and projections are shipwrecked once again on the rocks and reefs of class politics. The very idea of economic class is a poor abstraction unless it is grounded in social relations that are also racial, sexual and cultural. How does a class-divided culture really come to light? Only through the very social system that is saturated with the ruling ideas of a ruling class. The manifold reality of class is tested and proved in real time, and in searing events such as wars and epidemics. Before there is enlightenment there is heartbreak.


The epidemic of AIDS tracked heavily, though not exclusively, along lines of race, sex and class. Clinton discovered AIDS in earnest only when he left public office and began campaigning for the Nobel Prize. Nowadays Clinton would much rather deal with AIDS in Haiti (certainly a worthy cause) than with the class system that still burdens so many African-Americans with chronic illnesses, including AIDS.


Irony? But there can be no irony if we do not even remember history. Each president graduates from the White House into a kind of Ivy League of philanthropy, and into an alternate universe in which buildings, libraries and foundations bear their names. Besides being tasteless, such people have no sense of shame. There is an inconvenient truth buried in the foundation of all their well-publicized philanthropy. In the words of William Blake: "Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor, / And Mercy no more could be / If all were as happy as we."


Likewise, the only lesson Clinton learned from the economic counterrevolution led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was to make a hard-right U-turn toward deregulation, a kind of Keynesianism in reverse. In this realm, too, certain New Deal restraints on banks and the "free market" were abandoned. (I recommend a 1998 book by the economist Michael Meeropol, "Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution," and the recently published "The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street," by Robert Scheer.)


In Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party has used the courts as blunt instruments against the candidates of the Green Party. Using the "independent judiciary" as partisan brass knuckles may seem thuggish, but the bipartisan lockdown of elections can also be achieved by selling voters a false bargain. This is what happened when Proposition 14 was sold to Californians as a great electoral reform. It was nothing of the kind; it was designed to bump independent and insurgent parties off the ballot, and it may yet succeed. Recently, the Green gubernatorial candidate in California, Laura Wells, was denied the chance to debate the two corporate candidates at a public forum. When she tried to attend the event as a member of the audience, she was arrested. That story was then broadcast online and went over, under and around much of the traditional news media. Every such attack on basic democracy also speeds the day when career politicians hang themselves with their own rope.


War is more truly our national religion than the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, so making a class-conscious case for peace is rank heresy in many houses of worship and in both houses of Congress. Protestantism has largely devolved into the gospel of prosperity, and God has become the gatekeeper of a gated community- for in my Father's house there are many mansions.


The First Amendment to our Constitution forbids the establishment of any state religion, but the deism of Jefferson and other Founding Fathers is no better than atheism to Christian crusaders. For that matter, if the Bill of Rights can be neatly reduced to the right to own guns and form far-right militias, then the rest of the text is a damn nuisance. Much of our national history has not even been forgotten, since it was never learned or taught in the first place. This is why right-wing candidates for public office can invent any original intent they please for the Founding Fathers and not have any idea of the original text of our country's Constitution. The First Amendment was breaking news to Christine O'Donnell, a conservative Christian and a Republican candidate from Delaware for the U.S. Senate, during an Oct. 19 televised debate with her Democratic opponent .


If Abraham Lincoln were to rise from the grave and talk as plainly about labor and capital as he once did in Congress, many Democrats and Republicans would think he sounded like a socialist. That's not far wrong, since Lincoln was (within the limits of his time and place) a social democrat within the republican tradition. In other words, our devolved Democrats have long since abandoned plain talk about social democracy, even as our devolved Republicans have abandoned the constitutional ground of the republic.


Congress has become the front office of the ruling class, but the corporate-funded big media broadcast the official faction fights with all the frenzy of gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum. Those who truly fight and die do so in wars beyond our borders; but the American empire is justified as a horn of plenty, pouring forth democracy and all good things upon the world. If we happen to build our military bases near oil and mineral deposits, then any question raised about American morals and motives must be an outright slander against the soldiers who sacrifice limbs and lives. Career politicians do not just wrap themselves in the flag; they wrap themselves in the flags draped on the coffins of dead soldiers. For every John McCain or John Kerry who showed real courage in battle, however misguided the war, there are scores of politicians who never served in uniform and yet campaign for votes as professional militarists.


The bloody sacrifice of the young is enshrined in national rites and monuments, so the roots of the next war always extend far back into our immense military cemeteries; and the bloody fruits of empire seem always within reach. The partisan spectacle is a fact of public life, but just as surely a grand distraction. Once in a while the news breaks that criminals exist in executive offices; but the systematic criminality of the corporate state is a subject that never needs to be censored since it would never be raised in a bipartisan debate.


In the 1980s, the triumph of reaction was blamed not only on the Republican Party but also on feminists, gay people and anti-racist activists-namely, on people who were often fighting for our lives and for basic democracy. A whole crew of straight white men cranked out columns deriding "wedge issues" and "identity politics." Their common complaint was spelled out at greater length in books such as "The Twilight of Common Dreams" by Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky's "Left for Dead: The Life, Death and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America." Even Christopher Hitchens (who had not yet become a fellow traveler of the imperial right) was quoted in the February 1997 issue of The Progressive as saying, "I remember the first time I heard the slogan 'the personal is political.' I felt a deep, immediate sense of impending doom."


In "The Queer Question: Essays on Desire and Democracy" (South End Press, 1997) I suggested those writers were defending their own brand of identity politics. The danger of playing any identity as a trump card in a political poker game is real, but any claim to represent "the universal left" must also remain open to question. For the sake of brevity, I will summarize the case for a social democracy founded on social pluralism with a quote from Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew," written just after World War II:


"What we propose is a concrete liberalism. By that we mean that all persons who through their work collaborate toward the greatness of a country have the full rights of citizens of that country. What gives them this right is not the possession of a problematical and abstract 'human nature,' but their active participation in the life of the society. This means, then, that the Jews-and likewise the Arabs and the Negroes-from the moment that they are participants in the national enterprise, have a right to that enterprise; they are citizens. But they have these rights as Jews, Negroes, or Arabs-that is, as concrete persons."


If we are serious about the human dignity of "concrete persons," we must defend fair wages and all due legal protection for immigrant workers in our country today. There is an abysmal contradiction between exploiting the labor of immigrant workers and putting targets on their backs as alien invaders. But this contradiction also serves the interests of many employers, since a work force that must pass through barbed wire fences and police dogs will have a tougher time forming a labor union. In this way bosses can have their cake and take bread from workers, too.


True, a police raid on a restaurant kitchen or a tomato farm may be a problem for an employer on that very day. But this kind of random social terrorism is also money in the bank, since the long-term suppression of wages and labor organizing is not an accidental side effect. The lords of agribusiness have a working coalition with the local police chiefs. Otherwise we must explain why fruit and vegetables keep appearing so magically in supermarkets and on dinner plates. Or why so many front lawns and golf courses remain so well tended by landscape workers from Mexico or Guatemala. Or why so many hotels, hospitals and office buildings are cleaned by people who do not earn a living wage.


Here in the southwest region of the United States, this contradiction is a Grand Canyon between liberal ideals and actual ruling-class power. In reality, the number of undocumented workers crossing over our southern border has gone down. That is not surprising, given the deep recession and the recent political campaign to give police in Arizona the power to demand identity papers at will. Even so, the fantasy of a bunker state with an Iron Wall is a convenient exit from reality, since capitalism is an essentially porous and diffuse system of profit. Corporations (and politicians of both corporate parties) placed the mobility of capital above all other considerations.

Let's recall that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), pushed by President Clinton and implemented with bipartisan support in 1994, was a bill of rights for big business, but it was a hemispheric hurricane for the working class. Workers in the United States lost high-paying jobs in skilled manufacturing; Mexican workers swiftly lost wages before losing jobs entirely; and the culture of social democracy in Canada was deeply eroded. As Robert E. Scott wrote in his 2003 article "The high price of 'free' trade" on the Economic Policy Institute website:


"Further study of NAFTA by researchers in Canada and Mexico has shown that workers in all three countries have been hurt, but for different reasons (Faux et al. 2001). In Mexico, real wages have fallen sharply and there has been a steep decline in the number of people holding regular jobs in paid positions. Many workers have been shifted into subsistence-level work in the 'informal sector,' frequently unpaid work in family retail trade or restaurant businesses. Additionally, a flood of subsidized, low-priced corn from the United States has decimated farmers and rural economics. In Canada, a decade of heightened competition with the United States is eroding social investment in public spending on education, health care, unemployment compensation, and a wide range of other public services."


NAFTA was followed by the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005, which extended "the logic of the market" to five Central American nations and to the Dominican Republic. Jimmy Carter was an enthusiastic promoter of CAFTA, and if a more extensive South American Free Trade Agreement had been possible he would have supported that as well. But Carter did have the decency to state that the Venezuelan people had voted fair and square for an economic populist, Hugo Chavez. The working classes in Mexico, Central America and South America have often defied capitalist and outright fascist rulers in mass protests, but they have also suffered heavy losses through the jailing and killing of their bravest militants and labor leaders. To this day, workers from Juarez to Tierra del Fuego have long memories of political betrayals and outright repression. Generally, they do their best to settle accounts with ballots and not bullets. Anyone who argues that workers have no right to wage the class struggle beyond election days, however, is simply wishing that the working class would reduce itself to a passive production line on every other day of the year.


This is the ground of struggle, and this is the ground of solidarity. If socialists are not internationalists, we might as well join phony populists in the existing big corporate parties. The only internationalism recognized by demagogues such as Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly is the unrestricted mobility of capital over the whole planet. The price of this "free market" is the near feudal servitude of many millions of workers, and the imperial wars in which they die so young.


Patriotism of that kind is the false gospel of the ruling class. The sooner we break those mental chains, the better we are able to love our homeland. And what is any homeland but a wide sense of our neighborhood? If we do not want our streets filled with the tanks of a foreign power or our skies filled with deadly drones, then by what divine right do we inflict them on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan? These wars have long been an exercise of ruling-class power, waged in the domestic political realm by two political parties that serve the same corporate interests even as they play musical chairs in Congress.


"Our two-party system" is an ideological fiction, but this fiction has real political power. On the eve of the midterm elections, the Democratic Party is struggling to hold together the usual unstable coalition of Blue Dog Democrats, labor unions and corporate managers.


Whether the tea party movement is an appendage of the Republican Party or a mutant force that may break party ranks, we cannot yet predict. Tea party activists cover a spectrum of far-right causes, but at present the central and controlling idea seems to be free-market fundamentalism. In its purest form, this ideology is pure nonsense, since the irreducible price of every "free" market is the actual labor of human beings.


Granting "personhood" to corporations was a piece of godlike presumption on the part of Supreme Court justices in 1886, when they ruled in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment made any corporation a natural person under the U.S. Constitution. As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote 60 years later, "There was no history, logic, or reason to support that view."


That legal precedent of corporate personhood undermined our public life, yet it is consistent with the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case early this year (though it remains indefensible). The latter decision gives corporations a right to make unlimited campaign donations, and Congress has failed to impose disclosure requirements. Obama's noblest public moment came in his last State of the Union speech when he made a direct criticism of this Supreme Court ruling. But this president does not simply serve at the will of the people; he also serves at the will of the ruling class, and remains a member of that class in good standing so long as he presides loyally over a corporate state and imperial wars.


If every government depends on the consent of the governed, then every neighborhood and workplace is potentially a small republic of persons who are willing to say, "We do not consent." Do the capitalist parties depend upon your votes and donations? Deprive those parties of your moral and material support. Vote against the parties of war and empire every chance you get, and cast your vote for the parties of peace, economic democracy and ecological sanity. In this election, the Green Party of the United States represents not only our best hope of social democracy, but also our best chance to bring ecological common sense to our global economy.

[Nov 03, 2010] The Impotence of Elections by Paul Craig Roberts

Growing Anger

In his historical novel, The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa writes that things have to change in order to remain the same. That is what happened in the US congressional elections on November 2.

Jobs offshoring, which began on a large scale with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has merged the Democrats and Republicans into one party with two names. The Soviet collapse changed attitudes in socialist India and communist China and opened those countries, with their large excess supplies of labor, to Western capital.

Pushed by Wall Street and Wal-Mart, American manufacturers moved production for US markets offshore to boost profits and shareholder earnings by utilizing cheap labor. The decline of the US manufacturing work force reduced the political power of unions and the ability of unions to finance the Democratic Party. The end result was to make the Democrats dependent on the same sources of financing as Republicans.

Prior to this development, the two parties, despite their similarities, represented different interests and served as a check on one another. The Democrats represented labor and focused on providing a social safety net. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, housing subsidies, education, and civil rights were Democratic issues. Democrats were committed to a full employment policy and would accept some inflation to secure more employment.

The Republicans represented business. The Republicans focused on curtailing big government in all its manifestations from social welfare spending to regulation. The Republicans' economic policy consisted of opposing federal budget deficits.

These differences resulted in political competition.

Today both parties are dependent for campaign finance on Wall Street, the military/security complex, AIPAC, the oil industry, agri-business, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry. Campaigns no longer consist of debates over issues. They are mud-slinging contests.

Angry voters take their anger out on incumbents, and that is what we saw in the election. Tea Party candidates defeated Republican incumbents in primaries, and Republicans defeated Democrats in the congressional elections.

Policies, however, will not change qualitatively. Quantitatively, Republicans will be more inclined to more rapidly dismantle more of the social safety net than Democrats and more inclined to finish off the remnants of civil liberties. But the powerful private oligarchs will continue to write the legislation that Congress passes and the President signs. New members of Congress will quickly discover that achieving re-election requires bending to the oligarchs' will.

This might sound harsh and pessimistic. But look at the factual record. In his campaign for the presidency, George W. Bush criticized President Clinton's foreign adventures and vowed to curtail America's role as the policeman of the world. Once in office, Bush pursued the neoconservatives' policy of US world hegemony via military means, occupation of countries, setting up puppet governments, and financial intervention in other countries' elections.

Obama promised change. He vowed to close Guantanamo prison and to bring the troops home. Instead, he restarted the war in Afghanistan and started new wars in Pakistan and Yemen, while continuing Bush's policy of threatening Iran and encircling Russia with military bases.

Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes and prospects, and out of hope for their children's careers are angry. But the political system offers them no way of bringing about change. They can change the elected servants of the oligarchs, but they cannot change the policies or the oligarchs.

The American situation is dire. As a result of the high speed Internet, the loss of manufacturing jobs was followed by the loss of professional service jobs, such as software engineering, that were career ladders for American university graduates. The middle class has no prospects. Already, the American labor force and income distribution mimics that of a third world country, with income and wealth concentrated in a few hands at the top and most of the rest of the population employed in domestic services jobs. In recent years net new job creation has been concentrated in lowly paid occupations, such as waitresses and bartenders, ambulatory health care services, and retail clerks. The population and new entrants into the work force continue to grow more rapidly than job opportunities.

Turning this around would require more realization than exists among policymakers and a deeper crisis. Possibly it could be done by using taxation to encourage US corporations to manufacture domestically the goods and services that they sell in US markets. However, the global corporations and Wall Street would oppose this change.

The tax revenue loss from job losses, bank bailouts, stimulus programs, and the wars have caused a three-to-four-fold jump in the US budget deficit. The deficit is now too large to be financed by the trade surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC. Consequently, the Federal Reserve is making massive purchases of Treasury and other debt. The continuation of these purchases threatens the dollar's value and its role as reserve currency. If the dollar is perceived as losing that role, flight from dollars will devastate the remnants of Americans' retirement incomes and the ability of the US government to finance itself.

Yet, the destructive policies continue. There is no re-regulation of the financial industry, because the financial industry will not allow it. The unaffordable wars continue, because they serve the profits of the military/security complex and promote military officers into higher ranks with more retirement pay. Elements within the government want to send US troops into Pakistan and into Yemen. War with Iran is still on the table. And China is being demonized as the cause of US economic difficulties.

Whistleblowers and critics are being suppressed. Military personnel who leak evidence of military crimes are arrested. Congressmen call for their execution. Wikileaks' founder is in hiding, and neoconservatives write articles calling for his elimination by CIA assassination teams. Media outlets that report the leaks apparently have been threatened by Pentagon chief Robert Gates. According to Antiwar.com, on July 29 Gates "insisted that he would not rule out targeting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange or any of the myriad media outlets which reported on the leaks."

The control of the oligarchs extends to the media. The Clinton administration permitted a small number of mega-corporations to concentrate the US media in a few hands. Corporate advertising executives, not journalists, control the new American media, and the value of the mega-companies depends on government broadcast licenses. The media's interest is now united with that of the government and the oligarchs.

On top of all the other factors that have made American elections meaningless, voters cannot even get correct information from the media about the problems that they and the country face.

As the economic situation is likely to continue deteriorating, the anger will grow. But the oligarchs will direct the anger away from themselves and toward the vulnerable elements of the domestic population and "foreign enemies."

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

[Nov 03, 2010] Giving the Keys Back to the Folks Who Crashed the Car by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

Authors of the book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

After Tuesday's drubbing, Democrats will search for the hidden message of the election. But the message isn't hidden: The decisive blocs of voters that switched from Democrats in 2008 to Republicans in 2010 were angry and disillusioned -- with the economy, with a political system they see as helping banks and CEOs, not ordinary working families, and with both parties, Republicans (exit-poll favorability rating: 41 percent) an economic recovery package that included major tax cuts, to expanded health insurance and medical cost control, and to extension of the 2001 tax cuts for the middle class; the party that shamelessly courted lobbyists and corporate donors while claiming they were only against reform because it represented a "bailout" of these very same interests.

In exit polls, voters were asked who they blamed for the state of the economy. In order, they blamed banks, then the Bush administration, and only then the current administration. Yet those who blamed banks gave their votes by a wide margin to the GOP. Their votes have made Speaker-to-be John Boehner the second most powerful person in Washington only months after he staged an open rally for bank lobbyists, urging them to block Democrats and their "punk staffers." The rally worked: Wall Street swung toward the Republicans, joining health insurers, big business groups, energy companies, and the rest of the GOP's new money trust.

Midterm election losses are a virtual inevitability for the party of the president. A terrible economy makes them more certain -- and larger. The only thing that would have saved Democrats from big losses this time around was a huge organizational and fundraising edge. Thanks to the Tea Party and billions in outside campaign spending that favored the GOP, the edge was Republicans'.

If there is a hidden message in the election, it's one that we, in our recent book, Winner-Take-All Politics, call the "dirty little secret" of political science: most voters pay little attention to what happens in Washington and have only the vaguest sense of what is happening there. Most are completely unaware of how the filibuster has been used relentlessly to block action on the economy, and a majority mistakenly believes that the astonishingly unpopular TARP legislation passed under Obama, when in fact in was signed by George W. Bush.

We are taught to believe that voters call the shots. And they often do. Yet the vote is a blunt, heavy weapon -- one that voters barraged with negative ads and misleading messages, without strong guidance from grassroots organizations, often wield with little awareness of or regard for the collateral damage that will result. In this case, the damage is likely to be the crippling of goals and policies that most Americans continue to support.

One salient example sums up the whole: Republicans' big gains came with older voters -- in part because they were frightened by GOP attacks on the health care bill. Yet Republican budget blueprints -- from Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" to the GOP "Pledge to America" -- mean even bigger cuts in Medicare and the revival of the GOP's mothballed plans for partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare. Ask older Americans whether they would like to trash their cherished programs in return for massive new tax cuts for the richest of the rich, and the answer will be a resounding no. Only on election day, a strong majority of older Americans, in effect, said yes.

In John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, perhaps the most memorable line was uttered by an angry farmer about to lose his home (sound familiar?). Enraged and despairing but unable to pinpoint blame for his terrible loss, he asks, "Who can we shoot?" That's what voters were asking in 2010, and most had no clearer idea than the farmer of where responsibility for their plight lay.

The 2010 election was the political equivalent of the perfect crime: The GOP vigorously took on all reforms designed to rebalance the economy for the long term, tying Washington up in contorted knots, then were rewarded at the polls by voters dissatisfied with an ugly D.C. culture unable to produce economic renewal.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

[Nov 03, 2010] Republican Party Time By MAUREEN DOWD

Barack Obama deserved what he got but Republicans managed to fool rednecks again and again, providing the key finding of "What matters with Kansas": you can fool many people indefinitely and on this people repugs should concentrate.
NYTimes.com

At a Republican victory party suffused with vengeful glee, the man who body-surfed the anti-establishment wave to become the next Speaker of the House was looking very establishment.

Even though it was predicted, it was still a shock to see voters humiliate a brilliant and spellbinding young president, who'd had such a Kennedy-like beginning, while electing a lot of conservative nuts and promoting this central-casting congressman as the face of the future: a Republican who had vowed in a written pledge to restore America to old-fashioned values, returning to a gauzy "Leave It to Beaver" image that never existed even on the set of "Leave It to Beaver."

Republicans outcommunicated a silver-tongued president who was supposed to be Ronald Reagan's heir in the communications department.

They were able to persuade a lot of Americans that the couple in the White House was not American enough, not quite "normal," too Communist, too radical, too Great Society. All that Ivy League schooling had made them think they knew better than average American folks, not to mention the founding fathers.

The Speaker-in-waiting sounded the alarm: the elites in the White House were snuffing out the America he grew up in. It only took two years to realize that their direction for the country was simply, as he put it, "a contradiction with the vast majority of Americans."

No one gets to take America away from Americans - not even the American president!

"What the American people were saying is 'Enough!' " the Speaker-to-be told me, as he savored his own win and his party's landslide, which he said was "a historical tide, not just a partisan election."

Washington had not been listening. Washington had been scorning the deepest beliefs of Americans. And now that would have to change.

"American people are clearly fed up with what they see as the decay of American society," he declared.

The new leader of the House took a more black-and-white approach than the nuanced president. It's enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that you need the consent of the governed and the governed did not consent.

Ascending to third in the line of succession for the presidency: a working-class kid who rose in the House as a rabble-rouser willing to throw bombs to score points against powerful Democrats.

Now he'd be helping to run the country, saving it from what he regarded as an arrogant and out-of-touch clique of elites.

In the revolutionary flush of the electoral map glowing red, he was floating, working hard to avoid gloating (even though Sean Hannity was around, gloating about the pain about to befall the Democratic president).

But he could not resist taking a few jabs at the "liberal media elite" distorting things, and a few more at a puffed-up White House that got punished for not paying enough attention to people's anxieties.

"They had an enormous opportunity to bring about change and they failed, and I don't say that harshly," he said, adding: "They really are left-wing elitists and they really thought the country didn't get it, and, therefore, it was their job to give the country the government that they thought the country needed, even if they didn't want it. That's the whole history of the health plan."

There was a lot of talk, as in the campaign, about the misbegotten health care plan, about balancing the budget, about lowering the deficit and taxes, about doing something on abortion and bloated government. Meanwhile, bloated fat-cat lobbyists were dancing down K Street.

The next Speaker felt that the humbled president should take the election as a cue to be conciliatory, and he proposed they talk in the next few days. He offered to reach out to Democrats who wanted to work with his side, but also noted that the president would not be wise to stand in the way of the conservative agenda.

"I prefer to believe that this president, who is clearly very smart, is quite capable of thinking clearly about a message sent by the American people," he said.

He said that, contrary to what the media elite had been jabbering about, he would not use his subpoena power to rain down a series of investigations on the Democratic administration.

No "witch hunts," he said. Only "legitimate" investigations.

Yeah, that all worked out for Newt Gingrich. He really came through. The quotes above came from Gingrich, when I covered his heady victory in Marietta, Ga., in the 1994 Republican landslide that made him Speaker.

And, obviously, the Republican House only pursued "legitimate" investigations of Bill Clinton. Sixteen years later, as a weeping John Boehner extolled the American values he learned at his father's bar - in the moment he dethroned Nancy Pelosi - the new crop of anarchic conservatives are saying all the same things.

God help the Republic. And, Mr. Speaker, in the immortal words of Sharron Angle, man up!

[Nov 03, 2010] The Tragedy of the Obama Administration

The Big Picture

The first item damned him to a mediocre economic team, one that failed to respond strongly to the banks that created the crisis. The second error earned him the enmity of the opposing party. The third error was political, and likely cost him the House, and possibly the Senate.

The great irony is that the man who ran on the campaign slogan of Change failed to deliver it in any meaningful way - at least, where the public wanted it - in getting the reckless runaway banks under control, and in stimulating the moribund, post-credit crisis economy.

I hasten to add, that from a political perspective, the President was a wimp. Had Al Gore been President from 2000-08 (and controlled Congress), the next GOP President would have flailed him for the recession and crisis bank relentlessly. Hell, the GOP still beats Jimmy Carter like a pińata. Once Obama took office, that was pretty much the last we heard of the Bush recession. The public actually forget who authorized TARP, who bailed out Citibank, BofA, AIG, Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns, etc.

This amounted to political suicide.

Critics have debated Obama's hands off approach to passing National Romney-Care, his giving up (?!) the winning issue of partial Bush tax cut extensions. I am perplexed as to why he would not force a full confirmation battle over the charming midwestern Elizabeth Warren as new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chair - Bnaks versus your grandma.

But as far as I am concerned, those are secondary political issues. To me, his presidency began its fatal downward spiral once he allowed Robert Rubin to determine his initial financial appointments. By passing over more pragmatic candidates not tied to banks and Wall Street, the president missed his opportunity to rise to greatness.

The opportunity existed to get the renegade banks under control - to reduce their leverage, their recklessness, and to get their hands out of the taxpayers pockets.

That opportunity was squandered, and Obama ended up as a defender of the banking status quo. It is where his presidency could have achieved lasting greatness, and instead was turned into just another elected official, who over promised and under delivered . . .

TakBak04:

It is a Tragedy. So much time wasted..with so much that needed to be done. With his huge staff it shouldn't have been "impossible." Yet it seemed from the beginning that those who would serve in his Administration had been "hand picked by someone" from the get go for a "smooth, seamless transition."

I don't know if he was "suckered" or was "willing." I guess the Historians will parse that one out…long after those who suffer from the deregulation since Reagan are gone. Who will be left to read? We have to hope the folks who "BROUGHT THE CHANGE" will be left.

Hope….. Man…so much work to be done. But, at least we now see how it all works and so much has been revealed that perhaps we aren't still living and accepting "Smoke and Mirrors."

Roll up our shirt sleeves and let's get AT IT!

trainreq:

A proper epitaph for this administration.

drey:

Good analysis, Barry.

Unlike some who would ascribe sinister or conspiratorial motives to Obama's failings, I chalk them up to inexperience, ineptitude, and naivete. Good campaigners do not necessarily make good leaders. We've seen it time and time again. It's a different skill set entirely.

Start dealing in reality, BO – the Republicans do not LIKE you and never will. Nor will they work with you toward goals which will ultimately be seen as your accomplishments, not theirs. Get over it and start to govern. You may refer to the Clinton playbook….

cpd:

Very good summary. It also shows the tremendous hold special interests have on the politicians. So much private money flowing through DC has completely corrupted politics. Take private money out of politics, have publicly financed elections and institute across the board term limits and then there is half a chance of getting elected representatives that will do the right thing.

By the way, don't forget Obama reappointed Bernanke. That was unforgivable. It's time to put a non-economist in charge of the Fed (or better yet, just get rid of it).

Heretic:

Sadly, I have to agree with most of this. But if Mr. Obama was going to get any kind of health care legislation, could he wait? The watered down thing we got just barely made it with Democratic majorities in both houses – and losing the house seemed likely even in Jan 2009. But to do health care you have to do the big parts all at once: Everyone has to be insured, no one can be denied coverage, and subsidies for those who can't afford coverage. This may have been Obama's only chance to get that sort of a bill through.

Mannwich:

@Heretic: That's a fair point if he had thrown more weight into the economy and jobs situation it might have given him more political capital to then tackle the health care issue. Instead he used up his political capital on a health care bill that nobody seemed happy with or truly understood (which made people even unhappier). He got his priorities all mixed up.

beaufou:

He had a great opportunity, he could have pushed the Republicans into a corner and kept at them relentlessly; but it was all "anger accomplishes nothing" "I get it"…no, you didn't get it Barrack.

RW:

I agree that going for national Romneycare was probably a mistake - it should have been a straight-up call for Medicare-for-everyone and damn the torpedoes - but the notion that passing health care reform was a serious tactical error is simply ill-informed: As Krugman notes here at http://tinyurl.com/39vaefj those who make this claim cannot name a single significant economic policy initiative that Obama could have successfully pursued otherwise. In fact those making this argument appear to think that economic policy is more a matter of 'focus' - AKA a matter of PR and superficial expressions of 'caring' (bleh!) - than it is a matter of actually doing something.

But that fundamental error probably better describes the dysfunctional and declining state of our democracy than anything else: Appearance appears to be trumping actual form virtually everywhere as Reality-TV substitutes for reality and our nation dies the death of a thousand cuts in the process.

Panem et circenses (Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81), "Bread and circuses:" There are too few citizens devoted to civic duty and too many devoted to being fed and entertained. That is the problem.

Chief Tomahawk:

Where's the blame for the media?!?

They've reported this as the most expensive election at $4 billion, yet little has been examined about where the money is coming from and what the donors are hoping to get in return. Yet despite the enormous expense, candidates are still lining up to shell out the dough. There's only one reason they'd do it voluntarily and that's if there's a bigger expected payday to come by selling votes down the road. So, dear media,

How much are votes being sold for???

Mannwich:

@Chief: The whores in the MSM are on that very money meat wagon as well. Hence, the obvious reasons to not mention it.

druce:

Fatally cautious…one can understand keeping Geithner in the thick of the crisis, but not why he's still there.

But I have difficult believing enmity of the right would not have been the far worse if he had truly reformed Wall Street, washed out the zombie bank shareholders, put the sundry crooks in jail, enforced transparency, limited leverage, put in investor and borrower protection with teeth, etc., etc.

jcmcn5:

I agree with most of what you wrote except the part about not flailing the previous admin. Are you kidding? Hardly a week went by without Obama saying something to the effect that he'd inherited a mess. It's true, he did. But let's not pretend he didn't use that to his advantage when he could.

The fatal error was not focusing on job creation immediately, instead of wasting time and capital ramming a HCare bill down the throats of everyone and using bribery and pork to get it done. If he'd focused on creating jobs - immediate, private sector jobs (not teachers, not gov't heathcare workers) he'd have coasted through this election with an even larger majority. With that blunder, he revealed himself as the liberal idealogue he pretended not to be throughout the whole campaign of 2008.

As for his lack of execution - Maybe next time the Dems will hold out as savior someone who has done a little more with his life than be a community organizer. Really! What on earth did you expect from this guy? This is not about McCain or even Republicans. This is about about acting like a bunch of high school girls when some hot guy walks by, even though the hot guy is a shallow narcissist.

Hell, Hilary would have been a better choice. At least she had balls.

Robespierre:

A good read of "The Prince" could have saved him but nobody reads history anymore.

lalaland:

I think your view is myopic.

A: Government intervention in business is the 3rd rail in America for a very good reason – you don't want it to happen because it's too prone to corruption, pure and simple. I think you fail to appreciate the justified cautiousness of his approach. We stepped in and took over several companies, and threatened the livelihoods of many more. I think the calls for more action on the administration's part should consider how that sets precedent, and how that precedent could be abused in the future. He's already called a socialist just for completing what Bush began (gm and chrysler, aig, fannie and freddie, etc.)

B: They didn't have the votes. Kennedy died. Byrd died. You fail to appreciate the opposition. Democrats simply could not steamroll Republican opposition, pure and simple. Mitch McConnell has been vindicated as a tactician this very evening.

Did we have a substantive debate on financial regulations? No. Did we have a substantive debate on Health Care Reform? No. Was this because Obama didn't want a conversation, to find the best ideas? I don't believe that for a minute. If you are upset with what you got from Finreg, blame the opposition. If you are pissed at the healthcare bill you got, blame your representative who cast it as an 'all or nothing' proposition instead of a process they are supposed to engage in. We'll see how these republican victories stick when after 2 years they have nothing to show for it. After all, they didn't run on doing anything so I doubt they will disappoint.

Mannwich:

RW: So he couldn't have pursued a more robust (and effective) fiscal stimulus and attention to the economy and the creation of actual jobs? There were plenty of areas here (hello decaying, embarrassing infrastructure everywhere?) where he could have been much bolder. Instead he focused on ramming through a bad health care bill. That's been his hallmark from Day 1, confusing activity with accomplishment. His style of leadership might have worked fine in the '90′s, but not in a time of crisis where bold leadership is required.

Mbuna:

How much of a deal with the devil did Obama make to get elected in the first place hmm? Was it in fact the big corporations that put him over the top, despite what common knowledge dictated back then? Maybe he was already captured by the banks before he even got elected. Perhaps the electorate is already irrelevant, passe, because the candidates of both major parties are already captured by their corporate masters before they get elected. The electorate loses no matter who wins.

huxrules:

There was a good story on All Things Considered today about how Clinton didn't come into his presidency till he lost the congress in '94. We will see what Obama does tomorrow. I hope he finally comes out swinging.

paull:

Unfair and hyperbolic. Obama is working within the realm of the possible and has done good things; at a minimum, he hasn't done disastrous things, like his predecessor. It's the senate's rules that need to be changed.

jcmcn5:

huxrules - Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton. Clinton may have been a scoundrel and sexual predator, but he was a master politician who had already tasted political defeat twice before. Obama has never faced any such test. He will wilt.

But take heart. He may very well be saved by the incompetence of his political opponents.

limaur:

A muslim disguised as a christian, a communist pretending to be a liberal, a democrat hoping for bipartisan cooperation to get the country moving again. You , the people of the U.S., wanted the man to solve all your economic problems ,and with dispatch,while everybody bitched and complained and obstructed his every step. I do most sincerely hope that your U.S. will go to hell, for its arrogance, for its stupidity , for its bigotry and for being .. oh.. so fatuous.

Jackrabbit:

Don't forget renominating "Subprime is contained" Bernanke.

And any notion that Obama will change in any REAL way (he might make some show of it) should be dispelled by his performance on the Daily Show where he praised Summers for a "heck of a job" and tried to minimize the costs of bailing out the banks.

I have been skeptical of the line that Obama is owned by the banks but his Daily Show performance may have finally convinced me.

Mannwich:

LOL limaur. Halloween was Sunday night.

gregh:

Presidents are figureheads not experts. Most politicians don't know economics or finance, apparently most economists and finance people obviously don't know economics.

If you were president and were suddenly handed some war – 9/11 – in addition to hundreds of other major non-financial you'd probably be equally lost and having to put your trust into someone elses hands. He chose wrongly, but did he have time to study intracies and seriously vet those he'd trust to vet his potential choices? Would you have the time the study war, nation-building, anti-terrorism, etc in order to make what you felt to be the perfect decision while juggling 100 other balls? You'd probably have to trust the word of close folks on the hill… who would all make the same bad decisions. Barry you would have made great decisions regarding our financial troubles but you'd probably make blind ones regarding some very different crisis that isn't your regular schtick.

Mannwich:

I think most of us simply wanted plain old-fashioned bold, principled leadership. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is now.

RW:

No argument Mannwich but that's not the game the (feckless and useless) pundits have been playing: The cry that Obama should have been doing X or Y is not accompanied by a concrete example of am economic policy he could have actually proposed, passed through the Republican blockade, and successfully pursued.

The victory of Republican candidates today is more a message of voter confusion and despair than a message of actual policy direction.

The real "tragedy of the Obama administration" is less in its policies than in its message: But you already knew that didn't you.

FrankInTheFalls:

Very good analysis. But I cannot disagree more with this: "Once Obama took office, that was pretty much the last we heard of the Bush recession"

You have got to be kidding me. All we have heard for the past ten months is, "we were handed this economy, it will take a long time to undo the past eight years, blah blah blah" It even went on during Obama's recent stumping trip.

Yeah, we KNOW you were handed a pile of garbage, so tell us when you will do something to clean it up.

call me ahab:

Clinton didn't come into his presidency till he lost the congress in '94. We will see what Obama does tomorrow. I hope he finally comes out swinging.

not that you're a dumb ass - but Clinton in 1994 - moved to the right (and therefore did not come out swinging) - and worked with the Republican's on Republican initiatives after the congressional defeat-

but let's hope Obama comes out swinging- whatever that means

Mannwich:

Agreed RW. People on Main Street are failing desperately in this country. Looking for an answer. Any answer. The next two years should be interesting to say the least. Pull up a chair, get some popcorn. The circus is not only in town, it just doubled.

call me ahab:

I do most sincerely hope that your U.S. will go to hell, for its arrogance, for its stupidity , for its bigotry and for being .. oh.. so fatuous.

blow me douche bag

Mannwich:

@ahab: This GOP to date has had NO interest whatsoever in "working with Obama". Absolutely none. Their only interest has been "making him a one-term president", no matter the consequences to the country. The poetic justice now is they'll either be totally exposed (assuming anyone is paying attention, of course) or will have to work with him now.

DM RTA:

RW: "As Krugman notes here at http://tinyurl.com/39vaefj those who make this claim cannot name a single significant economic policy initiative that Obama could have successfully pursued otherwise. In fact those making this argument appear to think that economic policy is more a matter of 'focus' - AKA a matter of PR and superficial expressions of 'caring' (bleh!) - than it is a matter of actually doing something."

How about if the President had taken the back half of the stimulus bill spending and worked it tirelessly to make sure that there was more than 1100 pages of bill left over when it was spent? How about if instead of making comments like there are no shelf ready infrastructure projects making sure that the most stimulative ideas were being readied. How about glorifying the details and making them look like they were worked on by the people who know better than anyone else?…and then selling it as being worth it.

call me ahab:

manny-

Clinton went to the GOP after the congressional defeat-

not the other way around-

also- glad to see everyone on this blog lay down like a bunch of little bitches after the 10:11 comment above-

I guess I'll see you in hell manny

Matt P.:

All Presidents are not dealt the same hand. Obama was set up perfectly and has so far failed miserably. He came in with tremendous good will and with a HUGE advantage in Congress. They had more votes than any GOP President in the last 90 years or so. Crazy advantage for getting your legislation done with hardly a GOP vote required. Also, he came in after the blow up of the economy. No one blames him for the economy, they blame him for setting the wrong expectations on the recovery.

maximo:

It's sad to admit but you're absolutely right, Barry. Boy, this is a Fukuyama moment for America and the joke is on us.

JimRino:

"But I have difficult believing enmity of the right would not have been the far worse if he had truly reformed Wall Street, washed out the zombie bank shareholders, put the sundry crooks in jail, enforced transparency, limited leverage, put in investor and borrower protection with teeth, etc., etc."

Agreed. To do any of these, he'd have to find an effective means of dealing with the right wing Fox Professional Liars. As long as you have One Network Lying and Smearing Every Single Day you won't get anywhere near optimal policy passed. I guess I'm surprised just how deep racist feelings run on the right. They don't give a Damn about this Country as long as they can Smear a President.

Lariat1:

I'm disappointed in Obama and ashamed of the Republican strategy of just NO to everything. Statesmanship is dead and it is only going to get worse. I just came back from 5:15 am to 9:40 pm election working. It was sad, all the people coming in literally talking about the Revolution with the Tea Party and how everything will be fixed now. This was seriously felt and voiced by a lot of people. My God what is happening to this country.

JimRino:

I now think the ONLY way you can deal with Wall Street is to elect 100 Liberals to the Senate. The only way the Republican party could do more rear kissing of Wall Street would be to become gay.

JasRas:

The best opportunity wasted by a failure to grasp the situation and properly adjust… And now we will all pay regardless of party, place, demographic… Good luck to all.

Mannwich:

@Jim: But who cares if the "right would have been far worse". "W", whom I disagreed with on mostly everything was able to ram through nearly his entire agenda (except privatizing SS) with a far slimmer majority because he didn't give a rat's ass what the Dems or Dem voters thought. Use the bully pulpit and lead with conviction and principle, and the people will usually follow. If that doesn't work, then so be it. Losing while being conviction-less and unprincipled is much worse. The public, rightly or wrongly, admires bold leadership and people who lead with conviction and principle. The O man, and his constant giving away the house at every turn to an enemy that wanted nothing more than to destroy him and his presidency, showed neither throughout the last two years.

jeg3:

Great post BR, on the mark.

Obama is not a liberal ideologue, he is exactly like Bush II, A Neoliberal Corporatist. Obama followed the same failed Bush II policies and started his own with corporatized healthcare. Mainstreet America elects Austerians into office expecting the opposite, and BR is right in that the best you can do is to figure out how to use it to your advantage (and/or not to your disadvantage).

Godspeed America

dss:

"confusing activity with accomplishment."

Well said, Manny. With the ridiculous health care bill that was allowed to pass (2014 if you can stay alive that long) he needed to go down swinging, fighting for what was right rather than what the insurance companies bought. At least while the citizenry was being screwed they could say that someone fought for the right to have health care rather than the privilege that it is today.

Just like allowing the banksters to carry on with their ill gotten gains, the insurance and drug companies are very pleased to have Obama as president.

These times called for a fighter, the change agent he promised instead of this sad excuse for a leader. Oh sure, his administration points to the bills that were "allowed" to pass, the ones that would have passed with any Democratic president, as proof of his efficacy, they were bills he didn't fight very hard to get passed.

Now two more years of gridlock. two more years of pretending that Republican policies were not what drove this economy off the cliff. 2012? Who cares.

People are angry because they are tired of being sold down the river by both all political parties.

Stranded_in_CA:

If any president had economic advisers like Rubin (whom Obama had since he was senator), they too would have made the same rotten decisions in regards to Wall Street. Heck his entire roster of economic advisers read like a list of Wall Street insiders and tools.

You won't get intelligent nor honest information from such a sorry lot period.

FrancoisT:

Now that the House will be controlled by the Reichpubliscums, thou shall look at the last two years as a model of political civility and good manners.

It'll be unbelievably ugly in Washington DC until November 2012. Just take a look at the crop of Tea Partiers, mobster-tied ex-attorneys, total fuckheads, anti-science, worshipers of the folksy ignorance drinking at the fountain of power, ready to paralyze the country if their "requirements" are not met.

It's gonna hurt; BTW, pray we don't get a REAL crisis until the next election.

Mannwich:

I have to say, I'm embarrassed to have voted all these years for such a spineless, wimpy party. Enough already with the "other party is mean" meme. When you get the kind of majorities the Dems had, that shit just doesn't fly. LEAD, please.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/a-centrist-democratic-age_b_777955.html

call me ahab:

It'll be unbelievably ugly in Washington DC until November 2012.

so what's going to happen then that's so fan-fucking-tastic? Obviously you know the future- and I guess fuckheads and folksy people are going to get what's coming to them

JT23456:

Hey, it's all well & good to have 20-20 hindsight and skewer the invalids – let's face it – I should have been a lot smarter when I retired in 2001 and moved my money as well as our bodies offshore. Smart me would have been 2x as smart to move the $ to CH as we built a house in MX and moved here. At least we have the 50′ sailboat and the rum and we can go and spend 3-4 months in Tahiti while the corporate "avatars" duke it out over the bones and skin and the scabs that are left of the US corpse. Politicians are avatars – trust me.

JimRino:

plantseeds, What do you expect the "Republicans" are going to do? They're going to bankrupt you and your assets, take away your healthcare, ship your job overseas, and stick a flag up your ???. Then what are you going to do?

But, you're taxes will be lower. You just gave the country away to the Wall Street Mafia.

Jojo:

What a flame out! So much hope wasted and squandered.

Obama seemed to have so much poise and self-confidence coming into office. He was on the crest of a wave. He had a beautiful wife and two cute children. Thoughts of JFK and Camelot were in the minds of many.

But Obama stumbled from the beginning, failing to show any real sense of urgency. Everything he did was slow and methodical, one step at a time. He seems unable to express real empathy or understanding in any situation due to his inability to emote effectively. He is always cool and collected. And yes, he does come across as a wimp, afraid to or emotionally unable to stand up to and confront the Republican opposition front and center.

In these troubled times, we wanted and needed BOLD leadership. But Obama was and has been unable to rise to any opportunity. He simply does not have the personality or experience to be a real leader.

You can't change the color of the stripes on a zebra. The Dems should be searching for a new presidential candidate for 2012. Obama should not run for a 2nd term.

AGORACOM:

Americans haven't been happy with the health care system for decades.

BUT they were really mad about Wall Street / Bank fleecing right now.

He should have tackled Wall St first and hard.

It would have inspired citizens that desperately needed a hero.

He could have then ridden that wave into any reasonable legislation he wanted.

Obama blew it. I didn't want him to. I'm a Conservative from Canada – but hoped that someone would stop the Wall Street train wreck.

It would have been nice to watch a President act Presidential.

Le Sigh.

George … The Greek … From Canada

plantseeds:

JimRino – you're dizzy from the political tail chase. there is no difference between the two. you are a victim of the biggest scam in the history of the USA. they all belong to the same country clubs and stay on the same floor of the hotel. they all fly the private jet. republicans and democrats are one in the same. i don't rely on them and I am in charge of my own health and therefore health care. they can't take my job…I 'll leave the flag comment alone. the lower my taxes the better. the government is not the solution to anything. the sooner you learn that the better. keep playing the blame game if you choose but I am not so easily distracted.

call me ahab:

They're going to bankrupt you and your assets, take away your healthcare, ship your job overseas, and stick a flag up your ???. Then what are you going to do?

take away my healthcare that I pay for myself?

damn Republicans

Mannwich:

Hey plantseeds – what about those with a pre-existing condition through no fault of their own, except maybe faulty DNA? Should the plan be either "our own healthcare" or food and shelter? And that's assuming anyone would even cover you with a pre-existing condition. What say ye?

covel:

Why do we Americans continually have hope that a government filled with losers can do anything? Right or left, the people that go there are not our best or brightest. They are the ones who groove living at Hollywood for ugly people. Power and fame are their motives. Their skills? Their abilities? Come on.

wunsacon:

Ahab,

I'd be *happy* if I thought there were enough Karl Denninger remnants in the "tea party" that something might actually happen on the finance front. But, I see *mostly* neocon retreads. I don't see why you would take such offense to Francois's comment…

Mannwich:

@wunsy: Retards or retreads? LOL. Sorry…..

Darkness:

So, this should be interesting. BoA goes bankrupt and then what? The house is no way bailing them out. Has the populace become inured enough to avoid a generalized bank run?

The republicans sure are acting like teens being given a car with a full tank of gas. Surprise…

Greg0658:

I'll catch up on the 1/2 remaining coments later .. from my FB earlier to a J6P friend

1. like the puppet in the WH can break from the strings and grab his bazooka and go to town & country busting ___ umm .. I'm at a loss for …. Right Now by Chris Gaines aka Garth Brooks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7fM_jAmpWw

2. Greg!--WHAT?

3. :-) what :-| ok I'll write a book .. the White House is one office building in the USA (thats United States of America) he has control of the military as long as they don't do a coupdetta on him .. we have elections for that .. so thats the .. power of government .. plus much more like redistribution of taxes on stuff of each side R or D sees as the focus … the other part of all that is USA .. is the USA its people ? or its business ? .. and business really does control it all doesn't it .. and can pull a coupdetta on its puppet president if it wishes

new & now here on TBP … best wishes all .. to our newly elected controllers / same … voters don't be surprised if the elected go for the gusto while they can .. for I expect you would in their position .. ie: knowing they be gone in in 4 to 6

call me ahab:

Covel nails it!

Wunsacon-

it was a partisan comment through and through-

but if you agree with the sentiments- then I guess it is hard to see it as what it is

plantseeds:

November 3rd, 2010 at 12:13 am my response was to taking away MY healthcare which those dastardly republicans are going to try and do so says jimrino. don't get me wrong, i'm for social programs too whatever the case. i think it starts and ends at the community level though. disabled, dependent on others, down on your luck, etc. i've needed help and i lend a hand when i can too. mr. rino isn't talking about that though. he's all about the fight. it's like a sox fan and a yankees fan fighting it out in the parking lot when the athletes are watching from the top floor of the hotel laughing and drinking Cristal. i don't agree with him so i'm a republican, he even knows how i voted.

wunsacon:

Ahab,

Tom Delay, Phil Gramm, Bush/Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hank Paulson, Terri Schaivo, and pro-organized-religion legislation from DC are not distant memories. Obama never stopped digging the hole we're in. But, he did slow down some. I *do* think the "pace of shoveling" increases again. ;-)

[Nov 03, 2010] The Impotence of Elections by Paul Craig Roberts

Growing Anger

In his historical novel, The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa writes that things have to change in order to remain the same. That is what happened in the US congressional elections on November 2.

Jobs offshoring, which began on a large scale with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has merged the Democrats and Republicans into one party with two names. The Soviet collapse changed attitudes in socialist India and communist China and opened those countries, with their large excess supplies of labor, to Western capital.

Pushed by Wall Street and Wal-Mart, American manufacturers moved production for US markets offshore to boost profits and shareholder earnings by utilizing cheap labor. The decline of the US manufacturing work force reduced the political power of unions and the ability of unions to finance the Democratic Party. The end result was to make the Democrats dependent on the same sources of financing as Republicans.

Prior to this development, the two parties, despite their similarities, represented different interests and served as a check on one another. The Democrats represented labor and focused on providing a social safety net. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, housing subsidies, education, and civil rights were Democratic issues. Democrats were committed to a full employment policy and would accept some inflation to secure more employment.

The Republicans represented business. The Republicans focused on curtailing big government in all its manifestations from social welfare spending to regulation. The Republicans' economic policy consisted of opposing federal budget deficits.

These differences resulted in political competition.

Today both parties are dependent for campaign finance on Wall Street, the military/security complex, AIPAC, the oil industry, agri-business, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry. Campaigns no longer consist of debates over issues. They are mud-slinging contests.

Angry voters take their anger out on incumbents, and that is what we saw in the election. Tea Party candidates defeated Republican incumbents in primaries, and Republicans defeated Democrats in the congressional elections.

Policies, however, will not change qualitatively. Quantitatively, Republicans will be more inclined to more rapidly dismantle more of the social safety net than Democrats and more inclined to finish off the remnants of civil liberties. But the powerful private oligarchs will continue to write the legislation that Congress passes and the President signs. New members of Congress will quickly discover that achieving re-election requires bending to the oligarchs' will.

This might sound harsh and pessimistic. But look at the factual record. In his campaign for the presidency, George W. Bush criticized President Clinton's foreign adventures and vowed to curtail America's role as the policeman of the world. Once in office, Bush pursued the neoconservatives' policy of US world hegemony via military means, occupation of countries, setting up puppet governments, and financial intervention in other countries' elections.

Obama promised change. He vowed to close Guantanamo prison and to bring the troops home. Instead, he restarted the war in Afghanistan and started new wars in Pakistan and Yemen, while continuing Bush's policy of threatening Iran and encircling Russia with military bases.

Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes and prospects, and out of hope for their children's careers are angry. But the political system offers them no way of bringing about change. They can change the elected servants of the oligarchs, but they cannot change the policies or the oligarchs.

The American situation is dire. As a result of the high speed Internet, the loss of manufacturing jobs was followed by the loss of professional service jobs, such as software engineering, that were career ladders for American university graduates. The middle class has no prospects. Already, the American labor force and income distribution mimics that of a third world country, with income and wealth concentrated in a few hands at the top and most of the rest of the population employed in domestic services jobs. In recent years net new job creation has been concentrated in lowly paid occupations, such as waitresses and bartenders, ambulatory health care services, and retail clerks. The population and new entrants into the work force continue to grow more rapidly than job opportunities.

Turning this around would require more realization than exists among policymakers and a deeper crisis. Possibly it could be done by using taxation to encourage US corporations to manufacture domestically the goods and services that they sell in US markets. However, the global corporations and Wall Street would oppose this change.

The tax revenue loss from job losses, bank bailouts, stimulus programs, and the wars have caused a three-to-four-fold jump in the US budget deficit. The deficit is now too large to be financed by the trade surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC. Consequently, the Federal Reserve is making massive purchases of Treasury and other debt. The continuation of these purchases threatens the dollar's value and its role as reserve currency. If the dollar is perceived as losing that role, flight from dollars will devastate the remnants of Americans' retirement incomes and the ability of the US government to finance itself.

Yet, the destructive policies continue. There is no re-regulation of the financial industry, because the financial industry will not allow it. The unaffordable wars continue, because they serve the profits of the military/security complex and promote military officers into higher ranks with more retirement pay. Elements within the government want to send US troops into Pakistan and into Yemen. War with Iran is still on the table. And China is being demonized as the cause of US economic difficulties.

Whistleblowers and critics are being suppressed. Military personnel who leak evidence of military crimes are arrested. Congressmen call for their execution. Wikileaks' founder is in hiding, and neoconservatives write articles calling for his elimination by CIA assassination teams. Media outlets that report the leaks apparently have been threatened by Pentagon chief Robert Gates. According to Antiwar.com, on July 29 Gates "insisted that he would not rule out targeting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange or any of the myriad media outlets which reported on the leaks."

The control of the oligarchs extends to the media. The Clinton administration permitted a small number of mega-corporations to concentrate the US media in a few hands. Corporate advertising executives, not journalists, control the new American media, and the value of the mega-companies depends on government broadcast licenses. The media's interest is now united with that of the government and the oligarchs.

On top of all the other factors that have made American elections meaningless, voters cannot even get correct information from the media about the problems that they and the country face.

As the economic situation is likely to continue deteriorating, the anger will grow. But the oligarchs will direct the anger away from themselves and toward the vulnerable elements of the domestic population and "foreign enemies."

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

[Nov 03, 2010] Giving the Keys Back to the Folks Who Crashed the Car by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

Authors of the book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

After Tuesday's drubbing, Democrats will search for the hidden message of the election. But the message isn't hidden: The decisive blocs of voters that switched from Democrats in 2008 to Republicans in 2010 were angry and disillusioned -- with the economy, with a political system they see as helping banks and CEOs, not ordinary working families, and with both parties, Republicans (exit-poll favorability rating: 41 percent) an economic recovery package that included major tax cuts, to expanded health insurance and medical cost control, and to extension of the 2001 tax cuts for the middle class; the party that shamelessly courted lobbyists and corporate donors while claiming they were only against reform because it represented a "bailout" of these very same interests.

In exit polls, voters were asked who they blamed for the state of the economy. In order, they blamed banks, then the Bush administration, and only then the current administration. Yet those who blamed banks gave their votes by a wide margin to the GOP. Their votes have made Speaker-to-be John Boehner the second most powerful person in Washington only months after he staged an open rally for bank lobbyists, urging them to block Democrats and their "punk staffers." The rally worked: Wall Street swung toward the Republicans, joining health insurers, big business groups, energy companies, and the rest of the GOP's new money trust.

Midterm election losses are a virtual inevitability for the party of the president. A terrible economy makes them more certain -- and larger. The only thing that would have saved Democrats from big losses this time around was a huge organizational and fundraising edge. Thanks to the Tea Party and billions in outside campaign spending that favored the GOP, the edge was Republicans'.

If there is a hidden message in the election, it's one that we, in our recent book, Winner-Take-All Politics, call the "dirty little secret" of political science: most voters pay little attention to what happens in Washington and have only the vaguest sense of what is happening there. Most are completely unaware of how the filibuster has been used relentlessly to block action on the economy, and a majority mistakenly believes that the astonishingly unpopular TARP legislation passed under Obama, when in fact in was signed by George W. Bush.

We are taught to believe that voters call the shots. And they often do. Yet the vote is a blunt, heavy weapon -- one that voters barraged with negative ads and misleading messages, without strong guidance from grassroots organizations, often wield with little awareness of or regard for the collateral damage that will result. In this case, the damage is likely to be the crippling of goals and policies that most Americans continue to support.

One salient example sums up the whole: Republicans' big gains came with older voters -- in part because they were frightened by GOP attacks on the health care bill. Yet Republican budget blueprints -- from Paul Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future" to the GOP "Pledge to America" -- mean even bigger cuts in Medicare and the revival of the GOP's mothballed plans for partial privatization of Social Security and Medicare. Ask older Americans whether they would like to trash their cherished programs in return for massive new tax cuts for the richest of the rich, and the answer will be a resounding no. Only on election day, a strong majority of older Americans, in effect, said yes.

In John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, perhaps the most memorable line was uttered by an angry farmer about to lose his home (sound familiar?). Enraged and despairing but unable to pinpoint blame for his terrible loss, he asks, "Who can we shoot?" That's what voters were asking in 2010, and most had no clearer idea than the farmer of where responsibility for their plight lay.

The 2010 election was the political equivalent of the perfect crime: The GOP vigorously took on all reforms designed to rebalance the economy for the long term, tying Washington up in contorted knots, then were rewarded at the polls by voters dissatisfied with an ugly D.C. culture unable to produce economic renewal.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

[Nov 03, 2010] Republican Party Time By MAUREEN DOWD

Barack Obama deserved what he got but Republicans managed to fool rednecks again and again, providing the key finding of "What matters with Kansas": you can fool many people indefinitely and on this people repugs should concentrate.
NYTimes.com

At a Republican victory party suffused with vengeful glee, the man who body-surfed the anti-establishment wave to become the next Speaker of the House was looking very establishment.

Even though it was predicted, it was still a shock to see voters humiliate a brilliant and spellbinding young president, who'd had such a Kennedy-like beginning, while electing a lot of conservative nuts and promoting this central-casting congressman as the face of the future: a Republican who had vowed in a written pledge to restore America to old-fashioned values, returning to a gauzy "Leave It to Beaver" image that never existed even on the set of "Leave It to Beaver."

Republicans outcommunicated a silver-tongued president who was supposed to be Ronald Reagan's heir in the communications department.

They were able to persuade a lot of Americans that the couple in the White House was not American enough, not quite "normal," too Communist, too radical, too Great Society. All that Ivy League schooling had made them think they knew better than average American folks, not to mention the founding fathers.

The Speaker-in-waiting sounded the alarm: the elites in the White House were snuffing out the America he grew up in. It only took two years to realize that their direction for the country was simply, as he put it, "a contradiction with the vast majority of Americans."

No one gets to take America away from Americans - not even the American president!

"What the American people were saying is 'Enough!' " the Speaker-to-be told me, as he savored his own win and his party's landslide, which he said was "a historical tide, not just a partisan election."

Washington had not been listening. Washington had been scorning the deepest beliefs of Americans. And now that would have to change.

"American people are clearly fed up with what they see as the decay of American society," he declared.

The new leader of the House took a more black-and-white approach than the nuanced president. It's enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that you need the consent of the governed and the governed did not consent.

Ascending to third in the line of succession for the presidency: a working-class kid who rose in the House as a rabble-rouser willing to throw bombs to score points against powerful Democrats.

Now he'd be helping to run the country, saving it from what he regarded as an arrogant and out-of-touch clique of elites.

In the revolutionary flush of the electoral map glowing red, he was floating, working hard to avoid gloating (even though Sean Hannity was around, gloating about the pain about to befall the Democratic president).

But he could not resist taking a few jabs at the "liberal media elite" distorting things, and a few more at a puffed-up White House that got punished for not paying enough attention to people's anxieties.

"They had an enormous opportunity to bring about change and they failed, and I don't say that harshly," he said, adding: "They really are left-wing elitists and they really thought the country didn't get it, and, therefore, it was their job to give the country the government that they thought the country needed, even if they didn't want it. That's the whole history of the health plan."

There was a lot of talk, as in the campaign, about the misbegotten health care plan, about balancing the budget, about lowering the deficit and taxes, about doing something on abortion and bloated government. Meanwhile, bloated fat-cat lobbyists were dancing down K Street.

The next Speaker felt that the humbled president should take the election as a cue to be conciliatory, and he proposed they talk in the next few days. He offered to reach out to Democrats who wanted to work with his side, but also noted that the president would not be wise to stand in the way of the conservative agenda.

"I prefer to believe that this president, who is clearly very smart, is quite capable of thinking clearly about a message sent by the American people," he said.

He said that, contrary to what the media elite had been jabbering about, he would not use his subpoena power to rain down a series of investigations on the Democratic administration.

No "witch hunts," he said. Only "legitimate" investigations.

Yeah, that all worked out for Newt Gingrich. He really came through. The quotes above came from Gingrich, when I covered his heady victory in Marietta, Ga., in the 1994 Republican landslide that made him Speaker.

And, obviously, the Republican House only pursued "legitimate" investigations of Bill Clinton. Sixteen years later, as a weeping John Boehner extolled the American values he learned at his father's bar - in the moment he dethroned Nancy Pelosi - the new crop of anarchic conservatives are saying all the same things.

God help the Republic. And, Mr. Speaker, in the immortal words of Sharron Angle, man up!

[Nov 03, 2010] The Tragedy of the Obama Administration

The Big Picture

The first item damned him to a mediocre economic team, one that failed to respond strongly to the banks that created the crisis. The second error earned him the enmity of the opposing party. The third error was political, and likely cost him the House, and possibly the Senate.

The great irony is that the man who ran on the campaign slogan of Change failed to deliver it in any meaningful way - at least, where the public wanted it - in getting the reckless runaway banks under control, and in stimulating the moribund, post-credit crisis economy.

I hasten to add, that from a political perspective, the President was a wimp. Had Al Gore been President from 2000-08 (and controlled Congress), the next GOP President would have flailed him for the recession and crisis bank relentlessly. Hell, the GOP still beats Jimmy Carter like a pińata. Once Obama took office, that was pretty much the last we heard of the Bush recession. The public actually forget who authorized TARP, who bailed out Citibank, BofA, AIG, Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns, etc.

This amounted to political suicide.

Critics have debated Obama's hands off approach to passing National Romney-Care, his giving up (?!) the winning issue of partial Bush tax cut extensions. I am perplexed as to why he would not force a full confirmation battle over the charming midwestern Elizabeth Warren as new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chair - Bnaks versus your grandma.

But as far as I am concerned, those are secondary political issues. To me, his presidency began its fatal downward spiral once he allowed Robert Rubin to determine his initial financial appointments. By passing over more pragmatic candidates not tied to banks and Wall Street, the president missed his opportunity to rise to greatness.

The opportunity existed to get the renegade banks under control - to reduce their leverage, their recklessness, and to get their hands out of the taxpayers pockets.

That opportunity was squandered, and Obama ended up as a defender of the banking status quo. It is where his presidency could have achieved lasting greatness, and instead was turned into just another elected official, who over promised and under delivered . . .

TakBak04:

It is a Tragedy. So much time wasted..with so much that needed to be done. With his huge staff it shouldn't have been "impossible." Yet it seemed from the beginning that those who would serve in his Administration had been "hand picked by someone" from the get go for a "smooth, seamless transition."

I don't know if he was "suckered" or was "willing." I guess the Historians will parse that one out…long after those who suffer from the deregulation since Reagan are gone. Who will be left to read? We have to hope the folks who "BROUGHT THE CHANGE" will be left.

Hope….. Man…so much work to be done. But, at least we now see how it all works and so much has been revealed that perhaps we aren't still living and accepting "Smoke and Mirrors."

Roll up our shirt sleeves and let's get AT IT!

trainreq:

A proper epitaph for this administration.

drey:

Good analysis, Barry.

Unlike some who would ascribe sinister or conspiratorial motives to Obama's failings, I chalk them up to inexperience, ineptitude, and naivete. Good campaigners do not necessarily make good leaders. We've seen it time and time again. It's a different skill set entirely.

Start dealing in reality, BO – the Republicans do not LIKE you and never will. Nor will they work with you toward goals which will ultimately be seen as your accomplishments, not theirs. Get over it and start to govern. You may refer to the Clinton playbook….

cpd:

Very good summary. It also shows the tremendous hold special interests have on the politicians. So much private money flowing through DC has completely corrupted politics. Take private money out of politics, have publicly financed elections and institute across the board term limits and then there is half a chance of getting elected representatives that will do the right thing.

By the way, don't forget Obama reappointed Bernanke. That was unforgivable. It's time to put a non-economist in charge of the Fed (or better yet, just get rid of it).

Heretic:

Sadly, I have to agree with most of this. But if Mr. Obama was going to get any kind of health care legislation, could he wait? The watered down thing we got just barely made it with Democratic majorities in both houses – and losing the house seemed likely even in Jan 2009. But to do health care you have to do the big parts all at once: Everyone has to be insured, no one can be denied coverage, and subsidies for those who can't afford coverage. This may have been Obama's only chance to get that sort of a bill through.

Mannwich:

@Heretic: That's a fair point if he had thrown more weight into the economy and jobs situation it might have given him more political capital to then tackle the health care issue. Instead he used up his political capital on a health care bill that nobody seemed happy with or truly understood (which made people even unhappier). He got his priorities all mixed up.

beaufou:

He had a great opportunity, he could have pushed the Republicans into a corner and kept at them relentlessly; but it was all "anger accomplishes nothing" "I get it"…no, you didn't get it Barrack.

RW:

I agree that going for national Romneycare was probably a mistake - it should have been a straight-up call for Medicare-for-everyone and damn the torpedoes - but the notion that passing health care reform was a serious tactical error is simply ill-informed: As Krugman notes here at http://tinyurl.com/39vaefj those who make this claim cannot name a single significant economic policy initiative that Obama could have successfully pursued otherwise. In fact those making this argument appear to think that economic policy is more a matter of 'focus' - AKA a matter of PR and superficial expressions of 'caring' (bleh!) - than it is a matter of actually doing something.

But that fundamental error probably better describes the dysfunctional and declining state of our democracy than anything else: Appearance appears to be trumping actual form virtually everywhere as Reality-TV substitutes for reality and our nation dies the death of a thousand cuts in the process.

Panem et circenses (Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81), "Bread and circuses:" There are too few citizens devoted to civic duty and too many devoted to being fed and entertained. That is the problem.

Chief Tomahawk:

Where's the blame for the media?!?

They've reported this as the most expensive election at $4 billion, yet little has been examined about where the money is coming from and what the donors are hoping to get in return. Yet despite the enormous expense, candidates are still lining up to shell out the dough. There's only one reason they'd do it voluntarily and that's if there's a bigger expected payday to come by selling votes down the road. So, dear media,

How much are votes being sold for???

Mannwich:

@Chief: The whores in the MSM are on that very money meat wagon as well. Hence, the obvious reasons to not mention it.

druce:

Fatally cautious…one can understand keeping Geithner in the thick of the crisis, but not why he's still there.

But I have difficult believing enmity of the right would not have been the far worse if he had truly reformed Wall Street, washed out the zombie bank shareholders, put the sundry crooks in jail, enforced transparency, limited leverage, put in investor and borrower protection with teeth, etc., etc.

jcmcn5:

I agree with most of what you wrote except the part about not flailing the previous admin. Are you kidding? Hardly a week went by without Obama saying something to the effect that he'd inherited a mess. It's true, he did. But let's not pretend he didn't use that to his advantage when he could.

The fatal error was not focusing on job creation immediately, instead of wasting time and capital ramming a HCare bill down the throats of everyone and using bribery and pork to get it done. If he'd focused on creating jobs - immediate, private sector jobs (not teachers, not gov't heathcare workers) he'd have coasted through this election with an even larger majority. With that blunder, he revealed himself as the liberal idealogue he pretended not to be throughout the whole campaign of 2008.

As for his lack of execution - Maybe next time the Dems will hold out as savior someone who has done a little more with his life than be a community organizer. Really! What on earth did you expect from this guy? This is not about McCain or even Republicans. This is about about acting like a bunch of high school girls when some hot guy walks by, even though the hot guy is a shallow narcissist.

Hell, Hilary would have been a better choice. At least she had balls.

Robespierre:

A good read of "The Prince" could have saved him but nobody reads history anymore.

lalaland:

I think your view is myopic.

A: Government intervention in business is the 3rd rail in America for a very good reason – you don't want it to happen because it's too prone to corruption, pure and simple. I think you fail to appreciate the justified cautiousness of his approach. We stepped in and took over several companies, and threatened the livelihoods of many more. I think the calls for more action on the administration's part should consider how that sets precedent, and how that precedent could be abused in the future. He's already called a socialist just for completing what Bush began (gm and chrysler, aig, fannie and freddie, etc.)

B: They didn't have the votes. Kennedy died. Byrd died. You fail to appreciate the opposition. Democrats simply could not steamroll Republican opposition, pure and simple. Mitch McConnell has been vindicated as a tactician this very evening.

Did we have a substantive debate on financial regulations? No. Did we have a substantive debate on Health Care Reform? No. Was this because Obama didn't want a conversation, to find the best ideas? I don't believe that for a minute. If you are upset with what you got from Finreg, blame the opposition. If you are pissed at the healthcare bill you got, blame your representative who cast it as an 'all or nothing' proposition instead of a process they are supposed to engage in. We'll see how these republican victories stick when after 2 years they have nothing to show for it. After all, they didn't run on doing anything so I doubt they will disappoint.

Mannwich:

RW: So he couldn't have pursued a more robust (and effective) fiscal stimulus and attention to the economy and the creation of actual jobs? There were plenty of areas here (hello decaying, embarrassing infrastructure everywhere?) where he could have been much bolder. Instead he focused on ramming through a bad health care bill. That's been his hallmark from Day 1, confusing activity with accomplishment. His style of leadership might have worked fine in the '90′s, but not in a time of crisis where bold leadership is required.

Mbuna:

How much of a deal with the devil did Obama make to get elected in the first place hmm? Was it in fact the big corporations that put him over the top, despite what common knowledge dictated back then? Maybe he was already captured by the banks before he even got elected. Perhaps the electorate is already irrelevant, passe, because the candidates of both major parties are already captured by their corporate masters before they get elected. The electorate loses no matter who wins.

huxrules:

There was a good story on All Things Considered today about how Clinton didn't come into his presidency till he lost the congress in '94. We will see what Obama does tomorrow. I hope he finally comes out swinging.

paull:

Unfair and hyperbolic. Obama is working within the realm of the possible and has done good things; at a minimum, he hasn't done disastrous things, like his predecessor. It's the senate's rules that need to be changed.

jcmcn5:

huxrules - Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton. Clinton may have been a scoundrel and sexual predator, but he was a master politician who had already tasted political defeat twice before. Obama has never faced any such test. He will wilt.

But take heart. He may very well be saved by the incompetence of his political opponents.

limaur:

A muslim disguised as a christian, a communist pretending to be a liberal, a democrat hoping for bipartisan cooperation to get the country moving again. You , the people of the U.S., wanted the man to solve all your economic problems ,and with dispatch,while everybody bitched and complained and obstructed his every step. I do most sincerely hope that your U.S. will go to hell, for its arrogance, for its stupidity , for its bigotry and for being .. oh.. so fatuous.

Jackrabbit:

Don't forget renominating "Subprime is contained" Bernanke.

And any notion that Obama will change in any REAL way (he might make some show of it) should be dispelled by his performance on the Daily Show where he praised Summers for a "heck of a job" and tried to minimize the costs of bailing out the banks.

I have been skeptical of the line that Obama is owned by the banks but his Daily Show performance may have finally convinced me.

Mannwich:

LOL limaur. Halloween was Sunday night.

gregh:

Presidents are figureheads not experts. Most politicians don't know economics or finance, apparently most economists and finance people obviously don't know economics.

If you were president and were suddenly handed some war – 9/11 – in addition to hundreds of other major non-financial you'd probably be equally lost and having to put your trust into someone elses hands. He chose wrongly, but did he have time to study intracies and seriously vet those he'd trust to vet his potential choices? Would you have the time the study war, nation-building, anti-terrorism, etc in order to make what you felt to be the perfect decision while juggling 100 other balls? You'd probably have to trust the word of close folks on the hill… who would all make the same bad decisions. Barry you would have made great decisions regarding our financial troubles but you'd probably make blind ones regarding some very different crisis that isn't your regular schtick.

Mannwich:

I think most of us simply wanted plain old-fashioned bold, principled leadership. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is now.

RW:

No argument Mannwich but that's not the game the (feckless and useless) pundits have been playing: The cry that Obama should have been doing X or Y is not accompanied by a concrete example of am economic policy he could have actually proposed, passed through the Republican blockade, and successfully pursued.

The victory of Republican candidates today is more a message of voter confusion and despair than a message of actual policy direction.

The real "tragedy of the Obama administration" is less in its policies than in its message: But you already knew that didn't you.

FrankInTheFalls:

Very good analysis. But I cannot disagree more with this: "Once Obama took office, that was pretty much the last we heard of the Bush recession"

You have got to be kidding me. All we have heard for the past ten months is, "we were handed this economy, it will take a long time to undo the past eight years, blah blah blah" It even went on during Obama's recent stumping trip.

Yeah, we KNOW you were handed a pile of garbage, so tell us when you will do something to clean it up.

call me ahab:

Clinton didn't come into his presidency till he lost the congress in '94. We will see what Obama does tomorrow. I hope he finally comes out swinging.

not that you're a dumb ass - but Clinton in 1994 - moved to the right (and therefore did not come out swinging) - and worked with the Republican's on Republican initiatives after the congressional defeat-

but let's hope Obama comes out swinging- whatever that means

Mannwich:

Agreed RW. People on Main Street are failing desperately in this country. Looking for an answer. Any answer. The next two years should be interesting to say the least. Pull up a chair, get some popcorn. The circus is not only in town, it just doubled.

call me ahab:

I do most sincerely hope that your U.S. will go to hell, for its arrogance, for its stupidity , for its bigotry and for being .. oh.. so fatuous.

blow me douche bag

Mannwich:

@ahab: This GOP to date has had NO interest whatsoever in "working with Obama". Absolutely none. Their only interest has been "making him a one-term president", no matter the consequences to the country. The poetic justice now is they'll either be totally exposed (assuming anyone is paying attention, of course) or will have to work with him now.

DM RTA:

RW: "As Krugman notes here at http://tinyurl.com/39vaefj those who make this claim cannot name a single significant economic policy initiative that Obama could have successfully pursued otherwise. In fact those making this argument appear to think that economic policy is more a matter of 'focus' - AKA a matter of PR and superficial expressions of 'caring' (bleh!) - than it is a matter of actually doing something."

How about if the President had taken the back half of the stimulus bill spending and worked it tirelessly to make sure that there was more than 1100 pages of bill left over when it was spent? How about if instead of making comments like there are no shelf ready infrastructure projects making sure that the most stimulative ideas were being readied. How about glorifying the details and making them look like they were worked on by the people who know better than anyone else?…and then selling it as being worth it.

call me ahab:

manny-

Clinton went to the GOP after the congressional defeat-

not the other way around-

also- glad to see everyone on this blog lay down like a bunch of little bitches after the 10:11 comment above-

I guess I'll see you in hell manny

Matt P.:

All Presidents are not dealt the same hand. Obama was set up perfectly and has so far failed miserably. He came in with tremendous good will and with a HUGE advantage in Congress. They had more votes than any GOP President in the last 90 years or so. Crazy advantage for getting your legislation done with hardly a GOP vote required. Also, he came in after the blow up of the economy. No one blames him for the economy, they blame him for setting the wrong expectations on the recovery.

maximo:

It's sad to admit but you're absolutely right, Barry. Boy, this is a Fukuyama moment for America and the joke is on us.

JimRino:

"But I have difficult believing enmity of the right would not have been the far worse if he had truly reformed Wall Street, washed out the zombie bank shareholders, put the sundry crooks in jail, enforced transparency, limited leverage, put in investor and borrower protection with teeth, etc., etc."

Agreed. To do any of these, he'd have to find an effective means of dealing with the right wing Fox Professional Liars. As long as you have One Network Lying and Smearing Every Single Day you won't get anywhere near optimal policy passed. I guess I'm surprised just how deep racist feelings run on the right. They don't give a Damn about this Country as long as they can Smear a President.

Lariat1:

I'm disappointed in Obama and ashamed of the Republican strategy of just NO to everything. Statesmanship is dead and it is only going to get worse. I just came back from 5:15 am to 9:40 pm election working. It was sad, all the people coming in literally talking about the Revolution with the Tea Party and how everything will be fixed now. This was seriously felt and voiced by a lot of people. My God what is happening to this country.

JimRino:

I now think the ONLY way you can deal with Wall Street is to elect 100 Liberals to the Senate. The only way the Republican party could do more rear kissing of Wall Street would be to become gay.

JasRas:

The best opportunity wasted by a failure to grasp the situation and properly adjust… And now we will all pay regardless of party, place, demographic… Good luck to all.

Mannwich:

@Jim: But who cares if the "right would have been far worse". "W", whom I disagreed with on mostly everything was able to ram through nearly his entire agenda (except privatizing SS) with a far slimmer majority because he didn't give a rat's ass what the Dems or Dem voters thought. Use the bully pulpit and lead with conviction and principle, and the people will usually follow. If that doesn't work, then so be it. Losing while being conviction-less and unprincipled is much worse. The public, rightly or wrongly, admires bold leadership and people who lead with conviction and principle. The O man, and his constant giving away the house at every turn to an enemy that wanted nothing more than to destroy him and his presidency, showed neither throughout the last two years.

jeg3:

Great post BR, on the mark.

Obama is not a liberal ideologue, he is exactly like Bush II, A Neoliberal Corporatist. Obama followed the same failed Bush II policies and started his own with corporatized healthcare. Mainstreet America elects Austerians into office expecting the opposite, and BR is right in that the best you can do is to figure out how to use it to your advantage (and/or not to your disadvantage).

Godspeed America

dss:

"confusing activity with accomplishment."

Well said, Manny. With the ridiculous health care bill that was allowed to pass (2014 if you can stay alive that long) he needed to go down swinging, fighting for what was right rather than what the insurance companies bought. At least while the citizenry was being screwed they could say that someone fought for the right to have health care rather than the privilege that it is today.

Just like allowing the banksters to carry on with their ill gotten gains, the insurance and drug companies are very pleased to have Obama as president.

These times called for a fighter, the change agent he promised instead of this sad excuse for a leader. Oh sure, his administration points to the bills that were "allowed" to pass, the ones that would have passed with any Democratic president, as proof of his efficacy, they were bills he didn't fight very hard to get passed.

Now two more years of gridlock. two more years of pretending that Republican policies were not what drove this economy off the cliff. 2012? Who cares.

People are angry because they are tired of being sold down the river by both all political parties.

Stranded_in_CA:

If any president had economic advisers like Rubin (whom Obama had since he was senator), they too would have made the same rotten decisions in regards to Wall Street. Heck his entire roster of economic advisers read like a list of Wall Street insiders and tools.

You won't get intelligent nor honest information from such a sorry lot period.

FrancoisT:

Now that the House will be controlled by the Reichpubliscums, thou shall look at the last two years as a model of political civility and good manners.

It'll be unbelievably ugly in Washington DC until November 2012. Just take a look at the crop of Tea Partiers, mobster-tied ex-attorneys, total fuckheads, anti-science, worshipers of the folksy ignorance drinking at the fountain of power, ready to paralyze the country if their "requirements" are not met.

It's gonna hurt; BTW, pray we don't get a REAL crisis until the next election.

Mannwich:

I have to say, I'm embarrassed to have voted all these years for such a spineless, wimpy party. Enough already with the "other party is mean" meme. When you get the kind of majorities the Dems had, that shit just doesn't fly. LEAD, please.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/a-centrist-democratic-age_b_777955.html

call me ahab:

It'll be unbelievably ugly in Washington DC until November 2012.

so what's going to happen then that's so fan-fucking-tastic? Obviously you know the future- and I guess fuckheads and folksy people are going to get what's coming to them

JT23456:

Hey, it's all well & good to have 20-20 hindsight and skewer the invalids – let's face it – I should have been a lot smarter when I retired in 2001 and moved my money as well as our bodies offshore. Smart me would have been 2x as smart to move the $ to CH as we built a house in MX and moved here. At least we have the 50′ sailboat and the rum and we can go and spend 3-4 months in Tahiti while the corporate "avatars" duke it out over the bones and skin and the scabs that are left of the US corpse. Politicians are avatars – trust me.

JimRino:

plantseeds, What do you expect the "Republicans" are going to do? They're going to bankrupt you and your assets, take away your healthcare, ship your job overseas, and stick a flag up your ???. Then what are you going to do?

But, you're taxes will be lower. You just gave the country away to the Wall Street Mafia.

Jojo:

What a flame out! So much hope wasted and squandered.

Obama seemed to have so much poise and self-confidence coming into office. He was on the crest of a wave. He had a beautiful wife and two cute children. Thoughts of JFK and Camelot were in the minds of many.

But Obama stumbled from the beginning, failing to show any real sense of urgency. Everything he did was slow and methodical, one step at a time. He seems unable to express real empathy or understanding in any situation due to his inability to emote effectively. He is always cool and collected. And yes, he does come across as a wimp, afraid to or emotionally unable to stand up to and confront the Republican opposition front and center.

In these troubled times, we wanted and needed BOLD leadership. But Obama was and has been unable to rise to any opportunity. He simply does not have the personality or experience to be a real leader.

You can't change the color of the stripes on a zebra. The Dems should be searching for a new presidential candidate for 2012. Obama should not run for a 2nd term.

AGORACOM:

Americans haven't been happy with the health care system for decades.

BUT they were really mad about Wall Street / Bank fleecing right now.

He should have tackled Wall St first and hard.

It would have inspired citizens that desperately needed a hero.

He could have then ridden that wave into any reasonable legislation he wanted.

Obama blew it. I didn't want him to. I'm a Conservative from Canada – but hoped that someone would stop the Wall Street train wreck.

It would have been nice to watch a President act Presidential.

Le Sigh.

George … The Greek … From Canada

plantseeds:

JimRino – you're dizzy from the political tail chase. there is no difference between the two. you are a victim of the biggest scam in the history of the USA. they all belong to the same country clubs and stay on the same floor of the hotel. they all fly the private jet. republicans and democrats are one in the same. i don't rely on them and I am in charge of my own health and therefore health care. they can't take my job…I 'll leave the flag comment alone. the lower my taxes the better. the government is not the solution to anything. the sooner you learn that the better. keep playing the blame game if you choose but I am not so easily distracted.

call me ahab:

They're going to bankrupt you and your assets, take away your healthcare, ship your job overseas, and stick a flag up your ???. Then what are you going to do?

take away my healthcare that I pay for myself?

damn Republicans

Mannwich:

Hey plantseeds – what about those with a pre-existing condition through no fault of their own, except maybe faulty DNA? Should the plan be either "our own healthcare" or food and shelter? And that's assuming anyone would even cover you with a pre-existing condition. What say ye?

covel:

Why do we Americans continually have hope that a government filled with losers can do anything? Right or left, the people that go there are not our best or brightest. They are the ones who groove living at Hollywood for ugly people. Power and fame are their motives. Their skills? Their abilities? Come on.

wunsacon:

Ahab,

I'd be *happy* if I thought there were enough Karl Denninger remnants in the "tea party" that something might actually happen on the finance front. But, I see *mostly* neocon retreads. I don't see why you would take such offense to Francois's comment…

Mannwich:

@wunsy: Retards or retreads? LOL. Sorry…..

Darkness:

So, this should be interesting. BoA goes bankrupt and then what? The house is no way bailing them out. Has the populace become inured enough to avoid a generalized bank run?

The republicans sure are acting like teens being given a car with a full tank of gas. Surprise…

Greg0658:

I'll catch up on the 1/2 remaining coments later .. from my FB earlier to a J6P friend

1. like the puppet in the WH can break from the strings and grab his bazooka and go to town & country busting ___ umm .. I'm at a loss for …. Right Now by Chris Gaines aka Garth Brooks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7fM_jAmpWw

2. Greg!--WHAT?

3. :-) what :-| ok I'll write a book .. the White House is one office building in the USA (thats United States of America) he has control of the military as long as they don't do a coupdetta on him .. we have elections for that .. so thats the .. power of government .. plus much more like redistribution of taxes on stuff of each side R or D sees as the focus … the other part of all that is USA .. is the USA its people ? or its business ? .. and business really does control it all doesn't it .. and can pull a coupdetta on its puppet president if it wishes

new & now here on TBP … best wishes all .. to our newly elected controllers / same … voters don't be surprised if the elected go for the gusto while they can .. for I expect you would in their position .. ie: knowing they be gone in in 4 to 6

call me ahab:

Covel nails it!

Wunsacon-

it was a partisan comment through and through-

but if you agree with the sentiments- then I guess it is hard to see it as what it is

plantseeds:

November 3rd, 2010 at 12:13 am my response was to taking away MY healthcare which those dastardly republicans are going to try and do so says jimrino. don't get me wrong, i'm for social programs too whatever the case. i think it starts and ends at the community level though. disabled, dependent on others, down on your luck, etc. i've needed help and i lend a hand when i can too. mr. rino isn't talking about that though. he's all about the fight. it's like a sox fan and a yankees fan fighting it out in the parking lot when the athletes are watching from the top floor of the hotel laughing and drinking Cristal. i don't agree with him so i'm a republican, he even knows how i voted.

wunsacon:

Ahab,

Tom Delay, Phil Gramm, Bush/Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hank Paulson, Terri Schaivo, and pro-organized-religion legislation from DC are not distant memories. Obama never stopped digging the hole we're in. But, he did slow down some. I *do* think the "pace of shoveling" increases again. ;-)

[Nov 02, 2010] Chris Hedges The World Liberal Opportunists Made - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Chris Hedges

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class' flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.

Populations will endure repression from tyrants as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are swiftly and brutally discarded. Tocqueville observed that the French, on the eve of their revolution, hated the aristocrats about to lose their power far more than they had ever hated them before. The increased hatred directed at the aristocratic class occurred because as the aristocracy lost real power there was no decline in their fortunes. As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite. And the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on power.

The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations. An ineffectual liberal class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal through the political system and electoral politics. The liberals' disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression in a rejection of traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically, reap benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are busy channeling rage away from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the nation from the inside and are turning that anger toward the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our cause that liberals indeed turned their backs on the working and middle class.

The corporate state has failed to grasp the vital role the liberal class traditionally plays in sustaining a stable power system. The corporate state, by emasculating the liberal class, has opted for a closed system of polarization, gridlock and political theater in the name of governance. It has ensured a further destruction of state institutions so that government becomes even more ineffectual and despised. The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist movements. These movements rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class for its weakness, hypocrisy and uselessness. The promises of these proto-fascist movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.

The liberal class, despite becoming an object of public scorn, still prefers the choreographed charade. Liberals decry, for example, the refusal of the Democratic Party to restore habeas corpus or halt the looting of the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street speculators, but continue to support a president who cravenly serves the interests of the corporate state. As long as the charade of democratic participation is played, the liberal class does not have to act. It can maintain its privileged status. It can continue to live in a fictional world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness of the liberal class is not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the awful indignities of the corporate state.

The death of the liberal class cuts citizens off from the mechanisms of power. Liberal institutions such as the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions once set the parameters for limited self-criticism and small, incremental reforms and offered hope for piecemeal justice and change. The liberal class could decry the excesses of the state, work to mitigate them and champion basic human rights. It posited itself as the conscience of the nation. It permitted the nation, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define itself as being composed of a virtuous and even noble people. The liberal class was permitted a place within a capitalist democracy because it also vigorously discredited radicals within American society who openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism and who denounced a political system run by and on behalf of corporations. The real enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky.

The purging and silencing of independent and radical thinkers as well as iconoclasts have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The liberal class has cut itself off from the roots of creative and bold thought, from those forces and thinkers who could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. Liberals exude a tepid idealism utterly divorced from daily life. And this is why every television clip of Barack Obama is so palpably pathetic.

Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated junior partners of the capitalist class. Cars rolling out of the Ford and GM plants in Michigan were said to have been made by Ford-UAW. And where unions still exist, they have been reduced to simple bartering tools, if that. The social demands of unions early in the 20th century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday and Social Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and globalization. They have no new ideas. Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism meant to entertain without offense. The Democratic Party and the press have become courtiers to the power elite and corporate servants.

Once the liberal class can no longer moderate the savage and greedy inclinations of the capitalist class, once, for example, labor unions are reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and benefits, once public education is gutted and the press no longer gives a voice to the poor and the working class, liberals become as despised as the power elite they serve. The collapse of liberal institutions means those outside the circles of power are trapped, with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.

The liberal class no longer holds within its ranks those who have the moral autonomy or physical courage to defy the power elite. The rebels, from Chomsky to Sheldon Wolin to Ralph Nader, have been marginalized, shut out of the national debate and expelled from liberal institutions. The liberal class lacks members with the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies. It offers no ideological alternatives. It remains bound to a Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal principle including universal healthcare, an end to our permanent war economy, a robust system of public education, a vigorous defense of civil liberties, job creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the poor.

"The left once dismissed the market as exploitative," Russell Jacoby writes. "It now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion."

Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like "Yes we can!"

The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.

[Nov 02, 2010] Chris Hedges The World Liberal Opportunists Made - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Chris Hedges

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class' flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.

Populations will endure repression from tyrants as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are swiftly and brutally discarded. Tocqueville observed that the French, on the eve of their revolution, hated the aristocrats about to lose their power far more than they had ever hated them before. The increased hatred directed at the aristocratic class occurred because as the aristocracy lost real power there was no decline in their fortunes. As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite. And the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on power.

The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations. An ineffectual liberal class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal through the political system and electoral politics. The liberals' disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression in a rejection of traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically, reap benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are busy channeling rage away from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the nation from the inside and are turning that anger toward the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our cause that liberals indeed turned their backs on the working and middle class.

The corporate state has failed to grasp the vital role the liberal class traditionally plays in sustaining a stable power system. The corporate state, by emasculating the liberal class, has opted for a closed system of polarization, gridlock and political theater in the name of governance. It has ensured a further destruction of state institutions so that government becomes even more ineffectual and despised. The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist movements. These movements rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class for its weakness, hypocrisy and uselessness. The promises of these proto-fascist movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.

The liberal class, despite becoming an object of public scorn, still prefers the choreographed charade. Liberals decry, for example, the refusal of the Democratic Party to restore habeas corpus or halt the looting of the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street speculators, but continue to support a president who cravenly serves the interests of the corporate state. As long as the charade of democratic participation is played, the liberal class does not have to act. It can maintain its privileged status. It can continue to live in a fictional world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness of the liberal class is not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the awful indignities of the corporate state.

The death of the liberal class cuts citizens off from the mechanisms of power. Liberal institutions such as the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions once set the parameters for limited self-criticism and small, incremental reforms and offered hope for piecemeal justice and change. The liberal class could decry the excesses of the state, work to mitigate them and champion basic human rights. It posited itself as the conscience of the nation. It permitted the nation, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define itself as being composed of a virtuous and even noble people. The liberal class was permitted a place within a capitalist democracy because it also vigorously discredited radicals within American society who openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism and who denounced a political system run by and on behalf of corporations. The real enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky.

The purging and silencing of independent and radical thinkers as well as iconoclasts have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The liberal class has cut itself off from the roots of creative and bold thought, from those forces and thinkers who could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. Liberals exude a tepid idealism utterly divorced from daily life. And this is why every television clip of Barack Obama is so palpably pathetic.

Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated junior partners of the capitalist class. Cars rolling out of the Ford and GM plants in Michigan were said to have been made by Ford-UAW. And where unions still exist, they have been reduced to simple bartering tools, if that. The social demands of unions early in the 20th century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday and Social Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and globalization. They have no new ideas. Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism meant to entertain without offense. The Democratic Party and the press have become courtiers to the power elite and corporate servants.

Once the liberal class can no longer moderate the savage and greedy inclinations of the capitalist class, once, for example, labor unions are reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and benefits, once public education is gutted and the press no longer gives a voice to the poor and the working class, liberals become as despised as the power elite they serve. The collapse of liberal institutions means those outside the circles of power are trapped, with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.

The liberal class no longer holds within its ranks those who have the moral autonomy or physical courage to defy the power elite. The rebels, from Chomsky to Sheldon Wolin to Ralph Nader, have been marginalized, shut out of the national debate and expelled from liberal institutions. The liberal class lacks members with the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies. It offers no ideological alternatives. It remains bound to a Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal principle including universal healthcare, an end to our permanent war economy, a robust system of public education, a vigorous defense of civil liberties, job creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the poor.

"The left once dismissed the market as exploitative," Russell Jacoby writes. "It now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion."

Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like "Yes we can!"

The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.

[Oct 31, 2010] Social and Political Analysis Mexico Solidarity Network

The impact of neoliberalism and responses from below

At the dawn of the 21st century, neoliberalism is the predominant political and economic model in the world, impacting every level of society. While giving the appearance of dominance, the neoliberal model is built on increasingly shaky ground, including shrinking democratic spaces, unsuccessful attempts at cultural hegemony under the guise of "modernization," and a distorted distribution of wealth that has no historic precedent. The majority of the world's people are in a savage "race to the bottom" - poorer today than they were three decades ago - and no amount of propaganda can hide this stark reality.

For the past four decades, the US-Mexico relationship has been the most important laboratory for the neoliberal model, a sort of proving grounds for corporate-centered globalization. The implications of this experiment will be felt for generations to come, both North and South. The neoliberal era began four decades ago on the US-Mexico border with the Border Industrialization Program, a "free trade zone" that ushered in the era of maquiladoras. Factories that paid decent wages in the US moved south of the border, where wages are typically less than $1 an hour, labor laws are lax, and environmental standards are not enforced. The result is huge profits for transnational corporations, but declining standards of living for the Mexican and the US working classes, and an environmental disaster that affects both sides of the border. The maquiladora/free trade model is now the predominant economic development model throughout Latin America.

In 1981, under pressure from the Latin American debt crisis, Mexico signed the first IMF-sponsored Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in exchange for bailout loans. Today, SAPs are standard fair throughout the South, forcing governments with progressive tendencies to adopt neoliberal economic policies (or providing more conservative elites with political cover to do the same).

The North America Free Trade Accord (NAFTA), signed on January 1, 1994, is defining future US economic relations with the rest of Latin America - free flows of capital and goods across international borders but strict control of people. NAFTA has meant a loss of democracy in Mexico and the US, and an economic disaster for workers on both sides of the border.

Neoliberal policies have had a dramatic impact in rural areas throughout Latin America, particularly in Mexico. Highly subsidized corn exports from the US destroyed the internal corn market, placing nearly one-quarter of the Mexican population in dire circumstances. The result is massive migration, either to urban centers in Mexico or as undocumented workers to the United States. Neoliberal policies are directly responsible for this historically unprecedented migration, yet they barely enter the discussion on immigration policy.

The neoliberal model represents a globalization of class alliances. The wealthiest 5 or 10% on both sides of the border, those who control the economies and political systems, have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow citizens, and the resulting neoliberal policies reflect their interests. The elites enjoy increasingly strong institutional links, while the rest of us are left with less democracy, fewer economic options, more repression, increased poverty and less sovereignty.

In a world of growing globalization, international grassroots alliances become increasingly important in the struggle for democracy, sovereignty, and economic and political justice. The US-Mexico relationship is central in defining the ties between elites, and it is also central in defining increasingly important grassroots connections within civil society on both sides of the border.

The Mexico Solidarity Network is a community-based organization dedicated to fundamental social change that challenges existing power relationships, builds horizontal relations in directly affected communities and promotes autonomous alternatives.

[Oct 31, 2010] The Stealth Coup D'Etat: U.S.A. 2008-2010

The Stealth Coup D'Etat in the U.S. (called "The Quiet Coup" by Simon Johnson) was begun long ago, but the takeover reached fruition in the 2008-2010 timeframe.

Please read these brief excerpts from the 1968 classic Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook (by Edward Luttwak) and see if they don't remind you of the United States, circa 2008-2010:

Insurrection, the classic vehicle of revolution, is obsolete. The security apparatus of the modern state, with its professional personnel, with its diversified means of transport and communications, and with its extensive sources of information, cannot be defeated by civilian agitation, however intense and prolonged.

(CHS note: Luttwak referred to the May 1968 general strike in France as an example; by coincidence, the failure of today's general strikes in France to change Central State policy offers a more current example from the same nation.

Any attempt on the part of civilians to to use direct violence with improvised means will always be neutralized by the efficiency of modern automatic weapons; a general strike, on the other hand, will temporarily swamp the system, but cannot permanently damage it, since in the modern economic setting, the civilians will run out of food and fuel well before the military, the police and allied organizations.

(CHS note: Napoleon famously dissipated a civilian uprising with "a whiff of grapeshot" long before modern automatic weaponry. Organized violence always has an advantage over informally organized violence.)

If a coup does not make use of the masses, or of warfare, what instrument of power will enable it to seize control of the state? The short answer is that the power will come from the state itself.

A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.

Luttwak's first point about the futility of direct insurrection informed my own Survival+ critique, which concludes that the only effective means to weaken the Financial Power Elites who have partnered with State Elites is to opt out and assemble voluntary non-privileged parallel structures which are independent of the Central State and its Power Elites.

As I have sharpened the Survival+ critique (with an eye on a future revision), I have come to see that the term coup d'etat is not cheap theatrics or an analogy for the capture of the Central State by Financial Power Elites, but the accurate description of a long, stealthy infiltration and dominance of the key ministries of the United States government.

In the popular view, a coup d'etat is a sudden event, over in a few hours or at most days, a drama played out in impoverished Third World nations. The stealth coup which has occurred in the U.S. is an entirely different kind of coup--one that has operated in stealth mode for the most part, a process of gradual infiltration and opportunistic grasping of key levers of dependence and control.

Simon Johnson, co-author of the recent book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, also wrote the May 2009 article "The Quiet Coup". Here are a few key excerpts:

But these various policies--lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership -- had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector's profits -- such as Brooksley Born's now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998 -- were ignored or swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry's ascent.

Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services. Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight-a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Though incisive, Johnson's critique fails to grasp several critical features of the Stealth Coup D'Etat:

1. Once you have control of the financial powers of the U.S. via the tiny Elites of the Congress, the Executive Branch, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, then the rest of the government will follow.

To the degree that ownership of the Healthcare cartels is in the hands of the same Financial Power Elite, then the passage of the 2,300 page "Healthcare Reform Bill" in 2010 was simply another way for the Power Elite to expand its share of the national income.

The health of the citizenry or healthcare per se had essentially nothing to do with the passage of this monstrosity. The entire purpose was to increase the Elites' share of the national income by siphoning off an ever-greater share to the "healthcare" cartels.

2. This is how the Stealth Coup D'Etat works: the machinery of governance grinds through a simulacrum of democracy, but it's all for show; the theoretical structures are now completely different from the political realities. The citizens were against the bailout of Wall Street and the money-center banks 600-to-1; they were rightly ignored as inconsequential.

The citizenry replaced the political party leadership of Congress and the Presidency; absolutely nothing changed except the flavor of PR, spin and propaganda. The Power Elites and their Stealth Coup are apolitical. They don't care about the color of your uniform; whether you wear a blue shirt or a red shirt is inconsequential.

Some readers complain I over-use the descriptive word simulacrum, and I have tried to leaven this overuse with synonyms such as facsimile. But the key point to understand (and the goal here is always to reach an integrated understanding) is that there is a difference between formal structures such as democracy and free markets and their political and financial representations.

In other words, the "democracy" that was visible in passing healthcare reform (i.e. the diversion of more national income to a specific set of cartels) was a facsimile of democracy, a shadow of the real thing, a mere representation of true democracy.

This substitution of representation for reality is the key mechanism of the Stealth Coup D'Etat. In the financial fiasco now playing out, actual deeds to notes and property have been replaced with digital representations in a registry owned by the banks: MERS.

"Liberating" Iraq as a laudable goal of an enlightened State was merely a public relations facade for the occupation of a key geopolitical piece of a larger puzzle. The entire war has two components: the actual war on the ground, as revealed by 400,000 "liberated" documents, and the representation of the war in the Corporate Cartel Media and as presented by the Central State ministries.

3. The Stealth Coup can be traced by a simple dictum: follow the money. Once you control the money--the money supply, the manipulation of yields and bond sales, the budgeting and borrowing--then you control everything.

This is how a small Financial Power Elite dominates the vast, sprawling American Empire.

4. I use the term politics of experience in Survival+ (with a credit to its originator, R.D. Laing) to describe the manner in which the apparently depoliticized context of our daily media-saturated lives are shaped by political forces we rarely recognize.

In my critique, I invoke the term parallel shadow structures of privilege to describe the formalized but masked structures of power which operate behind the facades of democracy, free markets, and all the other PR bilge drummed into the minds of the the citizenry by a media cartel which itself has been financialized into a Corporatocracy.

Over time, Americans have come to believe that the current state of governance is "democracy" rather than a mere facsimile of democracy. They have come to believe (those still covered by insurance they don't directly pay for) that the U.S. "healthcare" system is "the finest in the world" when by some metrics it is the worst, most profligate, illness-inducing system imaginable. And so on.

Thus "homeownership" was elevated to quasi-religious status as a means of stripmining assets and income from a larger pool of debt-serfs. Earlier this year I asked a simple question: how much of your household's net income flows to cartels? That would include banking cartels (mortgages, second mortgages, credit cards, etc.), Central State-banking cartels (student loans), agribusiness cartels (fast foods, packaged foods, Monsanto, etc.), energy cartels, sickcare cartels (healthcare insurance, hospital chains, Big Pharma) and so on.

If we consider that much of rent payments flow to the same banking cartels (which is why the commercial real estate sector is imploding--too much debt, etc.), then most of us would find that the majority (or perhaps as much as 90%) of our money goes to a handful of cartels dominated by Financial Elites via the steady financialization of the U.S. economy.

How much of your taxes flow to the same cartels via their partnership/control of State fiefdoms?

If you think the term Stealth Coup D'Etat is overwrought, I invite you to ponder the headline quote from the Freedom Guerrilla weblog: None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.

From the point of view of a deconstructed politics of experience, then the events of 2008-2010 are simply the culmination of a Stealth Coup D'Etat which began with the overt financialization of the U.S. economy and indeed of its entire culture.

halvord:

Where does the militarization of the domestic US, mostly during 2000-2008, fit into this critique?

Herd Redirection:

The militarization started when the US entered WWII. It continued with the Korean War, then the Cold War, then Vietnam, then Gulf War I... Make no mistake, the takeover was firmly under way when George Bush Sr came in as VP.

The US needed a period of fear and patriotism, after the Tech Crash, which had the ability to get people asking all kinds of questions about the capital markets and large financial players. "You're with us, or you're against us" is not exactly debate masterclass.

PsychoNews has a series on the Oligarchy going now, we are outing them one psycho at a time: http://psychonews.site90.net

DavidPierre:

The USSA Coup D'Etat is still very 'In Your Face'...

"Another Useful Crisis"

A secret "Shadow government" under the highly classified...

"Continuity of Operations Plan" was installed on September 11, 2001.

Both "the war on terrorism" as well as the domestic war on freedom are consistent, from the point of view of Nazi/Fascist military planners, with the logic of Operation Northwoods.

Civilian casualties are used as "a war pretext incident", to galvanize public support for a military intervention.

Mentioned time and again by DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, a "second 9/11 attack" is contemplated; Al Qaeda, we are told, is preparing

"...a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process."

What we are not told is that Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA and that Al Qaeda remains a US sponsored "intelligence asset.

"The assumptions and rhetoric behind Homeland Security are nothing new. They echo an earlier statements by David Rockefeller to the United Nations Business Council in 1994:

"We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."

Similarly, in the words Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book, The Grand Chessboard:.

"…it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus [in America] on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO407B.html

rwe2late :

Maintaining the petrodollar extortion racket requires control over resources.

The military provides that control in the Mideast and elsewhere.

That would be explanation enough, but there is more.

Militarism provides additional opportunities for Shock Doctrine profiteering, and allows dissent to be stifled by fostering jingoism and enacting "war emergency" legislation.

Stifling dissent becomes increasingly necessary as the domestic economy is sacrificed to "globalism", employment to outsourcing, health and safety to "free trade" deregulation, Constitutional protections to endless wars, and the domestic government itself becomes subordinate to international corporations.

Barely noticed behind the flag-waving, the military also undergoes a transformation itself, no longer being a national institution protecting its citizens,... but instead becoming a global enterprise serving the members of a global crime syndicate.

In fact the globalised military not only serves that syndicate, but shares major goals of resource domination and expansion,

if not to maximize profit, then to maximize the parallel goal of maximizing "full-spectrum" military security.

tony bonn:

"Insurrection, the classic vehicle of revolution, is obsolete. The security apparatus of the modern state, with its professional personnel, with its diversified means of transport and communications, and with its extensive sources of information, cannot be defeated by civilian agitation, however intense and prolonged."

"Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?"

i used to read luttwak when i was a neocon toady but he fell out of the good graces of norman podhoretz when his incessant calls for numerous and cheap weapons over against high tech and expensive weaponry was thoroughly refuted by gulf 1.

although i will cavil with the author on a couple of points, this essay is superb in many respects....it is absolutely true that a small cabal of plutocrats control the money and power - and in the delicious words of the author - are strip mining america into poverty...they are transnational citizens of the world whose goal is ever more control under a new world order - hitler's famous words of the third reich reiterated by the murderer bush-41. read tarpley about the nexus with britain on this matter.

yet the plutocrats have more than money at their disposal. indeed money buys security which is precisely in the hands of the cia - an unregulated, unelected, and unaccountable cabal of murderers who slew john kennedy in broad daylight because they could for sport. the cia is the 5th branch of government.

as fletcher prouty made clear, the cia took over the government by the end of the 1950s....it is at that point that they could appoint and dismiss presidents.....kennedy it murdered....nixon it exiled.

none of this is tin foil....and even it were it does not diminish its truth...the iron corset on america is the military industrial complex of which eisenhower spoke....it is that unholy alliance anchored by the fed-cia - different sides of the same coin....the bush crime syndicate with the rockefellers, with the harrimans, bundys, soros',buffets, and whole slew of tyrannts control amerika and have done so for decades....

so of a truth the authors speaks of ersatz representations of the real thing....americans are deluded drunk with their own arrogance of democracy and impotence....they are but debt and consumer slaves to the great captains of lucre played like fools by their masters.

fuck the cia, fuck the fed, and fuck the plutocrats.

[Oct 31, 2010] Social and Political Analysis Mexico Solidarity Network

The impact of neoliberalism and responses from below

At the dawn of the 21st century, neoliberalism is the predominant political and economic model in the world, impacting every level of society. While giving the appearance of dominance, the neoliberal model is built on increasingly shaky ground, including shrinking democratic spaces, unsuccessful attempts at cultural hegemony under the guise of "modernization," and a distorted distribution of wealth that has no historic precedent. The majority of the world's people are in a savage "race to the bottom" - poorer today than they were three decades ago - and no amount of propaganda can hide this stark reality.

For the past four decades, the US-Mexico relationship has been the most important laboratory for the neoliberal model, a sort of proving grounds for corporate-centered globalization. The implications of this experiment will be felt for generations to come, both North and South. The neoliberal era began four decades ago on the US-Mexico border with the Border Industrialization Program, a "free trade zone" that ushered in the era of maquiladoras. Factories that paid decent wages in the US moved south of the border, where wages are typically less than $1 an hour, labor laws are lax, and environmental standards are not enforced. The result is huge profits for transnational corporations, but declining standards of living for the Mexican and the US working classes, and an environmental disaster that affects both sides of the border. The maquiladora/free trade model is now the predominant economic development model throughout Latin America.

In 1981, under pressure from the Latin American debt crisis, Mexico signed the first IMF-sponsored Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in exchange for bailout loans. Today, SAPs are standard fair throughout the South, forcing governments with progressive tendencies to adopt neoliberal economic policies (or providing more conservative elites with political cover to do the same).

The North America Free Trade Accord (NAFTA), signed on January 1, 1994, is defining future US economic relations with the rest of Latin America - free flows of capital and goods across international borders but strict control of people. NAFTA has meant a loss of democracy in Mexico and the US, and an economic disaster for workers on both sides of the border.

Neoliberal policies have had a dramatic impact in rural areas throughout Latin America, particularly in Mexico. Highly subsidized corn exports from the US destroyed the internal corn market, placing nearly one-quarter of the Mexican population in dire circumstances. The result is massive migration, either to urban centers in Mexico or as undocumented workers to the United States. Neoliberal policies are directly responsible for this historically unprecedented migration, yet they barely enter the discussion on immigration policy.

The neoliberal model represents a globalization of class alliances. The wealthiest 5 or 10% on both sides of the border, those who control the economies and political systems, have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow citizens, and the resulting neoliberal policies reflect their interests. The elites enjoy increasingly strong institutional links, while the rest of us are left with less democracy, fewer economic options, more repression, increased poverty and less sovereignty.

In a world of growing globalization, international grassroots alliances become increasingly important in the struggle for democracy, sovereignty, and economic and political justice. The US-Mexico relationship is central in defining the ties between elites, and it is also central in defining increasingly important grassroots connections within civil society on both sides of the border.

The Mexico Solidarity Network is a community-based organization dedicated to fundamental social change that challenges existing power relationships, builds horizontal relations in directly affected communities and promotes autonomous alternatives.

[Oct 31, 2010] The Stealth Coup D'Etat: U.S.A. 2008-2010

The Stealth Coup D'Etat in the U.S. (called "The Quiet Coup" by Simon Johnson) was begun long ago, but the takeover reached fruition in the 2008-2010 timeframe.

Please read these brief excerpts from the 1968 classic Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook (by Edward Luttwak) and see if they don't remind you of the United States, circa 2008-2010:

Insurrection, the classic vehicle of revolution, is obsolete. The security apparatus of the modern state, with its professional personnel, with its diversified means of transport and communications, and with its extensive sources of information, cannot be defeated by civilian agitation, however intense and prolonged.

(CHS note: Luttwak referred to the May 1968 general strike in France as an example; by coincidence, the failure of today's general strikes in France to change Central State policy offers a more current example from the same nation.

Any attempt on the part of civilians to to use direct violence with improvised means will always be neutralized by the efficiency of modern automatic weapons; a general strike, on the other hand, will temporarily swamp the system, but cannot permanently damage it, since in the modern economic setting, the civilians will run out of food and fuel well before the military, the police and allied organizations.

(CHS note: Napoleon famously dissipated a civilian uprising with "a whiff of grapeshot" long before modern automatic weaponry. Organized violence always has an advantage over informally organized violence.)

If a coup does not make use of the masses, or of warfare, what instrument of power will enable it to seize control of the state? The short answer is that the power will come from the state itself.

A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.

Luttwak's first point about the futility of direct insurrection informed my own Survival+ critique, which concludes that the only effective means to weaken the Financial Power Elites who have partnered with State Elites is to opt out and assemble voluntary non-privileged parallel structures which are independent of the Central State and its Power Elites.

As I have sharpened the Survival+ critique (with an eye on a future revision), I have come to see that the term coup d'etat is not cheap theatrics or an analogy for the capture of the Central State by Financial Power Elites, but the accurate description of a long, stealthy infiltration and dominance of the key ministries of the United States government.

In the popular view, a coup d'etat is a sudden event, over in a few hours or at most days, a drama played out in impoverished Third World nations. The stealth coup which has occurred in the U.S. is an entirely different kind of coup--one that has operated in stealth mode for the most part, a process of gradual infiltration and opportunistic grasping of key levers of dependence and control.

Simon Johnson, co-author of the recent book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, also wrote the May 2009 article "The Quiet Coup". Here are a few key excerpts:

But these various policies--lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership -- had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector's profits -- such as Brooksley Born's now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998 -- were ignored or swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry's ascent.

Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services. Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight-a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Though incisive, Johnson's critique fails to grasp several critical features of the Stealth Coup D'Etat:

1. Once you have control of the financial powers of the U.S. via the tiny Elites of the Congress, the Executive Branch, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, then the rest of the government will follow.

To the degree that ownership of the Healthcare cartels is in the hands of the same Financial Power Elite, then the passage of the 2,300 page "Healthcare Reform Bill" in 2010 was simply another way for the Power Elite to expand its share of the national income.

The health of the citizenry or healthcare per se had essentially nothing to do with the passage of this monstrosity. The entire purpose was to increase the Elites' share of the national income by siphoning off an ever-greater share to the "healthcare" cartels.

2. This is how the Stealth Coup D'Etat works: the machinery of governance grinds through a simulacrum of democracy, but it's all for show; the theoretical structures are now completely different from the political realities. The citizens were against the bailout of Wall Street and the money-center banks 600-to-1; they were rightly ignored as inconsequential.

The citizenry replaced the political party leadership of Congress and the Presidency; absolutely nothing changed except the flavor of PR, spin and propaganda. The Power Elites and their Stealth Coup are apolitical. They don't care about the color of your uniform; whether you wear a blue shirt or a red shirt is inconsequential.

Some readers complain I over-use the descriptive word simulacrum, and I have tried to leaven this overuse with synonyms such as facsimile. But the key point to understand (and the goal here is always to reach an integrated understanding) is that there is a difference between formal structures such as democracy and free markets and their political and financial representations.

In other words, the "democracy" that was visible in passing healthcare reform (i.e. the diversion of more national income to a specific set of cartels) was a facsimile of democracy, a shadow of the real thing, a mere representation of true democracy.

This substitution of representation for reality is the key mechanism of the Stealth Coup D'Etat. In the financial fiasco now playing out, actual deeds to notes and property have been replaced with digital representations in a registry owned by the banks: MERS.

"Liberating" Iraq as a laudable goal of an enlightened State was merely a public relations facade for the occupation of a key geopolitical piece of a larger puzzle. The entire war has two components: the actual war on the ground, as revealed by 400,000 "liberated" documents, and the representation of the war in the Corporate Cartel Media and as presented by the Central State ministries.

3. The Stealth Coup can be traced by a simple dictum: follow the money. Once you control the money--the money supply, the manipulation of yields and bond sales, the budgeting and borrowing--then you control everything.

This is how a small Financial Power Elite dominates the vast, sprawling American Empire.

4. I use the term politics of experience in Survival+ (with a credit to its originator, R.D. Laing) to describe the manner in which the apparently depoliticized context of our daily media-saturated lives are shaped by political forces we rarely recognize.

In my critique, I invoke the term parallel shadow structures of privilege to describe the formalized but masked structures of power which operate behind the facades of democracy, free markets, and all the other PR bilge drummed into the minds of the the citizenry by a media cartel which itself has been financialized into a Corporatocracy.

Over time, Americans have come to believe that the current state of governance is "democracy" rather than a mere facsimile of democracy. They have come to believe (those still covered by insurance they don't directly pay for) that the U.S. "healthcare" system is "the finest in the world" when by some metrics it is the worst, most profligate, illness-inducing system imaginable. And so on.

Thus "homeownership" was elevated to quasi-religious status as a means of stripmining assets and income from a larger pool of debt-serfs. Earlier this year I asked a simple question: how much of your household's net income flows to cartels? That would include banking cartels (mortgages, second mortgages, credit cards, etc.), Central State-banking cartels (student loans), agribusiness cartels (fast foods, packaged foods, Monsanto, etc.), energy cartels, sickcare cartels (healthcare insurance, hospital chains, Big Pharma) and so on.

If we consider that much of rent payments flow to the same banking cartels (which is why the commercial real estate sector is imploding--too much debt, etc.), then most of us would find that the majority (or perhaps as much as 90%) of our money goes to a handful of cartels dominated by Financial Elites via the steady financialization of the U.S. economy.

How much of your taxes flow to the same cartels via their partnership/control of State fiefdoms?

If you think the term Stealth Coup D'Etat is overwrought, I invite you to ponder the headline quote from the Freedom Guerrilla weblog: None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.

From the point of view of a deconstructed politics of experience, then the events of 2008-2010 are simply the culmination of a Stealth Coup D'Etat which began with the overt financialization of the U.S. economy and indeed of its entire culture.

halvord:

Where does the militarization of the domestic US, mostly during 2000-2008, fit into this critique?

Herd Redirection:

The militarization started when the US entered WWII. It continued with the Korean War, then the Cold War, then Vietnam, then Gulf War I... Make no mistake, the takeover was firmly under way when George Bush Sr came in as VP.

The US needed a period of fear and patriotism, after the Tech Crash, which had the ability to get people asking all kinds of questions about the capital markets and large financial players. "You're with us, or you're against us" is not exactly debate masterclass.

PsychoNews has a series on the Oligarchy going now, we are outing them one psycho at a time: http://psychonews.site90.net

DavidPierre:

The USSA Coup D'Etat is still very 'In Your Face'...

"Another Useful Crisis"

A secret "Shadow government" under the highly classified...

"Continuity of Operations Plan" was installed on September 11, 2001.

Both "the war on terrorism" as well as the domestic war on freedom are consistent, from the point of view of Nazi/Fascist military planners, with the logic of Operation Northwoods.

Civilian casualties are used as "a war pretext incident", to galvanize public support for a military intervention.

Mentioned time and again by DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, a "second 9/11 attack" is contemplated; Al Qaeda, we are told, is preparing

"...a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process."

What we are not told is that Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA and that Al Qaeda remains a US sponsored "intelligence asset.

"The assumptions and rhetoric behind Homeland Security are nothing new. They echo an earlier statements by David Rockefeller to the United Nations Business Council in 1994:

"We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."

Similarly, in the words Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book, The Grand Chessboard:.

"…it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus [in America] on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO407B.html

rwe2late :

Maintaining the petrodollar extortion racket requires control over resources.

The military provides that control in the Mideast and elsewhere.

That would be explanation enough, but there is more.

Militarism provides additional opportunities for Shock Doctrine profiteering, and allows dissent to be stifled by fostering jingoism and enacting "war emergency" legislation.

Stifling dissent becomes increasingly necessary as the domestic economy is sacrificed to "globalism", employment to outsourcing, health and safety to "free trade" deregulation, Constitutional protections to endless wars, and the domestic government itself becomes subordinate to international corporations.

Barely noticed behind the flag-waving, the military also undergoes a transformation itself, no longer being a national institution protecting its citizens,... but instead becoming a global enterprise serving the members of a global crime syndicate.

In fact the globalised military not only serves that syndicate, but shares major goals of resource domination and expansion,

if not to maximize profit, then to maximize the parallel goal of maximizing "full-spectrum" military security.

tony bonn:

"Insurrection, the classic vehicle of revolution, is obsolete. The security apparatus of the modern state, with its professional personnel, with its diversified means of transport and communications, and with its extensive sources of information, cannot be defeated by civilian agitation, however intense and prolonged."

"Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?"

i used to read luttwak when i was a neocon toady but he fell out of the good graces of norman podhoretz when his incessant calls for numerous and cheap weapons over against high tech and expensive weaponry was thoroughly refuted by gulf 1.

although i will cavil with the author on a couple of points, this essay is superb in many respects....it is absolutely true that a small cabal of plutocrats control the money and power - and in the delicious words of the author - are strip mining america into poverty...they are transnational citizens of the world whose goal is ever more control under a new world order - hitler's famous words of the third reich reiterated by the murderer bush-41. read tarpley about the nexus with britain on this matter.

yet the plutocrats have more than money at their disposal. indeed money buys security which is precisely in the hands of the cia - an unregulated, unelected, and unaccountable cabal of murderers who slew john kennedy in broad daylight because they could for sport. the cia is the 5th branch of government.

as fletcher prouty made clear, the cia took over the government by the end of the 1950s....it is at that point that they could appoint and dismiss presidents.....kennedy it murdered....nixon it exiled.

none of this is tin foil....and even it were it does not diminish its truth...the iron corset on america is the military industrial complex of which eisenhower spoke....it is that unholy alliance anchored by the fed-cia - different sides of the same coin....the bush crime syndicate with the rockefellers, with the harrimans, bundys, soros',buffets, and whole slew of tyrannts control amerika and have done so for decades....

so of a truth the authors speaks of ersatz representations of the real thing....americans are deluded drunk with their own arrogance of democracy and impotence....they are but debt and consumer slaves to the great captains of lucre played like fools by their masters.

fuck the cia, fuck the fed, and fuck the plutocrats.

[Oct 23, 2010] What's the Big Idea

Audacity of mediocricity
October 22, 2010 | Economist's View

I started this blog shortly after George Bush was reelected, and though many people assume that it was the presence of Republicans in power that was the primary motivation, that isn't the whole story. That was part of the motivation, no doubt, but there were two other factors that were more important. The first was how economic issues such as Social Security and tax cuts were being portrayed in the media, for example the false perceptions being generated about Social Security's long-run stability and the silly idea that tax cuts would pay for themselves that I heard so often.

But the biggest factor was that I felt Democrats were being misrepresented in the media. CNN in particular comes to mind. In the run-up to the election, it was the same people day after day representing Democrats in the media, and I did not feel they were doing a good job -- at all -- of representing the Party's views on economics or anything else. The voices I heard most often were far, far to the left of me, and, I thought, far too easy to dismiss. I wasn't persuaded by their arguments -- often wanting to tear my hair out when they didn't make the obvious rebuttal to crazy claims from the other side, and instead often sounded a bit crazy themselves -- so how could people on the fence be convinced that Democrats had better ideas? It was as though the TV shows would pick the most clueless, outlandish, easiest people to dismiss whenever they interviewed Democrats or pitted Democrats against Republicans. If only people knew who we really are, I would think, and what we actually stand for, certainly they would be persuaded. I never thought it would go anywhere, but starting the blog was part of the reaction to the feeling that Democrats in the silent majority needed to start speaking up and making their voices heard.

Now I'm frustrated again. Though I didn't always agree with it, prior to the Bush reelection at least there was a voice representing Democrats. Right now, there is no voice, at least not one I can hear. There are plenty of Democrats talking with loud voices, more than ever I'd guess, but there is no leadership to coordinate those voices and pull them into an harmonious whole with broad based appeal. We finally have control of the ship, and the captain is wandering aimlessly. What is Obama's vision? Where are we trying to go? What is the grander goal that is being served by the polices and strategies he is pursuing? Yes, he gives good speeches, but what is the single theme that runs through them all to coordinate and steer the party toward this larger vision? What is the big idea behind it all that is supposed to unite us? Without effective leadership, the unified vision the party needs to be successful will not emerge from the many strong voices seeking to provide the direction the party seems to lack.

The problem, however, is that I don't know if the centrist, bipartisan seeking, compromising Obama we have seen to date can actually embrace an encompassing vision. He seems afraid to be a Democrat, as though standing uncompromisingly for an idea will scare people away rather than attract them, and that needs to change.

Selected Comments
tjfxh:
No vision. No leadership.
don:
My take on the current situation, not directly related to your post.

Obama's biggest problems are the economy, for which he can't rightly be blamed, and his party's changes to medical insurance, which involve a transfer from current beneficiaries (retirees who as a class are heavy voters) to others.

Goldilocksisableachblonde:
The antidote for toxic Democratic leadership ?

Balls.

"Can I Call for Replacing the Milibands as the Heads of Britain's Labour Party with Ed Balls?"

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/can-i-call-for-replacing-the-milibands-as-the-heads-of-britains-labour-party-with-ed-balls.html


"...But whatever our competing visions for the economy, growth and deficit reduction, there is also a wider and more fundamental issue at stake which could be easily forgotten or postponed as we focus on how best to protect the current status quo in terms of growth, jobs and living standards.

It is the fairness of our society....

David Cameron has a narrow view of the role of the state – that it stifles society and economic progress. I have a wider view of the role of state – a coming together of communities through democracy to support people, to intervene where markets fail, to promote economic prosperity and opportunity.

He has a narrow view of justice – you keep what you own and whatever you earn in a free market free for all. My vision of a just society is a wider view of social justice that goes beyond equal opportunities, makes the positive case for fair chances, recognises that widely unequal societies are unfair and divisive and relies on active government and a modern welfare state to deliver fair chances for all.

Far from thinking that electoral success is based on the shedding or hiding of values, I believe we now need to champion those values and the importance of a fairer Britain – to show we are on peoples' side after all.

Labour's next leader needs a much stronger, clearer vision of the fairer Britain we will fight for – very different from the unfairness and unemployment the Coalition's savage and immediate cuts will cause..."

hix:
Westminster system with Obama as Prime Minster?

Be carefull what you wish for.

mrrunangun:
It is not bipartisanship, but undue deference to congressional leadership and its priorities which have undone the president thus far. Their priorities are raising money and taking care of the donors so they can raise more money in the future. Those are not the priorities of the people. The priorities of the people have been ignored by the congress. It is the president's job to focus the congress on the peoples' problems. O has failed to do that so far and people see that clearly.

Chicago mayor (1954-75)Richard J. Daley used to say that good government is good politics. It still is, but good government takes determination and guts as well as vision, direction, and persistence. Think FDR or LBJ. Or even Jeff Davis. Altho I am hopeful that experience will improve his performance, the president is 0 for 5 so far on those characteristics. I've seen stronger leadership in little league dugouts.

Michael Pettengill said in to mrrunangun...

So, Clinton's strategy for passing health care reform was superior, but the problem was there were too many moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats in 1994, but today the Clinton strategy would have just forced the Republicans to fall in line because they are just more conservative and determined to obstruct Obama on every turn?

Or perhaps Carter's health reform strategy would have worked?

Or perhaps Nixon's strategy?

Oh, wait, I know, FDR's strategy failed because he had 70 Democratic Senators but would have worked with 56 Democrats in the first half of 2009.

Ken Schulz:
If I ever hear Democrats' voices united in a "harmonious whole", I'll start looking for a wormhole back to my own universe.

We got the biggest step toward universal health care ever, but you insist on 'vision', a 'grander goal', a 'single theme'. LBJ had the 'Great Society', but look where that went.

I'd be satisfied with good, thoughtful, principled decisions on Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and more, with or without the vision.

Winslow R. said in to Ken Schulz...

I prefer, "it's the economy, stupid"

Fix the economy and many things will fall into place.

To remove the partisan divide in economics would be a worthy goal of Mr. Thoma. I'm not talking concession, but a factual based dismantling of schools of erroneous thought.

The dismantling of schools that favor corporate interests over sound economics require a new funding model. Why should the Fed, a semi-private entity, be able to direct the spending of public funds on research. The Fed has 'researched' or spent public funds pushing fiscal policy out of economic models. Even our host seems to believe monetary policy works better than fiscal policy, when it comes to inflation.

Kind of funny that Fed directed fiscal policy (Fed funded research) was used to show fiscal policy doesn't work.

Too bad the funding model for politics provides no guide for proper funding of economics. Neither politics nor economics currently serve public purpose.

lambert strether said in to Ken Schulz...

How is forcing me to purchase junk insurance from a private company under penalty of IRS enforcement anything other than a bailout of the insurance companies?

They're now guaranteed a market, and if you don't think they'll game the regulations, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. "Biggest step toward" my sweet Aunt Fanny.

kievite:
I think it's dangerous to consider Democratic party and Republican Party to be a different parties. Obama represents Republicans more then democrats in all major foreign policy issues and many domestic issues too. Such a George W. Obama. Dems and Repugs are more like left and right wings of the same neoliberal party. In a way, Obama's greatest service to the American people might be undermining two-party system illusion.

American two party system is a very interesting way to manipulate the public, very similar but much more smooth then one used in totalitarian societies or neo-theocratic societies such as the USSR (where the ruling party was simultaneously a religious cult).

The key element of this political invention is that it allows to divide the population into two camps by using peripheral issues like abortion or gay marriage and forcing them to compromise on the more important and economically vital issues. The beauty of Republican party is its magic ability to attract people who are essentially victims of this party policy. The beauty of Democratic party is its ability to sell neoliberal policies as progressive policies.

Still comparing Obama with a Mayberry Machiavellians such as war-mongering opportunist Sara Palin, it's easy to come to conclusion that Obama is not the worst choice even if he was a closet Trojan horse of financial oligarchy from the very beginning.

lambert strether said in to kievite...

klevite writes:

In a way Obama's greatest service to the American people might be undermining two-party system illusion.

I think it's also excellent that The Big O betrayed his youthful base, especially on DISemployment, and they'll never trust a D again. That can only be good, since they don't trust the Rs either. So much for the legacy parties.

http://www.correntewire.com/permanently_high_disemployment_screws_big_os_youthful_base_worst

Mark Field:
Great post. It's the failure of leadership which has been driving me crazy, even more than some of the policy decisions I disagree with. I can live with the latter when the driver of the car is heading in the right general direction. Not so when he's lost.
Mark Field:
After I wrote the above, I checked Brad DeLong's site and would encourage everyone to read this post: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/can-i-call-for-replacing-the-milibands-as-the-heads-of-britains-labour-party-with-ed-balls.html#comment-6a00e551f080038834013488672973970c

For me, the key phrase was this, which I think ties in perfectly with what Prof. Thoma said: "it's not enough to be right if you don't win the argument."

Winslow R. said in to Mark Field...

"We do need a credible and medium-term plan to reduce the deficit and to reduce our level of national debt – a pre-announced plan for reducing the deficit based on a careful balance between employment, spending and taxation – but only once growth is fully secured and over a markedly longer period than the government is currently planning.... "

Alright. This is a debate that needs to happen but hasn't. Delong, once again, is fanning fears of deficits. He, once again, shoots himself in the foot pushing deficits while fear-mongering about deficits.

Is that the plan? Good luck,

Perhaps it would be helpful to quit fear-mongering about deficits and instead focus on what Delong is really worried about, which is future inflation.

Until Delong can get it straight in his head that it is inflation that concerns him and not deficits, he is not an economist to quote.

Observer:
Obama never really led anything before becoming President, but developed something of a reputation for voting "present". He ceded a lot of control to the Congress to set priorities and direction.

The House has people like Conyers (81 years old, 45 years in Congress), Rangel (80,39), Levin (79, 27), Stark (78,37), Johnson (74,17), Waters (72,19), Waxman (71,35), Pelosi (70,23), Frank (70,29), etc.

The leadership is old, arrogant, out of touch, largely from heavily gerrymandered districts, extremely partisan, and far too many see being in Congress as a lifetime career.

About 20% of the US population is progressive/left. The people don't really want the vision progressives are selling. What vision Obama has is far to the left of the American mainstream, and when he moved from "hope and change, I'm not Bush" campaign mode to actually governing, this became increasing recognized. In foreign affairs, he's largely trapped by reality - probably a rude awakening.

The odds for forging a common vision from that starting point, and bipartisan success, seem low.

sglover said in to Observer...

It's a real stretch to claim that Hope'n'Change is too far left. He's far to the right of Nixon.

With that out of the way, I appreciate your congressional age/tenure list (skewed as it is -- you gonna tell us that the Republicans don't have their share of lifetime-term geezers?). I think it really is significant that so many our "leaders" are so ossified. Reminds me of the days of Brezhnev and Andropov....

Observer said in to sglover...

No, I agree that the Republicans have the same "too old, too long in office" problem. I listed Democrats because they are in charge now, and have had the most impact on legislation under Obama.

Personally, I think its kind of pathetic for members of Congress in their 70's who have spent 20+ years in office to be running again. They don't seem to be able to envision any other life, and don't want to give up the power - and I think that's a bad sign.

I believe we'd all be much better off if they had a successful life before Congress, served a couple of terms as a painful civic responsibility, and went back home to private life.

Michael Pettengill said in to Observer...

"The odds for forging a common vision from that starting point, and bipartisan success, seem low."

Yet Obama succeeded.

or are you expecting Obama to accomplish in two years what it took FDR over four years to do?

Oh, wait FDR didn't get health care with much larger Democratic majorities.

Obama has made major strides in every one of his vision statements:
- health reform
- financial regulation
- education reform
- energy policy
- energy innovation
- infrastructure

Which president has accomplished more with such intransigent opposition?

(the energy bill didn't pass the Senate, but SCOTUS gave Obama the EPA to implement carbon pollution limits, plus the clean air and water regulation).

hapa said in to Michael Pettengill...

ok let's look at these.

yes the administration did many things, that the unlikely mccain admin would have done differently if at all, and i'm pleased that we got to the water's surface, but i don't see the actual rescue boat you're saying is implied by their productivity.

stunney:
Ah, the vision thing.

How about Newt Gingrich's head on a pike?

Including the ears.

sglover:
"Though I didn't always agree with it, prior to the Bush reelection at least there was a voice representing Democrats"

Whose? Saying what, exactly?

Oh sure, there are **always** Dem gasbags ready to spew gas for the cameras. But can you name ONE national-level Dem who did anything to retard (never mind reverse) Bush administration pathologies?

You want a representative Dem "voice"? Try this one: Nan "History-making" Pelosi, unilaterally declaring the CONSTITUTIONAL remedy of impeachment "off the table" immediately after the '06 Dem sweep. Because every sentient creature could see that the Republicans were in for a walloping in the election after that, and why should Dems risk their access to the trough over a quaint thing like "rule of law"?

Andrew Bacevich correctly fingers the Democratic Party as the most egregious example of our broken political system. National-level Dems **routinely** do the opposite of what they promise their coalition -- and their coalition routinely lets them get away with it.

Leftists need to leave the Democratic Party, and hasten its death. It's a long shot, but we need a genuine left party, and the Dems are a real obstacle.

Michael Pettengill said in to sglover...

I see you wanted to repeat the success of Newt Gingrich which really won he and Republicans lots of support for Republicans and really defeated Clinton.

And the Republicans couldn't impeach Clinton in 6 years and won nothing.

But I guess you look at the Republican approval rating with envy - if only Democrats could go lower than that would be success.

And you have had a genuine left party, you just need a younger Nader to lead it.

RS:
Given that a Democratic led federal government is not much distinguishable from a Republican led federal government, perhaps the left can get behind a states-rights movement so that the benefits of leftist policies can more easily be perceived in those states that adopt them?
wjd123:
I honestly do not know what Mark Thoma is talking about. It seems like double talk to me. Does he want a stronger Democratic party with a vision or does he want republican light politics. These musings by him are the definition of vagueness. Who is he talking about, what unifying program does he have in the back of his mind.

Paul Krugman offers a strong democratic platform. This patform is nailed down solidedly in his writings. When he appears on TV with other pundits he is terrible. He just doesn't have a TV presence.

sam:
I really don't want to call my own President names. Certainly Bush deserved every bit of profanity and hate I could spew on another human being. But it seems Obama has turned out to be a big p*ssy. He's scared of standing alone, he's scared of the banks, he's scared of blue dogs, scared of the tea party, and scared of good ideas. Needless to say, I'm done voting. The democrats are no longer democrats. And the republicans stopped being, well, human for a couple of decades now. What we need is a new party, something akin to the tea party except it won't be all angry white people and not funded by billionaires, not even Soros. What we need is a revolution. I know that word brings up historically bad memories and connotations, but if this country ever needed a revolution the time is now or face the steady decline of all great empires.

Michael Pettengill said in to sam...

Name any president who has accomplished as much in less than two years as Obama has.

And FDR didn't get much accomplished by Jan 1935.

Nixon, LBJ, Carter got a lot done, but not as much that early.

lambert strether said in to Michael Pettengill...

Yep. Normalizing 10% nominal (20% real) DISemployment as far as the eye can see is quite an achievement. And "early" too!

And in the same way that only Nixon can go to China, only Obama could throw the Democratic base under the bus.

Michael Pettengill:
Mark, the problem I have with your statement is

first, it offers no criticism of Obama's vision which was laid out in Audacity of Hope four years ago, and that he has made great progress on in less than two years; perhaps it is too hard for you to read, or perhaps too hard for you to remember his "lectures" during the campaign on the major points?

second, I can't get any sense of any vision from you even after reading your posts for a number of months.

I am frustrated by the failure of anyone to respond to conservatives with appropriate sound bite drivel that skewers them. If anything, Obama has been spinning his wheels on the leftist issues instead of responding directly to conservative disastrous policy statements.

Let's take a few examples:

"you never hike taxes with high unemployment"

Republicans say you never hike taxes when employment is above 9%, but President Reagan hiked taxes 3 times when unemployment was over 9%: in Oct 82 when over 10%, in Jan 83 when over 10%, in June the payroll tax was hiked when over 9% - job creation resumed after the tax hikes, ending the job losses that began with the 81 tax cuts.

"repeal and replace socialist Obamacare"

Republicans call the health reform Obamacare and a socialist government takeover, but I listened to Bob Dole and his 1993 plan for health care reform, just like Mitt Romney did when he was governor of Mass, and the successfully passed the plan called Romneycare. These Republican plans were the foundation of my plan, so if I am a socialist, then so are Bob Dole and Mitt Romney.

But let's be clear, for a dozen years the Republicans controlled Congress, and during that time, the cost of health care benefits more than doubled. But Republicans offered no plan.

"the Obama stimulus failed"

Well, the 2009 stimulus plan include tax cuts for worker that went into effect almost immediately, and included the continuation of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. That the Republicans declare the 2009 tax cuts a failure, let's be honest and declare the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts a failure as well.

If the tax cut expiration is causing uncertainty, preventing job creation, then the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were the original cause of the uncertainty as job creation since they passed was worse than during the 90s when taxes were higher.

Clearly the Republicans have argued for ending all the tax cuts are returning to the high employment and deficit reducing tax rates of the 90s.

lambert strether said in to Michael Pettengill...

Let's cut to the chase. Of course The Big O's stimpack "failed." 10% nominal (20% real) DISemployment is the very definition of FAIL (unless you're in the legacy party leadership, in which case it's the desired policy outcome that nobody wants to talk about in the open).

hapa:
it's strange to see an economist asking for more heart from a politician. maybe it shows a deterioration or specialization in the field, with a chilling influence on the public sphere.

hapa said in to hapa...

*"maybe it shows": by 'it' i meant the strangeness, not the appeal for vision

roger:
I think, Mark Thoma, that you should reflect a bit on this desire for the center. I think it is this desire, for instance, that was behind your support for re-instating Bernanke. And for TARP.

But outside of a discursive world in which there is a center, a left and a right, there is a social world in which one has to ask: who reaps the greatest benefit from political programs? And at what cost? If, indeed, one wants, a., to hold onto a democratic republic, and b., to maintain the quality of life of a 'middle class' of workers in that republic - then one should erase the impression of ideological location from one's mind, at least now and again, and ask how that can be done. The inverse method - to begin with the Left, center (whatever that is) and right - seems to me to be the true craziness. It is the craziness that masks itself as normal. And I am crazy enough to read 'normal' as - wanting to establish and extend the major traits that characterize today's economy. That is, a disempowered labor force, freezing the increase in the medium household's compensation, and allowing the wealthiest to garner a greater and greater percent of income and wealth. This is what the center - the normal - is about. It isn't some accident, for instance, that upward social mobility, in almost all developed countries, is at a standstill or declining. Centrism seems a code word for managing that decline gently.

If, on the other hand, by centrism you mean - trying to align political policy with realizing a prosperous and democratically-friendly political economy - then the center might veer very far left - or right.

But centrism/moderation has ceased to mean this. And as it has become the defender of the normal, it has not had a very good record over the past decade.

lambert strether:
I don't know why it's hard to understand what Obama's "big idea" is.

His "big idea" is to do what he's actually doing:

Concealing and legitimizing what Jamie Galbraith calls the largest swindle in world history. That, and normalizing permanently high disemployment in the US to bring wages down to world levels.

Why isn't action the best test of intention? Watch what they do, and don't listen to what they say!

2slugbaits:
Mark,

Don't nitwit voters deserve at least some of the blame here? It's fair enough to blame Obama for not initially proposing a larger fiscal stimulus package, but at the end of the day I doubt that anything much different would have passed. [Remember, Al Franken hadn't yet been seated and the Democrats only nominally had 59 seats if you include Lieberman.] People get the kind of government that they deserve, and if voters habitually tune into Fox News and turn their radio dials to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, then guess what? You'll get an army of nitwit voters. What can any responsible politician do when a large chunk of the electorate believes a degree from Glenn Beck University is worth more than a degree from the Univesity of Oregon? In too many people's minds the only difference is that Glenn Beck "U" doesn't have a #1 ranked football team...other than that they see no difference in scholarship. That's a problem that Obama cannot fix. At some point voters have to start holding themselves accountable.

And as long as we're BS'ing about big ideas, I think there are two big fault lines in American policics. The first is the widening cultural gap between the Old Confederacy and the rest of the country. I am a northerner but I travel to the deep South a lot and I've noticed that over the last couple of years the South today has become MUCH more culturally conservative than it ever was. By a long shot. Friends and family members who have moved to the South are barely recognizable today. The South has always been conservative, but today's South is almost a different country compared to the South of only a few years ago. The second big fault line is generational. The Tea Party is largely the party of old folks. Their interests are short term. They deny global warming because they don't want to be inconvenienced today for a problem that won't affect them tomorrow. They are all for reforming Social Security by making tomorrow's retirees work longer provided none of those "reforms" affect them. They talk about fiscal responsibility but want low taxes today and no cuts in Medicare (remember what happened when the Democrats suggested mild Medicare reforms during the healthcare debate?). They are quite comfortabe with the prospect of deflation because it protects their assets and fixed income securities, but yet they raise hell when they don't get a COLA increase for Social Security. If Tom Brokaw wrote a book about them it would be called "The Greediest Generation." This is the same generational fault line that afflicts Japan. And it means that every off-year election will lurch us to the right and every Presidential election will lurch us back to the center.

save_the_rustbelt:
Democrats - the party of circular firing squads. The last Democrat who could actually kick butts and manage the political process was LBJ, the evil Texan.

Perhaps nominating and electing a very junior Senator was not such a hot idea?

Obama may have already confirmed his legacy, compromising his way to a health care bill so complicated and convoluted that it can never be successfully implemented (having just spent a week with top health care experts and federal officials, just an opinion of course).

jamzo:
I recommend substituting the daily show, the colbert report and south park for TV news

you will feel better. The news narrative is and always has been the product of commercial interests and it can be quite depressing

i am happy that you decided to do this blog and hope that you continue to do so.

jamzo:
by the way i am also disappointed in obama's leadership style. i think many people are. i would prefer a mores assertive approach. if you claim audacity you encourage people to expect some audacity

[Oct 23, 2010] What's the Big Idea

Audacity of mediocricity
October 22, 2010 | Economist's View

I started this blog shortly after George Bush was reelected, and though many people assume that it was the presence of Republicans in power that was the primary motivation, that isn't the whole story. That was part of the motivation, no doubt, but there were two other factors that were more important. The first was how economic issues such as Social Security and tax cuts were being portrayed in the media, for example the false perceptions being generated about Social Security's long-run stability and the silly idea that tax cuts would pay for themselves that I heard so often.

But the biggest factor was that I felt Democrats were being misrepresented in the media. CNN in particular comes to mind. In the run-up to the election, it was the same people day after day representing Democrats in the media, and I did not feel they were doing a good job -- at all -- of representing the Party's views on economics or anything else. The voices I heard most often were far, far to the left of me, and, I thought, far too easy to dismiss. I wasn't persuaded by their arguments -- often wanting to tear my hair out when they didn't make the obvious rebuttal to crazy claims from the other side, and instead often sounded a bit crazy themselves -- so how could people on the fence be convinced that Democrats had better ideas? It was as though the TV shows would pick the most clueless, outlandish, easiest people to dismiss whenever they interviewed Democrats or pitted Democrats against Republicans. If only people knew who we really are, I would think, and what we actually stand for, certainly they would be persuaded. I never thought it would go anywhere, but starting the blog was part of the reaction to the feeling that Democrats in the silent majority needed to start speaking up and making their voices heard.

Now I'm frustrated again. Though I didn't always agree with it, prior to the Bush reelection at least there was a voice representing Democrats. Right now, there is no voice, at least not one I can hear. There are plenty of Democrats talking with loud voices, more than ever I'd guess, but there is no leadership to coordinate those voices and pull them into an harmonious whole with broad based appeal. We finally have control of the ship, and the captain is wandering aimlessly. What is Obama's vision? Where are we trying to go? What is the grander goal that is being served by the polices and strategies he is pursuing? Yes, he gives good speeches, but what is the single theme that runs through them all to coordinate and steer the party toward this larger vision? What is the big idea behind it all that is supposed to unite us? Without effective leadership, the unified vision the party needs to be successful will not emerge from the many strong voices seeking to provide the direction the party seems to lack.

The problem, however, is that I don't know if the centrist, bipartisan seeking, compromising Obama we have seen to date can actually embrace an encompassing vision. He seems afraid to be a Democrat, as though standing uncompromisingly for an idea will scare people away rather than attract them, and that needs to change.

Selected Comments
tjfxh:
No vision. No leadership.
don:
My take on the current situation, not directly related to your post.

Obama's biggest problems are the economy, for which he can't rightly be blamed, and his party's changes to medical insurance, which involve a transfer from current beneficiaries (retirees who as a class are heavy voters) to others.

Goldilocksisableachblonde:
The antidote for toxic Democratic leadership ?

Balls.

"Can I Call for Replacing the Milibands as the Heads of Britain's Labour Party with Ed Balls?"

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/can-i-call-for-replacing-the-milibands-as-the-heads-of-britains-labour-party-with-ed-balls.html


"...But whatever our competing visions for the economy, growth and deficit reduction, there is also a wider and more fundamental issue at stake which could be easily forgotten or postponed as we focus on how best to protect the current status quo in terms of growth, jobs and living standards.

It is the fairness of our society....

David Cameron has a narrow view of the role of the state – that it stifles society and economic progress. I have a wider view of the role of state – a coming together of communities through democracy to support people, to intervene where markets fail, to promote economic prosperity and opportunity.

He has a narrow view of justice – you keep what you own and whatever you earn in a free market free for all. My vision of a just society is a wider view of social justice that goes beyond equal opportunities, makes the positive case for fair chances, recognises that widely unequal societies are unfair and divisive and relies on active government and a modern welfare state to deliver fair chances for all.

Far from thinking that electoral success is based on the shedding or hiding of values, I believe we now need to champion those values and the importance of a fairer Britain – to show we are on peoples' side after all.

Labour's next leader needs a much stronger, clearer vision of the fairer Britain we will fight for – very different from the unfairness and unemployment the Coalition's savage and immediate cuts will cause..."

hix:
Westminster system with Obama as Prime Minster?

Be carefull what you wish for.

mrrunangun:
It is not bipartisanship, but undue deference to congressional leadership and its priorities which have undone the president thus far. Their priorities are raising money and taking care of the donors so they can raise more money in the future. Those are not the priorities of the people. The priorities of the people have been ignored by the congress. It is the president's job to focus the congress on the peoples' problems. O has failed to do that so far and people see that clearly.

Chicago mayor (1954-75)Richard J. Daley used to say that good government is good politics. It still is, but good government takes determination and guts as well as vision, direction, and persistence. Think FDR or LBJ. Or even Jeff Davis. Altho I am hopeful that experience will improve his performance, the president is 0 for 5 so far on those characteristics. I've seen stronger leadership in little league dugouts.

Michael Pettengill said in reply to mrrunangun...

So, Clinton's strategy for passing health care reform was superior, but the problem was there were too many moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats in 1994, but today the Clinton strategy would have just forced the Republicans to fall in line because they are just more conservative and determined to obstruct Obama on every turn?

Or perhaps Carter's health reform strategy would have worked?

Or perhaps Nixon's strategy?

Oh, wait, I know, FDR's strategy failed because he had 70 Democratic Senators but would have worked with 56 Democrats in the first half of 2009.

Ken Schulz:
If I ever hear Democrats' voices united in a "harmonious whole", I'll start looking for a wormhole back to my own universe.

We got the biggest step toward universal health care ever, but you insist on 'vision', a 'grander goal', a 'single theme'. LBJ had the 'Great Society', but look where that went.

I'd be satisfied with good, thoughtful, principled decisions on Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and more, with or without the vision.

Winslow R. said in reply to Ken Schulz...

I prefer, "it's the economy, stupid"

Fix the economy and many things will fall into place.

To remove the partisan divide in economics would be a worthy goal of Mr. Thoma. I'm not talking concession, but a factual based dismantling of schools of erroneous thought.

The dismantling of schools that favor corporate interests over sound economics require a new funding model. Why should the Fed, a semi-private entity, be able to direct the spending of public funds on research. The Fed has 'researched' or spent public funds pushing fiscal policy out of economic models. Even our host seems to believe monetary policy works better than fiscal policy, when it comes to inflation.

Kind of funny that Fed directed fiscal policy (Fed funded research) was used to show fiscal policy doesn't work.

Too bad the funding model for politics provides no guide for proper funding of economics. Neither politics nor economics currently serve public purpose.

lambert strether said in reply to Ken Schulz...

How is forcing me to purchase junk insurance from a private company under penalty of IRS enforcement anything other than a bailout of the insurance companies?

They're now guaranteed a market, and if you don't think they'll game the regulations, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. "Biggest step toward" my sweet Aunt Fanny.

kievite:
I think it's dangerous to consider Democratic party and Republican Party to be a different parties. Obama represents Republicans more then democrats in all major foreign policy issues and many domestic issues too. Such a George W. Obama. Dems and Repugs are more like left and right wings of the same neoliberal party. In a way, Obama's greatest service to the American people might be undermining two-party system illusion.

American two party system is a very interesting way to manipulate the public, very similar but much more smooth then one used in totalitarian societies or neo-theocratic societies such as the USSR (where the ruling party was simultaneously a religious cult).

The key element of this political invention is that it allows to divide the population into two camps by using peripheral issues like abortion or gay marriage and forcing them to compromise on the more important and economically vital issues. The beauty of Republican party is its magic ability to attract people who are essentially victims of this party policy. The beauty of Democratic party is its ability to sell neoliberal policies as progressive policies.

Still comparing Obama with a Mayberry Machiavellians such as war-mongering opportunist Sara Palin, it's easy to come to conclusion that Obama is not the worst choice even if he was a closet Trojan horse of financial oligarchy from the very beginning.

lambert strether said in reply to kievite...

klevite writes:

In a way Obama's greatest service to the American people might be undermining two-party system illusion.

I think it's also excellent that The Big O betrayed his youthful base, especially on DISemployment, and they'll never trust a D again. That can only be good, since they don't trust the Rs either. So much for the legacy parties.

http://www.correntewire.com/permanently_high_disemployment_screws_big_os_youthful_base_worst

Mark Field:
Great post. It's the failure of leadership which has been driving me crazy, even more than some of the policy decisions I disagree with. I can live with the latter when the driver of the car is heading in the right general direction. Not so when he's lost.
Mark Field:
After I wrote the above, I checked Brad DeLong's site and would encourage everyone to read this post: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/10/can-i-call-for-replacing-the-milibands-as-the-heads-of-britains-labour-party-with-ed-balls.html#comment-6a00e551f080038834013488672973970c

For me, the key phrase was this, which I think ties in perfectly with what Prof. Thoma said: "it's not enough to be right if you don't win the argument."

Winslow R. said in reply to Mark Field...

"We do need a credible and medium-term plan to reduce the deficit and to reduce our level of national debt – a pre-announced plan for reducing the deficit based on a careful balance between employment, spending and taxation – but only once growth is fully secured and over a markedly longer period than the government is currently planning.... "

Alright. This is a debate that needs to happen but hasn't. Delong, once again, is fanning fears of deficits. He, once again, shoots himself in the foot pushing deficits while fear-mongering about deficits.

Is that the plan? Good luck,

Perhaps it would be helpful to quit fear-mongering about deficits and instead focus on what Delong is really worried about, which is future inflation.

Until Delong can get it straight in his head that it is inflation that concerns him and not deficits, he is not an economist to quote.

Observer:
Obama never really led anything before becoming President, but developed something of a reputation for voting "present". He ceded a lot of control to the Congress to set priorities and direction.

The House has people like Conyers (81 years old, 45 years in Congress), Rangel (80,39), Levin (79, 27), Stark (78,37), Johnson (74,17), Waters (72,19), Waxman (71,35), Pelosi (70,23), Frank (70,29), etc.

The leadership is old, arrogant, out of touch, largely from heavily gerrymandered districts, extremely partisan, and far too many see being in Congress as a lifetime career.

About 20% of the US population is progressive/left. The people don't really want the vision progressives are selling. What vision Obama has is far to the left of the American mainstream, and when he moved from "hope and change, I'm not Bush" campaign mode to actually governing, this became increasing recognized. In foreign affairs, he's largely trapped by reality - probably a rude awakening.

The odds for forging a common vision from that starting point, and bipartisan success, seem low.

sglover said in reply to Observer...

It's a real stretch to claim that Hope'n'Change is too far left. He's far to the right of Nixon.

With that out of the way, I appreciate your congressional age/tenure list (skewed as it is -- you gonna tell us that the Republicans don't have their share of lifetime-term geezers?). I think it really is significant that so many our "leaders" are so ossified. Reminds me of the days of Brezhnev and Andropov....

Observer said in reply to sglover...

No, I agree that the Republicans have the same "too old, too long in office" problem. I listed Democrats because they are in charge now, and have had the most impact on legislation under Obama.

Personally, I think its kind of pathetic for members of Congress in their 70's who have spent 20+ years in office to be running again. They don't seem to be able to envision any other life, and don't want to give up the power - and I think that's a bad sign.

I believe we'd all be much better off if they had a successful life before Congress, served a couple of terms as a painful civic responsibility, and went back home to private life.

Michael Pettengill said in reply to Observer...

"The odds for forging a common vision from that starting point, and bipartisan success, seem low."

Yet Obama succeeded.

or are you expecting Obama to accomplish in two years what it took FDR over four years to do?

Oh, wait FDR didn't get health care with much larger Democratic majorities.

Obama has made major strides in every one of his vision statements:
- health reform
- financial regulation
- education reform
- energy policy
- energy innovation
- infrastructure

Which president has accomplished more with such intransigent opposition?

(the energy bill didn't pass the Senate, but SCOTUS gave Obama the EPA to implement carbon pollution limits, plus the clean air and water regulation).

hapa said in reply to Michael Pettengill...

ok let's look at these.

yes the administration did many things, that the unlikely mccain admin would have done differently if at all, and i'm pleased that we got to the water's surface, but i don't see the actual rescue boat you're saying is implied by their productivity.

stunney:
Ah, the vision thing.

How about Newt Gingrich's head on a pike?

Including the ears.

sglover:
"Though I didn't always agree with it, prior to the Bush reelection at least there was a voice representing Democrats"

Whose? Saying what, exactly?

Oh sure, there are **always** Dem gasbags ready to spew gas for the cameras. But can you name ONE national-level Dem who did anything to retard (never mind reverse) Bush administration pathologies?

You want a representative Dem "voice"? Try this one: Nan "History-making" Pelosi, unilaterally declaring the CONSTITUTIONAL remedy of impeachment "off the table" immediately after the '06 Dem sweep. Because every sentient creature could see that the Republicans were in for a walloping in the election after that, and why should Dems risk their access to the trough over a quaint thing like "rule of law"?

Andrew Bacevich correctly fingers the Democratic Party as the most egregious example of our broken political system. National-level Dems **routinely** do the opposite of what they promise their coalition -- and their coalition routinely lets them get away with it.

Leftists need to leave the Democratic Party, and hasten its death. It's a long shot, but we need a genuine left party, and the Dems are a real obstacle.

Michael Pettengill said in reply to sglover...

I see you wanted to repeat the success of Newt Gingrich which really won he and Republicans lots of support for Republicans and really defeated Clinton.

And the Republicans couldn't impeach Clinton in 6 years and won nothing.

But I guess you look at the Republican approval rating with envy - if only Democrats could go lower than that would be success.

And you have had a genuine left party, you just need a younger Nader to lead it.

RS:
Given that a Democratic led federal government is not much distinguishable from a Republican led federal government, perhaps the left can get behind a states-rights movement so that the benefits of leftist policies can more easily be perceived in those states that adopt them?
wjd123:
I honestly do not know what Mark Thoma is talking about. It seems like double talk to me. Does he want a stronger Democratic party with a vision or does he want republican light politics. These musings by him are the definition of vagueness. Who is he talking about, what unifying program does he have in the back of his mind.

Paul Krugman offers a strong democratic platform. This patform is nailed down solidedly in his writings. When he appears on TV with other pundits he is terrible. He just doesn't have a TV presence.

sam:
I really don't want to call my own President names. Certainly Bush deserved every bit of profanity and hate I could spew on another human being. But it seems Obama has turned out to be a big p*ssy. He's scared of standing alone, he's scared of the banks, he's scared of blue dogs, scared of the tea party, and scared of good ideas. Needless to say, I'm done voting. The democrats are no longer democrats. And the republicans stopped being, well, human for a couple of decades now. What we need is a new party, something akin to the tea party except it won't be all angry white people and not funded by billionaires, not even Soros. What we need is a revolution. I know that word brings up historically bad memories and connotations, but if this country ever needed a revolution the time is now or face the steady decline of all great empires.

Michael Pettengill said in reply to sam...

Name any president who has accomplished as much in less than two years as Obama has.

And FDR didn't get much accomplished by Jan 1935.

Nixon, LBJ, Carter got a lot done, but not as much that early.

lambert strether said in reply to Michael Pettengill...

Yep. Normalizing 10% nominal (20% real) DISemployment as far as the eye can see is quite an achievement. And "early" too!

And in the same way that only Nixon can go to China, only Obama could throw the Democratic base under the bus.

Michael Pettengill:
Mark, the problem I have with your statement is

first, it offers no criticism of Obama's vision which was laid out in Audacity of Hope four years ago, and that he has made great progress on in less than two years; perhaps it is too hard for you to read, or perhaps too hard for you to remember his "lectures" during the campaign on the major points?

second, I can't get any sense of any vision from you even after reading your posts for a number of months.

I am frustrated by the failure of anyone to respond to conservatives with appropriate sound bite drivel that skewers them. If anything, Obama has been spinning his wheels on the leftist issues instead of responding directly to conservative disastrous policy statements.

Let's take a few examples:

"you never hike taxes with high unemployment"

Republicans say you never hike taxes when employment is above 9%, but President Reagan hiked taxes 3 times when unemployment was over 9%: in Oct 82 when over 10%, in Jan 83 when over 10%, in June the payroll tax was hiked when over 9% - job creation resumed after the tax hikes, ending the job losses that began with the 81 tax cuts.

"repeal and replace socialist Obamacare"

Republicans call the health reform Obamacare and a socialist government takeover, but I listened to Bob Dole and his 1993 plan for health care reform, just like Mitt Romney did when he was governor of Mass, and the successfully passed the plan called Romneycare. These Republican plans were the foundation of my plan, so if I am a socialist, then so are Bob Dole and Mitt Romney.

But let's be clear, for a dozen years the Republicans controlled Congress, and during that time, the cost of health care benefits more than doubled. But Republicans offered no plan.

"the Obama stimulus failed"

Well, the 2009 stimulus plan include tax cuts for worker that went into effect almost immediately, and included the continuation of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. That the Republicans declare the 2009 tax cuts a failure, let's be honest and declare the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts a failure as well.

If the tax cut expiration is causing uncertainty, preventing job creation, then the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were the original cause of the uncertainty as job creation since they passed was worse than during the 90s when taxes were higher.

Clearly the Republicans have argued for ending all the tax cuts are returning to the high employment and deficit reducing tax rates of the 90s.

lambert strether said in reply to Michael Pettengill...

Let's cut to the chase. Of course The Big O's stimpack "failed." 10% nominal (20% real) DISemployment is the very definition of FAIL (unless you're in the legacy party leadership, in which case it's the desired policy outcome that nobody wants to talk about in the open).

hapa:
it's strange to see an economist asking for more heart from a politician. maybe it shows a deterioration or specialization in the field, with a chilling influence on the public sphere.

hapa said in reply to hapa...

*"maybe it shows": by 'it' i meant the strangeness, not the appeal for vision

roger:
I think, Mark Thoma, that you should reflect a bit on this desire for the center. I think it is this desire, for instance, that was behind your support for re-instating Bernanke. And for TARP.

But outside of a discursive world in which there is a center, a left and a right, there is a social world in which one has to ask: who reaps the greatest benefit from political programs? And at what cost? If, indeed, one wants, a., to hold onto a democratic republic, and b., to maintain the quality of life of a 'middle class' of workers in that republic - then one should erase the impression of ideological location from one's mind, at least now and again, and ask how that can be done. The inverse method - to begin with the Left, center (whatever that is) and right - seems to me to be the true craziness. It is the craziness that masks itself as normal. And I am crazy enough to read 'normal' as - wanting to establish and extend the major traits that characterize today's economy. That is, a disempowered labor force, freezing the increase in the medium household's compensation, and allowing the wealthiest to garner a greater and greater percent of income and wealth. This is what the center - the normal - is about. It isn't some accident, for instance, that upward social mobility, in almost all developed countries, is at a standstill or declining. Centrism seems a code word for managing that decline gently.

If, on the other hand, by centrism you mean - trying to align political policy with realizing a prosperous and democratically-friendly political economy - then the center might veer very far left - or right.

But centrism/moderation has ceased to mean this. And as it has become the defender of the normal, it has not had a very good record over the past decade.

lambert strether:
I don't know why it's hard to understand what Obama's "big idea" is.

His "big idea" is to do what he's actually doing:

Concealing and legitimizing what Jamie Galbraith calls the largest swindle in world history. That, and normalizing permanently high disemployment in the US to bring wages down to world levels.

Why isn't action the best test of intention? Watch what they do, and don't listen to what they say!

2slugbaits:
Mark,

Don't nitwit voters deserve at least some of the blame here? It's fair enough to blame Obama for not initially proposing a larger fiscal stimulus package, but at the end of the day I doubt that anything much different would have passed. [Remember, Al Franken hadn't yet been seated and the Democrats only nominally had 59 seats if you include Lieberman.] People get the kind of government that they deserve, and if voters habitually tune into Fox News and turn their radio dials to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, then guess what? You'll get an army of nitwit voters. What can any responsible politician do when a large chunk of the electorate believes a degree from Glenn Beck University is worth more than a degree from the Univesity of Oregon? In too many people's minds the only difference is that Glenn Beck "U" doesn't have a #1 ranked football team...other than that they see no difference in scholarship. That's a problem that Obama cannot fix. At some point voters have to start holding themselves accountable.

And as long as we're BS'ing about big ideas, I think there are two big fault lines in American policics. The first is the widening cultural gap between the Old Confederacy and the rest of the country. I am a northerner but I travel to the deep South a lot and I've noticed that over the last couple of years the South today has become MUCH more culturally conservative than it ever was. By a long shot. Friends and family members who have moved to the South are barely recognizable today. The South has always been conservative, but today's South is almost a different country compared to the South of only a few years ago. The second big fault line is generational. The Tea Party is largely the party of old folks. Their interests are short term. They deny global warming because they don't want to be inconvenienced today for a problem that won't affect them tomorrow. They are all for reforming Social Security by making tomorrow's retirees work longer provided none of those "reforms" affect them. They talk about fiscal responsibility but want low taxes today and no cuts in Medicare (remember what happened when the Democrats suggested mild Medicare reforms during the healthcare debate?). They are quite comfortabe with the prospect of deflation because it protects their assets and fixed income securities, but yet they raise hell when they don't get a COLA increase for Social Security. If Tom Brokaw wrote a book about them it would be called "The Greediest Generation." This is the same generational fault line that afflicts Japan. And it means that every off-year election will lurch us to the right and every Presidential election will lurch us back to the center.

save_the_rustbelt:
Democrats - the party of circular firing squads. The last Democrat who could actually kick butts and manage the political process was LBJ, the evil Texan.

Perhaps nominating and electing a very junior Senator was not such a hot idea?

Obama may have already confirmed his legacy, compromising his way to a health care bill so complicated and convoluted that it can never be successfully implemented (having just spent a week with top health care experts and federal officials, just an opinion of course).

jamzo:
I recommend substituting the daily show, the colbert report and south park for TV news

you will feel better. The news narrative is and always has been the product of commercial interests and it can be quite depressing

i am happy that you decided to do this blog and hope that you continue to do so.

jamzo:
by the way i am also disappointed in obama's leadership style. i think many people are. i would prefer a mores assertive approach. if you claim audacity you encourage people to expect some audacity

[Oct 15, 2010] 'Operation Dark Heart' Author Alleges 9-11 Cover Up. Information Clearing House ICH

Fox News

Judge Napolitano's Ground-breaking interview with Lt. Col, Anthony Shaffer and Former CIA Intelligence officer, Michael Scheuer. -- Shaffer's book, "Operation Dark Heart" was essentially "censored" by the Pentagon in order that some classified details could be "redacted".

Operation Dark Heart exposes the good and bad of combat operations the U.S. Government does not want uncovered. Dark Heart highlights how a committed and innovative small group of experts can produce results despite operating in an often dysfunctional system. The account given by Tony Shaffer of how things worked in Afghanistan and in Washington give a whole new insight to the soldiers doing the fighting and a top heavy bureaucracy that impedes mission execution on the ground and consequently hinders overall mission effectiveness. More

Posted October 13, 2010

Selected Comments

Jay :

Okay now, put the last pieces together already. Inside Job!

evelyn burch:

fair enough that am interviewer with adjudicating experience could distill the brew down to the cover up. maybe these kinds of interviews will get the teaparty listeners to chew on the basics and get on with building the gallows.

Pull The Goalie:

I think that this is part of the disinformation strategy. Fox News is interviewing 911 "Truth Seakers" without yelling at them, cutting off their mikes and without bashing their character. That tells me that they want the sheeple to hear this information. That way they can manage the paradigm of 911 Truth. They know that the world is getting smart about what really happened and so they are trying to muddy the waters. In this example, they are going to be framing the concept that, yes, their were cover-ups on the 911 Commission. That way they can limit what the sheeple are going to believe. People are going to go down, and high level people. But they will just be patsies.

Christian Socialist :

What USA needs is a United Christian Socialist Front to combat the satanic powers of capitalism. Capitalism is satanic, and most US Christians should know that Christianity is socialism and communism of love and wealth. Americans should wake up from loving capitalism and should begin to reject, to fight, and to hate capitalism and all the oligarchic systems that Satan has used for the last 5000 years. Only socialism and after the socialist stage (state-less communism) can really bring on the Kingdom of God on earth, which will be the communism state-less stage (After the dictatorship of the proletariat) which Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg wrote about. Thanks

My recent post REMEMBER THE PROMISE YOU MADE BY COCK ROBIN- A SONG TO REMIND YOU WHEN USA WAS A PARADISE OF WEALTH- EVEN WITH REAGAN WE WERE BETTER !!

L. N.:

This is disinformation -- he tells us something we already know ("inside job") while promoting a fictitious version of what is happening on the ground and in Washington -- a fictitious "disconnect" that does not really exist -- what is happening in the Middle East is *exactly* what the U.S. needs to have happen there. It is going like clockwork.

We had better get smarter about vetting our information sources.

Rey:

Anthony Shaffer was an Defense Intelligence Agency officer working under a secret program called "Able Danger" created in the late 90's, to monitor or (and) "infiltrate" Muslim terror cells, Shaffer bumped into Mohammed Atta's File and informed his superiors that something fishy was going on and that Atta was up to no good, If I understand he was ordered to "drop" the matter and was removed from the case...

Everything in the Intel business is compartmentalized so Shaffer was doing his job, in total honesty, which is to follow and collect information on "bad guys" However I believe that his superiors knew exactly what they were doing in removing him from the case: They did not want him to go any further and find out to much about what was in preparation : a "false flag attack" using Arabs useful idiots who were trained by private military contractors (with Mossad and ISI ) who train Arab mercenaries, to pose as terrorists in order to infiltrate "real" Terrorists groups for money (Atta received $ 100.000 from the ISI, Pakistani Intel General Ahmad) also trained to "hijack" planes not knowing that the aircrafts were going to be remote controlled and that they were set up....

When Shaffer found out, like the rest of the world what happened on 9/11 2001, he tried to go back to the Atta's network files., but most of these files were destroyed, he also lost his " clearance" at the DIA and his job, thanks to his superiors...

AMERICA, IT IS TIME TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH ON THE SUBJECT, YOU'VE BEEN DUPED ON THE 9/11.

The invasion of Afghanistan was planned a year before the 9/11, Bin Laden was a CIA asset , paid and trained by the CIA when the Russian invaded Afghanistan in the 70's 80's(see Charlie's War) and most likely died early 2002 of kidney failure ....

The "WAR ON TERROR" is Fake and mostly staged. The US UK Israel intelligence infiltrates Muslim Terror cells for decades and set them up... The "terror scare" is use to justify the "perpetual State of War" in the middle East, our NEW "COLD WAR" with the complicity of our mainstream media.

Peace. Because War is a racket.

neville:

All that needs to be said about 9/11 is that when a nation destroys all the evidence of a crime scene the only conclusion that we in the ''FREE WORLD'' can draw is, that it is just one hellava big cover up.

You cannot convict or even take to TRIAL OR CONVICT anyone on what flimsy evidence you have on the incident, which by facts coming to light look like George Bush and co know more than what there lives are worth to disclose.

Inhabitant:

9/11: The Unidentified Murder Weapons http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT28hCyXsLs&fe...

David ISS:

This video is a combination of Three Card Monte and damage control. Keep people's attention elsewhere while moving the ball under another cup. Damage control as yes, there was a cover-up of a vacuous nature. The "Deep State" is guilty of course. Now carry on.

Neville: There is more than flimsy evidence of the crimes about 9/11. Military grade nanothermite was found at ground zero. Google Alan Sabrosky for the details. WTC7 is another and is a sore thumb for the global elites and social engineers. Go to BuildingWhat.org for more information on how a 47 story building came down in near fall speed with no plane hitting this building.

capt jim:

RED HERRING WARNING: Two unbelievable sources for truth, fox, and their partners CIA.

Neither is creditable. Please see inhabitants suggestion for real truth.

Also, notice how the red herring piece keeps OBL as the foil when in fact he was on the same payroll as these CIA liars and confusers of then real issue -- who had the ability to control NORAD, and set in place the thermite in the buildings?

[Oct 15, 2010] The Oil Drum Drumbeat October 14, 2010

October 14, 2010

tejanojim:

Re: Pentagon going green, because it has to

Anyone want to estimate the EROI of a tanker truck of fuel burned by insurgents in Pakistan?

Twilight:
The same or better than a truck load of fuel burned by the military. Neither accomplishes anything of value.
mos6507:
The locals who would like not to go back to the days of heads lopped off in soccer stadiums might disagree with that.
sldulin:
The timeless, comforting rationalizations for colonialism and imperialism. Not that the argument is fraudulent or advanced in poor faith, but it advances a profound thought and then neglects to answer the profound questions that follow. Which locals? Those who have aligned themselves most closely with their occupiers? Those vulnerable to having their heads lopped off? Those locals who could never hope to achieve political power under the old regime? Or perhaps you would appeal to a concept of a great 'silent majority' of Afghans who theoretically are opposed to the chopping off of heads in stadiums and welcome the arrival of Western 'justice' even if administered by their traditional enemies? Tricky business, empire, particularly when the center cannot hold and our own economy and culture are in shambles. The dishonesty is baked in the cake as we elevate our values and demonize our enemies. Americans would prefer to avoid the hard questions of who we are, of what justice is, of why we fight. Just stick to the script- invade, depose, hold elections, pat ourselves on the back, rinse lather repeat.
lengould:
Excellent! Exactly. mos6507, how would you, as an america I presume, appreciate having your nation bombed, your present leadership proscribed as criminals wanted dead or alive (dead preferrably) and your government system overthrown by, say, the Scandanavian countries, simply in the name of the victims of execution of prisoners convicted of murder? The parallels are perfect.

And the decisions of local peoples everywhere are all about "what it takes to get ahead". If getting ahead in one place amounts to supporting some less than perfectly rational Islam religious leader in order to get appointed to a post in city government, or earn a living in bureaucracy, how does that make them different from someone in the US who supports some less than perfectly rational Christain religious leader for all the same reasons?

eric blair:
And note - here I am agreeing with something Lengould said.

Perhaps Darwinian would like to say something agreeable on this topic eh?

jjhman:
I wish I'd said that. Absolutely poetic.
tejanojim:
Yeah, that's my take. The EROI is roughly equivalent to driving the tanker into Afghanistan and using it to refuel the drone aircraft we use to blow up villages and wedding parties. Either way - a colossal waste of time, effort and resources.
Oct:
The whole war is a political stunt. What security is obtained by all this?
Perk Earl :
The whole war is a political stunt. What security is obtained by all this?

None. I am still astounded that Obama decided to keep troops in Afghanistan, after he said of Iraq something to the effect of, "You can't win a political war with the military". But that's exactly what it is in Afghanistan, a political war of corruption and no military action will change that situation. Obama must have felt he couldn't get re-elected if he pulled the troops out. What a waste!

Oilman Sachs:
Oct: Maybe I can answer your question:

So basically it's all about containing Iran and Pakistan.

Not to mention the usual resource stuff: rare earth minerals, natural gas pipelines, etc.

I don't agree with any of this, by the way, I think it's a waste of time and money that will contribute to the collapse of America. But I call them like I see them.

sgage:
Exactly right, OMS. We simply can't afford this crap, and it's going to ruin us, if it hasn't already.
Merrill:
Bases in Afghanistan are no threat to either Afghanistan or Pakistan. They are too far from the coast to be securely supplied by sea. Our airlift capability is too thin and too expensive to support any sizable force for long. Only with the cooperation of Pakistan and Russia can they continue to operate in Afghanistan.

In the oriental game of Go, they would be what are known as "dead stones" -- stones on the board that lack freedom and connections not blocked by the opposing players stones.

eric blair:
What security is obtained by all this?

The job security of political leadership. I believe the historical quote was "you don't change horses in mid stream".

The security of a fat wallet of money. There has been a large transfer of cash involved. Odds are its not your wallet that is fatter now is all.

garyp:

For every 1 gallon of fuel used for warfighting purpose, 40 are used to get it there. A tanker along a supply route is probably only a percentage of the way through that ratio, but its still significant.

"The line between disorder and order lies in logistics..." Sun Tzu

[Oct 15, 2010] 'Operation Dark Heart' Author Alleges 9-11 Cover Up. Information Clearing House ICH

Fox News

Judge Napolitano's Ground-breaking interview with Lt. Col, Anthony Shaffer and Former CIA Intelligence officer, Michael Scheuer. -- Shaffer's book, "Operation Dark Heart" was essentially "censored" by the Pentagon in order that some classified details could be "redacted".

Operation Dark Heart exposes the good and bad of combat operations the U.S. Government does not want uncovered. Dark Heart highlights how a committed and innovative small group of experts can produce results despite operating in an often dysfunctional system. The account given by Tony Shaffer of how things worked in Afghanistan and in Washington give a whole new insight to the soldiers doing the fighting and a top heavy bureaucracy that impedes mission execution on the ground and consequently hinders overall mission effectiveness. More

Posted October 13, 2010

Selected Comments

Jay :

Okay now, put the last pieces together already. Inside Job!

evelyn burch:

fair enough that am interviewer with adjudicating experience could distill the brew down to the cover up. maybe these kinds of interviews will get the teaparty listeners to chew on the basics and get on with building the gallows.

Pull The Goalie:

I think that this is part of the disinformation strategy. Fox News is interviewing 911 "Truth Seakers" without yelling at them, cutting off their mikes and without bashing their character. That tells me that they want the sheeple to hear this information. That way they can manage the paradigm of 911 Truth. They know that the world is getting smart about what really happened and so they are trying to muddy the waters. In this example, they are going to be framing the concept that, yes, their were cover-ups on the 911 Commission. That way they can limit what the sheeple are going to believe. People are going to go down, and high level people. But they will just be patsies.

Christian Socialist :

What USA needs is a United Christian Socialist Front to combat the satanic powers of capitalism. Capitalism is satanic, and most US Christians should know that Christianity is socialism and communism of love and wealth. Americans should wake up from loving capitalism and should begin to reject, to fight, and to hate capitalism and all the oligarchic systems that Satan has used for the last 5000 years. Only socialism and after the socialist stage (state-less communism) can really bring on the Kingdom of God on earth, which will be the communism state-less stage (After the dictatorship of the proletariat) which Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg wrote about. Thanks

My recent post REMEMBER THE PROMISE YOU MADE BY COCK ROBIN- A SONG TO REMIND YOU WHEN USA WAS A PARADISE OF WEALTH- EVEN WITH REAGAN WE WERE BETTER !!

L. N.:

This is disinformation -- he tells us something we already know ("inside job") while promoting a fictitious version of what is happening on the ground and in Washington -- a fictitious "disconnect" that does not really exist -- what is happening in the Middle East is *exactly* what the U.S. needs to have happen there. It is going like clockwork.

We had better get smarter about vetting our information sources.

Rey:

Anthony Shaffer was an Defense Intelligence Agency officer working under a secret program called "Able Danger" created in the late 90's, to monitor or (and) "infiltrate" Muslim terror cells, Shaffer bumped into Mohammed Atta's File and informed his superiors that something fishy was going on and that Atta was up to no good, If I understand he was ordered to "drop" the matter and was removed from the case...

Everything in the Intel business is compartmentalized so Shaffer was doing his job, in total honesty, which is to follow and collect information on "bad guys" However I believe that his superiors knew exactly what they were doing in removing him from the case: They did not want him to go any further and find out to much about what was in preparation : a "false flag attack" using Arabs useful idiots who were trained by private military contractors (with Mossad and ISI ) who train Arab mercenaries, to pose as terrorists in order to infiltrate "real" Terrorists groups for money (Atta received $ 100.000 from the ISI, Pakistani Intel General Ahmad) also trained to "hijack" planes not knowing that the aircrafts were going to be remote controlled and that they were set up....

When Shaffer found out, like the rest of the world what happened on 9/11 2001, he tried to go back to the Atta's network files., but most of these files were destroyed, he also lost his " clearance" at the DIA and his job, thanks to his superiors...

AMERICA, IT IS TIME TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH ON THE SUBJECT, YOU'VE BEEN DUPED ON THE 9/11.

The invasion of Afghanistan was planned a year before the 9/11, Bin Laden was a CIA asset , paid and trained by the CIA when the Russian invaded Afghanistan in the 70's 80's(see Charlie's War) and most likely died early 2002 of kidney failure ....

The "WAR ON TERROR" is Fake and mostly staged. The US UK Israel intelligence infiltrates Muslim Terror cells for decades and set them up... The "terror scare" is use to justify the "perpetual State of War" in the middle East, our NEW "COLD WAR" with the complicity of our mainstream media.

Peace. Because War is a racket.

neville:

All that needs to be said about 9/11 is that when a nation destroys all the evidence of a crime scene the only conclusion that we in the ''FREE WORLD'' can draw is, that it is just one hellava big cover up.

You cannot convict or even take to TRIAL OR CONVICT anyone on what flimsy evidence you have on the incident, which by facts coming to light look like George Bush and co know more than what there lives are worth to disclose.

Inhabitant:

9/11: The Unidentified Murder Weapons http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT28hCyXsLs&fe...

David ISS:

This video is a combination of Three Card Monte and damage control. Keep people's attention elsewhere while moving the ball under another cup. Damage control as yes, there was a cover-up of a vacuous nature. The "Deep State" is guilty of course. Now carry on.

Neville: There is more than flimsy evidence of the crimes about 9/11. Military grade nanothermite was found at ground zero. Google Alan Sabrosky for the details. WTC7 is another and is a sore thumb for the global elites and social engineers. Go to BuildingWhat.org for more information on how a 47 story building came down in near fall speed with no plane hitting this building.

capt jim:

RED HERRING WARNING: Two unbelievable sources for truth, fox, and their partners CIA.

Neither is creditable. Please see inhabitants suggestion for real truth.

Also, notice how the red herring piece keeps OBL as the foil when in fact he was on the same payroll as these CIA liars and confusers of then real issue -- who had the ability to control NORAD, and set in place the thermite in the buildings?

[Oct 15, 2010] The Oil Drum Drumbeat October 14, 2010

October 14, 2010

tejanojim:

Re: Pentagon going green, because it has to

Anyone want to estimate the EROI of a tanker truck of fuel burned by insurgents in Pakistan?

Twilight:
The same or better than a truck load of fuel burned by the military. Neither accomplishes anything of value.
mos6507:
The locals who would like not to go back to the days of heads lopped off in soccer stadiums might disagree with that.
sldulin:
The timeless, comforting rationalizations for colonialism and imperialism. Not that the argument is fraudulent or advanced in poor faith, but it advances a profound thought and then neglects to answer the profound questions that follow. Which locals? Those who have aligned themselves most closely with their occupiers? Those vulnerable to having their heads lopped off? Those locals who could never hope to achieve political power under the old regime? Or perhaps you would appeal to a concept of a great 'silent majority' of Afghans who theoretically are opposed to the chopping off of heads in stadiums and welcome the arrival of Western 'justice' even if administered by their traditional enemies? Tricky business, empire, particularly when the center cannot hold and our own economy and culture are in shambles. The dishonesty is baked in the cake as we elevate our values and demonize our enemies. Americans would prefer to avoid the hard questions of who we are, of what justice is, of why we fight. Just stick to the script- invade, depose, hold elections, pat ourselves on the back, rinse lather repeat.
lengould:
Excellent! Exactly. mos6507, how would you, as an america I presume, appreciate having your nation bombed, your present leadership proscribed as criminals wanted dead or alive (dead preferrably) and your government system overthrown by, say, the Scandanavian countries, simply in the name of the victims of execution of prisoners convicted of murder? The parallels are perfect.

And the decisions of local peoples everywhere are all about "what it takes to get ahead". If getting ahead in one place amounts to supporting some less than perfectly rational Islam religious leader in order to get appointed to a post in city government, or earn a living in bureaucracy, how does that make them different from someone in the US who supports some less than perfectly rational Christain religious leader for all the same reasons?

eric blair:
And note - here I am agreeing with something Lengould said.

Perhaps Darwinian would like to say something agreeable on this topic eh?

jjhman:
I wish I'd said that. Absolutely poetic.
tejanojim:
Yeah, that's my take. The EROI is roughly equivalent to driving the tanker into Afghanistan and using it to refuel the drone aircraft we use to blow up villages and wedding parties. Either way - a colossal waste of time, effort and resources.
Oct:
The whole war is a political stunt. What security is obtained by all this?
Perk Earl :
The whole war is a political stunt. What security is obtained by all this?

None. I am still astounded that Obama decided to keep troops in Afghanistan, after he said of Iraq something to the effect of, "You can't win a political war with the military". But that's exactly what it is in Afghanistan, a political war of corruption and no military action will change that situation. Obama must have felt he couldn't get re-elected if he pulled the troops out. What a waste!

Oilman Sachs:
Oct: Maybe I can answer your question:

So basically it's all about containing Iran and Pakistan.

Not to mention the usual resource stuff: rare earth minerals, natural gas pipelines, etc.

I don't agree with any of this, by the way, I think it's a waste of time and money that will contribute to the collapse of America. But I call them like I see them.

sgage:
Exactly right, OMS. We simply can't afford this crap, and it's going to ruin us, if it hasn't already.
Merrill:
Bases in Afghanistan are no threat to either Afghanistan or Pakistan. They are too far from the coast to be securely supplied by sea. Our airlift capability is too thin and too expensive to support any sizable force for long. Only with the cooperation of Pakistan and Russia can they continue to operate in Afghanistan.

In the oriental game of Go, they would be what are known as "dead stones" -- stones on the board that lack freedom and connections not blocked by the opposing players stones.

eric blair:
What security is obtained by all this?

The job security of political leadership. I believe the historical quote was "you don't change horses in mid stream".

The security of a fat wallet of money. There has been a large transfer of cash involved. Odds are its not your wallet that is fatter now is all.

garyp:

For every 1 gallon of fuel used for warfighting purpose, 40 are used to get it there. A tanker along a supply route is probably only a percentage of the way through that ratio, but its still significant.

"The line between disorder and order lies in logistics..." Sun Tzu

[Oct 06, 2010] Public Option Duplicity Revisited -- Yet More Evidence of Obama Spinelessness

Proof that Obama's failings are ones of character and experience comes from an area that was the centerpiece of his election campaign, an area in which he professed to have considerable interest, namely health care reform.

One of the big disappointments of the health "reform", from the liberal perspective, was the abandonment of the public option. But Obama had never seem committed. Indeed, one of the truly bizarre features of the town hall debate fiasco was the failure of Team Obama to hit on the obvious argument to rebut the hysterical objection to it, that it would be "socialism": "We have a very successful and popular government funded health care program now. It's called Medicare. We want to build and expand on it."

Glenn Greenwald was pilloried for pointing out the at best limp wristed Obama support during tortuous horse trading on the bill. But as he discussed yesterday, more disclosures have proven what everyone suspected, that Team Obama was never serious about the public option, and always regarded it as a bargaining chip:

What Daschle said here - in his interview with Volsky and, apparently, in his new book - is crystal clear, and is consistent with what has long been clear: despite its stream of public statements to the contrary, the Obama White House made no efforts to have a public option in the bill because their secret, early agreement with "stakeholders" was that no public option (and thus no real mechanism of competition with private industry) would be created.

What I find surprising about the excitement about this "revelation" (see David Dayen for recap) is that it comes as news to many people in what purports to be the left in this country. I must confess to having been only a casual follower of the health care bill machinations, yet it was blindingly obvious that Obama wasn't committed to much of anything in the bill, but getting something, anything passed that looked enough different to be able to be dressed up as an accomplishment, at least in that never-never land in which Obama lives, where every policy shortcoming can and will be solved by propaganda.

There were plenty of indications that if Obama had put shoulder to wheel, he could have gotten more. From the far-from-Obama-friendly Wall Street Journal, when the public option was voted down in the Senate:

The two votes suggested that the "public option" is all but dead in the Senate, though it clings to life in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said it will be included in a bill to be brought to the House floor. The idea could still revive if the White House weighs in strongly on its behalf. Another possibility is the "trigger" option, where the public plan takes effect only if other steps fail to expand coverage and lower costs.

Obama pointedly ignored Democrat efforts to revive the health care option during the reconciliation process via the use of Medicare. The public story was that Lieberman, who had supported the idea previously, had reneged. Yet Obama has tended to give Lieberman a free pass for various transgressions despite his having betrayed Obama in the last election. Is Lieberman somehow untouchable, or could a more complex game be operating?

Ironically, this little tempest in a teapot says more about the efforts Team Obama has devoted to neutralizing critics on the left, so that people who dare speak the unvarnished truth like Greenwald are rejected as heretics. A more confident President would go after worthier and more important targets, meaning opponents to his agenda, rather than make sure he has an echo chamber among his constituents.

rd

Obama had a major chance to dump Geithner before he brought him on board. TurboTax-Gate was the perfect excuse (if not a primary reason) to do that, especially since there were numerous people, including myself, e-mailing and calling Senators protesting his appointment to Treasury.

Obama REALLY wanted Geithner for Treasury, so I do find the argument that he is being led astray by people very disengenuous. There were plenty of other candidates who did not have their pawprints all over the financial crisis.

Similarly, he did not have to re-nominate Bernanke since there was a lot of opposition to his re-appointment. Once again, there were plenty of other potential candidates who did not have their pawprints on the financial crisis.

ella
As we pay more and more for health care, we have less to spend. Less spending is detrimental to the consumer economy. As health care costs continue to rise, more Americans will see the fraud of "bending the cost curve". Obama sold the public down the river for a promise of reduced cost by insurers, hospitals, and Pharma. Now, many will distrust the D's to manage health care.

Only a public option would have provided true competition. But of course Obama did not want competition, nor did Congress. What will happen when the health care industry implodes due to cost so high few will be able to pay? And what will become of the health of the public? As it declines and we are less and less productive who will support the economy, the tax base and the military. Have we truly forgotten what national security means?

For many Americans their health care costs are 20-30 of their gross income. And yet their wages are falling. The middle class depends on earning enough to pay for their cost of living. The cost of living has outstripped incomes for years. Many Americans depended on debt, which was a substitute for income. The debt hangover must not be paid for, as the debt is paid down demand for goods and services has fallen. New credit is harder and harder to obtain. As the cost of goods and services in the real economy (not the phony CPI) continue to rise, we will be forced to pay more and more for the basics. The GDP will likely fall as a result.

Reducing the cost of health care with a public option would have given us the ability to afford a middle class life style. That extra income would result in demand, demand would increase hiring and lower unemployment, and raise the GDP. We would be healthier and more secure in knowing that we would receive medical care at a reasonable cost. Health security is a component of national security.

Koshem Bos:
The nomination of Geithner was an apparent payoff to Wall Street as well as Obama's best indication that Wall Street is untouchable in his administration. It didn't take a genius to understand that from the early days of the administration. Therefore, the claim that Obama was led by his nose economically is nonsense.

Listening carefully and watching the events in the primaries in 2008 haven't left much hope that he'll make even a passable president. He was the weakest in the debates, he relied on brute force, i.e. huge gathering and cheating in caucuses, and pure racism, and he called Bill Clinton – the former "first black president" a racist.

Of course, he was better the McCain; that isn't much of consolation.

The last quote in the update to the post is a bombshell, but everyone knew that Obama had the habit of avoiding the tough votes.

I always believed the health care reform was intended to leave a personal mark in history rather than a real reform about which he could care less.

Z:
IMO, it's more deceitful than spineless to go against a campaign promise that 2/3rds of the people favored; even though he did it behind closed doors and tried to cover his tracks, it was pretty bold of him to even try to get away with it. And that's the scariest thing about obama: he thinks he can bullshit his way thru anything. He actually enjoys playing the populace; you can see it in the way that he struts around during his campaign speeches as he plays to the basest elements of the crowds. Most people, even our sociopathic politicians, would be smart enough to be cautious in selling out the people this brazenly, but not him. He thinks that he is so smart and so charming that he can fuck us over and get away with it. He's a nut in those regards and there exists no self-correction mechanism within him to change his corporate servile-common people sellout ways even when good sense should tell him otherwise.
Mad Hemingway
I voted early this week for November and most of my picks were Green Party.

My mom was born in the Depression and she's given up on the Democrats since Obama came in (Pelosi & Reid are also reasons).

So, the question is, who will primary Obama. Right now, there's no governor doing the kinds of things FDR when he was governor of NY. And nobody else for that matter that I'm aware of.

[Oct 06, 2010] Public Option Duplicity Revisited -- Yet More Evidence of Obama Spinelessness

Proof that Obama's failings are ones of character and experience comes from an area that was the centerpiece of his election campaign, an area in which he professed to have considerable interest, namely health care reform.

One of the big disappointments of the health "reform", from the liberal perspective, was the abandonment of the public option. But Obama had never seem committed. Indeed, one of the truly bizarre features of the town hall debate fiasco was the failure of Team Obama to hit on the obvious argument to rebut the hysterical objection to it, that it would be "socialism": "We have a very successful and popular government funded health care program now. It's called Medicare. We want to build and expand on it."

Glenn Greenwald was pilloried for pointing out the at best limp wristed Obama support during tortuous horse trading on the bill. But as he discussed yesterday, more disclosures have proven what everyone suspected, that Team Obama was never serious about the public option, and always regarded it as a bargaining chip:

What Daschle said here - in his interview with Volsky and, apparently, in his new book - is crystal clear, and is consistent with what has long been clear: despite its stream of public statements to the contrary, the Obama White House made no efforts to have a public option in the bill because their secret, early agreement with "stakeholders" was that no public option (and thus no real mechanism of competition with private industry) would be created.

What I find surprising about the excitement about this "revelation" (see David Dayen for recap) is that it comes as news to many people in what purports to be the left in this country. I must confess to having been only a casual follower of the health care bill machinations, yet it was blindingly obvious that Obama wasn't committed to much of anything in the bill, but getting something, anything passed that looked enough different to be able to be dressed up as an accomplishment, at least in that never-never land in which Obama lives, where every policy shortcoming can and will be solved by propaganda.

There were plenty of indications that if Obama had put shoulder to wheel, he could have gotten more. From the far-from-Obama-friendly Wall Street Journal, when the public option was voted down in the Senate:

The two votes suggested that the "public option" is all but dead in the Senate, though it clings to life in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said it will be included in a bill to be brought to the House floor. The idea could still revive if the White House weighs in strongly on its behalf. Another possibility is the "trigger" option, where the public plan takes effect only if other steps fail to expand coverage and lower costs.

Obama pointedly ignored Democrat efforts to revive the health care option during the reconciliation process via the use of Medicare. The public story was that Lieberman, who had supported the idea previously, had reneged. Yet Obama has tended to give Lieberman a free pass for various transgressions despite his having betrayed Obama in the last election. Is Lieberman somehow untouchable, or could a more complex game be operating?

Ironically, this little tempest in a teapot says more about the efforts Team Obama has devoted to neutralizing critics on the left, so that people who dare speak the unvarnished truth like Greenwald are rejected as heretics. A more confident President would go after worthier and more important targets, meaning opponents to his agenda, rather than make sure he has an echo chamber among his constituents.

rd

Obama had a major chance to dump Geithner before he brought him on board. TurboTax-Gate was the perfect excuse (if not a primary reason) to do that, especially since there were numerous people, including myself, e-mailing and calling Senators protesting his appointment to Treasury.

Obama REALLY wanted Geithner for Treasury, so I do find the argument that he is being led astray by people very disengenuous. There were plenty of other candidates who did not have their pawprints all over the financial crisis.

Similarly, he did not have to re-nominate Bernanke since there was a lot of opposition to his re-appointment. Once again, there were plenty of other potential candidates who did not have their pawprints on the financial crisis.

ella
As we pay more and more for health care, we have less to spend. Less spending is detrimental to the consumer economy. As health care costs continue to rise, more Americans will see the fraud of "bending the cost curve". Obama sold the public down the river for a promise of reduced cost by insurers, hospitals, and Pharma. Now, many will distrust the D's to manage health care.

Only a public option would have provided true competition. But of course Obama did not want competition, nor did Congress. What will happen when the health care industry implodes due to cost so high few will be able to pay? And what will become of the health of the public? As it declines and we are less and less productive who will support the economy, the tax base and the military. Have we truly forgotten what national security means?

For many Americans their health care costs are 20-30 of their gross income. And yet their wages are falling. The middle class depends on earning enough to pay for their cost of living. The cost of living has outstripped incomes for years. Many Americans depended on debt, which was a substitute for income. The debt hangover must not be paid for, as the debt is paid down demand for goods and services has fallen. New credit is harder and harder to obtain. As the cost of goods and services in the real economy (not the phony CPI) continue to rise, we will be forced to pay more and more for the basics. The GDP will likely fall as a result.

Reducing the cost of health care with a public option would have given us the ability to afford a middle class life style. That extra income would result in demand, demand would increase hiring and lower unemployment, and raise the GDP. We would be healthier and more secure in knowing that we would receive medical care at a reasonable cost. Health security is a component of national security.

Koshem Bos:
The nomination of Geithner was an apparent payoff to Wall Street as well as Obama's best indication that Wall Street is untouchable in his administration. It didn't take a genius to understand that from the early days of the administration. Therefore, the claim that Obama was led by his nose economically is nonsense.

Listening carefully and watching the events in the primaries in 2008 haven't left much hope that he'll make even a passable president. He was the weakest in the debates, he relied on brute force, i.e. huge gathering and cheating in caucuses, and pure racism, and he called Bill Clinton – the former "first black president" a racist.

Of course, he was better the McCain; that isn't much of consolation.

The last quote in the update to the post is a bombshell, but everyone knew that Obama had the habit of avoiding the tough votes.

I always believed the health care reform was intended to leave a personal mark in history rather than a real reform about which he could care less.

Z:
IMO, it's more deceitful than spineless to go against a campaign promise that 2/3rds of the people favored; even though he did it behind closed doors and tried to cover his tracks, it was pretty bold of him to even try to get away with it. And that's the scariest thing about obama: he thinks he can bullshit his way thru anything. He actually enjoys playing the populace; you can see it in the way that he struts around during his campaign speeches as he plays to the basest elements of the crowds. Most people, even our sociopathic politicians, would be smart enough to be cautious in selling out the people this brazenly, but not him. He thinks that he is so smart and so charming that he can fuck us over and get away with it. He's a nut in those regards and there exists no self-correction mechanism within him to change his corporate servile-common people sellout ways even when good sense should tell him otherwise.
Mad Hemingway
I voted early this week for November and most of my picks were Green Party.

My mom was born in the Depression and she's given up on the Democrats since Obama came in (Pelosi & Reid are also reasons).

So, the question is, who will primary Obama. Right now, there's no governor doing the kinds of things FDR when he was governor of NY. And nobody else for that matter that I'm aware of.

[Oct 05, 2010] Tea & Crackers

Rolling Stone Politics

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it - the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade - will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.

...Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008, and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book, The Revolution. The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W. Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.

The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party 2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG - massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis; the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford - and now the government was going to bail them out.

"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"

Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe.

Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the financial-services industry, FreedomWorks - which took money from companies like mortgage lender MetLife - had the opportunity to persuade millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other things, Wall Street reform.

Joining them in the fight was another group, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the billionaire David Koch, whose Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in America. In addition to dealing in plastics, chemicals and petroleum, Koch has direct interests in commodities trading and financial services. He also has a major stake in pushing for deregulation, as his companies have been fined multiple times by the government, including a 1999 case in which Koch Industries was held to have stolen oil from federal lands, lying about oil purchases some 24,000 times.

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement - which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview.

  1. Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me - I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.)
  2. Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.")
  3. They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views - despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate.
  4. In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog - and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over - as I do on a recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park. Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being before deciding to treat you.

"They're going to look at your age, your vocation in life, your health, your income. . . ." says a guy active in the Northern Kentucky Tea Party.

"Your race?" I ask.

"Probably," he says.

"White males need not apply," says another Tea Partier.

"Like everything else, the best thing you can do is be an illegal alien," says a third. "Then they won't ask you any questions."

An amazing number of Tea Partiers actually believe this stuff, and in the past year or so a host of little-known politicians have scored electoral upsets riding this kind of yahoo paranoia. Some are career Republican politicians like Sharron Angle, the former Nevada assemblywoman who seized on the Tea Party to win the GOP nomination to challenge Harry Reid this fall. Others are opportunistic incumbents like Jan Brewer, the Arizona governor who reversed a dip in the polls by greenlighting laws to allow police to stop anyone in a Cypress Hill T-shirt. And a few are newcomers like Joe Miller, the Alaska lawyer and Sarah Palin favorite who whipped Republican lifer Lisa Murkowski in the state's Senate primary. But the champion of champions has always been Rand Paul, who as the son of the movement's would-be ideological founder was poised to become the George W. Bush figure in the Tea Party narrative, the inheritor of the divine calling.

Since Paul won the GOP Primary in Kentucky, the Tea Party has entered a whole new phase of self-deception. Now that a few of these so-called "outsider" politicians have ridden voter anger to victories over entrenched incumbents, they are being courted and turned by the very party insiders they once campaigned against. It hasn't happened everywhere yet, and in some states it may not happen at all; a few rogue politicians, like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, might still squeak into office over the protests of the Republican establishment. But in Kentucky, home of the Chosen One, the sellout came fast and hard.

Paul was transformed from insurgent outsider to establishment stooge in the space of almost exactly one year, making a journey that with eerie cinematic precision began and ended in the same place: The Rachel Maddow Show. When he first appeared on the air with the MSNBC leading lady and noted Bible Belt Antichrist to announce his Senate candidacy in May 2009, Paul came out blazing with an inclusive narrative that seemingly offered a realistic alternative for political malcontents on both sides of the aisle. He talked with pride about how his father's anti-war stance attracted young voters (mentioning one Paul supporter in New Hampshire who had "long hair and a lip ring"). Even the choice of Maddow as a forum was clearly intended to signal that his campaign was an anti-establishment, crossover effort. "Bringing our message to those who do not yet align themselves as Republicans is precisely how we grow as a party," Paul said, explaining the choice.

In the early days of his campaign, by virtually all accounts, Paul was the real thing - expansive, willing to talk openly to anyone and everyone, and totally unapologetic about his political views, which ranged from bold and nuanced to flat-out batshit crazy. But he wasn't going to change for anyone: For young Dr. Paul, as for his father, this was more about message than victory; actually winning wasn't even on his radar. "He used to talk about how he'd be lucky if he got 10 percent," recalls Josh Koch, a former campaign volunteer for Paul who has broken with the candidate.

Before he entered the campaign, Paul had an extensive record of loony comments, often made at his father's rallies, which, to put it generously, were a haven for people gifted at the art of mining the Internet for alternate theories of reality. In a faint echo of the racially charged anti-immigrant paranoia that has become a trademark of the Tea Party, both Paul and his father preached about the apocalyptic arrival of a "10-lane colossus" NAFTA superhighway between the U.S. and Mexico, which the elder Paul said would be the width of several football fields and come complete with fiber-optic cable, railroads, and oil and gas pipelines, all with the goal of forging a single American-Mexican state. Young Paul stood with Dad on that one - after all, he had seen Mexico's former president on YouTube talking about the Amero, a proposed North American currency. "I guarantee you," he warned, "it's one of their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent." And Paul's anti-interventionist, anti-war stance was so far out, it made MoveOn look like a detachment of the Third Marines. "Our national security," he declared in 2007, "is not threatened by Iran having one nuclear weapon."

With views like these, Paul spent the early days of his campaign looking for publicity anywhere he could get it. One of his early appearances was on the online talk show of noted 9/11 Truth buffoon and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The two men spent the broadcast exchanging lunatic fantasies about shadowy government forces, with Paul at one point insisting that should Obama's climate bill pass, "we will have an army of armed EPA agents - thousands of them" who would raid private homes to enforce energy-efficiency standards. Paul presented himself as an ally to Jones in the fringe crusade against establishment forces at the top of society, saying the leaders of the two parties "don't believe in anything" and "get pushed around by the New World Order types."

Unsurprisingly, the GOP froze Paul out, attempting to exclude him from key party gatherings in Kentucky like the Fayette County Republican Party Picnic and the Boone County Republican Party Christmas Gala. "We had the entire Republican establishment of the state and the nation against us," says David Adams, who mobilized the first Tea Party meetings in Kentucky before serving as Paul's campaign manager during the primaries.

The state's Republican establishment, it must be said, is among the most odious in the nation. Its two senators - party kingmaker and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and mentally disappearing ex-jock Jim Bunning - collectively represent everything that most sane people despise about the modern GOP. McConnell is the ultimate D.C. insider, the kind of Republican even Republicans should wonder about, a man who ranks among the top 10 senators when it comes to loading up on pork spending. With his needle nose, pursed lips and prim reading glasses, he's a proud wearer of the "I'm an intellectual, but I'm also a narrow-minded prick" look made famous by George Will; politically his great passion is whoring for Wall Street, his most recent triumph coming when he convinced Republican voters that a proposed $50 billion fund to be collected from big banks was actually a bailout of those same banks. Bunning, meanwhile, goes with the "dumb and unashamed" style; in more than a decade of service, his sole newsworthy accomplishment came when he said his Italian-American opponent looked like one of Saddam's sons.

Paul's animus toward the state's Republican overlords never seemed greater than in August 2009, when McConnell decided to throw a fancy fundraiser in Washington for the national GOP's preferred candidate, Trey Grayson. Attended by 17 Republican senators who voted for the TARP bailout, the event was dubbed the "Bailout Ball" by Paul's people. Paul went a step further, pledging not to accept contributions from any senator who voted to hand taxpayer money over to Wall Street. "A primary focus of my campaign is that we need Republicans in office who will have the courage to say no to federal bailouts of big business," he declared.

The anti-establishment rhetoric was a big hit. Excluded from local campaign events by the GOP, Paul took his act to the airwaves, doing national TV appearances that sent his campaign soaring with Tea Party voters. "We were being shut out of a lot of opportunities in the state, so you go with what is available to you," says Adams. "And what was available was television."

In the primary almost a year later, Paul stomped Grayson, sending shock waves through the national party. The Republican candidate backed by the party's Senate minority leader had just received an ass-whipping by a Tea Party kook, a man who tried to excuse BP's greed-crazed fuck-up in the Gulf on the grounds that "sometimes accidents happen." Paul celebrated his big win by going back to where he'd begun his campaign, The Rachel Maddow Show, where he made a big show of joyously tearing off his pseudolibertarian underpants for the whole world to see - and that's where everything changed for him.

In their first interview, Maddow had softballed Paul and played nice, treating him like what he was at the time - an interesting fringe candidate with the potential to put a burr in Mitch McConnell's ass. But now, Paul was a real threat to seize a seat in the U.S. Senate, so Maddow took the gloves off and forced him to explain some of his nuttier positions. Most memorably, she hounded him about his belief that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power. The money exchange:

Paul was pilloried as a racist in the national press. Within a day he was completely reversing himself, telling CNN, "I think that there was an overriding problem in the South so big that it did require federal intervention in the Sixties." Meanwhile, he was sticking his foot in his mouth on other issues, blasting the Americans With Disabilities Act and denouncing Barack Obama's criticism of British disaster merchant BP as "un-American."

Paul's libertarian coming-out party was such a catastrophe - the three gaffes came within days of each other - that he immediately jumped into the protective arms of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party. "I think he's said quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage," McConnell said, explaining why Paul had been prevailed upon by the party to cancel an appearance on Meet the Press. Some news outlets reported that Paul canceled the appearance after a call from Karl Rove to Adams, who concedes that he did speak with Rove around that time.

Soon after, McConnell threw yet another "Bailout Ball" fundraiser in Washington - only this time it was for Rand Paul. The candidate who just a year before had pledged not to accept money from TARP supporters was now romping in bed with those same politicians. When pressed for an explanation of Paul's about-face on the bailouts, Adams offers an incredibly frank admission. "When he said he would not take money from people who voted for the bank bailout, he also said, in the same breath, that our first phone call after the primary would be to Senator Mitch McConnell," says Adams. "Making fun of the Bailout Ball was just for the primary."

With all the "just for the primary" stuff out of the way, Paul's platform began to rapidly "evolve." Previously opposed to erecting a fence on the Mexican border, Paul suddenly came out in favor of one. He had been flatly opposed to all farm subsidies; faced with having to win a general election in a state that receives more than $265 million a year in subsidies, Paul reversed himself and explained that he was only against subsidies to "dead farmers" and those earning more than $2 million. Paul also went on the air with Fox News reptile Sean Hannity and insisted that he differed significantly from the Libertarian Party, now speaking more favorably about, among other things, judicious troop deployments overseas.

Beyond that, Paul just flat-out stopped talking about his views - particularly the ones that don't jibe with right-wing and Christian crowds, like curtailing the federal prohibition on drugs. Who knows if that had anything to do with hawkish Christian icon Sarah Palin agreeing to headline fundraisers for Paul, but a huge chunk of the candidate's libertarian ideals have taken a long vacation.

"When he was pulling no punches, when he was reciting his best stuff, I felt like I knew him," says Koch, the former campaign volunteer who now works with the Libertarian Party in Kentucky. "But now, with Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove calling the shots, I feel like I don't know him anymore."

Hardcore young libertarians like Koch - the kind of people who were outside the tent during the elder Paul's presidential run in 2008 - cared enough about the issues to jump off the younger Paul's bandwagon when he cozied up to the Republican Party establishment. But it isn't young intellectuals like Koch who will usher Paul into the U.S. Senate in the general election; it's those huge crowds of pissed-off old people who dig Sarah Palin and Fox News and call themselves Tea Partiers. And those people really don't pay attention to specifics too much. Like dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude.

Outside the Palin rally in September, I ask an elderly Rand supporter named Blanche Phelps if she's concerned that her candidate is now sucking up to the same Republican Party hacks he once campaigned against. Is she bothered that he has changed his mind on bailouts and abortion and American interventionism and a host of other issues?

Blanche shrugs. "Maybe," she suggests helpfully, "he got saved."

Buried deep in the anus of the Bible Belt, in a little place called Petersburg, Kentucky, is one of the world's most extraordinary tourist attractions: the Creation Museum, a kind of natural-history museum for people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. When you visit this impressively massive monument to fundamentalist Christian thought, you get a mind-blowing glimpse into the modern conservative worldview. One exhibit depicts a half-naked Adam and Eve sitting in the bush, cheerfully keeping house next to dinosaurs - which, according to creationist myth, not only lived alongside humans but were peaceful vegetarians until Adam partook of the forbidden fruit. It's hard to imagine a more telling demonstration of this particular demographic's unmatched ability to believe just about anything.

Even more disturbing is an exhibit designed to show how the world has changed since the Scopes trial eradicated religion from popular culture. Visitors to the museum enter a darkened urban scene full of graffiti and garbage, and through a series of windows view video scenes of families in a state of collapse. A teenager, rolling a giant doobie as his God-fearing little brother looks on in horror, surfs porn on the Web instead of reading the Bible. ("A Wide World of Women!" the older brother chuckles.) A girl stares at her home pregnancy test and says into the telephone, "My parents are not going to know!" As you go farther into the exhibit, you find a wooden door, into which an eerie inscription has been carved: "The World's Not Safe Anymore."

Staff members tell me Rand Paul recently visited the museum after-hours. This means nothing in itself, of course, but it serves as an interesting metaphor to explain Paul's success in Kentucky. The Tea Party is many things at once, but one way or another, it almost always comes back to a campaign against that unsafe urban hellscape of godless liberalism we call our modern world. Paul's platform is ultimately about turning back the clock, returning America to the moment of her constitutional creation, when the federal bureaucracy was nonexistent and men were free to roam the Midwestern plains strip-mining coal and erecting office buildings without wheelchair access. Some people pick on Paul for his humorously extreme back-to-Hobbesian-nature platform (a Louisville teachers' union worker named Bill Allison follows Paul around in a "NeanderPaul" cave-man costume shouting things like "Abolish all laws!" and "BP just made mistakes!"), but it's clear when you talk to Paul supporters that what they dig most is his implicit promise to turn back time, an idea that in Kentucky has some fairly obvious implications.

At a Paul fundraiser in northern Kentucky, I strike up a conversation with one Lloyd Rogers, a retired judge in his 70s who is introducing the candidate at the event. The old man is dressed in a baseball cap and shirtsleeves. Personalitywise, he's what you might call a pistol; one of the first things he says to me is that people are always telling him to keep his mouth shut, but he just can't. I ask him what he thinks about Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act.

"Well, hell, if it's your restaurant, you're putting up the money, you should be able to do what you want," says Rogers. "I tell you, every time he says something like that, in Kentucky he goes up 20 points in the polls. With Kentucky voters, it's not a problem."

In Lexington, I pose the same question to Mica Sims, a local Tea Party organizer. "You as a private-property owner have the right to refuse service for whatever reason you feel will better your business," she says, comparing the Civil Rights Act to onerous anti-smoking laws. "If you're for small government, you're for small government."

You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.

At a restaurant in Lexington, I sit down with a Tea Party activist named Frank Harris, with the aim of asking him what he thinks of Wall Street reform. Harris is a bit of an unusual Tea Partier; he's a pro-hemp, anti-war activist who supported Dennis Kucinich. Though he admits he doesn't know very much about the causes of the crash, he insists that financial reform isn't necessary because people like him can always choose not to use banks, take out mortgages, have pensions or even consume everyday products like gas and oil, whose prices are set by the market.

"Really?" I ask. "You can choose not to use gas and oil?" My awesomely fattening cheese-and-turkey dish called a "Hot Brown" is beginning to congeal.

"You can if you want to," Harris says. "And you don't have to take out loans. You can save money and pay for things in cash."

"So instead of regulating banks," I ask, "your solution is saving money in cash?"

He shrugs. "I'm trying to avoid banks at every turn."

My head is starting to hurt. Arguments with Tea Partiers always end up like football games in the year 1900 - everything on the ground, one yard at a time.

My problem, Frank explains, is that I think I can prevent crime by making things illegal. "You want a policeman standing over here so someone doesn't come in here and mug you?" he says. "Because you're going to have to pay for that policeman!"

"But," I say, confused, "we do pay for police."

"You're trying to make every situation 100 percent safe!" he shouts.

This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they've mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn't an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.

The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go home, but they can't; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those of us who are resigned to life on this planet.

Of course, the fact that we're even sitting here two years after Bush talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things: One, the American voter's unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party's incredible recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm.

The bad news is that the Tea Party's political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That's the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It's just that it's a lot of noise, and there's no telling when it's ever going to end.

This was an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, available on newsstands on October 1, 2010.

[Oct 05, 2010] Tea & Crackers

Rolling Stone Politics

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it - the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade - will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.

...Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008, and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book, The Revolution. The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W. Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.

The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party 2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG - massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis; the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford - and now the government was going to bail them out.

"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"

Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe.

Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the financial-services industry, FreedomWorks - which took money from companies like mortgage lender MetLife - had the opportunity to persuade millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other things, Wall Street reform.

Joining them in the fight was another group, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the billionaire David Koch, whose Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in America. In addition to dealing in plastics, chemicals and petroleum, Koch has direct interests in commodities trading and financial services. He also has a major stake in pushing for deregulation, as his companies have been fined multiple times by the government, including a 1999 case in which Koch Industries was held to have stolen oil from federal lands, lying about oil purchases some 24,000 times.

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement - which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview.

  1. Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me - I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.)
  2. Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.")
  3. They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views - despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate.
  4. In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog - and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over - as I do on a recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park. Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being before deciding to treat you.

"They're going to look at your age, your vocation in life, your health, your income. . . ." says a guy active in the Northern Kentucky Tea Party.

"Your race?" I ask.

"Probably," he says.

"White males need not apply," says another Tea Partier.

"Like everything else, the best thing you can do is be an illegal alien," says a third. "Then they won't ask you any questions."

An amazing number of Tea Partiers actually believe this stuff, and in the past year or so a host of little-known politicians have scored electoral upsets riding this kind of yahoo paranoia. Some are career Republican politicians like Sharron Angle, the former Nevada assemblywoman who seized on the Tea Party to win the GOP nomination to challenge Harry Reid this fall. Others are opportunistic incumbents like Jan Brewer, the Arizona governor who reversed a dip in the polls by greenlighting laws to allow police to stop anyone in a Cypress Hill T-shirt. And a few are newcomers like Joe Miller, the Alaska lawyer and Sarah Palin favorite who whipped Republican lifer Lisa Murkowski in the state's Senate primary. But the champion of champions has always been Rand Paul, who as the son of the movement's would-be ideological founder was poised to become the George W. Bush figure in the Tea Party narrative, the inheritor of the divine calling.

Since Paul won the GOP Primary in Kentucky, the Tea Party has entered a whole new phase of self-deception. Now that a few of these so-called "outsider" politicians have ridden voter anger to victories over entrenched incumbents, they are being courted and turned by the very party insiders they once campaigned against. It hasn't happened everywhere yet, and in some states it may not happen at all; a few rogue politicians, like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, might still squeak into office over the protests of the Republican establishment. But in Kentucky, home of the Chosen One, the sellout came fast and hard.

Paul was transformed from insurgent outsider to establishment stooge in the space of almost exactly one year, making a journey that with eerie cinematic precision began and ended in the same place: The Rachel Maddow Show. When he first appeared on the air with the MSNBC leading lady and noted Bible Belt Antichrist to announce his Senate candidacy in May 2009, Paul came out blazing with an inclusive narrative that seemingly offered a realistic alternative for political malcontents on both sides of the aisle. He talked with pride about how his father's anti-war stance attracted young voters (mentioning one Paul supporter in New Hampshire who had "long hair and a lip ring"). Even the choice of Maddow as a forum was clearly intended to signal that his campaign was an anti-establishment, crossover effort. "Bringing our message to those who do not yet align themselves as Republicans is precisely how we grow as a party," Paul said, explaining the choice.

In the early days of his campaign, by virtually all accounts, Paul was the real thing - expansive, willing to talk openly to anyone and everyone, and totally unapologetic about his political views, which ranged from bold and nuanced to flat-out batshit crazy. But he wasn't going to change for anyone: For young Dr. Paul, as for his father, this was more about message than victory; actually winning wasn't even on his radar. "He used to talk about how he'd be lucky if he got 10 percent," recalls Josh Koch, a former campaign volunteer for Paul who has broken with the candidate.

Before he entered the campaign, Paul had an extensive record of loony comments, often made at his father's rallies, which, to put it generously, were a haven for people gifted at the art of mining the Internet for alternate theories of reality. In a faint echo of the racially charged anti-immigrant paranoia that has become a trademark of the Tea Party, both Paul and his father preached about the apocalyptic arrival of a "10-lane colossus" NAFTA superhighway between the U.S. and Mexico, which the elder Paul said would be the width of several football fields and come complete with fiber-optic cable, railroads, and oil and gas pipelines, all with the goal of forging a single American-Mexican state. Young Paul stood with Dad on that one - after all, he had seen Mexico's former president on YouTube talking about the Amero, a proposed North American currency. "I guarantee you," he warned, "it's one of their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent." And Paul's anti-interventionist, anti-war stance was so far out, it made MoveOn look like a detachment of the Third Marines. "Our national security," he declared in 2007, "is not threatened by Iran having one nuclear weapon."

With views like these, Paul spent the early days of his campaign looking for publicity anywhere he could get it. One of his early appearances was on the online talk show of noted 9/11 Truth buffoon and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The two men spent the broadcast exchanging lunatic fantasies about shadowy government forces, with Paul at one point insisting that should Obama's climate bill pass, "we will have an army of armed EPA agents - thousands of them" who would raid private homes to enforce energy-efficiency standards. Paul presented himself as an ally to Jones in the fringe crusade against establishment forces at the top of society, saying the leaders of the two parties "don't believe in anything" and "get pushed around by the New World Order types."

Unsurprisingly, the GOP froze Paul out, attempting to exclude him from key party gatherings in Kentucky like the Fayette County Republican Party Picnic and the Boone County Republican Party Christmas Gala. "We had the entire Republican establishment of the state and the nation against us," says David Adams, who mobilized the first Tea Party meetings in Kentucky before serving as Paul's campaign manager during the primaries.

The state's Republican establishment, it must be said, is among the most odious in the nation. Its two senators - party kingmaker and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and mentally disappearing ex-jock Jim Bunning - collectively represent everything that most sane people despise about the modern GOP. McConnell is the ultimate D.C. insider, the kind of Republican even Republicans should wonder about, a man who ranks among the top 10 senators when it comes to loading up on pork spending. With his needle nose, pursed lips and prim reading glasses, he's a proud wearer of the "I'm an intellectual, but I'm also a narrow-minded prick" look made famous by George Will; politically his great passion is whoring for Wall Street, his most recent triumph coming when he convinced Republican voters that a proposed $50 billion fund to be collected from big banks was actually a bailout of those same banks. Bunning, meanwhile, goes with the "dumb and unashamed" style; in more than a decade of service, his sole newsworthy accomplishment came when he said his Italian-American opponent looked like one of Saddam's sons.

Paul's animus toward the state's Republican overlords never seemed greater than in August 2009, when McConnell decided to throw a fancy fundraiser in Washington for the national GOP's preferred candidate, Trey Grayson. Attended by 17 Republican senators who voted for the TARP bailout, the event was dubbed the "Bailout Ball" by Paul's people. Paul went a step further, pledging not to accept contributions from any senator who voted to hand taxpayer money over to Wall Street. "A primary focus of my campaign is that we need Republicans in office who will have the courage to say no to federal bailouts of big business," he declared.

The anti-establishment rhetoric was a big hit. Excluded from local campaign events by the GOP, Paul took his act to the airwaves, doing national TV appearances that sent his campaign soaring with Tea Party voters. "We were being shut out of a lot of opportunities in the state, so you go with what is available to you," says Adams. "And what was available was television."

In the primary almost a year later, Paul stomped Grayson, sending shock waves through the national party. The Republican candidate backed by the party's Senate minority leader had just received an ass-whipping by a Tea Party kook, a man who tried to excuse BP's greed-crazed fuck-up in the Gulf on the grounds that "sometimes accidents happen." Paul celebrated his big win by going back to where he'd begun his campaign, The Rachel Maddow Show, where he made a big show of joyously tearing off his pseudolibertarian underpants for the whole world to see - and that's where everything changed for him.

In their first interview, Maddow had softballed Paul and played nice, treating him like what he was at the time - an interesting fringe candidate with the potential to put a burr in Mitch McConnell's ass. But now, Paul was a real threat to seize a seat in the U.S. Senate, so Maddow took the gloves off and forced him to explain some of his nuttier positions. Most memorably, she hounded him about his belief that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power. The money exchange:

Paul was pilloried as a racist in the national press. Within a day he was completely reversing himself, telling CNN, "I think that there was an overriding problem in the South so big that it did require federal intervention in the Sixties." Meanwhile, he was sticking his foot in his mouth on other issues, blasting the Americans With Disabilities Act and denouncing Barack Obama's criticism of British disaster merchant BP as "un-American."

Paul's libertarian coming-out party was such a catastrophe - the three gaffes came within days of each other - that he immediately jumped into the protective arms of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party. "I think he's said quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage," McConnell said, explaining why Paul had been prevailed upon by the party to cancel an appearance on Meet the Press. Some news outlets reported that Paul canceled the appearance after a call from Karl Rove to Adams, who concedes that he did speak with Rove around that time.

Soon after, McConnell threw yet another "Bailout Ball" fundraiser in Washington - only this time it was for Rand Paul. The candidate who just a year before had pledged not to accept money from TARP supporters was now romping in bed with those same politicians. When pressed for an explanation of Paul's about-face on the bailouts, Adams offers an incredibly frank admission. "When he said he would not take money from people who voted for the bank bailout, he also said, in the same breath, that our first phone call after the primary would be to Senator Mitch McConnell," says Adams. "Making fun of the Bailout Ball was just for the primary."

With all the "just for the primary" stuff out of the way, Paul's platform began to rapidly "evolve." Previously opposed to erecting a fence on the Mexican border, Paul suddenly came out in favor of one. He had been flatly opposed to all farm subsidies; faced with having to win a general election in a state that receives more than $265 million a year in subsidies, Paul reversed himself and explained that he was only against subsidies to "dead farmers" and those earning more than $2 million. Paul also went on the air with Fox News reptile Sean Hannity and insisted that he differed significantly from the Libertarian Party, now speaking more favorably about, among other things, judicious troop deployments overseas.

Beyond that, Paul just flat-out stopped talking about his views - particularly the ones that don't jibe with right-wing and Christian crowds, like curtailing the federal prohibition on drugs. Who knows if that had anything to do with hawkish Christian icon Sarah Palin agreeing to headline fundraisers for Paul, but a huge chunk of the candidate's libertarian ideals have taken a long vacation.

"When he was pulling no punches, when he was reciting his best stuff, I felt like I knew him," says Koch, the former campaign volunteer who now works with the Libertarian Party in Kentucky. "But now, with Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove calling the shots, I feel like I don't know him anymore."

Hardcore young libertarians like Koch - the kind of people who were outside the tent during the elder Paul's presidential run in 2008 - cared enough about the issues to jump off the younger Paul's bandwagon when he cozied up to the Republican Party establishment. But it isn't young intellectuals like Koch who will usher Paul into the U.S. Senate in the general election; it's those huge crowds of pissed-off old people who dig Sarah Palin and Fox News and call themselves Tea Partiers. And those people really don't pay attention to specifics too much. Like dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude.

Outside the Palin rally in September, I ask an elderly Rand supporter named Blanche Phelps if she's concerned that her candidate is now sucking up to the same Republican Party hacks he once campaigned against. Is she bothered that he has changed his mind on bailouts and abortion and American interventionism and a host of other issues?

Blanche shrugs. "Maybe," she suggests helpfully, "he got saved."

Buried deep in the anus of the Bible Belt, in a little place called Petersburg, Kentucky, is one of the world's most extraordinary tourist attractions: the Creation Museum, a kind of natural-history museum for people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. When you visit this impressively massive monument to fundamentalist Christian thought, you get a mind-blowing glimpse into the modern conservative worldview. One exhibit depicts a half-naked Adam and Eve sitting in the bush, cheerfully keeping house next to dinosaurs - which, according to creationist myth, not only lived alongside humans but were peaceful vegetarians until Adam partook of the forbidden fruit. It's hard to imagine a more telling demonstration of this particular demographic's unmatched ability to believe just about anything.

Even more disturbing is an exhibit designed to show how the world has changed since the Scopes trial eradicated religion from popular culture. Visitors to the museum enter a darkened urban scene full of graffiti and garbage, and through a series of windows view video scenes of families in a state of collapse. A teenager, rolling a giant doobie as his God-fearing little brother looks on in horror, surfs porn on the Web instead of reading the Bible. ("A Wide World of Women!" the older brother chuckles.) A girl stares at her home pregnancy test and says into the telephone, "My parents are not going to know!" As you go farther into the exhibit, you find a wooden door, into which an eerie inscription has been carved: "The World's Not Safe Anymore."

Staff members tell me Rand Paul recently visited the museum after-hours. This means nothing in itself, of course, but it serves as an interesting metaphor to explain Paul's success in Kentucky. The Tea Party is many things at once, but one way or another, it almost always comes back to a campaign against that unsafe urban hellscape of godless liberalism we call our modern world. Paul's platform is ultimately about turning back the clock, returning America to the moment of her constitutional creation, when the federal bureaucracy was nonexistent and men were free to roam the Midwestern plains strip-mining coal and erecting office buildings without wheelchair access. Some people pick on Paul for his humorously extreme back-to-Hobbesian-nature platform (a Louisville teachers' union worker named Bill Allison follows Paul around in a "NeanderPaul" cave-man costume shouting things like "Abolish all laws!" and "BP just made mistakes!"), but it's clear when you talk to Paul supporters that what they dig most is his implicit promise to turn back time, an idea that in Kentucky has some fairly obvious implications.

At a Paul fundraiser in northern Kentucky, I strike up a conversation with one Lloyd Rogers, a retired judge in his 70s who is introducing the candidate at the event. The old man is dressed in a baseball cap and shirtsleeves. Personalitywise, he's what you might call a pistol; one of the first things he says to me is that people are always telling him to keep his mouth shut, but he just can't. I ask him what he thinks about Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act.

"Well, hell, if it's your restaurant, you're putting up the money, you should be able to do what you want," says Rogers. "I tell you, every time he says something like that, in Kentucky he goes up 20 points in the polls. With Kentucky voters, it's not a problem."

In Lexington, I pose the same question to Mica Sims, a local Tea Party organizer. "You as a private-property owner have the right to refuse service for whatever reason you feel will better your business," she says, comparing the Civil Rights Act to onerous anti-smoking laws. "If you're for small government, you're for small government."

You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.

At a restaurant in Lexington, I sit down with a Tea Party activist named Frank Harris, with the aim of asking him what he thinks of Wall Street reform. Harris is a bit of an unusual Tea Partier; he's a pro-hemp, anti-war activist who supported Dennis Kucinich. Though he admits he doesn't know very much about the causes of the crash, he insists that financial reform isn't necessary because people like him can always choose not to use banks, take out mortgages, have pensions or even consume everyday products like gas and oil, whose prices are set by the market.

"Really?" I ask. "You can choose not to use gas and oil?" My awesomely fattening cheese-and-turkey dish called a "Hot Brown" is beginning to congeal.

"You can if you want to," Harris says. "And you don't have to take out loans. You can save money and pay for things in cash."

"So instead of regulating banks," I ask, "your solution is saving money in cash?"

He shrugs. "I'm trying to avoid banks at every turn."

My head is starting to hurt. Arguments with Tea Partiers always end up like football games in the year 1900 - everything on the ground, one yard at a time.

My problem, Frank explains, is that I think I can prevent crime by making things illegal. "You want a policeman standing over here so someone doesn't come in here and mug you?" he says. "Because you're going to have to pay for that policeman!"

"But," I say, confused, "we do pay for police."

"You're trying to make every situation 100 percent safe!" he shouts.

This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they've mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn't an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.

The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go home, but they can't; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those of us who are resigned to life on this planet.

Of course, the fact that we're even sitting here two years after Bush talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things: One, the American voter's unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party's incredible recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm.

The bad news is that the Tea Party's political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That's the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It's just that it's a lot of noise, and there's no telling when it's ever going to end.

This was an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, available on newsstands on October 1, 2010.

[Oct 01, 2010] Why is There No Political Outlet for Anger on the Left These Days " naked capitalism

LeeAnne said it well: "Obama's greatest service to the American people is the end of any illusion a two-party system exists." American two party system is just an interesting political invention where one party state tries to d to divide the population into two camps by attracting people to one of the opposite poles and forcing them to compromise on the other as part of the party platform

I wonder why this has come to pass. In the stone ages of my youth, the left was feared (some of that was due to the violence of the 1960s: riots, demonstrations, the SDS, the Weather Underground, to name a few), in fact so feared it led to the concerted right wing push that started in the 1970s. But then again, the left was also much further to the left.

One can point to some causes. The young used to be a reliable source of idealism and willingness to break china. As French Prime Minister Aristide Briand said, "The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head." But young people in America are worried about survival (aka getting a job) and up to their eyeballs in school debt, which they can't discharge even in bankruptcy. School loans in particular seem an almost Machiavellian device for forcing students into bourgeois conformity. And we have Obama's veal pen strategy which neutered key groups on the progressive flank.

It might even be plausible to attribute the complacency (or maybe sullen resignation) of what passes for the left to Prozac use or learned wussiness. For instance, some of my colleagues were having fun by e-mail coming up with the name for a leftie movement to oppose the Tea Partiers. This was all in good fun, but they came up with Cammomile, which per Bill Black could stand for "Creative Anti-imperialist Majoritarian Movement Of Morally Illuminated Liberal Enterpreneurs."

How about something more to the point, like the Pitchfork Party?

In all seriousness, why has no movement emerged on the left to channel the considerable disappointment and anger of progressives?

purple:

On a broad scale it does have to do with the collapse of the USSR; much of the push from the left came from hard-core socialists who were driving the debate. The Left hasn't found an alternative yet and is basically flailing about intellectually.

On a smaller scale, yes, the debt slavery of the current student, and a whole host of laws which tie receiving loans to 'being good' , i.e. not being arrested for protesting, act as a chill.

Also, the 'elite' has been successful at directing broader Left goals of economic equality and workplace democracy into more narrow ethnic and identity rights issues which, while important, are easier to control.

Jim the Skeptic:

The Tea Party is to the right of the Republicans and the Communist party is to the left of the Democrats. Neither party will have any sustained success in this country. Only a Progressive party operating at the center between the major political parties can have any success. And the new party will be snuffed out when both parties move to the center.

Our politics over the last 20 years have been about dividing middle class voters with social issues.

The Republicans have been rabidly against any form of abortion. That issue has been used to bludgeon any opponent including some of their own. The Republicans have also been rabidly in favor of deregulation of business.

The Republicans don't like government unless it is enforcing their moral and ethical standards on the entire population. Abortion is a deeply personal issue which could have been left to the people involved. The system of regulation of business had served us well for over 50 years, there was no adequate reason for change.

The Democrats have been rabidly protective of welfare programs, illegal immigration, and gay rights. By 1990 it was obvious that welfare programs had done harm, with one family on welfare for several generations and none of them had held jobs. (I understand that they were a tiny minority but how was that even possible?) Only a Republican Congress and a conservative southern Democrat President could change the system. Illegal immigration in the late 1980s was a defining issue and only a compromise granting amnesty to the 3 million illegals allowed a resolution of sorts. (Why were the Democrats so determined to protect an illegal minority?) In the early 1990s it was gays serving in the military and only the compromise of 'Don't ask, don't tell' put a temporary end to the issue. Then came gay marriage.

The Democrats protection of the two minority groups, gays and illegal immigrants, borders on Quixotic. We have no moral or legal obligation to allow unlimited immigration into this country and it should be a matter of principal that we will do nothing to encourage illegal immigration. The illegals should have been forced to return home by extremely harsh punishment of their employers. Gays are a minority who are protected by the same laws that protect the rest of us from crimes against our persons or property. Spending political capital on extending these minorities' rights, distracts from more important problems and divides the Democratic party's followers. There were more important issues which they should have been addressing, like the stagnant wages of the middle class. The US Supreme Court believes that corporations are a minority worthy of their protection. When will this fascination with minorities end?

At this stage in our history the health of our economy is the paramount issue. We are headed toward lower living standards for the majority and incredible wealth for the top 1%. If the majority can not force it's will on the minority top 1% then what is the point of our political exercise. Should every minority's vote be counted twice to insure fairness? If the majority must provide special protections for any and all minorities then we will never be done with these special laws. Those laws protect but they also divide. Where will it end?

How can any Progressive party come into existence while these sort of social issues are dominant?

Hugh:

Before the 2008 election, I stressed the need for a progressive party. The Democrats were not addressing our concerns and Obama, as most progressives acknowledged at the time, was not and never had been a progressive. I was told the important thing was to elect Obama and put an end to the bad days of the Bush era. Well, we can all see how well that turned out.

There has been a lot of talk about how the left has been veal penned. But I don't think it is understood how much of its organizations have been. The healthcare debate is a great example for this. You had large swathes of the traditionally liberal Democratic blogosphere like dkos and Huffington Post that were essentially in the bag for whatever the Democrats/Obama came up with. This also included HCAN, a veal pen creation put together by other veal pen groups, including unions.

But beyond these, there were co-opted veal penned progressive groupings. These were the public option supporters, like firedoglake. The PO was never more than a contentless, read into it whatever you want, hook to keep the rubes quiet while the real sellout was going on.

These were the positions of most of the liberal/progressive organizations and groups going in. Noticeably absent from all these was the only truly progressive program of single payer universal healthcare. This already exists in various forms in most of the industrialized world and delivers better outcomes at substantially lower prices. What is so interesting about this is that not only did Obama and the Democrats never put this on or anywhere near the table, neither did almost the whole of the organized left. Single payer proponents were ostracized, banned, and viciously attacked, not just by Obama and the Democrats, which was to be expected, but by this much larger veal pen of liberal Democrats and independent progressives.

When it was all over, the public option was exposed as the PR sham it was, and had always been. Some progressive groups belatedly opposed the healthcare bill, but most did not. By then it didn't matter anyway. It was a done deal. Yet to this day, most of the rancor of these groups remains directed at the single payer supporters, the only people in that whole sorry mess who got it right on both the policy and the politics that were going on.

So what does this have to do with a new progressive party or populist movement on the left? Well, everything. All the liberal and progressive groups that could have done so much to create a real debate on healthcare yet did so much instead to suppress that debate are playing the same role here. dkos and Huffington Post could be powerful tools for organizing a populist progressive alternative to the two parties and the Tea party. But this would be to overlook that they operate as virtual adjuncts of the Democratic party. So their hostility to anything independent or third party is expectable.

What is less expected, and actually quite pernicious, is how so many progressive blogs take a similar if not so obvious position. There the attitude, as I have often heard, is go out organize a third party, get it up and running, on the ballot, and start winning elections, and then, and only then, will we maybe come along.

You have to understand these are the same groups that in 2006 and 2008 pushed hard the theme of "more and better Democrats" and eagerly sought out potential forward looking Democrats and organized for them. Many of those Democrats lost, done in by the Establishment Democratic machine, but even those that won without exception sold out their progressive supporters and turned their back on them at the earliest opportunity. Yet these groups, despite being burned and burned again, continue to concentrate on and favor Democrats. When it comes to backing actual progressives, people who won't burn them or scuttle the progressive agenda, they vary between indifferent and hostile.

So if you want to know why there is no populist alternative on the left, the answer is that huge chunks of the left continue to be controlled by the Democratic party, fairly overtly. Independent progressives are similarly dominated by Trojan Horse groups, progressive in name but Democratic in orientation, which suck all the air out of progressive organizing efforts. The result is that progressives are largely shut out, even on the left, even in those organizations that should be most supportive of their ideas, even among those that say they support those ideas.

There are a few progressives who have rebelled and are trying to build new organizations. But it is hard. Look at it this way. There is a periphery between traditional Democrats and liberal Democrats. There is another between liberal Democrats and progressives, and there is yet another between veal pen progressives and true independent progressives. Progressives have a good message and good solutions, but it is difficult to get it to an audience in a recognizable form past all those veal pens.

anon:

Thank you, Hugh. You expressed my concerns far more eloquently than I could have.

In 2006, I volunteered many hours to elect a representative that was opposed by the Democratic Party because he was "unelectable" (i.e., not centrist enough). He won but, as you said, he soon turned his back on his progressive supporters and became a stalwart, mainstream Dem. The same thing happened with other candidates I gave money to.

Most of my friends supported single payer and were frustrated that it was not a part of the health care debate. Yet most fell into line and are now defending Obama and the other Dems.

Doug Terpstra:

Great analysis, Hugh. But dare I say, this time it's different? It sure feels different.

LeeAnne said it well: "Obama's greatest service to the American people is the end of any illusion a two-party system exists." There's enormous cynicism seething on both the left and right promising high volatility, fraught with pitfalls, yes, but also potential. Who knows, if regressives retake control of Congress (which I am perversely hoping for) and that happens to coincide with a renewed market contagion (nothing's changed) or military disaster (no end anywhere in sight), then rapid change is possible, maybe even on the order of the collapse of the USSR. Even in darkness we should keep a candle lit and plenty of lamp oil at hand.

Maju:

I understand that the Obama phenomenon, two years ago, specially the Democrat nomination campaign with all its grassroots mobilization, later vanished like smoke, was a good example of the huge grassroots forces that are latent at the Left in the USA. However, as soon as the Dem nomination was achieved, it became obvious (at least to me and also to some red intellectuals in the USA, like James Petras) that he was just another man of the establishment. Still people was so desperate with the Bush period that they voted for him anyhow (apparently, because the e-voting system is anything but transparent).

That campaign emphasizes the need for permanent and not just campaign- or leader-oriented organization. If all that grassroots movement would be organized now, they could at least have an influence by the left of Obama and the Dem establishment, and could probably be placing candidates or going out to strike or make a huge demo against the Gulf spill abuses or creating a new party or whatever.

They are not organized, so they have no influence. Instead Big Capital, the Military, the Zionists, and even the NeoCons… have it. Because they are organized (in a hierarchical undesirable manner).


[Oct 01, 2010] Why is There No Political Outlet for Anger on the Left These Days " naked capitalism

LeeAnne said it well: "Obama's greatest service to the American people is the end of any illusion a two-party system exists." American two party system is just an interesting political invention where one party state tries to d to divide the population into two camps by attracting people to one of the opposite poles and forcing them to compromise on the other as part of the party platform

I wonder why this has come to pass. In the stone ages of my youth, the left was feared (some of that was due to the violence of the 1960s: riots, demonstrations, the SDS, the Weather Underground, to name a few), in fact so feared it led to the concerted right wing push that started in the 1970s. But then again, the left was also much further to the left.

One can point to some causes. The young used to be a reliable source of idealism and willingness to break china. As French Prime Minister Aristide Briand said, "The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head." But young people in America are worried about survival (aka getting a job) and up to their eyeballs in school debt, which they can't discharge even in bankruptcy. School loans in particular seem an almost Machiavellian device for forcing students into bourgeois conformity. And we have Obama's veal pen strategy which neutered key groups on the progressive flank.

It might even be plausible to attribute the complacency (or maybe sullen resignation) of what passes for the left to Prozac use or learned wussiness. For instance, some of my colleagues were having fun by e-mail coming up with the name for a leftie movement to oppose the Tea Partiers. This was all in good fun, but they came up with Cammomile, which per Bill Black could stand for "Creative Anti-imperialist Majoritarian Movement Of Morally Illuminated Liberal Enterpreneurs."

How about something more to the point, like the Pitchfork Party?

In all seriousness, why has no movement emerged on the left to channel the considerable disappointment and anger of progressives?

purple:

On a broad scale it does have to do with the collapse of the USSR; much of the push from the left came from hard-core socialists who were driving the debate. The Left hasn't found an alternative yet and is basically flailing about intellectually.

On a smaller scale, yes, the debt slavery of the current student, and a whole host of laws which tie receiving loans to 'being good' , i.e. not being arrested for protesting, act as a chill.

Also, the 'elite' has been successful at directing broader Left goals of economic equality and workplace democracy into more narrow ethnic and identity rights issues which, while important, are easier to control.

Jim the Skeptic:

The Tea Party is to the right of the Republicans and the Communist party is to the left of the Democrats. Neither party will have any sustained success in this country. Only a Progressive party operating at the center between the major political parties can have any success. And the new party will be snuffed out when both parties move to the center.

Our politics over the last 20 years have been about dividing middle class voters with social issues.

The Republicans have been rabidly against any form of abortion. That issue has been used to bludgeon any opponent including some of their own. The Republicans have also been rabidly in favor of deregulation of business.

The Republicans don't like government unless it is enforcing their moral and ethical standards on the entire population. Abortion is a deeply personal issue which could have been left to the people involved. The system of regulation of business had served us well for over 50 years, there was no adequate reason for change.

The Democrats have been rabidly protective of welfare programs, illegal immigration, and gay rights. By 1990 it was obvious that welfare programs had done harm, with one family on welfare for several generations and none of them had held jobs. (I understand that they were a tiny minority but how was that even possible?) Only a Republican Congress and a conservative southern Democrat President could change the system. Illegal immigration in the late 1980s was a defining issue and only a compromise granting amnesty to the 3 million illegals allowed a resolution of sorts. (Why were the Democrats so determined to protect an illegal minority?) In the early 1990s it was gays serving in the military and only the compromise of 'Don't ask, don't tell' put a temporary end to the issue. Then came gay marriage.

The Democrats protection of the two minority groups, gays and illegal immigrants, borders on Quixotic. We have no moral or legal obligation to allow unlimited immigration into this country and it should be a matter of principal that we will do nothing to encourage illegal immigration. The illegals should have been forced to return home by extremely harsh punishment of their employers. Gays are a minority who are protected by the same laws that protect the rest of us from crimes against our persons or property. Spending political capital on extending these minorities' rights, distracts from more important problems and divides the Democratic party's followers. There were more important issues which they should have been addressing, like the stagnant wages of the middle class. The US Supreme Court believes that corporations are a minority worthy of their protection. When will this fascination with minorities end?

At this stage in our history the health of our economy is the paramount issue. We are headed toward lower living standards for the majority and incredible wealth for the top 1%. If the majority can not force it's will on the minority top 1% then what is the point of our political exercise. Should every minority's vote be counted twice to insure fairness? If the majority must provide special protections for any and all minorities then we will never be done with these special laws. Those laws protect but they also divide. Where will it end?

How can any Progressive party come into existence while these sort of social issues are dominant?

Hugh:

Before the 2008 election, I stressed the need for a progressive party. The Democrats were not addressing our concerns and Obama, as most progressives acknowledged at the time, was not and never had been a progressive. I was told the important thing was to elect Obama and put an end to the bad days of the Bush era. Well, we can all see how well that turned out.

There has been a lot of talk about how the left has been veal penned. But I don't think it is understood how much of its organizations have been. The healthcare debate is a great example for this. You had large swathes of the traditionally liberal Democratic blogosphere like dkos and Huffington Post that were essentially in the bag for whatever the Democrats/Obama came up with. This also included HCAN, a veal pen creation put together by other veal pen groups, including unions.

But beyond these, there were co-opted veal penned progressive groupings. These were the public option supporters, like firedoglake. The PO was never more than a contentless, read into it whatever you want, hook to keep the rubes quiet while the real sellout was going on.

These were the positions of most of the liberal/progressive organizations and groups going in. Noticeably absent from all these was the only truly progressive program of single payer universal healthcare. This already exists in various forms in most of the industrialized world and delivers better outcomes at substantially lower prices. What is so interesting about this is that not only did Obama and the Democrats never put this on or anywhere near the table, neither did almost the whole of the organized left. Single payer proponents were ostracized, banned, and viciously attacked, not just by Obama and the Democrats, which was to be expected, but by this much larger veal pen of liberal Democrats and independent progressives.

When it was all over, the public option was exposed as the PR sham it was, and had always been. Some progressive groups belatedly opposed the healthcare bill, but most did not. By then it didn't matter anyway. It was a done deal. Yet to this day, most of the rancor of these groups remains directed at the single payer supporters, the only people in that whole sorry mess who got it right on both the policy and the politics that were going on.

So what does this have to do with a new progressive party or populist movement on the left? Well, everything. All the liberal and progressive groups that could have done so much to create a real debate on healthcare yet did so much instead to suppress that debate are playing the same role here. dkos and Huffington Post could be powerful tools for organizing a populist progressive alternative to the two parties and the Tea party. But this would be to overlook that they operate as virtual adjuncts of the Democratic party. So their hostility to anything independent or third party is expectable.

What is less expected, and actually quite pernicious, is how so many progressive blogs take a similar if not so obvious position. There the attitude, as I have often heard, is go out organize a third party, get it up and running, on the ballot, and start winning elections, and then, and only then, will we maybe come along.

You have to understand these are the same groups that in 2006 and 2008 pushed hard the theme of "more and better Democrats" and eagerly sought out potential forward looking Democrats and organized for them. Many of those Democrats lost, done in by the Establishment Democratic machine, but even those that won without exception sold out their progressive supporters and turned their back on them at the earliest opportunity. Yet these groups, despite being burned and burned again, continue to concentrate on and favor Democrats. When it comes to backing actual progressives, people who won't burn them or scuttle the progressive agenda, they vary between indifferent and hostile.

So if you want to know why there is no populist alternative on the left, the answer is that huge chunks of the left continue to be controlled by the Democratic party, fairly overtly. Independent progressives are similarly dominated by Trojan Horse groups, progressive in name but Democratic in orientation, which suck all the air out of progressive organizing efforts. The result is that progressives are largely shut out, even on the left, even in those organizations that should be most supportive of their ideas, even among those that say they support those ideas.

There are a few progressives who have rebelled and are trying to build new organizations. But it is hard. Look at it this way. There is a periphery between traditional Democrats and liberal Democrats. There is another between liberal Democrats and progressives, and there is yet another between veal pen progressives and true independent progressives. Progressives have a good message and good solutions, but it is difficult to get it to an audience in a recognizable form past all those veal pens.

anon:

Thank you, Hugh. You expressed my concerns far more eloquently than I could have.

In 2006, I volunteered many hours to elect a representative that was opposed by the Democratic Party because he was "unelectable" (i.e., not centrist enough). He won but, as you said, he soon turned his back on his progressive supporters and became a stalwart, mainstream Dem. The same thing happened with other candidates I gave money to.

Most of my friends supported single payer and were frustrated that it was not a part of the health care debate. Yet most fell into line and are now defending Obama and the other Dems.

Doug Terpstra:

Great analysis, Hugh. But dare I say, this time it's different? It sure feels different.

LeeAnne said it well: "Obama's greatest service to the American people is the end of any illusion a two-party system exists." There's enormous cynicism seething on both the left and right promising high volatility, fraught with pitfalls, yes, but also potential. Who knows, if regressives retake control of Congress (which I am perversely hoping for) and that happens to coincide with a renewed market contagion (nothing's changed) or military disaster (no end anywhere in sight), then rapid change is possible, maybe even on the order of the collapse of the USSR. Even in darkness we should keep a candle lit and plenty of lamp oil at hand.

Maju:

I understand that the Obama phenomenon, two years ago, specially the Democrat nomination campaign with all its grassroots mobilization, later vanished like smoke, was a good example of the huge grassroots forces that are latent at the Left in the USA. However, as soon as the Dem nomination was achieved, it became obvious (at least to me and also to some red intellectuals in the USA, like James Petras) that he was just another man of the establishment. Still people was so desperate with the Bush period that they voted for him anyhow (apparently, because the e-voting system is anything but transparent).

That campaign emphasizes the need for permanent and not just campaign- or leader-oriented organization. If all that grassroots movement would be organized now, they could at least have an influence by the left of Obama and the Dem establishment, and could probably be placing candidates or going out to strike or make a huge demo against the Gulf spill abuses or creating a new party or whatever.

They are not organized, so they have no influence. Instead Big Capital, the Military, the Zionists, and even the NeoCons… have it. Because they are organized (in a hierarchical undesirable manner).


[Sep 27, 2010] Why is There No Political Outlet for Anger on the Left These Days-

Poll ratings show approval levels for the major political perps, meaning the President, Congress, each of the two major parties, at levels so low as to be tantamount to loathing. But while the Tea Party has become a force to be reckoned with by tapping into this wellspring of discontent, those on the left who are unhappy with the lump of coal the Administration and the Democratic party has put in their stocking have no outlet.

I wonder why this has come to pass. In the stone ages of my youth, the left was feared (some of that was due to the violence of the 1960s: riots, demonstrations, the SDS, the Weather Underground, to name a few), in fact so feared it led to the concerted right wing push that started in the 1970s. But then again, the left was also much further to the left.

One can point to some causes. The young used to be a reliable source of idealism and willingness to break china. As French Prime Minister Aristide Briand said, "The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head." But young people in America are worried about survival (aka getting a job) and up to their eyeballs in school debt, which they can't discharge even in bankruptcy. School loans in particular seem an almost Machiavellian device for forcing students into bourgeois conformity. And we have Obama's veal pen strategy which neutered key groups on the progressive flank.

It might even be plausible to attribute the complacency (or maybe sullen resignation) of what passes for the left to Prozac use or learned wussiness. For instance, some of my colleagues were having fun by e-mail coming up with the name for a leftie movement to oppose the Tea Partiers. This was all in good fun, but they came up with Cammomile, which per Bill Black could stand for "Creative Anti-imperialist
Majoritarian Movement Of Morally Illuminated Liberal Enterpreneurs."

How about something more to the point, like the Pitchfork Party?

In all seriousness, why has no movement emerged on the left to channel the considerable disappointment and anger of progressives?

[Sep 27, 2010] Why is There No Political Outlet for Anger on the Left These Days-

Poll ratings show approval levels for the major political perps, meaning the President, Congress, each of the two major parties, at levels so low as to be tantamount to loathing. But while the Tea Party has become a force to be reckoned with by tapping into this wellspring of discontent, those on the left who are unhappy with the lump of coal the Administration and the Democratic party has put in their stocking have no outlet.

I wonder why this has come to pass. In the stone ages of my youth, the left was feared (some of that was due to the violence of the 1960s: riots, demonstrations, the SDS, the Weather Underground, to name a few), in fact so feared it led to the concerted right wing push that started in the 1970s. But then again, the left was also much further to the left.

One can point to some causes. The young used to be a reliable source of idealism and willingness to break china. As French Prime Minister Aristide Briand said, "The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head." But young people in America are worried about survival (aka getting a job) and up to their eyeballs in school debt, which they can't discharge even in bankruptcy. School loans in particular seem an almost Machiavellian device for forcing students into bourgeois conformity. And we have Obama's veal pen strategy which neutered key groups on the progressive flank.

It might even be plausible to attribute the complacency (or maybe sullen resignation) of what passes for the left to Prozac use or learned wussiness. For instance, some of my colleagues were having fun by e-mail coming up with the name for a leftie movement to oppose the Tea Partiers. This was all in good fun, but they came up with Cammomile, which per Bill Black could stand for "Creative Anti-imperialist
Majoritarian Movement Of Morally Illuminated Liberal Enterpreneurs."

How about something more to the point, like the Pitchfork Party?

In all seriousness, why has no movement emerged on the left to channel the considerable disappointment and anger of progressives?

[Sep 24, 2010] Paul Krugman: Downhill With the G.O.P.

Economist's View
Republicans have thoroughly embraced the Irving Kristol strategy for political effectiveness: "say whatever it takes to gain power":
Downhill With the G.O.P., by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I've always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America's two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. ... And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

On Thursday, House Republicans released their "Pledge to America," supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, "Deficits are a terrible thing. Let's make them much bigger." The document repeatedly condemns federal debt - 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which ... would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade - about $700 billion more than the Obama administration's tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there's only one specific cut proposed - canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That's less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified - "except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops." In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what's left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won't cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: "No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid... No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress."

The "pledge," then, is nonsense. ... So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn't even trying to make sense?

The answer isn't a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, "so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government." In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That's a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren't going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon - if ever. Remember, the Bush administration's attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress - and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn't that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

[Sep 24, 2010] Paul Krugman: Downhill With the G.O.P.

Economist's View
Republicans have thoroughly embraced the Irving Kristol strategy for political effectiveness: "say whatever it takes to gain power":
Downhill With the G.O.P., by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I've always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America's two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. ... And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

On Thursday, House Republicans released their "Pledge to America," supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, "Deficits are a terrible thing. Let's make them much bigger." The document repeatedly condemns federal debt - 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which ... would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade - about $700 billion more than the Obama administration's tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there's only one specific cut proposed - canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That's less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified - "except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops." In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what's left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won't cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: "No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid... No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress."

The "pledge," then, is nonsense. ... So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn't even trying to make sense?

The answer isn't a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, "so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government." In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That's a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren't going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon - if ever. Remember, the Bush administration's attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress - and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn't that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

[Sep 11, 2010] The Real Lesson of Post-9-11 Once Fools Rush In, They Never, Ever Leave by James Wolcott

September 11, 2010 | James Wolcott's Blog Vanity Fair

TPM's Josh Marshall pithily describes the perversity of a day of mourning being converted into a Newt Gingrich belly-dance of dread-mongering:

Having a hard time reconciling the experiences of those I know who lived through the 9/11 attacks with the emergence of "9/11" as Republican hate festival.

On the other hand, how did we not see it coming.

Upon which follows a clip of Rudy Giuliani at his most Tony Soprano neocon.

But basic, venal political opportunism doesn't begin to explain the magnitude of dementia uncapped by 9/11 that led to a lava flow of blood and destruction that veined through the decade.

[Sep 11, 2010] The Real Lesson of Post-9-11 Once Fools Rush In, They Never, Ever Leave by James Wolcott

September 11, 2010 | James Wolcott's Blog Vanity Fair

TPM's Josh Marshall pithily describes the perversity of a day of mourning being converted into a Newt Gingrich belly-dance of dread-mongering:

Having a hard time reconciling the experiences of those I know who lived through the 9/11 attacks with the emergence of "9/11" as Republican hate festival.

On the other hand, how did we not see it coming.

Upon which follows a clip of Rudy Giuliani at his most Tony Soprano neocon.

But basic, venal political opportunism doesn't begin to explain the magnitude of dementia uncapped by 9/11 that led to a lava flow of blood and destruction that veined through the decade.

[Sep 04, 2010] Is the GOP Ready for Prime Time FrumForum by David Frum

But when a party exhausts or abandons its policy impetus, power devolves to committee chairs. Politico describes this devolution as "opening" government. Well, yes - but opening to whom? Committee chairs occupy one corner of what used to be described as the "iron triangle" - with the other two corners occupied by industry lobbyists and federal regulators.

[Sep 04, 2010] The Purge at Cato FrumForum by David Frum

"At least they didn't get purged as badly as Kamensky, Zinoviev and Trotsky. Lindsey and Wilkinson can live to scribble another day" Sadly the Republican party may be years away from a return to sanity.

We are likely soon to have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, maybe the U.S. Senate too. And what will that majority do? The answer seems to be: They have not a clue. Unlike the Republican House and Senate majorities of 1994, unlike the Republican Senate majority of 1980, these new majorities will arrive with only slogans for a policy agenda. After staging a for-the-record vote against Obamacare, and after re-enacting the Bush tax cuts, it will be policy mission accomplished.

...

There's little other policy inventory, because the think tanks have not done their proper work. Without a think tank agenda, the new majority will rapidly decline into a brokerage service for K Street.

After the GOP lost its majority in 2006, a leading think tanker said to me: "Somehow I always thought we'd get more done before we became completely corrupt." How much will we get done next time given the poverty of our think tank work over the past half decade? And how can we expect better work from institutions that have so emphatically warned their employees that an unwanted answer can end a career?

The losers here are not Brink Lindsey (who has moved to a fine new position) or Will Wilkinson (whose personal future is more unsettled, but whose talents will surely also be recognized). The loser is a conservative political movement waiting at the end of the intellectual conveyor belt for a product that increasingly arrives so shoddy and defective that it might as well not come at all.

balconesfault:

It might be objected that Cato and the others have no choice. The waters are surging in the conservative world, and conservative institutions must either ride the wave or be swamped.

The wave? Clearly "the wave" is the tide of money directed via coordinated effort between the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olin Foundation, and a small number of other huge donors that support the "independent" think tanks. The people in charge of those think tanks cannot ignore the wishes of those donors, since without them they'd be reduced to putting most of their staff on leave or part-time status while resorting to direct mail campaigns to keep their doors open.

We have seen that the Koch family has been carefully cultivating the Tea Party as an electoral cudgel to use both within and without the GOP. We know the Koch family is a primary funder of Cato.

There is any reason for surprise here?

Stranded Wind:

Spot on analysis here. The American right has tipped away from self reliance and the rule of the law, landing in the hands of religious fanatics like Sarah Palin, racist crackpots connected with the Klan and Stormfront, and paranoid anti-government Tea Party kooks voting against their own interests on behalf of the Koch brothers.

It's like watching a favorite uncle with dementia coming on fast. Affirmation of the Christian Identity heresy replaces policy analysis and that just isn't relevant in the real world.

Rabiner:

The problem with a conservative or in this case libertarian purge of alternative ideas is that competition of ideas leads to the best ideas eventually coming out on top. If everyone who doesn't tow the party line is kicked to the curb then there is no internal debate among people on how to proceed forward. Democrats and liberals as a whole may be fractured but at least there are a wealth of ideas coming from them to debate and look at. Conservatives have a dither of ideas which makes them seem outdated and unwilling to govern.

Personally I think liberalism and libertarianism has a lot more in common on social issues than conservatism and libertarianism does on economic issues. However, if you're going to be a strict economic libertarian you're just not going to agree with governments role in anything. This seems to be Cato's mission (economic over social issues) so I'm not surprised these people were pushed out after many years of employment.

I do find it humorous how wrong Fairy Hardcastle is regarding conservatives and voting for health care reform. The reform that passed was very similar to the conservative response to Clinton's legislation in the mid 1990s.

Fairy Hardcastle
Rabiner, it's hard to assess your humor when neither you nor I read every page of either the 1990s counter proposal you cite nor the recently passed legislation and prepared a point by point comparison. Come to think of it, neither did the legislators of the 111th.
Rabiner
Fairy Hardcastle:

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/February/23/GOP-1993-health-reform-bill.aspx

here ya go. Enjoy seeing the Republican bill from 1993 and how similar it is to what was passed in 2009.

And Title 7 are those 'death panels' or as sane people call them: advanced directives.

JJWFromME
What Lindsey did was dare spell out his opposition to Country and Western Marxism, and thus, touched the third rail of modern institutionalized "conservatism." Lindsey wanted a debate of ideas, not a mindless, PR-orchestrated populism, which actually was the kind of thing the founders of this country were greatly afraid of. Culture war and coordinated messaging makes the kind of public discussions we need as a country (about, for instance, global warming) all but impossible…

Lindsey forgot who he worked for–Koch and Scaife and company.

[Sep 04, 2010] Is the GOP Ready for Prime Time FrumForum by David Frum

But when a party exhausts or abandons its policy impetus, power devolves to committee chairs. Politico describes this devolution as "opening" government. Well, yes - but opening to whom? Committee chairs occupy one corner of what used to be described as the "iron triangle" - with the other two corners occupied by industry lobbyists and federal regulators.

[Sep 04, 2010] The Purge at Cato FrumForum by David Frum

"At least they didn't get purged as badly as Kamensky, Zinoviev and Trotsky. Lindsey and Wilkinson can live to scribble another day" Sadly the Republican party may be years away from a return to sanity.

We are likely soon to have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, maybe the U.S. Senate too. And what will that majority do? The answer seems to be: They have not a clue. Unlike the Republican House and Senate majorities of 1994, unlike the Republican Senate majority of 1980, these new majorities will arrive with only slogans for a policy agenda. After staging a for-the-record vote against Obamacare, and after re-enacting the Bush tax cuts, it will be policy mission accomplished.

...

There's little other policy inventory, because the think tanks have not done their proper work. Without a think tank agenda, the new majority will rapidly decline into a brokerage service for K Street.

After the GOP lost its majority in 2006, a leading think tanker said to me: "Somehow I always thought we'd get more done before we became completely corrupt." How much will we get done next time given the poverty of our think tank work over the past half decade? And how can we expect better work from institutions that have so emphatically warned their employees that an unwanted answer can end a career?

The losers here are not Brink Lindsey (who has moved to a fine new position) or Will Wilkinson (whose personal future is more unsettled, but whose talents will surely also be recognized). The loser is a conservative political movement waiting at the end of the intellectual conveyor belt for a product that increasingly arrives so shoddy and defective that it might as well not come at all.

balconesfault:

It might be objected that Cato and the others have no choice. The waters are surging in the conservative world, and conservative institutions must either ride the wave or be swamped.

The wave? Clearly "the wave" is the tide of money directed via coordinated effort between the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olin Foundation, and a small number of other huge donors that support the "independent" think tanks. The people in charge of those think tanks cannot ignore the wishes of those donors, since without them they'd be reduced to putting most of their staff on leave or part-time status while resorting to direct mail campaigns to keep their doors open.

We have seen that the Koch family has been carefully cultivating the Tea Party as an electoral cudgel to use both within and without the GOP. We know the Koch family is a primary funder of Cato.

There is any reason for surprise here?

Stranded Wind:

Spot on analysis here. The American right has tipped away from self reliance and the rule of the law, landing in the hands of religious fanatics like Sarah Palin, racist crackpots connected with the Klan and Stormfront, and paranoid anti-government Tea Party kooks voting against their own interests on behalf of the Koch brothers.

It's like watching a favorite uncle with dementia coming on fast. Affirmation of the Christian Identity heresy replaces policy analysis and that just isn't relevant in the real world.

Rabiner:

The problem with a conservative or in this case libertarian purge of alternative ideas is that competition of ideas leads to the best ideas eventually coming out on top. If everyone who doesn't tow the party line is kicked to the curb then there is no internal debate among people on how to proceed forward. Democrats and liberals as a whole may be fractured but at least there are a wealth of ideas coming from them to debate and look at. Conservatives have a dither of ideas which makes them seem outdated and unwilling to govern.

Personally I think liberalism and libertarianism has a lot more in common on social issues than conservatism and libertarianism does on economic issues. However, if you're going to be a strict economic libertarian you're just not going to agree with governments role in anything. This seems to be Cato's mission (economic over social issues) so I'm not surprised these people were pushed out after many years of employment.

I do find it humorous how wrong Fairy Hardcastle is regarding conservatives and voting for health care reform. The reform that passed was very similar to the conservative response to Clinton's legislation in the mid 1990s.

Fairy Hardcastle
Rabiner, it's hard to assess your humor when neither you nor I read every page of either the 1990s counter proposal you cite nor the recently passed legislation and prepared a point by point comparison. Come to think of it, neither did the legislators of the 111th.
Rabiner
Fairy Hardcastle:

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/February/23/GOP-1993-health-reform-bill.aspx

here ya go. Enjoy seeing the Republican bill from 1993 and how similar it is to what was passed in 2009.

And Title 7 are those 'death panels' or as sane people call them: advanced directives.

JJWFromME
What Lindsey did was dare spell out his opposition to Country and Western Marxism, and thus, touched the third rail of modern institutionalized "conservatism." Lindsey wanted a debate of ideas, not a mindless, PR-orchestrated populism, which actually was the kind of thing the founders of this country were greatly afraid of. Culture war and coordinated messaging makes the kind of public discussions we need as a country (about, for instance, global warming) all but impossible…

Lindsey forgot who he worked for–Koch and Scaife and company.

[Sep 03, 2010] One Lump Or Two - By James Howard Kunstler

August 30, 2010 | Clusterfuck Nation

Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!

Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor," which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene).

Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his role as a television clown and don the mantle of an evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame -- where it's heading anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when they don't understand what is happening to them.

Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than really answering "a call." The emptiness of his platitudes and the confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during an earlier age of ferment which -- guess what -- coincided with a decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History [Knoph,1945].)

Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth -- this truth being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did previously.

Barack Obama personifies this failure these days, a politician proclaiming "change" who not only managed to change nothing, but promoted a continuation of the national self-swindling with legislation so dazzlingly prolix and complicated that no one can claim to have read either the Health Care Reform Act or the Financial Regulation bill, the two hallmarks of his tenure so far, neither of which will change anything about how we do these things. Why Mr. Obama has turned out to be such a weenie remains a mystery. Even the former communists at Russia Today laugh at the idea that he is a "communist" or a "socialist" and so do I. He certainly appears to be hostage of the more malign forces in society these days -- the medical insurance racket, the too-big-to-fail banks, the multi-national corporations. But I don't believe it's because he wants to suck up to them, or join their country clubs when his current job ends.

My own guess is that he's been informed that the system is so fragile that if he dares to disturb even one teensy-weensy part of it -- for instance, by throwing some executives from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, et cetera, into federal prison -- that said system will fly to pieces in a fortnight. So Obama's main task for a year and a half has been to desperately apply baling wire and duct tape to the banking system while telling fibs to the public about a wished-for recovery to a prior state. Unfortunately that prior state is the ecstasy of a self-swindle in the moments before it unravels... the sublime feeling of having gotten something wonderful for nothing. We're beyond that now and nothing on the age-old shelf of nostrums, spells, prayers, and miracle-cures will avail to bring that moment back, though the public does not know this.

This is what allows a faker like Glenn Beck to shine. The masses still truly believe that prayer will save them from bankruptcy, foreclosure, penury, the loss of status, and the cut-off of precious air-conditioning, so Glenn steps onto a national monument like an Aztec priest ascending the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli to soothe the angry god with worshipful incantations, and incidentally maybe a few dozen sacrificial hearts cut out -- just as the tea-bagger right-wing glorifies the sacrifices of US soldiers blown up by roadside bombs for the sake of American military adventuring in lost causes like the war to turn Afghanistan into a functioning western-style democracy.

Glenn Beck's sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated, child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by backstage extremist billionaires who think they don't have enough money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In the process she'll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government goodbye for good.

In the meantime, the financial markets are getting ready to puke, the housing market has yet a million frauds left to unwind, the commercial real estate and retail sectors are crashing, the projects in Afghanistan, and Iraq, too (despite the current hype about the end of the combat mission there), are set to suck a few billion a day out of the system, indefinitely, and the season leading into the holidays is taking shape as a major amplification of all the converging clusterfucks that make these such interesting times. The tea-bagger faction will only get more desperately crazy as a result.

The bigger mystery in all this -- if I may perhaps engage in some nostalgia of my own -- is: what happened to reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of vicious morons in a time of troubles?

[Sep 03, 2010] America Won the Cold War But Now Is Turning Into the USSR, Gerald Celente

Yahoo! Finance

There's a lot of talk these days about America being an empire in decline. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, goes a step further, arguing America is following a similar path as the former Soviet Union.

"While the many glaring differences between the two political systems have been exhaustively publicized - especially in the U.S. - the glaring similarities [go] unnoticed," Celente writes in The Trends Journal, which he publishes.

In the accompanying video, Celente describes some of these similarities, including:

As with many observers, Celente thinks America will suffer the same fate in Afghanistan as the USSR, the British Empire, Alexander the Great and all others who've ventured into the "graveyard of empires."

The irony, of course, is that while America defeated Soviet Communism and won the Cold War, perhaps our greatest threat today comes from China and its booming state-controlled economy.

[Sep 03, 2010] One Lump Or Two - By James Howard Kunstler

August 30, 2010 | Clusterfuck Nation

Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!

Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor," which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene).

Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his role as a television clown and don the mantle of an evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame -- where it's heading anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when they don't understand what is happening to them.

Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than really answering "a call." The emptiness of his platitudes and the confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during an earlier age of ferment which -- guess what -- coincided with a decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History [Knoph,1945].)

Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth -- this truth being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did previously.

Barack Obama personifies this failure these days, a politician proclaiming "change" who not only managed to change nothing, but promoted a continuation of the national self-swindling with legislation so dazzlingly prolix and complicated that no one can claim to have read either the Health Care Reform Act or the Financial Regulation bill, the two hallmarks of his tenure so far, neither of which will change anything about how we do these things. Why Mr. Obama has turned out to be such a weenie remains a mystery. Even the former communists at Russia Today laugh at the idea that he is a "communist" or a "socialist" and so do I. He certainly appears to be hostage of the more malign forces in society these days -- the medical insurance racket, the too-big-to-fail banks, the multi-national corporations. But I don't believe it's because he wants to suck up to them, or join their country clubs when his current job ends.

My own guess is that he's been informed that the system is so fragile that if he dares to disturb even one teensy-weensy part of it -- for instance, by throwing some executives from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, et cetera, into federal prison -- that said system will fly to pieces in a fortnight. So Obama's main task for a year and a half has been to desperately apply baling wire and duct tape to the banking system while telling fibs to the public about a wished-for recovery to a prior state. Unfortunately that prior state is the ecstasy of a self-swindle in the moments before it unravels... the sublime feeling of having gotten something wonderful for nothing. We're beyond that now and nothing on the age-old shelf of nostrums, spells, prayers, and miracle-cures will avail to bring that moment back, though the public does not know this.

This is what allows a faker like Glenn Beck to shine. The masses still truly believe that prayer will save them from bankruptcy, foreclosure, penury, the loss of status, and the cut-off of precious air-conditioning, so Glenn steps onto a national monument like an Aztec priest ascending the Pyramid of Huitzilopochtli to soothe the angry god with worshipful incantations, and incidentally maybe a few dozen sacrificial hearts cut out -- just as the tea-bagger right-wing glorifies the sacrifices of US soldiers blown up by roadside bombs for the sake of American military adventuring in lost causes like the war to turn Afghanistan into a functioning western-style democracy.

Glenn Beck's sidekick nowadays, Sarah Palin, is exactly the kind of corn pone Hitler that America deserves: a badly-educated, child-like, war-mongering opportunist easily manipulated by backstage extremist billionaires who think they don't have enough money yet. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. In the process she'll turn the sad remnants of the Republican party into a suicide cult, but she might just get elected and you can kiss the 230-year-long experiment in representative government goodbye for good.

In the meantime, the financial markets are getting ready to puke, the housing market has yet a million frauds left to unwind, the commercial real estate and retail sectors are crashing, the projects in Afghanistan, and Iraq, too (despite the current hype about the end of the combat mission there), are set to suck a few billion a day out of the system, indefinitely, and the season leading into the holidays is taking shape as a major amplification of all the converging clusterfucks that make these such interesting times. The tea-bagger faction will only get more desperately crazy as a result.

The bigger mystery in all this -- if I may perhaps engage in some nostalgia of my own -- is: what happened to reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of vicious morons in a time of troubles?

[Sep 03, 2010] America Won the Cold War But Now Is Turning Into the USSR, Gerald Celente

Yahoo! Finance

There's a lot of talk these days about America being an empire in decline. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, goes a step further, arguing America is following a similar path as the former Soviet Union.

"While the many glaring differences between the two political systems have been exhaustively publicized - especially in the U.S. - the glaring similarities [go] unnoticed," Celente writes in The Trends Journal, which he publishes.

In the accompanying video, Celente describes some of these similarities, including:

As with many observers, Celente thinks America will suffer the same fate in Afghanistan as the USSR, the British Empire, Alexander the Great and all others who've ventured into the "graveyard of empires."

The irony, of course, is that while America defeated Soviet Communism and won the Cold War, perhaps our greatest threat today comes from China and its booming state-controlled economy.

[Aug 24, 2010] "Capitalist Myopia" Mark Thoma

August 17, 2010

Maxine Udall on the "socially detrimental effects of capitalist myopia":

Capitalist Myopia, by Maxine Udall: In 1955, the song, Sixteen Tons, written by Merle Travis and sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford, alluded to the down side of company stores. What seems surprising is the popularity of a song about owing one's "soul to the company store" among a workforce that by 1955 had generally benefited from re-emerging post-war economic growth and heightened union activity. That the workforce had become more "white collar" and that many employees were not actually members of unions makes it all the more puzzling.

The company store has been a well-known and near-archetypal feature of Appalachian culture since well before my time. Coal companies built homes for their workers in areas where there was coal, but where there was often no other commercial activity. It was necessary to have a town if one was going to have workers nearby to extract the coal. The houses tended to look the same and are built close together. They were rented to workers with leases that enabled companies to quickly terminate and oust troublesome (i.e., union supporting) or unproductive workers.

It was also necessary to have a store where workers could purchase the necessaries of life, so companies provided it. Sometimes rents and purchases were deducted directly from miner's paychecks. You would think the resulting reduction in transaction costs would result in lower prices, but you would be wrong. Rents and company store prices tended to be higher than prices in nearby competitive markets.

Another "innovation" was the use of company scrip instead of US currency to pay wages. Scrip was only good at the company store. This assured that mining companies recaptured through monopoly prices some of the wages they paid. It occasionally allowed them to raise wages without eroding their profits (since they could recover the wage rise through higher store prices and housing rents).

The growth of other sources of jobs and the growth and legal empowerment of unions gradually eroded mining company power. This link from the West Virginia Division of History and Culture provides credible evidence that concentrated mine company economic and political power led to abuses and to violence on both sides of the "dispute."

I think about company towns and company stores whenever someone starts bleating about government power; the sameness that would be induced by government control of the means of production; the two-tiered system that will evolve if government has too much power; the inefficiencies that will result from government regulation. All more or less true. But then I think of the sameness of company town housing, the two-tiered system of worker and management, and I think of the "inefficiencies" of unsafe workplaces and the "race to the bottom" that must necessarily ensue in the absence of a common standard for consumer and worker safety. And I conclude that economic and political power should not be concentrated excessively in anyone's hands, whether public or private, and that a government constituted to be of, by and for the people will almost certainly have to provide some countervailing force against excessive corporate economic and political power.

Finding the balance will always be the problem. Simple answers will almost never be right.

Company stores and company towns were a way for those with economic and political power to extract a few more dollars from the people doing a lot of the work and assuming a lot of the workplace risk. Like investment bankers who apparently couldn't come up with (as Joe Stiglitz put it in Freefall) a good mortgage product with "low transaction costs and low interest rates" that "would have helped people manage the risk of home ownership, including protection in the event their house loses value or borrowers lose their job," so some coal companies could not come up with a means of providing necessary housing and food to employees without also further impoverishing workers and enriching owners.

reason:

Mark T,
That Frank short article that Maxine links to (race to the bottom) is brilliantly written, it is worth posting on its own.

bakho:

Beautiful post. It may be a "cost" for corporations but a benefit for the rest of us.

Eric:

Marriage is a human institution that has had state sanction and limitations for thousands of years. Gun ownership is specifically in our constitution. Abortion for the sole purpose of not wanting to have a child was, within easy living memory of many Americans, banned in nearly all juristictions and is now a constitutional right based on penumbras of constitutional language. The struggle to either modify or enforce our current immigration laws is important to millions of residents - citizens and non-citizens. If race is fundamentally a distraction, why was our President wasting his time on beer summits and ancedotes about his grandmother? The balance of economic power is critically important in any society and clearly needs an adjustment in our contry as it exists today, but to describe these other issues as distractions is just bizarre.

K Ackermann said in to Eric...

( but to describe these other issues as distractions is just bizarre.)

Beautiful. You demonstrated her point perfectly. Get hung up on the diversions.

Stroke your hate and fears, Eric. Polish your hate and pass it on.

yuan said in to Eric...

"but to describe these other issues as distractions is just bizarre"

Its like you've never heard of a wedge issue. You get a gold star for carrying water for the oligarchs.

ken melvin said in to yuan...

This inability to put things in context, to think 2nd or 3rd order is the greatest failure of our educational system.

Lafayette:

The French do not wax romantically about coal mines, where they are or were dotted all around the northeast of the country and the south of Belgium. They were the major source of heating in the 19th century.

Emile Zola's book Germinal about mine strikers in the 18th century was seminal in bringing to the consciousness of the French the abysmal lot of the poor and particularly those who worked and died in the mines for a pittance.

One might say it was key inevitably to awakening the conscience of the French, which nonetheless took almost 60 years and a World War to bring about the Popular Movement that put a Socialist government in power in 1936. From which numerous policy decisions gave French workers a more decent lifestyle. Like annual vacations that had never been heard of before.

Americans are way beyond that lack of Collective Conscience. But, having lost our way after WW2, with the economic boom that followed, I dare say that our conscience got left somewhere by the roadside. What happened this last time around, aka the Great Recession, can be attributed, in different degrees, to general binging of the population not only on cheap credit but also the cupidity of Top Management to transform that binge into easy in-the-pocket money.

As we move to a Service Industry oriented economy, the work place is more an office than a mine or factory-floor. So, the issue of the condition of the American worker is less hardship and more fairness. That is, why are they on the losing losing side of the Return to Labor vs: Return to Capital dichotomy?

Just because Will Smith earns 80 megabucks a year and "poor" Eddie Murphy only 50MBs does not mean that blacks in America have all reached a middle-class existence. But, the underclass of society sees such spectacular riches, and the way people obtain them, as the Quick Way Out (of misery). So, they believe in it; rather than slower, incremental economic policies that better generally their social condition ... like a Public HC Option.

I want it all and I want it RIGHT NOW! Yeah, right, go ask Will for a hand-out ...

btg said in to K Ackermann...

"That the workforce had become more "white collar" and that many employees were not actually members of unions makes it all the more puzzling."

but no doubt even if the economy was changing, many people had parents or grandparents who had lived that type of existence.

even then, there were a number of coal strikes in the late 40s and early 50s. and even for those who didn't grow up in towns with company stores, it was very much a protest against corporate power that clearly resontated with all sort of unionised, and non-unionised, workers.

but even then, sometimes a song's populatarity has nothing to do with its politics or lyrics - particularly true with pop music since the early 60s.

K Ackermann said in to btg...

That's very true. It took me a while to figure out that a rap song talking about shooting cops is loved not because people think cops should be shot, but because they are celibrating the fact that they can say it out loud. It's just an FU to the establishment, and I can get behind that.

Patricia Shannon said in to save_the_rustbelt...

For one thing, most people can feel empathy and caring for those less fortunate. At the Frankie Valli concert I went to several months ago, the song that got the most applause by far was "Rag Doll", about a boy's love for a poor girl. Made me feel much better about the human race.

For another, people can relate to being oppressed by some of their employers, even if the specifics are different.

Ignacio:

John Kay at London School of Economics reaches similar conclusions with a different approach. He talks about powerful rent-seekers pursuing higher revenues through expanded privileges. Instead of the company store, he uses as an example the tariffs that landowners imposed to commerce through Rhin river. OK, they buildt nice castles but produced economic stagnation.

Banksters have too many privileges.

Tim L.:

"People do indeed want to have green pastures in front of them"

It is called a front lawn.

"This sounds suspiciously like the beginning of collective action"

The end of collective action is watching televised events together. The collective consciousness is displayed via cable and satellite.

"Unfortunately, collective action uninformed by virtue is unlikely to result in anything that is any better than that achieved by investment banking without virtue"

Tune in. Turn on. Barcalounger. Far out.

K Ackermann:

Maxine is such a good writer - right up there with Jesse.

One of the reasons Libertarianism is so insidious is that it will never come fully into the light but rather just pick at the threads of the fabric of society.

Individualism, they say. Don't tread on me.

But it doesn't work that way. They want to opt out of the collective aspects of society but until their footprint is non-existent, they don't have that right.

I have to smell their garbage. I have to deal with their ignorant children. I have to pull over for their ambulance when their arteries clog. I have to pay more for insurance when their house burns down because nobody can tell them they need smoke detectors.

No man is an island but some are king of the hill. The smart ones know its money velocity that got them there, not hoarding. The captains of industry can increase velocity by redistribution, or they can pay for security, but in the end, they are going to pay one way or another. It may as well be constructively.

We can stand together, or swing alone.

I'm out of cliches.

kievite said in to K Ackermann...

"One of the reasons Libertarianism is so insidious is that it will never come fully into the light but rather just pick at the threads of the fabric of society."

That's a very good observation.

I would say more: it was the existence of the USSR that kept some of the most nasty rent seeking elements in check. And also kept bizarre ideologies outside mainstream.

To a certain extent the USSR while providing miserable life for those people inside the Iron Curtain served as a kind of countervailing force that kept the most damaging rent seeking impulses in check and as a side effect improved the life of people here in the USA.

Devin said in to kievite...

I find it interesting the narrative of the US vs. the USSR has come to be seen as a narrative of capitalism vs. communism, or private enterprise vs. central state planning. Yet the reality was far different. At the time, the US had substantial redistribution of wealth (top tax rates of 70% or more during most of the period) and significantly more government regulation and other interventions in market than we do today. The US was certainly described better as a mixed economy (i.e. more "socialist") during the Cold War era than a pure capitalist economy.

The narrative of the Cold War should be that of a balanced, pragmatic approach to economic policy versus a narrow, ideological approach. Instead, we've taken the wrong lesson and gone all-in on another narrow, ideological approach with the foolish belief that just because it's a different ideology than the one that failed spectacularly in the USSR, that it will somehow end better.

Fred C. Dobbs:

Seems that when America was founded, 'Capitalism' was a fairly new, untested concept, in a formal sense.
The US is now as much a Capitalist nation as it is Christian, arguably. Isn't the Company Store now
Wal-Mart? I know it used to be Sears-Roebuck.

K Ackermann said in to Fred C. Dobbs...

85% of Wal-Mart products are made outside of the US. They are the largest retailer on earth.

The majority of Wal-Mart employees with children live below the poverty line, and their children qualify for free lunch at schools. They are the largest private employer in America.

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores3.html

Fred C. Dobbs said in to K Ackermann...

So, 'The Land of Opportunity' is on the way to being 'The Land of Lowered Expectations'.

It has a certain ring. This from 2007, already.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/opinion/13fri2.html

Farrar:

Sixteen tons - 1955 - I remember it well. that summer vacation, I had a job with Alcoa, Vancouver, WA. I had to join the Teamsters because I was driving a truck part of the time; I resented paying the dues and never went to a meeting. Over time, though, I got to know some of the older regular workers, and I began to appreciate their almost unquestioning loyalty to the union movement. Many of those guys had come of age during the depression back east, and they knew very well the significance of the company store. That song represented all the distance they had come and their determination to hold on to the advantages they had won through the union movement.

What ever happened?

When I arrived in France, I joined the CGT and never missed a meeting.

jamzo:

thanks for the wonderful post

the song was popular for the same reason that the "sad" musics "traditional irish and scots music", "the blues", "bluegrass", etc, are popular

these "musics" resonate with life experience and soothe the listener

Roadrunner:

Point taken

Although it's easy to pick on investment bankers in hindsight I reckon you should meet the Fuggers and hear about their Fuggerei no pun intended

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger

Rock me Amadeus

K Ackermann said in to Roadrunner...

Awesome link. Thank you. I clicked through to the Fuggerei page. What a great place, and to think it still serves the same purpose today at the same price.

Bruce Wilder:

Karl Smith, of the Modeled Behavior blog, offered the following, as part of his explanation for opposing Elizabeth Warren to head the new CFPB, the consumer protection agency created as part of the finreg reform.

I can't quite get my head around Karl's "thinking", here. But, it is definitely an alternative to the "countervailing power" model offered by Maxine Udall, which I, myself, tend to adopt as my default view of what's desirable.

Karl Smith: "My ideal vision of the government is as an institution that is a fair and neutral arbiter of disputes. One that ensures that fraud, deception, bullying and coercion don't go on."

"No one doubts that fraud, by both borrowers and lenders went on during this crisis. We may dispute how important that was as a cause but I think few of us believe that it should be standard practice. Ideally, any new regulatory powers would be aimed at curing that fraud."

"What that agency should not be doing is taking explicit sides and aiming for explicit outcomes. It should not take the position that big banks are the villains and that consumers are the victims. It should enforce rules that ensure all players treat each other fairly."

Bruce Wilder:

There is, in the Liberal's view of government, an expectation of a certain sort of fair-minded neutrality, which has certainly become obsolete, as government, in the U.S., has become steadily more authoritarian and less competent.

Barbara Ehrenreich, commenting on the Eric Alterman piece in the current Nation, had a rant:

"The government . . . is not only expensive, "bloated" and all the rest. It has become a handmaid to corporate power-a hiring hall from which compliant officials are selected for vastly more lucrative private-sector jobs, as well as an emergency cash reserve for companies that fall on hard times. No wonder so many Americans unthinkingly conflate "big government" and "big corporations." This is not the kind of government that hires unemployed people to paint murals on post office walls. And, as everyone knows, when the bank decides to repossess your home, it's a public employee who will kick in the door.

". . . In the years since government-state and local as well as federal-has shed its role as a kindly change agent, it has assumed a new one as über-cop: building more penitentiaries, snapping up stoners, harassing blacks and Latino-looking people on the streets. Nonviolent protests have dwindled, not only because of activists' lingering deference toward Obama but because the police response to any outdoor gathering so resembles the assault on Falluja.

"Even the more helpful government programs have become agents of an increasingly repressive state. Food stamp offices, public housing complexes and homeless shelters are the sites of "warrant searches" used to gather up people who might have missed a court date concerning an unpaid debt. Public housing residents are subjected to drug tests; in many states, the process of applying for what remains of welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) parallels that of being booked by the police, complete with mug shots and fingerprints. Although you won't find them out campaigning against ICE raids and urban stop-and-frisk programs, some of the Tea Partyers seem to dimly understand this, with one handmade poster at last year's 9/12 demonstration in Washington saying, for example, Government Health Care = Pee in a Cup."

http://www.thenation.com/article/154017/corpo-obama-geithner-petraeus-state

Bruce Wilder:

Mike Kimel, of the blog, Presimatics, put up a first-person narrative recently that I thought was very revealing, about what it means to live with an authoritarian state, doing the bidding of its corporate masters. Here's the thing about authoritarian states: they are not open to reason.

"My wife, deep into her third trimester of pregnancy, went out to run some errands with my mother and a family friend. It was pouring, and when they got back to the house, they saw a piece of paper stapled to a little tree at the end of our driveway. It was a notice from the Sheriff's Department that our house was going to be auctioned off on October 1st.

"Now, obviously it had to be a bad joke. After all:

1. We had only bought the house the previous year and were about two months ahead on our mortgage.
2. The plaintiff was CountryWide, which is not the company with which have a mortgage.
3. The name of the defendant from whom the home was to be foreclosed was not the legal owner of the house – that is to say, my wife or I. In fact, the name of the defendant was similar to the name of the previous owner of the home, but the spelling was definitely off.
4. From what we heard of Sheriff's auctions, notices tend to be left on the door. Not stapled to a tiny little tree in the pouring rain.

"But when my wife checked the Sheriff's site on-line, it turns out that, indeed, our home was slated to be auctioned off on October 1st. Multiple calls to the Sheriff's office were not returned. As to CountryWide – who exactly do you call at CountryWide? There's no "Press 4 if you have no relationship with CountryWide but we're trying to seize your house anyway." Ironically, if we did have a delinquent CountryWide mortgage, getting somewhere with them might have possible as any of their call center representatives would have been able to handle taking a payment. But the situation we were in, that they put us in, isn't one of the options that their call center seems equipped to sort out.

"When it started to become obvious that a) this was deadly serious and b) there was a whole machine moving inexorably forward, my wife got nervous. She didn't sleep at all that first night, and because she didn't sleep, neither did I. And every roadblock we hit made us more exasperated at what was already a difficult time.

"After a couple of days of trying the obvious remedies, we contacted our title company and called our attorney. And it took a while, but the upshot was that after a few weeks, we managed to stop the proceedings. CountryWide uses an external law firm to deal with the Sheriff's office, and we managed to convince them that the process should be halted. Doing so meant showing we had the title and that we are the owners of record as far as the County is concerned. Additionally, thanks to the previous owner who helped us out here, we were able to show that CountryWide received a wire transfer when the previous owner sold us the house. Thus, we proved to CountryWide's external legal firm that they had followed unlawful orders by putting in the request to have our home foreclosed. They in turn managed to get their contacts at CountryWide to give them the OK to contact the Sheriff's department to put a halt to the process.

"Though we're no longer in danger of losing our home (as far as we know), I'm kind of upset right now at two parties. The first is CountryWide, for all the obvious reasons. But I also have a problem with the Sheriff's department because from where I'm standing, it seems like its procedures are set up in such a way as to validate CountryWide's mistakes. Let's start with the note pinned to a tree in the pouring rain. What if we were traveling or the wind was just a little stronger? Would the note have been there when we got back? Would we even have known about the auction until after it happened?

"Second, it appears that that the Sheriff's department auctions off homes simply on the word of CountryWide or its outside attorney. A check of the County Tax Assessor's Office would have told them there was a problem with CountryWide's request, namely that the person they wanted to seize the home from doesn't own it or have any rights to it whatsoever. (Actually, I also wonder why the outside attorney didn't check any of this either.) And it isn't as if CountryWide and/or the Sheriff checked but were working off outdated information; if the previous owner was truly the intended defendant, her name wasn't even spelled right in the complaint which also should have raised some eyebrows. Worse, as per the above-mentioned wire transfer, CountryWide actually wasn't owed anything at all by anyone.

"In short, CountryWide was trying to collect on a debt that didn't exist, supposedly owed by a person who they had wrongly identified, by seizing property owned by other people. And yet the Sheriff's Department acted on their claim, and refused to give us, the party affected by that series of errors, so much as a return phone call.

"The only conclusion I can reach from this is that there are no safeguards at all built into the system. None. . . ."

Kimel titled his post, Countrywide Goes Kafka
http://www.presimetrics.com/blog/?p=110

Devin:

Her conclusions can be reached from any number of starting points. I use 19th & 20th century world history:

From my limited historical knowledge, it seems "creeping socialism" fears have little or no basis. Conditions like those of the USSR or Cuba come about through dramatic, revolutionary action, in response to an unyielding system. While countries like the US and Britain were experiencing incremental changes in the balance of power and economic distribution of wealth in society through the last two centuries, countries like Russia were completely unyielding in terms of implementing policies to bring about broader prosperity...until a dramatic revolution brought sweeping changes.

I'm not aware of incremental changes made at the ballot box or by elected legislators bringing about a socialist or communist state. The most "socialist" examples I can think of would be the Nordic countries, yet those nations are home to major global companies and consistently ranked among the most entrepreneurial and small-business-friendly nations in the world--in other words, they're a far cry from true socialism. Perhaps somebody can correct me?

It seems if you want to bring about a socialist or communist state, the best approach is defend the interests of the wealthy and powerful while doing little or nothing for the rest of society.

Wyrm said in to Devin...

Allende was a democratically-elected politician who tried to bring socialism to his nation. That didn't turn out too well for him.

I'm not sure about Chavez.

save_the_rustbelt:

For the youngsters in the audience...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0

Brian:

Yes, what if the wind were a little stronger? Seems there's too many elements to fuse our powers and too little framework to make good on thin recommendations. Damn ordinary complexity is winning?

[Aug 24, 2010] "Capitalist Myopia" Mark Thoma

August 17, 2010

Maxine Udall on the "socially detrimental effects of capitalist myopia":

Capitalist Myopia, by Maxine Udall: In 1955, the song, Sixteen Tons, written by Merle Travis and sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford, alluded to the down side of company stores. What seems surprising is the popularity of a song about owing one's "soul to the company store" among a workforce that by 1955 had generally benefited from re-emerging post-war economic growth and heightened union activity. That the workforce had become more "white collar" and that many employees were not actually members of unions makes it all the more puzzling.

The company store has been a well-known and near-archetypal feature of Appalachian culture since well before my time. Coal companies built homes for their workers in areas where there was coal, but where there was often no other commercial activity. It was necessary to have a town if one was going to have workers nearby to extract the coal. The houses tended to look the same and are built close together. They were rented to workers with leases that enabled companies to quickly terminate and oust troublesome (i.e., union supporting) or unproductive workers.

It was also necessary to have a store where workers could purchase the necessaries of life, so companies provided it. Sometimes rents and purchases were deducted directly from miner's paychecks. You would think the resulting reduction in transaction costs would result in lower prices, but you would be wrong. Rents and company store prices tended to be higher than prices in nearby competitive markets.

Another "innovation" was the use of company scrip instead of US currency to pay wages. Scrip was only good at the company store. This assured that mining companies recaptured through monopoly prices some of the wages they paid. It occasionally allowed them to raise wages without eroding their profits (since they could recover the wage rise through higher store prices and housing rents).

The growth of other sources of jobs and the growth and legal empowerment of unions gradually eroded mining company power. This link from the West Virginia Division of History and Culture provides credible evidence that concentrated mine company economic and political power led to abuses and to violence on both sides of the "dispute."

I think about company towns and company stores whenever someone starts bleating about government power; the sameness that would be induced by government control of the means of production; the two-tiered system that will evolve if government has too much power; the inefficiencies that will result from government regulation. All more or less true. But then I think of the sameness of company town housing, the two-tiered system of worker and management, and I think of the "inefficiencies" of unsafe workplaces and the "race to the bottom" that must necessarily ensue in the absence of a common standard for consumer and worker safety. And I conclude that economic and political power should not be concentrated excessively in anyone's hands, whether public or private, and that a government constituted to be of, by and for the people will almost certainly have to provide some countervailing force against excessive corporate economic and political power.

Finding the balance will always be the problem. Simple answers will almost never be right.

Company stores and company towns were a way for those with economic and political power to extract a few more dollars from the people doing a lot of the work and assuming a lot of the workplace risk. Like investment bankers who apparently couldn't come up with (as Joe Stiglitz put it in Freefall) a good mortgage product with "low transaction costs and low interest rates" that "would have helped people manage the risk of home ownership, including protection in the event their house loses value or borrowers lose their job," so some coal companies could not come up with a means of providing necessary housing and food to employees without also further impoverishing workers and enriching owners.

reason said...

Mark T,
That Frank short article that Maxine links to (race to the bottom) is brilliantly written, it is worth posting on its own.

bakho said...

Beautiful post. It may be a "cost" for corporations but a benefit for the rest of us.

Eric said...

Marriage is a human institution that has had state sanction and limitations for thousands of years. Gun ownership is specifically in our constitution. Abortion for the sole purpose of not wanting to have a child was, within easy living memory of many Americans, banned in nearly all juristictions and is now a constitutional right based on penumbras of constitutional language. The struggle to either modify or enforce our current immigration laws is important to millions of residents - citizens and non-citizens. If race is fundamentally a distraction, why was our President wasting his time on beer summits and ancedotes about his grandmother? The balance of economic power is critically important in any society and clearly needs an adjustment in our contry as it exists today, but to describe these other issues as distractions is just bizarre.

K Ackermann said in reply to Eric...

( but to describe these other issues as distractions is just bizarre.)

Beautiful. You demonstrated her point perfectly. Get hung up on the diversions.

Stroke your hate and fears, Eric. Polish your hate and pass it on.

yuan said in reply to Eric...

"but to describe these other issues as distractions is just bizarre"

Its like you've never heard of a wedge issue. You get a gold star for carrying water for the oligarchs.

ken melvin said in reply to yuan...

This inability to put things in context, to think 2nd or 3rd order is the greatest failure of our educational system.

Lafayette said...

The French do not wax romantically about coal mines, where they are or were dotted all around the northeast of the country and the south of Belgium. They were the major source of heating in the 19th century.

Emile Zola's book Germinal about mine strikers in the 18th century was seminal in bringing to the consciousness of the French the abysmal lot of the poor and particularly those who worked and died in the mines for a pittance.

One might say it was key inevitably to awakening the conscience of the French, which nonetheless took almost 60 years and a World War to bring about the Popular Movement that put a Socialist government in power in 1936. From which numerous policy decisions gave French workers a more decent lifestyle. Like annual vacations that had never been heard of before.

Americans are way beyond that lack of Collective Conscience. But, having lost our way after WW2, with the economic boom that followed, I dare say that our conscience got left somewhere by the roadside. What happened this last time around, aka the Great Recession, can be attributed, in different degrees, to general binging of the population not only on cheap credit but also the cupidity of Top Management to transform that binge into easy in-the-pocket money.

As we move to a Service Industry oriented economy, the work place is more an office than a mine or factory-floor. So, the issue of the condition of the American worker is less hardship and more fairness. That is, why are they on the losing losing side of the Return to Labor vs: Return to Capital dichotomy?

Just because Will Smith earns 80 megabucks a year and "poor" Eddie Murphy only 50MBs does not mean that blacks in America have all reached a middle-class existence. But, the underclass of society sees such spectacular riches, and the way people obtain them, as the Quick Way Out (of misery). So, they believe in it; rather than slower, incremental economic policies that better generally their social condition ... like a Public HC Option.

I want it all and I want it RIGHT NOW! Yeah, right, go ask Will for a hand-out ...

btg said in reply to K Ackermann...

"That the workforce had become more "white collar" and that many employees were not actually members of unions makes it all the more puzzling."

but no doubt even if the economy was changing, many people had parents or grandparents who had lived that type of existence.

even then, there were a number of coal strikes in the late 40s and early 50s. and even for those who didn't grow up in towns with company stores, it was very much a protest against corporate power that clearly resontated with all sort of unionised, and non-unionised, workers.

but even then, sometimes a song's populatarity has nothing to do with its politics or lyrics - particularly true with pop music since the early 60s.

K Ackermann said in reply to btg...

That's very true. It took me a while to figure out that a rap song talking about shooting cops is loved not because people think cops should be shot, but because they are celibrating the fact that they can say it out loud. It's just an FU to the establishment, and I can get behind that.

Patricia Shannon said in reply to save_the_rustbelt...

For one thing, most people can feel empathy and caring for those less fortunate. At the Frankie Valli concert I went to several months ago, the song that got the most applause by far was "Rag Doll", about a boy's love for a poor girl. Made me feel much better about the human race.

For another, people can relate to being oppressed by some of their employers, even if the specifics are different.

Ignacio said...

John Kay at London School of Economics reaches similar conclusions with a different approach. He talks about powerful rent-seekers pursuing higher revenues through expanded privileges. Instead of the company store, he uses as an example the tariffs that landowners imposed to commerce through Rhin river. OK, they buildt nice castles but produced economic stagnation.

Banksters have too many privileges.

Tim L. said...

"People do indeed want to have green pastures in front of them"

It is called a front lawn.

"This sounds suspiciously like the beginning of collective action"

The end of collective action is watching televised events together. The collective consciousness is displayed via cable and satellite.

"Unfortunately, collective action uninformed by virtue is unlikely to result in anything that is any better than that achieved by investment banking without virtue"

Tune in. Turn on. Barcalounger. Far out.

K Ackermann said...

Maxine is such a good writer - right up there with Jesse.

One of the reasons Libertarianism is so insidious is that it will never come fully into the light but rather just pick at the threads of the fabric of society.

Individualism, they say. Don't tread on me.

But it doesn't work that way. They want to opt out of the collective aspects of society but until their footprint is non-existent, they don't have that right.

I have to smell their garbage. I have to deal with their ignorant children. I have to pull over for their ambulance when their arteries clog. I have to pay more for insurance when their house burns down because nobody can tell them they need smoke detectors.

No man is an island but some are king of the hill. The smart ones know its money velocity that got them there, not hoarding. The captains of industry can increase velocity by redistribution, or they can pay for security, but in the end, they are going to pay one way or another. It may as well be constructively.

We can stand together, or swing alone.

I'm out of cliches.

kievite said in reply to K Ackermann...

"One of the reasons Libertarianism is so insidious is that it will never come fully into the light but rather just pick at the threads of the fabric of society."

That's a very good observation.

I would say more: it was the existence of the USSR that kept some of the most nasty rent seeking elements in check. And also kept bizarre ideologies outside mainstream.

To a certain extent the USSR while providing miserable life for those people inside the Iron Curtain served as a kind of countervailing force that kept the most damaging rent seeking impulses in check and as a side effect improved the life of people here in the USA.

Devin said in reply to kievite...

I find it interesting the narrative of the US vs. the USSR has come to be seen as a narrative of capitalism vs. communism, or private enterprise vs. central state planning. Yet the reality was far different. At the time, the US had substantial redistribution of wealth (top tax rates of 70% or more during most of the period) and significantly more government regulation and other interventions in market than we do today. The US was certainly described better as a mixed economy (i.e. more "socialist") during the Cold War era than a pure capitalist economy.

The narrative of the Cold War should be that of a balanced, pragmatic approach to economic policy versus a narrow, ideological approach. Instead, we've taken the wrong lesson and gone all-in on another narrow, ideological approach with the foolish belief that just because it's a different ideology than the one that failed spectacularly in the USSR, that it will somehow end better.

Fred C. Dobbs said...

Seems that when America was founded, 'Capitalism' was a fairly new, untested concept, in a formal sense.
The US is now as much a Capitalist nation as it is Christian, arguably. Isn't the Company Store now
Wal-Mart? I know it used to be Sears-Roebuck.

K Ackermann said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs...

85% of Wal-Mart products are made outside of the US. They are the largest retailer on earth.

The majority of Wal-Mart employees with children live below the poverty line, and their children qualify for free lunch at schools. They are the largest private employer in America.

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores3.html

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to K Ackermann...

So, 'The Land of Opportunity' is on the way to being 'The Land of Lowered Expectations'.

It has a certain ring. This from 2007, already.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/opinion/13fri2.html

Farrar said...

Sixteen tons - 1955 - I remember it well. that summer vacation, I had a job with Alcoa, Vancouver, WA. I had to join the Teamsters because I was driving a truck part of the time; I resented paying the dues and never went to a meeting. Over time, though, I got to know some of the older regular workers, and I began to appreciate their almost unquestioning loyalty to the union movement. Many of those guys had come of age during the depression back east, and they knew very well the significance of the company store. That song represented all the distance they had come and their determination to hold on to the advantages they had won through the union movement.

What ever happened?

When I arrived in France, I joined the CGT and never missed a meeting.

jamzo said...

thanks for the wonderful post

the song was popular for the same reason that the "sad" musics "traditional irish and scots music", "the blues", "bluegrass", etc, are popular

these "musics" resonate with life experience and soothe the listener

Roadrunner said...

Point taken

Although it's easy to pick on investment bankers in hindsight I reckon you should meet the Fuggers and hear about their Fuggerei no pun intended

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger

Rock me Amadeus

K Ackermann said in reply to Roadrunner...

Awesome link. Thank you. I clicked through to the Fuggerei page. What a great place, and to think it still serves the same purpose today at the same price.

Bruce Wilder said...

Karl Smith, of the Modeled Behavior blog, offered the following, as part of his explanation for opposing Elizabeth Warren to head the new CFPB, the consumer protection agency created as part of the finreg reform.

I can't quite get my head around Karl's "thinking", here. But, it is definitely an alternative to the "countervailing power" model offered by Maxine Udall, which I, myself, tend to adopt as my default view of what's desirable.

Karl Smith: "My ideal vision of the government is as an institution that is a fair and neutral arbiter of disputes. One that ensures that fraud, deception, bullying and coercion don't go on."

"No one doubts that fraud, by both borrowers and lenders went on during this crisis. We may dispute how important that was as a cause but I think few of us believe that it should be standard practice. Ideally, any new regulatory powers would be aimed at curing that fraud."

"What that agency should not be doing is taking explicit sides and aiming for explicit outcomes. It should not take the position that big banks are the villains and that consumers are the victims. It should enforce rules that ensure all players treat each other fairly."

Bruce Wilder said...

There is, in the Liberal's view of government, an expectation of a certain sort of fair-minded neutrality, which has certainly become obsolete, as government, in the U.S., has become steadily more authoritarian and less competent.

Barbara Ehrenreich, commenting on the Eric Alterman piece in the current Nation, had a rant:

"The government . . . is not only expensive, "bloated" and all the rest. It has become a handmaid to corporate power-a hiring hall from which compliant officials are selected for vastly more lucrative private-sector jobs, as well as an emergency cash reserve for companies that fall on hard times. No wonder so many Americans unthinkingly conflate "big government" and "big corporations." This is not the kind of government that hires unemployed people to paint murals on post office walls. And, as everyone knows, when the bank decides to repossess your home, it's a public employee who will kick in the door.

". . . In the years since government-state and local as well as federal-has shed its role as a kindly change agent, it has assumed a new one as über-cop: building more penitentiaries, snapping up stoners, harassing blacks and Latino-looking people on the streets. Nonviolent protests have dwindled, not only because of activists' lingering deference toward Obama but because the police response to any outdoor gathering so resembles the assault on Falluja.

"Even the more helpful government programs have become agents of an increasingly repressive state. Food stamp offices, public housing complexes and homeless shelters are the sites of "warrant searches" used to gather up people who might have missed a court date concerning an unpaid debt. Public housing residents are subjected to drug tests; in many states, the process of applying for what remains of welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) parallels that of being booked by the police, complete with mug shots and fingerprints. Although you won't find them out campaigning against ICE raids and urban stop-and-frisk programs, some of the Tea Partyers seem to dimly understand this, with one handmade poster at last year's 9/12 demonstration in Washington saying, for example, Government Health Care = Pee in a Cup."

http://www.thenation.com/article/154017/corpo-obama-geithner-petraeus-state

Bruce Wilder said...

Mike Kimel, of the blog, Presimatics, put up a first-person narrative recently that I thought was very revealing, about what it means to live with an authoritarian state, doing the bidding of its corporate masters. Here's the thing about authoritarian states: they are not open to reason.

"My wife, deep into her third trimester of pregnancy, went out to run some errands with my mother and a family friend. It was pouring, and when they got back to the house, they saw a piece of paper stapled to a little tree at the end of our driveway. It was a notice from the Sheriff's Department that our house was going to be auctioned off on October 1st.

"Now, obviously it had to be a bad joke. After all:

1. We had only bought the house the previous year and were about two months ahead on our mortgage.
2. The plaintiff was CountryWide, which is not the company with which have a mortgage.
3. The name of the defendant from whom the home was to be foreclosed was not the legal owner of the house – that is to say, my wife or I. In fact, the name of the defendant was similar to the name of the previous owner of the home, but the spelling was definitely off.
4. From what we heard of Sheriff's auctions, notices tend to be left on the door. Not stapled to a tiny little tree in the pouring rain.

"But when my wife checked the Sheriff's site on-line, it turns out that, indeed, our home was slated to be auctioned off on October 1st. Multiple calls to the Sheriff's office were not returned. As to CountryWide – who exactly do you call at CountryWide? There's no "Press 4 if you have no relationship with CountryWide but we're trying to seize your house anyway." Ironically, if we did have a delinquent CountryWide mortgage, getting somewhere with them might have possible as any of their call center representatives would have been able to handle taking a payment. But the situation we were in, that they put us in, isn't one of the options that their call center seems equipped to sort out.

"When it started to become obvious that a) this was deadly serious and b) there was a whole machine moving inexorably forward, my wife got nervous. She didn't sleep at all that first night, and because she didn't sleep, neither did I. And every roadblock we hit made us more exasperated at what was already a difficult time.

"After a couple of days of trying the obvious remedies, we contacted our title company and called our attorney. And it took a while, but the upshot was that after a few weeks, we managed to stop the proceedings. CountryWide uses an external law firm to deal with the Sheriff's office, and we managed to convince them that the process should be halted. Doing so meant showing we had the title and that we are the owners of record as far as the County is concerned. Additionally, thanks to the previous owner who helped us out here, we were able to show that CountryWide received a wire transfer when the previous owner sold us the house. Thus, we proved to CountryWide's external legal firm that they had followed unlawful orders by putting in the request to have our home foreclosed. They in turn managed to get their contacts at CountryWide to give them the OK to contact the Sheriff's department to put a halt to the process.

"Though we're no longer in danger of losing our home (as far as we know), I'm kind of upset right now at two parties. The first is CountryWide, for all the obvious reasons. But I also have a problem with the Sheriff's department because from where I'm standing, it seems like its procedures are set up in such a way as to validate CountryWide's mistakes. Let's start with the note pinned to a tree in the pouring rain. What if we were traveling or the wind was just a little stronger? Would the note have been there when we got back? Would we even have known about the auction until after it happened?

"Second, it appears that that the Sheriff's department auctions off homes simply on the word of CountryWide or its outside attorney. A check of the County Tax Assessor's Office would have told them there was a problem with CountryWide's request, namely that the person they wanted to seize the home from doesn't own it or have any rights to it whatsoever. (Actually, I also wonder why the outside attorney didn't check any of this either.) And it isn't as if CountryWide and/or the Sheriff checked but were working off outdated information; if the previous owner was truly the intended defendant, her name wasn't even spelled right in the complaint which also should have raised some eyebrows. Worse, as per the above-mentioned wire transfer, CountryWide actually wasn't owed anything at all by anyone.

"In short, CountryWide was trying to collect on a debt that didn't exist, supposedly owed by a person who they had wrongly identified, by seizing property owned by other people. And yet the Sheriff's Department acted on their claim, and refused to give us, the party affected by that series of errors, so much as a return phone call.

"The only conclusion I can reach from this is that there are no safeguards at all built into the system. None. . . ."

Kimel titled his post, Countrywide Goes Kafka
http://www.presimetrics.com/blog/?p=110

Devin said...

Her conclusions can be reached from any number of starting points. I use 19th & 20th century world history:

From my limited historical knowledge, it seems "creeping socialism" fears have little or no basis. Conditions like those of the USSR or Cuba come about through dramatic, revolutionary action, in response to an unyielding system. While countries like the US and Britain were experiencing incremental changes in the balance of power and economic distribution of wealth in society through the last two centuries, countries like Russia were completely unyielding in terms of implementing policies to bring about broader prosperity...until a dramatic revolution brought sweeping changes.

I'm not aware of incremental changes made at the ballot box or by elected legislators bringing about a socialist or communist state. The most "socialist" examples I can think of would be the Nordic countries, yet those nations are home to major global companies and consistently ranked among the most entrepreneurial and small-business-friendly nations in the world--in other words, they're a far cry from true socialism. Perhaps somebody can correct me?

It seems if you want to bring about a socialist or communist state, the best approach is defend the interests of the wealthy and powerful while doing little or nothing for the rest of society.

Wyrm said in reply to Devin...

Allende was a democratically-elected politician who tried to bring socialism to his nation. That didn't turn out too well for him.

I'm not sure about Chavez.

save_the_rustbelt said...

For the youngsters in the audience...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0

Brian said...

Yes, what if the wind were a little stronger? Seems there's too many elements to fuse our powers and too little framework to make good on thin recommendations. Damn ordinary complexity is winning?

[Aug 12, 2010] Frustrated White House Slams "Professional Left"

Yet this is an Administration that, ironically, seems to think its Faustian pacts with corporate interests can be sold to a presumed-to-be-clueless public with artful PR.

Stress will bring out an organism's or an organization's defenses, and the beleaguered Obama administration is looking mighty defensive these days. The great unwashed public isn't buying its PR about its supposed accomplishments, such as the disgrace that it misbrands as financial reform (which 80% are skeptical will prevent a future crisis) and health care reform (which a recent poll shows disapproval v. approval in a 4:3 ratio).

Yet this is an Administration that, ironically, seems to think its Faustian pacts with corporate interests can be sold to a presumed-to-be-clueless public with artful PR. But this supposedly media savvy bunch has persistently violated a fundamental rule of marketing: you don't misrepresent your product. While politicians all oversell what they can accomplish, the Team Obama campaign has become increasingly desperate as the inconsistency between the Administration's "product positioning" and observable reality become increasingly evident. As we noted in March:

The widespread, vocal opposition to the TARP was evidence that a once complacent populace had been roused. Reform, if proposed with energy and confidence, wasn't a risk; not only was it badly needed, it was just what voters wanted.

But incoming president Obama failed to act. Whether he failed to see the opportunity, didn't understand it, or was simply not interested is moot. Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the Obama administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff. There would be no Nixon goes to China moment from the architects of the policies that created the crisis, namely Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers.

Defenders of the administration no doubt will content that the public was not ready for measures like the putting large banks like Citigroup into receivership. Even if that were true (and the current widespread outrage against banks says otherwise), that view assumes that the executive branch is a mere spectator, when it has the most powerful bully pulpit in the nation. Other leaders have taken unpopular moves and still maintained public support.

Obama's repudiation of his campaign promise of change, by turning his back on meaningful reform of the financial services industry, in turn locked his Administration into a course of action. The new administration would have no choice other that working fist in glove with the banksters, supporting and amplifying their own, well established, propaganda efforts.

Thus Obama's incentives are to come up with "solutions" that paper over problems, avoid meaningful conflict with the industry, minimize complaints, and restore the old practice of using leverage and investment gains to cover up stagnation in worker incomes. Potemkin reforms dovetail with the financial service industry's goal of forestalling any measures that would interfere with its looting. So the only problem with this picture was how to fool the now-impoverished public into thinking a program of Mussolini-style corporatism represented progress.

To put it more simply, "it's the policies, stupid." The Obama Administration appears pathologically unable to see that its flagging poll numbers and the high odds of credibility-sapping Democrat losses in the mid-term elections are the result of errors in judgment. But instead, it is now reduced to trying to shift blame for its flagging fortunes onto….evil pinkos! This would be comical if it weren't utterly pathetic.

What passes for the left in this country has been so marginalized that it has limited sway to begin with (although the public is strongly supportive of some positions they defend, such as preserving Social Security and Medicare). And Team Obama would have to have a badly distorted self image to think its centrist (at best) policies qualify as progressive. A more logical explanation is that the Administration presumed it could either co-opt or corral enough liberals so that any salvos from that flank would be limited to those deemed so extreme that their opposition might actually be a plus (think the controversial Noam Chomsky). Jane Hamsher has chronicled the aggressive Obama efforts to shackle liberal groups :

Someone asked me over the weekend to be more explicit about what the term "veal pen" means:

The veal crate is a wooden restraining device that is the veal calf's permanent home. It is so small (22″ x 54″) that the calves cannot turn around or even lie down and stretch and is the ultimate in high-profit, confinement animal agriculture.(1) Designed to prevent movement (exercise), the crate does its job of atrophying the calves' muscles, thus producing tender "gourmet" veal.

[]

About 14 weeks after their birth, the calves are slaughtered. The quality of this "food," laden with chemicals, lacking in fiber and other nutrients, diseased and processed, is another matter. The real issue is the calves' experience. During their brief lives, they never see the sun or touch the Earth. They never see or taste the grass. Their anemic bodies crave proper sustenance. Their muscles ache for freedom and exercise. They long for maternal care. They are kept in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes…..

I heard it over and over again - if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn't the last time something like that happened - just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.

And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent. They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out….

Where are they on health care? Why aren't they running ads against the AMA, the hospitals, the insurance industry barons who have $700 million in stock options, PhRMA, the device manufacturers and the White House for doing back room deals with all of the above?

Why are they not calling for the White House to release the details of those secret deals?

Because they are participating in those deals, instead of trying to destroy them. Well, that and funneling millions of dollars in pass-throughs to their consultant friends that they are supposed to be spending on the health care fight.

The truth is - they've all been sucked into insulating the White House from liberal critique, and protecting the administration's ability to carry out a neoliberal agenda that does not serve the interests of their members. They spend their time calculating how to do the absolute minimum to retain their progressive street cred and still walk the line of never criticizing the White House.

Yves here. With this as background, the impotent White House tongue-lashing reported yesterday in The Hill is particularly revealing:

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy."

The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."…..

Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington "in America," and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.

Yves here. I suspect most readers will take issue with Gibbs' straw manning and claim that "progressives" are solidly behind Obama. What interests me is his attempt to discredit via branding a group the Administration sees as enemies.

"Professional left" evokes images of union members drummed up to come out and join protests, all carrying the same mass manufactured placards. Yet the irony here is the Administration's frustration results from the fact that the people that are real thorns in its side are the antithesis of career political foot soldiers of the left of center persuasion. Per Hamsher, that's the sort they've been able to neutralize.

Instead, the ones that have annoyed them are those who have followings not because they are paid operatives of leftie groups, as Gibbs intimates, but effective, charismatic commentators on TV, such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Dylan Ratigan. So the "professional," which should be a compliment, is instead a slur, implying they make their money by (per Gibbs' rant) hewing to an ideological line, as opposed to simply calling out obvious and persistent Obama Administration hypocrisy.

To the extent any of the members of these professional lefties' fanbases even take notice of Gibbs' peculiar attack, it's certain to engender more loyalty. The fact he'd resort to a stunt like this indicates not simply desperation, but also detachment from reality.

russell1200

August 11, 2010 at 5:38 am

Or it could be that they are manufacturing a Sister Souljah moment. The Glenn Becks of the world have branded them as communists, and they are trying to recapture the independent vote.

Which of course would somewhat make Ms. Hamsher's point.

Of course they do have some rather radical elements in (not necessarily very important) positions within their administration, which leave them open to the "communist" attack.

DownSouth

August 11, 2010 at 6:46 am

You have fallen into the same trap as Obama, thinking it's all about rhetoric (branding) and nothing about substance.

Obama lost the independents because of his policy failures, not because something some fringe right-wing entertainer said.

alex

August 11, 2010 at 8:19 am

"Of course they do have some rather radical elements in (not necessarily very important) positions within their administration …"

Please name some – the presence of some "radicals" might make me feel better.

BTW, what qualifies as a radical in the Obama administration? Someone who favors prudence with taxpayers' money over feeding the hand that bribes you? Believing that the Bill of Rights is not toilet paper?

Bill in Providence

August 11, 2010 at 1:24 pm

"BTW, what qualifies as a radical in the Obama administration? Someone who favors prudence with taxpayers' money over feeding the hand that bribes you?"

Faaabulous! I owe you a drink of your choice for that. You brightened my dark day.

pjwrites

August 11, 2010 at 1:35 pm

Hear, hear, Alex.

Should the Obama administration need answers as to why the professional left or anyone else may doubt his ability to lead, your last two "questions" should prove the point.

This is exactly why I lost any respect I had for the man.

john bougearel

August 11, 2010 at 6:00 am

The Obama Administration, and the risk to the Democrat party in the mid-term elections may be more a result of 'errors in character' and not just 'errors in judgment.'

Neoliberal agendas from the Obama administration speak more to errors of character more than judgment, imho. The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs 'peculiar attack' on critics of the Administration speaks to both errors of character and judgment.

Less is more, Mr. Gibbs, speak softly and carry a big stick, and your words will be like iron.

anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 6:08 am

Thank you, Yves, for reminding us how sick of Bush profligacy and cronyism, we all were and what a transparently empty suit candidate nothing burger was and is.

The devil for me is in the details. My wife and don't smoke. I quit before we got married and while our domestic life is far from perfect, we haven't poisoned our kids with second-hand smoke. Hope and change only thought seriously the consequences of his tobacco addiction about quitting once the cameras started rolling.

Still, the pliant press willingly fed the bum cigarettes while writing 'gym rat' hagiographies, and 'he really is trying to quit' excuses for Inflate My Grades.

I didn't personally write about a billion email, comments, and essays for near 10% unemployment for pretty much all of the Dem president's only term in office.

This guy was always one of the 'them.' Heard a telling interview with 'O', one of the few times I actually listened to anything he said. He was waxing eloquent about his purported love for baseball. When asked about his favorite player on one of the Chicago teams, 'O' slipped past the question to identify one of the owners, by name.

'Wouldn't want to get him mad at me', reported O. Well, rest assured, the wealthiest folks in America are feeling pretty good about their collective 600 million dollar investment. Stock market is doing fine, the rich are getting richer and My Wife Still Shops At Target is finding that getting used to all that money and celebrity simply takes practice.

Those high unemployment numbers, btw? They're not numbers, they're figures, symbols, representing broken dreams, broken finances, and broken families, in many cases. That's the legacy of cowardice, self-interest, and corruption.

If a Republican were presiding over this kind of economic and social train wreck there would be riots in the street.

Instead, we have to come to Naked Capitalism for sensible, expert editorial comment.

Wasn't like some of us didn't see this all coming.

'Question his experience and judgment?' Sound to me like you calling him 'uppity.'

Times to remember.

attempter

August 11, 2010 at 6:46 am

This has been one of the few episodes of comedy I've been able to enjoy lately. It sure does evince desperation on the administration's part, and also gives the clearest revelation yet of how much Obama truly despises the "progressives" and everything they claim (but never act upon) to believe in.

At the same time watching said progressives whine and sputter over it afforded much Schadenfreude.

I especially liked the imbecility of the "professional left" comment, when it's precisely the professional hacks who have been such despicable traitors in astroturfing for this corporate thug administration. So it's precisely them who this clown yaps at, and now their feelings are hurt? Awww…

Anybody who truly didn't like this kind of treatment would renounce Obama and the Democratic party once and for all as clearly beyond redemption. I said this was the clearest revelation yet, but it's really been pretty clear from the start.

But I fear that for all the whining, Obama's still making a fairly safe bet that this rabble will largely cave in and crawl back as they always do, since "we have no alternative to the Democratic party" constitutes the extremely pinched limits of their courage, their morality, and their intelligence.

Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the Obama administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff.

That sums up why the "inheritance" meme is such a vile lie. If an inheritance is odious to you, you renounce it, you reject it, you destroy it.

But when you embrace the "inheritance" with lascivious glee, as Obama embraced the Bailout, the war, the corporatist assault in general, and all the economic policies, right down to the same personnel, which destroyed this country, then it's no inheritance at all. You take full personal ownership retroactively to Day One.

That's what Obama did across the board.

anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 8:18 am

Occidental College, Columbia, Harvard Law, Hyde Park? Not exactly a track-record of poverty and self-denial, is it?

Course, paying for it without good grades and scholarships means kissing some rich butt along the way. The corporate class recognizes ambition and greed. Obama parked his behind in the pews of Wright's church once a week or so to build credibility and used his community organizing operations to help poor people and make Rezko rich.

He might be a good man and motivated by all the right reasons. I personally doubt it. But you don't borrow money to buy a home you can't afford from the Bank of Thug unless you're either especially dumb or simply greedy and amoral.

I see no reason to vilify him for being anything other than a corrupt member of the ruling class. The Kerry yacht debacle shows the gulf separating us from them. I'm extremely unlikely to make 500 k in any single year, much less pay 500 k in taxes for my toy boat.

Bob Herbert wrote an excellent column this week on the misery of unemployment and the loss of dignity and dreams.

I'd happily trade any single year of Bush, including 2003, for a return to unemployment numbers during the Bush years.

2000-2008 is starting to look like the good old days to an increasing number of Americans.

It's that bad.

i on the ball patriot

August 11, 2010 at 8:42 am

Pernicious Greed Slams "Professional Vanilla Greed", thus elevating the perpetual conflict and deflecting from the real world of rich and poor, have and have not, and the wealthy ruling elite intentional genocide by propaganda of the global middle class and underclass.

Pernicious Greed and Vanilla Greed are now co-opted as symbolic tools of divisiveness further blurring the lines of the fake political theater and masking the deceptions.

The wealthy ruling elite own and control the delivery of the total propaganda machine including the 'highly paid operatives' such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Dylan Ratigan. ("effective, charismatic commentators on TV" - ROTFLMAO).

As the deception deepens, and is being discovered at the same time, the con always throws more distraction into the game.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

liberal

August 11, 2010 at 12:38 pm

Anybody who truly didn't like this kind of treatment would renounce Obama and the Democratic party once and for all as clearly beyond redemption.

I agree, but because of the twin idiocies of first-past-the-post voting and a lack of proportional representation, a viable third party simply isn't possible.

Mad Hemingway

August 11, 2010 at 6:56 am

Like FDR, I welcome the Administration's hatred.

Let's see them get re-elected without their base.

As far as Jane H goes, she'd be better off dumping the Dems permanently; that's her blind spot. I lost count of the number of times she raised money for the "progressive" pols during health care, only to see them all fold to Obama. That's what busts people's credibility.

Psychoanalystus

August 11, 2010 at 7:11 am

Obama sold out the American people first on the health care "reform", then on this financial reform, then on the useless wars, and most recently on the British Petroleum clean up.

Paraphrasing another reader, "no balls, no principles… just bull shit" That's Obama, alright!

Psychoanalystus

JohnL

August 11, 2010 at 7:27 am

Everyone's acting as if Obama and the Democrats were the only politicians in this little act. I guess everyone has forgotten the GOP's deliberate acts of opposition, obstruction, denial, delay and downright public lying on any and everything the Democrats and Obama have proposed.

Not one bill has produced a GOP alternate; instead, we've seen them foaming at the mouth in fake outrage over how Obama is putting us deeper in debt (forgetting the massive hole their previous leader dug initially), how his acts were nothing but corporate pandering, while they proposed nothing at all.

I certainly blame Obama for not being liberal enough, but given the rhetoric and constant propaganda spewing from the right side of the aisle, it's inevitable that he has tried to find some common ground with them. The problem is, there isn't one; the GOP has decided to conduct a scorched earth strategy for 2 years in the hope that it leads to a majority turnaround in both houses of Congress. If that happens, watch true gridlock take place for the next two years!

Francois T

August 11, 2010 at 9:07 am

Oh! Lots of us haven't forget the Reichpubliscums and their strategy of scorched Earth while betting on the legendary amnesia of Joe-6-pack and Jane 10-pack-Carton. Of course, all this with a mainstream media that trembles with abject dear anytime a hint of "librul" accusation MAY float their way.

That said, this was the hand Obama was dealt. Instead of repeatedly expose the Repubs for what they do and who they are, (like Alan Grayson from which the WH could buy a clue or two) he chose to play the great guy who can raise above the fray. Well, that may be real effective during a philosophical debate, but a debate this ain't: it's about getting results, meaningful results at that.

The telltale sign that this was not achieved is this: despite a high number of legislative accomplishments, the public perceive, and rightly so, that substantive victories are few and far between. Be it health care, financial reform, said victories were obtained by compromising from the get go. Is that what they call a good negotiation strategy? Or was it the Obama paradigm from the start?

As for other "promises" like card check (out of the agenda as far as the eye can see) DADT, DOMA, CFPA (OMFG!!!! Is Warren nominable ask the Obamatons while shaking in their boots) immigration reform, we'll wait a long time for these to happen.

The bottom line? FDR was not, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a first class intellect, but he sure had a world class personality. Obama? Just the reverse.

As for the Republicants, I'm ready to bet a nice and crisp 100$ bill (backed by the full faith and credit of the US gubmint, of course) that their mid term electoral results will be dismally bad, contrary to the lame stream media prognostications.

readerOfTeaLeaves

August 11, 2010 at 11:05 am

Agree that Obama was dealt a horrendous hand with respect to GOP obstructionism, and also agree with Francois T that the GOP will do worse in the midterms than the general news media predict.

With that said:

Yet the irony here is the Administration's frustration results from the fact that the people that are real thorns in its side are the antithesis of career political foot soldiers of the left of center persuasion. Per Hamsher, that's the sort they've been able to neutralize.

Instead, the ones that have annoyed them are those who have followings not because they are paid operatives of leftie groups, as Gibbs intimates, but effective, charismatic commentators on TV, such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Dylan Ratigan. So the "professional," which should be a compliment, is instead a slur, implying they make their money by (per Gibbs' rant) hewing to an ideological line, as opposed to simply calling out obvious and persistent Obama Administration hypocrisy.

Whereas the Fox media appear to take their information from GOP-fed Talking Points (talk about your veal pen…), the left appears to draw from a wider, more intellectually fearless collection of fairly diverse temperaments.

FWIW, what appears to distinguish 'the left' is a focus on the need for outcomes. The traditional left may have been fine with endless meetings and nice appointments; the newer left appear to be far more focused on outcomes.

Our federal political processes (including Senate rules, as well as the structure of Senate committees) has been overwhelmed by a multitude of factors. In addition, the old one-state-two-votes notion is ludicrous if you look at the demography of the US: currently, only 9 states have half the population, which means that there are 18 senate votes representing half the population of the United States.

Rather than howl like a stuck pig, Gibbs would be smarter to explain how the demographics of the 20th century (accelerating after WWII) resulted in a political process where any single senate vote can shut down the federal legislative process.

18 senate votes represent **half** the US population.
The other 82 votes represent the other half of the population.

Of those 82 votes in low-density states, at least half are currently controlled by the GOP obstructionists.

This is what Gibbs needs to understand, and then explain.
Whining is not going to cut it.

Doug Terpstra

August 11, 2010 at 11:28 am

Another who perceives Obama's tangled web. Thespian Brer Obama is playing his role to the hilt: "don't throw me into that briar patch!" wink-wink. The "opposition" will do so of course, raising the specter of Palin as the new Caesar and thus ensuring his second term.

One clarification on Obama's "substantive victories": I submit that such trumpeted 'achievements', both HCR and FR, were not merely highly "compromised" but in fact Trojan-horse victories for the kleptocracy, ensuring a captive market for insurance rackets and rolling bailouts for Wall Street banksters, soon to be followed by Social Security "reform". Delayed implementation leaves some doubt about that assertion, but the thousands and thousands of lobbyist-authored pages are most assuredly full of the devil's details.

On HCR, Gibb's comment, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare…", reveals volumes about the Bummer administration's core values. Oh, no, not Canadian healhcare!

What scary radicals these 'professional lefties' are. If they had their way we'd have Kucinich's Department of Peace, engaging in actual diplomacy, and withdrawing from quagmire oil wars. Where's the profit in that?

Fritz

August 11, 2010 at 7:39 am

The Obsolescence of Barack Obama
Wall Street Journal August 11

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704164904575421363005578460.html

Iok Sotot

August 11, 2010 at 7:50 am

""I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy.""

Obama is nothing like George W. Bush! The most striking difference is that Obama is a black man and can talk good. If those two were standing next to each other you would be able to tell which one is which because GW is a pale beige while Obama is more coffee colored.

He's taller too.

BDBlue

August 11, 2010 at 7:53 am

If only more people had paid attention to Adolph Reed, Jr. about Obama (or anything else, for that matter). Here's what he wrote about him in 1996 (so, really, nothing is new):

In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program–the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.

It was all branding. From the very get-go. That's where the lesson is. And, of course, now that people bought the product, they can see it doesn't live up to its branding. That was predictable.

What's surprising is that so many of the Obama people don't seem to understand that basic notion. You'd think Gibbs – part of Obama's branding team – would understand the issue.

Or maybe he does and this is more branding. One last tribal appeal to all those "progressives" in "real America" to stand with their guy. Nevermind what Consumer Reports says, Obama is awesome.

anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 9:20 am

has a bone to pick with Yves, Markos, and Jane H.

As I noted up thread, there is nothing remarkable about the current occupant of the Oval Office, He is not deserving of any special opprobrium, IMHO.

The magic didn't take back in 2007 at a time when I wanted very much to believe in the "eloquence and intelligence" of the Senator from Chicago. Didn't. I can remember clearly two events. The first was an article in New York magazine describing Obama's talent for slipping difficult questions. A lady in in a town hall asked the Senator if he thought there was too much religion in American politics. As I person of faith, I was sincerely hoping that we'd get a clear, unambiguous YES, as an answer. Instead, he offered a lecture on Martin Luther King and James Madison and the baffle-gab just spilled forth and flowed. Then, he appeared on the Daily Show and allowed Jon Stewart to lick his hand. Yukk!

That was it for me. With luck, we'll have enough Republicans under pressure to return to small government to create a pro-business environment and get the job numbers up. I'd actually like to see Yves in charge of reforming the regulatory apparatus of the government. Cause I'm not seeing anything from any party that inspires any reason to believe there's going to be any change.

Put people back to work and scale back the big projects.

anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 9:22 am

Ruth Marcus has a bone to pick. Sorry about messing up the html.

liberal

August 11, 2010 at 1:16 pm

I supported the guy, but I knew exactly what he was by looking up his voting record (in this case, at Americans for Democrati c Action).

So I'm disappointed but not at all surprised.

As for the hope/change BS, it was obvious from the get-go that that was just campaign rhetoric.

scharfy

August 11, 2010 at 8:13 am

He just never had it. As the previous poster noted – Obama was a brand, sold to American as the perfect antidote to the spoiled child of privilege – George Bush.

Though the right continually tried to paint him as a left wing ideologue, a man of deep internal Marxists tendency, he was nothing of the sort. Sure he hung out with radicals, even knew a few, but only because it added to the brand, at times. In truth he was a political opportunist, sailing wherever the wind blew him, quickly to be sure – but never with his own rudder, with his own convictions.

He certainly didn't betray the left, anymore than W betrayed the right. Those men were exactly who they were supposed to be. How could they conceal themselves?

I think it was Aristotle who said a nation gets the leader it deserves. American hyper-consumerism brought to power a media darling straight from Madison Avenue, catalyzed by the media in all its glory.

alex

August 11, 2010 at 8:39 am

This shows how meaningless terms like left, right and center are, and how people use them out of laziness or to play political games.

Is reducing healthcare costs (e.g. the public option, which the CBO thought was a real money saver) just a left-wing issue? Is not corruptly bailing out the banks a left-wing issue? "Centrist" is often used as another word for corrupt, with pragmatism as an excuse; there are always rent seekers favoring the status quo. And I say that as someone who genuinely is more a centrist than an extremist of either stripe. "Centrist" as Washington speak is giving real centrists a bad name.

lambert strether

August 11, 2010 at 12:07 pm

Alex writes:

the public option, which the CBO thought was a real money saver

There are a few problems with that statement:

1. Category confusion between the "public option" as a series of talking points, and the public option policy as embodied in crafted legislation. Both constantly shifted, but the implementation started out with 130 million enrollees and ended up with 10 million - the latter figure giving the lie to the public option advocates who claimed that it would succeed in bringing market pressures to bear on the health insurance companies.

2. Here's what the CBO said:

a public plan is also apt to attract enrollees who, overall, are less healthy than average (for the same reasons it would attract a substantial number of enrollees). Although the payments received by all plans in the exchanges would be adjusted to account for differences in the health of their enrollees, the methods used to make such adjustments are imperfect. As a result, the higher costs of those less healthy enrollees in the public plan would probably be offset partially but not entirely; the rest of the added costs would be reflected in the public plan's premiums. Correspondingly, the costs and premiums of competing private plans would, on average, be slightly lower than if no public plan was available.

So, a "real money saver" indeed (for whatever version of the public option CBO was looking at) - just not very much money.

3. Next, CBO scoring is the wrong metric for public policy choices in health care, because it only talks about government spending, and not private spending. Single payer, for example, cannot be fairly assessed by the CBO, since its $400 billion a year savings are society wide.

4. Finally, this is the chart we need to understand how broken our uniquely American health care system is.

JIm Haygood

August 11, 2010 at 9:10 am

'It's the policies, stupid.'

So true. O'Bomba's surge in Afghanistan mirrors Bush's surge in Iraq. And his saber-rattling toward Iran recalls Bush's NYT-trumpeted 'Saddam's WMDs' fantasy. Like his floppy-eared predecessor Lyndon Barack Johnson, O'Bummer's the Viceroy of Vietghanistan, and he's goin' down.

Gibbs's invocation of tired, anachronistic labels such as left-right and liberal-conservative - not to mention fascist policies such as drug testing - shows just how out of it (and how like their alleged nemeses) the O'Bomber White House is.

Unconsciously, they're acting out Poppy Bush's astonishment at the supermarket checkout when he encountered laser scanning. For patrician Poppy, whose servants always did the shopping, sufficiently developed technology was indistinguishable from magic. And now Nobel Laureate O'Bomba thinks sufficiently developed technology is gonna deliver 'victory in Afghanistan.' HA HA HA - frickin' deluded clown - all hail the King of the Drones!

In this, the tenth year of the Bush-Obama administration, all the long-suffering people want to know is: Have we hit bottom yet? I reckon not …

pros

August 11, 2010 at 9:35 am

Obama is the Manchurian candidate of the corporate/military kleptocracy... end of story

Bob Morris

August 11, 2010 at 9:35 am

'The Avocado Declaration' by written by Peter Camejo in 2004 explains how explains how real change in the US invariably originates from third parties and independent movements, and how the historic role of the Democratic Party has been to co-opt such change and render it harmless.

http://www.cagreens.org/longbeach/avocado.htm

That's why Netroots can't win. They can not reform the party from within, and will either be co-opted or leave in disgust.

f. fondremont

August 11, 2010 at 9:40 am

Deja vu but better, Macondo instead of Katrina, even more U6. The same kind of desperate flailing from another disposable mediocrity installed by corporations and cut loose. T

the abject-failure investment theme that worked so well with Bush, Obama's predecessor puppet. This is gonna be great.

citizendave

August 11, 2010 at 10:31 am

Gibbs: "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality … They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president." Gibbs is saying to me "Stop dreaming!" while I'm trying to dream, trying to keep hope alive. Dreaming about true reform is like trying to get a campfire started in a drenching downpour. Gibbs reminded me of Rahm saying in regard to single payer that liberals are (expletive deleted) "retards". I do a periodic "gut check" and ask myself "why are we at war?" and draw a blank for a few seconds until the mainstream excuses start to seep in. I ask myself "what does the White House stand for?" and draw a blank, but nothing starts to seep in, except that they call themselves Democrats. I wonder if they are getting their sense of identity from the polarization with the Republicants. Attempter helps me to see clearly: how has this administration distinguished itself from the previous administration? I don't hold these people in as much contempt as the previous bunch (oh, wait, it is the same bunch). Perhaps that is the greatest danger, that this administration is more subtle, and therefore more insidious.

eightnine2718281828mu5

August 11, 2010 at 10:40 am

This game could not be more simple: unite your supporters and divide your enemies.

Can anyone imagine Reagan insulting his base?
Bush I or II?

Bill or Hillary?

Frank Ohsen

August 11, 2010 at 11:01 am

Ooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. When the MSM starts turning against their darling to this extent you can bet your last devalued dollar that a big war effort is on the brink to distract from collateral political shrapnel. Soros and that ilk of current administration benefactors are no doubt well positioned to take advantage however. Always it's win-win for them.

And if I were Iran I'd be praying to Allah, big time baby. All shock and awe hell about to break loose upon you. Iraq in comparison will look like lazer tag. Picture The Big-O on an aircraft carrier soon.

Obama Czars are about to get their first big wartime test in undiplomatic leadership. They've done really well so far on other matters haven't they? They will be consumate pros at this wartime stuff. Things are looking interestingly fine.

Assume the position boys and girlz. Your initiation is about to commence. Just practice saying: "Sir, may I have another?!!??!!!"

traderjoe

August 11, 2010 at 12:41 pm

Yes, war very possible. We have several nice regional police actions teed up in NK, Iran, Chavez.

It depends upon what the PTB want. Do they want Dems to lose in November to create the illusion of participation and choice with the sheeple? How can they keep the system running for 6-12 more months as they finish their raping of the middle class and prepare for the collapse? Can they stick save the economy a little longer?

There is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. They both serve their corporate/banking/defense masters. They take turns 'being in charge' in order to keep the people quiet. MSNBC and Fox News owned by different media barons – who sell their ads to corporate america. It's all a distraction – keeping people watching the illusion instead of the looting.

brian

August 11, 2010 at 11:07 am

Do we want to abolish the Pentagon? No
Do we want Canadian Healthcare? Hell Yes!!
Covers everyone
Costs 1/3 less
Canadians have a longer lifespan than us
And no 30% off the top to insurers

Todays LA Times

"The top executives at the nation's five largest for-profit health insurance companies pulled in nearly $200 million in compensation last year - while their businesses prepared to hit ratepayers with double-digit premium increases, according to a new analysis conducted by healthcare activists.

The leaders of Cigna Corp., Humana Inc., UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint Inc. each in effect received raises in 2009, the report concluded, based on an analysis of company reports filed with the Security and Exchange Commission.

H. Edward Hanway, former chief executive of Philadelphia-based Cigna, topped the list of high-paid executives, thanks to a retirement package worth $110.9 million. Cigna paid Hanway and his successor, David Cordani, a total of $136.3 million last year.

Only one executive in the list actually saw his paycheck shrink last year: Ron Williams, the CEO of Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna Inc., earned nearly $18.2 million in total compensation, down from $24.4 million in 2008."

lambert strether

August 11, 2010 at 11:28 am

Not to throw gas on the flames of what passes for internecine warfare on what passes for the left, but:

Hamsher was instrumental in creating her own little veal pen on HCR, along with all the other access bloggers, who were - oddly, or not - unanimous in their refusal to give single payer advocates any oxygen at all.

The tell occurred very early, when single payer advocate Dr. Margaret Flowers was arrested for civil disobedience in the Baucus hearing room, since Baucus had refused to include single payer advocates in his hearings. (Unsurprising, since Liz Fowler, a Wellpoint VP on secondment to his staff, had drafted his bill.) None of the access bloggers, including Hamsher, gave this story any play whatever.

Hamsher in particular turned over an entire silo to a paid lobbyist for so-called "public option" advocates HCAN, Jason Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum supplied a daily column misleadingly titled "Health Care News," but in line with HCAN's (and FDL's?) funder mission, it too suppressed single payer coverage.

The story of the public option is a sad one (except for those who were funded to push it, of course). Beginning as an academic proposal by one Jacob Hacker, it began as a neo-liberal proposal that preserved the centrality of health insurance companies, but supplemented their coverage with a Medicare-style program with approximately 130 million enrollees. After many twists and turns, it emerged in the House bill covering 9 or 10 million enrollees, and then died altogether. This, too, is unsurprising, given that the public option was never anything other than a sales pitch in a bait and switch operation, comprised of a series of ever-changing talking points, and had (unlike single payer) never been shown to save a single life or a single dollar. (See Kip Sullivan here and here.)

The cream of the jest is that Obama had betrayed the so-called public option from the very beginning of the HCR process, and never intended to implement it - despite all the "savvy" and "pragmatic" career "progressives" who acted as if it were still on the table. (Whether they knew of Obama's betrayal, or not, isn't really relevant to their putative savviness; if they did know, they betrayed along with Obama; if they did not, they can make no claim to either tactical or strategic competence.)

In short, that Hamsher is being quoted as any sort authority on what the genuine progressives, let alone the left, should do, is not only one of life's little ironies, it's a classic illustration of how Versailles works: Only those who fail are allowed another round to double down; and the dirty hippies who tried to warn everyone of the coming fail were right, are silenced and ostracized.

Valissa

August 11, 2010 at 12:13 pm

I thought Glenn Greenwald said it best here…

Robert Gibbs attacks the fringe losers of the left http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/10/gibbs/index.html

NOTaREALmerican

August 11, 2010 at 12:24 pm

The Red and Blue Teams of the Republicrat Party. Different Clowns same Circus. The sociopaths manipulating the true-believer dumbasses for fun and profit.

Until the peasants are in pain enough that second Party is formed nothing can change. Of course, before that happens the fascists win (it's the simple flow of human nature history – worshiping the nobility).

Kevin de Bruxelles

Yes they are screaming bloody murder today but after a week or so of frenzied outrage and just as the bruises start healing, the Professional (or is it Retarded?)Left will fall back into line and stand by their Dems. The leadership of the Dems know full well that they can bitch slap these weak clowns all they want and the only reaction will be even more eager servitude. Just go read some of the liberal blogs and you will see many of these losers are already trying to crawl back right into bed with their Dems even as their wounds are still oozing.

Barrington Moore in his classic "The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" shows that a reactionary regime always follows the union of the aristocratic and bourgeois elites. In the US it is only slightly different; a wealthy corporate elite have locked in with a liberal cultural elite on economic issues while maintaining a phony cultural war to give the impression of political debate for the benefit of the peasants and lumpenproletariat.

Most of the bourgeois Left are smart enough to know this but insist on continuing this sham political theater since they are not at all ready to throw away the economic benefits of their alliance with corporate wealth. This is why Daily Kos will be full of "Stand by your Dems" diaries. You know how these go: "Yes, it's true the Dems once again brutally pimp slapped us right in front of our family and friends and stuffed a bottle of Drano down our throats and I'm really really outraged about this, but – deep down inside Dems really do love us in their own special way but are just afraid to show it, and we just need to elect better Dems that won't slap us around quite so much …"

O=W, and when the majority of American's finally realize that it makes absolutely no difference whether a Democrat or Republican wins an election, then we will start moving towards a solution. But this also means realizing that success is not measured by whether the other party that you vote for wins. Once Americans are liberated from voting for the peanuts the Republicrats throw their way real political parties will eventually take form. The political establishment will fight this process tooth and nail of course. So watch out for more fake rebranding exercises like the Tea Party.

When the Gap realized they were not doing so well with a lower income demographic they opened up Old Navy – but even though it has a different name and slightly different products, it's still all run out of Gap headquarters. The Tea Party is just the Republicans version of Old Navy where they opened a slightly rebranded knock-off for their low-rent voters. But they maintain complete control over it. If the Dems lose big in 2010 look for them to open up an equally weak knock-off chain called something goofy like "We Shall Overcome" for pissed off lefties.

anonymous

I agree with almost this entire post, except for the part about the Republicans and the Tea-Party. The Tea-party is home to a lot of unhappy, small government, anti-Obama types and many of them will vote Republican, mostly because between their anti-Obama and anti-big government sentiments, they're almost certain to show up at the polls to depose the party in power.

Where you have it wrong, IMHO, is that the Tea-Partiers are as hostile, almost, to Republicans as they are Dems, for many of the reasons you cite.

I spent a couple of years at DKOS and agree very much with your general observation. There are hardcore dissenters but they don't get much play. And that's the difference between the Tea-Party and the left.

The Left takes no and the beatdown over and over and then begs for more. The Tea-Party isn't built that way. The GOP would love to own them. Howard Dean will try to marry the GOP to Bush or the 'racist fringe' in the Tea Party, but the sense I get is that the Tea-Party isn't taking orders from any authority figures, self-appointed or elected.

If the GOP does as well as expected, they'll be under the same scrutiny and if they don't deliver, they're going to hear about it, sooner rather than later. I'm not saying the Tea-Partiers are rational or correct. But they're not owned by anyone.

liberal

But they're not owned by anyone.

Of course they're owned by the GOP. Where were they on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Where were they when the tally for Iraq was closing in on $1T?

Jessica

Right now, American politics is a battle between those who favor a stronger government, which will give more money and power to the very rich, and those who favor a weaker government so that the rich can just take it from us.

How do we create something new? I think we need both vision and organization.

anonymous

This is an astonishing comment. What would anyone else have done? I can think of a dozen sites offering informed options about what might have been done differently from the perspective of the left and from the right.

You've clearly not bothered to read the central argument in the guest post, which is that whatever the intent, the current policies are not working. And with unemployment around 10 percent, those without jobs would like to have jobs.

Yves has offered a variety of different solutions to different parts of the problem in multiple posts and generally very good links. The guest posters here are outstanding. So, there are a lot of things different people might have done differently.

Take a look around the web. TPM has some interesting commentary on the stimulus was too small by design, Eschaton on the blogroll here is covering the same points.

I'm one of the Obama bashers and would love to be able to say something nice about the guy, beyond he clearly loves his family and growing rich. The great seats he gets at any basketball game he wants to attend are cool, too, but not much consolation to the thirty odd million looking for work.

John

Thanks for the . Was looking for a good fight and not sure I would find one.

I think you underestimate the contradictions at play.

You have the pensions of the american public tied up in 401k's, bonds, and the like…. If the financial community is brought to heel, as it should be, the savings of these and of others around the world, if the financial implosion of 08 is any indication, are gone.

Consider in addition the ongoing role of America as the world's policeman, the budgetary issues aligned with that, and how we draw down expenditures while keeping employees working at all those independent contractors and military hardware and software producers (the kind of manufacturing America does nowadays.)

People get too educated. That's what I think. And it stops them from seeing we have a world of around 6 billion people to keep alive one way or another, and 10 billion will be in the mix by around 2050.

We can make the food. We can build the houses. We can create the infrastructure. The only question is what is it going take to get it done? And, the answer to that involves money, and money is a weird thing, especially today when around 97% of it is 0's and 1's.

Tao Jonesing

@John,

Speaking the truth about Obama is not "bashing" him.

And to say that Obama's efforts on health insurance reform and financial reform have "fallen a bit short" is such a massive understatement that it defies reality. The man did NOT put his full effort into achieving any more than he "achieved" (like the individual mandate that he primary Obama opposed). Indeed, he and his administration behind the scenes actively worked against the very things Obama said he wanted in various speeches and town halls.

The office of the President is a very powerful one, unless you don't want it to be. Obama could have achieved much, much more if he had wanted to do so.

John

You may well be right. I hope not though.

Doug Terpstra

"…to say that Obama's efforts on health insurance reform and financial reform have "fallen a bit short" is such a massive understatement that it defies reality."

Well said. HCR and Financial Regulation were both bloated bills written by lobbyists as Trojan-horse victories for the kleptocracy, with implementation delayed for electoral strategy. It is in fact Gibbs who should be escorted to the boy's room with a specimen cup.

Doug Terpstra

August 11, 2010 at 1:13 pm

"What interests me is his attempt to discredit via branding a group the Administration sees as enemies."

Indeed, but it's not yet as paranoid as Nixon's "enemies list." Intended as a perjorative, "Professional Left" is not quite as clever as oxymoronic labels like "limousine liberal" or "cultural elitist". "Professional" normally connotes an expert of intellectual integrity and high moral character, so it is actually quite complimentary, except of course, when applied to politician, lawyer, or press secretary.

Jackrabbit

August 11, 2010 at 1:33 pm

This comment makes no sense to me.

The Left should be comforted because the slur doesn't rise to Nixon's level of paranoia?

The Left should be complemented because they've been labeled "Professional?"

The term "Professional Left" was used to attack the legitimacy of the criticism being leveled at the Administration. As in "those people will never be satisfied – its their JOB to be criticial."

Doug Terpstra,

August 11, 2010 at 1:43 pm

My point was that it's not a very effective slur. Sorry if that makes no sense to you.

Jackrabbit

August 11, 2010 at 1:18 pm

Gibbs was probably falling back on the old maxim: "a good defense is a good offense."

The Administration can't defend its compromises and concessions and is embarrassed that the left is looking past the PR to their record. Then there's lame-brained goof-ups like Michele Obama's recent trip to Spain which Maureen Dowd highlighted in her NYTimes column.

dandelion

August 11, 2010 at 1:46 pm

One thing I hope is put to rest forever: the notion that experience doesn't matter. Beside the very large problem with policy is the fact that this WH organization is tremendously disorganized and incompetent - witness the failure to replace the Bush-appointed states attorneys general even knowing how politicized those appointments were; witness the complete failure in the Gulf; witness the complete inability to articulate a vision that is coherent.

The Obamamaniacs' consistent cry that experience didn't matter was naive and ageist (and sexist when claiming that Hillary Clinton's experience was only "serving tea.") The idea that he was equally experienced as Lincoln was a ludicrous and ridiculously hagiographic comparison.

At a time when we're involved in two wars, facing the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, the DNC engineered the nomination of the most inexperienced person running and told us over and over that "judgment" was more important.

Right. In what other employment scenario would any one consider that a valid argument?

[Aug 12, 2010] Frustrated White House Slams "Professional Left"

Yet this is an Administration that, ironically, seems to think its Faustian pacts with corporate interests can be sold to a presumed-to-be-clueless public with artful PR.

Stress will bring out an organism's or an organization's defenses, and the beleaguered Obama administration is looking mighty defensive these days. The great unwashed public isn't buying its PR about its supposed accomplishments, such as the disgrace that it misbrands as financial reform (which 80% are skeptical will prevent a future crisis) and health care reform (which a recent poll shows disapproval v. approval in a 4:3 ratio).

Yet this is an Administration that, ironically, seems to think its Faustian pacts with corporate interests can be sold to a presumed-to-be-clueless public with artful PR. But this supposedly media savvy bunch has persistently violated a fundamental rule of marketing: you don't misrepresent your product. While politicians all oversell what they can accomplish, the Team Obama campaign has become increasingly desperate as the inconsistency between the Administration's "product positioning" and observable reality become increasingly evident. As we noted in March:

The widespread, vocal opposition to the TARP was evidence that a once complacent populace had been roused. Reform, if proposed with energy and confidence, wasn't a risk; not only was it badly needed, it was just what voters wanted.

But incoming president Obama failed to act. Whether he failed to see the opportunity, didn't understand it, or was simply not interested is moot. Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the Obama administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff. There would be no Nixon goes to China moment from the architects of the policies that created the crisis, namely Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers.

Defenders of the administration no doubt will content that the public was not ready for measures like the putting large banks like Citigroup into receivership. Even if that were true (and the current widespread outrage against banks says otherwise), that view assumes that the executive branch is a mere spectator, when it has the most powerful bully pulpit in the nation. Other leaders have taken unpopular moves and still maintained public support.

Obama's repudiation of his campaign promise of change, by turning his back on meaningful reform of the financial services industry, in turn locked his Administration into a course of action. The new administration would have no choice other that working fist in glove with the banksters, supporting and amplifying their own, well established, propaganda efforts.

Thus Obama's incentives are to come up with "solutions" that paper over problems, avoid meaningful conflict with the industry, minimize complaints, and restore the old practice of using leverage and investment gains to cover up stagnation in worker incomes. Potemkin reforms dovetail with the financial service industry's goal of forestalling any measures that would interfere with its looting. So the only problem with this picture was how to fool the now-impoverished public into thinking a program of Mussolini-style corporatism represented progress.

To put it more simply, "it's the policies, stupid." The Obama Administration appears pathologically unable to see that its flagging poll numbers and the high odds of credibility-sapping Democrat losses in the mid-term elections are the result of errors in judgment. But instead, it is now reduced to trying to shift blame for its flagging fortunes onto….evil pinkos! This would be comical if it weren't utterly pathetic.

What passes for the left in this country has been so marginalized that it has limited sway to begin with (although the public is strongly supportive of some positions they defend, such as preserving Social Security and Medicare). And Team Obama would have to have a badly distorted self image to think its centrist (at best) policies qualify as progressive. A more logical explanation is that the Administration presumed it could either co-opt or corral enough liberals so that any salvos from that flank would be limited to those deemed so extreme that their opposition might actually be a plus (think the controversial Noam Chomsky). Jane Hamsher has chronicled the aggressive Obama efforts to shackle liberal groups :

Someone asked me over the weekend to be more explicit about what the term "veal pen" means:

The veal crate is a wooden restraining device that is the veal calf's permanent home. It is so small (22″ x 54″) that the calves cannot turn around or even lie down and stretch and is the ultimate in high-profit, confinement animal agriculture.(1) Designed to prevent movement (exercise), the crate does its job of atrophying the calves' muscles, thus producing tender "gourmet" veal.

[]

About 14 weeks after their birth, the calves are slaughtered. The quality of this "food," laden with chemicals, lacking in fiber and other nutrients, diseased and processed, is another matter. The real issue is the calves' experience. During their brief lives, they never see the sun or touch the Earth. They never see or taste the grass. Their anemic bodies crave proper sustenance. Their muscles ache for freedom and exercise. They long for maternal care. They are kept in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes…..

I heard it over and over again - if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn't the last time something like that happened - just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.

And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent. They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out….

Where are they on health care? Why aren't they running ads against the AMA, the hospitals, the insurance industry barons who have $700 million in stock options, PhRMA, the device manufacturers and the White House for doing back room deals with all of the above?

Why are they not calling for the White House to release the details of those secret deals?

Because they are participating in those deals, instead of trying to destroy them. Well, that and funneling millions of dollars in pass-throughs to their consultant friends that they are supposed to be spending on the health care fight.

The truth is - they've all been sucked into insulating the White House from liberal critique, and protecting the administration's ability to carry out a neoliberal agenda that does not serve the interests of their members. They spend their time calculating how to do the absolute minimum to retain their progressive street cred and still walk the line of never criticizing the White House.

Yves here. With this as background, the impotent White House tongue-lashing reported yesterday in The Hill is particularly revealing:

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy."

The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."…..

Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington "in America," and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.

Yves here. I suspect most readers will take issue with Gibbs' straw manning and claim that "progressives" are solidly behind Obama. What interests me is his attempt to discredit via branding a group the Administration sees as enemies.

"Professional left" evokes images of union members drummed up to come out and join protests, all carrying the same mass manufactured placards. Yet the irony here is the Administration's frustration results from the fact that the people that are real thorns in its side are the antithesis of career political foot soldiers of the left of center persuasion. Per Hamsher, that's the sort they've been able to neutralize.

Instead, the ones that have annoyed them are those who have followings not because they are paid operatives of leftie groups, as Gibbs intimates, but effective, charismatic commentators on TV, such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Dylan Ratigan. So the "professional," which should be a compliment, is instead a slur, implying they make their money by (per Gibbs' rant) hewing to an ideological line, as opposed to simply calling out obvious and persistent Obama Administration hypocrisy.

To the extent any of the members of these professional lefties' fanbases even take notice of Gibbs' peculiar attack, it's certain to engender more loyalty. The fact he'd resort to a stunt like this indicates not simply desperation, but also detachment from reality.

russell1200

August 11, 2010 at 5:38 am

Or it could be that they are manufacturing a Sister Souljah moment. The Glenn Becks of the world have branded them as communists, and they are trying to recapture the independent vote.

Which of course would somewhat make Ms. Hamsher's point.

Of course they do have some rather radical elements in (not necessarily very important) positions within their administration, which leave them open to the "communist" attack.

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DownSouth

August 11, 2010 at 6:46 am

You have fallen into the same trap as Obama, thinking it's all about rhetoric (branding) and nothing about substance.

Obama lost the independents because of his policy failures, not because something some fringe right-wing entertainer said.

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alex

August 11, 2010 at 8:19 am

"Of course they do have some rather radical elements in (not necessarily very important) positions within their administration …"

Please name some – the presence of some "radicals" might make me feel better.

BTW, what qualifies as a radical in the Obama administration? Someone who favors prudence with taxpayers' money over feeding the hand that bribes you? Believing that the Bill of Rights is not toilet paper?

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Bill in Providence

August 11, 2010 at 1:24 pm

"BTW, what qualifies as a radical in the Obama administration? Someone who favors prudence with taxpayers' money over feeding the hand that bribes you?"

Faaabulous! I owe you a drink of your choice for that. You brightened my dark day.

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pjwrites

August 11, 2010 at 1:35 pm

Hear, hear, Alex.

Should the Obama administration need answers as to why the professional left or anyone else may doubt his ability to lead, your last two "questions" should prove the point.

This is exactly why I lost any respect I had for the man.

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john bougearel

August 11, 2010 at 6:00 am

The Obama Administration, and the risk to the Democrat party in the mid-term elections may be more a result of 'errors in character' and not just 'errors in judgment.'

Neoliberal agendas from the Obama administration speak more to errors of character more than judgment, imho. The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs 'peculiar attack' on critics of the Administration speaks to both errors of character and judgment.

Less is more, Mr. Gibbs, speak softly and carry a big stick, and your words will be like iron.

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anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 6:08 am

Thank you, Yves, for reminding us how sick of Bush profligacy and cronyism, we all were and what a transparently empty suit candidate nothing burger was and is.

The devil for me is in the details. My wife and don't smoke. I quit before we got married and while our domestic life is far from perfect, we haven't poisoned our kids with second-hand smoke. Hope and change only thought seriously the consequences of his tobacco addiction about quitting once the cameras started rolling.

Still, the pliant press willingly fed the bum cigarettes while writing 'gym rat' hagiographies, and 'he really is trying to quit' excuses for Inflate My Grades.

I didn't personally write about a billion email, comments, and essays for near 10% unemployment for pretty much all of the Dem president's only term in office.

This guy was always one of the 'them.' Heard a telling interview with 'O', one of the few times I actually listened to anything he said. He was waxing eloquent about his purported love for baseball. When asked about his favorite player on one of the Chicago teams, 'O' slipped past the question to identify one of the owners, by name.

'Wouldn't want to get him mad at me', reported O. Well, rest assured, the wealthiest folks in America are feeling pretty good about their collective 600 million dollar investment. Stock market is doing fine, the rich are getting richer and My Wife Still Shops At Target is finding that getting used to all that money and celebrity simply takes practice.

Those high unemployment numbers, btw? They're not numbers, they're figures, symbols, representing broken dreams, broken finances, and broken families, in many cases. That's the legacy of cowardice, self-interest, and corruption.

If a Republican were presiding over this kind of economic and social train wreck there would be riots in the street.

Instead, we have to come to Naked Capitalism for sensible, expert editorial comment.

Wasn't like some of us didn't see this all coming.

'Question his experience and judgment?' Sound to me like you calling him 'uppity.'

Times to remember.

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attempter

August 11, 2010 at 6:46 am

This has been one of the few episodes of comedy I've been able to enjoy lately. It sure does evince desperation on the administration's part, and also gives the clearest revelation yet of how much Obama truly despises the "progressives" and everything they claim (but never act upon) to believe in.

At the same time watching said progressives whine and sputter over it afforded much Schadenfreude.

I especially liked the imbecility of the "professional left" comment, when it's precisely the professional hacks who have been such despicable traitors in astroturfing for this corporate thug administration. So it's precisely them who this clown yaps at, and now their feelings are hurt? Awww…

Anybody who truly didn't like this kind of treatment would renounce Obama and the Democratic party once and for all as clearly beyond redemption. I said this was the clearest revelation yet, but it's really been pretty clear from the start.

But I fear that for all the whining, Obama's still making a fairly safe bet that this rabble will largely cave in and crawl back as they always do, since "we have no alternative to the Democratic party" constitutes the extremely pinched limits of their courage, their morality, and their intelligence.

Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the Obama administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff.

That sums up why the "inheritance" meme is such a vile lie. If an inheritance is odious to you, you renounce it, you reject it, you destroy it.

But when you embrace the "inheritance" with lascivious glee, as Obama embraced the Bailout, the war, the corporatist assault in general, and all the economic policies, right down to the same personnel, which destroyed this country, then it's no inheritance at all. You take full personal ownership retroactively to Day One.

That's what Obama did across the board.

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anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 8:18 am

Occidental College, Columbia, Harvard Law, Hyde Park? Not exactly a track-record of poverty and self-denial, is it?

Course, paying for it without good grades and scholarships means kissing some rich butt along the way. The corporate class recognizes ambition and greed. Obama parked his behind in the pews of Wright's church once a week or so to build credibility and used his community organizing operations to help poor people and make Rezko rich.

He might be a good man and motivated by all the right reasons. I personally doubt it. But you don't borrow money to buy a home you can't afford from the Bank of Thug unless you're either especially dumb or simply greedy and amoral.

I see no reason to vilify him for being anything other than a corrupt member of the ruling class. The Kerry yacht debacle shows the gulf separating us from them. I'm extremely unlikely to make 500 k in any single year, much less pay 500 k in taxes for my toy boat.

Bob Herbert wrote an excellent column this week on the misery of unemployment and the loss of dignity and dreams.

I'd happily trade any single year of Bush, including 2003, for a return to unemployment numbers during the Bush years.

2000-2008 is starting to look like the good old days to an increasing number of Americans.

It's that bad.

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i on the ball patriot

August 11, 2010 at 8:42 am

Pernicious Greed Slams "Professional Vanilla Greed", thus elevating the perpetual conflict and deflecting from the real world of rich and poor, have and have not, and the wealthy ruling elite intentional genocide by propaganda of the global middle class and underclass.

Pernicious Greed and Vanilla Greed are now co-opted as symbolic tools of divisiveness further blurring the lines of the fake political theater and masking the deceptions.

The wealthy ruling elite own and control the delivery of the total propaganda machine including the 'highly paid operatives' such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Dylan Ratigan. ("effective, charismatic commentators on TV" - ROTFLMAO).

As the deception deepens, and is being discovered at the same time, the con always throws more distraction into the game.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

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liberal

August 11, 2010 at 12:38 pm

Anybody who truly didn't like this kind of treatment would renounce Obama and the Democratic party once and for all as clearly beyond redemption.

I agree, but because of the twin idiocies of first-past-the-post voting and a lack of proportional representation, a viable third party simply isn't possible.

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Mad Hemingway

August 11, 2010 at 6:56 am

Like FDR, I welcome the Administration's hatred.

Let's see them get re-elected without their base.

As far as Jane H goes, she'd be better off dumping the Dems permanently; that's her blind spot. I lost count of the number of times she raised money for the "progressive" pols during health care, only to see them all fold to Obama. That's what busts people's credibility.

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Psychoanalystus

August 11, 2010 at 7:11 am

Obama sold out the American people first on the health care "reform", then on this financial reform, then on the useless wars, and most recently on the British Petroleum clean up.

Paraphrasing another reader, "no balls, no principles… just bull shit" That's Obama, alright!

Psychoanalystus

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JohnL

August 11, 2010 at 7:27 am

Everyone's acting as if Obama and the Democrats were the only politicians in this little act. I guess everyone has forgotten the GOP's deliberate acts of opposition, obstruction, denial, delay and downright public lying on any and everything the Democrats and Obama have proposed.

Not one bill has produced a GOP alternate; instead, we've seen them foaming at the mouth in fake outrage over how Obama is putting us deeper in debt (forgetting the massive hole their previous leader dug initially), how his acts were nothing but corporate pandering, while they proposed nothing at all.

I certainly blame Obama for not being liberal enough, but given the rhetoric and constant propaganda spewing from the right side of the aisle, it's inevitable that he has tried to find some common ground with them. The problem is, there isn't one; the GOP has decided to conduct a scorched earth strategy for 2 years in the hope that it leads to a majority turnaround in both houses of Congress. If that happens, watch true gridlock take place for the next two years!

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Francois T

August 11, 2010 at 9:07 am

Oh! Lots of us haven't forget the Reichpubliscums and their strategy of scorched Earth while betting on the legendary amnesia of Joe-6-pack and Jane 10-pack-Carton. Of course, all this with a mainstream media that trembles with abject dear anytime a hint of "librul" accusation MAY float their way.

That said, this was the hand Obama was dealt. Instead of repeatedly expose the Repubs for what they do and who they are, (like Alan Grayson from which the WH could buy a clue or two) he chose to play the great guy who can raise above the fray. Well, that may be real effective during a philosophical debate, but a debate this ain't: it's about getting results, meaningful results at that.

The telltale sign that this was not achieved is this: despite a high number of legislative accomplishments, the public perceive, and rightly so, that substantive victories are few and far between. Be it health care, financial reform, said victories were obtained by compromising from the get go. Is that what they call a good negotiation strategy? Or was it the Obama paradigm from the start?

As for other "promises" like card check (out of the agenda as far as the eye can see) DADT, DOMA, CFPA (OMFG!!!! Is Warren nominable ask the Obamatons while shaking in their boots) immigration reform, we'll wait a long time for these to happen.

The bottom line? FDR was not, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a first class intellect, but he sure had a world class personality. Obama? Just the reverse.

As for the Republicants, I'm ready to bet a nice and crisp 100$ bill (backed by the full faith and credit of the US gubmint, of course) that their mid term electoral results will be dismally bad, contrary to the lame stream media prognostications.

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readerOfTeaLeaves

August 11, 2010 at 11:05 am

Agree that Obama was dealt a horrendous hand with respect to GOP obstructionism, and also agree with Francois T that the GOP will do worse in the midterms than the general news media predict.

With that said:

Yet the irony here is the Administration's frustration results from the fact that the people that are real thorns in its side are the antithesis of career political foot soldiers of the left of center persuasion. Per Hamsher, that's the sort they've been able to neutralize.

Instead, the ones that have annoyed them are those who have followings not because they are paid operatives of leftie groups, as Gibbs intimates, but effective, charismatic commentators on TV, such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Dylan Ratigan. So the "professional," which should be a compliment, is instead a slur, implying they make their money by (per Gibbs' rant) hewing to an ideological line, as opposed to simply calling out obvious and persistent Obama Administration hypocrisy.

Whereas the Fox media appear to take their information from GOP-fed Talking Points (talk about your veal pen…), the left appears to draw from a wider, more intellectually fearless collection of fairly diverse temperaments.

FWIW, what appears to distinguish 'the left' is a focus on the need for outcomes. The traditional left may have been fine with endless meetings and nice appointments; the newer left appear to be far more focused on outcomes.

Our federal political processes (including Senate rules, as well as the structure of Senate committees) has been overwhelmed by a multitude of factors. In addition, the old one-state-two-votes notion is ludicrous if you look at the demography of the US: currently, only 9 states have half the population, which means that there are 18 senate votes representing half the population of the United States.

Rather than howl like a stuck pig, Gibbs would be smarter to explain how the demographics of the 20th century (accelerating after WWII) resulted in a political process where any single senate vote can shut down the federal legislative process.

18 senate votes represent **half** the US population.
The other 82 votes represent the other half of the population.

Of those 82 votes in low-density states, at least half are currently controlled by the GOP obstructionists.

This is what Gibbs needs to understand, and then explain.
Whining is not going to cut it.

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Doug Terpstra

August 11, 2010 at 11:28 am

Another who perceives Obama's tangled web. Thespian Brer Obama is playing his role to the hilt: "don't throw me into that briar patch!" wink-wink. The "opposition" will do so of course, raising the specter of Palin as the new Caesar and thus ensuring his second term.

One clarification on Obama's "substantive victories": I submit that such trumpeted 'achievements', both HCR and FR, were not merely highly "compromised" but in fact Trojan-horse victories for the kleptocracy, ensuring a captive market for insurance rackets and rolling bailouts for Wall Street banksters, soon to be followed by Social Security "reform". Delayed implementation leaves some doubt about that assertion, but the thousands and thousands of lobbyist-authored pages are most assuredly full of the devil's details.

On HCR, Gibb's comment, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare…", reveals volumes about the Bummer administration's core values. Oh, no, not Canadian healhcare!

What scary radicals these 'professional lefties' are. If they had their way we'd have Kucinich's Department of Peace, engaging in actual diplomacy, and withdrawing from quagmire oil wars. Where's the profit in that?

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Fritz

August 11, 2010 at 7:39 am

The Obsolescence of Barack Obama
Wall Street Journal August 11

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704164904575421363005578460.html

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Iok Sotot

August 11, 2010 at 7:50 am

""I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy.""

Obama is nothing like George W. Bush! The most striking diffirence is that Obama is a black man and can talk good. Also, Obama is black. If those two were standing next to each other you would be able to tell which one is which because GW is a pale beige while Obama is more coffee colored.
He's taller too.

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BDBlue

August 11, 2010 at 7:53 am

If only more people had paid attention to Adolph Reed, Jr. about Obama (or anything else, for that matter). Here's what he wrote about him in 1996 (so, really, nothing is new):

In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program–the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.

It was all branding. From the very get-go. That's where the lesson is. And, of course, now that people bought the product, they can see it doesn't live up to its branding. That was predictable.

What's surprising is that so many of the Obama people don't seem to understand that basic notion. You'd think Gibbs – part of Obama's branding team – would understand the issue.

Or maybe he does and this is more branding. One last tribal appeal to all those "progressives" in "real America" to stand with their guy. Nevermind what Consumer Reports says, Obama is awesome.

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anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 9:20 am

has a bone to pick with Yves, Markos, and Jane H.

As I noted up thread, there is nothing remarkable about the current occupant of the Oval Office, He is not deserving of any special opprobrium, IMHO.

The magic didn't take back in 2007 at a time when I wanted very much to believe in the "eloquence and intelligence" of the Senator from Chicago. Didn't. I can remember clearly two events. The first was an article in New York magazine describing Obama's talent for slipping difficult questions. A lady in in a town hall asked the Senator if he thought there was too much religion in American politics. As I person of faith, I was sincerely hoping that we'd get a clear, unambiguous YES, as an answer. Instead, he offered a lecture on Martin Luther King and James Madison and the baffle-gab just spilled forth and flowed. Then, he appeared on the Daily Show and allowed Jon Stewart to lick his hand. Yukk!

That was it for me. With luck, we'll have enough Republicans under pressure to return to small government to create a pro-business environment and get the job numbers up. I'd actually like to see Yves in charge of reforming the regulatory apparatus of the government. Cause I'm not seeing anything from any party that inspires any reason to believe there's going to be any change.

Put people back to work and scale back the big projects.

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anonymous

August 11, 2010 at 9:22 am

Ruth Marcus has a bone to pick. Sorry about messing up the html.

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liberal

August 11, 2010 at 1:16 pm

I supported the guy, but I knew exactly what he was by looking up his voting record (in this case, at Americans for Democrati c Action).

So I'm disappointed but not at all surprised.

As for the hope/change BS, it was obvious from the get-go that that was just campaign rhetoric.

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scharfy

August 11, 2010 at 8:13 am

He just never had it. As the previous poster noted – Obama was a brand, sold to American as the perfect antidote to the spoiled child of privilege – George Bush.

Though the right continually tried to paint him as a left wing ideologue, a man of deep internal Marxists tendency, he was nothing of the sort. Sure he hung out with radicals, even knew a few, but only because it added to the brand, at times. In truth he was a political opportunist, sailing wherever the wind blew him, quickly to be sure – but never with his own rudder, with his own convictions.

He certainly didn't betray the left, anymore than W betrayed the right. Those men were exactly who they were supposed to be. How could they conceal themselves?

I think it was Aristotle who said a nation gets the leader it deserves. American hyper-consumerism brought to power a media darling straight from Madison Avenue, catalyzed by the media in all its glory.

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alex

August 11, 2010 at 8:39 am

This shows how meaningless terms like left, right and center are, and how people use them out of laziness or to play political games.

Is reducing healthcare costs (e.g. the public option, which the CBO thought was a real money saver) just a left-wing issue? Is not corruptly bailing out the banks a left-wing issue? "Centrist" is often used as another word for corrupt, with pragmatism as an excuse; there are always rent seekers favoring the status quo. And I say that as someone who genuinely is more a centrist than an extremist of either stripe. "Centrist" as Washington speak is giving real centrists a bad name.

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lambert strether

August 11, 2010 at 12:07 pm

Alex writes:

the public option, which the CBO thought was a real money saver

There are a few problems with that statement:

1. Category confusion between the "public option" as a series of talking points, and the public option policy as embodied in crafted legislation. Both constantly shifted, but the implementation started out with 130 million enrollees and ended up with 10 million - the latter figure giving the lie to the public option advocates who claimed that it would succeed in bringing market pressures to bear on the health insurance companies.

2. Here's what the CBO said:

a public plan is also apt to attract enrollees who, overall, are less healthy than average (for the same reasons it would attract a substantial number of enrollees). Although the payments received by all plans in the exchanges would be adjusted to account for differences in the health of their enrollees, the methods used to make such adjustments are imperfect. As a result, the higher costs of those less healthy enrollees in the public plan would probably be offset partially but not entirely; the rest of the added costs would be reflected in the public plan's premiums. Correspondingly, the costs and premiums of competing private plans would, on average, be slightly lower than if no public plan was available.

So, a "real money saver" indeed (for whatever version of the public option CBO was looking at) - just not very much money.

3. Next, CBO scoring is the wrong metric for public policy choices in health care, because it only talks about government spending, and not private spending. Single payer, for example, cannot be fairly assessed by the CBO, since its $400 billion a year savings are society wide.

4. Finally, this is the chart we need to understand how broken our uniquely American health care system is.

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JIm Haygood

August 11, 2010 at 9:10 am

'It's the policies, stupid.'

So true. O'Bomba's surge in Afghanistan mirrors Bush's surge in Iraq. And his saber-rattling toward Iran recalls Bush's NYT-trumpeted 'Saddam's WMDs' fantasy. Like his floppy-eared predecessor Lyndon Barack Johnson, O'Bummer's the Viceroy of Vietghanistan, and he's goin' down.

Gibbs's invocation of tired, anachronistic labels such as left-right and liberal-conservative - not to mention fascist policies such as drug testing - shows just how out of it (and how like their alleged nemeses) the O'Bomber White House is.

Unconsciously, they're acting out Poppy Bush's astonishment at the supermarket checkout when he encountered laser scanning. For patrician Poppy, whose servants always did the shopping, sufficiently developed technology was indistinguishable from magic. And now Nobel Laureate O'Bomba thinks sufficiently developed technology is gonna deliver 'victory in Afghanistan.' HA HA HA - frickin' deluded clown - all hail the King of the Drones!

In this, the tenth year of the Bush-Obama administration, all the long-suffering people want to know is: Have we hit bottom yet? I reckon not …

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pros

August 11, 2010 at 9:35 am

Obama is the Manchurian candidate of the corporate/military kleptocracy... end of story

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Bob Morris

August 11, 2010 at 9:35 am

'The Avocado Declaration' by written by Peter Camejo in 2004 explains how explains how real change in the US invariably originates from third parties and independent movements, and how the historic role of the Democratic Party has been to co-opt such change and render it harmless.

http://www.cagreens.org/longbeach/avocado.htm

That's why Netroots can't win. They can not reform the party from within, and will either be co-opted or leave in disgust.

f. fondremont

August 11, 2010 at 9:40 am

Deja vu but better, Macondo instead of Katrina, even more U6. The same kind of desperate flailing from another disposable mediocrity installed by corporations and cut loose. T

the abject-failure investment theme that worked so well with Bush, Obama's predecessor puppet. This is gonna be great.

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citizendave

August 11, 2010 at 10:31 am

Gibbs: "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality … They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president." Gibbs is saying to me "Stop dreaming!" while I'm trying to dream, trying to keep hope alive. Dreaming about true reform is like trying to get a campfire started in a drenching downpour. Gibbs reminded me of Rahm saying in regard to single payer that liberals are (expletive deleted) "retards". I do a periodic "gut check" and ask myself "why are we at war?" and draw a blank for a few seconds until the mainstream excuses start to seep in. I ask myself "what does the White House stand for?" and draw a blank, but nothing starts to seep in, except that they call themselves Democrats. I wonder if they are getting their sense of identity from the polarization with the Republicants. Attempter helps me to see clearly: how has this administration distinguished itself from the previous administration? I don't hold these people in as much contempt as the previous bunch (oh, wait, it is the same bunch). Perhaps that is the greatest danger, that this administration is more subtle, and therefore more insidious.

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eightnine2718281828mu5

August 11, 2010 at 10:40 am

This game could not be more simple: unite your supporters and divide your enemies.

Can anyone imagine Reagan insulting his base?
Bush I or II?

Bill or Hillary?

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Frank Ohsen

August 11, 2010 at 11:01 am

Ooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. When the MSM starts turning against their darling to this extent you can bet your last devalued dollar that a big war effort is on the brink to distract from collateral political shrapnel. Soros and that ilk of current administration benefactors are no doubt well positioned to take advantage however. Always it's win-win for them.

And if I were Iran I'd be praying to Allah, big time baby. All shock and awe hell about to break loose upon you. Iraq in comparison will look like lazer tag. Picture The Big-O on an aircraft carrier soon.

Obama Czars are about to get their first big wartime test in undiplomatic leadership. They've done really well so far on other matters haven't they? They will be consumate pros at this wartime stuff. Things are looking interestingly fine.

Assume the position boys and girlz. Your initiation is about to commence. Just practice saying: "Sir, may I have another?!!??!!!"

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traderjoe

August 11, 2010 at 12:41 pm

Yes, war very possible. We have several nice regional police actions teed up in NK, Iran, Chavez.

It depends upon what the PTB want. Do they want Dems to lose in November to create the illusion of participation and choice with the sheeple? How can they keep the system running for 6-12 more months as they finish their raping of the middle class and prepare for the collapse? Can they stick save the economy a little longer?

There is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. They both serve their corporate/banking/defense masters. They take turns 'being in charge' in order to keep the people quiet. MSNBC and Fox News owned by different media barons – who sell their ads to corporate america. It's all a distraction – keeping people watching the illusion instead of the looting.

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brian

August 11, 2010 at 11:07 am

Do we want to abolish the Pentagon? No
Do we want Canadian Healthcare? Hell Yes!!
Covers everyone
Costs 1/3 less
Canadians have a longer lifespan than us
And no 30% off the top to insurers

Todays LA Times

"The top executives at the nation's five largest for-profit health insurance companies pulled in nearly $200 million in compensation last year - while their businesses prepared to hit ratepayers with double-digit premium increases, according to a new analysis conducted by healthcare activists.

The leaders of Cigna Corp., Humana Inc., UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint Inc. each in effect received raises in 2009, the report concluded, based on an analysis of company reports filed with the Security and Exchange Commission.

H. Edward Hanway, former chief executive of Philadelphia-based Cigna, topped the list of high-paid executives, thanks to a retirement package worth $110.9 million. Cigna paid Hanway and his successor, David Cordani, a total of $136.3 million last year.

Only one executive in the list actually saw his paycheck shrink last year: Ron Williams, the CEO of Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna Inc., earned nearly $18.2 million in total compensation, down from $24.4 million in 2008."

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lambert strether

August 11, 2010 at 11:28 am

Not to throw gas on the flames of what passes for internecine warfare on what passes for the left, but:

Hamsher was instrumental in creating her own little veal pen on HCR, along with all the other access bloggers, who were - oddly, or not - unanimous in their refusal to give single payer advocates any oxygen at all.

The tell occurred very early, when single payer advocate Dr. Margaret Flowers was arrested for civil disobedience in the Baucus hearing room, since Baucus had refused to include single payer advocates in his hearings. (Unsurprising, since Liz Fowler, a Wellpoint VP on secondment to his staff, had drafted his bill.) None of the access bloggers, including Hamsher, gave this story any play whatever.

Hamsher in particular turned over an entire silo to a paid lobbyist for so-called "public option" advocates HCAN, Jason Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum supplied a daily column misleadingly titled "Health Care News," but in line with HCAN's (and FDL's?) funder mission, it too suppressed single payer coverage.

The story of the public option is a sad one (except for those who were funded to push it, of course). Beginning as an academic proposal by one Jacob Hacker, it began as a neo-liberal proposal that preserved the centrality of health insurance companies, but supplemented their coverage with a Medicare-style program with approximately 130 million enrollees. After many twists and turns, it emerged in the House bill covering 9 or 10 million enrollees, and then died altogether. This, too, is unsurprising, given that the public option was never anything other than a sales pitch in a bait and switch operation, comprised of a series of ever-changing talking points, and had (unlike single payer) never been shown to save a single life or a single dollar. (See Kip Sullivan here and here.)

The cream of the jest is that Obama had betrayed the so-called public option from the very beginning of the HCR process, and never intended to implement it - despite all the "savvy" and "pragmatic" career "progressives" who acted as if it were still on the table. (Whether they knew of Obama's betrayal, or not, isn't really relevant to their putative savviness; if they did know, they betrayed along with Obama; if they did not, they can make no claim to either tactical or strategic competence.)

In short, that Hamsher is being quoted as any sort authority on what the genuine progressives, let alone the left, should do, is not only one of life's little ironies, it's a classic illustration of how Versailles works: Only those who fail are allowed another round to double down; and the dirty hippies who tried to warn everyone of the coming fail were right, are silenced and ostracized.

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Valissa

August 11, 2010 at 12:13 pm

I thought Glenn Greenwald said it best here…

Robert Gibbs attacks the fringe losers of the left http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/10/gibbs/index.html

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NOTaREALmerican

August 11, 2010 at 12:24 pm

The Red and Blue Teams of the Republicrat Party. Different Clowns same Circus. The sociopaths manipulating the true-believer dumbasses for fun and profit.

Until the peasants are in pain enough that second Party is formed nothing can change. Of course, before that happens the fascists win (it's the simple flow of human nature history – worshiping the nobility).

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Kevin de Bruxelles

Yes they are screaming bloody murder today but after a week or so of frenzied outrage and just as the bruises start healing, the Professional (or is it Retarded?)Left will fall back into line and stand by their Dems. The leadership of the Dems know full well that they can bitch slap these weak clowns all they want and the only reaction will be even more eager servitude. Just go read some of the liberal blogs and you will see many of these losers are already trying to crawl back right into bed with their Dems even as their wounds are still oozing.

Barrington Moore in his classic "The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" shows that a reactionary regime always follows the union of the aristocratic and bourgeois elites. In the US it is only slightly different; a wealthy corporate elite have locked in with a liberal cultural elite on economic issues while maintaining a phony cultural war to give the impression of political debate for the benefit of the peasants and lumpenproletariat.

Most of the bourgeois Left are smart enough to know this but insist on continuing this sham political theater since they are not at all ready to throw away the economic benefits of their alliance with corporate wealth. This is why Daily Kos will be full of "Stand by your Dems" diaries. You know how these go: "Yes, it's true the Dems once again brutally pimp slapped us right in front of our family and friends and stuffed a bottle of Drano down our throats and I'm really really outraged about this, but – deep down inside Dems really do love us in their own special way but are just afraid to show it, and we just need to elect better Dems that won't slap us around quite so much …"

O=W, and when the majority of American's finally realize that it makes absolutely no difference whether a Democrat or Republican wins an election, then we will start moving towards a solution. But this also means realizing that success is not measured by whether the other party that you vote for wins. Once Americans are liberated from voting for the peanuts the Republicrats throw their way real political parties will eventually take form. The political establishment will fight this process tooth and nail of course. So watch out for more fake rebranding exercises like the Tea Party.

When the Gap realized they were not doing so well with a lower income demographic they opened up Old Navy – but even though it has a different name and slightly different products, it's still all run out of Gap headquarters. The Tea Party is just the Republicans version of Old Navy where they opened a slightly rebranded knock-off for their low-rent voters. But they maintain complete control over it. If the Dems lose big in 2010 look for them to open up an equally weak knock-off chain called something goofy like "We Shall Overcome" for pissed off lefties.

anonymous

I agree with almost this entire post, except for the part about the Republicans and the Tea-Party. The Tea-party is home to a lot of unhappy, small government, anti-Obama types and many of them will vote Republican, mostly because between their anti-Obama and anti-big government sentiments, they're almost certain to show up at the polls to depose the party in power.

Where you have it wrong, IMHO, is that the Tea-Partiers are as hostile, almost, to Republicans as they are Dems, for many of the reasons you cite.

I spent a couple of years at DKOS and agree very much with your general observation. There are hardcore dissenters but they don't get much play. And that's the difference between the Tea-Party and the left.

The Left takes no and the beatdown over and over and then begs for more. The Tea-Party isn't built that way. The GOP would love to own them. Howard Dean will try to marry the GOP to Bush or the 'racist fringe' in the Tea Party, but the sense I get is that the Tea-Party isn't taking orders from any authority figures, self-appointed or elected.

If the GOP does as well as expected, they'll be under the same scrutiny and if they don't deliver, they're going to hear about it, sooner rather than later. I'm not saying the Tea-Partiers are rational or correct. But they're not owned by anyone.

liberal

But they're not owned by anyone.

Of course they're owned by the GOP. Where were they on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Where were they when the tally for Iraq was closing in on $1T?

Jessica

Right now, American politics is a battle between those who favor a stronger government, which will give more money and power to the very rich, and those who favor a weaker government so that the rich can just take it from us.

How do we create something new? I think we need both vision and organization.

anonymous

This is an astonishing comment. What would anyone else have done? I can think of a dozen sites offering informed options about what might have been done differently from the perspective of the left and from the right.

You've clearly not bothered to read the central argument in the guest post, which is that whatever the intent, the current policies are not working. And with unemployment around 10 percent, those without jobs would like to have jobs.

Yves has offered a variety of different solutions to different parts of the problem in multiple posts and generally very good links. The guest posters here are outstanding. So, there are a lot of things different people might have done differently.

Take a look around the web. TPM has some interesting commentary on the stimulus was too small by design, Eschaton on the blogroll here is covering the same points.

I'm one of the Obama bashers and would love to be able to say something nice about the guy, beyond he clearly loves his family and growing rich. The great seats he gets at any basketball game he wants to attend are cool, too, but not much consolation to the thirty odd million looking for work.

John

Thanks for the reply. Was looking for a good fight and not sure I would find one.

I think you underestimate the contradictions at play.

You have the pensions of the american public tied up in 401k's, bonds, and the like…. If the financial community is brought to heel, as it should be, the savings of these and of others around the world, if the financial implosion of 08 is any indication, are gone.

Consider in addition the ongoing role of America as the world's policeman, the budgetary issues aligned with that, and how we draw down expenditures while keeping employees working at all those independent contractors and military hardware and software producers (the kind of manufacturing America does nowadays.)

People get too educated. That's what I think. And it stops them from seeing we have a world of around 6 billion people to keep alive one way or another, and 10 billion will be in the mix by around 2050.

We can make the food. We can build the houses. We can create the infrastructure. The only question is what is it going take to get it done? And, the answer to that involves money, and money is a weird thing, especially today when around 97% of it is 0's and 1's.

Tao Jonesing

@John,

Speaking the truth about Obama is not "bashing" him.

And to say that Obama's efforts on health insurance reform and financial reform have "fallen a bit short" is such a massive understatement that it defies reality. The man did NOT put his full effort into achieving any more than he "achieved" (like the individual mandate that he primary Obama opposed). Indeed, he and his administration behind the scenes actively worked against the very things Obama said he wanted in various speeches and town halls.

The office of the President is a very powerful one, unless you don't want it to be. Obama could have achieved much, much more if he had wanted to do so.

John

You may well be right. I hope not though.

Doug Terpstra

"…to say that Obama's efforts on health insurance reform and financial reform have "fallen a bit short" is such a massive understatement that it defies reality."

Well said. HCR and Financial Regulation were both bloated bills written by lobbyists as Trojan-horse victories for the kleptocracy, with implementation delayed for electoral strategy. It is in fact Gibbs who should be escorted to the boy's room with a specimen cup.

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Doug Terpstra

August 11, 2010 at 1:13 pm

"What interests me is his attempt to discredit via branding a group the Administration sees as enemies."

Indeed, but it's not yet as paranoid as Nixon's "enemies list." Intended as a perjorative, "Professional Left" is not quite as clever as oxymoronic labels like "limousine liberal" or "cultural elitist". "Professional" normally connotes an expert of intellectual integrity and high moral character, so it is actually quite complimentary, except of course, when applied to politician, lawyer, or press secretary.

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Jackrabbit

August 11, 2010 at 1:33 pm

This comment makes no sense to me.

The Left should be comforted because the slur doesn't rise to Nixon's level of paranoia?

The Left should be complemented because they've been labeled "Professional?"

The term "Professional Left" was used to attack the legitimacy of the criticism being leveled at the Administration. As in "those people will never be satisfied – its their JOB to be criticial."

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Doug Terpstra

August 11, 2010 at 1:43 pm

My point was that it's not a very effective slur. Sorry if that makes no sense to you.

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Jackrabbit

August 11, 2010 at 1:18 pm

Gibbs was probably falling back on the old maxim: "a good defense is a good offense."

The Administration can't defend its compromises and concessions and is embarrassed that the left is looking past the PR to their record. Then there's lame-brained goof-ups like Michele Obama's recent trip to Spain which Maureen Dowd highlighted in her NYTimes column.

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dandelion

August 11, 2010 at 1:46 pm

One thing I hope is put to rest forever: the notion that experience doesn't matter. Beside the very large problem with policy is the fact that this WH organization is tremendously disorganized and incompetent - witness the failure to replace the Bush-appointed states attorneys general even knowing how politicized those appointments were; witness the complete failure in the Gulf; witness the complete inability to articulate a vision that is coherent.

The Obamamaniacs' consistent cry that experience didn't matter was naive and ageist (and sexist when claiming that Hillary Clinton's experience was only "serving tea.") The idea that he was equally experienced as Lincoln was a ludicrous and ridiculously hagiographic comparison.

At a time when we're involved in two wars, facing the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, the DNC engineered the nomination of the most inexperienced person running and told us over and over that "judgment" was more important.

Right. In what other employment scenario would any one consider that a valid argument?

Skidding Toward Fall - Clusterfuck Nation

By James Howard Kunstler
on August 2, 2010 8:50 AM

This economy has a destination for sure, but it's not in the direction where all eyes are trained in moist hopefulness: that glimmering horizon of longed-for growth. You will not get that kind of growth -- the kind that increases the overall wealth of the organism in question. A few people will make more money than they did before, but overall we are in an epic contraction. More people and organizations will go broke than will thrive. It will seem very unfair.

The true destination of the US economy is to get smaller and for two reasons mainly: 1.) Capital ("money") is vanishing out of our system steadily and rapidly due to a massive collective failure to repay money owed on loans, mortgages, debts, and assorted obligations. 2.) Access to the primary resource we depend on for powering the economy (oil) is increasingly beyond our control -- even worse, under the control of people who would like us to eat shit and die.

We really have a choice between two ways of dealing with this. We can downsize and re-scale consciously and coherently, or we can continue to chase after the phantom of growth and allow the nation to fall into a shambles of desperation. So far into this long emergency of an economic fiasco, we seem to have chosen the pursuit of a phantom. That's what President Obama was doing last week in Detroit, shilling for a new electric automobile which, he said, will make us "energy independent." If Mr. Obama believes this, then it isn't a very good advertisement for an Ivy League education.

I'd like to know how many Americans believe that electric cars run on virtually free energy (but I don't have pollsters on my payroll). I'd bet a lot of them do, including President Obama. Sorry to rain on this uplifting parade. At best, such a car fleet would run on coal -- that is coal-fired electric power plants -- but even that is a ridiculous fantasy when you actually pencil-out the details. Not to mention that a nation full of people with dwindling or vanishing incomes won't be in a position to fork over forty-grand for one of those new pseudo "green" vehicles. Also not to mention -- wait for it -- that due to rapidly vanishing capital there will be far fewer car loans available. The only thing growing in this part of the picture is the number of Americans who cannot possibly qualify for a car loan under normal terms that would require regular repayment of interest-and-principal. (Plenty of Americans qualify for the new "innovative" kind of loan -- the kind that you never have to make payments on, but for the moment, the banks are choking to death on them, so additional approvals may lag for a time.)

It's instructive that so much current hoopla about economic growth revolves around the issue of cars. For, if anything, reality is telling us very clearly that the mass motoring paradigm is near its end. Our determination to prop it up at all costs, despite the grave impairments of available capital and energy resources is a symptom of our detachment from reality. It's also a fine illustration of the psychology of previous investment, which prompts a desperate society to squander its scarce remaining resources on the very things that are putting it out of business.

We don't need need more highways. We're about to find out that we don't have the money to keep up regular repairs on the highways we already have. The hundreds of millions of "stimulus" dollars that President Obama flung into "shovel-ready" highway projects was among the more tragically dumb mistakes he made early on, and he has apparently learned nothing along these lines since then.

Interestingly, NPR ran a local story over the weekend -- an obscure little item -- saying that Amtrak was determined to raise the average speed of its passenger trains running north from Connecticut through Vermont from 40 miles-per-hour to 60mph. That would be some triumphant accomplishment! It would bring us back to about an 1860 level of service. Of course, I happen to believe that we will be lucky in a few years if we are able to enjoy an 1860's standard-of-living, so maybe this little side venture in public transport is perfectly in tune with America's future.

Otherwise, these are just ominous days of drift in a place of stillness where the uncomplaining robot traders tirelessly work their magic in the server farms of Wall Street, while their putative "handlers" enjoy the dainty pleasures of the Hamptons -- which seem to center these days on pounding back vast draughts of premium vodka in conjunction with Red Bull, cocaine, hydroponic ganja, Viagra, and Klonopin to round off all those edges. And let's not forget the catered delicacies circulating on trays passed by super-models -- the yellowtail tartare tidbits, the green olive pesto crescents, the firecracker shrimp canapés. I wonder if the nibblers ever stop to reflect on how many of the un-privileged "out there" get by lately on dog food and ketchup.

My timing is notoriously faulty, they say, but I can't ignore the sensation of being seasick-on-dry-land that tells me something awful is at hand. President Obama appears more and more Gorbachev-like to me, a well-intentioned functionary sailing his ship-of-state steadily into a maelstrom. The course is set and ain't nobody going to make a move to change it. Of course, Mr. Obama is no more to blame than Mr. Gorbachev was -- if anything one can't help but admire Gorby's steering of the creaky old Soviet ghost ship into drydock with nary a pint of blood spilled in the process -- but what's really striking in America today is the massive failure of leadership in the layers below Mr. Obama, and in all the other sectors of American culture where CEOs, chairpersons-of-the-boards, deans and provosts, doctors of this and that, generals and attorneys-general, even diverse clergy in all their arresting head-gear cannot collectively advocate for reality.

This failure of credentialed and elected authorities will surely unleash the crazies as we skid toward fall. Legitimacy hates a vacuum. The absence of a reality-based consensus for action will invite a consensus based on other things such as the lust for vengeance, the labeling of scapegoats, patriotic gore, and all the alternate trappings of a politics-gone-mad. Enjoy the heat and the clam rolls wherever you are in the meantime, and when you come home don't be surprised if you no longer recognize the country you're in.

Stockman: How the GOP Destroyed the U.S. Economy By Barry Ritholtz

August 1st, 2010 |

Over the years, I have described myself politically as a "Jacob Javits* Republican." For those of you unfamiliar with the Senator from NY, Javits was a social progressive, a fiscal conservative, "a political descendant of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Republicanism."

After he "retired" in 1980, the GOP took a very different turn: The emphasis on Fiscal conservatism was lost. Balanced budgets were no longer a priority. In terms of electoral politics, the embrace with the Religious Right was a deal with the devil. It married the party to a backwards combination of social regressiveness and magical thinking. Ideology trumped facts, and conflicting data and science was ignored.

In short, the party became more focused on Politics than Policy.

I bring this up as an intro to David Stockman's brutal critique of Republican fiscal policy. Stockman was the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. His NYT OpEd - subhed: How the GOP Destroyed the US economy - perfectly summarizes the most legitimate critiques of decades of GOP economic policy.

I can sum it up thusly: Whereas the Democrats have no economic policy, the Republicans have a very bad one.

The details are what makes Stockman's take so astonishing. Here are his most important observations, of which I find little to disagree with:

• The total US debt, including states and municipalities, will soon reach $18 trillion dollars. That is a Greece-like 120% of GDP.

• Supply Side tax cuts for the wealthy are based on "money printing and deficit finance - vulgar Keynesiansism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes."

• Republicans abandoned the belief that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts - government, trade, central banks private households and businesses.

• Once fiscal conservatism was abandoned, it led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.

• The Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement.

• Who is to blame? Milton Friedman. In 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold.

• According to Friedman, "The free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct." What actually occurred was "impossible." Stockman calls it "Friedman's $8 trillion error."

• Ideological tax-cutters are what killed the Republicans' fiscal religion.

• America's debt explosion has resulted from the Republican Party's embrace, three decades ago, of the insidious Supply Side doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts.

• The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine.

• It was Paul Volcker who crushed inflation and enabled a solid economic rebound - not the Reagan Supply Side Tax cuts.• Republicans believed the "delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts."

• Over George W. Bush 8 years in office, non-defense appropriations gained 65%.• Fiscal year 2009 (GWB last budget): Tax-cutters reduced federal revenues to 15% of GDP - lower than they had been since the 1940s.

• The expansion of our financial sector has been vast and unproductive. Stockman blames (tho but not by name): 1) Greenspan, for flooding financial markets with freely printed money; and 2) Phil Gramm, for removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation.

• The shadow banking system grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008 (see Gramm, above).

• Trillion-dollar financial conglomerates are not free enterprises - they are wards of the state, living on virtually free money from the Fed's discount window to cover their bad bets.

• From 2002 to 2006, the top 1% of Americans received two-thirds of the gain in national income.

I find it fascinating that the most incisive criticism of the irresponsible GOP policies has comes from two of its former stars: Bruce Barlett and now David Stockman. Sure, Krugman, Stiglitz, DeLong and others have railed against Bush policies for years. But it seems to take an insider's critique to really give the debate some punch.

Its funny, but when I criticize Bush, I get accused of being a liberal Democrat (I am not). I am simply giving my honest perspective of an utterly ruinous set of irresponsible policies that did lasting damage to America. The critiques of Obama does not generate the same sort of reaction. I suspect brain damaged partisans of the left suffer from somewhat different cognitive deficits than brain damaged partisans of the right.

Here's to hoping that reality-based economic policies are somewhere in our future.

Note: Brain damaged partisan comments will be unceremoniously deleted

Source:
Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
DAVID STOCKMAN
NYT, July 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html

____________

* If you want a better idea of Javit' politics, he was an early advocate of civil rights and an opponent of discrimination and segregation. Javits was against government involvement in medical decisions - he opposed legislation on birth control, abortion, etc. - unlike some of today's so-called Libertarians hypocrites. He was unhappy with the witch hunt atmosphere during the Cold War, and publicly opposed funding the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Fiscally conservative, he was for low taxes, a balanced budget, but also supported modest regulation to prevent the private sector from running amuck. He supported low taxes, a balanced budget, reduced military spending, no overseas wars unless absolutely necessary to defend the country. He supported the initial foray into Vietnam, but switched, becoming an early Senatorial opponent of the war in 1967.

Most of all, he was a pragmatic, bi-partisan Senate member, who worked across the aisle with both sides to produce legislation for the public good. The Javits Convention Center in NYC is named after him, as are numerous buildings in various SUNY campuses, as well as a Federal Fellowship Program.

In 1979, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, and lost the GOP primary to political sleazeball Alfonse D'Amato.

Powell Memo Text and Analysis

Powell Memo published August 23, 1971
This page and our introduction were published April 3, 2004

Introduction

In 1971, Lewis F. Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell's nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Powell Memo did not become available to the public until long after his confirmation to the Court. It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell's legal objectivity. Anderson cautioned that Powell "might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice...in behalf of business interests."

Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy.

Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building - a focus we share, though usually with contrasting goals. One of our great frustrations is that "progressive" foundations and funders have failed to learn from the success of these corporate institutions and decline to fund the Democracy Movement that we and a number of similarly-focused organizations are attempting to build. Instead, they overwhelmingly focus on damage control, band-aids and short-term results which provide little hope of the systemic change we so desperately need to reverse the trend of growing corporate dominance.

We see depressingly little sign of change. Progressive institutions eagerly embrace tools like the web and e-mail as hopes for turning the nation in a progressive direction. They will not. They are tools that can and must be used to raise funds and mobilize people more effectively (and we rely on them heavily), but tools and tactics are no substitute for long-term vision and strategy.

So did Powell's political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment "right" for corporations to influence ballot questions. On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers.

Confidential Memorandum:
Attack of American Free Enterprise System

DATE: August 23, 1971
TO: Mr. Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chairman, Education Committee, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
FROM: Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

This memorandum is submitted at your request as a basis for the discussion on August 24 with Mr. Booth (executive vice president) and others at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The purpose is to identify the problem, and suggest possible avenues of action for further consideration.

Dimensions of the Attack
No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.1 This varies in scope, intensity, in the techniques employed, and in the level of visibility.

There always have been some who opposed the American system, and preferred socialism or some form of statism (communism or fascism). Also, there always have been critics of the system, whose criticism has been wholesome and constructive so long as the objective was to improve rather than to subvert or destroy.

But what now concerns us is quite new in the history of America. We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.

Sources of the Attack
The sources are varied and diffused. They include, not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before in our history. But they remain a small minority, and are not yet the principal cause for concern.

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.

Moreover, much of the media-for varying motives and in varying degrees-either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these "attackers," or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.

One of the bewildering paradoxes of our time is the extent to which the enterprise system tolerates, if not participates in, its own destruction.

The campuses from which much of the criticism emanates are supported by (i) tax funds generated largely from American business, and (ii) contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system.

Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the enterprise system to survive.

Tone of the Attack
This memorandum is not the place to document in detail the tone, character, or intensity of the attack. The following quotations will suffice to give one a general idea:

William Kunstler, warmly welcomed on campuses and listed in a recent student poll as the "American lawyer most admired," incites audiences as follows:

"You must learn to fight in the streets, to revolt, to shoot guns. We will learn to do all of the things that property owners fear."2 The New Leftists who heed Kunstler's advice increasingly are beginning to act -- not just against military recruiting offices and manufacturers of munitions, but against a variety of businesses: "Since February, 1970, branches (of Bank of America) have been attacked 39 times, 22 times with explosive devices and 17 times with fire bombs or by arsonists."3 Although New Leftist spokesmen are succeeding in radicalizing thousands of the young, the greater cause for concern is the hostility of respectable liberals and social reformers. It is the sum total of their views and influence which could indeed fatally weaken or destroy the system.

A chilling description of what is being taught on many of our campuses was written by Stewart Alsop:

"Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of 'the politics of despair.' These young men despise the American political and economic system . . . (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans."4 A recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that: "Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries."5

A visiting professor from England at Rockford College gave a series of lectures entitled "The Ideological War Against Western Society," in which he documents the extent to which members of the intellectual community are waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system and the values of western society. In a foreword to these lectures, famed Dr. Milton Friedman of Chicago warned: "It (is) crystal clear that the foundations of our free society are under wide-ranging and powerful attack -- not by Communist or any other conspiracy but by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote."6

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who -- thanks largely to the media -- has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans. A recent article in Fortune speaks of Nader as follows:

"The passion that rules in him -- and he is a passionate man -- is aimed at smashing utterly the target of his hatred, which is corporate power. He thinks, and says quite bluntly, that a great many corporate executives belong in prison -- for defrauding the consumer with shoddy merchandise, poisoning the food supply with chemical additives, and willfully manufacturing unsafe products that will maim or kill the buyer. He emphasizes that he is not talking just about 'fly-by-night hucksters' but the top management of blue chip business."7

A frontal assault was made on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system by Yale Professor Charles Reich in his widely publicized book: "The Greening of America," published last winter.

The foregoing references illustrate the broad, shotgun attack on the system itself. There are countless examples of rifle shots which undermine confidence and confuse the public. Favorite current targets are proposals for tax incentives through changes in depreciation rates and investment credits. These are usually described in the media as "tax breaks," "loop holes" or "tax benefits" for the benefit of business. * As viewed by a columnist in the Post, such tax measures would benefit "only the rich, the owners of big companies."8

It is dismaying that many politicians make the same argument that tax measures of this kind benefit only "business," without benefit to "the poor." The fact that this is either political demagoguery or economic illiteracy is of slight comfort. This setting of the "rich" against the "poor," of business against the people, is the cheapest and most dangerous kind of politics.

The Apathy and Default of Business
What has been the response of business to this massive assault upon its fundamental economics, upon its philosophy, upon its right to continue to manage its own affairs, and indeed upon its integrity?

The painfully sad truth is that business, including the boards of directors' and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels, often have responded -- if at all -- by appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem. There are, of course, many exceptions to this sweeping generalization. But the net effect of such response as has been made is scarcely visible.

In all fairness, it must be recognized that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it. The traditional role of business executives has been to manage, to produce, to sell, to create jobs, to make profits, to improve the standard of living, to be community leaders, to serve on charitable and educational boards, and generally to be good citizens. They have performed these tasks very well indeed.

But they have shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics, and little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate.

A column recently carried by the Wall Street Journal was entitled: "Memo to GM: Why Not Fight Back?"9 Although addressed to GM by name, the article was a warning to all American business. Columnist St. John said:

"General Motors, like American business in general, is 'plainly in trouble' because intellectual bromides have been substituted for a sound intellectual exposition of its point of view." Mr. St. John then commented on the tendency of business leaders to compromise with and appease critics. He cited the concessions which Nader wins from management, and spoke of "the fallacious view many businessmen take toward their critics." He drew a parallel to the mistaken tactics of many college administrators: "College administrators learned too late that such appeasement serves to destroy free speech, academic freedom and genuine scholarship. One campus radical demand was conceded by university heads only to be followed by a fresh crop which soon escalated to what amounted to a demand for outright surrender."

One need not agree entirely with Mr. St. John's analysis. But most observers of the American scene will agree that the essence of his message is sound. American business "plainly in trouble"; the response to the wide range of critics has been ineffective, and has included appeasement; the time has come -- indeed, it is long overdue -- for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.

Responsibility of Business Executives
What specifically should be done? The first essential -- a prerequisite to any effective action -- is for businessmen to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management.

The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival -- survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.

The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation's public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself. This involves far more than an increased emphasis on "public relations" or "governmental affairs" -- two areas in which corporations long have invested substantial sums.

A significant first step by individual corporations could well be the designation of an executive vice president (ranking with other executive VP's) whose responsibility is to counter-on the broadest front-the attack on the enterprise system. The public relations department could be one of the foundations assigned to this executive, but his responsibilities should encompass some of the types of activities referred to subsequently in this memorandum. His budget and staff should be adequate to the task.

Possible Role of the Chamber of Commerce
But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

Moreover, there is the quite understandable reluctance on the part of any one corporation to get too far out in front and to make itself too visible a target.

The role of the National Chamber of Commerce is therefore vital. Other national organizations (especially those of various industrial and commercial groups) should join in the effort, but no other organizations appear to be as well situated as the Chamber. It enjoys a strategic position, with a fine reputation and a broad base of support. Also -- and this is of immeasurable merit -- there are hundreds of local Chambers of Commerce which can play a vital supportive role.

It hardly need be said that before embarking upon any program, the Chamber should study and analyze possible courses of action and activities, weighing risks against probable effectiveness and feasibility of each. Considerations of cost, the assurance of financial and other support from members, adequacy of staffing and similar problems will all require the most thoughtful consideration.

The Campus
The assault on the enterprise system was not mounted in a few months. It has gradually evolved over the past two decades, barely perceptible in its origins and benefiting (sic) from a gradualism that provoked little awareness much less any real reaction.

Although origins, sources and causes are complex and interrelated, and obviously difficult to identify without careful qualification, there is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source. The social science faculties usually include members who are unsympathetic to the enterprise system. They may range from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California at San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend. Such faculty members need not be in a majority. They are often personally attractive and magnetic; they are stimulating teachers, and their controversy attracts student following; they are prolific writers and lecturers; they author many of the textbooks, and they exert enormous influence -- far out of proportion to their numbers -- on their colleagues and in the academic world.

Social science faculties (the political scientist, economist, sociologist and many of the historians) tend to be liberally oriented, even when leftists are not present. This is not a criticism per se, as the need for liberal thought is essential to a balanced viewpoint. The difficulty is that "balance" is conspicuous by its absence on many campuses, with relatively few members being of conservatives or moderate persuasion and even the relatively few often being less articulate and aggressive than their crusading colleagues.

This situation extending back many years and with the imbalance gradually worsening, has had an enormous impact on millions of young American students. In an article in Barron's Weekly, seeking an answer to why so many young people are disaffected even to the point of being revolutionaries, it was said: "Because they were taught that way."10 Or, as noted by columnist Stewart Alsop, writing about his alma mater: "Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores' of bright young men ... who despise the American political and economic system."

As these "bright young men," from campuses across the country, seek opportunities to change a system which they have been taught to distrust -- if not, indeed "despise" -- they seek employment in the centers of the real power and influence in our country, namely: (i) with the news media, especially television; (ii) in government, as "staffers" and consultants at various levels; (iii) in elective politics; (iv) as lecturers and writers, and (v) on the faculties at various levels of education.

Many do enter the enterprise system -- in business and the professions -- and for the most part they quickly discover the fallacies of what they have been taught. But those who eschew the mainstream of the system often remain in key positions of influence where they mold public opinion and often shape governmental action. In many instances, these "intellectuals" end up in regulatory agencies or governmental departments with large authority over the business system they do not believe in.

If the foregoing analysis is approximately sound, a priority task of business -- and organizations such as the Chamber -- is to address the campus origin of this hostility. Few things are more sanctified in American life than academic freedom. It would be fatal to attack this as a principle. But if academic freedom is to retain the qualities of "openness," "fairness" and "balance" -- which are essential to its intellectual significance -- there is a great opportunity for constructive action. The thrust of such action must be to restore the qualities just mentioned to the academic communities.

What Can Be Done About the Campus
The ultimate responsibility for intellectual integrity on the campus must remain on the administrations and faculties of our colleges and universities. But organizations such as the Chamber can assist and activate constructive change in many ways, including the following:

Staff of Scholars
The Chamber should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system. It should include several of national reputation whose authorship would be widely respected -- even when disagreed with.

Staff of Speakers
There also should be a staff of speakers of the highest competency. These might include the scholars, and certainly those who speak for the Chamber would have to articulate the product of the scholars.

Speaker's Bureau
In addition to full-time staff personnel, the Chamber should have a Speaker's Bureau which should include the ablest and most effective advocates from the top echelons of American business.

Evaluation of Textbooks
The staff of scholars (or preferably a panel of independent scholars) should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology. This should be a continuing program.

The objective of such evaluation should be oriented toward restoring the balance essential to genuine academic freedom. This would include assurance of fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system, its accomplishments, its basic relationship to individual rights and freedoms, and comparisons with the systems of socialism, fascism and communism. Most of the existing textbooks have some sort of comparisons, but many are superficial, biased and unfair.

We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizens groups have not hesitated to review, analyze and criticize textbooks and teaching materials. In a democratic society, this can be a constructive process and should be regarded as an aid to genuine academic freedom and not as an intrusion upon it.

If the authors, publishers and users of textbooks know that they will be subjected -- honestly, fairly and thoroughly -- to review and critique by eminent scholars who believe in the American system, a return to a more rational balance can be expected.

Equal Time on the Campus
The Chamber should insist upon equal time on the college speaking circuit. The FBI publishes each year a list of speeches made on college campuses by avowed Communists. The number in 1970 exceeded 100. There were, of course, many hundreds of appearances by leftists and ultra liberals who urge the types of viewpoints indicated earlier in this memorandum. There was no corresponding representation of American business, or indeed by individuals or organizations who appeared in support of the American system of government and business.

Every campus has its formal and informal groups which invite speakers. Each law school does the same thing. Many universities and colleges officially sponsor lecture and speaking programs. We all know the inadequacy of the representation of business in the programs.

It will be said that few invitations would be extended to Chamber speakers.11 This undoubtedly would be true unless the Chamber aggressively insisted upon the right to be heard -- in effect, insisted upon "equal time." University administrators and the great majority of student groups and committees would not welcome being put in the position publicly of refusing a forum to diverse views, indeed, this is the classic excuse for allowing Communists to speak.

The two essential ingredients are (i) to have attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers; and (ii) to exert whatever degree of pressure -- publicly and privately -- may be necessary to assure opportunities to speak. The objective always must be to inform and enlighten, and not merely to propagandize.

Balancing of Faculties
Perhaps the most fundamental problem is the imbalance of many faculties. Correcting this is indeed a long-range and difficult project. Yet, it should be undertaken as a part of an overall program. This would mean the urging of the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees.

The methods to be employed require careful thought, and the obvious pitfalls must be avoided. Improper pressure would be counterproductive. But the basic concepts of balance, fairness and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups.

This is a long road and not one for the fainthearted. But if pursued with integrity and conviction it could lead to a strengthening of both academic freedom on the campus and of the values which have made America the most productive of all societies.

Graduate Schools of Business
The Chamber should enjoy a particular rapport with the increasingly influential graduate schools of business. Much that has been suggested above applies to such schools.

Should not the Chamber also request specific courses in such schools dealing with the entire scope of the problem addressed by this memorandum? This is now essential training for the executives of the future.

Secondary Education
While the first priority should be at the college level, the trends mentioned above are increasingly evidenced in the high schools. Action programs, tailored to the high schools and similar to those mentioned, should be considered. The implementation thereof could become a major program for local chambers of commerce, although the control and direction -- especially the quality control -- should be retained by the National Chamber.

What Can Be Done About the Public?
Reaching the campus and the secondary schools is vital for the long-term. Reaching the public generally may be more important for the shorter term. The first essential is to establish the staffs of eminent scholars, writers and speakers, who will do the thinking, the analysis, the writing and the speaking. It will also be essential to have staff personnel who are thoroughly familiar with the media, and how most effectively to communicate with the public. Among the more obvious means are the following:

Television
The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance. This applies not merely to so-called educational programs (such as "Selling of the Pentagon"), but to the daily "news analysis" which so often includes the most insidious type of criticism of the enterprise system.12 Whether this criticism results from hostility or economic ignorance, the result is the gradual erosion of confidence in "business" and free enterprise.

This monitoring, to be effective, would require constant examination of the texts of adequate samples of programs. Complaints -- to the media and to the Federal Communications Commission -- should be made promptly and strongly when programs are unfair or inaccurate.

Equal time should be demanded when appropriate. Effort should be made to see that the forum-type programs (the Today Show, Meet the Press, etc.) afford at least as much opportunity for supporters of the American system to participate as these programs do for those who attack it.

Other Media
Radio and the press are also important, and every available means should be employed to challenge and refute unfair attacks, as well as to present the affirmative case through these media.

The Scholarly Journals
It is especially important for the Chamber's "faculty of scholars" to publish. One of the keys to the success of the liberal and leftist faculty members has been their passion for "publication" and "lecturing." A similar passion must exist among the Chamber's scholars.

Incentives might be devised to induce more "publishing" by independent scholars who do believe in the system.

There should be a fairly steady flow of scholarly articles presented to a broad spectrum of magazines and periodicals -- ranging from the popular magazines (Life, Look, Reader's Digest, etc.) to the more intellectual ones (Atlantic, Harper's, Saturday Review, New York, etc.)13 and to the various professional journals.

Books, Paperbacks and Pamphlets
The news stands -- at airports, drugstores, and elsewhere -- are filled with paperbacks and pamphlets advocating everything from revolution to erotic free love. One finds almost no attractive, well-written paperbacks or pamphlets on "our side." It will be difficult to compete with an Eldridge Cleaver or even a Charles Reich for reader attention, but unless the effort is made -- on a large enough scale and with appropriate imagination to assure some success -- this opportunity for educating the public will be irretrievably lost.

Paid Advertisements
Business pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the media for advertisements. Most of this supports specific products; much of it supports institutional image making; and some fraction of it does support the system. But the latter has been more or less tangential, and rarely part of a sustained, major effort to inform and enlighten the American people.

If American business devoted only 10% of its total annual advertising budget to this overall purpose, it would be a statesman-like expenditure.

The Neglected Political Arena
In the final analysis, the payoff -- short-of revolution -- is what government does. Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed by several leading candidates for President of the United States.

It is still Marxist doctrine that the "capitalist" countries are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public following among Americans.

Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of "lobbyist" for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the "forgotten man."

Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen's views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to "consumerism" or to the "environment."

Politicians reflect what they believe to be majority views of their constituents. It is thus evident that most politicians are making the judgment that the public has little sympathy for the businessman or his viewpoint.

The educational programs suggested above would be designed to enlighten public thinking -- not so much about the businessman and his individual role as about the system which he administers, and which provides the goods, services and jobs on which our country depends.

But one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination -- without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

As unwelcome as it may be to the Chamber, it should consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena.

Neglected Opportunity in the Courts
American business and the enterprise system have been affected as much by the courts as by the executive and legislative branches of government. Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.

Other organizations and groups, recognizing this, have been far more astute in exploiting judicial action than American business. Perhaps the most active exploiters of the judicial system have been groups ranging in political orientation from "liberal" to the far left.

The American Civil Liberties Union is one example. It initiates or intervenes in scores of cases each year, and it files briefs amicus curiae in the Supreme Court in a number of cases during each term of that court. Labor unions, civil rights groups and now the public interest law firms are extremely active in the judicial arena. Their success, often at business' expense, has not been inconsequential.

This is a vast area of opportunity for the Chamber, if it is willing to undertake the role of spokesman for American business and if, in turn, business is willing to provide the funds.

As with respect to scholars and speakers, the Chamber would need a highly competent staff of lawyers. In special situations it should be authorized to engage, to appear as counsel amicus in the Supreme Court, lawyers of national standing and reputation. The greatest care should be exercised in selecting the cases in which to participate, or the suits to institute. But the opportunity merits the necessary effort.

Neglected Stockholder Power
The average member of the public thinks of "business" as an impersonal corporate entity, owned by the very rich and managed by over-paid executives. There is an almost total failure to appreciate that "business" actually embraces -- in one way or another -- most Americans. Those for whom business provides jobs, constitute a fairly obvious class. But the 20 million stockholders -- most of whom are of modest means -- are the real owners, the real entrepreneurs, the real capitalists under our system. They provide the capital which fuels the economic system which has produced the highest standard of living in all history. Yet, stockholders have been as ineffectual as business executives in promoting a genuine understanding of our system or in exercising political influence.

The question which merits the most thorough examination is how can the weight and influence of stockholders -- 20 million voters -- be mobilized to support (i) an educational program and (ii) a political action program.

Individual corporations are now required to make numerous reports to shareholders. Many corporations also have expensive "news" magazines which go to employees and stockholders. These opportunities to communicate can be used far more effectively as educational media.

The corporation itself must exercise restraint in undertaking political action and must, of course, comply with applicable laws. But is it not feasible -- through an affiliate of the Chamber or otherwise -- to establish a national organization of American stockholders and give it enough muscle to be influential?

A More Aggressive Attitude
Business interests -- especially big business and their national trade organizations -- have tried to maintain low profiles, especially with respect to political action.

As suggested in the Wall Street Journal article, it has been fairly characteristic of the average business executive to be tolerant -- at least in public -- of those who attack his corporation and the system. Very few businessmen or business organizations respond in kind. There has been a disposition to appease; to regard the opposition as willing to compromise, or as likely to fade away in due time.

Business has shunted confrontation politics. Business, quite understandably, has been repelled by the multiplicity of non-negotiable "demands" made constantly by self-interest groups of all kinds.

While neither responsible business interests, nor the United States Chamber of Commerce, would engage in the irresponsible tactics of some pressure groups, it is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system -- at all levels and at every opportunity -- be far more aggressive than in the past.

There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.

Lessons can be learned from organized labor in this respect. The head of the AFL-CIO may not appeal to businessmen as the most endearing or public-minded of citizens. Yet, over many years the heads of national labor organizations have done what they were paid to do very effectively. They may not have been beloved, but they have been respected -- where it counts the most -- by politicians, on the campus, and among the media.

It is time for American business -- which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions -- to apply their great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.

The Cost
The type of program described above (which includes a broadly based combination of education and political action), if undertaken long term and adequately staffed, would require far more generous financial support from American corporations than the Chamber has ever received in the past. High level management participation in Chamber affairs also would be required.

The staff of the Chamber would have to be significantly increased, with the highest quality established and maintained. Salaries would have to be at levels fully comparable to those paid key business executives and the most prestigious faculty members. Professionals of the great skill in advertising and in working with the media, speakers, lawyers and other specialists would have to be recruited.

It is possible that the organization of the Chamber itself would benefit from restructuring. For example, as suggested by union experience, the office of President of the Chamber might well be a full-time career position. To assure maximum effectiveness and continuity, the chief executive officer of the Chamber should not be changed each year. The functions now largely performed by the President could be transferred to a Chairman of the Board, annually elected by the membership. The Board, of course, would continue to exercise policy control.

Quality Control is Essential
Essential ingredients of the entire program must be responsibility and "quality control." The publications, the articles, the speeches, the media programs, the advertising, the briefs filed in courts, and the appearances before legislative committees -- all must meet the most exacting standards of accuracy and professional excellence. They must merit respect for their level of public responsibility and scholarship, whether one agrees with the viewpoints expressed or not.

Relationship to Freedom
The threat to the enterprise system is not merely a matter of economics. It also is a threat to individual freedom.

It is this great truth -- now so submerged by the rhetoric of the New Left and of many liberals -- that must be re-affirmed if this program is to be meaningful.

There seems to be little awareness that the only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom -- ranging from that under moderate socialism to the iron heel of the leftist or rightist dictatorship.

We in America already have moved very far indeed toward some aspects of state socialism, as the needs and complexities of a vast urban society require types of regulation and control that were quite unnecessary in earlier times. In some areas, such regulation and control already have seriously impaired the freedom of both business and labor, and indeed of the public generally. But most of the essential freedoms remain: private ownership, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.

In addition to the ideological attack on the system itself (discussed in this memorandum), its essentials also are threatened by inequitable taxation, and -- more recently -- by an inflation which has seemed uncontrollable.14 But whatever the causes of diminishing economic freedom may be, the truth is that freedom as a concept is indivisible. As the experience of the socialist and totalitarian states demonstrates, the contraction and denial of economic freedom is followed inevitably by governmental restrictions on other cherished rights. It is this message, above all others, that must be carried home to the American people.

Conclusion
It hardly need be said that the views expressed above are tentative and suggestive. The first step should be a thorough study. But this would be an exercise in futility unless the Board of Directors of the Chamber accepts the fundamental premise of this paper, namely, that business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late.

Footnotes

1 . Variously called: the "free enterprise system," "capitalism," and the "profit system." The American political system of democracy under the rule of law is also under attack, often by the same individuals and organizations who seek to undermine the enterprise system.
2 . Richmond News Leader, June 8, 1970. Column of William F. Buckley, Jr.
3 . N.Y. Times Service article, reprinted Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 17, 1971.
4 . Stewart Alsop, Yale and the Deadly Danger, Newsweek, May 18. 1970.
5 . Editorial, Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 7, 1971.
6 . Dr. Milton Friedman, Prof. of Economics, U. of Chicago, writing a foreword to Dr. Arthur A. Shenfield's Rockford College lectures entitled "The Ideological War Against Western Society," copyrighted 1970 by Rockford College.
7 . Fortune. May, 1971, p. 145. This Fortune analysis of the Nader influence includes a reference to Nader's visit to a college where he was paid a lecture fee of $2,500 for "denouncing America's big corporations in venomous language . . . bringing (rousing and spontaneous) bursts of applause" when he was asked when he planned to run for President.
8 . The Washington Post, Column of William Raspberry, June 28, 1971.
9 . Jeffrey St. John, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 1971.
* . Italic emphasis added by Mr. Powell.
10 . Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, "The Total Break with America, The Fifth Annual Conference of Socialist Scholars," Sept. 15, 1969.
11 . On many campuses freedom of speech has been denied to all who express moderate or conservative viewpoints.
12 . It has been estimated that the evening half-hour news programs of the networks reach daily some 50,000,000 Americans.
13 . One illustration of the type of article which should not go unanswered appeared in the popular "The New York" of July 19, 1971. This was entitled "A Populist Manifesto" by ultra liberal Jack Newfield -- who argued that "the root need in our country is 'to redistribute wealth'."
14 . The recent "freeze" of prices and wages may well be justified by the current inflationary crisis. But if imposed as a permanent measure the enterprise system will have sustained a near fatal blow.

ReclaimDemocracy.org focuses on long-term movement-building and systemic change, striving to shift energy and funding from reactive work against individual harms caused by corporations to proactive efforts that seek to revoke corporate power systemically. Our ultimate goals involve Constitution-level change.

For those new to our work, the article From Protest to Rebellion is a good introduction to our approach. And be sure to visit our corporate personhood library -- the most thorough resource on the topic.

Which is the Bigger Threat Terrorism or Wall Street Bonuses " naked capitalism

NOTaREALmerican:

It depends who the audience is.

If we assume that the goal of any well run society (meaning, well run for the nobility) is to manipulate their peasants into paranoid fear-of-outsiders, then trrrrrsssts are the winning ticket.

In fact, I think all REAL Patriots should be much more worried about trrrrsss getting Wall Street's bonuses.

(Queue eagle: )

Protect America's bonuses from trrrrrrssss; vote Republicrat!

Glen says:

I cannot imagine terrorists being able to inflict the damage that Wall St already has done. Wiping out the vibrant middle class which was the envy of the free world, destroying the American dream of from the roots up hard work to success (it's now the European dream since it happens there more often).

Osama Bin Laden always knew to attack America's economic center first for the greatest results, he just never imagined he'd have such strong and willing allies. Taking down the twin towers was never an act which could threaten the fundamental existence of America, but gutting the middle class, outsourcing manufacturing, and turning Wall St into a den of greed and corruption will destroy America.

attempter says:

Which is a greater threat to the nation - terrorism or the relentless decline of middle income families? Unless we abandon our core values out of unwarranted fear, terror cannot fundamentally change our way of life. The number of people affected by growing income disparity is vast. When I was a student, income disparity was indicative of an underdeveloped and unstable society.

Yes. Foreign terrorism is no threat. Domestic corporate terrorists, on the other hand, are the worst existential threat American democracy and freedom have ever faced.

The comprehensive assault on every aspect of economic stability, broad-based prosperity, public spaces, and democracy itself, constitutes the worst attack this country has ever sustained. The goal of this massive treason is to destroy America once and for all.

The government appropriately devotes enormous resources to protect our lives and property from terrorism. It is unthinkable that a leader would display any weakness opposing this threat. Politicians have stiff backbones when it comes to terrorism.

In contrast, the government is timid and half-hearted in its approach to the system which perversely rewards a few Wall Street traders with billions of dollars of bonuses, yet allows the foundation to decay.

This is exactly backwards. Terrorism constitutes no existential threat, and there's nothing which can remotely be called an objective correlative for the trumped-up hysteria, creeping police statism, and so-called "Global War on Terror" which is really just a massive extension of embezzling Pentagon budgets.

So the only character options for any politician who supports these things are criminality or cowardice. A "stiff backbone" isn't on the list.

By contrast, while perhaps some in government are cowardly about constraining Wall Street and corporatism in general, the vast majority are completely, irredeemably corrupt, and are consciously, gleefully aggressive in the way they plunder the country on behalf of their gangster masters.

Over the last fifteen years, the financial sector's percentage of GDP has increased dramatically. At the same time, the median family income stagnated and then declined. I do not believe that this is a coincidence.

Not a coincidence at all. The 1971 Lewis Powell memo is a good place to start in reading about the comprehensive totalitarian plan:

http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html

These young traders are simply doing what America has told them to do.

"America" didn't tell them to become criminals. A corrupt, gangster system whose government aspect has alienated all sovereignty and renounced all legitimacy told them to do it and continues to tell them to do it.

The system is organized crime; it's not America. It and its cadres are no part of America. They're waging vicious war on America

colinc says:

Well said, sir! Moreover, thanks for the link!! That document should be "relabeled" from "Powell's memo" to "The Corporatist Manifesto." Events over the past 3+ decades would seem to indicate that the "captains of industry" not only heeded Powell's declaration but implemented it in the most extreme and egregious manner possible. Much like McNamara's "talks" over the close of the Vietnam war served to escalate "the war on drugs" to absurd levels. Organized crime was never "defeated," just transmuted into the corporate and political oligarchy that is now being exhibited.

Within a couple of years after I "returned" to college in the mid-'80s, I learned and have been telling everyone since that, in this country (the USA), what passes as "education" is nothing more than an abject form of programming. In other words, for the slower readers, if you have a bachelor's degree or "higher," there is an INCREASED probability that "your thoughts" are most certainly NOT "your own." You have been brain-washed to "believe" and "conform" rather than "think critically." After all, an uninformed and ignorant populace is easier to control and manipulate to act against their own interests. That is part and parcel of the overall psychopathy that "what 'they' don't know can and will be used against 'them' for 'our' profit!"

Alas, I think all we can do at this point is say, to whomever will listen, the immortal words of Andrei Bonovia, the 'XO' (speaking to his captain) on the Soviet sub trying to sink Red Ocober, "You arrogant ass. You've killed 'us'!"

Hugh says:

I second what attempter is saying. It is not a choice between terrorism and something else. What we see now is political terrorists vs. financial terrorists. The financial terrorists make the political ones look like pikers. The "young traders" are not misguided innocents. They are more like street punks aspiring to become "made" men.

And innovation? Get real. Innovation nowadays is just code for fraud, con, scam, and Ponzi scheme. The poster really needs to ask himself one question: Does he think we have a solid financial system, albeit one currently experiencing significant problems or does he think what we have is crony casino capitalism? It rather seems the first because he gives everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. It's just some bad priorities. Traders are only doing what we ask them, etc. I take the second option. These guys are crooks. They should be viewed as such and treated as such. No excuses, not 3 years after the housing bust and almost 2 years after the meltdown. If you can't wake up and smell the coffee, it's either that you or your nose is dead.

Doug Terpstra says:

"Yes. Foreign terrorism is no threat. Domestic corporate terrorists, on the other hand, are the worst existential threat American democracy and freedom have ever faced."

Really the article's title question could be paraphrased quite simply as: "Which is the Bigger Threat: Terrorism or the Cause of Terrorism?" Wall Street fraud, extortion, and the military violence required to sustain it is the genesis, the virus; terrorism is the symptom of an underlying disease. Our metastasizing, eternal state of war against this symptom is in fact the real cancer.

i on the ball patriot says:

Kudos to attempter and Hugh and a pox on Wallace C. Turbeville for mouthing this apologetic, deflective bullshit. Its not "financial innovation" its an intentional gutting of the middle and under classes. Wall street bonuses and the war on terror are tentacles of the same interconnected scam.

These gangsters belong in prison and on the end of ropes. We need a death penalty for financial traitors.

Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

Doug Terpstra says:

I'll second that. High writes about Turbeville "…he gives everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. It's just some bad priorities."

I've observed the same from Turbeville's and J K Galbraith's articles, like diehard Obama supporters with a maddening insistence, bordering on willful blindness, on giving these guys the benefit of doubt, saying they're underperforming and overpaid, when in fact its patently obvious they should be earning fifty cents doing laundry or assembly at a privatized supermax. In this, intentionally or not, these authors are hurdles to the wholesale systemic reform required…system tweakers where bunkerbusters are needed.

steelhead23 says:

"Trader compensation is at the heart of the problem. It encourages behavior that is inconsistent with Wall Street's most important function: raising capital for industry and commerce. The banks and the government are afraid that the traders will desert the banks and move to hedge funds if their compensation is reduced. If they do jump ship, it is all the better for America. At least hedge funds can blow themselves up without crippling the US economy in the process."

The author appears to have forgotten about LTCM. Simply put, if I can get a Primary Dealer to let me leverage up 80 to 1, then my hedge fund could become a financial weapon of mass destruction. Paying quants less might work, but the better trick would be to force all banks to which federal guarantees and access to the Fed's various windows are granted to be organized as non- profit organizations. No profit, no motive to maximize profits, no wicked financial innovation.

Dave of Maryland says:

At the rate things are going, the Pentagon & Wall Street will go on getting everything they want, despite protests from the rest of the country.

At some point Social Security will be ended. I don't see how that can be stopped.

Add in states that are bust & strapped & pushed to the wall, and the solution becomes succession. There isn't a state in the country that wouldn't be sitting pretty if it had the money that Washington currently extracts from it to send to Wall Street & the Pentagon. So far as I can see, the only reason not to secede is Social Security payments.

That the states are all mindlessly corrupt & petty merely makes the process interesting. If independent, they would quickly print worthless money. But hey, they would be OUR gangsters. NOT Washington cronies.

Dave says:

both terrorism & the declining economy/banker bonuses are courtesy of the same people.

Think of it, if a disaster or terrorist act makes people panic & hide behind the puppet in the oval office why wouldn't they go ahead and allow/exaserbate/create one?

The cat is out of the bag, if you don't see the truth you are now the minority.

Jim says:

Attempter, Hugh and I on the ball patriot appear in agreement that Tuberville'a analysis does not get anywhere near to the heart of the problem when he suggests mere policy reforms such as reducing trader compensation in order to reduce short-term incentives.

My question is the following: How is the nihilism (i.e. gangsterism) emerging throughout the leadership of major institutions in American society related to our evolving social structure? Or is it?

Yves, Ed Harrison on others on NC have begun to trace this logic toward nihilism more specifically in the historical evolution of investment banking (i.e. the movement toward logic of the trader) (Although Yves and Ed still appear to think that enlightened policy proposals such as Tubervilles will save us.)

How do each of you see the link (if any) between personality and social formation?

What are the type of specific structual reforms (if any) which will contain or eliminate this march to gangsterism in our leadership structure?

Do you see cultural/theological/ethical visions as important in your new politics?

skippy says:

Jim…for my self I see: First we must position/accept the role of conservators of this lovely planet that gave birth to us *it is our mother*, then we can come to grips with what it means to be human and what path[s are available in experiencing it.

Our banking/financing feudal lords are using a scorched earth policy, we know how that ends.

lambert strether says:

Why don't we turn the banks into regulated public utilities?

steelhead23 says:

See my post above. I prefer a non-profit structure. Here is my simple clear logic. Banks perform best when they serve the public interest. Profit seeking is not necessarily adverse to the public interest, but certainly when it metasticizes into getting as much out of your customers as humanly possible, profit-seeking is not in the public interest. I will not disagree that profit-seeking is good for innovation. Unfortunately, those innovations have tended toward the Ponzi/obfuscation side, rather than the efficiency side. Treating banks as a regulated utility might limit their profit-seeking behavior (note: the enticement of profits has tended to create a banking system that corrupts its regulators) – forcing them to be non-profit absolutely would. But you are definitely on the right track. Banks either need to be regulated like a wayward child, or forced to become non-profit. The road we are currently on leads to serfdom.

David Sheegog says:

As long as we expect Corporate Boards, or some other inside-the-company entity to limit bonuses in ANY corp, we will continue to see growth of the incomes of our financial oligarchy and the gutting of the middle class. There is only one way to solve this nightmare of compound greed and that is to re-instate confiscatory taxes on incomes from any source over, say, 2 or 3 million dollars. I don't think Turbeville appreciates how effective the 91% tax rate on income over $1M was in creating the great middle class and industrial power of this country before Kennedy, then Reagan deregulated greed with their unjustified taxes cuts for the rich.

doc holiday says:

Our revolutionary fathers were terrorists and guys like Washington and Hamilton, Jefferson and all the other capitalist dudes were all in the game to make a buck. In for a penny, in for a pound - and the endless wonders of interest and monetization - it was all there back then and all these young punks are doing today is just adding a little extra branding and glitter.

There aint one of yah that wouldn't love to make what these superstar tramp traders are pulling in - but, in the end, these whores will end up in the same gutters, looking at the same stars as the whores they replaced. It's the circle of life … get out of the way and look the other way, because technology will flatten your ass….

See: Lion King – Circle of Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX07j9SDFcc

* This has not been reviewed for logic.

[Jul 25, 2010] "The Monumental Hypocrisy of the Republican Party" by Bruce Bartlett

Economist's View

I'm behind today. While I try to catch up, first, from an interview with Bruce Bartlett:

Six questions for Bruce Bartlett, The Economist: ... DiA: More generally, which party do you find more credible when discussing America's fiscal challenges?
Mr Bartlett: The Republicans don't have any credibility whatsoever. They squandered whatever they had when they enacted a massive UNFUNDED expansion of Medicare in 2003. Yet they had the nerve to complain about Obama's health plan, WHICH WAS FULLY PAID FOR according to the Congressional Budget Office. The word "chutzpah" is insufficient to describe how utterly indefensible the Republican position is, intellectually.
Furthermore, Republicans have a completely indefensible position on taxes. In their view, deficits cannot arise from tax cuts. No matter how much taxes are cut, no matter how low revenues go as a share of GDP, tax cuts are never a cause of deficits; they result ONLY AND EXCLUSIVELY from spending-and never from spending put in place by Republicans, such as Medicare Part D, TARP, two unfunded wars, bridges to nowhere, etc-but ONLY from Democratic efforts to stimulate growth, help the unemployed, provide health insurance for those without it, etc.
The monumental hypocrisy of the Republican Party is something amazing to behold. And their dimwitted accomplices in the tea-party movement are not much better. They know that Republicans, far more than Democrats, are responsible for our fiscal mess, but they won't say so. And they adamantly refuse to put on the table any meaningful programme that would actually reduce spending. Judging by polls, most of them seem to think that all we have to do is cut foreign aid, which represents well less than 1% of the budget.
Consequently, I have far more hope that Democrats will do what has do be done. The Democratic Party is now the "adult" party in American politics, willing to do what has to be done for the good of the country. The same cannot be said of Republicans, who seem unwilling to do anything that would interfere with their ambition to retake power so that they can reward their lobbyist friends with more give-aways from the public purse.
Unfortunately, I don't think Democrats have the guts or the stamina to put forward a meaningful deficit-reduction programme because they know-as I do-that it will require higher revenues. But facing big losses in the elections this fall I can't blame them.

That leaves us facing political gridlock between the sensible but cowardly party and the greedy, sociopathic party. Not a pleasant choice for those of us in the sensible, lets-do-what-we-have-to-do-for-the-good-of-the-country independent centre. ...

Next, as Brad DeLong notes, Martin Wolf "makes the case that America's future depends on the rapid destruction of the Republican Party and its replacement by an alternative opposition party to the Democrats":
The political genius of supply-side economics, by Martin Wolf: ...My reading of contemporary Republican thinking is that there is no chance of any attempt to arrest adverse long-term fiscal trends should they return to power. Moreover, since the Republicans have no interest in doing anything sensible, the Democrats will gain nothing from trying to do much either. That is the lesson Democrats have to draw from the Clinton era's successful frugality, which merely gave George W. Bush the opportunity to make massive (irresponsible and unsustainable) tax cuts. In practice, then, nothing will be done. ...
To understand modern Republican thinking on fiscal policy, we need to go back to perhaps the most politically brilliant (albeit economically unconvincing) idea in the history of fiscal policy: "supply-side economics". Supply-side economics liberated conservatives from any need to insist on fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets. ... It allowed them to promise lower taxes, lower deficits and, in effect, unchanged spending. Why should people not like this combination? Who does not like a free lunch?
How did supply-side economics bring these benefits? First, it allowed conservatives to ignore deficits. They could argue that, whatever the impact of the tax cuts in the short run, they would bring the budget back into balance, in the longer run. Second, the theory gave an economic justification – the argument from incentives - for lowering taxes on politically important supporters. Finally, if deficits did not, in fact, disappear, conservatives could fall back on the "starve the beast" theory: deficits would create a fiscal crisis that would force the government to cut spending and even destroy the hated welfare state.
In this way, the Republicans were transformed from a balanced-budget party to a tax-cutting party. This innovative stance proved highly politically effective...
The ... theory that cuts would pay for themselves has proved altogether wrong. ... Indeed, Greg Mankiw ... has responded to the view that broad-based tax cuts would pay for themselves, as follows: "I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don't." Indeed, he has referred to those who believe this as "charlatans and cranks". ...
So, when Republicans assail the deficits under President Obama, are they to be taken seriously? ...[I]t is not deficits themselves that worry Republicans, but rather how they are caused: deficits caused by tax cuts are fine; but spending increases brought in by Democrats are diabolical, unless on the military. ...
What conclusions should outsiders draw about the likely future of US fiscal policy? First, if Republicans win the mid-terms in November, as seems likely, they are surely going to come up with huge tax cut proposals (probably well beyond extending the already unaffordable Bush-era tax cuts).
Second, the White House will probably veto these cuts, making itself even more politically unpopular.
Third, some additional fiscal stimulus is, in fact, what the US needs, in the short term, even though across-the-board tax cuts are an extremely inefficient way of providing it.
Fourth, the Republican proposals would not, alas, be short term, but dangerously long term, in their impact.
Finally, with one party indifferent to deficits, provided they are brought about by tax cuts, and the other party relatively fiscally responsible (well, everything is relative, after all), but opposed to spending cuts on core programs, US fiscal policy is paralyzed. ...
This is extraordinarily dangerous. The danger does not arise from the fiscal deficits of today, but the attitudes to fiscal policy, over the long run, of one of the two main parties. Those radical conservatives (a small minority, I hope) who want to destroy the credit of the US federal government may succeed. If so, that would be the end of the US era of global dominance. The destruction of fiscal credibility could be the outcome of the policies of the party that considers itself the most patriotic.
In sum, a great deal of trouble lies ahead, for the US and the world.
Where am I wrong, if at all?

[Jul 23, 2010] Paul Krugman: Addicted to Bush

Economist's View

Just say no:

Addicted to Bush, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: For a couple of years, it was the love that dared not speak his name. In 2008, Republican candidates hardly ever mentioned the president still sitting in the White House. ...

The truth, however, is that the only problem Republicans ever had with George W. Bush was his low approval rating. They always loved his policies and his governing style - and they want them back. In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have come out for a complete return to the Bush agenda, including tax breaks for the rich and financial deregulation. They've even resurrected the plan to cut future Social Security benefits.

But they have a problem: how can they embrace President Bush's policies, given his record? ... What's a Republican to do? You know the answer. There's now a concerted effort under way to rehabilitate Mr. Bush's image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.

On the economy: Last week Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, declared that "there's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy." ...

I guess it depends on the meaning of the word "vibrant." The actual record of the Bush years was (i) two and half years of declining employment, followed by (ii) four and a half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight-year average under Bill Clinton, followed by (iii) a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of the "Bush boom," such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000.

But the Bush apologists hope that you won't remember all that. And they also have a theory ... that President Obama, though not yet in office or even elected, caused the 2008 slump. You see, people were worried in advance about his future policies, and that's what caused the economy to tank. Seriously.

On the deficit: Republicans are now claiming that ... the deficit is Mr. Obama's fault. "The last year of the Bush administration," said Mr. McConnell recently, "the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range ... most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it's almost 10 percent."

But that 3.2 percent figure, it turns out, is for fiscal 2008 - which wasn't the last year of the Bush administration, because it ended in September of 2008. In other words, it ended just as the failure of Lehman Brothers - on Mr. Bush's watch - ... caused the deficit to soar: By the first quarter of 2009 ... federal borrowing had already reached almost 9 percent of G.D.P. To some of us, this says that the economic crisis that began under Mr. Bush is responsible for the great bulk of our current deficit. But the Republican Party is having none of it.

Finally, on the war: ...Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was letting Democrats get away with the "shameful" claim that the Bush administration hyped the case for invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!

Again, Republicans aren't trying to rescue George W. Bush's reputation for sentimental reasons; they're trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies. And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the next time Republicans are in power, they'll behave differently. If you believe that they've learned something - say, about fiscal prudence or the importance of effective regulation - you're kidding yourself. You might as well face it: they're addicted to Bush.

[Jul 22, 2010] Kabuki Democracy Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, for Now

Eric Alterman attempt to identify the systemic roots of America's political insanity from the position of a left-wing observer comes short. Degenerative tendencies aside (visible especially clearly from the left wing: as Oscar Wilde aptly noted "objective opinion is our opinion about people we don't like ;-)" Bush regime enjoyed substantial level of support of the population (might be manufactured after 9/11 but still support). He did manage to identify a number of prime suspects: the anti-democratic rules of the political game, the role of money, right wing media, background framing and ideology. It would be nice to be able to do something about them.
But coming up with a purely US-centric view for what is clearly an international phenomenon violates the principles of critical thinking unless we believe in "export of ideology" like Communists did. The USA political situation was replicated in almost every other advanced industrial economy (US, Germany, Italy, you name it; even Russia -- fro all practical purposes Putin is right-wing nationalist politician). While US republicans is a nice wrecking crew with unique ability to harm the nation, conservatives of various flavors rule everywhere. There should be some more coherent explanation of the correct situation that explains that phenomenon.

Paul Krugman correctly notes that Barack Obama "isn't completely innocent of blame in the current spill," owing to the fact that BP "received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office." Indeed, as the current deputy interior secretary later mused, "What happened to all the stakeholders-Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government-all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security." But the "broader pattern" here, Krugman notes, is one of "the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology." As a result of this ideology's ruinous effects, we are likely being lulled into a similar sense of "false security" about any number of aspects of our public life and the government's regulatory responsibilities. These failures have the potential to despoil almost every aspect of President Obama's positive agenda, not unlike an oil gusher spewing its poison into a pristine Louisiana wetland.

Faced with countless challenges merely to restore some sensible equilibrium to US policy regarding say, long-term deficits or financial regulation, Obama faces the conundrum of a system that, as currently constructed, gives the minority party no strategic stake in sensible governance. The two parties are demonstrably different in this respect. Democrats, even in the minority, participate in solutions designed to improve governance. They cannot help themselves. A commitment to the principle of good governance is the primary reason most Democrats tend toward politics in the first place. One might argue that this faith in government's ability to improve people's lives is misplaced or that it becomes easily corrupted over time by the temptations of power and privilege, but few serious political observers would deny its initial presence. This is rarely true of Republicans, who are suspicious of government on principle and opposed to successful programs in practice. (If government succeeds, Republican ideology fails…)

Ironically, given the deeply contested manner in which George W. Bush ascended to the presidency in 2000 despite his second place finish in the popular vote and a transparent power grab on his behalf by the US Supreme Court, it is Obama's, not Bush's, legitimacy that has come under attack by mainstream Republicans. As the environmental reporter Dave Roberts describes it, "at the federal Congressional level, the Republican Party has become tight in its discipline, extreme in its ideology, and utterly unprincipled in its tactics." To be fair to the Democrats, they are a far more ideologically diverse party than the Republicans, and contain many moderates, many of whom, in past Congresses, would easily have been conservatives. To further complicate matters, the more conservative or "centrist" representatives are almost always the most vulnerable, since they do not represent reliably liberal districts (many were recently recruited by Rahm Emanuel for the purposes of winning in "purple" districts). As NPR's Ron Elving recently observed following the publication of yet another poll predicting catastrophe for the Democrats this November, "The House Democratic majority is, as always, a struggle between the 'sitting pretty' faction that's safe (this year as always) and the more fragile 'scaredy cat' faction that could be carried off by even the gentlest of anti-incumbent breezes." "The 'scaredy cats' are the Blue Dogs," adds New York Times pundit Charles M. Blow. As a result, the Democratic leadership in both houses is forever forced to compromise with its own side rather than its opposition. Now add to this the fact that, as Roberts rightly notes, "Congressional Republicans exercise far more party discipline, are far more extreme ideologically, and are far more willing to twist and abuse procedure than are Congressional Democrats." It's true, as pundits like to claim, that both sides "do it," but Republican conservatives do it better, more often and to far greater effect.

Again, to offer just one tiny for instance, when Democratic Congressman Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii announced his plans to leave Congress to run for governor, he picked as his date of departure February 28, just before the big make-'em-or-break-'em series of votes on healthcare reform. Barely a week later, Republican Congressman Nathan Deal of Georgia made the same announcement regarding his ambition to occupy his state's governor's chair, but his Republican colleagues prevailed upon him to stick around long enough to vote against healthcare. Meanwhile, and I wish I were making this up, Abercrombie's Democratic colleagues not only let him run away from the fight but even gave him going-away party. Too bad Abercrombie was already gone. (And in an almost too-fitting ending, the Democrats lost this bluest of blue seats-temporarily at least-in the May special election, owing to their inability to settle on a single candidate in time for the vote.)

Republicans never bothered to come up with an alternative healthcare proposal to Obama's; this was unnecessary. All they needed was the word "no." ("We're the party of 'Hell, no!'" cried Sarah Palin to a crowd of cheering Southern Republicans in mid-April.) Afterward, they make a speech about the need for the government to cut taxes and reduce spending. I swear I'm not kidding. When Senator DeMint introduced a GOP stimulus plan, authored by the Heritage Foundation, it consisted in its entirety of making the Bush tax cuts permanent and adding to them additional tax breaks for corporations and wealthy Americans. If enacted-never a serious possibility-it would have cost roughly three times what Obama's cost over the next ten years. Even DeMint found it necessary to admit that it was "not innovative or particularly clever. In fact, it's only eleven pages." Anyone who observes the current state of the Republican Party, whether at the elite or grassroots levels, will not find much clamoring for powerful public policy proposals. What the Congressional Republicans lack in seriousness, however, they make up in self-discipline, particularly when compared to the constantly divided (and frequently dispirited) Democrats.

Given this radicalization of their base, coupled with their ideological antipathy toward government solutions to societal problems, the current Republican leadership came to power with no interest whatever in bipartisan legislation. As DeMint famously promised, healthcare reform could be used to "break" the President. According to Republican-until-recently Arlen Specter-long before the White House had offered any details about the bill's content-before even "the ink was dry on the oath of office," the Republican caucus was plotting how to defeat Obama in 2012. Or as Representative Mike Conaway (R, Texas), a member of the Republican Steering Committee, put it, "I think, in the minority, you're not responsible for governing," and hence, "You can be a little purer in your ideology than when you're trying to get things done." This problem has only progressed during Obama's first year, as we shall see below.

Whatever the motivation, it is has become easier and easier for a determined minority to throw sand in the gears of the legislative process. America's system of political representation, now more than two centuries old, has grown ever more anachronistic. For instance, when the United States Senate was created, the most populous state had just twelve times more people than the one with the smallest population. Now it's seventy times; giving those in small and underpopulated states a massive political advantage over the rest of us. And it just so happens that the best-represented areas of America are also the most conservative. It is therefore no coincidence that the forty Republican senators with the ability to bottle up almost anything in the Senate represent barely a third of the US population.

This is just the beginning of the problems Americans face in terms of disproportionate representation. The average age of a US senator is 69, while the median age of Americans, according to the most recent census figures, is just over 35. Women are a majority of the US population but only 17 percent of the Senate. Only four senators are African-American, Hispanic or Native American, while these minorities represent a third of the population. Most senators are also millionaires; most Americans, needless to say, are not. Elderly white male millionaires therefore come to do quite well when it comes to legislation. Underrepresented groups, not so much…

The minority party has myriad means to bottle up legislation, and owing to a breakdown in comity among senators, no special interest is deemed too small or insignificant to monkey up the works. The most common tool of late has been the Republican threat to filibuster. Genuine filibusters of the kind Southern Democrats used to use to block civil rights legislation in the '40s and '50s are unnecessary today, as senators found them inconvenient, what with all the back-and-forth travel, fundraising opportunities and media appearances it would cost them. (The average senator spends about one percent of his time on the floor of the Senate, an infinitesimal fraction of what they devote to fundraising.) The ease of this particular tactic has increased exponentially as the Republicans grew ever more shameless in shutting down votes in which they are in the minority.

[Jul 21, 2010] China- The US Is "Insolvent and Faces Bankruptcy"

This naive view on China does not takes into account that the country faces formidable problems with its neo-feudal politic system still run by Communist Party brass. Also the USA is "blessed country" in one important sense -- everybody is descendant of emigrants and that makes nationalism much less of a danger. China has Tibet problem, Uyghur problem and others that I don't know about
Jesse's Café Américain

It would most certainly be a nuclear option to outright dump Treasuries outright, and would raise the ire of what is still a formidable military power. But it is the Western mind that is so incapable of seeing the many shades of gray in every situation, the subtle gradations in a range of choices that I believe China not only sees but is already actively pursuing.

China is not the only country that resents the devastating frauds that the US has perpetrated on not only its own people but the rest of the world through its Wall Street banks and ratings agencies.

Most Americans overlook this developing estrangement that is beginning to isolate the US and UK from even their traditional allies in Europe and South America and Asia. This is a serious error, but so typical of the short term mentality dominated by greed, dishonesty, and self-delusion that captured the American psyche in the latter part of The New American Century. But what choice does Europe have except to take what the Anglo-Americans serve them. Take it or leave it. And ain't currency war hell?

It never pays to have a 'checkerboard mentality' when your opponent is playing Go."

[Jul 20, 2010] The Real Reason Geithner Is Afraid of Elizabeth Warren by John R. Talbott

There is international aspect in activity of Treasury and in this sense the USA is a victim of its empire. That nuance escapes Warren. So it might be that Geithner is not only banking appointee...
The Huffington Post

...Certainly, Warren is not the commercial banking industry's first pick to serve in this new role. And unlike other legislation in which an industry's lobbying effort would naturally slow or cease once the legislation is passed, the new financial reform bill is continuing to attract enormous lobbying action from the banks. The reason is simple. The bill has been written to put a great deal of power as to how strongly it is implemented in the hands of its regulators, some of which remain to be chosen. The bank lobby will work incredibly hard to see that Warren, the person most responsible for initiating and fighting for the idea of a consumer financial protection group, is denied the opportunity to head it.

But this is not the only reason that Geithner is opposed to Warren's nomination. I believe Geithner sees the appointment of Elizabeth Warren as a threat to the very scheme he has utilized to date to hide bank losses, thus keeping the banks solvent and out of bankruptcy court and their existing management teams employed and well-paid.

To see how this scheme works during the current crisis we must go back and examine previous crises and recessions in order to understand their cause. As Kenneth Rogoff explains in his new book, This Time is Different, most crises are preceded by a boom or bubble period in which asset classes, such as homes in this case, reached unsustainable pricing levels. The main driver of most of these asset bubbles is loose bank lending in which banks offer money to asset buyers on very liberal terms, thus guaranteeing that asset prices will inflate abnormally. Eventually, all bubbles burst, and in the worst cases we are led into financial crises. The banks make things even more difficult because as prices fall the banks end up with substantial increases in problem loans.

To deal with this increase in problem loans, the banks typically pull back on all lending, not just lending in the affected sector. The banks, now primarily concerned with their own survival if they wrote off the problem loans, literally stop almost all new lending, thus driving the economy into a deep recession. It is difficult to sustain economic activity when there is no credit being supplied by the banking system. The banks, instead of lending to businesses and consumers, shift their investments to very safe instruments like US Treasury securities. The result is a risk-free cash flow that over time eventually repairs the banks' balance sheets by increasing their profitability and thus restoring their book equity.

Typically, during crises, the Federal Reserve also lowers interest rates and the cost of bank borrowing so as to make this risk-free profit spread to banks even greater. In the current financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates to almost zero percent per annum thus assuring that the banks can profit enormously by doing almost nothing, not lending and sitting on risk free Treasury investments. While good for the banks, one can see how damaging this lack of credit extension can be to an economy trying to recover from an economic crisis.

What is most damaging about this approach to an economy attempting to recover from a recession is that it ensures that the policy of tight money from the banks will continue for some time. Time is needed for the banks to earn their way out of their loan losses and insolvency problems if they decide not to quickly write off the bad loans. In Japan, after their banking crisis of 1994, it took more than a decade for the banks to repair their balance sheets and resume normal lending thus retarding economic growth for decades.

This is exactly the plan that Geithner and Larry Summers have proposed for the current crisis. If you remember, Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary at the time, had announced that the $700 billion TARP funds would be used to buy toxic assets like bad mortgage loans from the commercial banks. But this never happened and now the amount of bad bank loans has increased in the trillions. Immediately after receiving authorization of the funding for TARP from Congress, Paulson reversed direction and decided to make direct equity investments in the banks rather than using the TARP funds to acquire their bad loans.

So where are the trillions of dollars of bad loans that the banks had on their books? They are still there.

[Jul 20, 2010] Guest Post "Only 21% Say U.S. Government Has Consent of the Governed … Those with the Lowest Incomes are the Most Skeptical"

February 18, 2010 | naked capitalism

ray l love:

This is a good post - and its message is an important one, however, the analysis provided by the links is misleading.

The 'oligarchy' contention for example (Simon Johnson), as presented, which is in the context of a "Banana Republic", is problematic. The dysfunctional conditions of the US culture or society is unlike any historical precedent and so it must be understood as such if we are to put our Democracy back in balance.

Our circumstances are the combined result of a divided working-class and the emergence an investment-class that enables a form of democratic tyranny. It is the size of the investment-class that makes the political situation increasingly difficult to balance, and the Rasmussen poll shows that the distribution of satisfaction is socio-economic:

"Those who earn more than $100,000 a year are more narrowly divided on the question, but those with lower incomes overwhelming reject the notion that today's government has the consent from which to derive its just authority. Those with the lowest incomes are the most skeptical."

So I suppose that it might be accurate to say that our demographics enable an oligarchy.

But Banana Republics do not have 40 or 50% of the population (shareholders) benefiting directly from an oligarchy. So, our configuration is more deeply rooted in regards to power.

And this is unprecedented and a result of Globalization. It was in fact a necessary function of what allowed the complacency, and the selective ignorance, that was integral to the global exploitation that has afforded the largest leisure class ever, by any and all standards.

But it would be an underestimation of how destructive this much concentrated power could be, (concentrated though because this leisure-class is only a small percentage of humanity), considering just how much military strength it has to protect that power, in a world with the availability of resources decreasing to maintain so much conspicuous consumption.

A Banana Republic would be far less dangerous.

[Jul 19, 2010] Guest Post The Dangers Of A Failed Presidency By Michael Krieger, of KAM LP

07/15/2010 | zero hedge

If moderation is a fault then indifference is a crime.

-Jack Kerouac

Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.

-Buddha

Having fallen from the eternal, the Evil One's desires are endless, insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness. But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else. All he takes, he destroys. Certainly he rules the material, as he is called the Prince of this World in the gospels - but only of the things of this world.

-Denis de Rougemont

I have been calling Barrack Obama's Presidency a failure for at least six months now and it seems that I now have considerable company in this assessment as it becomes obvious to most. It is not a failure because of the Republicans. It is not a failure because of events beyond his control. It is a failure because this was a man that filled a depressed and downtrodden nation with the audacity of hope. When I voted for the man I knew it was against my personal financial interests. It was clear what he would do with taxes. Nevertheless, I got to the polls and voted for this fifth avenue creation thinking maybe, just maybe he might do some of the things he said. Most important to me were two issues related to the military-industrial complex (see Eisenhower's warning on this during his Farewell Address http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY) and civil liberties.

George W Bush was turning America into a depressed police state with perpetual war and consolidation of power between a corporate oligarchy and entrenched political class. A nation where the masses voluntarily gave up many of the liberties the founding fathers fought for merely to ease the fear that consumed them and which was propagated by the administration and the media. I and many others that voted for him even though they disagreed strongly with his economic policies thought he would at least reverse this trend. Why did we think this? Cause he said so. How foolish we were.

That being said, the real answer was certainly not John McCain as I think we would be in just as bad shape with him. I think that what this experience has taught us is that the President of the United States answers to others behind the scene. There are many theories on who these others are but I will keep it very simple. There is clearly a power elite that consists of a union between big corporate and financial oligarchs and career bureaucrats in Washington D.C. These are the folks that pull the strings of all administrations. All you have to do is look at the trends that have been in place since George W Bush and continue under Obama to see what these players want. Bigger government and thus more Federal power, more wealth for the oligarchs (thank you Federal Reserve) and an erosion of the middle class, and reduction of civil liberties in the name of the 1984-like never-ending "war on terror." I believe in a war on terror of my own. A war against the terror that Washington D.C. is constantly trying to inject into your head so that you sheepishly give away all you rights and power to them. That's my war on terror.

Ok, so what do I mean by "The Dangers of a Failed Presidency." I mean that it is July of an election year and Obama's magic spell that held sway over the American people and the world for about three months has completely washed away. I mean that the printed money mirage recovery that we have had to tragically watch is ending and we have no job growth to speak of other than a few hundred thousand census workers. The public has no appetite for more spending and Bernanke has no cover to print more money (yet). As such, if people think things are in freefall now for this administration just wait and see how the next several months pan out. This then brings me to the following quote:

"The bottom line here is that Americans don't believe in President Obama's leadership," says Rob Shapiro, another former Clinton official and a supporter of Mr Obama. "He has to find some way between now and November of demonstrating that he is a leader who can command confidence and, short of a 9/11 event or an Oklahoma City bombing, I can't think of how he could do that."

I found this quote in an FT article earlier in the week and it sent chills all over my body. This is how the strategists in Washington D.C. think. They are sick, twisted people. This guy doesn't even realize how sick and twisted what he said is which is why he said it. Imagine what they say off the record! You can take this quote in many different ways but none of them are good. I am not going to say anything beyond the fact that I would be VERY suspicious if some sort of event occurred before the elections. Google the term "false flag."

Also remember Rahm Emmanuel's famous quote of "you don't ever want a crisis to go to waste; it's an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid." Think about this deeply. This doesn't mean do what the public wants, or follow the constitution. It means that that those pulling the strings of power have the opportunity to do what THEY want, what fits THEIR ideology.

Hitler is the most famous modern example of a leader that used a crisis to form his fascist state. Again, I am not talking about Obama in isolation. I am referring to the power structure that has been firmly in place since the 9/11 attacks. Many call it a silent coup. I agree with this assessment.

This email is not meant to create fear. It is actually meant to get people ready if things get crazy for whatever reason. It is a challenge to people. I challenge everyone to think about how they would react should another terrorist attack or something along those lines occur. I was there for 9/11 and I saw the buildings go down in person. I know what it was like to be manipulated by my own government and media in the wake of such an emotional trauma. I also see that what we have done since, with things such as the Patriot Act and two wars that are still ongoing, and I have reflected on how they have changed America for the worse and provided a fertile ground for the elite to take away more of our rights and our wealth. So my rallying cry is that we must be strong and fearless in the face of fearful events. In the wake of anything that may occur in the years ahead we must not react on emotion and NEVER give away our inalienable rights in the name of protection from big brother. Be fearless, strong and resolute. Spend more time with your neighbors and build things up at the local level. If we have those supports then we will be less inclined to cry to the magicians in D.C. and the Federal Reserve for "help."

Mike

B9K9:

B9K9's Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a suggestion involving lack of knowledge by the power-elite approaches 1.

Riddle me this: how does a widely-known slacker of questionable intelligence and proven lack of track record in leadership experience become president of the USA? (Note that this question is applicable to both Bush & Hussein.)

In spite of their corrupt natures, I'm beginning to come to admire both Nixon & Clinton because both of them had what it took to reach the top. (Not least of which, they are certainly the two presidents with the highest IQs.) Sure, they were/are mean SOBs, but compared to our last two failed presidents, I'm not sure which is preferable.

Hussein was put in place as a fall guy - it is a measure of his utter cluelessness that Barry accepted such a position. He is the perfect foil: First, he led the way to assist the banker class to unload their toxic assets onto the public @ the highest possible prices long after the market top. Second, he is now leading the way to ensure a Republican sweep which will implement "austerity" as a means of collapsing property prices via deflation. Once that is accomplished, the bailed out bankers sitting on $trillions of our cash will be able to buy back all remaining assets for pennies on the dollar.

This tragic-comedy farce will only come to an end when the "strong-man" appears on the horizon. If you look closely into the faint distance, you might be able to detect/discern a slight disturbance. He is coming - we will know he has arrived when default/repudiation is placed front & center as the #1 priority of the country.

Until then, it's all theatrics as we dance to our doom.

Rusty Shorts:

That about sums it up !!

Yophat :

Except for the overwhelming ignorance.....Eisenhower was a turd and his comments drip with heavy hypocrisy- Google Operation Keelhaul....and then read "Body of Secrets" by James Banford.....and then read "The Politician" by Robert Welch.

Of course one does need to be truly ignorant to vote for a CIA welp like Obama.....or his predecessor Bush jr (CIA also known as Bush & Co - go back to Allen Dulles/Prescott Bush at BBH)....or the CIA's money launderer Billy Bob Clinton of Mena, AK fame.....or George Sr (Operation Zapata otherwise known as Bay of Pigs, the take out of JFK - smash CIA/Bush into thousand pieces comment, Iran/Contra, attempt of Reagan - Hinckley/Bush family bond).....etc etc

[Jul 17, 2010] What is Simon Johnson Smoking " naked capitalism

  • global-ease says:

    July 15, 2010 at 8:36 am

    "… the GTS unit is increasingly integral to the parent company's functioning. Clients that move funds through GTS leave a lot of cash on deposit at the unit, which funnels the money to other parts of Citigroup for lending or other uses. GTS's deposit-gathering muscle has grown more important since the financial crisis began…"
    AND
    "The major dealers, which are the firms listed earlier, plus players like Barclays, HSBC, Paribas, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, all have large counterparty exposures to each other through a whole range of businesses"

    I am combining these two broad thoughts to present another aspect of the interconnection of the TBTF syndrome.

    Please do not ignore the fact that the major dealers also use Citi's GTS network and infrastructure to promote their own business in countries in which they do not have said infrastructure. Every banker who covers clients around the globe knows you need good relationships with the local Citi branch if you want to do business in a country in which your firm does not have real infrastructure. Why? Simple – b/c the local currency accounts, cash reserves and collateral instruments are usually held at Citi, across the globe. If you want acccess to or a lien or a pledge on those accounts (which you always do) you need Citi.

    So, GTS could be construed as TBTF and what are your solutions? Sell it to another TBTF competitor? Or, watch JPM try to unseat Citi as the global go-to guy for such mundane and critical inter-dependent global banking services infrastructure needs. Hey, someone's got to do it.

    I am taking the easy way out today in simply presenting another fact/problem, as opposed to solving any. But the point is, as we dig deeper into how to break up the joint and decrease interdependencies, we just keep getting sucker-punched by the reality of the true global interdependencies that was inevitable and in fact, was a goal when we started.

    • [Jul 15, 2010] What is Simon Johnson Smoking "

    July 15, 2010 | naked capitalism

    jdmckay:

    Obama had a window of opportunity when he came into office. He blew it.

    That "window" was wide open and the opportuntiy was to explain to a largely ignorant public precisely how they'd been fleeced by BushCo and financial sector.

    BO continuted the coverup, and refie'd the crooks. He didn't just blow it, he closed the window and sealed it.

    Aside from his distaste for confrontation, he wasn't interested in economics,

    After election but prior to inauguration, he had plenty of top notch after advisers recommending a structural cleanup. AFAIC, BO made a choice: he was most certainly informed.

    and delegated it to the sort of people he liked, Clintonites (really Rubin cronies) with glittering resumes.

    I wish you'd be more explicit in describing things like this. These guys' core attributes are not explained by "Clintonite", and US economy/infrastructure had plenty of all the stuff needed to go forward productively when Clinton left office.

    Under Clinton, the malfeasance was in pockets (some large, yes), with plenty of legitimate resources foundational. Ensuing 8 yrs, malfeasance was made saturating and institutional.

    But then, at this point, I guess maybe it's all just an anecdotal postscript as there's precious little on the horizon from anywhere suggesting meaningful fundamental "change" in the right direction.

    WSJ is entirely unrepentant… considers (OpED last week) last week's SCOTUS ruling requiring reconsidering Jeffrey Skilling (Enron: "What's the difference between the Titanic and California?") and his crew's convictions a victory against the forces who would like to "criminalize business". In their view, these guys were engaged in legitimate enterprise.

    We see similar language from wave of tea party/repub candidates leading in polling across the country advocating more big biz wet dreams, while leaving the same corroding core miscreants pulling the levers of financial flow into their own bank accounts at expense of meaningful and needed investment. EG. we're headed for another lateral move back to BushCo.

    Majority of US public in for a very, very rude awakening in coming yrs. decades, and they are very unprepared. The US political spectacle makes Monty Python look scholarly.

    Richard Kline:

    To me, the worries of those in Government regarding the maintenance of the US behemoth banks, not to say their regulation, are not primarily focused on 'stability,' or 'optimal system design,' even less fairness. These institutions are seen as enormous projections of American state and economic power. This view is not entirely wrong. Our power as a national economy was, and to a degree still is, in our industrial production. The degree to which US T. rex banks chokehold the global financial system is a real pressure-point for American interest at this time. So the banks aren't simply a financial problem; they aren't primarily an economic problem; they are a political problem.

    To me, this is why the pipsquek powers-that-wannabe in US government refuse to govern the banks: they cannot see or get around the political reality of these banks as financial aircraft carriers threatening Those Other People to approach, conceptually or practically, the economic and systemic gross imbalances which these banks represent.

    I'm less sanguine than I have ever been that we will se 'reform' of the US financial system worth the name of such: the system will fail, and the 'reform' to follow will look more like some attempt to rebuild what we have only with a few sharp edges filed off. Unless, y'know, the people take over the government, which these here American type sheeple appear to have no such inclination to undertake for themselves. The 'reform' of this system will be nature's way: it'll gorge and correlate itself to dissolution.

    Got a Victory Garden? Y'all may need one when nature wins as ever in the end.

    [Jul 03, 2010] Eugene Robinson Robert Byrd's Redemption - Truthdig

    "We Stand Passively Mute"
    Sen Robert Byrd, on the floor of the US Senate
    Wednesday 12 February 2003

    Clips

    To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.

    Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent-ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.

    We stand passively mute in the United States Senate…

    And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.

    ... This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come.

    ...One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11…But to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet.

    Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

    ...Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq-a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15-this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare-this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

    http://byrd.senate.gov/speeches/byrd_speeches_2003february/byrd_speeches_2003march_list/byrd_speeches_2003march_list_1.html

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/feb/18/usa.iraq

    [Jun 28, 2010] General McChrystal: FAIL

    Coming Perfect Storm
    Peter Beinart analyzes the significance of the McCrystal Rolling Stone piece:
    Of course, McChrystal deserves to be reprimanded for letting a reporter make him and his staff look like arrogant jerks. But by focusing on McChrystal's supposed challenge to Obama's manhood-is the president afraid of his generals? Will Obama show that he can't be pushed around?-the press is turning a story about policy into a story about penises. What matters isn't what McChrystal said about Obama; it's what he believes about Afghanistan. That's why he should lose his job.

    For close to a year now, it's been painfully clear that McChrystal, with the backing of David Petraeus and the rest of the top military brass, wants America to make an unlimited commitment to the Afghan war. Counterinsurgency, they believe, works; all it requires is an unlimited amount of money and time. As Jonathan Alter details in his book, The Promise, McChrystal and company spent last summer waging a media and bureaucratic campaign aimed at forcing Obama to make that unlimited commitment. Obama resisted, insisting on a timeline for beginning America's withdrawal. But the fight goes on. In his book, Alter quotes Biden as pledging that "In July of 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it." Confronted with that quote last weekend, Robert Gates shot Biden down, declaring that "that absolutely has not been decided."

    Obama's problem isn't that McChrystal is talking smack about him. His problem is that McChrystal isn't pursuing his foreign policy. McChrystal wants to "win" the war in Afghanistan (whatever that means) no matter what it takes. Obama believes that doing whatever it takes will cost the U.S. so much money, and so distract the administration from other concerns, that it will cripple his efforts to stabilize America's finances and rebuild American economic power. That's the struggle that Hastings exposes: between a single-minded general who will stop at nothing to fulfill his mission and a president who believes that even if that mission saves Afghanistan, it could bankrupt the United States. It's a struggle about whether America is going to adjust to the new limits on its power or pretend that they don't exist.

    That's the real relevance of the Harry Truman-Douglas MacArthur analogy. Truman didn't just fire MacArthur because the general treated him with disrespect. He fired him because MacArthur wanted to do whatever it took to liberate the Korean peninsula, including bombing mainland China, whereas Truman came to realize that Korea must be a limited war, fought merely to preserve South Korean independence. In insisting that America's Cold War strategy be the containment of communism, not the rollback of communism, Truman kept the pursuit of military victory from destroying American power.

    Now Obama must do the same. Last summer, he tried to split the difference-surging in Afghanistan while simultaneously pledging to retreat on the theory that within eighteen months the U.S. could so weaken the Taliban that they would sue for peace. Six months in, that strategy looks increasingly absurd. As its most honest proponents concede, counterinsurgency is a long, messy business, especially when the president whose country you're trying to save is indifferent, if not hostile, to the effort. In all likelihood, when the deadline for troop withdrawal arrives a year from now, Obama will be forced to choose between something that looks like an unlimited commitment and something that looks like defeat. He'll be forced to make the choice that he avoided last year.

    My only quibbles with this superb analysis is that I think I might be a little less generous in my assumptions about what Obama thinks, and about what his foreign policy is. Obama chose Afganistan, chose, in some ways, to affirm and extend the Bush policy. Obama certainly changed the attitude of the U.S. toward Pakistan, and dramatically, but, in the main, Obama chose to continue and escalate the War in Afganistan, without, to my mind, clearly articulating achievable goals and objectives, or identifying the means to do so.

    My general view is that Obama is a Master Politician, who focuses his calculation on the political consequences, meaning by "political", the consequences on attitudes and conventional wisdom among the elite, particularly the Media elite, and among the bullies of the Right. How it will look, in other words, in the public relations contest.

    Sadly, I don't think he has much of an appreciation, at the end of the day, for the consequences of policy. He's a strategic thinker in political terms, but not a strategic thinker in policy terms. At least not most of the time.

    He did what he thought was politically wise, with regard to Afganistan. But, the lack of policy substance in his choice was betrayed by the failure to outline genuine and achievable goals and objectives for the continued war in Afganistan. He left a policy vacuum.

    And, McChrystal and Petraeus and Gates drove their trucks into that policy vacuum. Obama did not discipline McChrystal when the general deviated from Obama's foreign policy strategy, because Obama did not really have a foreign policy strategy in Afganistan. Obama had only the appearance of a strategy, thrown up long enough to do what he thought needed to be done, politically. After that he trusted his subordinates to fill in the blanks, with a real policy and strategy, the one Beinart disparages.

    I acknowledge that Obama has a formal process in place, which, I suppose, is something. Very large organizations need formal processes, not because leaders need them to make deliberate decisions, which is how Obama's process is portrayed in the Media, but because a formal process is needed in order that the operational meaning of the policy in action, at the lowest levels, is in accord with intention at the top. This isn't just a top-down process, there's a role for feedback, and educating the guys at the top.

    This process is not working. The Rolling Stone article was quite clear that McChrystal is failing, and knows he's failing, to get his ideas on counterinsurgency strategy and tactics, to percolate down through the ranks, without serious and debilitating distortions. McChrystal was not succeeding, and didn't know who to blame, and did not know how to digest what soldiers on the front lines were telling him about how it is, out there.

    That's a serious, serious problem. McChrystal, after being fired, did not participate in the top-level reviews, today, at the White House. That's understandable on one level, but curious on another, because one would hope that top-level policy-makers, looking abject failure in the face, would be a bit more curious about what is going on, in the field.

    [Jun 24, 2010] Missed Opportunity: BP Gulf of Mexico Disaster By Barry Ritholtz

    June 22, 2010 | The Big Picture

    One of my criticisms of George W. Bush as President was, when presented with an opportunity to achieve greatness, he repeatedly failed to rise to the occasion. Indeed, his presidency can be viewed as a series of missed opportunities:

    "Once in a generation, the stars align for a political leader. There is this perfect moment – too often based on some enormous danger of long-lasting consequences for generations to come . . . the perfect combination of leadership and threat, of challenge and response meet. The leader – imperfect, fallible, yet ready to rise to the occasion – grabs the brass ring."

    That was what I wrote following 9/11. There was a moment to transcend politics. Restructure global alliances, refocus military spending away from its cold war footing, force some sort of Israeli/Palestine deal, wrestle the US deficits to the ground. Rather than dare the nation to rise to the challenge, to make personal sacrifices for the greater good, to step up to greatness, the country was told . . . to go shopping.

    Barack Obama seems to be following W's footsteps. He has now twice failed to is rise to an occasion of great import. In the words of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, he has - repeatedly –"wasted a good crisis." The financial collapse was a grand opportunity to undo three decades of misguided decision-making and radical deregulation. He chose to focus on . . . Health Care.

    Now, we have another crisis - the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster. And yet again, we see another missed opportunity. The Oval Office speech the other day was just that - a speech, filled with mere words. There was no challenge, no sense of national need, no urgency. It was the same tired energy speech that, as Jon Stewart of TDS pointed out, every single president since Nixon has given.

    For the greatest orator of his generation, our president appears to be lacking in imagination.

    I am not a speechwriter, but if I were, this is what I would have suggested to President Obama that his June 15, 2010 Oval Office Speech looked like:

    "Good evening, my fellow Americans.

    On April 20th, an explosion ripped through BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Estimates of this leak have risen from 1,000 barrels per day to as much as 100,000 BPD. The Gulf of Mexico is now endangered - the food that it produces, its pristine beaches, its travel and tourist destinations are all threatened with despoilation. This environmental catastrophe is a tragedy of unprecedented proportions.

    But there is worse news: This may be the future we are looking at. This may be the first of many such catastrophes we may face in the years to come. It is the result of a series of many bad decision made by too many people about too many important things. Our corporate partners have made inexpedient decisions to take on more risk to pursue greater profits. We saw this in both the banking sector and more recently, energy companies. Our regulators have become too cozy with their charges. Our Supreme Court somehow has mistakenly come to the conclusion that corporations are the equivalent to Human Beings, with the same guarantees to free speech and political participation. We have failed to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. We have allowed ourselves to become so inured to the benefits of cheap, plentiful energy, that we have ignored the risks and the costs.

    We are in danger of losing our way, of no longer being a Democracy, and morphing instead into a corporatocracy - a nation of, by and for Corporations

    This has gone on for far, far too long.

    So tonight, I am proposing 10 sweeping changes for America:

    1. Energy R&D: First, we need to recognize that a decade into the 21st century, we are still wed to 19th century fuel sources. What we need is a fundamental breakthrough in energy technology. Toward that end, I am convening a new "Manhattan Project" - only this time, it is for fundamental research into new forms of Energy. We need more than incremental improvements in solar and battery power, we need a major breakthrough that is the equivalent of the Atomic bomb in its magnitude.

    I am requesting Congress Fund a $250 billion dollar Federal research agency to fund fundamental physics and chemistry research - into battery technology, solar efficiency, wind and wave power, thorium nuclear, and all manners of new ideas. The private sector has failed to do this over the past century, so it is up to we the people to get this accomplished.

    If we were able to find $185 billion dollars for AIG, then surely we can find $250B to secure our energy futures.

    2. Gas Taxes: Gasoline is cheap and plentiful. This has encouraged us to be incredibly wasteful in our energy choices. We are the only industrialized western nation that has not implemented some form of disincentive to to be so profligate in our fuel consumption. Hence, we will be phasing in Pigou taxes over the next 10 years of 10 cent per gallon of gasoline.

    The US consumes 16 million barrels of gasoline a day. Automobiles use nearly 10 million of those barrels - about 400,000,000 gallons per day. We want to slow that consumption, and channel the pigou taxes into productive research and mass transit.

    Speaking of which:

    3. Mass Transit: I am implementing a massive overhaul of our national mass transit. We are too inefficient in how much energy we consume merely getting around from place to place. Hi Speed rail between cities, increased rail within the cities, natural gas burning buses, and electric vehicles will become the standard.

    4. CAFE Standards: For local driving, we need to also be more efficient. Thus, we will raise our national Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for automobiles. We were making progress in the 1970s and early 80s, but we got complacent. I am confident that our auto engineers and manufacturers will find a way to deign more efficient vehicles.

    5. Alternative Energy for Homes: I have already established tax credits for making homes more efficient, replacing old furnaces, upgrading insulation and windows. But we can do better. So we will be offering a new set of tax credits for alternative energy sources at the home level. Solar, geothermal, wind will all be subsidized by a federal tax credits for home and apartment owners.

    6. Upgrade the Grid: Our existing energy grid is antiquated, inefficient and problematic. I am appointing a panel of scientific experts to make recommendations to upgrade the electric grid, transmit power more efficiently, and help to reduce black outs. Further, we need to make the grid more secure from attack from overseas hackers and others who would use our open society to do us harm.

    7. Campaign Finance Reform: I have appointed my old colleague, John McCain, as head of a task force on campaign finance reform. Both sides of the aisle have become corrupted by the money in politics. No one knows the campaign finance rules better than John, who has been working on this issue for decades. The time has come for reform, to prevent the banksters and the ol company lobbyists from having their way.

    8. Lobbying Rules: The revolving door between regulators and industry, between Congress (and Congressional staffers) and lobbying firms is totally unacceptable. Whether its Toyota and Auto safety regulation, the SEC and Corporate defendants, or BP and MMM, it will no longer be tolerated.

    Hence, as CEO of the Executive Branch, I am putting a 5 year waiting period before you can leave government employment and take a job with the industry you were regulating. For Congressional staffers, you cannot go into any industry covered by the elected official you worked with. This includes any legislation they worked upon. This moratorium will also be submitted as legislation for Congress to pass, and woe to the lawmaker who votes against it.

    9. Corporate Donations: The Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission granted "corporate personhood" - it gave corporations the same speech rights as flesh-and-blood human beings. This was an error, and ws not what the founders envisioned when they wrote "We the People." Hence, I have introduced legislation into Congress to reverse that Supreme Court decision.

    10. Transparent Disclosure: Finally, we are mandating a completely transparent system of disclosures - for all campaign donations, lobbying activity, and any and all donations to groups that engage in lobbying. You have the right to give money to whatever groups are trying to influence legislation . . . but the people have a right to know what was given to whom and for what purpose. All of this information will be published on publicly available websites.

    My past 6 predecessors in this office all made similar promises - but the danger was not acute enough to get the nation to act. The Gulf tragedy has now focused our attention in a way that perhaps never was before. It will require effort, sacrifice, hardship.Butit will also create new jobs, develop new industries, and put the United States on firmer footing to be a world leader in energy.

    In the end, we will be a better nation for it - stronger, more secure, wealthier - for the sacrifices I am calling upon all of us to make.

    Good night, and God bless America.

    ~~~

    That is the speech I would have had the President make. Truly great leaders, when presented with terrible situations, find a way to achieve greatness. He missed the last time out. If the mess in the gulf gets appreciably worse, he will have one last opportunity. I hope he doesn't pass up the chance yet again.

    Selected Comments

    rob hone :

    I have heard from thinking friends on the right that the Bush agenda on tax cuts and spending was a deliberate attempt to bankrupt the systems of big government. A kind of tough love that would lead to a "force majeure" in the process of privatizing America. It would be ironic if the conservative movement had finally overplayed its hand with the Bush 2 era. Surely the rise of the conservative media along with the rise in republican power in Washington would seem to have reached a parabolic point on the cosmic chart, perhaps to recede inexorably toward a more European zeitgeist.

    The Curmudgeon :

    States exist for the foundational purpose of providing security. Great leaders achieve greatness when the security of the state is threatened in an existential way. As bad as 9/11 was, it was hardly a threat to our existence, or even to our international hegemony.

    The Gulf oil spill is even less threatening to our existence. Whether all our efforts ultimately fail or not really does not matter. The oil will eventually stop spewing and the ocean will recover. Pristine white sand beaches are a luxury, not a necessity. The world won't stop because some vacation plans went awry. The Florida coast is in many ways is a testament to man's folly when he has more dollars than sense, building billion dollar projects along beaches that are regularly raked by hurricanes.

    The reason we haven't seen any great leaders in America in the last couple of decades is because America is existentially secure. Bill Clinton would probably have been another FDR had he enjoyed the luxury of governing during an a major conflict. Instead, he let a blue dress squander a legacy of governance that was competent for its time. He didn't do anything governmentally stupid, like his Bush bookends, that history will record as two of the greatest war-mongers in US history.

    Instead of using the Gulf spill to galvanize a remaking of society, Obama should use his cool demeanor to calmly explain that things will work out for the best, which they will, if he lets them. Searching for new energy sources is nice, but even with a $100 billion Gulf spill, oil is still cheaper than anything else out there for the time being, and stupidly wasting societal resources on more expensive energy resources could ultimately yield that existential threat from which all great leaders arise.

    Niskyboy :

    Well, as problematic as drilling for oil is, we can't really overlook how much energy there is in a gallon of gasoline, now can we? Chemistry can be such an inconvenience, but gasoline has a huge amount of available energy, and it is delivered in a convenient form that can be stored ffor a long time. What else besides gasoline are you going to use to propel a 3,500-pound car loaded with family and luggage over long distances at highway speeds? (OK, OK, diesel, natural gas, sure - but the point is, there's a ton of available energy in fossil fuels, which is why we use them in the first place.)

    Therefore, although I certainly like your point #4, for my two cents it's lacking in oomph because it's really the MAIN point which should be emphasized. You like graphs - plot some showing the increase in engine fuel economy versus both emissions and horsepower outputs since 1970, for both gasoline and diesel engines. They are pretty impressive, and we're nowhere near finished. For example, one could view hybrids not primarily as a step toward fully electric vehicles, but the other way, as an improvement to what is primarily an internal combustion engine-based power system.

    When an alternative energy source actually delivers enough energy - and conveniently - to be a real threat to gasoline, is when people will switch to it. Not before. Therefore, let's stop shoveling so much R&D money into this futuristic stuff, and pour a lot more R&D funds into internal combusion engine development. It's not trendy, granted, but it's a winner.

    Separately, a pet peeve - better batteries. Please, you'd have to be a beliver in perpetual motion machines. Lithium is dangeous anyway– remember the laptop battery fires of a few years ago? Think that's solved? Go ahead and drop your laptop 10 times and see how long it takes for the battery to catch fire afterward. Up here in the Albany, NY area the streets are full of potholes and other drivers are as crazy as they are anywere else - there's no way can a lithium-battery-powered car achieve the same levels of safety current vehicles achieve routinely. And, of course, no existing or imagined lithium battery can deliver as much energy as a lowly gallon of gasoline.

    franklin411 :

    It can't be a missed opportunity unless there's an actual chance of enactment.

    We've never, in the history of this Republic, had a political party entirely devoted to obstructing the governance of this nation AT ALL. We have never had the filibuster used on EVERY bill introduced in Congress.

    What we've had since January 2009 is a coup. The Republicans have rebelled against democracy, and they are using the rights and privileges of the democratic process to pursue their revolt.

    In this, the Republican Party is no different than Al Qaeda.

    wrongway :

    Greatness? I would settle for simple competence.

    Obama should have said "We are going to focus all of our efforts and resources on plugging the hole in the gulf and on cleaning up the mess." Then actually do it.

    After 9/11, Bush should have said "We are going to focus all of our efforts and resources on capturing Osama Bin Laden and stamping out Al Qaida." Then actually do it.

    Instead of grandiose speeches and schemes, we need to focus and commit to solving individual problems. That way we would actually accomplish something.

    The Curmudgeon :

    Your lizard eyes are clouding your view F411. If the Republicans are obstructionist, it is because they can be -– it is because they have political support for obstructionism. Aside from it being a bit disingenuous to blame minority Republican trolls for the failure of your enlightened Progressives to get all that they wish in the legislature, it simply isn't true. Name a legislative initiative that hasn't passed because of Republicans.

    Besides, as one that sees all colors through a political prism, you should be happy the Republicans are obstructionist. It will make them look like fools when your re-engineered society brings peace and happiness to the world.

    Transor Z :

    @VangelV:

    Wow, you're out of your freakin' tree, buddy. Wilson staunchly opposed the punitive terms of Versailles and also proposed global divestment from colonial holdings and democratic self-determination as a general principle. Do you actually know what the Fourteen Points were??? Wilson's 1917 intervention caused the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 - WTF??? Don't you know that the US intervened militarily in support of the anti-Bolshevist insurgency by the White Army and actually sent troops into Russia to fight the Red Army until 1919??? You have NO CLUE what you are talking about and your comment made everyone a little dumber. May God have mercy on your soul.

    ------
    @Niskyboy:

    I think it boils down to whether the burning up of all of those cheap BTUs has enriched human civilization in a lasting way - and laid the foundation for weaning ourselves off of it. Unfortunately, our consumption pattern has been more like bacteria than sentient/planful beings.

    louiswi:

    The best way to look at the political establishment today is to make a comparison to Major League Baseball. For example, A small group of teamowners control every single aspect of the game with absolutely nothing left to chance. Oh you say, "are you saying the games are fixed?" "Of course not", I say, "the outcome of the games have nothing to do with the real interests of the owners which is solely financial."

    In the same way, a small group of people have complete control of the political establishment and absolutely nothing is left to chance. Oh, the lefties and righties, the idealogues, the patriots etc etc all think they have a voice in the outcome but the facts are, the outcome of an election is irrelevant. Nothing is left to chance. Their guy always wins as their guys are the only players. That is why we see Obama appearing more and more like GW.

    The small group of people who are leaving nothing to chance? A handful of corporate heads, one or two media types, military/industrial folks, Israeli reps and a small handful of minor players.

    Marcus Aurelius:

    VangelV:

    I can't tell if you're misreading history or trying to rewrite it, but Presidents that did nothing forced those who followed them to do something (usually something radical), as we are currently relearning (although I don't think Obama is up to the task).

    As globalization is teaching us, the American people aren't any greater than people anywhere else. In fact, we're getting our asses handed to us.

    Your "relatively free" marketplace included child labor, subsistence farming, company towns, government paid union busters, slavery, and a long series of land grabs.

    FDR's policies created the middle class. They (along with Eisenhower's highway system) pulled us into the 20th century. There is a very strong correlation between high taxes on the wealthy and the growth of the middle class. Make of that relationship what you will, there's also the current wreckage to our economy to consider, which took place despite (actually because of) tax cuts, deregulation, the lax enforcement of laws as they pertain to the wealthy and powerful, and the elevation of the corporate body to super human status.

    Your chain of events regarding despots of the 20th century and how they came to power is cherry picking of the first order.

    quidite1:

    Barry, Are you against the corporate free speech rights of the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News too?

    The Citizens United Supreme Court case has been horribly misunderstood. This decision will get money out of the shadows (where I assure you it was [I work in politics]) and into the open so you can follow who is donating what to whom. And guess what - Exxon isn't going to be spending $100 million to elect politicians because it's a bad business decision.

    Last, remember, politicians want to eliminate any source of power that can threaten their incumbency - and every campaign finance "reform" should be understood as enhancing the power of politicians at the expense of those who threaten the status quo.

    Your points 1,2 6 and 10 have merit, though.

    1. beaufou Says:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 12:20 pm

      I don't know if read the link posted yesterday (jeg03) about engineering and the current state of affairs, I think there was a lot of truth to it.
      One tidbit:

      "Illusions of Progress

      In terms of technological innovation and industrial creativity, the United States is not today the country it once was. In the second half of the 20th century this ebb was masked by several phenomena. An illusion of sustained innovative momentum was created by the vigorously continuing exploitation of legacy technologies, including obsolete energy sourcing. Wall Street activities increased in intensity even as they became more tenuously associated with industrial productivity and innovation. Computerization, although based on innovations dating back decades, was exploited with such media panache that it fostered a misleading impression of technological growth across the board. In fact, the nation entered an era of deindustrialization in the second half of the 20th century. "

      Managerial positions are occupied by savvy financial so-called experts bent on restructuring and outsourcing to maximize profit for their investing friends.

      There is something absolutely wrong with this one way ticket to the promised land, progress stalls in favor of paper-wealth branded as real growth.

      Long term unemployment becomes the trend, as some kind of inevitable accident, just like financial crisis; it is nobody's fault therefore nobody can fix it, impoverishment and jobless recoveries are now accepted by those in power, I question their intelligence or their honesty, choose one or the other.

      One of the reasons we may not see another effort such as Bretton Woods in the near future or before it's too late, is because the Dollar might suffer a blow Americans are not ready to take.

      As early as 1965, De Gaulle was shitting in the boots of Johnson, asking for gold instead of paper money, arguing the system would create unreal deficits no-one would eventually be able to repay. The Nixon shock made matters worse, while I wouldn't recommend a return to the gold standard, I think Keynes idea should won have the day in 1945:

      Keynes' proposals would have established a world reserve currency (which he thought might be called "bancor") administered by a central bank vested with the possibility of creating money and with the authority to take actions on a much larger scale (understandable considering deflationary problems in Britain at the time).

      "In case of balance of payments imbalances, Keynes recommended that both debtors and creditors should change their policies. As outlined by Keynes, countries with payment surpluses should increase their imports from the deficit countries and thereby create a foreign trade equilibrium. Thus, Keynes was sensitive to the problem that placing too much of the burden on the deficit country would be deflationary."

      Looking at the current situation in Greece and Germany, Greece imports way too much and does not produce enough and Germany exports way too much while not consuming enough, making each country irresponsible for its trade balance and letting loans and funds readily available to the point of no return, it's the same story the world over.

      As for the corporate world, playing the freedom card any chance they get, they have become a destructive force similar to the gold-drunken Spaniard elite a few centuries ago, so rich they didn't feel the need to update their own society resulting in idiocracy and inquisitions.

      We need bailouts and 0% interest for bankers to make credit available, another crock of shit served up by the ever dominating finance assholes.

      I don't know how you can think that stagnant wages at home and slave labor abroad combined with ever increasing prices of commodities and housing will lead to consuming by people unable to pay their debt as it is.

      Maybe re-evaluating the amount of private debt one country can absorb based on its standard of living and job market rather than consumer confidence would be a good start.

      You cannot govern outside of reality, but reality has a strong lobbied bias nowadays.

    1. Julia Chestnut Says:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 8:32 pm

      I have to disagree with you - any time the President says "I will appoint a panel" or a "task force" I take that to mean that nothing will get done. A bunch of blowhards will meet to create a report that will not be acted upon.

      Sometimes the practical solution is a panel - but never announce that as your action point. Sure, it's what they always do, because it sounds like doing something when really it is doing less than nothing.

      I really liked Rachel Maddow's version, frankly. She's got much larger cajones than the guy we elected. I do entirely agree about realigning the incentives and working on the grid. We also need to work on some other incredibly antiquated infrastructure. But the issue is that we've already fallen so horribly behind on the steps that the next advances will be based upon: I'm not sure how it's going to work to get us where we need to go.

    2. Andy T Says:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 8:40 pm

      @Tranzor Z.

      Exactly! What we need is for all the scientists and engineers to go to work for the government. The government could dictate which sorts of projects and ideas get the best funding. That really does seem like the best way to allocate resources, doesn't it?

      Where does it end?

    3. dsawy Says:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 8:56 pm

      @ changja:

      re: government-sponsored innovation. Most of your examples are true, but we should NB a common thread: they came out of the "military-industrial complex." DARPA, after all, stands for "DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Agency." The Internet was invented to enhance communication in the event of a nuke exchange. The innovations in aviation were, of course, an outgrowth of military aviation during WWII. GPS was designed to enable first-shot response in artillery counter-battery fire, and until the 90's, the high-precision GPS signal was not decrypted for civilian use.

      We should NB, again, that the widespread deployment into the civilian economy was the result of private investment and development. The original Internet would be nearly unusable by 99% of the users of what you see as the 'net today. There was nothing like modern web browsers in the government-controlled 'net.

      There was plenty of private-sector development that happened that greatly influenced and leveraged the network you see today. Ethernet? Private development (Xerox). Time servers, file servers, print servers? Xerox again. Auto-discovery of network devices? Xerox, DEC, Apple. Thinwire Ethernet? Private sector. FDDI and successive fiber optics networking? Private sector. Wireless networking? There was a start in the defense sector, but the private sector picked up spread spectrum wireless modulation and really ran with it. Cheap routers? Private sector. Ubiquitous ethernet interfaces in every PC? Private sector. ISDN, Frame Relay, cable TV networking, DSL, wireless point-to-point? All private sector.

      The transcontinental railroad was a private-sector job, but with a government-backed payoff of land – the railroads were given a checkerboard pattern of land for 20 miles on either side of the path of the railroad. Every other section was controlled by the government, and the other section was given to the RR's. Until the 90's, you could still see this checkerboard pattern along the RR path in northern Nevada. The railroad has sold off most of these sections to raise capital and reduce taxation. You can still see the checkerboard on BLM maps, however, where ranchers haven't done exchanges to "block up" their grazing lands.

      The model that appears to work the best is this, IMO: government lab pure research, private development. The government labs are very good at sponsoring "pure" research since we've demolished the private sector "pure" research labs (especially Bell Labs). "Pure" research is research that doesn't care whether or not there will be a product made from the research "soon or ever." By the government doing the "pure" research and putting it into the public domain, the intellectual property doesn't get squirreled away by patents, and the private sector can duke it out who makes the best use of the idea.

      There used to be more "pure" research done in the private sector: An example would be the crypto research done by Bell Labs over the years from WWII to the 70's. You benefit today from this pure crypto/math research done at Bell Labs. The "pure" research done by Uncle Sammy in crypto – you and I don't get to even know about that, much less leverage it. There is plenty of pure research done in medical, biological and plant science fields, but too much of this ends up being constrained by IP laws and patents for us to see widespread development of the ideas.

    4. Carse Says:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 9:29 pm

      I'm not against foreign wars, I'm against foreign wars the government has no intentions to win. Political whims kill Americans and waste money. Neither Bush or Obama hold the political will to win the Afghanistan war. Bush did alright in Iraq, he established a democracy, stability, and a trading partner to an area of the world in desperate need of some political education. They received it courtesy of the US military.

      I am also a veteran of the Vietnam war. I'm sensing than none of you have sacrificed anything for some fundamental freedoms.

    5. willid3 Says:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 9:36 pm

      i wonder on what planet some live on. The first 150 years of the US, there was no middle class, you were either rich. or dirt poor. and we don't even have to mention the slaves ion that era do we? it wasn't until the 20th century that the beginnings of a middle class came into existence, and only after WW2 did it really take off. the early era of the US is mostly marked by how little %95 of Americans earned. and how much the top 1% did. we always seem to think the bygone days are better than today.

      But i agree with BR's points though. i just suspect that he didn't do it because the Congress we have won't do much. we have one party who needs to line every thing up. but has to big a tent to do that. the other has only one principle. NO on any thing. don't fix any thing. and be sure to blame the others for their failings. the hired those who worked at the MMS that helped create the disaster by ignoring any thing that stuck out as a sore thumb. like all the oil companies having the same DR plan?? and worrying about protecting animals that don't live there? and i sort of wonder about those who say this or that is unconstitutional when they said nothing when the government was spying on them and others. and why is it now some thing to be worried about instead of before? and just when has business ever lead the way on new technology. only if government paid for it. and prodded them to do it

    6. Transor Z Says:
      June 22nd, 2010 at 9:41 pm

      @Tranzor Z.

      Exactly! What we need is for all the scientists and engineers to go to work for the government. The government could dictate which sorts of projects and ideas get the best funding. That really does seem like the best way to allocate resources, doesn't it?

      Where does it end?

      Well, Andy, hopefully it doesn't BEGIN with crazy straw-man hyperbolic misstatements of my comments!

      MEH and I have had some exchanges in the last couple years where we both lamented the shrinking of Bell Labs. Bell Labs was private sector, you see. Seriously, painting anybody who wants robust public sector investment in R&D, public health, mass transit, infrastructure as a dirty commie is foolishness.

    7. ZedLoch:

      Obama is afraid of name-calling and being labeled. What he doesn't seem to understand is that he will never win over his critics, but his base will get tired if he doesn't fire them up with bold actions.

      Thus a lot of positive talk and "tipped hats" to gay rights; giving up on the most effective parts of health reform in favor of "bipartisan" (aka lobbyist approved) compromise; muddling on financial reform, immigration, energy policy, etc.

      I voted for the guy, but now I'm wondering if we should have gone with Hillary. She seems more likely to actually kick ass, instead of just looking around for one already bent over…

    [Jun 23, 2010] Which do you trust less – Big Business (including Wall Street) or Big Government? by Rdan

    6/19/2010

    Robert Reich asks and answers the question "Which do you trust less – Big Business (including Wall Street) or Big Government?":

    But fundamentally, the debate is absurd.

    It's not the purpose of the private sector to protect the public. Companies like Goldman Sachs, Massey Energy, WellPoint, and BP will do everything they can to make money. They owe allegiance to their shareholders. Hopefully along the way they also make great products and provide terrific services. If the market is competitive, both consumers and investors gain.

    The purpose of government is to protect and enhance the well-being of Americans. Its job is to protect the public from corporate excesses - enacting laws that bar certain actions that may hurt or endanger the public, and fully enforcing those laws.

    We get into trouble when the two sets of responsibilities are confused – when big business and Wall Street spend vast amounts of money trying to influence government, and when government officials (including the officials of regulatory agencies) pull their punches because they're aiming for lucrative jobs in the private sector.

    The real challenge of our time has nothing to do with whether one trusts Big Business and Wall Street more or less than Big Government. The challenge is to keep the two apart, each focused on what they're supposed to be doing. (That's why, for example, I still think it unwise to have

    Selected Comments

    Greg

    "Business at least has to persuade me to part with what is mine: offer me something I want more to get me to give up what I have. Government is allowed to demand what is mine and shoot me if I don't hand it over. That greater power over me is more likely to lead to greater abuse of power, no?"

    I agree with some of your expressed sentiment. No one likes knowing there is someone/something that has the power to force you to do anything. We LOVE the ILLUSION that we are free. However I prefer that that power over people exists somewhere and that WE are responsible for and responsive TO its actions. Responsive TO doesnt simply imply taking what it says quietly but responsive by redirecting it when it becomes too draconian. If we all operated under the idea that what we are doing is being observed by every one of our fellow citizens AND they are sitting in front of a console with the power to either approve or disapprove (and disapprove meant some sort of punishment) we would all act in a more responsible manner.

    I take issue with your idea that something is ALL yours and thusly you have COMPLETE control over it. You make your money because of not in spite of the efforts of a lot of other people. You are what you are not solely on your own merits. A little more humility in the arena of what OURS is definitely in order in this country.

    Our rugged individualism has turned into a mental disorder.

    Other people will tell you more accurately what you are worth if you could shut up from your own self aggrandizement long enough to hear. (This was not just directed at you Tim)

    [Jun 19, 2010] The Very Angry Tea Party - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

    The same anger brought to power National Socialists in Germany...

    This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other - the anonymous blob called simply "government" - has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence. That is permanent.

    In politics, the idea of divorce is the idea of revolution. The Tea Party rhetoric of taking back the country is no accident: since they repudiate the conditions of dependency that have made their and our lives possible, they can only imagine freedom as a new beginning, starting from scratch. About this imaginary, Mark Lilla was right: it corresponds to no political vision, no political reality. The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction.

    In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing. Lilla calls the Tea Party "Jacobins"; I would urge that they are nihilists. To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violence of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech - the last already to great and distorting effect. But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins' fantasy of total freedom, "a fury of destruction"? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.

    KT:

    The first posted comment essentially illustrated Dr. Bernstein's point: i.e., that the "Tea Party" anger is essentially nihilistic and destructive, and relies on blind denial ("I am right") of the existence of the "other." The Tea Party crowd shouts down elected representatives because to engage in a discussion -- a Town Hall - would be to acknowledge a connection and dependency that the shouters are driven to deny. If the Senator exists, then I am part of society. If I am part of society, then I am injured by society's defects. Hence, society must be erased, even if that means shouting other people down.

    I also note that those who are doing the most shouting are they for whose identity the frontier ethos and myth of individuality have been most crucial; namely, less educated Americans, and particularly the white, working class. Sarah Palin is a hero to these people because she comes from Alaska -- the frontier -- is neither literate nor well-informed, but has nonetheless put herself center stage, proudly asserting not merely her heritage, but also her lack of qualifications, as virtues. Saint Sarah of Alaska is the individualist ethos hypostasized, the sacred embodiment of everything that the Tea Party holds dear, the defiant "No!" to the reality that frightens those to whom the myth has provided comfort in a world -- a socio-economic system -- in which they were, in fact, powerless.

    Moreover, the guys making money don't care that they are "socially constructed," but rather merely want to go on making money, even at the expense of the fellow citizens to whom they are linked. Hence, the myth of individuality, provides a panacea for the poor, primarily serves the interests of the rich. The great irony in the situation that Prof. Bernstein describes is that, by powerfully asserting their putative "individuality," the Tea Party is validating the very interests, and institutions, that they claim to hate.

    Marx called this "false consciousness," and predicted a revolution that would culminate in the end of such bad thinking. Hegel saw such conflicts as metaphysical -- between ideas -- rather than material -- between social classes. What we are seeing today, is false consciousness exploding into frustrated fury. What is scary -- and boy, is it scary -- is that, unlike Marx's proletarians, and Hegel's communities of mind, the Tea Partiers do not seek a new, better resolution to their problems, but rather merely the destruction of all that belies their delusions. And that's us.

    Jon

    As Rousseau pointed out, we have a Social Contract, that binds us to our society and government. We willingly, even if not knowingly, renounce our freedom as individuals or wild animals to live together.

    Professor Bernstein states that the Tea Partiers feel abandoned like friends or lovers after the relationship fails. One writer writes that he feels let down by a litany of bail-outs. Aren't the bail-outs a symptom of a deeper failure: A failure of our economic institutions, corporations and workers, to make it work, to be governed by principles of honesty and hard-work rather than opportunism, greed, and happenstance?

    I find Prof. Bernstein's thesis here fascinating, but there is a deeper problem than the illusion of individual sovereignty in society. The entire Western tradition is established in dominion over nature, sovereignty over plants, oceans, air, animals. This is more than individual sovereignty. We have been told that animals, lands, air and water are endless resources for us to conquer and exploit. It just ain't so. We are slowly seeing the consequences of not seeing our interdependence and relationship, not only with the economies of our country and the world, but also of our planet.

    We can't endlessly pollute the oceans and air, nor deplete the oceans. By this thesis, the members of the Tea Party are furious children, let down by the illusion that any man or woman can be a billionaire if they only try hard enough. The image of a temper tantrum is frightening. Think of armed adults raging.

    Unfortunately those raging about the environment rage silently and quietly, through academic papers and institutions and no one hears them. What if we are not only let down by our economic institutions and myths but also by our belief that we can do anything we want to nature and it may have no or minor consequences? This is time for iconoclasty and creative, intelligent, non-violent rage.

    [Jun 18, 2010] The Four Pillars of Conservatism it is not as Incoherent as it seems by Bruce Webb

    Angry Bear

    Family values/patriarchy; Property rights/inheritance; Public order/tradition; External defense/xenophobia.

    Taken individually and in combination I think they serve to explain the essential unity of the various divides of modern conservatism into paleo-Cons, neo-cons, social values Cons, religious Cons, and perhaps most for my purposes the alignment of top level economic strata: bankers and factory owners with what are in economic terms their natural enemies: shopowners, small farmers, and even those factory workers.

    If we were all at heart Homo Oeconomicus, each seeking to maximize our our own self-interest, why would those groups accept an economic system openly rigged against them. (It is not like at any point in history or high or popular literature that bankers have been popular figures, instead they are Snidely Whiplash tying Sweet Nell to the tracks so as o get her property. http://carmenmillet.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/dorightcast.jpg

    Rich S:

    Here's my take on what "good" can be distilled from conservatism:

    1. Respect existing structures and institutions on the basis that they are the result of historical processes that have ferreted out structures and institutions that do not work in the real world and left us with those that do work.

    2. Realize that the world is complex and that our attempts to improve it may not succeed in bringing about the results we want and may also bring about unintended negative consequences.

    Pretty much everything else is bunk, and yes, I have read Kirk's Conservative Mind, Nash's Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945, as well as Burke himself.

    Even the two "good" propositions above are far from airtight:

    • Regarding #1, it may be that the institutions and traditions we have are not reflective of a natural selection process resulting in "what works" (or Hayek's sponateous order) but rather a reflection of which groups in society historically had the power to impose their will on everyone else.
    • Regarding #2, this is really just an argument for proceeding cautiously, rather than for not proceeding at all.

    Rich S:

    I agree, and that was sorta the point of my last paragraph - yes the institutions we have today have stood the test of time, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're better than any other ones, particularly since they may just be reflective of the desires of those with the power to enforce them.

    I also think that conservative intellectuals tend to focus too much on Burke and his prudent conservatism while ignoring the influence of de Maistre and his darker conservatism. IMO, the influence of de Maistre's authoritarian conservatism can readily be seen in much of today's conservatism

    [Jun 13, 2010] Robert Reich (Why the Main Street Economy Isn't Getting Any Better)

    The common wisdom is that excessive debt-financed spending was one of the causes of the recent recession, so the news that household debt is dropping is being celebrated by business cheerleaders as reason to believe we're on the mend.

    Baloney. The reason so many Americans went into such deep debt was because their wages didn't keep up. The median wage (adjusted for inflation) dropped between 2001 and 2007, the last so-called economic expansion. So the only way typical Americans could keep spending at the rate necessary to keep themselves - and the economy - going was to borrow, especially against the value of their homes. But that borrowing ended when the housing bubble burst.

    So now Americans have no choice but to pare back their debt. That's bad news because consumer spending is 70 percent of the economy. It helps explain why we so few jobs are being created, and why we can't escape the gravitational pull of the Great Recession without far more government spending.

    It's also a bad omen for the future. The cheerleaders are saying that for too long American consumers lived beyond their means, so the retrenchment in consumer spending is good for the long-term health of the economy. Wrong again. The problem wasn't that consumers lived beyond their means. It was that their means didn't keep up with what the growing economy was capable of producing at or near full-employment. A larger and larger share of total income went to people at the top.

    So in the longer term, it's hard to see where the buying power will come from unless America's vast middle class has more take-home pay. Yet the economy is moving in exactly the opposite direction: Businesses continue to slash payrolls. And the hourly wage of the typical American with a job continues to drop, adjusted for inflation.

    Here's more news: A Federal Reserve report Thursday showed the net worth of Americans rose a fourth straight quarter in January-March. Don't be fooled by this one either. That increase was almost entirely based on the stock market's rise in the first quarter. But the market has since fallen back to where it was at the start of the year. More to the point, most Americans don't have many assets in the stock market. To the extent they have any net worth, it's in their homes. And home prices continue to languish.

    Don't be fooled by the cheerleaders. The economic news continues to be dismal.

    [Jun 13, 2010] Rational Ignorance - Dictionary Definition of Rational Ignorance

    Definition: Rational ignorance is the option of an agent not to acquire or process information about some realm. Ordinarily used to describe a citizen's choice not to pay attention to political issues or information, because paying attention has costs in time and effort, and the effect a citizen would have by voting per se is usually zero.

    It Is Up to Us to Decide What Government's Role Will Be There and Elsewhere

    Angry Bear

    Brooks sums up the problem. "[Americans] want to hold [Obama] responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change. At some point somebody's going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government."

    Brooks posits such irrational demands flow from a growing nervousness over "America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems." Bob Herbert, also writing in the New York Times, suggests this helplessness is self-inflicted."

    "For a nation that can't stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we've become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us . . . The American public [needs] to begin coping in a serious and sustained way with an energy crisis that we've been warned about for decades. If the worst environmental disaster in the country's history is not enough to bring about a reversal of our epic foolishness on the energy front, then nothing will . . . When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly?"

    Last year, Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and rising GOP star, responded to Obama's first address to Congress by, among other things, belittling research into environmental and other dangers from volcanoes as ridiculous and unaffordable. When oil from the BP leak began threatening his state's shores, he started begging the federal government to spend and act without limits.

    Republicans and too many Americans in general do not seem to see any more hypocrisy in this than they did opposing "socialistic" healthcare while simultaneously screaming over potential cuts to Medicare. They criticize Obama for failing to fix the BP leak but when faced with a disaster that resulted from far-too-cozy relationships between Big Oil and federal regulators, they argue for less regulation and "Drill, Baby, Drill!" They claim to embrace risk-taking associated with entrepreneurial capitalism but when they and their families are the ones at risk, they expect government protection.

    As E.J. Dionne noted in the Washington Post, "Deregulation is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren't issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its Tea Party critics claim it is. But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task."

    Obama's Katrina Maybe Worse - NYTimes.comby FRANK RICH

    FOR Barack Obama's knee-jerk foes, of course it was his Katrina. But for the rest of us, there's the nagging fear that the largest oil spill in our history could yet prove worse if it drags on much longer. It might not only wreck the ecology of a region but capsize the principal mission of the Obama presidency.

    Before we look at why, it would be helpful to briefly revisit that increasingly airbrushed late summer of 2005. Whatever Obama's failings, he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor. President Bush's top disaster managers - the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, as well as the notorious "Brownie" - professed ignorance of New Orleans's humanitarian crisis a full day after the nation had started watching it live in real time on television. When Bush finally appeared, he shunned the city entirely and instead made a jocular show of vowing to rebuild the coastal home of his party's former Senate leader, Trent Lott. He never did take charge.

    The Obama administration has been engaged with the oil spill from the start - however haltingly and inarticulately at times. It was way too trusting of BP but was never AWOL. For all the second-guessing, it's still not clear what else the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to cosmetic, difference in plugging the hole: yell louder at BP, send in troops and tankers, or, as James Carville would have it, assume the role of Big Daddy? The spill is not a Tennessee Williams play, its setting notwithstanding, and it's hard to see what more drama would add, particularly since No Drama Obama's considerable talents do not include credible play-acting.

    But life isn't fair, and this president is in a far tougher spot in 2010 than his predecessor was in 2005.

    When Katrina hit, Bush was in his second term and his bumbling was not a shock to a country that had witnessed two-plus years of his grievous mismanagement of the Iraq war. His laissez-faire response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall to big business. His administration's posture toward the gulf region had been telegraphed at its inception, when Dick Cheney convened oil and gas cronies, including Enron's Ken Lay, to set environmental and energy policy. The Interior Department devolved into a cesspool of corruption, even by its historically low standards, turning the Bush-Cheney antigovernment animus into a self-fulfilling prophecy and bequeathing Obama a Minerals Management Service as broken as the Bush-Cheney FEMA exposed by Katrina.

    Obama was elected as a progressive antidote to this discredited brand of governance. Of all the president's stated goals, none may be more sweeping than his desire to prove that government is not always a hapless and intrusive bureaucratic assault on taxpayers' patience and pocketbooks, but a potential force for good.

    He returned to this theme with particular eloquence in his University of Michigan commencement speech 10 days after the Deepwater Horizon blowout. He reminded his audience that under both parties the federal government helped build public high schools, the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system, engineered the New Deal and Medicare - and imposed safety and environmental standards on the oil industry. Quoting Lincoln, Obama said that "the role of government is to do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves."

    We expect him to deliver on this core conviction. But the impact on "the people" of his signature governmental project so far, health care reform, remains provisional and abstract. Like it or not, a pipe gushing poison into an ocean is a visceral crisis demanding visible, immediate action.

    Obama's news conference on Thursday - explaining in detail the government's response, its mistakes and its precise relationship to BP - was at least three weeks overdue. It was also his first full news conference in 10 months. Obama's recurrent tardiness in defining exactly what he wants done on a given issue - a lapse also evident in the protracted rollout of the White House's specific health care priorities - remains baffling, as does his recent avoidance of news conferences. Such diffidence does not convey a J.F.K.-redux in charge of a neo-New Frontier activist government.

    Long before Obama took office, the public was plenty skeptical that government could do anything right. Eight years of epic Bush ineptitude and waste only added to Washington's odor. Now Obama is stuck between a rock and a Tea Party. His credibility as a champion of reformed, competent government is held hostage by video from the gulf. And this in an election year when the very idea of a viable federal government is under angrier assault than at any time since the Gingrich revolution and militia mobilization of 1994-5 and arguably since the birth of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s.

    This is why the more revealing strand of Rand Paul's post-primary victory romp may have been his musings about BP, not civil rights law - although they are two sides of the same ideological coin. He called out Obama and his administration for sounding "really un-American" in their "criticism of business." He asked that we stop the "blame game" over the disaster and instead just accept the fact that "accidents happen." Much as Paul questioned the federal government's role in ordering lunch counters to desegregate, so he belittled its intrusion into BP's toxic private enterprise. But unlike the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the role of government in corporate regulation is a continuing battle, not settled law.

    Hardly were those words out of Paul's mouth than the G.O.P. gave him the hook. He dropped his scheduled appearance on last Sunday's "Meet the Press." Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader and Paul's newly self-appointed minder, declared that his fellow Kentuckian had said "quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage." Establishment conservatives have scrambled to portray Paul as either an innocent victim of a liberal media game of "gotcha" or an inexperienced citizen-politician who made the rookie mistake of conducting campaign interviews as if they were classroom seminars in Libertarian theory. We were told he really didn't mean what he was saying, and that he certainly didn't represent the G.O.P. or the Tea Party movement.

    Whom are they kidding? Paul rightly described his victory as "a message from the Tea Party" that it was on the march "to take our government back." And if he doesn't represent the G.O.P., who does if not his most powerful supporters and ideological fellow travelers, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin? Aside from saying no to Obama, the Republican Party has no ideas except Tea Party ideas, Rand Paul ideas. And as The Economist, hardly a liberal observer, put it, Paul's views are those of "a genuine radical who believes in paring government down to the bone."

    The president of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, codified the mission in apocalyptic terms last weekend. The new American "culture war," Arthur C. Brooks wrote in The Washington Post, is not "over guns, gays or abortion" but pits "the principles of free enterprise" against the "European-style statism" he accuses Obama of fomenting. It's a war that takes no prisoners: the A.E.I. purged the former Bush speechwriter David Frum after he broke with the strict party line.

    The stakes are high. To win this culture war, the right must rewrite history - and not just that of the Bush response to Katrina. In his jeremiad, Brooks held only "government housing policy" responsible for the 2008 economic meltdown and gave a pass to what he regards as an already overregulated Wall Street. Palin has brazenly accused Obama of being in financial hock to Big Oil when it's her own "drill, baby, drill" party that has collected three-quarters of Big Oil's campaign cash for decades.

    The Tea Party is meanwhile busy rewriting America's early history under Beck's tutelage by enforcing a vision of the Constitution tantamount to the Creationists' view of Genesis. We must obey the words of the founding fathers literally - or what the Tea Partiers think those words to be. (Many Tea Partiers seem unaware that Medicare is a government entitlement postdating Tom Paine.) There can be no evolution or amendments. Any Obama initiatives are sacrilegious. All previous add-ons are un-American and must be pared away, from the Department of Education to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Michael Steele, the party chairman, attacked Elena Kagan for joining Thurgood Marshall in finding the original text of the Constitution "defective" because, among other defects, it countenanced slavery.

    The only good news from the oil spill is that when catastrophe strikes, even some hard-line conservatives, like Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, start begging for the federal government to act, and act big. It's the crunch moment for government to make its case - as Obama belatedly started to do on Thursday. But words are no match for results. As long as the stain washes up on shore, the hole in BP's pipe will serve the right as a gaping hole in the president's argument for expanded government supervision of, for starters, Big Oil and big banks. It's not just the gulf that could suffer for decades to come.

    Dave

    "As long as the stain washes up on shore, the hole in BP's pipe will serve the right as a gaping hole in the president's argument for expanded government supervision of, for starters, Big Oil and big banks."

    The column was sensible and persuasive until the sentence at the very end. And then you got it exactly wrong, Frank. The oil spill, like the economic meltdown in 2008, destroys the conservative and libertarian ideas of the Republican party that allowed the catastrophe that we are now seeing. Rand Paul entertains us with his ludicrous ideas about civil rights and criticizing BP, but Bobby Jindal, who like Obama must answer to his constituent, is calling for more government to deal with the Gulf crisis, not less. No, the present debacle is not Obama's Katrina, it's the legacy of Bush and Cheney that is erupting in the Gulf.

    Jumper

    You are correct. It is not in American DNA to accept lack of results when faced with national challenges.

    Americans want to see results that at least significantly minimizes damage to our Southern coastal areas. There is such a solution that has been used on an oil disaster in the Arabian Gulf that was at least fifty times larger than this one. Very serious, knowledgeable engineers have been championing it.

    BP has been doing nothing about it and should have started it at least two weeks ago. Why? Because as BP CEO Tony Hayward, a University of Edinburgh PhD, told BP senior managers in 2006, BP has a problem of top management not listening to people below them. Once again, they're not listening.

    The solution is simple. Use a fleet of supertankers to suck the oil off the surface of the ocean. In 1993, Nick Pozzi was an engineer for Saudi Aramco. Due to a series of accidents all at once, he was faced with oil gushing from two wells and four leaking tankers. Some of the supertankers used for sucking up oil were parked near the oil gushing up from the wells and some sucked oil off the other surface.

    Mr. Pozzi has offered his services but has been rebuffed. Mr. John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil has been making the publicity rounds trying to get someone to start this operation.

    It's psst time Mr. John Hofmeister be listened to, empty tankers coming out of Houston be hired and put to work sucking and segregating oil and water.

    Cost? You're kidding. We gave billions to the Wall Street rat hole. Sell some more U.S. bonds and pay the cost to get that fleet of tankers and support vessels doing the job. We've got a contingency fund for war and we can use that to start saving our South Eastern coast. Seize BP assets for collateral if that's the sort of reassurance Congress needs to act immediately.

    Clean a swath through the slop. Use that swath as a fire break. Use the smaller ships to clean in to the coast. Use the tankers to keep the oil south of the swath. The number of tankers can be reduced as the slop presently out there is cleaned up. With this technique, we could even survive until the relief well is completed if we had to.

    There's your bold plan, Mr. Rich, that will get the job done. We've got to quit fixating on the blasted hole. Hire the tankers, get the job started. We've got the southern coastal area of our nation to protect. By the way, 85% of the Arabian Gulf oil was recovered - 85% didn't reach the coast line.

    Frank Rich is right when he points out that this could be much worse for the country than Katrina. Obama will have to explain why he made four fundraising trips to California during this time. Then he has to leave the area to go to Chicago for the weekend. If he moved his office to the Gulf area until this situation gets resolved, he may show how serious this is to this country and the world

    kathleen

    Five minutes ago President Obama was accused of taking over private businesses, expanding the size of government, and destroying our freedoms, especially the freedom to make a profit any damn way we could. My favorite president was attacked for bringing both fascism and communism to the formerly white White House.

    Now everybody from MSNBC to FOX are oil experts, and environmental experts, and all are predicting President Obama's demise. The voters who hang on the pronouncements of the Wrong-All-The-Time pundits have forgotten that no one predicted Barack Obama would even be nominated.

    And what tragic flaw has #44 exhibited?

    The same people who were calling for his greying head because he was turning America into a socialist state are now angry because he hasnt taken over the oil companies.

    They all hate big government, and now they are mad because he hasnt made it bigger.

    priceofcivilization

    Memo to Democratic defenders: This should not be Obama's Katrina (a mismanaged natural disaster); this should be Obama's 9-11.

    Remember that first 9 months of baby Bush (and Dick Cheney, of Halliburton) when they had no plan at all, and convened big oil people to write a policy for the government. That policy has more or less been in force ever since: let lobbyists write the regs. But what people forget is that Bush couldn't do anything until he had an enemy, until after 9-11. Everything he did for the next 7 years was framed as a response to 9-11. Everything was justified as part of the war on terror. Well, THAT is what this oil spill should be for Obama.

    This is Obama's greatest opportunity. He can rule for 7 years under the banner: response to what happens if big multinational corporations are given the reigns of power. What we need is to limit the power of big banks and big oil, or else we will get another recession and more oil spills. If he can grab the rhetorical power, this can define him and boost him...not be used to attack him. (Where is George Lakoff's wisdom about framing issues when we need it?)

    Bruce P

    The comparison to Katrina doesn't hold. The oil spill is not a natural disaster, but a human disaster, and ultimately a political disaster. It is the consequence of allowing the oil companies on Dick Cheney's energy task force to write their own regulations for oil exploration when they lacked the capacity to protect the public interest from their own failures. Let us not forget that those who are complaining the loudest now have their own share of culpability. The voters and politicians in the Gulf states who are crying for the government to save them are the same ones who voted for Cheney and for "Drill, baby, drill."

    2lulu

    The primary fault of Mr. Obama's in managing this catastrophe was in not publically recognizing it for what it was immediately. I mean, AN OIL RIG BLEW UP IN THE GULF OF MEXICO AND WAS SPEWING THOUSANDS OF GALLONS DAILY! Mr. President, let's amp up the volume to correlate to the horror of it all. It wasn't necessary that he have all the facts on the first day, it was necessary that he announce his immediate implementation of all governmental agencies in the containment/clean-up. These past 40 days he should have held full press court for updates several times a week. Are we to believe that with an environmental disaster of this magnitude he couldn't spare 30 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to keep the citizenry informed?

    Stu Freeman

    Mr. Obama has only himself to blame for the nationwide amnesia concerning the Bush-era record of corruption and malfeasance. Had he been willing to investigate that record during the early period of his own administration and to hold people like Dick Cheney accountable for breaking any number of laws, Americans would be intimately acquainted with (among other things) the selling off of our national energy policy to Cheney's brotherhood of oilmen- including the folks at British Petroleum. By giving his predecessors a pass in order that the nation could go on about its business, Mr. Obama has allowed the oil spill to come pouring down on his own head.

    Erik Roth

    Frankly Mr. Rich, you persist to baffle me by writing, "Obama's recurrent tardiness ... remains baffling, as does his recent avoidance of news conferences. Such diffidence does not convey a J.F.K.-redux in charge of a neo-New Frontier activist government." Rather than JFK, Barack Obama was elected to give us a new New Deal, a la FDR, to correct the horrible damage done by Reagan through Bush, and to change the grossly misguided course that the country was on. But the fact remains that he has done none of that. Far more troubling, because blame for that cannot be laid simply to obstructionist opposition, Obama has shown repeatedly that he doesn't intend to make any substantial change. So, why can't you see that? Look, Obama is irrelevant. This isn't about him. This is our fate. We need to take control of it, and that means overthrowing the rulers in both parties, and the corporate powers who own them. We can have a progressive future, or a regressive one. Pitifully, Obama will be part of neither, but blind devotion to him will ensure the latter.

    Christine

    I suggest that this is not "Obama's Katrina," but rather "America's Chernobyl." Just as the nuclear accident exposed the weaknesses and self-destructive nature of the Soviet system, the BP disaster shows that the refusal to confront the economic, political, and environmental implications of our dependence on fossil fuels is suicidal. Chernobyl was one of the first events leading directly to the collapse of the USSR. As the oil continues to flow in the Gulf, the USA appears to be heading toward its own demise.

    Jack

    Rich and the other Obama apologists are far too kind to him. True, Obama never promised, literally, to take any progressive action, but by his studied eloquence, he let many of us believe that he really was a progressive. Many of us wised up as soon as he picked his neo-Rubin economic team - Summers, Geithner, et al. This was a clear sign that Obama was in thrall to the fat cats of Wall Street and big business who had actually bankrolled him despite the claim of relying on "small" contributions.

    And there is the Clinton example of how much money is out there to be made after the presidency if you do as you are told by the powers that be.

    Obama's hapless and inept handling of the Gulf oil spill and defense of BP, and big oil, just like his defense of Wall Street, and selling out health care reform to the insurance and pharma companies, has finally awakened even the most dense progressives to his true nature and agenda. We must get a real progressive in the White House, even if it means letting some Republican dufus win in 2012 so that the rest of America will wake up too. All progressives must abandon Obama now! He is a lost cause!

    zcaley

    Rich and the other Obama apologists are far too kind to him. True, Obama never promised, literally, to take any progressive action, but by his studied eloquence, he let many of us believe that he really was a progressive.

    Many of us wised up as soon as he picked his neo-Rubin economic team - Summers, Geithner, et al. This was a clear sign that Obama was in thrall to the fat cats of Wall Street and big business who had actually bankrolled him despite the claim of relying on"small" contributions.

    And there is the Clinton example of how much money is out there to be made after the presidency if you do as you are told by the powers that be.

    Obama's hapless and inept handling of the Gulf oil spill and defense of BP, and big oil, just like his defense of Wall Street, and selling out health care reform to the insurance and pharma companies, has finally awakened even the most dense progressives to his true nature and agenda.

    We must get a real progressive in the White House, even if it means letting some Republican dufus win in 2012 so that the rest of America will wake up too. All progressives must abandon Obama now! He is a lost cause!

    CJGC:

    What could/should Obama have done earlier and better re the ongoing oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico?

    In no special order:

    1. Reminded us all that 11 men died in the explosion. Sadly, that human consequence of the disaster got pretty much ignored in the national media for several weeks. That alone would have put BP on notice and might have prompted them to tear up the "agreements" they forced the survivors to sign - what? not to speak to the media.

    2. Announced a moratorium on off shore drilling until further notice and until we had a full understanding of what led to the explosion and the spilling oil.

    3.. Publicly asserted that BP would be held responsible for paying for the full cost of the disaster. The details on what BP could actually be forced to pay could have been left for later.

    4. Insisted that government scientists and independent experts have full access to the oil spill site to report to the president and to the public what was going on and what could be done. He could further have announced that the site was not the private territory of BP and that BP would not be allowed to control access.

    Michael Drew:

    It is certainly quite plausible that as an individual event, the government failure in this disaster may be greater than that of Katrina, and indeed the political allout may be greater in time as well. After all, Obama has much further to fall now than Bush did in Spetember 2005.

    And there lies the key to where this is not his Katrina. What made Bush's Katrina Bush's Katrina (as opposed to New Orleasns' Katrina, to which "Bush's Katrina," i.e. the fall out for his approaval and legacy, couldn't be less relevant), is that it came at a time when the credibility of his administration, and above all perceptions of its competence, were hanging by a thread (mainly due to Iraq, but for many other reasons). Katrina simply exceeded the remaining tensile strength of that thread (by a couple tons), and his popularity cratered thereafter, ever to recover. Obama has had no previous highly visible outright disasters. this may well turn out to be a fundamentally damaging moment for his presidency and prevent him another term. But it won't be his Katrina, because it is not a dramatic continuation of a series of administration failures, as Katrina was for Bush. Katrina also came months into Bush's second term, when there wasn't even a hint of an excuse that any nook or cranny of the government could be said to still be more shaped by the previous government than his. I don't hold Obama's being still in the first half of his first terma as an excuse for his response either, but I suspect politically independent observers have the contrast in the back of their mind nonetheless. Further, the nature of the disaster does not play into the established perceptions of Obama's party's weak points the way Katrina did for Bush's. Republicans are more associated in the oubic mind with the oil industry and Democrats with enviromental concern, whereas domestic human disaster response is the type of thing the public expects Democrats to do well and Republicans to be lackluster with (the fact that the victims of Katrina were disproportionately African-American didn't help Bush according to established party perceptions either).

    For all of these reasons, it is clear that the political dynamics around this event are quite different for this president than they were around Katrina for President Bush. This is not Obama's Katrina. This is his 2010 Gulf oil disaster. And yes, it may turn out to be worse, perhaps far worse, for him and for the country, than Katrina was.

    Madison:

    Why are the Amercian people, so many of whom want less government control and interference in their lives, less tax and more "leave us to run our own lives" rhetoric- ready to pull this president down over the BP oil spill.

    Obama didn't cause, it can't directly fix but can say they are doing everything possible and that everyone affected will be helped.

    Drilling for oil in the ocean has always had its risks- we accept that because we need the oil. Maybe now there will be more thought to alternative clean energy fuels and an acceptance that climate change has to be tackled. Oil is a dangerous substance.

    texasbeachcomber:

    In so many ways this is Obama's Katrina. I won't defend either FEMA or Bush's oversight as neither was particularly competent, but 90% of the blame for Katrina rests with the Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin. World class incompetence at the city and state level is what doomed New Orleans.

    Obama wrongly assumed that the well would be plugged quickly and was slow to act. He really didn't plan for a worse case scenario. If he was on top of this from the start he would have quickly mobilized the Coast Guard to begin effort to minimize the potential damage to the coastline. Quicker action would have helped to minimize the damage that is going to occur. We probably won't know the full impact of not jumping on this earlier until the leak is stopped.

    I would like to nominate Ken Salazar as this disaster's "Brownie". The man is an idiot and Obama should tell him to stop trying to tell BP how to plug the well (something he has no expertise at) and focus on clean up efforts.

    Lastly, Obama's Louisiana photo ops juxtaposed against California fund raisers has all the sensitivity of Bush flyovers.

    From what I have seen so far the most competent president in American History hasn't produced any better results for the people of the Gulf Coast, than Bush did for New Orleans. Let's hope this changes real soon.

    Scott:

    President Obama inherited a huge environmental mess compliments of no-regulation Bush and Cheney who never met an oil well that wasn't worth drilling. One of the lessons we must learn from the mother of all environmental disasters is that failing to regulate corporations, in this case the oil industry, can lead to catastrophic events. This disaster proves that left to their own devices, corporations can fail miserably in protecting the public good.

    But we cannot continue to compare and rationalize Obama's sub-par performance by pointing to the failures of Bush/Cheney, or how horrible things would be with the dynamic duo of McCain/Palin chanting "drill baby drill" as the Gulf chokes to death. Pointing to the failures of these regimes only lets the Obama Administration off the hook, and creates a climate for the right wing to re-emerge.

    With the failure of top kill to stem the gusher that flows 24/7, Obama and his administration needs to spend 24/7 focusing on this disaster. First, he needs to place administration experts in the room with BP as they are making decisions, and give them the power to overrule decisions they feel are not in the public's best interest. Second, Obama needs to ask for all of the help we can get from any Nation willing to provide us with vessels and experts who can help clean up the Gulf. Third, he needs to get the Department of Justice engaged RIGHT NOW to criminally investigate BP, issuing subpoenas to obtain all of the facts, and commence prosecutions if the facts so warrant. Fourth, we need transparency concerning what is happening to our Gulf of Mexico--public information in a timely manner, not through BP PR flacks.

    All of us who supported Obama believe Government can do more to protect the public and regulate reckless corporate behavior. Obama now has his chance to demonstrate Government is up to task. If he fails, we will inherit a regime that we all know has absolutely no concern for the environment, or regulation of the oil industry.

    AKAurora:

    As this disaster has worn on, several things have become abundantly clear:

    1) We're dealing with something far bigger than ever visualized;

    2) It's likely to remake a whole lot of people's impressions of government versus the private sector, regulation, and environmental issues;

    3) People panic when they're afraid -- and they're afraid now.

    I'm surprised at the number of people, on both sides of the spectrum, demanding that the government take over, use the military--in short, declare martial law. Meanwhile, they keep insisting that BP pay and be responsible for everything. They aren't seeing the inherent conflict between the two ideas.

    BP has already written more checks to those harmed by the disaster than Exxon ever did in Alaska.

    As for Obama and whether or not this is his Katrina? Not really. It might end up worse, but this isn't a "natural disaster," or "Act of God." This is born of some terrible policies, incompetent Oil Company management, and a pretense that nothing like this would ever happen (again).

    Additionally, it will create the biggest smack in the face possible to all of those content to continue along on the same old path of fossil fuels. This accident is exactly what the alternative energy people and environmentalists have been talking about. We cannot afford to wait for climate change or peak oil. We must make major overhauls to our way of living NOW. This may be the boot up the butt to get Congress moving and to spark the economy. Obama could come off a bigger winner.

    Mark Goldesm (rumor mill -- NNB)

    WORST CASE SCENARIO

    Frank the potential cataclysm is much worse than might be imagined.

    Here is what a scientist who uses the pseudonym magellanic has to say:

    "The Deepwater Horizon blowout quickly eclipsed the Exxon Valdez. It is likely to pass Chernobyl as the worst man made environmental disaster on record. Given that the best-case predictions of capping the flow are weeks, if not months, away, it is probably a good idea to roll out the worst-case scenarios and start strategizing about fighting it as the contamination spreads.

    We could well be witnessing the first stages of a global environmental Armageddon as it unfolds before our eyes in slow motion. By the time you read this, the petroleum slick will be involved with the Loop Current which will accelerate dispersal of the Gulf slick and begin to convert it into the North Atlantic Ocean slick. Once the hydrocarbon raft starts moving with the current, it will spread throughout the Gulf of Mexico. A portion of it will escape the Gulf through the Straits of Florida between south Florida and Cuba, fouling those shorelines. Most of that water will then flow up the Straits of Florida, between Florida's east coast and the Bahamas, while the rest spreads through the passages between the various islands of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The muck will continue to flow up the east coast of North America powered by the Gulf Stream. It would be wise for all East Coast states and Maritime provinces to prepare mitigation efforts similar to the valiant stand currently being made by citizens of the Gulf states.

    …The consequences of a thin petroleum film floating on the surface of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans will need to be addressed. The film constitutes a barrier for oxygen exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere. Most near-surface life is comprised of zooplankton (animals) and phytoplankton (plants). Without oxygen this bountiful community of unicellular life will perish: the base of the food chain will disappear. Like falling dominos, the North Atlantic extinction will travel up the food chain. Fisheries will become a memory. Cultures that rely on seafood for sustenance, primarily in Africa, northern South America, Central America, and Caribbean island nations will need to adapt to a change of diet or face a similar fate.

    The petroleum film will also impede water evaporation. If the solar energy that evaporates water is blocked, the only alternative is for the surface water temperature to rise. Warmer water will accelerate Arctic Ocean melting during the long summer daylight hours and impede refreezing during the long, cold, winter darkness. Arctic Ocean mammals such as polar bears and walruses will probably not survive."

    His full comment, as well as a few others, can be read at: http://www.aesopinstitute.org

    Since Methane in the arctic already, in the opinion of James Hansen and other scientists, threatens to soon pass a tipping point, which could extinguish human life on earth in a matter of a few years, we may be facing a cataclysm far beyond anything yet widely discussed or considered.

    This is a profound national and planetary emergency. President Obama needs to respond and lead in a manner consistent with the potential threat.

    When Pearl Harbor was attacked, within a few months the Willow Run factory completed a bomber every 59 minutes.

    Kevin Costner has for years been supporting development of a centrifuge which can be used to clean up oil spills. These should be in urgent round-the-clock production, on as large a scale as possible, and deployed as rapidly as they are completed.

    Oil booms to direct the flow may help according to magellanic. He wrote: "Is there a way to stop the spread of the petroleum already floating in the Gulf? The best opportunity to contain the dispersal is at the "narrows" between Key West and Cuba.

    Such a solution will be expensive but not nearly as expensive as the clean-up efforts that will need to be made if the contamination in the currents is left unabated."

    An ominous report by Russia's Ministry of Natural Resources is calling this the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history. The report claims the oil is threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with "total destruction". Experts say Corexit 9500 is a solvent four times more toxic than oil - and when mixed with the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, it will "phase transition" - changing the liquid into a gaseous state, which can be absorbed by clouds. The gas will then be released as "toxic rain" leading to "unimaginable environmental catastrophe" destroying all life forms from the "bottom of the evolutionary chart to the top". The story is reprinted on the Aesop Institute website.

    The White House needs to rapidly determine if these horrific predictions might be accurate. And if this cataclysm truly threatens millions of human lives, what courses of action might ameliorate the impact?

    Dave

    "As long as the stain washes up on shore, the hole in BP's pipe will serve the right as a gaping hole in the president's argument for expanded government supervision of, for starters, Big Oil and big banks."

    The column was sensible and persuasive until the sentence at the very end. And then you got it exactly wrong, Frank. The oil spill, like the economic meltdown in 2008, destroys the conservative and libertarian ideas of the Republican party that allowed the catastrophe that we are now seeing. Rand Paul entertains us with his ludicrous ideas about civil rights and criticizing BP, but Bobby Jindal, who like Obama must answer to his constituent, is calling for more government to deal with the Gulf crisis, not less. No, the present debacle is not Obama's Katrina, it's the legacy of Bush and Cheney that is erupting in the Gulf.

    Richard Luettgen:

    If any lesson exists in what the wad perceives as a lackluster response by President Obama to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, it is that government's ability to effectively oversee the activities of thousands of dangerous industrial activities is quite limited. To actually do so effectively would require that every other expert in America be a government employee working for some regulatory agency: now, wouldn't that do wonders for the national debt?

    So, if people perceive this as his Katrina (grow up, America; I mean, really), then it could be a positive if they conclude that government has a legitimate role to play in our lives, but that it is a limited role: by promulgating policy we require industry to follow, and by conducting spot audits appropriate to a reasonable number of available, qualified auditors; then, when required, to do as the president has done, mobilize the largest response to a natural disaster in our history and take prudent steps to hold responsible parties accountable for costs.

    If the Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service had done its job as a regulator rather than cozying up to the regulated, then decisions that were taken on the Deep Horizon rig leading to the catastrophe might have been different, possibly averting the spill.

    Similarly, if the SEC had done its job competently, Bernie Madoff might never have been suffered to work his predations; or if the five agencies charged with regulating mortgages (The Fed, Office of Thrift Management, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of Comptroller of the Currency, and the National Credit Union Administration) had not been thoroughly intimidated by a Congress intent on creating prosperity out of whole cloth by allowing anybody to get a mortgage on any terms, then we might not have had a real estate bubble, a crash or the Great Recession; or if some of those same agencies and others had taken a hard look at the over-leveraging of banking institutions over the past few years, then the solvency problems that have decimated our economy and required an immense bailout might have been avoided.

    And on and on. The solution isn't to scream at the inherent greed of man, represented as well in industry as it is in individuals: the solution is to understand the appropriate role of government, and to play that role competently. How many people, under a Democratic Congress, president and federal prosecutors, have gone to jail for violating perfectly adequate laws governing mortgage issuance? Practically none. How does that constitute playing the role competently?

    Reasonable people will not conclude that the Deepwater Horizon oil leak is President Obama's Katrina if he does his job competently, which, so far, he has with regard to that one incident. But he will also be judged by how well he does his whole job, which is un-fouling the regulatory environment that at once seeks to do too much and fails to do what it should.

    Gemli:

    George W. Bush was a prolific creator of burdens. He dropped the ball on Katrina, started two wars, dismantled constitutional protections of liberty, squandered the budget surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton, and presided over the virtual destruction of the U.S. economy. President Obama took office with many of these burdens in full flower, and with the seeds of others planted and watered by W as left the White House.

    But the single worst burden that few could have anticipated was the complete and utter intransigence of the Republican Party. At a time when constructive dialog and bipartisanship were needed most, there was none. The strategy of the Republicans was strictly designed to undermine, disrupt, impede, or destroy any cooperation or good-faith negotiation. The example set by the Republicans provided a nucleus around which the country's incipient racism, disgruntlement, and free-floating resentment could congeal, giving birth to the Tea Party movement. They now support a variety of clown candidates for high office, too stupid to even realize that they are working against their own self-interests.

    And should the Republicans prevail and take down this intelligent, even-tempered, fair-minded chief executive, who would take his place? Presumably the Republicans are looking for the opposite of Obama. Would dumb, erratic, and intolerant fill the bill? Isn't that what we just got rid of? I have no idea what the Republicans want or stand for. It has something to do with weakening government, eliminating financial regulation, and in general being storm troopers, paving the way for our Corporate Overlords.

    I don't agree with everything Mr. Obama does, or with his pace or emphasis, but I have the strong sense that I will be better off if his policies prevail. Republicans, on the other hand, have a lean and hungry look, and I get the strong feeling that I'm the appetizer.

    Michele:

    While the tragedy in the Gulf is nauseatingly catastrophic, was probably preventable, and will haunt us far longer than Katrina, to suggest they are synonomous is wrong. It has long been FEMA's responsibility to respond to the needs of people in a hurricane. They failed, miserably, to execute a function that had been fine-tuned, studied, and flow-charted. It happens, often, and it's something the government had been great at. While we taxpayers continued to pay for the service, the "new" management failed to give us our money's worth.

    In contrast, it has never been the responsibility of the government to cap an unstoppable oil well in depths deeper than humans can go. SHould it be? I guess so. Nor have I ever heard of an oil spill clean up addressed in the midst of a continuing spill. Woulda coulda shoulda. It was a failure of the government. Absolutely.

    But it cannot be attributed to Bush, Clinton, or Obama. It is attributable to all of us. For allowing the growth of the belief government is incompetent, has no value, and should be shrunk. For putting our faith in the crazy notion that corporate America will act in any interest other than the holy bottom line. We are all responsible. And we can condemn Obama for not responding more forcibly. But what tools did we give him to respond with?

    This was NOT Obama's Katrina moment. It was his 9/11 without the security briefing warning. And he didn't meet my expectations. But would anybody?

    Jeanne:

    As a lifelong Democrat who voted for President Obama, I disagree that this is not his Katrina -- it's actually worse because he approved the off-shore drilling, and it was his deficient and incompetent Department of the Interior that failed to do its due-diligence in ensuring that BP had the proper safety provisions in place and a workable contingency plan.

    BP's reputation for having the worst record in the industry for safety was well known. President Obama only days before the disaster assured the American public that off-shore drilling was safe. On top of everything, he failed to communicate the Administration's response to the disaster, leaving the nation, and especially citizens in the region of the Gulf, aghast at the scope of the catastrophe and the anemic response of the Commander-in-Chief. It has always been my hope that President Obama would succeed as President; however, until he shows the vigor and determination in resolving the oil spill that he has shown in passing healthcare and economic reform bills, he will be show that he is not better than either of the Bush Administrations in responding to disasters. And, showing leadership in the face of such disasters is the mark of a true statesman. I am still waiting for that statesman to emerge.

    pmeek:

    Frank, sadly there's not much the Administration can do, because they've only got the courage of focus group convictions...

    On a bipartisan basis, our country has decided to let Big Oil and Wall Street do whatever they want for the past 30 years, now it seems they can do nothing, and our government settles for even less, so what should we Americans learn?

    We could ban offshore oil drilling for good, it's a very negligible contribution to our energy needs and destroys the environment.

    We could decide to make alternative energy economically viable, which means either a large tax on fossil fuels or the roundabout feel good of cap and trade.

    We could decide to nationalize BP's American assets, so taxpayers can be assured of slightly more than not very much to clean up the worst environmental disaster in American history.

    We could decide that decades of poverty in one tricky pony fossil fuel states like Louisiana and West Virginia might be worth overcoming.

    We could do something about 10% unemployment.

    Alas, none of this will happen, partly because our politics are more or less funded and controlled by very large corporate interests, partly because the country's divided, partly because there's no one in either party offering a vision of leadership, partly because once you've got your share, you're not very willing to accept anyone else getting theirs.

    Shall we as Americans decide to become something more than sweeps month pelicans?

    I hope so, but at the moment I'm not too confident.

    James:

    The Obama administration has been engaged with the oil spill from the start - however haltingly and inarticulately at times. It was way too trusting of BP but was never AWOL.

    ----

    Really? Well let's see, on March 31 the president gave a big speech that gave a big thumbs up to offshore drilling and attested to its safety. This despite the fact it was well known at the time that MMS was a deeply flawed "regulatory" agency that pretty much let industry call the shots. The fact that Obama gave a green light in this environment means he pretty much hadn't done his home work and, to put it plainly, didn't really know what he was talking about.

    That doesn't sound particularly competent to me, contrary to your view, and I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that the administration may have prevented the BP debacle if they been engaged from the start with the serious risks that afflicted offshore drilling.

    JDKJJK:

    Obama took office knowing, full well, that the Bush Administration had ceded authority of the regulatory agencies. The fact that MMS and other regulatory agencies were not overhauled immediately does not bode well for the Obama Administration. Most of the changes needed were not total rewrites of federal regulations, just enforcement of the existing regulations. The fact is these are Executive Agencies and Obama does not need input from Congress on changing the regulatory cultures at these agencies.

    Granted the past administration's failure to enforce existing regulations probably poisoned the mind-set of many of the Federal workers and they viewed any new top initiatives with a jaundiced eye. After all, the corporations called the shots for years and the Massey Coal mine disaster did nothing to change that perception.

    However, meaningful change in our laws and regulations must contain the most striking changes in how American business operates since Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt.

    As it stands, for the most part, Obama has done nothing to limit the power of corporations and the fact that the Healthcare Stocks have continued to rise even after Healthcare reform demonstrates that far from protecting the public these rules will only further enrich corporate America. In addition, Wal-Mart's endorsement of Healthcare Reform tells me all I need to know about the current Healthcare law. If the apathetic sheep of the American Public do not demand the most stringent regulations, the battle and the war is lost.

    One other interesting factor took place this week. Chinese workers in a Honda factory went on Strike for increased wages. When was the last time we read about a meaningful Strike in the United States? Production workers, here at home, have been cowed into exercising any Union Rights and the moratorium on drilling in the gulf has been used to the advantage of BP and other oil companies by stating that shutting down oil production risked thousands of jobs. While this may be true, if the proper regulations are enforced and union protections and regulatory violations are brought to the government's attention with a real expectation of an immediate transparent government response the bullying tactics of the corporations will be minimized. .
    There is some hope; Obama could still a Reagan here, who in 1984 was still campaigning against Jimmy Carter. Come November, the Democrats must hammer home the point that the current de-regulatory environment was thirty years in the making and changing the mission statement is not quite as simple as simply firing the head of MMS.

    Will we continue to act as a nation of apathetic sheep and buy into the line that what is good for Corporations is good for America. The financial meltdown and the hole in the Gulf floor would seem to be the perfect example of the exact opposite for this ridiculous premise. Unfortunately, I no longer have any faith in the American voted. One must indeed ask oneself, "What the matter with Kansas?"

    kentuck:

    The President made a political calculation. He could have claimed responsibility early and taken all the blame for this disaster. Or he could let it go on for a few days or a few weeks and take some of the blame for the disaster.

    He knew there was nothing he or the government could do that British Petroleum could not do. But by letting BP handle it up 'til now, he knew that many people would see BP as the responsible party, regardless if the President accepts responsibility.

    The sad truth is that neither government or BP can do anything to stop this gusher. Perhaps they were hoping that it would heal itself? However, they have punctured a deep wound and no one knows when it will stop bleeding. There is nothing government can do except point blame toward the responsible party. It may be the truth that suffers for decades to come.

    Adam L.:

    Katrina is worse because a couple thousand people died. It is also a more complex failing. Disaster response is geared to work from the bottom up. Local government takes the lead, supported by state government, with the federal government providing additional assistance as necessary. For most natural disasters, the federal government's involvement is minimal.

    In the case of Katrina, we had a natural disaster unmatched in modern history married with an unprecedented failure by Mayor Nagin's corrupt and woefully unprepared city government and a state Democratic machine riddled with graft and malfeasance -- including the direct theft of millions of dollars set aside for an eventuality such as Katrina.

    The Bush administration plausibly but mistakenly assumed that the state and local governments would be leading the charge for the immediate aftermath, and the feds would be handling the long-term logistics and recovery -- as it had with every other major natural disaster.

    By contrast, oil drilling has always been strictly a federal responsibility. This was going to be Obama's responsibility to deal with from day one. He seemed to look at it as a distraction. The jarring image of his EPA director guffawing with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show while thousands of gallons of fuel poured into the Gulf of Mexico struck home. The mineral agency has been completely ineffectual, and Obama's response has been to come out, berate BP, rinse repeat. The only real information we've gotten has come from Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is desperate to avoid the failures of his predecessor.

    This administration is a political operation, even more so than its predecessors. And the result is political solutions to practical problems.

    parik:

    Media's Panic: Expect Obama to give a press conference every day to say he is on the job …directing that the oil leak be capped.

    If the president is not seen saying this every day in some bellicose fashion, huffing and puffing and threatening, then he is portrayed by the media as not doing his job. What kind of paternalistic garbage is this? Do we want a president who as a leader is able to get things done, or do we want a father-figure, constantly reassuring us, as though we were children?

    In this age, efficiency necessarily trumps "emotionalism"…getting things done is true leadership; feigned anger and emotional verbosity are not. Do these pundits want Obama to "shoot from the hip" at points of conflict, just to make people "feel" better, or do they want management that produces results? Now he is being blamed for being too calm in the face of crises…can you imagine wanting anything less from the guy who controls dropping the bomb?

    Further, can we not accept the roles of cabinet members with their assigned responsibilities to do their jobs, without the president constantly being seen on every TV screen during a crisis?

    Chris Mathews, James Carville, and the CNN's anti-Obama David Gergen and others all seem to think that President Obama is a leader and worthy to be president "only" as long as he passes THEIR tests…Garbage. This has been seen too often with so-called liberal acceptance – masked by platitudes and a sense of superior smugness.

    President Obama probably has more on his plate than any president since Roosevelt, both upfront and behind the scenes, in terms of the protection and welfare of this country. However, he is being defined by how many trips he makes to the Gulf, or the number of redundant announcements he makes on the White House steps.

    These panicky, puerile pundits do more injustice to their viewers in one broadcast than Rush Limbaugh does in a month. We expect FOX and Limbaugh to twist the facts of the circumstance for edification of their "Lemmings." However, with this "media elite" many of us thought would have enough intelligence to go beyond the emotional pale this kind of circumstance may cause.

    It seems that pundits, who are arguing that President Obama did not respond fast enough, by not showing each step of his participation, should argue for the government to get into the oil drilling and repair business, instead of blaming Obama for what the government cannot do at any speed.

    Jeremy Horne, Ph.D.:

    It should be quite clear to all but the most fanatical of "free-enterprise" and corporatist ideologues that Corporatism and "free-enterprisers" put profit first and people and the environment last. In essence, we have a war going here, and no compromise over the basic ethos of free enterprise ethos of greed and consumerism is possible. The mine disasters, this BP gusher debacle (with the attendant lies, attempts to keep the truth from the people, and attempting to save the well for their profits, rather than shutting it down), and the rampant destruction being caused by natural gas mining in the northwest centrall part of the US should be more than enough evidence of this.

    It may take the whole of the Gulf of Mexico to be contaminated permanently before the sheeple "get it", that capitalism and all of its relatives (including corporatism) must be destroyed irrevocably, and a humane political economy, such as democratic socialism or a variant, such as cooperativism (cooperatives) must come to pass. I, for one, will be working for the eradication of capitalism and a new day when people can be free at last from this horrible institution with such a vile ethos of greed, avarice, unlimited and unsustainable growth, environmental destruction, and total lack of concern for the well being of all humanity.

    JackMiller:

    Do you really expect the "Great Enabler" to do anything about this. Other than make a few tough sounding speeches and belatedly taking responsibility for this mess nothing will change. It appears that Obama has taken a hands off stance by allowing BP to run the entire operation from the begining. Is he naive or unwilling to offend such a powerful player or misinformed. I don't know what to make of this. The president seems to be his usual dispassionate, detached self. The amazing thing is that this president appears to have made no contingencies in the event that BP fails. We spend more than the rest of the world combined on the military and have some of the finest people on Earth in the uniform and yet no one appears to have asked them to seriously look at this. Looking back I am disgusted with myself for being so gullible to believe that Obama would actually do something substantial. Frank you are absolutely right, incompetence whether deliberate like that of the Bush admin. or caused by neglect like the current admin. is rapidly diminishing what is left of the publics faith in its institutions.

    In terms of how this president has performed it appears we have a continuation of Bush's third term.

    Larry Figdill:

    This is a strange take on the situation; one that actually feeds into the far right viewpoint that Rich is so concerned about. Obama and the federal government are not in a position to stop the leak themselves - in contrast to FEMA/homeland security/response to natural disasters, that's not how the oil exploration and extraction system has been set up.

    The failure, as made completely obviously by this crisis (and surprisingly barely mentioned by Rich) is that the federal government has had so little role in regulating the oil industry and its practices. The development of this bad situation has been long in the works, but was deeply cemented in place by the Bush-Cheney administration of 8 years. I suppose one could fault Obama for not having changed this quicker, but think about what he has faced.

    Stimulus package, health care, financial regulation have been huge fights, and he has not even been able to start on immigration reform, let alone a full energy policy/legislation. He should be embarrassed by the fact that he was going to allow more offshore drilling, but I assume that he did this as a way to try to compromise on his energy plan. Personally, I am disappointed that Obama has been so willing to compromise with Republicans while getting almost nothing in return and I wish he was more of a fighter for his goals. But I think that Rich's demands is asking the guy to be (unrealistically) phenomenally heroic and omnipotent in carrying out his goals in the first year and a half of his presidency.

    mickeyrad:

    Pres. Obama needs to show that the Federal Government can solve problems, including BP's mess in the Gulf. If he can't, he won't be re-elected.

    Mr. Obama needs an inter-departmental task force from Justice, Defense, Energy, Interior, & other departments to (1) start collecting money damages from BP & make sure it pays the full bill; (2) stop the gusher; and (3) clean up the mess.

    BP should be forced to immediately pay all costs for the past 30 days, then pay monthly for each month's costs. BP is clearly incompetent to stop the leak, so we need the best people in the world for that job.

    As for cleaning up the mess, that's easy. Instead of funding war crimes in Afghanistan, use $50 billion to hire 2 million people at $25,000 per year in a new WPA. Bill BP one billion dollars monthly for this cost.

    Mr. Obama can govern like FDR, or he can go back to Chicago in 2013. Our situation today demands radical change: we need a Federal Government that "works". Mr. Obama's tepid, compromising, centrist approach is failing.

    Uncle Sam needs to pin BP to the mat, to stop the gusher, and to hire 2 million people in a new WPA to clean up this mess. Anything else will earn Mr. Obama well-deserved one-way ticket back to Chicago.

    Michael Radosevich

    schrodinger:

    Who built the levees that failed in Katrina? The government. Who had the resources needed to rescue, feed, house and provide healthcare to the victims of Katrina? The government. And who forecast the storm and provided critical warnings that allowed most residents of New Orleans to evacuate? The government.

    In many ways the government was integral to the Katrina disaster.

    Who engineered the well that blew out? BP. Who owned the blowout preventer that failed? Transocean. Who built the blow out preventer that couldn't? Cameron. Who cemented the plugs that didn't plug? Halliburton. Who owns the robots trying to plug the well? Oceanneering. This is a private sector disaster. Government had some oversight role, but it was mostly a bystander.

    Deepwater Horizon in many ways is a good advert for government. Government is playing an important role in cleaning up the mess and in holding the private sector accountable. There will probably be new rules and regulations written, but it important that they are useful. Determining what is useful awaits a better understanding of exactly what happened.

    Katrina in many ways shows the bad side of government. Government built levees gave people the confidence to live in New Orleans and then failed when they were needed. That wasn't Bush's fault, but a product of administrations of both parties. Government did a superb job of forecasting the hurricane and a lousy job of cleaning up the mess.

    There is no reason for this oil spill to damage the administration as long as Obama reminds people that they shouldn't expect too much from Washington. He should also remind people that Mexico recovered from a huge spill from Ixtoc, and that the Gulf coast will do the same. With government's help of course!

    Jumper:

    You are correct. It is not in American DNA to accept lack of results when faced with national challenges.

    Americans want to see results that at least significantly minimizes damage to our Southern coastal areas. There is such a solution that has been used on an oil disaster in the Arabian Gulf that was at least fifty times larger than this one. Very serious, knowledgeable engineers have been championing it.

    BP has been doing nothing about it and should have started it at least two weeks ago. Why? Because as BP CEO Tony Hayward, a University of Edinburgh PhD, told BP senior managers in 2006, BP has a problem of top management not listening to people below them. Once again, they're not listening.

    The solution is simple. Use a fleet of supertankers to suck the oil off the surface of the ocean. In 1993, Nick Pozzi was an engineer for Saudi Aramco. Due to a series of accidents all at once, he was faced with oil gushing from two wells and four leaking tankers. Some of the supertankers used for sucking up oil were parked near the oil gushing up from the wells and some sucked oil off the other surface.

    Mr. Pozzi has offered his services but has been rebuffed. Mr. John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil has been making the publicity rounds trying to get someone to start this operation.

    It's psst time Mr. John Hofmeister be listened to, empty tankers coming out of Houston be hired and put to work sucking and segregating oil and water.

    Cost? You're kidding. We gave billions to the Wall Street rat hole. Sell some more U.S. bonds and pay the cost to get that fleet of tankers and support vessels doing the job. We've got a contingency fund for war and we can use that to start saving our South Eastern coast. Seize BP assets for collateral if that's the sort of reassurance Congress needs to act immediately.

    Clean a swath through the slop. Use that swath as a fire break. Use the smaller ships to clean in to the coast. Use the tankers to keep the oil south of the swath. The number of tankers can be reduced as the slop presently out there is cleaned up. With this technique, we could even survive until the relief well is completed if we had to.

    There's your bold plan, Mr. Rich, that will get the job done. We've got to quit fixating on the blasted hole. Hire the tankers, get the job started. We've got the southern coastal area of our nation to protect. By the way, 85% of the Arabian Gulf oil was recovered - 85% didn't reach the coast line.

    Tea Party Extremism by Bruce Bartlett

    02 Jun 2010

    One of the problems with analyzing the so-called tea party movement (TPM) is separating the views of its hard-core members, who go to demonstrations and are the voice of the movement, from those that may sympathize in a general sort of way and may identify themselves as TPM supporters to public opinion pollsters. Lumping the two groups together in polls does two things: it tends to overstate the political influence of the TPM and understate the extremism of its most fanatic members.

    A new University of Washington poll sheds light on these observations by separating TPM agnostics, who may somewhat approve or disapprove of the TPM, from those that strongly approve of it. Released on Tuesday, it sampled 1,695 Washington State voters-a large sample-and asked them to define themselves as strong TPM supporters (19% of the sample), those that somewhat approve or disapprove of it (26% of the sample), and those that strongly disapprove (27% of the sample; not included below).

    What I think this poll shows is that taxes and spending are not by any means the only issues that define TPM members; they are largely united in being unsympathetic to African Americans, militant in their hostility toward illegal immigrants, and very conservative socially. At a minimum, these data throw cold water on the view that the TPM is essentially libertarian. Based on these data, I would say that TPM members have much more in common with social conservatives that welcome government intervention as long as it's in support of their agenda.

    Poll of Washington State Voters, May 2010 (percent)

    Question Hard Core Tea Party Supporters Tea Party Agnostics All Voters
    While equal opportunity for blacks and minorities to succeed is important, it's not really the government's job to guarantee it (agree). 74 57 52
    Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve (disagree). 78 65 59
    If blacks would only try harder, they would be as well off as whites (agree). 46 27 26
    Immigration is changing the culture in the US for the worse (agree). 54 30 32
    The immigration law in Arizona which requires police to question people they suspect are illegal immigrants for proof of legal status (approve).

    88

    54

    52
    Welcoming immigrants to US society, even immigrants who entered illegally makes America better off in the long run (agree).

    23

    51

    50
    Barack Obama's policy of engaging with Muslim countries (disapprove). 73 34 33
    We should not single out Muslims or Middle Easterners for airport security stops (disagree). 63 46 43
    Gay and lesbian couples should have the same legal right to marry as straight couples (agree). 18 39 41
    Compared to the size of their group, lesbians and gays have too much political power (agree). 52 32 25

    Source: University of Washington

    Hell's Kitchen

    "these data throw cold water

    "these data throw cold water on the view that the TPM is essentially libertarian"

    indeed, but only if we're talking about the libertarianism that is in the books.
    In the real world, real libertarianism is what's coming out of the R&R Paul duet
    and it's not a pretty sight when looking at the kind of groups that have come out
    of the woodwork to unite under the banner of these two.

    Bob

    Rand Paul - self declared not libertarian

    that is according to this Time article.

    http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1972721,00.html

    Bruce Bartlett

    Libertarians

    My point is not that tea partiers consider themselves to be libertarians, but that libertarians are mistaken in thinking that tea partiers are also libertarians. I think this poll proves conclusively that they are not.

    Real Libertarians

    I am not sure I agree with Hell's Kitchen. There are plenty of "book libertarians" in the blogosphere: Julian Sanchez, Radley Balko, the Unqualified Offerings crowd all come to mind immediately. Read 'em. They're pretty good. I don't always agree with them, but then again, nobody should always agree with anybody else.

    On the other hand, a lot of stone reactionaries call themselves "libertarian" in an attempt to get some social respectability. The Paul crew might fit that description, although I think that the elder Paul is about half libertarian and half nutter. The younger Paul strikes me as all glibertarian, all the time.

    [May 30, 2010] Barack Obama's credibility hits rock bottom after oil spill and Sestak scandal by Toby Harnden

    Of course this guy Toby Harnden is a typical conservative ranter. If Obama had become closely involved too soon after the Golf disaster began, he would have been accused of further socialist tendencies to take government where business best belongs. And the first days BP was the only party that has all the information. As they fight for the survival of the company they probably did their best. But he should declare state of national emergency for the region after the first week or so and bring military on board with some kind of National coordination center. I'd like to see more public debate and discussion about the technical aspects of the efforts so far to stop this. How would you connect it to the broken valve one mile deep?
    Telegraph

    When any political leader feels they have to declare that they are "fully engaged" in an issue, it is clear that they are in trouble. Talking about it undermines the very point you are trying to make - not to mention that pesky Oil Spill Cam showing that, 38 days into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, not a whole lot had been achieved.

    Even judging Obama by his words, he has fallen woefully short over what has now eclipsed the 1989 Exxon Valdez wreck as biggest oil spill catastrophe in American history. He may have described it as an "unprecedented disaster" in last Thursday's press conference but a week into the crisis he was blithely stating that "this incident is of national significance" and rest assured he was receiving "frequent briefings" about it.

    George W Bush's unpopularity and perceived incompetence was encapsulated by the way he dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Candidate Obama branded it "unconscionable incompetence".

    Central to Obama's appeal was his promise to be truly different. His failure to achieve that is now at the core of the deep disappointment Americans feel about him. At the press conference - the first full-scale affair he had deigned to give for 309 days - he appeared uncomfortable and petulant.

    His approach to the issue was that of the law student suddenly fascinated by a science project. He displayed none of the visceral indignation Americans feel about pretty much everything these days - two-thirds now say they are "angry" about the way things are going - resorting instead to Spock-like technocratic language and legalese. "I'm not contradicting my prior point," he stated at one juncture. During those 63 minutes of soporific verbosity, about 800 barrels of oil poured into the Gulf.

    Obama engaged in the obligatory populist bashing of Big Oil and, of course, demonstrated the Obama administration's version of Tourette's Syndrome, blaming the previous administration for the situation when, by my reckoning, it's a full 16 months since Bush left office.

    By Friday, he was sticking his finger in the sand at Grand Isle, Louisiana as part of a photo op self-consciously designed to contrast with Bush's famous looking down on the Katrina devastation from Air Force One. It was Obama's second visit to Louisiana in the 39 days since disaster struck. According to C'BS's Mark Knoller, in the same period Bush visited the post-Katrina region seven times.

    But perhaps the most dangerous sign during the press conference for Democrats fearful of an unprecedented electoral disaster in November's mid-term elections was the evasion and opacity of the man who promised a new era of transparency and a different kind of politics.

    When asked about the resignation of the director of the Minerals Management Service - an agency he had excoriated -- he professed that "I don't know the circumstances in which this occurred". She had, of course, been fired.

    Steve Porter:

    This article, like many of the comments, is tasteless rightwing drivel that completely misses the point. The oil spill was, and is, BP's responsibility. Unlike Katrina, this mess was created by a company, not natural events. There's not much Obama can do to stop it, and it's BP that should be clearing this mess up in any event.

    Obama was never going to make the ludicrous expectations that were created for him in the wake of a totally disastrous Bush/Cheney administration. He inherited an unprecedented debt thanks to the banking crisis and has done a pretty damn good job with the resources available to him. The Healthcare bill is a magnificent achievement. I can't believe my ears when I hear public healthcare described as "evil". What's "eveil" about looking after your citizens who don't have the means to do so themselves? Is it "evil" because a few shareholders don't get to line their pockets further at the expense of workers and customers? You should be grateful that you have an intelligent President, who understands more than the dumbed-down bullshit Fox News spews forth daily, who understands the importance and effectiveness of "soft" power, and who seems to have a genuine desire to create a fairer society. The BP spill is BP's fault, so stop using it as an excuse to bash a guy who's actually done pretty well.

    Isabel:

    If Obama had become closely involved too soon after the GofM disaster began, he would have been accused of further socialist tendencies to take government where business best belongs.

    Look at all the finger-pointing, at every level of society. Understandable, as we each begin to comprehend the magnitude of this disaster. The jewel of the Americas, the Gulf of Mexico, is on its way to becoming a new Dead Sea. We are all culpable, some more than others of course. But we are all losers when our actions harm our home. The only hope I can find is in thinking that amnesia won't set in so easy this time - maybe we'll be shocked into listening to the environmentalists (Rachel Carson, Jacques Cousteau) before it really is too late.

    Patrick Hadley

    Funny to see a coalition has been formed in American by:
    .
    - the enemies of Big Government;
    .
    - the friends of Big Oil;
    .
    - the advocates of Drill Baby Drill;
    .
    - those who think that the most dangerous sentence in the language is "I am from the government and I'm here to help";
    .
    - those who decry all attempts to impose federal regulations onto the free market;
    .
    with the aim of blaming Obama for the oil leak.

    [May 29, 2010] Economist's View Angry Old White Men

    "...that is what amazing about watching them. they have no clue that they are the ones responsible for the Corporate take over, at least the idiots who make the noise. the rest of the rich white men are so pleased at how dumb their fellow cohorts are."

    OrganicGeorge :
    I'm probably one of the few people here who grew up in rural America, deep south to be exact, and still works and lives in rural America.

    The biggest change for white men was the civil right act of 64 and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws. However, we know that the bigotry did not end, it just went underground. Bigots do not live in exclusively in rural areas, they walk the halls of Congress everyday.

    The NYT's research showed many of the Tea Party's angry white men were in-fact well educated and most would be effected by a tax increase to top brackets.

    The Tea Party movement was orchestrated by Fox News and Dick Armey's AstroTurf advocacy group Freedom-works. Shara Palin is on Rupert Murdock's payroll. How do you conduct social research on a movement that's essentially a corporate marketing program?

    Rural white men are angry, you would be also if there were no job opportunities for you. Corporate Ag jobs, with the exception of management, are minimum wage or piece work with no benefits. Industrial Ag extracts wealth from rural communities; the multiplier is less than 1 to 1 as money flows from rural areas into corporate coffers.

    Economist are concerned that this generation of middle class workers will have a lower standard of living that their parents or grand parents. This already happened in rural America decades ago and the University types haven't a clue.

    It seems nobody in the press or the econ profession is aware of the hundreds of millions of dollars the Obama administration is pumping into rural areas under the USDA "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" program.

    Corporate Ag, like the colonialist they are, oppose the transfer of funds from commodity support programs and other corporate largess to people. That's correct, they oppose assistance to help small farmers and processors build and grow small local business to help rebuild their local rural economies. The multiplier for this type of assistance should be about 3 or 4 to 1.

    Industrial Ag is claiming that only their form a Ag is legit so therefor all government assistance should go to them. I'm not making this up.

    Most industrial Ag cannot survive without government assistance. The entire model is build on subsidized grain, tax credits and not being held responsible for the cost of down stream pollution. It's a failed model waiting to die.

    Bigots are bigots regardless of where they live; but trying to tie the anger of rural white men to anything other that lack of economic opportunity is ivory tower BS.

    P.S. Merl Haggard now smokes pot, took a public stand against the Iraq war and supported Hillary for President.

    Hal :

    I have a friend who was born and grew up in a small mid-western town in a rural farming area until he left to go to college and then on to a university career. But he still has contacts in his home town and thinks he understands the feelings there. The town upper class is white and relatively rich (not New York rich of course). What would turn many of them into tea party people, he believes, is basically lack of education. They may have gone to the state university in the 1930s, but what they learned there then isn't much by today's standards and they have not gotten any better informed since. Many don't use the internet and watch mainly Fox News, etc. They know enough to "appreciate" Limbaugh and O'Reilly. Krugman would be beyond their understanding of economics. They are concealed racists and of course detest Obama whereas they adored Bush and his tax breaks. What one often overlooks is that most of the really bright young people from these small towns left for better things in bigger, urban places. He did. And this meant that the less talented and the less bright (to be honest about it) were the ones left behind and they have formed the town elite and arbiters of opinion there.

    bakho said...

    The reaction of Democrats to the incompetence and war mongering of GWBush was to hold anti-war rallies (much ignored by the press) and start a new level of grass roots activism. Because the left wing activist base test to be college educated and progressive, it has a very different look than the Tea Party. During the 2008 campaign, the left wing (which at times is independent and critical of democrats) joined with the democrats to support a huge grassroots effort to sweep Republicans out of the White House.

    The conservative activist base reacts the very same way. They don't like main stream Republicans. They were dismayed by the incompetence of Bush, but are anti-progressive in every way. Whenever Democrats get into office, they react to try to get Republicans back in office. Because the Tea Party base is fundamentally different from the progressive base, the look and feel is different.

    Both progressives and the Tea Party are dissatisfied with the economy and the direction of the government whether or not their guy is in the White House. It is not necessary to invent narratives to describe the phenomena.

    The urban rural phenomena can be understood this way. Those who are satisfied with the small town rural life will stay and look for ways to stay in the community. Those who are dissatisfied will move away to urban areas. Those who move may do so for educational or economic opportunities that are better in urban areas. They may also move to join larger communities of people like themselves. The net result is a rural population that is white, older (because people move when they are young) and more conservative (because they are satisfied with the status quo). They want opportunities where they are.

    Hal :
    Who are "main stream" Republicans these days? I find that almost all seem to be right wing reactionaries. "Liberal Republicans" as far as I can see don't exist any longer. You might be able to name a (very) few.
    Devin :
    "high taxes, bloated and intrusive government, mommy state which suppose to take care of the intellectual from a cradle to a grave."

    Replace "intellectual" with "rural resident", and you've pretty much got the current reality. With limited exceptions (hat tip to Organic George and the real, unsubsidized farmers), what passes for farming today is the product of massive corporate-controlled government subsidy.

    Combine that with the direct welfare assistance the rural residents receive in much higher proportion than urban residents, not to mention the regulation that requires utility providers to provide electricity and communication infrastructure at a loss to rural residents, and it's clear who really needs the nanny state.

    If urban residents ever became as anti-government as rural residents, it would mean the end of rural America (and probably urban America, too, but that's another story).

    Bernard:

    Tea parties are angry old white men. still fighting the Vietnam war against the Hippies. Nixon and Reagan were a concerted response to the liberal ideas of the '60. these white men are still fighting the left, no concerned that everyone loses when the Corporations have the final say, since St. Ronnie open up Government to control by the Rich/Corporations.

    that is what amazing about watching them. they have no clue that they are the ones responsible for the Corporate take over, at least the idiots who make the noise. the rest of the rich white men are so pleased at how dumb their fellow cohorts are.

    with the Civil Right Act and Women almost getting the ERA passed, white men were outraged and terrified by their loss of control over those they once held economic power over. this is just the gradual unfolding of the changes started by the rabble rousers of the '60s.

    to have the right and white men admit this would be nice, but highly questionable.
    the whole thing about Rand Paul and the Civil rights issue and Arizona is just the proof that these white men know what is what and are continuing their "struggle" against those they see as taking their power. the whole thing about the "Old white men" in college years ago, was just another aspect of the changes that the "60s brought to America.

    when myths change there is great turmoil until society finds a way to create the "new" myth that will guide the leaders of the present day.

    that there is so much doubt and question about why these white men are angry is a real cause for wonder. it is so obvious. just as change is upsetting, white men don't like the change they see for they have to be responsible for only themselves too. before they were the Masters of the Universe/America and no one dared to question their authority or power.

    Republican are the Daddy party. listen to Daddy. like the TV series, Father Knows Best, just because they were a white man, you were supposed to "obey" him cause Father knew best.

    and it is true commons sense isn't common.

    [May 24, 2010] How the U.S. Resembles the U.S.S.R. By George Feifer

    April 28, 2010 | russianow.washingtonpost.com

    When I was young, the world's great problem was all black and white because little in history had been less ambiguous than the Cold War that consumed my wonderfully righteous country. Good vs. bad, honesty and decency vs. deceit and immorality, the Land of the Free vs. the Evil Empire. Although Whitaker Chambers wasn't my favorite interpreter of the era, his view of Communism and Freedom as "the two irreconcilable faiths of our time" was spot on for 99 percent of Americans, including me before Moscow residence tinted my vision with some grey. But was the clarity of the super-overwhelming majority of my countrymen less in the lay of the political land than in our perception of it? And is a kind of convergence taking place between contemporary America and the last decades of the U.S.S.R.? That's not to suggest anything remotely like equivalence. Even after taking two steps forward, one back under Nikita Khrushchev and later, the Soviet Union (S.U.) was a dictatorship.

    And despite the dismaying retreats from the rule of law under George W. Bush and money's chilling corruption of its governments, the United States (U.S.) remains a democracy of sorts. But I'm going to ask here, with genuine hope to be challenged, whether the two are more alike than we like to think. Not the same, I hasten to shout in repetition, but with more similarities than we're willing to acknowledge.

    That unwanted suspicion struck me during Bush's presidency, when America got rich in jokes about him (while we were growing poorer in infrastructure, education, restraint of greed, ethical behavior in general and other aspects of a civilized society). Holy smokes, that smacked of the Soviet Union, where I laughed when I wasn't complaining because 10 minutes with my friends, members of the working intelligentsia, rarely passed without side-splitting satire of Soviet words and ways. Apparently the same was true in Nazi Germany, where jokes were all the more riotous because they could bring more severe punishment than in post-Stalinist Soviet Union or post 9/11 America, gripped by fear as it is. Humor's your weapon when you're powerless to change conditions that deeply upset.

    Powerless? Yes, and the inability of my likes to do the slightest anything to stop the invasion of Iraq and other national developments I abhorred taught me a good deal I'd known but hadn't really felt about my Russian friends, whose political potency stopped at spoofing Brezhnev and sappy Soviet slogans. How naive I was, how ignorant and trusting, when I began meeting them in the 1950s and 1960s! While my American friends and I sneered or raged about Kremlin domination of Soviet letters and history, the CIA was secretly subsidizing some of our own intellectual life, probably including my fellowship, the money for which was channeled through a prestigious academic organization. The fellowship was for graduate work in Soviet studies at Columbia University. The FBI officers who one day knocked at the door of my nearby digs promised I'd never get a job in American academia or journalism, much less government. That was in response to my refusal to give them the names of Soviet citizens with whom I was corresponding--names they very well knew because, as we later learned, they were steaming open the envelopes of mail to the U.S.S.R. What they really wanted was to hook me into collaboration, which was also the goal of the KGB officer who tried to recruit me in Moscow. (Although the FBI agents weren't appreciably less repugnant than the KGB man, my would-be CIA recruiter took me to his Yale Club and behaved like a gentleman.)

    Ah, but our cause was good and theirs was evil, wasn't that the difference that justified subterfuge and deception on the part of the defenders against Soviet determination to rule the world? American propaganda, which was much less crude and relentless than Soviet-- therefore often more effective--made that threat the dominant reality of most of the U.S.A. I knew. Bankrolled or not by our government, our commentary, television shows and movies the likes of "Red Dawn" about a Soviet invasion to enslave virtuous America was doing a job on us. When I was in the navy prior to my graduate work, the perfidious doings of the Soviet submarines we were trying to track down (once successfully by my destroyer) angered the crew. We had not the slightest idea that American submarines were doing far naughtier things to the Soviet Union, much less that while Washington was lecturing the world about the glory of American democracy and justice, the CIA was overthrowing democratically elected governments--of Iran's Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, Congo's Patrice Lumumba in 1960, etc.--and assassinating some of their leaders.

    Surely I'm now ignorant of all sorts of illegal and no doubt shameful things my government is currently up to. Maybe they'll be revealed in time for my children or grandchildren to know. Meanwhile, isn't what we do know enough not to dismiss my suggestion that the U.S.A. shares many of the characteristics of the late U.S.S.R., in kind if not degree? It was no kook who disapproved of a standing army in peacetime because it might "overawe the public sentiment" but Thomas Jefferson, in 1799. The America that was founded in wariness of the military has become, as the Soviet Union almost always was, profoundly militar military estabombined.

    We operate some 761 military bases, some very small but others huge. They include those on which we maintain roughly 350,000 soldiers in 150 countries abroad, and if that doesn't make an empire I don't know what does, although ours of course isn't for our benefit, heaven forbid, but chiefly to protect other countries, right? Although President Obama has changed our rhetoric, our reliance on weapons remains virtually unchanged, and if it's just a coincidence that we're fighting in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires that bogged down Soviet armies a quarter of a century ago, it's not a happy one. We won't collapse, as the Soviet Union did shortly after it withdrew in 1989, but we won't prosper as a civilization either.

    Meanwhile, too, American flags fly everywhere in appeal to nationalism I saw only in the Soviet Union, although Nazi Germany may have surpassed both of us in that too. That while our government becomes more and more of and for the rich, as the government of the U.S.S.R. was more and more of and for the nomenklatura, and our cherished privacy, not to mention our liberties, is increasingly under attack. Although the Obama administration has also changed the tone of governmental trespass into what used to be our personal lives and stopped some of the most egregious excesses, the Patriot Act and other legislation that enables the government to exercise direct censorship and a kind of prior restraint on intellectual activities remain the law of the land. (A Nobel prize-winning scientist at Cornell University is convinced that fear of government intrusion was chiefly responsible for the plummet of 40 labs to two within 24 months of enactment of the Patriot Act.) Not only may the FBI inspect computer files and library and research records in our citadel of freedom; it also reports about their deviation from patriotic political ideology. And that's not to ask how carefully our telephone and electronic communications are being monitored because the full scope of the warrantless wiretapping is secret. What is known is that Americans, watched far more closely than ever, have begun forgetting the rights of privacy they used to enjoy.

    Of course that was worse in the Soviet Union, but not everything was, at least during its final decades. Some of the American planes that overflew our unscrupulous adversary for surveillance inevitably had mechanical trouble. The American intelligence personnel who feared the hateful KGB would torment the downed pilots with water-boarding and other hideous devices seethed in vain because that never happened. It was we who resorted to that torture, which our government, employing sophistry that would have enraged us if it had come from Moscow, claimed was nothing of the kind when administered by the CIA.

    Don't get me wrong, American society remains far freer and more admirable in general. If I'd been asked whether I wanted to live permanently here or there, my choice would have been here without an instant's hesitation. But don't tell me the U.S., too much like the S.U., isn't mired in self-admiring, self-righteous, often obscurantist ideology while Europe advances toward greater pragmatism and humanism. Don't tell me we didn't use and aren't using some of the S.U.'s ugliest practices, nor that the urge for that use doesn't come chiefly from the same source as it did for the bad guys: fear of enemies and insecurity about our ourselves beneath our sanctimonious bragging. Chest-thumping about being the world's best, chosen to tell everyone else how to live, no more assuages our inner doubts about ourselves or our ignorance of other cultures than it did for the Soviets.

    No, do tell me if I'm mistaken.

    George Feifer is the author of Moscow Farewell and The Battle of Okinawa.

    [May 24, 2010] Max Keiser And Gerald Celente Deconstruct Financial Fraud zero hedge

    snowball777:

    Yellow Dogs are a potential problem with unions, but that doesn't mean that a countervailing force to the exploitative impetus from management isn't necessary any more than bad cops imply that we shouldn't have a police force.

    The downsides to unions are the same ones to which any hierarchical system is prone.

    I've seen what the union did for my grandfather when he worked at Ford, what the carpenter's union did for my dad as an apprentice craftsman, and I've read enough Zinn to realize that the same problems encountered by the people working for Massey in WV today were being dealt with by exploited workers trading scrip at the company store throughout the 19th century.

    I'm not a union member, but I don't pretend that everyone clocking a 9-5 is in the same position to play John Galt with the capitalists that I am.

    As for comparisons with the banksters....you're off by an order of magnitude...just look at the money each is able to put up in the farcical ceremonies we call elections.

    Mentaliusanything:

    Public servant's - Again no they don't - they provide a 'service' - How in Gods name do you think things are Projected, planned and large infrastructure project get up. Who collects, who distributes the peoples money for the people. Yes they create nothing but without them you don't go anywhere. They provide the very Taxi in which you ride to your destination. Judas priest - don't knock some of the most intelligent people you have because they know they have to follow the orders they get from above. They are not elected but they plan 50 years in front with the things they are given.

    I dare you to imagine life without the servants of the people. you would eat anarchy for breakfast and feast on your children at night. Grow up!

    Now to Unions - like it or not you people inherited the Westminster system of Government and Unions are the opposition to the government (re Business) - if you had no unions you would be working for free 7 days and get a bowl of rice and a thread bare blanket at night. Some of the great privileges you enjoy are due to union pressure. If you want to knock them be very aware you lose a voice completely. Np in fact support your union it may be the very voice you now need to square this thing away. (never been a member but as management would fear their removal because my ass would be grass.)

    chindit13:

    :Okay, I'm prepared to set the modern day record for junks.

    There is no New World Order. The Bilderbergs are just a bunch of self-important clowns who are arrogant enough to think they even understand all the variables, much less control them. Ditto Davos. Ditto the G7/8/20. Add the Trilateral Commission, the Masons and Opus Dei. Skull and Bones? Just a bunch of drunk frat-boy types who never quite grow up.

    People who attribute great power and control to the elite are merely compensating for their own lack of resolve or courage or success. It is an excuse for failure, nothing more. It is an admission of defeat before the battle even starts. All of the conspiracies attributed to the great unseen forces get more bizarre and less rational with time. Eventually the conspiracies don't even have to make sense; they just have to be stated repeatedly, quoted in articles, linked in comments etc., until they become a kind of tautology. Everybody feels better about themselves because they have an excuse not to attack the gods.

    The one mistake I see many writers make on this blog is to over estimate the power of those who are raping the US and oppressing its citizens. Some people seem to believe the elite are surrounded by a massive force, like the ones protecting the arch villains in James Bond movies, and who get ceremoniously slaughtered in the climactic scene.

    In point of fact the elite is quite small, poorly protected, and able to do what they do simply because the general population allows it to happen.

    The source of their power is actually quite simple. Money. That's it. They have gamed the system so that the monied interests scratch the backs of the legal holders of power (who are different from the holders of physical power), then the leaders do a reach-around and take care of the desires of the monied elite.

    For example, Jamie Dimon wants something (a way to accumulate more money), so he hires some lobbyists who know the "go buttons" of those who make the rules, then the rule makers---whether it is Congress, the Fed or Treasury---arrange the system purely for the benefit of Jamie Dimon.

    Everyone in that circle jerk, however, is vulnerable. Physically vulnerable. Contrary to those I might call conspiratorialists, the greater system does not protect these thieves and corrupt officials. That is an illusion.

    Whether it is the military, the CIA, the NSA, or the FBI...all of these organizations and institutions are made up of free thinking people who merely work for a living, pay taxes, are not especially rich, and are as disgusted by what the powered elite are doing as anyone. Again contrary to many false beliefs among people who post here, these organizations and institutions, for the most part, feel a loyalty and owe an allegiance to the country and to the constitution. They neither owe nor feel a loyalty to unelected, self-serving bankers or their governmental minions and pawns. Once aroused, the men and women of these entities are as likely to devote their efforts to the destruction and removal of the elite as any other angry American.

    All of the men and women of these organizations swore an oath the day they took up their post. They swore to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States". Some of you may have taken that oath at one time in your lives. You did not swear to protect the cheats, thieves, liars and the corrupt politicians or individuals of this country, nor did anyone else who served or is now serving. No one took an oath to defend Wall Street, or a corrupt official, or lobbyists, and certainly not the Federal Reserve. The oath was to the Constitution and the principles upon which the country was founded. Those who have taken that oath want what is fair and just and right. They will fight for that. Like you, they want to raise their children in a land where opportunities abound and where the playing field is as level as possible. They do not want to assume the obligations of failures or of the greedy or the corrupt, just because those guilty of such sins hold official or financial power.

    The powered elite, however, work to maintain the illusion that they are all powerful and have all of these institutions on their side. They do not.

    Many of you have service people in your families. Many of you know service people, or FBI folks, or CIA and NSA folks. Does any person on this site truly believe that any of these people would lay down his life for Lloyd Blankfein or Mitch McConnell or Tim Geithner or Ben Bernanke? A life is too precious to sacrifice for those so undeserving.

    If you think that anyone would, you are wrong. The loyalties of these people are to a greater good. There are not ten people in the Armed Forces who would turn their weapons on innocent American citizens. There is not a single Marine, present or former, who would. Most, however, would raise their guns against those who would subvert, for their own personal gain, all for which the country supposedly stands.

    In reality, the people on the ground who hold the guns, control the streets, have dominion over the actual bank accounts of the monied elite, control the airways and information systems, etc., are just common people like you and me. The man or woman working in a bank for $50K a year knows how to transfer the entire balance of Jamie Dimon's account to his or her own. The bodyguard for any of the elite, a man or woman as much abused by the power structure as anyone else, has the power of life and death over those they ostensibly protect. Ten bank employees, each with an axe to grind, could turn Lloyd Blankfein into a pauper in seconds with a few keystrokes. A pilot of a G650, if sensing imminent danger, will leave Teterboro Airport with his own family on board rather than wait for Lloyd or Jamie or Warren to show up.

    When the time comes for the people to physically take back America and sweep away those whose only interest is their own wealth and power, all of those people in the military and in the various agencies will be allies, not enemies. There may be a few people at the top of any of those entities, who would try to preserve the rotten and broken system, because they benefit unfairly from it. The vast majority of the rank and file, though, will stand for what is right. There are more true patriots than you think.

    Don't believe the illusion. The foundation on which the monied elite and the co-opted leaders stand is sand. The fortress, in which they would have you believe they live, is a facade. They are buck naked.

    Once the giant is aroused and the illusion laid bare, the tiny group of greedy, power-hungry, self-serving scum that has ruined the once democratic nation will be slaughtered or swept away by an aggrieved people. Yes, the masses in general have been hoodwinked and pacified and on balance lack the courage of the Founding Fathers of the United States, but they will awaken as conditions deteriorate for the 300 million who are not part of Wall Street, or Congress, or the bodies that would rape the people for the gain of the few.

    Remember that in the days of the Soviet Bloc, the people of Eastern Europe lived under the iron fist of a system they thought was omnipotent. It was not. As a simple example, I give you former Romanian leader Ceaucescu. In the end, the institutions that supposedly protected him and made him invulnerable turned against him and his family, and joined the people in bringing fairness and freedom into their society. In the West we applauded their courage. Our leaders, ironically, also applauded their courage, oblivious to the fact that the same fate might justifiably one day befall them.

    We, the People of America, hold even more power than the people of Romania did. Cleansing our land of those who would dishonor everything the country was meant to be will be far easier. When that day finally arrives and the people have had enough of the stealing and the unfairness and the taxation without representation---which is EXACTLY what it is---then the supposed protectors of the elite will turn on the their masters as quickly and as righteously and with the same certainty as the people and the system turned against Nikolae Ceaucescu.

    That day is coming. Those who would deny it stand in the way of history.

    AnAnonymous:

    It started well. The elite, the conspiracy theories are most of the times drivel. It went off the road when it went about raping the US people.

    The common US citizen is perfectly awaked: this person knows that the current deal is the best for his own self interests. Sitting in the consumer seat is not the worst seat in the game.

    People are confusing the end of the efficiency of looting exterior countries (which yields not enough to bail out the US citizens as it used to) and a really dysfunctional US structure. The US elite are no more corrupted today than they were yesterday. It is just that a certain scheme is showing signs of exhaustion.

    mikla:

    +1, good post, there's a lot in there.

    IMHO both is true:

    1. Coordination is implicit. Geese don't conspire to fly south, they don't need to. That's the "movement of crowds" commonly-motivated behavior. Central banks don't need to conspire to debase, they just do. Since they all have the same goal (inflate), they don't need to conspire to do their thing (they are implicitly coordinated through goals and operational behavior).
    2. Coordination is explicit. Still, Ben picks up the phone and gives the UK a big check to purchase US bonds. The Fed buys Greece's bonds directly. Central bankers meet, and forty-five minutes later an agreement is made to set interest rates worldwide.

    Insert "governments", and the same is true (although of course, governments have areas for collaboration and competition).

    IMHO a "true" (explicit) New World Order with a few guys-in-robes making all the decisions is problematic because (1) it's hard to keep a conspiracy like that secret over an extended time without "defectors", and (2) there are many random inputs, like actual elections/populace-action that may defy "the plan".

    So, I agree with your main assertion:

    The source of their power is actually quite simple. Money. That's it. They have gamed the system so that the monied interests scratch the backs of the legal holders of power (who are different from the holders of physical power), then the leaders do a reach-around and take care of the desires of the monied elite.

    That's really quite simple. It's plausible, and it's logical. You just stated something as true as, "politicians as-a-group say whatever they think will get them (re-)elected." Does anyone on Earth want to argue with that assertion? You'd be considered an idiot to *not* believe that.

    It's silly to assert Goldman Sachs doesn't exercise tremendous influence over the US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, if not actually the "prime mover" of policy and implementation. IMHO, it's this type of centralized influence of a few individuals, quite likely not bounded by a given nation's interest (a given large financial institution and the banking system transcends sovereign borders) that makes the "conspiracy theory" compelling.

    IMHO, "conspiracy theory" may not be explicitly true, but it's hard to argue it's not implicitly true. Thus, at some level, it's kind of true:

    We all follow the ritual where they come out of the meeting and announce, in public, the new interest rate for the nation, and the world -- and we the people find this "normal" and "acceptable". Wow.

    These same people can print and distribute more than a $Trillion dollars at a time, backed by the taxpayer, without audit, review, or approval of any elected or government official. Wow.

    Our system mandates that we have these very-few "deciders", these World Central Planners, and we explicitly support it. It's illegal to audit their process, we cannot review their decision, and we cannot refuse to implement what they have decided.

    Does anyone want to argue that a very few people don't exercise tremendous control over all nations (through the banking system)? You'd be an idiot to try.

    [May 23, 2010] Alan Grayson- GOP Running Congress Is Like Al-Qaeda Flying Planes

    ...he believed Republicans had an interest in destroying the federal government, so giving them power over the federal government wouldn't make sense. "Why would you want to put people in charge of government who just don't want to do it? You wouldn't expect to see Al-Qaeda members as pilots," he told an interviewer outside of the camera range.

    [May 22, 2010] Schama: Are the Guillotines Being Sharpened?

    Simon Schama tonight warns in the Financial Times that revolutionary rage is close to the boiling point in Europe and the US :

    Historians will tell you there is often a time-lag between the onset of economic disaster and the accumulation of social fury. In act one, the shock of a crisis initially triggers fearful disorientation; the rush for political saviours; instinctive responses of self-protection, but not the organised mobilisation of outrage…

    Act two is trickier. Objectively, economic conditions might be improving, but perceptions are everything and a breathing space gives room for a dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of their rising expectations. What happened to the march of income, the acquisition of property, the truism that the next generation will live better than the last? The full impact of the overthrow of these assumptions sinks in and engenders a sense of grievance that "Someone Else" must have engineered the common misfortune….At the very least, the survival of a crisis demands ensuring that the fiscal pain is equitably distributed. In the France of 1789, the erstwhile nobility became regular citizens, ended their exemption from the land tax, made a show of abolishing their own privileges, turned in jewellery for the public treasury; while the clergy's immense estates of popcts understates the islocation suffered by many in advanced economies. Schama depicts the crisis-induced change as merely the end of rising expectations, but the shock

    is deeper than that.

    Severe financial crises result in a permanent decline in the standard of living. For some citizens, that has come through contracts being reneged, in particular, pension cuts. Other people see their savings in tatters and have no realistic prospect for being able to fund their retirement. And for many of these individuals, the odds of finding continuing, reasonably paid work are low. Even before unemployment soared, people over 40 face poor job prospects. The idea that the middle aged cohort can earn back losses to their nest eggs is wishful thinking. And the young are not much better off. New graduates also face a hostile job market. Worse, students often went into debt to finance their education, believing the mantra that it was an investment.

    And many of the societies suffering these financial shocks have already suffered a great deal of erosion of their underlying support structures. Even before the crisis, in the US and other advanced economies, social bonds have eroded in a remarkably short period of time, roughly a generation and a half. Job tenures are short; employees and employers have little loyalty to each other. Ties to communities are weak. Many families have two working parents, so career and parenting demands leave little time to participate in local organizations. Advanced technology frequently offers an easier leisure outlet than trying to coordinate schedules with time (or financially) stressed friends. But marriage and families are also not the haven they once were, given high divorce rates.

    One oft unrecognized factor is that alienation and social stress are directly related to income inequality. This is hardly a new finding, but it seldom gets media coverage in the plutocratic US. And it has concrete, measurable costs. As Michael Prowse explained in the Financial Times:

    …..if you look for differences between countries, the relationship between income and health largely disintegrates. Rich Americans, for instance, are healthier on average than poor Americans, as measured by life expectancy. But, although the US is a much richer country than, say, Greece, Americans on average have a lower life expectancy than Greeks. More income, it seems, gives you a health advantage with respect to your fellow citizens, but not with respect to people living in other countries….

    Once a floor standard of living is attained, people tend to be healthier when three conditions hold: they are valued and respected by others; they feel 'in control' in their work and home lives; and they enjoy a dense network of social contacts. Economically unequal societies tend to do poorly in all three respects: they tend to be characterised by big status differences, by big differences in people's sense of control and by low levels of civic participation….

    Unequal societies, in other words, will remain unhealthy societies – and also unhappy societies – no matter how wealthy they become. Their advocates – those who see no reason whatever to curb ever-widening income differentials – have a lot of explaining to do.

    Yves here. If you look at broader indicators of social well being, you see the same finding: greater income inequality is associated with worse outcomes. From a presentation by Kate Pickett, Senior lecturer at the University of York and author of The Spirit Level, at the INET conference in April:

    Picture 52

    Note in particular where Japan sits on the chart. Some readers have argued that the US has little to fear from deflation and a protracted period of near-zero growth, since Japan is orderly and prosperous-looking, despite its relative decline. But Japan was and is the most socially equal major economy, and during its crisis, it observed the Schama prescription of sharing the pain. The US, the UK, and to a lesser degree, Europe, have done the exact reverse, with both the bank rescues and austerity measures effectively a transfer from ordinary citizens to financiers.

    As James Lardner pointed out in the New York Review of Books in June 2007, even before the wheels started coming off the economy, the social contract in the US was pretty frayed, but a concerted propaganda campaign PR effort promoted the fiction that it was the best of all possible worlds:

    To gain their political ends, the robber barons and monopolists of the Gilded Age were content with corrupting officials and buying elections. Their modern counterparts have taken things a big step further, erecting a loose network of think tanks, corporate spokespeople, and friendly press commentators to shape the way Americans think about the economy…. the new communications apparatus wants us to believe that our economic wellbeing depends almost entirely on the so-called free market-a euphemism for letting the private sector set its own rules. The success of this great effort can be measured in the remarkable fact that, despite the corporate scandals and the social damage that these authors explore; despite three decades of deregulation and privatization and tax-and-benefit-slashing with, as the clearest single result, the relentless rise of economic inequality to levels so extreme that since 2001 "the economy" has racked up five straight years of impressive growth without producing any measurable income gains for most Americans-even now, discussions of solutions or alternatives can be stopped almost dead in their tracks by mention of the word government.

    Yves here. Having weakened faith in government and made considerable progress towards creating a social Darwinist paradise of isolated individuals pitted against each other, the oligarchs may be about to harvest a whirlwind.

    [May 22, 2010] Slashdot Comments Conservative Textbook Curriculum Passes Final Vote In Texas

    Re:Time to stop relying on Texas... (Score:5, Insightful)
    by DarkOx:

    No I think letting the Federal DOE become the ministry of information would have far worse consequences than this decision in Texas.

    I have read lots of history and while I think the church-and-state arguments the Texas board makes are a little week, I can tell you that if you pickup the typical High School Civics book today there IS a progressive bias. I don't think its out of line to insists that books at least cover major political events like the Contract with America, the Goldwater movement in the 60s and not leaving kids with the impression Nixon started Vietnam, is out of line at all.

    When did progress... (Score:5, Insightful)
    by Tassach:

    When Teddy Roosevelt and the rest of the sane people left the Republican party in 1912.Reply to This

    Re:When did progress... (Score:5, Informative)
    by CosaNostra Pizza Inc:

    "Under God" was not originally in the Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge in 1892. The phrase "Under God" was added in 1954.

    Re:Time to stop relying on Texas... (Score:5, Funny)

    The Department of Energy?

    Heathen, energy is a myth. It is just a manifestation of God's blessings bestowed upon us. It is he who makes the sun shine, plants grow (the conversion from solar to chemical is one of His miracles, falsely attributed to photosynthesis by sinners). Repent sinner.

    At least that was what my textbook told me.

    I for one (Score:5, Funny)
    by Herkum01:

    Welcome to the new American Taliban.

    Finally they are no longer pretending to be like the rest of us.

    [May 20, 2010] FOMC Minutes On Greece and Housing Hoocoodanode

    "Amazing thing is, Newt Gingrich could drop any of these quotes on Fox News and no one would even bat an eye. "

    Juvenal Delinquent:

    We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people. ~ Adolf Hitler

    Juvenal Delinquent:

    The Government of the Reich, which regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation, attaches the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See, and is endeavouring to develop them. ~ Adolf Hitler

    Juvenal Delinquent:

    Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith. ~ Adolf Hitler

    Juvenal Delinquent:

    National Socialism has always affirmed that it is determined to take the Christian Churches under the protection of the State... The decisive factor which can justify the existence alike of Church and State is the maintenance of men's spiritual and bodily health, for it that health were destroyed it would mean the end of the State and also the end of the Church... It is my sincere hope that thereby for Germany, too, through free agreement there has been produced a final clarification of spheres in the functions of the State and of one Church. ~ Adolf Hitler

    Assume Crash Positions:

    Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

    The Government of the Reich, which regards Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation, attaches the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See, and is endeavouring to develop them. ~ Adolf Hitler

    Like nearly every central European leader since the mid 800s with an eye toward legitimizing his attempts to rule the continent, Hitler wasn't shy about invoking the Holy Roman Empire (which, to paraphrase Linda Richman, was neither Holy nor Roman. Discuss.)

    Maury the Credit Responsibility Panda:

    Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

    National Socialism has always affirmed that it is determined to take the Christian Churches under the protection of the State...

    Amazing thing is, Newt Gingrich could drop any of these quotes on Fox News and no one would even bat an eye.

    greenchutes:

    Tagsazurite wrote:

    the Nazis didn't like religion

    •sigh *
    As long as we're ing everything in sight...

    European fascism was basically a Catholic phenomenon, emphatically so in central europe. Hlinka was still on the 20 koruna note in Slovakia when it was finally phased out just a few years ago.

    Juvenal Delinquen:

    The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life. ~ Adolf Hitler

    Juvenal Delinquent:

    If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work. ~ Adolf Hitler

    RE:

    Juvenal Delinquent wrote:

    I could go on for many threads showing you how complicit chrisitianity was in the 3rd Reich, if you'd like.

    JD, I, for one, appreciated the quotes. I'm familiar with many of them. It is amazing how ignorance of history allows for the complete distortion of facts.

    Genn Beck ahoy.

    [May 15, 2010] Mervyn King World's Worst Financial Crisis Ever zero hedge

    05/14/2010

    Apostate 22:21:

    Yeah, I tried to tell people back in '08 - when Soros says "this shit is retarded," as he did in a speech at Columbia, he will do his damndest to rip the balls off every penny ante government out there, so long as he's still breathing.

    He fled the Nazis. He remembers. He takes no shit. I disagree with his approach in many respects (and I find his philanthropic efforts both misguided and damaging), but when he speaks, the only people who matter listen.

    The media is just so deluded that they're not worth listening to. It's worse than Pravda in the USSR or even your typical Chinese paper. They're much, much dumber, much more corrupt, and most of these bastards fail to even turn a profit.

    Bringin It 22:53:

    Great post and I'm especially happy to see recognition of this - It's worse than Pravda in the USSR. Because it's true.

    I remember in the 60's mocking US news reels of what dumb gruel they had to swallow over there. Now here we are with Americans trapped in their own glass bubble.

    Augustus - 22:59:

    The people reading Pravda all knew that is was pure propaganda. They were much wiser that what we have for an educated American public. It is self induced ignorance here.

    akak - 00:21:

    I used this exact same analogy with a friend a few days ago, comparing the captive US corporate media to the USSR's old Pravda and Izvestia. He thought the comparison was extreme --- I told him it was probably much closer than most Americans could possibly realize.

    But of course, most of us here already know that.

    pak - 04:22:

    +10

    According to Orwell, "happiness can exist only in acceptance."

    I would argue that even in former Soviet Bloc countries, the citizenry these days is much more delusional and naive than 30-40 years ago. Apparently, people enjoy being idiots because that essentially makes them happy.

    ArmchairRevolut... - 07:06:

    This is absolutely true. Some people will get angry with you if you enlighten them, because it takes them from their happy (ignorant) place.

    pak - 08:55:

    You'll certainly like this one, also from Orwell:

    "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

    The problem is - these days "the ruling circles" wouldn't try to suppress you or destroy you physically. Instead, they'd try to put a tinfoil hat on you. If you don't allow that, they'll call you "immature" or "populist". Just follow the financial reform debate, and you'll see how it works..

    [May 10, 2010] The Global Crisis of Legitimacy STRATFOR

    By George Friedman

    Financial panics are an integral part of capitalism. So are economic recessions. The system generates them and it becomes stronger because of them. Like forest fires, they are painful when they occur, yet without them, the forest could not survive. They impose discipline, punishing the reckless, rewarding the cautious. They do so imperfectly, of course, as at times the reckless are rewarded and the cautious penalized. Political crises - as opposed to normal financial panics - emerge when the reckless appear to be the beneficiaries of the crisis they have caused, while the rest of society bears the burdens of their recklessness. At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political.

    The financial and economic systems are subsystems of the broader political system. More precisely, think of nations as consisting of three basic systems: political, economic and military. Each of these systems has elites that manage it. The three systems are constantly interacting - and in a healthy polity, balancing each other, compensating for failures in one as well as taking advantage of success. Every nation has a different configuration within and between these systems. The relative weight of each system differs, as does the importance of its elites. But each nation contains these systems, and no system exists without the other two.

    Limited Liability Investing

    Consider the capitalist economic system. The concept of the corporation provides its modern foundation. The corporation is built around the idea of limited liability for investors, the notion that if you buy part or all of a company, you yourself are not liable for its debts or the harm that it might do; your risk is limited to your investment. In other words, you may own all or part of a company, but you are not responsible for what it does beyond your investment. Whereas supply and demand exist in all times and places, the notion of limited liability investing is unique to modern capitalism and reshapes the dynamic of supply and demand.

    It is also a political invention and not an economic one. The decision to create corporations that limit liability flows from political decisions implemented through the legal subsystem of politics. The corporation dominates even in China; though the rules of liability and the definition of control vary, the principle that the state and politics define the structure of corporate risk remains constant.

    In a more natural organization of the marketplace, the owners are entirely responsible for the debts and liabilities of the entity they own. That, of course, would create excessive risk, suppressing economic activity. So the political system over time has reallocated risk away from the owners of companies to the companies' creditors and customers by allowing corporations to become bankrupt without pulling in the owners.

    The precise distribution of risk within an economic system is a political matter expressed through the law; it differs from nation to nation and over time. But contrary to the idea that there is a tension between the political and economic systems, the modern economic system is unthinkable except for the eccentric but indispensible political-legal contrivance of the limited liability corporation. In the precise and complex allocation of risk and immunity, we find the origins of the modern market. Among other reasons, this is why classical economists never spoke of "economics" but always of "political economy."

    The state both invents the principle of the corporation and defines the conditions in which the corporation is able to arise. The state defines the structure of risk and liabilities and assures that the laws are enforced. Emerging out of this complexity - and justifying it - is a moral regime. Protection from liability comes with a burden: Poor decisions will be penalized by losses, while wise decisions are rewarded by greater wealth. Because of this, society as a whole will benefit. The entire scheme is designed to increase, in Adam Smith's words, "The Wealth of Nations" by limiting liability, increasing the willingness to take risk and imposing penalties for poor judgment and rewards for wise judgment. But the measure of the system is not whether individuals benefit, but whether in benefiting they enhance the wealth of the nation.

    The greatest systemic risk, therefore, is not an economic concept but a political one. Systemic risk emerges when it appears that the political and legal protections given to economic actors, and particularly to members of the economic elite, have been used to subvert the intent of the system. In other words, the crisis occurs when it appears that the economic elite used the law's allocation of risk to enrich themselves in ways that undermined the wealth of the nation. Put another way, the crisis occurs when it appears that the financial elite used the politico-legal structure to enrich themselves through systematically imprudent behavior while those engaged in prudent behavior were harmed, with the political elite apparently taking no action to protect the victims.

    In the modern public corporation, shareholders - the corporation's owners - rarely control management. A board of directors technically oversees management on behalf of the shareholders. In the crisis of 2008, we saw behavior that devastated shareholder value while appearing to enrich the management - the corporation's employees. In this case, the protections given to shareholders of corporations were turned against them when they were forced to pay for the imprudence of their employees - the managers, whose interests did not align with those of the shareholders. The managers in many cases profited personally through their compensation system for actions inimical to shareholder interests. We now have a political, not an economic, crisis for two reasons. First, the crisis qualitatively has moved beyond the boundaries of a cyclical event. Second, the crisis is rooted in the political-legal definitions of the distribution of corporate risk and the legally defined relations between management and shareholder. In leaving the shareholder liable for actions by management, but without giving shareholders controls to limit managerial risk taking, the problem lies not with the market but with the political system that invented and presides over the limited liability corporation.

    Financial panics that appear natural and harm the financial elite do not necessarily create political crises. Financial panics that appear to be the result of deliberate manipulation of the allocation of risk under the law, and from which the financial elite as a whole appears to have profited even while shareholders and the public were harmed, inevitably create political crises. In the case of 2008 and the events that followed, we have a paradox. The 2008 crisis was not unprecedented, nor was the federal bailout. We saw similar things in the municipal bond crisis of the 1970s, and the Third World Debt Crisis and Savings and Loan Crisis in the 1980s. Nor was the recession that followed anomalous. It came seven years after the previous one, and compared to the 1970s and early 1980s, when unemployment stood at more than 10 percent and inflation and mortgages were at more than 20 percent, the new one was painful but well within the bounds of expected behavior.

    The crisis was rooted in the appearance that it was triggered by the behavior not of small town banks or third world countries, but of the global financial elite, who took advantage of the complexities of law to enrich themselves instead of the shareholders and clients to whom it was thought they had prior fiduciary responsibility.

    This is a political crisis then, not an economic one. The political elite is responsible for the corporate elite in a unique fashion: The corporation was a political invention, so by definition, its behavior depends on the political system. But in a deeper sense, the crisis is one of both political and corporate elites, and the perception that by omission or commission they acted together - knowingly engineering the outcome. In a sense, it does not matter whether this is what happened. That it is widely believed that this is what happened alone is the origin of the crisis. This generates a political crisis that in turn is translated into an attack on the economic system.

    The public, which is cynical about such things, expects elites to work to benefit themselves. But at the same time, there are limits to the behavior the public will tolerate. That limit might be defined, with Adam Smith in mind, as the point when the wealth of the nation itself is endangered, i.e., when the system is generating outcomes that harm the nation. In extreme form, these crises can delegitimize regimes. In the most extreme form - and we are nowhere near this point - the military elite typically steps in to take control of the system.

    This is not something that is confined to the United States by any means, although part of this analysis is designed to explain why the Obama administration must go after Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and others. The symbol of Goldman Sachs profiting from actions that devastate national wealth, or of the management of Lehman wiping out shareholder value while they themselves did well, creates a crisis of confidence in the political and financial systems. With the crisis of legitimacy still not settling down after nearly two years, the reaction of the political system is predictable. It will both anoint symbolic miscreants, and redefine the structure of risk and liability in financial corporations. The goal is not so much to achieve something as to create the impression that it is achieving something, in other words, to demonstrate that the political system is prepared to control the entities it created.

    The Crisis in Europe

    We see a similar crisis in Europe. The financial institutions in Europe were fully complicit in the global financial crisis. They bought and sold derivatives whose value they knew to be other than stated, the same as Americans. Though the European financial institutions have asserted they were the hapless victims of unscrupulous American firms, the Europeans were as sophisticated as their American counterparts. Their elites knew what they were doing.

    Complicating the European position was the creation of the economic union and the euro by the economic and political elite. There has always been a great deal of ambiguity concerning the powers and authority of the European Union, but its intentions were always clear: to harmonize Europe and to create European-wide solutions to economic problems. This goal always created unease in Europe. There were those who were concerned that a united Europe would exist to benefit the elites, rather than the broader public. There were also those who believed it was designed to benefit the Franco-German core of Europe rather than Europe as a whole. Overall, this reflected minority sentiment, but it was a substantial minority.

    The financial crisis came at Europe in three phases. The first was part of the American subprime crisis. The second wave was a uniquely European crisis. European banks had taken massive positions in the Eastern European banking systems. For example, the Czech system was almost entirely foreign (Austrian and Italian) owned. These banks began lending to Eastern European homebuyers, with mortgages denominated in euros, Swiss francs or yen rather than in the currencies of the countries involved (none yet included in the eurozone). Doing this allowed banks to reduce interest rates, as the risk of currency fluctuation was pushed over to the borrower. But when the zlotys and forints began to plunge, these monthly mortgage payments began to soar, as did defaults. The European core, led by Germany, refused a European bailout of the borrowers or lenders even though the lenders who created this crisis were based in eurozone countries. Instead, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was called in to use funds that included American and Chinese, as well as European, money to solve the problem. This raised the political question in Eastern Europe as to what it meant to be part of the European Union.

    The third wave is represented by crisis in sovereign debt in countries that are part of the eurozone but not in the core of Europe - Greece, of course, but also Portugal and possibly Spain. In the Greek case, the Germans in particular hesitated to intervene until it could draw the IMF - and non-European money and guarantees - into the mix. This obviously raised questions in the periphery about what membership in the eurozone meant, just as it created questions in Eastern Europe about what EU membership meant.

    But a much deeper crisis of legitimacy arose. In Germany, elite sentiment accepted that some sort of intervention in Greece was inevitable. Public sentiment overwhelmingly opposed intervention, however. The political elite moved into tension with the financial elite under public pressure. In Greece, a similar crisis emerged between an elite that accepted that foreign discipline would have to be introduced and a public that saw this discipline as a betrayal of its interests and national sovereignty.

    Europe thus has a double crisis. As in the United States, there is a crisis between the financial and political systems. This crisis is not as intense as in the United States because of a deeper tradition of integration between the two systems in Europe. But the tension between masses and elites is every bit as intense. The second part of the crisis is the crisis of the European Union and growing sense that the European Union is the problem and not the solution. As in the United States, there is a growing movement to distrust not only national arrangements but also multinational arrangements.

    The United States and Europe are far from the only areas of the world facing crises of legitimacy. In China, for example, the growing suppression of all dissent derives from serious questions as to whom the financial expansion of the past 30 years benefits, and who will pay for the downturns. It is also interesting to note that Russia is suffering much less from this crisis, having lived through its own crisis before. The global crisis of legitimacy has many aspects worth considering at some point.

    But for now, the important thing is to understand that both Europe and the United States are facing fundamental challenges to the legitimacy of, if not the regime, then at least the manner in which the regime has handled itself. The geopolitical significance of this crisis is obvious. If the Americans and Europeans both enter a period in which managing the internal balance becomes more pressing than managing the global balance, then other powers will have enhanced windows of opportunities to redefine their regional balances.

    In the United States, we see a predictable process. With the unease over elites intensifying, the political elite is trying to stabilize the situation by attacking the financial elite. It is doing this to both demonstrate that the political elite is distinct from the financial elite and to impose the consequences on the financial elite that the impersonal system was unable to do. There is precedent for this, and it will likely achieve its desired end: greater control over the financial system by the state and an acceptable moral tale for the public.

    The European process is much less clear. The lack of clarity comes from the fact that this is a test for the European Union. This is not simply a crisis within national elites, but within the multinational elite that created the European Union. If this leads to the de-legitimization of the EU, then we are really in uncharted territory.

    But the most important point is that almost two years since a normal financial panic, the polity has still not managed to absorb the consequences of that event. The politically contrived corporation, and particularly the financial corporations, stands accused of undermining the wealth of nations. As Adam Smith understood, markets are not natural entities but the result of political decisions, as is the political system that creates the allocation of risk that allows markets to function. When that system appears to fail, the consequences go far beyond the particular financials of that event. They have political consequences and, in due course, geopolitical consequences.

    The Predator State How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too

    Amazon.com

    I bought this book after seeing the author interviewed on Bill Moyers' Journal, March 27, 2010

    By Amy Masarwe - See all my reviews
    (REAL NAME)

    This review is from: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (Hardcover)

    One of the things I appreciated most about this book was that Mr. Galbraith managed to convey so much actual scholarly data and professional experience in a compelling, informative way, sans, intentionally, any potentially complicated industry jargon or mathematical equations.

    As expected, he painstakingly details decades of frustratingly illogical and demonstrably willful malicious deregulation. And while the utter moral disregard for the suffering knowingly hoisted upon an unsuspecting public is quite horrific, the real perversion in this criminal wealth-transfer Ponzi-scheme -- benignly referred to as capitalism -- further lies in the privatized profits provided the overlord masters our dumb, duped commonwealth so generously socialized the expenses for, and worse still, the needlessly complicated Credit Default Swaps; which, deceptively simple, are exactly as titled: a swap (or trade) on the default (or demise) of credit (or mortage). A bet by a lender that his own borrower will fail. Not exactly rocket science.

    And thus we are provided Bubble Engineering 101.

    The banks exploited a mortgage loophole -- that being the absense of a gatekeeper, much like the SEC is to Wallstreet -- that allowed them to knowingly package financial products to people that couldn't afford them; not only in order that they could gain huge short-term profits on the way UP, but also now to ensure they gain on the way DOWN as well.

    One of the symptoms of this market-fundamentalism disease so prevalent in Washington is the constant pressure for more, more, more. Investors want their dividends, and as you can see, when no laws are in place to protect the public, companies like these banks they seem to worship will resort to any means to make that happen. Hence the predatory terminology; since it is clear they preyed upon the very customers it was assumed they had a fiduciary responsibility to, and that the public in return could actually trust, when as we are now well aware, the pathetic naked reality is none in fact ever existed.

    Wthholding information from people in order to sell them a financial product that the bank stands only to profit from, and the sucker responding to the incessant solicitation stands only to lose from, essentially is a form of insider trading; and is illegal for obvious reasons. It would be like a doctor placing a bet that you will die under his care.

    Still another, perhaps even more disturbing, detail persists. Factually processing the degree and scale all these common sense ethics were violated -- morality thrown by the wayside and laws retroactively rewritten any time it was convenient in the socially acceptable pursuit of profit -- somehow manage to pale in comparison if the allegations of open mockery and contempt of the citizenry prove true. Even a casual recollection of whatever bizarre occasional example you might recall being displayed on the news might lend support to such a conclusion in this world gone mad where agents from the government are apparently given carte blache to shoot even school children and the eldery with electricity over the simplest parking lot disagreement. Falsely propogated since childhood in the cleverly-branded Bill of Rights, it would seem no attempt to reclaim that aspect of our fabled heritage ever goes unpunished. Quickly revealed as temporary privileges, at best, and even then "snorted at by insiders"?

    It's vomit-inducing.

    Authors like James Galbraith remain critical for me over these recent years in better understanding the perpetual chaos we are observing and enduring here in America. It is shameful and outrageous the egregious degree of malfeasance these criminal conflcit-laden traitors have gotten away with, plain as the light of day, and the obvious decay of this nation is now unavoidably evident everywhere. Perhaps the reader may find some solace in the hinted undercurrent of the author's restrained disdain as we teter on the cusp of complete the decline to inevitably follow.

    I wish I had time to read it again. For the interested, James K. Galbraith's websites offer many, many more lectures and interviews and dissertaions to explore.

    [May 08, 2010] Guest Post Unemployment for Those Who Earn $150,000 or More is Only 3%, While Unemployment for the Poor is 31% " naked capitalism

    April 25, 2010

    PJM:

    Now, Im seeing real discussions about american problems in Naked Capitalism. In stead blaming others, the debate should first discuss internal problems. Without thinking in our problems and discuss them, we cant have a real picture what are the real exterior threats.

    As a foreigner and a strong believer in USA, the benchmark and model for the free world was USA. That was what I was thought since boy. "Learn with them", theyre lead the free world even with a lot of problems, my father teached me. But today USA inst the model anymore.

    When some americans reads criticisms from outside they react like racists, chauvinistes or even worst. They tend to think that outside criticism is anti-americanism. This the real problem of USA. Acts like an empire. In Portugal we had the same problem.

    Long way ago, Portugal was big. The criticism from outsiders werent welcomed and the dictatorship took the isolationism as the choice because it was hard to swallow some external opinions. This is a map from Portugal, when I was born:

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vIYSzbdzouU/S86jnMtkA7I/AAAAAAAACHo/euWKVNYyPj4/s1600/galv%C3%A3oportugal.jpg

    In http://tempoquepassa.blogspot.com/

    The title above the map :

    "Portugal isnt a smal cowntry", in portuguese.

    That map isnt complete because we had Macau, now China, Cabo Verde Islands, Guiné Bissau and Santo Tomé & Principe.

    But when I was born, Portugal was one biggest countries of the world. With a lot of natural resources like diamnonds, exotic trees, cotton, precious stones, tungsten, copper, and later, plenty of oil and natural gas. The generation before my fathers thought that we could live without others and every criticism from outside was blamed. We were one big empire and they thought Portugal could be better than USA.

    Later we discovered that USA isnt only money, militar power and son on. USA was the first cowntry that was a creation of one revolution. In Europe, french revolution is a kind of landmark, but in reallyty, american revolution was the real revolution where the freedom and democracy was the aim of the known american fathers, like Benjamim Franklin (one mason with a strong influence in the french revolution), George washington, and others.

    Today USA isnt the model to us. In fact, USA become the worst thing in one democracy. Today, USA and Russia are very similar. But americans dont like to know this simple fact: USA is in decandence and isnt the role model for the world. A lot americans dont like to read some criticism. In the past this criticism was linked with communism. But today they link with terrorism and anti-americanism. Americans are blind to acept others opinions and critics. They think that these kind of opinions are hate for USA. These americans are fools.

    But when some americans start thinking in their own problems and what their cowntry become, they realise that USA is a very ugly cowntry. For a foreigner who lives outside USA, it is hard to swallow to see how americans wants to give lessons to others. Because USA has changed and looks a rogue state, others dont like to read some criticism by some arrogants americans. Others dont like to see how USA become a rogue empire that wants to be the sheriff of the world.

    Some years ago, when USA had wars, we tend to believe that was a fight between the goodones and the badones. This admiration and respect with USA values gave to spagetti westerns a lot of sucess around the world. I rememeber in Europe the sucess of these kind of movies because it was like seeing the good americans agaisnt the ugly americans, as in the real world, the good americans agaisnt URSS, China, and others ugly states.

    But today, what we see? USA cheating their allies to control oil and gas pipelines. Democracy and freedom were only words to plunder others resources. The change in american presidency gave the same bullshit: words but the same plundering. For a foreigner, mr. Obama and mr. Bush are the same faces of the oligarchs and american stablishment.

    The first error from mr. Obama it wasnt the delay to leave Iraq and afhganistan. No, these delays arent the real problem. The real problem was mr. Obama didnt abolish the legislation of Homeland Security. The real problem of mr. Obama is giving the same bullshit to people to control the civil rights. Now mr. Obama is spreading fear mongering about nukes and some kind of weapons that terrorist can have acess to have allies around the world. The same bullshit as mr. Bush.

    But for a foreigner, isnt mr. Obama versus mr. Bush, as some americans pretend to think. No. This is USA versus world. This is a rogue state versus the world. For us, the only thing that we see is USA authorities having rogue behaviour. And americans should realise that we dont want to know what guy is the White House. For us, the guy is allways the same, no matter the name of the guy, his color, his party or his religion or even sexual orientation. No, for a foreigner, the guy is the leader of USA and represents american people. so amricans should realise that White House mistakes are american mistakes. As the Puttin mistakes were Russia mistakes. Or in the past, Staline behaviour was Russia behaviour.

    Some americans should realise that USA is loosing support around the world. Americans should realise that around the world, USA isnt the same ally as before. In Europe, governments are falling because their support to USA. In Germany they discuss openly the war in Afhganistan. And in my cowntry, some voices are starting discussing what the hell are we doing in others wars. For what are we fight in Iraq and in Afhganistan? War against terror? Or war to help USA plundering others resources?

    Of course the americans nationalists (strange concept of american patriotism) dont like to read these kind of criticism from outsiders. They tend to think that we hate americans, or were anti-americans. But it isnt true. A lot of criticism are real concern with american decandence and blindness. And a lot of criticism is the ally betrayed by USA and his misbehaviour. A lot of criticism is resentment because americans pretend to be give lessons but they live in an ugly political and economic system. A lot of criticism is denying the right to americans to give others lessons because USA is a rogue state.

    In my humble opinion, americans should be more polite against others countries. The arrogant americans will pay for this misbehaviour in the future. One these days, USA will be looked by the world as North Korea is today. One these days, USA will have a lot of enemies and just a few puppets who follows his master. Today, in some political circles, UK is the american poodle. why this happen? British and americans should make an internal debate.

    China is becoming the strongest economic power of the world. In the past USA bought allies with money, markets and guns. Today is China. But if USA doesnt change his misbehaviour and americans dont start to be more polite with others, and respect them, one these days, China will be a Democracy with a lot of allies, and USA will be alone with his british pooodle. Americans arent doing their homework.

    Another point that americans should realise is the seeds of revolt inside USA. Chuck Norris, in CNN, showed that USA could split and end as we see today. For us, USA should be watched carefull because could bem a instability factor in the world. Even we must to give serious attention the instability inside USA that could trigger another civil war.

    Americans should think better what is happening inside USA, outside USA and around the world. Americans should pay attention for some signals around the world. USA is loosing support around the world, is in troubles, is having some behaviour as rogue state and is arrogant to others countries.

    Americans should listening more and talking less to others countries. Because, USA isnt a good model. In fact, USA is showing how a democracy can decay and starts having behaviour as one soft dicatorship. Like Russia or even venezuela.

    NOONBALLOON:

    PJM,

    Your thoughts are interesting, and probably widely held, and perhaps justifiably so, from an external perspective. Some might say that the US is has become a victim of its own success. Adam Smith's capitalist system approach allowed for the growth and expansion that propelled the US forward to its present day status, however, it also allowed for the total fat which could be trimmed from the private sector in order to in fact support the more socialist perspectives of the welfare mentality. And so now it seems that we're all in favor killing the golden goose, which may actually be required in order collapse a completely corrupted, and now completely tangled mixed economic and regulatory system. The greater question might be, which system shall we employ to replace it, and will it actually work for the longer term? The choice is actually pretty simple, and you have alluded to it as well….Freedom (Capitalism and the efficiency of the free-markets) vs. Government Control (perhaps an MIT/George Soros pushed Control Economy melded within a global economic system).

    While we rationalize ideas like the raising of the minimum wage, and make back room deals to give more influence and power to our labor unions, China, and others, peg their currencies to the US dollar, and their wages stay flat, despite fantastic economic growth over several years time. We bind ourselves with more and more regulation, while China actively smooth's the pathway for its industries. Although, we seem to be following in their footsteps with regard to Government Motors. But why would any business wish to locate in the US vs. China? What's the actual benefit? American Exceptionalism…not anymore! There's probably a strong argument to be made for the US government actually working to errode and destroy anything and everything that might provide for some form of exceptional value, perceived or otherwise, within the US. Although, we do have to ask ourselves "exceptional compared to what", and perhaps there's still some value to be found within certain pockets/markets. However, what's really interesting is the total extent to which China and the US have fought to keep their banking sectors separate and not intermingled (For example: US Bear Stearns and China's Construction Bank).

    China's Citic May Not Go Through with Bear Deal http://www.cnbc.com/id/23647539

    "Bank of China and China Construction Bank are said to abandon endeavors of going public in New York and to go for a Hong Kong listing alone, due to stricter IPO requirements in the United States."

    http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-127779297/bank-china-construction-bank.html

    As for positions held in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, we only have to look a map to understand their importance to overall stability and containment strategies. I certainly wouldn't defend the arguments for WMDs or the terrorist threat with regard to this same positioning, but I wouldn't belie their overall importance either, nor would I say that the US has exploited its positions to capture, control, or unfairly benefit from the natural resources of either of these regions. The evidence just isn't there for that.

    But for now, we'll probably continue along our path to provide lots of lip service and bowing to every cheap dictator that might help sustain, or advance, our current position.

    PJM:

    Dear Noonballoon, I have some ideas what is best for the world and even for USA. But I would like more to give some opinions how I would like to see my cowntry. Maybe is the best to show what I believe is better for USA also. However I respect a lot the american people, even when I give strong and hard opinions against some american opinions. So i wish to see american people discussing more deeply their problems and listen others opinions, even doesnt look the best for USA.

    We need a strong USA, but this strenght should come from political leadership and not only from weapons. I still believe the USA is the best ally to give some dreams to the world. As I said and you agree, more freedom, capitalism, less governement and more civil society. More internal and external competition, more respecto for the people. Everywhere in the world.

    But the leadership should come by defending civil rights, less fearmongering security. The changes in the USA are showing a decay in the respect for the peoples rights inside USA. Some bad examples are red flags for us, external observer. For example, is hard to swallow for us knowing that the police can arrest a tweleve years old child in the school, in from his mates. Is this normal in a democratic society? The child scrapped a table and the political power uses these kind of physical force against a poor child? Who never scrapped a table when boyschool? I did. I did worst things like glue some teachers object. I was disciplined by the school. But never, never I had afraid to see cops to arrest me because I was some kind of crazy child. Even in one dictatorship I never was afraid of to be arrest by these chool behaviour. Even during our dictatorship!

    But that sad episode it wasnt only a isolated case. We can start with the Abu Ghraib case. It wasnt a behaviour from a democracy. But, as a pattern, we still have Guantanamo. Isnt an concentration camp? It is. It was closed? No. So, when this concentration camp is closed and USA gives to every man the right to live as a normal human being? Even the criminal should have the right to live as an human beeing. This is the first landmark of a Democracy. why mr. obama lie to the world?

    In Europe we lived with terrorism some years ago. Even some countries still have internal terrorism, like Spain. But even them, the terrorists, should be prosecuted as an human beeing. But when one prisioner hasnt legal rights and is treated like an dog or even less, the Democracy looses his moral superiority. So, USA should understands that his behaviour inst one of a Democracy. USA behaviour must to change to be acepted like a normal and well functionationg democracy.

    Other legislation, borned after 9/11, is an atack to civil rights. Not only an atack to foreigners civil rights but american people civil rights. To live in a free society means to have some degree of risk. Even to die in one terrorist atack. Some europeans countries lived with the threat of terrorism but never had some civil rights cuted because the terrorists. On the contraire, having civil rights cuted is a victory of terrorists. Is their aim: change our freedom because they hated the free societies. Why USA didnt study the european past and learn with us, to fight terrorism? Why these kind of civil rights violations? Doesnt make sense.

    Bob Goodwin said that the world changed, not USA. Yes, the world changed, but USA changed too. USA changed and become more similar to bad democracies, like Russia or even Venezuela. USA is today a formal democracy, not organic democracy. Some say that USA become a banana republic without bananas. I dont think that USA is a banana republic. Yet. No, I dont think so. But is towards these kind of "democracy". Maybe, as you said: USA is a victim of his own sucess. I tend to believe the same thing. USA won the cold war and lost his soul. Because in old days, USA wanted to be the opposite of URSS and China. Without these enemies, USA become more similar to bad democracies.

    Sincerely I wish a good USA. I made vacations in USA and I loved. I have some family in USA and they still believe that USA is a good cowntry, but not as before. And I believe that the world needs a good USA, a strong USA and a well balanced USA. I wish american people to have a strong internal reflection. And understands that the world is changing and is more exigent with USA. China will be the next superpower in the world. And the best ally to fight the dictatorship in China is one good model democracy as USA. If USA become much the same China, I think the world will have to suffer to avoid future shocks. And it will more dificult to avoid a Third World War.

    We need a strong democracy in USA, with freedom and respect for civil rights. We need a better and strong american society. We know that USA wil never be a perfect model to the world. But we dont want to see USA like Russia, Venezuela or China. We need to improve our democracies, not decaying ours free societies.

    I still dream with a world where the Democracy, Freedom and respect for every human being is the main goal of Humanity. I still hope to see americans with the same dream. I really hope.

    I still believe that bell in Philadelfia. And hoping that bell having some meaning to USA as has to me.

    Bob Goodwin:

    America was loved because of its power when the world had powerful evil, such as Nazi Germany, Communist China, and Stalinist Russia. Having defeated each of those enemies, we are now simply a power without an enemy. The love we used to enjoy is now resentment.

    America can (and will) be left behind. But it is the world that has changed – not America.

    [Apr 23, 2010] Why Can't They See?

    Why do Americans keep putting a negative spin on things? Why are they so anxious about the future when the bad news is, according to the experts, clearly behind them? Why are they so worried about their financial condition when orders, profits, and share prices are booming? Why can't they just accept what Wall Street and Washington keep telling them -- that the recession is over?

    Maybe it's because conditions are nowhere near as great as politicians, economists, policymakers, Wall Street "strategists," TV pundits, and other members of the rose-colored glasses set keep saying they are. If so, that probably explains why, according to the latest poll from Gallup, "One in Five Americans Fear Job Loss in Next 12 Months":

    If laid off, 44% could go barely a month before experiencing significant financial hardship

    PRINCETON, NJ -- Even as Gallup's underemployment measure shows that more people are getting full-time jobs, 21% of American workers think it is "very" or "fairly" likely that they will lose their jobs or be laid off during the next 12 months. That is nearly twice the 12% pre-recession level of 2007 and about the same as the 19% recorded in late 1982, during another deep recession.

    1975-2010 Trend: Thinking About the Next 12 Months, How Likely Do You Think It Is That You Will Lose Your Job or Be Laid Off?

    Further reflecting today's lack of job security, 38% of Americans employed full- or part-time say they are "not at all likely" to lose their jobs over the next year -- down 19 points from April 2007, and by far the lowest level of self-professed job security Gallup has measured since 1975.

    Many Could Not Replace Their Current Jobs

    American workers are not optimistic about replacing their current jobs if they are laid off: 42% say they would be "very" (16%) or "somewhat" (26%) likely to find another job "just as good as the one [they] have now." This is down from 64% in April 2007 and 70% in April 2001.

    2001-2010 Trend: If You Were to Lose Your Job, How Likely Is It That You Would Find a Job Just as Good as the One You Have Now?

    Many Would Encounter Financial Hardship

    Forty-four percent of employees say they could go up to a month after losing their job before experiencing significant financial hardship, and another 27% say they could last up to four months. This financial fragility is not much different than it was in April 2003 and February 2001, when 41% and 46%, respectively, said they could last up to a month.

    Paycheck dependency is more prevalent in the South as well as among those who have a high school education or less and those who make less than $30,000 a year.

    Click here to read the rest.

    Posted by Michael Panzner on April 23, 2010 at 08:41 PM in Economics | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

    [Apr 21, 2010] Coincidence, Campaign, or Meme?

    I'm not sure whether it is a coincidence, an orchestrated campaign, or a meme that is gaining traction, but three sobering commentaries on America's diminishing fortunes have popped up over the past few days:

    "Bankrupt Empire" (Doug Bandow, National Interest)

    The United States government is effectively bankrupt. Washington no longer can afford to micromanage the world. International social engineering is a dubious venture under the best of circumstances. It is folly to attempt while drowning in red ink.

    Traditional military threats against America have largely disappeared. There's no more Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, Maoist China is distant history and Washington is allied with virtually every industrialized state. As Colin Powell famously put it while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: "I'm running out of enemies. . . . I'm down to Kim Il-Sung and Castro." However, the United States continues to act as the globe's 911 number.

    Unfortunately, a hyperactive foreign policy requires a big military. America accounts for roughly half of global military outlays. In real terms Washington spends more on "defense" today than it during the Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War.

    U.S. military expenditures are extraordinary by any measure. My Cato Institute colleagues Chris Preble and Charles Zakaib recently compared American and European military outlays. U.S. expenditures have been trending upward and now approach five percent of GDP. In contrast, European outlays have consistently fallen as a percentage of GDP, to an average of less than two percent.

    The difference is even starker when comparing per capita GDP military expenditures. The U.S. is around $2,200. Most European states fall well below $1,000. Adding in non-Pentagon defense spending-Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Department of Energy (nuclear weapons)-yields American military outlays of $835.1 billion in 2008, which represented 5.9 percent of GDP and $2,700 per capita.

    Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations worries that the increased financial obligations (forget unrealistic estimates about cutting the deficit) resulting from health-care legislation will preclude maintaining such oversize expenditures in the future, thereby threatening America's "global standing." He asks: Who will "police the sea lanes, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combat terrorism, respond to genocide and other unconscionable human rights violations, and deter rogue states from aggression?"

    Of course, nobody is threatening to close the sea lanes these days. Washington has found it hard to stop nuclear proliferation without initiating war, yet promiscuous U.S. military intervention creates a powerful incentive for nations to seek nuclear weapons. Armored divisions and carrier groups aren't useful in confronting terrorists. Iraq demonstrates how the brutality of war often is more inhumane than the depredations of dictators. And there are lots of other nations capable of deterring rogue states.

    The United States should not attempt to do everything even if it could afford to do so. But it can't. When it comes to the federal Treasury, there's nothing there. If Uncle Sam was a real person, he would declare bankruptcy.

    "Graceful Decline" (Christopher Layne, The American Conservative)

    The end of Pax Americana

    The United States emerged from World War II in a position of global dominance. From this unparalleled military and economic power came a Pax Americana that has endured for more than six decades. It seemed the sun would never set on the U.S. empire.

    But America is increasingly unable to play the hegemon's assigned role. Militarily, a hegemon is responsible for stabilizing key regions and guarding the global commons. Economically, it offers public goods by opening its domestic market to other states, supplying liquidity for the world economy, and providing the reserve currency. A hegemon is supposed to solve international crises, not cause them. It is supposed to be the lender of last resort, not the biggest borrower. Faced with wars it cannot win or quit and an economy begging rescue, the United States no longer fits the part.

    Still, many in the mainstream foreign-policy community see these as temporary setbacks and believe that U.S. primacy will endure for years to come. The American people are awakening to a new reality more quickly than the academy. According to a December 2009 Pew survey, 41 percent of the public believes that the U.S. plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did a decade ago.

    The epoch of American dominance is drawing to a close, and international politics is entering a period of transition: no longer unipolar but not yet fully multipolar. President Barack Obama's November 2009 trip to China provided both substantive and emblematic evidence of the shift. As the Financial Times observed, "Coming at a moment when Chinese prestige is growing and the U.S. is facing enormous difficulties, Mr. Obama's trip has symbolized the advent of a more multi-polar world where U.S. leadership has to co-exist with several rising powers, most notably China." In the same Pew study, 44 percent of Americans polled said that China was the leading economic power; just 27 percent chose the United States.

    Much of America's decline can be attributed to its own self-defeating policies, but as the U.S. stumbles, others-notably China, India, and Russia-are rising. This shift in the global balance of power will dramatically affect international politics: the likelihood of intense great-power security competitions-and even war-will increase; the current era of globalization will end; and the post-1945 Pax Americana will be replaced by an international order that reflects the interests, values, and norms of emerging powers.

    China's economy has been growing much more rapidly than the United States' over the last two decades and continues to do so, maintaining audacious 8 percent growth projections in the midst of a global recession. Leading economic forecasters predict that it will overtake the U.S. as the world's largest economy, measured by overall GDP, sometime around 2020. Already in 2008, China passed the U.S. as the world's leading manufacturing nation-a title the United States had enjoyed for over a century-and this year China will displace Japan as the world's second-largest economy. Everything we know about the trajectories of rising great powers tells us that China will use its increasing wealth to build formidable military power and that it will seek to become the dominant power in East Asia.

    Optimists contend that once the U.S. recovers from what historian Niall Ferguson calls the "Great Repression"-not quite a depression but more than a recession-we'll be able to answer the Chinese challenge. The country, they remind us, faced a larger debt-GDP ratio after World War II yet embarked on an era of sustained growth. They forget that the postwar era was a golden age of U.S. industrial and financial dominance, trade surpluses, and persistent high growth rates. Those days are gone. The United States of 2010 and the world in which it lives are far different from those of 1945.

    "The Death of the American Century" (Henry Allen, The Washington Post)

    The dream is dying.

    It was this: a belief that the world has a special love for Americans, for our earnest innocence and gawky immediacy, for our willingness to share the obvious truth and light of democracy with people still struggling in the darkness of history, for our random energy, syncopated music and lopsided, baseball-playing grins. Throw in a little purple mountains' majesty and amber waves of grain, and you get the idea.

    It's hard to say just when the dream was born. With Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet circling the globe? With Woodrow Wilson's war to make the world safe for democracy? In 1940 Henry Luce, who told Americans who they were each week in Time and Life, proclaimed "The American Century." World War II made it come true.

    I acquired the dream from newsreels and Life magazine after World War II when I saw shots of the French and Italians throwing flowers at our troops as we freed them from the Nazis, GIs coming home with war brides, German children staring up from rubble to cheer the American planes bringing them food in the Berlin Airlift.

    I was quite young -- born in 1941 -- but old enough to hold these truths to be self-evident: We didn't conquer; we liberated. We were always the good guys. We wore the white hats. Despite their grousing about uncultured big-foot Yankees, everyone else secretly wanted to live like Americans. When they threw flowers they were our friends, not collaborators like those French women whose villages shaved their heads when their German boyfriends left a step ahead of the Americans. The women stayed behind, of course -- nobody wanted to be a Nazi war bride in postwar Germany.

    They lost, we won. Nothing makes friends like total victory, the kind we don't even hope for anymore. Why, in twice-nuked Japan, boys took up baseball.

    America was going to run the world, not for America's good but -- for the first time in history -- for the world's own good.

    What a wonderful dream! It took some hits, but it survived our stalemate in Korea, our utter failure in Vietnam, our retreat from Lebanon, our Blackhawk Down catastrophe in Somalia.

    It survived us making fools of ourselves when our Iranian hostage rescue foundered in dusty desert chaos without an enemy shot being fired. We couldn't even bring back all our dead for burial.

    We bombed a mental hospital in Grenada while freeing the world from some vague Communist menace. We bombed an ibuprofen factory in Africa in retaliation for an attack on our Nairobi embassy. We bombed the Chinese Embassy in our air war to liberate Kosovo. The dream even survived George W. Bush launching a war to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

    Now, though, things are different.

    There is no special love for us. We have our unique virtues, and we have come closer than any other nation to fulfilling Jesus's command to love our enemies. But we are awakening from the dream.

    Still, we cling to it. John Kennedy promised that we would pay any price, bear any burden to make it come true, and Ronald Reagan called us "a city on a hill," with the eyes of the world on us. Obama thrills audiences when he soars into his messianic world-saving rhetoric.

    By now, it's as if we wouldn't be America without the dream, and a candidate couldn't win the presidency without believing in it.

    Yet Capt. Mark Moretti, commander of our forces in the Korengal, put it this way: "I think leaving is the right thing to do."

    The dream is dying. No resuscitation, please.

    [Apr 21, 2010] Thoughts on the Tea Party

    I was asked by our weekly paper to give some thoughts on the Tea Party movement. Here is what I came up with:

    The Tea Party movement combines ignorance, anger, and justifiable indignation. For some, this ignorance reflects a degree of racism and ethnic hostility.

    The anger has been nurtured by the demise of journalism along with a cynically crafted rhetoric of hate. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a master of this mode of communication. In 1990, four years before Gingrich ascended to his leadership position, his organization, GOPAC circulated a memo instructing Republicans about the most effective method of communication in the political arena. The memo recommended that his fellow travelers adopt a vocabulary built upon confrontational words, such as "decay, sick, unionized bureaucracy, greed, corruption, radical, permissive, and bizarre." Without a responsible media, this strategy went largely unchallenged until it became common practice.

    The Tea Party, crafted by Republican interests, cleverly managed to whip the resulting anger into an Astroturf movement. At the same time, the Tea Party anger made sense, although it was misdirected. As I tried to show in the Confiscation of American Prosperity, since 1970 the United States has undergone a more massive transfer of wealth than either the Chinese or Soviet Revolutions. Damn right, people should be angry -- but not at the poor immigrants or racial and ethnic minorities, who are made out to be causing all the trouble.

    One of the big complaints of the Tea Party is taxes. Their complaints are partially justified. The partiers are largely middle-class. Poverty precludes the very poor from paying much in taxes, while influence allows the very rich to avoid paying their share. The burden of taxes largely falls on the middle class.

    In addition, people are alienated. They know that they have virtually no say in the way the system works. They are absolutely right to call for a more democratic way of governing. Ironically, of course, the same forces that are behind the conditions that generate this anger are manipulating the Tea Party to serve their own ends.

    [Apr 21, 2010] "Republican Opposition to the Orderly Liquidation Fund"

    Economics of Contempt is annoyed. And there's good reason to be annoyed (at the very least):
    Republican Opposition to the Orderly Liquidation Fund, by Economics of Contempt: The thing that annoys me most about Republicans' new-found opposition to the $50bn orderly liquidation fund is that they are, without question, doing Wall Street's bidding on this.

    Killing a "pre-funded" resolution fund - which would be used to help pay for resolutions under the new resolution authority - is the Street's #1 issue in financial reform. That might seem a bit strange at first, until you realize that the majority of the $50 billion would come directly out of the major dealer banks' profits over the next few years. (Never underestimate the Street's ability to be short-sighted.) This issue has been at the top of the Street's wish list since last summer, when Barney Frank started suggesting that the House bill might include a pre-funded resolution fund.

    The funny thing is, the Street had been having a very hard time getting traction on this issue. They lost the battle over pre-funding in the House, whose financial reform bill did end up including a "Systemic Dissolution Fund" (the size of which was left to the FDIC's discretion, which means it definitely would be larger than $50bn). They were also having a hard time getting any traction in the Senate - Dodd wanted a pre-funded resolution fund, the administration had signed off on pre-funding, and Warner and Corker appeared to have agreed on a $50bn resolution fund as part of their compromise on the resolution authority.

    Enter Mitch McConnell. As soon as McConnell started loudly calling the $50bn pre-funded resolution fund a "bailout fund," and made opposition to it a Republican litmus test, everyone started distancing themselves from the idea. And now a pre-funded resolution fund is all but dead. Amazing.

    Now, I think it's pretty clear from my record that I'm about as far from being a Wall Street/Washington conspiracy theorist as you can get. But in this case, what I honestly believe happened is that when McConnell and John Cornyn had their infamous meeting with a group of Wall Street executives a couple weeks ago, McConnell and Cornyn asked what their #1 issue in financial reform was, and after being told it was pre-funding the resolution authority, McConnell and Cornyn basically promised to kill it. It was, after all, a fundraising meeting, and McConnell and Cornyn are desperate to raise money for November.

    The Street's problem, apparently, was that it had been trying to make the case for a post-funded resolution authority on the merits. McConnell didn't want to deal with all that "logic" hocus-pocus, so he decided to just start straight-up lying about the resolution fund. And it worked. Ah, politics.

    (To be fair, there's a reasonable case to be made on both sides of this issue. ... Pre-funding obviously forces the banks to internalize the costs upfront, but it sacrifices the ability to tailor the costs of a bank failure.)

    [Apr 18, 2010] Robert Creamer George Orwell is Reborn as Mitch McConnell

    Fifty-one years ago, the novelist George Orwell published "1984" -- a social science fiction classic about a future totalitarian regime that had perfected the art of propaganda and mind control.

    The book contributed several iconic terms to the political lexicon -- "Big Brother," "thoughtcrime" -- and perhaps most profoundly prescient -- the concept of "doublethink." "Doublethink" is the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs. The concept was later refined as "doublespeak" -- which is simply the notion that if you say something often enough, you can convince normal people that something is its opposite.

    The concepts are clearly on display in this well known excerpt from 1984:

    "From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

    The modern Republican Party has worked hard over the last decade to perfect the arts of "doublethink" and "doublespeak." Karl Rove and George Bush were masters of the craft. They called their plan to reduce restrictions on polluters the "Clear Skies Initiative." When they eliminated Clinton-era rules conserving forests they called their program the "Healthy Forests Initiative." And, of course, they argued that their program of warrantless wiretaps enhanced our "freedom."

    Now Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has carried Orwellian "doublespeak" to new heights of sheer chutzpa. Tuesday McConnell took to the Senate floor to charge that President Obama's proposal to hold the Wall Street Banks accountable actually "institutionalizes" bailouts of Wall Street.

    Of course, McConnell forgot to mention in his floor speech that he and the chief of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Senator John Cornyn, had just returned from a trip to New York, where they had private meetings with top Wall Street executives to enlist their help in funding Republican campaigns this fall in exchange for killing tough financial reform.

    And the big Wall Street banks have plenty of reasons to oppose reform. J.P. Morgan Chase just published its new earning figures for the quarter -- $3.3 billion -- up almost 300% from last year. The firm spent a record $6.2 million on its attempts to lobby Congress last year, and you've got to admit -- that the money spent on that army of lobbyists got a pretty good return on investment.

    And it's not limited to a well known names. David Tepper CEO of Appalossoa Management -- a hedge fund -- made $4 billion last year -- personally. Four billion dollars is enough money to pay about 80,000 teachers.

    Wall Street has every intention of trying to buy off enough Members of Congress to allow them to continue precisely the reckless behavior that sunk the economy eighteen months ago -- and cost seven million Americans their jobs -- all the while making a lot of executives and traders very, very rich.

    You've got to give it to McConnell. He has gall to march straight from a New York meeting where he got instructions from Wall Street, and go to the floor of the Senate where he attempted to convince Americans that a bill to hold the big Wall Street Banks accountable, is really a "bank bailout bill."

    This cynical tactic is taken directly from the pages of the now-famous memo penned by Republican pollster Frank Luntz who found that it was the only argument that has any traction with swing voters -- or even the Republican rank and file. The fact is that there is a huge fissure in the Republican Party between the Wall Street elite that has always been the core Republican constituency -- and the rank and file party membership that is almost as suspicious of Wall Street as it is of "big government."

    The Party's ability to successfully sell this Orwellian notion is their only hope of taking political high ground in the upcoming debate over holding Wall Street accountable. But selling the notion that this is a "big bank bailout bill" is a much more difficult lift than convincing seniors that the health bill included "death panels." The "death panel" fantasy had traction because it built on the underlying foundation of hatred for "big government" in the Republican base and among some independents.

    But as soon as people learn that the Republican leadership actually represents the big banks -- and takes huge sums of money from the big banks - their argument that they oppose the bill because it is a "bank bailout" falls flat.

    You can say anything you want. But to be persuasive it has to have at least an ounce of credulity. Not even the most ardent right wing zealot could believe that the big banks would back the Republicans so they will oppose a "big bank bailout". No, the big banks are backing Republicans because they don't want to be held accountable. Their CEO's want to be free to continue their reckless speculation, so they can take home their ten or twenty or fifty million dollar bonus checks regardless of the impact it has on the economy or the jobs of Americans.

    For instance, the bill's requirement that "derivatives" be traded on transparent public exchnages instead of privately by a few big banks, will cost the biggest Wall Street banks $20 to $40 billion a year. But it will also help prevent the reckless speculation in these instruments -- which are really nothing more than bets that the price of stock or commodity will go up or down. Speculation in "derivatives" was a big factor that caused the financial collapse in the fall of 2008. But the big banks don't care. They just want to keep on stuffing huge sums of money into their pockets.

    In many respects their attempt to sell the "this bill is a bank bailout" fantasy is a mark of Republican political desperation over this issue. It is up to Democrats to make the distinctions crystal clear. Democrats should refuse to compromise with Wall Street-Republicans or water down the bill one iota. We will get the Republican votes for the final bill to hold Wall Street accountable, not because we have compromised and incorporated "Republican" (Wall Street) ideas -- but because they are compelled by political reality to vote yes on the bill.

    To win, we have to squeeze the Republicans -- to expose the fact that they are fronting entirely for the big Wall Street Banks. Forcing the Republicans into a corner -- not compromise -- is the road to success. It is the road to success both from the standpoint of enacting a policy that reins in the Wall Street banks and holds them accountable -- and from the standpoint of electoral politics. It is the only path to assuring that the recklessness of Wall Street doesn't result in another economic catastrophe that costs millions more Americans their jobs.

    Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.

    [Apr 15, 2010] Ron Paul- "We Can Do Better With Peace Than With War"

    Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

    Inquiring minds are listening to Ron Paul at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference


    Election 2012: Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41%

    Please consider the results from Rasmussen Reports on Election 2012.

    Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is – virtually dead even.

    A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

    Ask the Political Class, though, and it's a blowout. While 58% of Mainstream voters favor Paul, 95% of the Political Class vote for Obama.

    But Republican voters also have decidedly mixed feelings about Paul, who has been an outspoken critic of the party establishment.

    Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the GOP's vice presidential nominee in 2008, is another Republican who has been bucking the party's traditional leadership and was the keynote speaker at the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Republican voters say Palin shares the values of most GOP voters throughout the nation. Just 18% of Republicans see Palin as a divisive force within the GOP.

    Sarah Palin is NOT The Republican Party Future

    This will not win me any hoorays from Republican conservatives, but the best thing for the party would be to distance itself from Palin as quickly and as much as possible.

    Palin may not be viewed as a divisive force within the GOP, but the GOP badly needs independents and Reagan Democrats to win. In that group, Palin most assuredly is a divisive force.

    Palin is hugely responsible for the solid trashing McCain received in the last election. She is a hopeless speaker, completely devoid of any knowledge of foreign policy.

    The future of the Republican party (both parties for that matter), is not war mongers who support Iraq and Afghanistan but the youth of America that wants to and needs to look beyond the needless travesties of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

    Ron Paul has energized the youth of America and that is the future of the party. The country is begging for fiscal conservatives who are willing to always be fiscal conservatives (not just when it comes to social spending).

    The US cannot afford to waste trillions of dollars keeping troops in 140 countries around the world.

    It is high time the Republican party accept that simple statement of fact. Unfortunately, McCain could not do it, and Sarah Palin does not even understand the discussion!

    Political Class Has Vested Interest In War

    The reason "95% of the Political Class support Obama" over Ron Paul is the political class in both parties are mostly war mongers. Enough already!

    Indeed, the military complex has a vested interest in perpetual war, much like unions has a vested interest in forever increasing benefits regardless of the consequences to the taxpayer. Note that wars on terror cannot possibly be won because it is impossible to win a war against a method - terror.

    I am tired of the argument "weak on defense". Defense should be just that - defense - not military escapades costing $trillions in Iraq. We won the war. Great. The cost was insanely high. From the point of view of Bin Laden, we lost because we wasted a $trillion for no reason at all.

    In Praise of a Balanced Budget Amendment

    If we had a balanced budget amendment, we would see a change in a hurry. No Republican would dare support raising taxes to fund the insanities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    If Republicans truly want to lead, they will act as if there is a balanced budget amendment whether there is one or not, and stop this needless spending.

    We do not need war, we cannot afford war, and most of all "We Can Do Better With Peace Than With War".

    Support the troops. Bring them home now.

    Mike "Mish" Shedlock
    http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

    [Apr 05, 2010] Obama Should Channel Teddy Roosevelt

    Economist's View

    Bruce Wilder:

    Johnson and Kwak are pressing a political thesis about the power of an elite faction in shaping the ends of public policy, and not an economic thesis about the particulars of financial industry structure or regulation, except insofar that they implicitly hypothesize that the interests of the bankers and financiers in the way the financial system functions, is at odds with the general, public interest.

    I have to admit I think exhorting the President, who appointed Summers and Geithner and Emmanuel (and chose Biden), seems like a futile endeavor. Class warfare is the logical political frame, for instituting a thorough-going policy reform, which, if it is economically effective, will greatly reduce the incomes, wealth and power of the financial elite. Obama's personal political strategy appears to be to offer his personal brand and inspiring but cerebral rhetorical leadership style as proof against revolution, not its instrument. He's a symbolically, not substantively, progressive President, who has built a coalition of conservatives and progressives, thoroughly dominated by conservatives, while leaving the opposition a mad rump of reactionaries and authoritarians and the ruthless opportunists ready to lead them.

    It is the progressives -- the left of the Democratic Party -- and not the President -- who are powerless and passive in the present configuration of out politics. The President, enjoying the support of Jamie Dimon and friends, is very powerful, indeed. Obama successfully embodied many sincere and genuine and admirable wishes, of people across the political spectrum, but wishing Obama was a fantasy version of Teddy Roosevelt (who, in reality, was far more conservative, even by the standards of his own day, than Obama is, by the standards of ours), is not a sensible exercise of political power.

    The kind of class warfare stance that Johnson and Kwak recommend to Obama would require that Obama assemble quite a different governing and electoral coalition, one that combines populist-authoritarian appeals with progressive ones, while hazarding the hostility of not just the banksters, but the whole of the corporate elite, including the corporate-dominated Media, at a time when other centers of organized political power are at full ebb. Unions, the professions, "independent" media, academia, small business -- it is all pretty pathetic.

    A lying jerk with a video camera was able to destroy ACORN with a single YouTube -- stampeding Congress to enact a bill of attainder in the process! No sensible politician is going to take a flyer on siding with the poor in class warfare, in these political circumstances.

    the buggy professor said...

    The following three links should give anyone who doesn't know much about Theodore Roosevelt a very good summary of his life and political activity and legacies. Easy to read, they would also be a good refresher of this man's fascinating life and impact on American politics and society for those who want some up-dated readings. None, though, dig deep into Roosevelt's complex personality --- constantly active, always on the move and seemingly everywhere at once, the scion of a rich family who went to Harvard with a servant and blackboot and emerged as the leader of the Progressive movement and attacks on big business and big finance, the first president to invite a black man to dinner (Booker T. Washington) and appoint a Jew to his Cabinet, a voracious reader and writer who distrusted intellectuals and professors, a big game hunter who led the conservationist movement as president, and a fervent exponent of expanding American power in the world and a former head of the Rough Riders in the war with Spain (he served in Cuba after quitting public office to raise funds for and leading the US detachment) who simultaneously won the Nobel Peace Prize.

    1) The following long review of a couple of books on Teddy Roosevelt appeared originally earlier in the last decade in the American Prospect
    http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-1386373/Theodore-Roosevelt-Books-in-review.html

    2) This a long, balanced, easy-to-grasp wiki article on Teddy Roosevelt's life and political activities and legacies. What it doesn't do is probe the polar-tugs clashing in his complicated inner life.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt

    3) This wiki article focuses on Roosevelt's presidential period.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Theodore_Roosevelt
    …

    Michael Gordon, AKA the buggy professor

    Bruce Wilder:

    MG: "the first president to invite a black man to dinner (Booker T. Washington)"

    It is kind of interesting how events get distilled into myth. Roosevelt rather casually invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, when the celebrated educator was in D.C. -- he loved to invite famous people to dinner and lecture them. The Democratic press got wind of it, and it became a scandal that Roosevelt had sullied the White House -- the "White" House! (yes, people said that for real.) Roosevelt basically apologized, insisting it was a purely private dinner, and never repeated the offense.

    A major premise for the "outrage" expressed in the press was that this was the "first time" any President had invited a black man into the sacred precincts of the White House. This was not, of course, true, since blacks had visited the White House as prominent politicians and leaders in the Lincoln Administration and afterward. Finally, the claim was rather grudgingly narrowed to "eating dinner" there -- thus, associating the offense with one of the new taboos of segregation, which was still advancing and being promoted across the country. Establishing and reinforcing the segregation taboo was, arguably, the main political purpose and Roosevelt did nothing to defeat that purpose.

    There were far more serious public scandals involving race than dinner at the White House for a black supporter of segregation. Public lynching was an epidemic across the greater South, reaching, sometimes into states like Indiana and Delaware. Republican Presidents were expected to denounce these practices, which Roosevelt did, though tepidly. Roosevelt participated personally in the summary dismissal without trial of three companies of black soldiers in the infamous case of the "Brownsville Raid", a trumped-up case in Texas, effectively ending for a time, service by African-Americans under the arms of the United States.

    the buggy professor:

    What President Obama's philosophical outlook on international relations and "evil in the world" has in common with Theodore AND Franklyn Roosevelt . . . truths, it seems, that conflict with the worldviews of the chronic monopolizing posters here at Economist's Views.

    And a further truth that collides head-on even more with the shared group-think pieties: The belief in the overall benign use of power in world affairs of the USA . . . or horror of horrors! Obama, seen apparently, as not only a sell-out to The Oligarchy, but a covert member of the scheming Neo-Conservative Conspiracy in American foreign policies!

    And not much different on those scores than post-FDR Democratic presidents --- Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton, with Jimmy Carter the odd-man-out. Clinton, you might remember, the initiator of American military power in Bosnia 1995, in Iraq (1998, several hundred cruise missiles launched with an aim to decapitate the Saddam political and military leadership), and against Yugoslavia in 1999.

    Oh my God! What in the world has been going on??? The Progressive Theodore, the warrior Wilson, the even greater warriors FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, and now --- how could it happen! how could it be! --- Obama the bellicose jingoist who didn't bring Finnish-style pacifism to American foreign policy.

    ..

    From President Obama's 2009 acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize.

    ..

    "...We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

    I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naďve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

    But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

    I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower.

    But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

    .

    So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another -- that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

    So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly inreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions." A gradual evolution of human institution..."

    ..

    Michael Gordon, AKA the buggy professor

    Bruce Wilder said in reply to the buggy professor...

    When you call for George W. Bush to be tried for the war crimes he committed, including the prosecution of unjustified, aggressive war, invading Iraq, you'll have some credibility as a moral voice. Right now, all I get from your blathering is that you are not very good at factual or moral distinctions or reasoning.

    Fred C. Dobbs said...

    On the other hand, TR's role advocating for Japan after the Russo-Japanese War set the stage for that country's ascendancy in the Pacific region and ensuing infamous events. He also got the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06bradley.html

    Bruce Wilder said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs...

    Germany's participation in World War I, and Japan, as Britain's ally, taking over their Pacific Island possessions, might have a somewhat more concrete facilitating effect. Also, the Japanese might have had some minor role in their own rise.

    Incidentally, I caused the recent financial crisis. When I moved my bank accounts to Bank of America in 1989, that set the stage. Sorry to all for the trouble.

    Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Bruce Wilder...

    Read the Bradley piece? The UK & US+TR seem to have major roles in encouraging Japan to hegemonize the region. This is not the butterfly effect, after all.
    Panayotis said...
    If we believe that bank policy is driven by speculation, prohibitions can be tried but they will be evaded with new financial innovations (Minsky) to exploit any opportunities from existing complexities. Then we can tax their profits 100% plus a penalty premium as a deterrent against their private motivation!

    the buggy professor said...

    "Bruce Wilder said:

    "When you call for George W. Bush to be tried for the war crimes he committed, including the prosecution of unjustified, aggressive war, invading Iraq, you'll have some credibility as a moral voice. Right now, all I get from your blathering is that you are not very good at factual or moral distinctions or reasoning."

    1) Thank you for your comments, Bruce. Alas, they avoid the central issue in prof bug's commentary you linked to.

    Tersely put, "Are Obama's views about international relations, evil in the world, and America's role to deal with it in line with all the Democratic presidents in the 20th century except Jimmy Carter --- who used force reluctantly to try rescuing American embassy captives in Iran?"

    Those presidents:

    Woodrow Wilson
    FDR
    Truman
    Kennedy
    Johnson
    Clinton

    2) If you can discern major differences in their worldviews about foreign and security policies and the necessary use at times of American military power, kindly set out those differences rather than the usual swipes?

    For that matter, though I was very critical of the blithe, best-case assumptions that lay behind the Bush military-intervention in Iraq --- and especially the Panglossian optimism about the occupation that followed --- would you like to set out the differences that you discern in President Obama's and President Bush's policies . . . at any rate, less than 15 months now after Obama's inauguration?

    ...


    3) Let me help with a nudge or two here as a start:

    Obama did try, rightly, the first few months, to engage Iran with what results you now know. How does his current policy on Iran differ from Bush's?

    Obama did try, as Bush did, to obtain Chinese diplomatic assistance in dealing with Iran and North Korea, but with what results you now know too . . . including a much tougher line on Chinese-American economic relations (now fortunately toned down on both sides for the time being) than Bush, and with similar policies to Bush's on Taiwan and Tibet.

    Obama adhered to the same deadline set by the Bush-Iraqi government for withdrawal of most American troops. Or did he not?

    Obama decided last fall to follow suit with the same sort of military surge that the Bush administration --- very belatedly, after a perversely stubborn and self-defeating military strategy between the spring of 2003 and the start of 2007 --- initiated in Iraq.

    Has Obama tried to encourage the Pakistani government as Bush did to take decisive military action in the regions of Northern Pakistan, only with more success?

    ...

    4) Two differences seem worth mentioning:

    A tougher stand for the time being on Israeli housing in East Jerusalem compared to Bush's policies.

    And a far tougher policy in dealing with our European NATO allies -- reminiscent of Bush's in 2003 dealing with French-German-Belgium opposition to the US-British led intervention in Iraq (supported by all of the other current 28 members of NATO except for Canada. And supported vigorously by Spain, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic, Poland, and later militarily by several others. (Australia, in from the start militarily, isn't part of NATO).

    If anything, Obama's administration has snubbed our allies in ways Bush tried to avoid and mend after 2004. Or as the NY Times put it on March 29th, 2010:


    "Europeans Woo U.S., Promising Relevance
    By STEVEN ERLANGER
    Published: March 28, 2010

    "BRUSSELS - Stung by a perception of America's indifference to its historical alliance with Europe, senior European leaders are calling for a rebalancing of the relationship, promising the Obama administration that the Europeans can be partners for global challenges ranging from security to climate change.
    Related

    "Sarkozy, and France, Look to U.S. Visit (March 29, 2010)
    A high-level conference here on Sunday was dominated by European efforts to get Washington's attention, with promises of new, concerted action that were met with polite skepticism. American officials and European experts largely see European national leaders as focused on their own debates about Greece and the debt crisis afflicting the group of countries that use the euro, divided over China and Russia and tired of Afghanistan. Europe is seen just now as not a problem for the United States, but not much help, either...."

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/world/europe/29europe.html

    ...

    5) For that matter, Obama has tried --- just as Bush did in 2001 and for two years more or so --- to move closer to Russia. The one big difference: a different President, Dimitry Medveded rather than Putin.

    ...

    6) So I repeat the main questions raised by prof bug's earlier post:

    Why, if you and Roger and Anne and Ken (to mention just three of the regular posters who seem to see US foreign and military policies in generally dark tones --- imperialist, neo-imperialist, bullying, militarized, what have you --- why is it that the current Democratic President has hardly swerved not just from the earlier kinds of use of power (diplomatic, economic, military) that all Democratic Presidents and Teddy Roosevelt to boot used in the 20th century, with Carter the one exception?

    And how, exactly --- including Obama's military budget in a worse economy than Bush dealt with --- do Obama's philosophical outlook on international life, evil adversaries, and the overall need and benign use of America power to deal with them differ from George Bush's except in tone?

    ...

    7) When I get some concrete, non-sarcastic scribblings by way of reply, you can count on me to consider them and give a reasoned reply again. But in the meantime, isn't it horrible --- not to have shared groupthink, defended by self-anointed gatekeepers, in charge of these exchanges in Prof Thoma's threads? Wasn't it joyful --- a kind of self-validation of an unchallengeable set of ideological pieties --- to be echoed dozens of times in each thread no matter what the subject was: economic, political, foreign policy, cultural, socio-economic?

    Didn't it seem morally uplifting to heave in common all sorts of categorical, taken-for-granted beliefs asserted, reasserted, and underscored with lots of bad-mouthing of any dissenters . . . Ms. Anne, the attack-dog guardian, let loose to scare them all off with her laugh-a-second snarky absurdities?

    I remain, as always, your obedient and faithful servant,

    Michael Gordon, AKA the buggy professor

    Orwell Watch: Democracy Being Linked to Socialism

    naked capitalism

    Those who remember the sorry saga of the Iraq war no doubt recall the numerous, shifting explanations of why the US attacked an unprovoked invasion of a country that had no ability to mount an attack on the US. Once the canard of "weapons of mass destruction" was dismissed, one of the next set of bogus explanations was that Osama bin Laden was in cahoots with Sadaam Hussein. That was implausible on its face; bin Laden had tried to destabilize Iraq, and various leaks from intelligence sources disputed the Administration lies party line (see here and here for example). Bush eventually 'fessed up that there was no connection between Iraq and al Quaeda.

    But there was no risk in denying the myth at that point. Indeed, it turns out that our brains are wired so badly that mentioning two ideas as being connected, whether to claim they are linked or to deny it, serves to reinforce the belief that they ARE connected. Call it "the lady doth protest too much" effect. A 2007 Washington Post article explains:

    The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

    When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

    Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

    The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

    Even worse, when an erroneous belief is confronted frontally, people still cling to it if it supports an outcome to which they are attached. For instance, surveys found that Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to believe in a Saddam-Osama connection, even after Bush had repudiated it. An article in Sociological Inquiry describes how survey participants who had believed in a Saddam-Osama connection responded when presented with information that the relationship did not exist, including the 2005 climbdown by Bush himself:

    Picture 74

    Notice: only 1/6 changed their minds, with the vast majority merely denying that they had ever held the incorrect belief. Only 2% of the total engaged in "Bayseian updating" meaning absorbing the new information and rethinking their position.

    This is a long winded into, but it serves to establish two points:

    1. Per the CDC example, it isn't hard to implant beliefs, particularly when they are perceived to come from authoritative sources

    2. Once someone is attached to a belief (or to something that the belief bolsters) it is hard to dislodge

    Yves here. So the latest troubling sighting is efforts to turn "democracy" into a suspect word. While it may seem loopy to raise this as a concern, "liberal" was not all that long ago seen in the US as a positive, or at worst, descriptive term. Now "liberal" is so discredited that The Position Formerly Known As Liberal has either crept with its tail between its legs to the center, but still maintains that it is liberal, or is now called "progressive", but that too is rapidly losing positive brand association, since pretty much everyone has figured out that Progressive = The Position Formerly Known As Liberal. So don't kid yourself that even cherished concepts like "democracy" are immune to reimaging.

    From the Salt Lake Tribune (hat tip reader bubaroth):

    Some Utah County parents are calling on the Alpine School District to stop spreading "false educational ideas." First and foremost, the parents say, the district needs to clamp down on its use of the D-word: "democracy."…

    Alpine's mission statement is "Educating all students to ensure the future of our democracy."

    But this nation is a republic, not a democracy, said Oak Norton, a Highland father of five and the founder of Utah's Republic. The Constitution guarantees every state a "republican form of government." "Karl Marx said, 'Democracy is the road to socialism,' " Norton said. A true democracy, he said, relies solely on majority rule and inevitably devolves into anarchy, which then sprouts socialist dictators.

    Yves here. Um, the Weimar Republic descended into fascism, the first French Republic led to the First Empire under Napoleon…but never mind. See Saddam hearts Osama 2.0 in the little Karl Marx quote? Whoever is the evil genius behind the smear campaign on democracy knows the psychological tricks.

    And why are some people so tetchy pedantic about the use of the word "democracy"? Because they see it as linked to The Position Formerly Known As Liberal. In other words, they'll attack the idea of democracy if that's what it takes to defeat those (what, gay lovin'? abortionists? godless?) progressives:

    Jowers said he received some of the same criticism about the D-word as chairman of the Governor's Commission on Strengthening Utah's Democracy.

    "There seems to be a segment of the population who is worried not just about being technically precise on these words … but somehow interprets a move to democracy as some type of a progressive movement that needs to be stopped," [Kirk] Jowers [director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics] said. "For the most part, when people talk about strengthening democracy, they're talking about getting more people in the United States involved in our politics and government and more nations in the world being subject to elections instead of dictators."

    Yves here. While this so far looks to be an isolated event, struggles over cultural norms are often fought via the public education system, so this bears monitoring.

    Ridicule of Conspiracy Theories Focuses On Diffusing Criticism of the Powerful (George Washington's Blog, 2/10/10)

    The Military-Industrial Complex is Ruining the Economy January 9, 2010 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/

    The Crusade Continues in Iraq (George Washington's Blog, 1/18/10)

    Read more on Iraq War at Wikinvest

    [Mar 29, 2010] Economist's View Will the GOP Remain the Party of No

    Bradley Stark:

    What does the ascension of Tea Party and a useless opposition party named GOP say about the evolution of our society? I know not.

    The GOP has become the American Taliban. Scare tactics with no basis in reality. It is the departure from reality that scares me.

    Our democracy needs a rational, engaged opposition party. Richard Nixon's health care reform proposal and creation of EPA, Teddy Roosevelt's creation of a national park system rather than 'drill baby drill', Eisenhower's warning of the 'military industrial complex'...would lead to Tea party hoopla far in excess of anything Obama has done to date.

    [Mar 29, 2010] "The Closing of the Conservative Mind"

    Bruce Bartlett on AEI's decision to fire David Frum:

    David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind, by Bruce Bartlett: As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank Called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.

    Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute. I don't know all the details, but I presume that his Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.

    Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

    It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already.

    Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.

    I will have more to say on this topic later. But I wanted to say that this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.

    brian holt:

    sad, but a great example of the empty party the republicans and their tea-baggers have become.

    don:

    It's more than sad, it's disgusting. Apparently, being fired from AEI has about the same effect on one's standing in the conservative world as getting a dishonorable discharge from the military or being fired from the civil service has on one's standing in the job market. This limits the opportunities for research by sensible conservatives. It should also seriously tarnish the value of the AEI label.
    But from my experiences with Holz-Eakin, he is a very reasonable guy.

    paine:

    "my experiences with .."

    over cocktails don ???

    reasonable might include follows the prevailing currents

    [Mar 29, 2010] Paul Krugman: Punks and Plutocrats

    Mar 28, 2010 | Economist's View

    Will Republicans dare to oppose financial reform?:

    Punks and Plutocrats, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Health reform is the law of the land. Next up: financial reform. But will it happen? The White House is optimistic, because it believes that Republicans won't want to be cast as allies of Wall Street. I'm not so sure. The key question is how many senators believe that they can get away with claiming that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and regulating big banks is doing those big banks a favor. ...
    We have already ... stepped in to rescue troubled financial companies, so as to avoid a complete collapse. And you should bear in mind that the biggest bailouts took place under a conservative Republican administration, which claimed to believe deeply in free markets. There's every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: when push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out. ...

    The only question now is whether the financial industry will pay a price for this privilege, whether Wall Street will be obliged to behave responsibly in return for government backing. And who could be against that?

    Well, how about John Boehner, the House minority leader? Recently Mr. Boehner gave a talk to bankers in which he encouraged them to balk efforts by Congress to impose stricter regulation. "Don't let those little punk staffers take advantage of you, and stand up for yourselves," he urged - where by "taking advantage" he meant imposing some conditions on the industry in return for government backing.

    Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, promptly had "Little Punk Staffer" buttons made up and distributed to Congressional aides.

    But Mr. Boehner isn't the problem: Mr. Frank has already shepherded fairly strong financial reform through the House. Instead, the question is what will happen in the Senate.

    In the Senate, the legislation on the table was crafted by Senator Chris Dodd... It's significantly weaker than the Frank bill, and needs to be made stronger.... But no bill will become law if Senate Republicans stand in the way of reform.

    But won't opponents of reform fear being cast as allies of the bad guys (which they are)? Maybe not. Back in January, Frank Luntz, the G.O.P. strategist, circulated a memo on how to oppose financial reform. His key idea was that Republicans should claim that up is down - that reform legislation is a "big bank bailout bill," rather than a set of restrictions on the banks.

    Sure enough, a few days ago Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama ... claimed that an essential part of reform - tougher oversight of large, systemically important financial companies - is actually a bailout, because "The market will view these firms as being 'too big to fail' and implicitly backed by the government." Um, senator, the market already views those firms as having implicit government backing...: in any future crisis those firms will be rescued, whichever party is in power.

    The only question is whether we're going to regulate bankers so that they don't abuse the privilege of government backing. And it's that regulation - not future bailouts - that reform opponents are trying to block.

    So it's the punks versus the plutocrats - those who want to rein in runaway banks, and bankers who want the freedom to put the economy at risk, freedom enhanced by the knowledge that taxpayers will bail them out in a crisis. Whatever they say, the fact is that people like Mr. Shelby are on the side of the plutocrats; the American people should be on the side of the punks, who are trying to protect their interests

    Will the GOP Remain the Party of No?

    This is from The Myrtle Beach Sun:
    DeMint, Graham let S.C. down on health care overhaul, by Isaac Bailey, The Myrtle Beach Sun: Two South Carolina legislators had the opportunity to shape the historic health care bill President Obama signed into law on Tuesday... Because the Senate version of the bill was going to be the foundation of the law, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint were our only two politicians who could have forced even more conservative ideas into the legislation. ... Neither did. Both shirked their responsibility to the state to walk lockstep with the GOP.

    There was little reason to expect anything different from DeMint, who represents the party's Rush Limbaugh-wing. He didn't begin the debate saying we must find a way to bring down S.C.'s high percentage of the un- and underinsured. He didn't say we must find a way to stem costs that are spiraling out of control, bankrupting hard-working people for the sin of getting too sick. He didn't say the days of uninsured families having to leave coffee cans decorated with a sick loved one's photo on convenience store counters must end. He didn't say that if reform included strong tort reform so doctors would no longer feel the need to perform unnecessary tests that he would vote for it.

    Instead, he said reform's defeat would be Obama's "Waterloo", that it would break the president. Only after his comments ignited a firestorm did DeMint propose a policy that most experts considered laughable. He was focused on politics, not people.
    Sen. Graham began the debate differently. He knew if nothing changed, our health care system would eventually bankrupt us, which is why he initially supported the bipartisan Bennett-Wyden bill. ... But the proposal went nowhere fast. Instead of Graham engaging in the fight to incorporate the best parts of Wyden-Bennett - or any other effective plan - he fell in line with the rest of the GOP caucus.
    He, too, became more concerned about his party's positioning for November than the people he was sent to Washington to represent...
    The most vulnerable South Carolinians ... needed Graham and DeMint to lead. ... They didn't. Instead, they stood for the petty and ignored the real needs of the people. History won't forget. And neither should we.

    And, from the local paper this morning:

    Move past 'repeal, replace', Editorial, Register Guard: Republicans are preparing to march into the 2010 election under the dubious banner of "Repeal and replace!"
    It's a losing strategy, one that GOP lawmakers should rethink before venturing too far down that road. The health care reform bill has been signed into law. ... The Republicans should turn the page on health care if they want to shed the "party of no" label that served both the GOP and nation poorly in the debate over health reform.
    That doesn't mean that House Minority Leader John Boehner and other Republican leaders should publicly embrace Obamacare. That's unrealistic; their philosophical differences with Democrats on reform are too deep and broad, and Republicans resentment over President Obama's historic achievement precludes even the pretense of a political truce.
    But Republicans face long odds in any attempt to repeal and replace health care reform, and they know it. ... As Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., acknowledged, repeal "is not realistic because Barack Obama would veto the bill and we don't have the votes to override it."
    For Republicans such as Boehner, Kyl and DeMint, "repeal and replace" is an election strategy and not a practical legislative goal. ...
    Repeal-and-replace Republicans eventually must face the difficult task of explaining why their apocalyptic predictions - everything from the death panels to the dismantling of democracy - didn't come true. In the months and years to come, many Americans, even those skeptical about the reform effort, will come to see the scare tactics as hyperbolic depictions of a bill whose moderate approach incorporated many Republican ideas.
    Republicans have just suffered a devastating legislative defeat, and they are entitled to nurse their wounds. But the GOP's political aspirations - and the nation's interests - would be best served by full engagement on the many critical issues facing Congress, from financial regulatory reform to immigration to unemployment. ... Republicans remain fixated on their loss on health reform - so much so that some, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have publicly ruled out any bipartisan cooperation for the remainder of the current session.
    The American people need - and deserve - a legislative process in which both parties are engaged and bring competing views to the table. By clinging to the cold corpse of the health care debate, Republicans will miss an opportunity to express a clear, compelling vision on other issues - a vision that could do far more to sway voters to their side this fall than continuing to flail away over health care. ...
    While there is still time, Republicans should repeal and replace their catchphrase, and substitute another that bodes better for their party's future.

    There's an inconsistency between free market ideology and the need for reform in areas like health care and financial services. One of the first steps in reforming the system is to acknowledge that the market won't take care of the problems itself. Once that is acknowledged, i.e. that regulation is needed to fix these market failures, the only question is whether that regulation will be of the "market-based" variety or by edict (e.g. this is the difference between system of tradable carbon permits that allow least cost carbon reduction strategies to emerge and a government set emission limit for each industry which generally does not achieve ca4rbon reductions at least cost).

    With Democrats mostly opposed to old fashioned edict style regulation -- with their willingness to embrace market-based solutions to regulatory issues -- and with Republicans unwilling to embrace anything that Democrats propose, there is little ground left for those Republicans who are willing to admit that markets sometimes fail to stand upon. Democrats have taken the middle ground -- market based regulation -- from Republicans. This leaves Republicans with a choice of going along and compromising (and thereby embracing proposals they have made in the past, e.g. the health care bill looks an awful lot like the health care program Romney put in place in Massachusetts), or standing in opposition simply because it is a Democratic proposal. The choice they've made, standing in opposition to everything, is a losing strategy that allows policy to be shaped entirely be the other side. It will be interesting to see if a fissure develops within the Republican Party over this.

    Will Republicans be able to share the market-based regulatory ground Democrats have taken away? There are already signs that Republicans will work with Democrats on financial reform, but there were early signs of a bi-partisan effort on health care as well, so we'll see how this plays out. I think people are fed up with banks and want something to be done, and Republican attempts to block legislation won't play well with the public at all. So I expect the coalition of no to be broken -- some legislators will see that they cannot continue just saying no and expect public support -- but not without big fights within the Republican Party between the extremists and the centrists. If Republicans do move in this direction, and it's more likely they'll do so on financial reform than on climate change legislation, you'll see an attempt to reclaim these policies as Republican (here's a great example: Health Care Reform--A Republican Idea?). And given the administration's centrist tendencies, in many cases they'll have a pretty good argument.

    Posted by Mark Thoma on Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 10:34 AM in Economics, Financial System, Health Care, Politics, Regulation Save to del.icio.us Tweet This Reblog Permalink Comments (32)

    [Mar 28, 2010] Paul Krugman: Going to Extreme

    "it's a party that fundamentally doesn't accept anyone else's right to govern."
    Economist's View

    The transformation is complete: "today's G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan":

    Going to Extreme, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NYTimes: I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law. But a few days later, it doesn't seem quite as entertaining - and not just because of the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers. For if you care about America's future, you can't be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties.

    To be sure,... it's been a hoot watching Mitt Romney squirm as he tries to distance himself from a plan that, as he knows full well, is nearly identical to the reform he himself pushed through as governor of Massachusetts. His best shot was declaring that enacting reform was an "unconscionable abuse of power," a "historic usurpation of the legislative process" - presumably because the legislative process isn't supposed to include things like "votes" in which the majority prevails. ...

    What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party's leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was "Armageddon." The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi ... surrounded by flames, while the committee's chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on "the firing line." And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight. ... Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush - but you'll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials.

    No, to find anything like what we're seeing now you have to go back to the last time a Democrat was president. Like President Obama, Bill Clinton faced a G.O.P. that denied his legitimacy - Dick Armey, the second-ranking House Republican (and now a Tea Party leader) referred to him as "your president." Threats were common: President Clinton, declared Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, "better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard." ... And once they controlled Congress, Republicans tried to govern as if they held the White House, too, eventually shutting down the federal government in an attempt to bully Mr. Clinton into submission.

    Mr. Obama seems to have sincerely believed that he would face a different reception. And he made a real try at bipartisanship, nearly losing his chance at health reform ... in a vain attempt to get a few Republicans on board. At this point, however, it's clear that any Democratic president will face total opposition from a Republican Party that is completely dominated by right-wing extremists.

    For today's G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan - not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It's a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans' economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It's a party in which paranoid fantasies... - Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions - are mainstream. And, as a result, it's a party that fundamentally doesn't accept anyone else's right to govern.

    In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it's a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don't.

    Hal:

    Whatever faults Reagan had he was not a "crazy" like so many (most?) contemporary Republicans. And his bark was much worse than his bite.

    bakho:

    That is probably true. Reagan was a paid shill for wealthy conservative special interests prior to his political career. His governing was a bit more pragmatic than some of the extreme positions he was paid to promote.

    However, Reagan's belief in privatization has led to the creation of a crony capitalist corporate welfare state which in many instances is nothing more than skimming operations that take an unnecessary and unjustified cut out of money intended for defense, infrastructure and domestic services. Some of that money is kicked back to fund politicians that support the sweetheart deals.

    Student loans is exhibit #1 (Wasn't privatizing student loans a Reagan creation?) and the loan sharks can boo hoo their recent loss all they want with no sympathy from me.

    The loan shark loss is a victory for students and education.

    Lafayette:

    THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

    { Reagan was a paid shill for wealthy conservative special interests prior to his political career.}

    Perhaps, but let us not forget that Reagan also was responsible for bringing down the marginal tax rate, which has allowed the flow of highly munificent donations to the Replicant Party, which in turn has funded their hair-brained belligerence.

    Money may be indeed the root of all evil and when it comes to politics money doesn't talk, it shouts.

    Fred C. Dobbs:

    'a hoot watching Mitt Romney squirm as he tries to distance himself from a plan that, as he knows full well, is nearly identical to the reform he himself pushed through as governor of Massachusetts.'

    Or an indication of serious political instability, when Party #2 is a distinctly 'purified' minority of zealots still able to hamstring the federal government, and Party #1, quite 'mongrelized' (with a comparatively broad range of political views) is barely able to govern even though in 'the majority'. These are dangerous, disturbing time..

    ilsm:

    When Mencken said something about democracy is 'running the circus from the monkey cage' he was foreseeing Boehner, Gramm and the recent insanity in the Grand Odd Party ....

    Judy:

    Ilsm

    The parties have shifted to the right. The Democratic Party leadership to the right and the Republican Party leaders to the far right..off the chart to Fascism.

    paine:

    "off the chart to Fascism"

    judy you have no conception how far we are from fascism

    why glenn beck is a candy cain the tea baggers are mostly aged dagwood bumsteds
    clue less hooked fish flopping on the deck gasping for oxygen

    kharris:

    As to Fred's point about Party #2, the NYT carries a piece today about Senator Bennet of Utah (R) having some question about even being able to get on the primary ballot - not pure enough. The question is, could one of the most conservative states end up with a Democratic Senator because Republicans can't tolerate even the slightest hint of pragmatism? We can only hope.

    Teabaggers are foot soldiers, as bakho notes. War is often less kind to foot soldiers than to generals. These teabags are just the latest manifestation of the GOP's ability to get people all gunned up to work against their own interest. This is "What's Wrong with Kansas".

    Fred C. Dobbs:

    Follow this to some logical conclusion, and there will be almost no one 'left' (except brown shirts) in the GOP, and the 'Other' party will be so diverse as to never be able to reach consensus on anything. Are we there yet?

    OhNoNotAgain:

    "War is often less kind to foot soldiers than to generals."

    Yeah, no kidding. I'm sure if Ernst Röhm had to do it all over again, he wouldn't be so gung-ho about things.

    ken melvin:

    Methinks that leading a group of batshits is much like riding the tiger 'cepting riding the tiger yields a more dignified image. Another apt analogy is that of a bunch of Elmer Gantrys holding tent meeting in drought country.

    bakho:

    The TeaBaggers are not poor. They are mostly in the upper 50% economically and wealthy wannabees. This is precisely the class that bears far more than their fair share of the tax burden because the truly wealthy are shirking their responsibility.

    Republicans always promise tax relief but never give more than a few pennies to this group. If that group got the tax cuts the GOP promised, they would have little reason to support tax cuts. This bait and switch game always tries to keep taxes too high on the majority and use the anti tax sentiment to cut taxes for the wealthy, cut services for the middle class and put more of the burden on the middle class.

    By taking an extreme anti tax position, they naturally align with the wealthy special interests rather than form a compromise with those who support better services.

    ilsm:

    The monkey cage running the republican party is not the only process working in the republican psyche.

    The Orwellian motive is obvious, that is to deny the masses a share in the fruits of the economy through militarism, fear mongering and divisive pandering to radical morality on any number of insane issues.

    The 15% that gets 85% of the income is paying less than 70% of the taxes and 'kindly' lending the remainder to the government.

    The great con!

    paine:

    "The 15% that gets 85% of the income is paying less than 70% of the taxes and 'kindly' lending the remainder to the government."

    they prolly vote dembo now as often as dumbo

    and why not

    both parties can't be wrong at once from any one class pov

    not parties like the Rs and Ds that are both dedicated to preserving and protecting the system at any rate
    but either can from time to time drift into semi perminent oppositional status

    time for repubs to try on that hat

    the fall election is of course not the test as 70 wasn't for the dems

    its 12 i think by then the dumbo rout will be clear

    Devin:

    "The 15% that gets 85% of the income is paying less than 70%"

    Oh, but it's worse than that. We all know that social security receipts are treated just like any other revenue, and have been financing govt operations since at least the 80s. Currently SS receipts are more than income tax receipts. And since SS is capped at ~$106k, that means the top 15% cannot mathematically be paying more than about 30% of SS taxes. Which means the top 15%, earning 85% of the income, is only paying about 50% of the taxes.

    I so rarely see it mentioned that our tax code actually becomes regressive once income gets up to the SS cap (currently ~$106k). The increase in tax rates above $106k never makes up for the tax savings that are enjoyed by exceeding the cap. No wonder upper-middle class people are so pissed. Individuals earning between about $50k and $100k actually pay the highest marginal tax rates of anybody in the country, and those at the upper end of that range pay the highest effective tax rates.

    OhNoNotAgain:

    Beautifully put. This has been the great con taking place since 1983 when SS was "shored up". It's one thing to invest in treasuries as a sound investment vehicle. It's a whole different thing to have that money be re-distributed to the very wealthy in the form of tax cuts, and to then constantly scream about the "insolvency" of SS.

    julio:

    Ha, so you think they have their hands in your pocket, eh?

    Take your dollar of excess SS tax (more than needed for pay-as-you-go), use the windfall to cut top tax rates (and put a bond in the SS account), then follow that into the future, and figure out what happens when SS redeems that bond from the general fund.

    Question: how many more hands are there in your pocket now?
    Bonus points: add the impact of cutting inheritance taxes. How many more hands?
    (and, What's the word for someone who has his hands in your child's pockets?)

    Devin:

    Not my pockets. No, thanks to our ridiculous excuse for a health care system and my wife's health, I haven't had enough taxable income to even pay income tax for several years. I would gladly trade places with those getting taxed at the maximum rate. But thankfully it sounds like in about 3 months our nation will have an option for people like my wife, and we might be able to finally get our finances under control and start having to pay taxes again.

    Imagine that, there's more important things in life than avoiding taxes. That seems to be a concept many in our country just can't wrap their minds around.

    julio:

    The latest version of that idiocy is the rants about the "cost" of government-provided health insurance, and "how are we going to pay for it", as if it were currently free.

    anne:

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/david-frum-aei-heritage-and-health-care/

    March 25, 2010

    David Frum, AEI, Heritage and Health Care
    By Paul Krugman

    David Frum * has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute; ** one has to assume that this is a response to his outspokenness about the Republican failure on health reform.

    In discussing the Frum firing, Bruce Bartlett asserts that AEI has muzzled its health-care experts, because the truth is that they agree with a lot of what Obama is proposing. I find this quite believable; back in 2003 Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, which is supposedly harder-right than AEI, proposed a health care reform *** consisting of … drumroll … an individual mandate coupled with subsidies to make insurance affordable. In short, Obamacare.

    I was struck, by the way, by Butler's recommendation that we

    "Provide support to people to obtain health care based on their need, not where they happen to work, or their eligibility for welfare, or their military record, or their age."

    From each according to his ability, to each according to his need?

    * I'm informed, by family members, that Frum is a distant cousin of yours truly.

    ** http://capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1601/groupthink-right-would-make-stalin-proud

    *** http://www.heritage.org/Research/Testimony/Laying-the-Groundwork-for-Universal-Health-Care-Coverage

    paine:

    "Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush - but you'll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials."

    true ichabod crane dembot chitter maybe a few waved pitch forks would have sped you pwog merit types along to reform instead of clintonian triangles and now obummer octogons

    well at least you want to slap on that import surcharge god love ya for that at least

    paine:

    "We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. " that is wonderously silly if we had two such parties they could merge into one with wings and such where the whole game could be played without the mock combat required by our electoral system

    mexico had such a set up till fairly recently and japan. Of course not de jure like err THE PRC set up but why not go to that point merge the two parties and pass a constitutional amendment
    declaring this repudnocrat party the "leading party " with certain unique duties rights and privileges

    bob mcmanus:

    The question isn't "How do we Democrats help create a better Republican Party" for Gawd's sake.

    The question is "How do we get rid of the damn thing."

    A political party is both less and more than the sum of its parts A party is not a collection of people, ideologies, and policy positions. It is much more a history, a brand, a tribe.

    Abstracted from tax cutting or strong defense or anti-choice, as examples, none of which are unique or necessary to Republicanism. I would contend that the things Krugman complains about define Republicanism, are its very heart and soul.

    Jim:

    It would be interesting to decouple political contributions like health care is decoupled from premiums. Money goes in, is randomly distributed on some arbitrary basis, and the connection between giver and dollars is lost.

    OhNoNotAgain:

    That's a very cool idea. Sort of like the public financing, only voluntary.

    However, I suspect that most people would simply stop giving money if they couldn't ensure that it goes to the "right people". It's the same emotional logic behind why a contingent of people don't like health care. Their tax dollars are going to go to the "wrong people".

    Lyle:

    How to fix the parties
    1 open primaries.
    2 non partisan redistricting process, with a priority of design 1 equal population, 2 compact, 3 using a mathematical term convex i.e. no funny shapes.

    paine

    lyle

    the electoral system is what it is because it works well enough for the corporate system to "live with it "

    now if you try to goose up the small d democracy
    in it by reforming it

    you might spoil the pax corporatorium

    paine:

    read the vickrey solution to the gerry trap its in political science either 62 63 64 somewhere 'round there
    he produced a mechanism to generate districts

    reason:

    But you should get rid of first past the post (either by means of preferential voting or proportional representation) to give third parties a chance to do something other than help their actual opponents.

    paine:

    you guys are re arranging the the deck chairs here

    chomsky loves to show how "the people" are way too often way more progressive then the two big party cores can you possibly believe such a pronounced and persistent "institutional adjustment " to the general will is the product of our electoral arrangements ??

    Devin:

    "not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats"

    I'm glad Krugman made this distinction. Whatever Reagan's personal views, his actions were more pragmatic than his disciples seem to understand. Indeed, if Reagan were running for office today and his actual record was fresh in memory (not distorted as it is by time), he would be pilloried for not being a true conservative. Reagan cut taxes, but then raised them when it was clear they'd cut too much revenue. As governor he passed additional tax increases. Reagan negotiated with terrorists. Reagan withdrew forces from Lebanon after suicide attacks on American troops. As governor Reagan signed into law no-fault divorce, increasing the divorce rate.

    A candidate who had done any one of those things would have almost no chance in the Republican party today. The GOP has gone so crazy that even Reagan wouldn't be conservative enough for them anymore.

    OhNoNotAgain :

    Yep, he's more like Schwartzenegger/Bloomberg than anything from the core of the Republican part today.

    Stephen Kriz :

    Krugman nails it again. I have one fundamental, paradoxical question: "When one political party has a core belief that 'government is the problem', why would you ever, ever put that party in charge of the government"?

    Modern Republicans are nihilists at their core. Is it any wonder that they brought the country to the brink of anarchy when they were in charge?

    roger:

    The "irrational" people can't do much worse than the "rational" leaders did. Let's see, in the 00s - we finally had enough proof that global warming was real, and we - gave tax credits to companies to buy Hummers. We were attacked by a small paramilitary group, based in Afghanistan, which we utterly failed to destroy, but we did decide, what the hell, to invade Iraq - egged on by many an op ed piece in the NYT. We watched the tech bubble collapse, and fixed it with a housing bubble that was blessed by the same economists and economic journalists who continue to write thumbsuckers in the NYT business pages, even as we suffer from the greatest percentage of unemployed since - well, the forties.

    For almost thirty years, the freshwater and saltwater economists have agreed that the "public" secotor shouldn't "intrude" into the economy (magically, the public sector produces nothing in the view of the priests), and so they have ardently pushed to extrude obvious social welfare goods into the profit sector - where, surprise surprise, they experience mysterious unstoppable inflation.

    This week, a panel of rational, thinking American elites presented the solution to all our broadband problems -and if we go along with it, in 2020 they are projecting we can catch up with S. Korea in 2008. The one solution they dare not mention would be actual competition, as Verizon would not allow this - after all, would it be 'fair' to them for all their investments? And as we know, economists, who find mass layoffs eminently fair, become soft hearted when fairness starts to effect a companies ROI - it makes them weep, like the Walrus and the Carpenter.

    The record of fiasco and predation of the gated community whose opinions are given to us as centrist solemnities before which we all must bow,Dems and Republicans, would make a clinical depressive laugh. Krugman should know better - the problem is not the Repubican teabaggers. The problem is a predatory oligarchy. Period.

    paine:

    'The "irrational" people can't do much worse than the "rational" leaders did'

    a fine endorsement of populism roger

    " For almost thirty years, the freshwater and saltwater economists have agreed that the "public" sector shouldn't "intrude" into the economy "

    neoliberal consensus from mankiw to krugman began to break down at various places along the line
    during the second clinton term

    "magically, the public sector produces nothing in the view of the priests"

    really ??? i'd say the school of neo liberal priests were always divided on that point
    but it remained largely academic until rahm's "don't miss this opportunity" moment last january

    i submit the mad dash to fill a bunch of fantasy infra structure projects pretty nicely obscured the job recovery mission and the household debt relief mission similarly to universal health dreams crowding out the dark side of a front loaded mandate and back loaded cost controls

    it every case the opportunity to give the little toiling wage people some relief from health premiums pay roll taxes sales taxes and mortgage payments was squandered on goo goo social uplift projects
    hey these wonks and donks ain't stupid or ignorant i guess they really don't want to champion the job class these obummercrats are not FDR's great grand children anymore then the billary duplex was, and so they have ardently pushed to extrude obvious social welfare goods into the profit sector - where, surprise surprise, they experience mysterious unstoppable inflation

    Jesse:

    @roger
    "The record of fiasco and predation of the gated community whose opinions are given to us as centrist solemnities before which we all must bow, Dems and Republicans, would make a clinical depressive laugh. Krugman should know better - the problem is not the Repubican teabaggers. The problem is a predatory oligarchy. Period."

    Truer words were never spoken.

    http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/03/bombshell-whistleblower-steps-forward.html

    Lafayette:

    {Truer words were never spoken.}

    You're right. Thank God they were never spoken.

    They were written. Indelible evidence of a pathetically naive untruth.

    OhNoNotAgain:

    Be sure and check back with us then, okay ? You know, since you can see the future and all.

    yuan:

    Please stop pouting because Obama stole and implemented your party's healthcare reform ideas. Its time for republicans to accept Obama as a kindred corporate whore.

    paine:

    yuan u got it romneycare => obummercare corporate prompted reform

    hey we'll get it ask any corporation what a pain in the asses health plans are they WANT OUT

    only the special needs guys here the corporations in the line of fire need a decent interval to hyper-loot and then withdraw with honor

    paine :

    dumbo is an elephant. these wonks ain't dumb anyway

    the term is dorkocrats and the big repug win in 10 will echo the big donkey win in 70 the white house is a dem house till the dumbocans regroup and find some policy space to wedge back in with

    we tend to forget corporate amerika used the reagan movement quite nicely but the momentum of that movement has carried it over the high side of the policy track

    corporate america wants well deep dish clinton not triangles not little abner plays ike but an actual reformer

    does corporate america know this ?? not yet not till the rematch where 12 avenges 80
    i recall the moment when the establishment realized reagan was the future it was in september of 80
    that late suddenly the big media treated him well...respectfully

    it was quite obvious like the pror fall when this same big media after suckering him in suddenly turned on teddy when he announced at long last he was running

    only err with teddy it was a turn in the opposite direction

    ted's primary run and ronnie's big run two hinges that made the pivot

    well i see a pivot ahead here to in 12 suddenly the entire corporate head dress will wiggle to the donkey trot

    some clown an anti-mcgovern call he/her from the very heart of the tea bag bleeched nation
    will get shuned and scoffed at while obummer rises like a suffle

    Patricia Shannon:

    You like the results of the last time the Repubs were in power? You think we need more of the same?

    yuan:

    "You like the results of the last time the Repubs were in power? You think we need more of the same?"

    Who are you talking about Bush or Obama?

    Lafayette:

    Feeding the trolls is futile ... they just keep coming back as pollution, rather than indulge in meaningful debate.

    It's foolish to expect anything more intelligent from them. We've been debating Health Care here for quite some time. We've laid as much factual evidence as possible before the forum. It is apparent that anything is better than what we have as HC, but what we will get will not be as good as that which a modern nation should expect.

    Some people are too stupid to even understand the facts; besides, dogma requires no intelligence whatsoever.

    Fred C. Dobbs:

    FWIW, objecting to mandates as "unconscionable abuse of power" is a typical GOP allusion to the 10th Amendment: 'powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people'.

    Which is taken by the faithful to mean, in this case, that even if a State puts on a mandate for health or auto insurance, that doesn't mean the Federales can. It's got to the point that the GOP doesn't state the 10th Amendment connection, and PK & the Democrats ignore it, as political discourse has become somewhat stylized.

    Cynthia:

    If Paul Krugman really and truly has the conscience of a liberal that he claims to have, he'd also complain about how corporate Democrats, from Barack Obama on down, have turned their party into the party of Ronald Reagan, too:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfLJIfRUBkU

    Lafayette:

    {The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.}

    - Keynes, John Maynard

    anne:

    Devin:

    "But thankfully it sounds like in about 3 months our nation will have an option for people like my wife, and we might be able to finally get our finances under control and start having to pay taxes again."

    Please explain, though of course personal references are never necessary, but explain so we can understand what provision of the health care legislation will be quickly meaningful. Knowing how concrete changes are to come with the legislation is and will be quite important.

    Reply Mar 27, 2010 at 09:02 AM

    anne said...
    http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=03&year=2010&base_name=meaning_budget_numbers_on_heal

    March 27, 2010

    Meaningful Budget Numbers on Health Care

    How many New York Times readers know how large $500 million is as a share of California's budget? How about $370 million a share of Texas' budget.

    My guess is that almost no one outside of the people who live in these states (and probably not even many of them) has any clue as to how large these sums are to the state governments. This means that when the NYT tells readers * that the health care reform bill will cost the state of California $500 million a year in higher Medicaid costs and Texas $370 million a year, it is giving readers no information whatsoever.

    The article could have instead told readers that the Medicaid expenses will add approximately 0.5 percent to the budgets of both California and Texas. This would have allowed readers to better assess the impact of the bill on state budgets.

    * http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/health/policy/27impact.html

    --Dean Baker

    anne:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/health/policy/27impact.html

    March 26, 2010

    Some States Find Burdens in Health Care Law
    By MICHAEL LUO

    Because of the new health care law, Arizona lawmakers must now find a way to maintain insurance coverage for 350,000 children and adults that they slashed just last week to help close a $2.6 billion budget deficit.

    Louisiana officials say a reduction in federal money to hospitals that treat the uninsured under the bill could be a death knell for their state-run charity hospital system.

    In California, policymakers estimate they will have to come up with an additional $500 million a year to make necessary increases in payments to Medicaid providers.

    Across the country, state officials are wading through the minutiae of the health care overhaul to understand just how their governments will be affected. Even with much still to be digested, it is clear the law may be as much of a burden to some state budgets as it is a boon to uninsured consumers.

    States with the largest uninsured populations, like Texas and California, might be considered by its backers the biggest winners to emerge from the law, because so many additional residents will have access to health insurance. But because those states are being required to significantly expand their Medicaid programs, they are precisely the ones that will face the biggest financial strains, in many cases magnified by existing budget shortfalls.

    "The federal government has to account for states' inability to sustain our current programs, much less expand," said Kim Belshé, secretary of California's Health and Human Services Agency.

    In contrast, states like Massachusetts and Wisconsin, which already have extensive health care safety nets, do not expect to spend much more money, while still taking in billions in federal grants.

    In Massachusetts, for example, which already has a form of universal coverage, the federal government will wind up taking over from the state a significantly larger share of the costs of Medicaid coverage for adults without children, officials said.

    "On balance, it's definitely a gain," said JudyAnn Bigby, secretary of the Massachusetts Office of Health and Human Services.

    Supporters of the new law have argued that states will benefit from efforts to slow health care inflation and billions of dollars in new federal spending on subsidies for the uninsured and on an array of programs like community health centers.

    But even with more federal help, the challenge for states like Alabama, Arkansas and Texas that now offer only limited Medicaid coverage will be substantial. In these states, Medicaid has been mostly restricted to low-income families with children, pregnant women, certain people with disabilities and some elderly. The income cutoffs have also been extremely low.

    Beginning in 2014, however, anyone with an income of up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or $29,300 for families of four, will be eligible for coverage under Medicaid. For the first three years, the federal government will pick up the entire cost of these new enrollees, but the state share then gradually increases until it reaches 10 percent in 2020.

    Texas, which has some of the most restrictive Medicaid eligibility rules in the country for adults, currently covers working parents only if they do not earn more than roughly 20 percent of the federal poverty level. The program does not cover childless adults.

    Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, a research group in Austin that strongly supported the health care law, estimated that if the legislation went into effect today, an additional one million adults would qualify for Medicaid, at a cost of $370 million a year if Texas were to pay its full 10 percent share.

    In addition, Ms. Dunkelberg said, many children who are currently eligible but are not enrolled in Medicaid and the state Children's Health Insurance Program will emerge and want to join, potentially costing the state several hundred million dollars.

    Some states, like Arizona, face an immediate fiscal conundrum because of stipulations in the law that prohibit them from rolling back their existing Medicaid programs before the required expansion takes effect....

    anne said...

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/politics/28teaparty.html

    March 27, 2010

    With No Job, Plenty of Time for Tea Party
    By KATE ZERNIKE

    The fact that many Tea Party supporters joined after losing their jobs raises questions of whether the movement can survive an improvement in the economy.

    [I find the heading and description insulting, but am not quite sure why. Is the assumption implicit that a political movement, even a movement I would not be part of, is lacking in sincerity as such, especially so if people in the movement may be hurting? What of movements left or right during the Depression?]

    Reply Mar 27, 2010 at 10:38 AM

    roger said in reply to anne...
    That was a personal anecdote story that - of course - tells us nothing about how many Tea Party members are unemployed. And you are right about the patronizing tone.

    On the other hand, I liked Mrs. Reimer.

    Reply Mar 27, 2010 at 10:43 AM

    OhNoNotAgain said in reply to anne...
    Yeah, except for the tiny fact that they're shilling for the very people that are the most responsible for their unemployment, and are actively working against the people doing the most to resolve the situation so that they can find a job again.

    It's the hypocisy and the blindness to one's own interests that warrants mockery

    Fred C. Dobbs:

    Corporate America gets even for 'Obamacare'?

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/technology/companies/27phone.html

    AT&T Plans $1 Billion Charge for Health Care - AP - March 26, 2010

    The telecommunications giant AT&T said on Friday that it would take a $1 billion noncash accounting charge in the first quarter because of the health care overhaul and might cut benefits it offers.

    The charge is the largest disclosed so far. Earlier this week, the AK Steel Corporation, Caterpillar, Deere & Company and Valero Energy announced similar accounting charges, saying the health care law that President Obama signed Tuesday would raise their expenses. On Friday, the 3M Company said it would take a charge of $85 million to $90 million. ...

    Sen Bernie Sanders That Is Immoral! That Is Wrong! ..he covers Wall St,The Fed and corruption.

    Mar 17, 2010 | Democratic Underground

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzrjtwaJZtg

    Posted on YouTube: March 17, 2010 March 17, 2010

    Sen Bernie Sanders: That Is Immoral! That Is Wrong! Pt2

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jXiu-SbxrA

    http://sanders.senate.gov /

    Sen Bernie Sanders speaks truth to power!

    The Importance of Donald Kohn " The Baseline Scenario

    Russ

    Finally, and I know I'm in the minority here, why are we trying to increase the power of the Fed chair - especially a Fed chair from the opposite party? Leaving aside policy questions, I think the deification of the Fed chair in the past two decades has been a decidedly bad thing. The sensitivity of the markets to one man's pronouncements (and, just imagine, his health) is a bad thing; the fact that an unelected person is widely considered the second-most powerful person in the country is a bad thing; and if our economic fate actually depends on one person's wisdom, that's also a bad thing. (Including Bernanke, three of the four current members are Bush appointees, including a former investment banker and a former chair of the ABA.)

    The mention of the health of such a person reminds me of the part in "The Madness of King George" where Pitt, discussing the king's mental health, says "We congratulate ourselves on how advanced our system is, but where it comes to the monarch's health we might as well be ruled by the Turkish sultan."

    I think one of the strongest pieces of evidence for not just Dem incompetence in general but the political stupidity of Obama specifically is how these clowns can't even get the spoils system right.

    The spoils system is so well-established, so accepted as a prerogative of power, and so relatively innocuous (indeed it almost seems only fair, your party takes power, you hand out jobs to your guys and some pork to your voters) that they even teach it in school, a rare glimpse of truth amid the normal lies and propaganda about "good government".

    Yet Obama's demented "bipartisanship" fetish seems to extend even to here. He leaves in place Bernanke and others at the fed, let alone a bona fide Bush political cadre like John Dugan at the OCC. I've seen several lower profile examples as well, and every time I have to shake my head. Each time I say, there's no Democrat, no good Party man who worked his tail off in 2008, who would like that job?

    Evidently not, as far as Obama's concerned.

    And perhaps the most mind-boggling thing I've seen since the crisis began was a chart showing the stimulus disbursements by congressional district, where most of the top 10, including the whole top 5 if I remember correctly, were to Republican districts!

    It's been a long time since any level of corruption, crime, or evil surprised me. But this kind of flat out basic incompetence by standards of Party Politics 101 is just amazing.

    Even if one is so soul-dead that he can still support Democrats not caring about their wickedness, surely their incompetence must be the incontrovertible indicator that they're terminally decadent, that they will never do anything good again, only the bad.

    It's been true for a long time now that Democrats cannot win at any significant level; they can only enter a vacuum by default where Republican evil and recklessness become too much for the voters to accept. (NB, Rep incompetence is about policy, in conception and execution, but never about their own political house-tending. They never fail to give jobs and pork to their own people. But Dems are incompetent at every level.)

    For the electorate it's always, do we vote for the Reps or do we throw the Rep bums out? And only where they throw the bums out do they then vote Dem, because that's currently the only alternative.

    We need an alternate alternative.

    I know people will say I don't understand, and if we had debate on the board the markets would be spooked. I think that effectively amounts to saying that dictatorship is good for the markets, so we should have a dictator.

    Yes, market terrorism is getting really old by now. When are we going to deal with these terrorists the way they deserve to be dealt with?

    As for the dictator, we've long known that's what they want. To its eternal shame the MSM sought to turn the unelected, unconstitutional Greenspan into such a figure. Paulson made it explicit in 9/08 with the original demand to be made a Treasury dictator. (The MSM and stock market terrorism sought to strong-arm us there as well, just like the Brownshirts in 1933 surrounding the Reichstag chanting "We want the Enabling Act.")

    Since then both tracks have been accurate, as the admin keeps trying to turn the Treasury secretary into an unaccountable authoritarian while restoring the Fed chair's old status and nimbus. That must be the "reason", beyond enshrined wingnut welfare, that they wanted Heckuva Job Bennie back. They thought it would be a bad precedent for Fed tyranny as such if any chairman could ever fail to serve out his entire term because of outside pressures.

    Like Arendt said in Origins of Totalitarianism, the Leader doesn't have to have any particular abilities (other than at bureaucratic infighting). The point is that once he's installed he has to be dogmatically invested with unaccountable pseudo-"authority" and followed implicitly. (That part of her thesis applies best to established systems.) This goes a long way toward explaining wingnut welfare, and in turn the pandemic enshrinement of wingnut welfare (by business and govt, and applauded by media and academia) is strong evidence of the calcifying totalitarianims of this system.

    Now this does not mean that Donald Kohn is a bad person

    A public person's actions are the only meaningful measure of what kind of person someone is. I can't imagine what other metric could any relevance whatsoever.

    One's actions are tyrannical and criminal, one is a criminal and cadre of tyranny.

    jake chase

    Like it or not, the credit bubble and ensuing bailout has ceded the balance of economic and political power to China. What will happen next is out of the Fed's control, but it is completely within China's control. The financial possibilities are spiking interest rates, another asset bubble or a doubling of the price level, and we are all free to place our bets. As for the real economy, we can expect continuing job loss, Federal make work, military adventuring, tax relief for the plutocracy, destruction of the social safety net, plunder of small savers, national security hysteria, bankster and executive looting, academic doubletalk, preening by Larry Summers, mousing by Bernanke, cheerleading by Obama.

    The real danger is collapse of the social order. The charlatans who made this mess are now doing their best to avoid that in the only way they know -- extend and pretend. The growth, globalization, finance model lived an extra thirty years on consumer usury, stock market bubbles and a housing bubble. No one in authority today has a clue how any other model might work.

    [Feb 25, 2010] Shooting Banks Obama's impotent assault on Wall Street.

    February 24, 2010 | The New Republic

    The banks have the power to preserve this arrangement. While the U.S. financial system has a long tradition of functioning well with a relatively large number of banks and other intermediaries, in recent years, it has been transformed into a highly concentrated system for key products. The big four have half of the market for mortgages and two-thirds of the market for credit cards. Five banks have over 95 percent of the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Three U.S. banks have over 40 percent of the global market for stock underwriting. This degree of market power brings with it not just antitrust concerns, which this administration has declined to act on, and a huge amount of economic risk--but great political influence as well.

    The banks are going to use that power to block legislation containing any meaningful financial reform. And they are likely to succeed. Their current political donations surpass those given by most other interest groups, and the limit on their future donations has just been lifted by the Supreme Court. These banks and their allies are already targeting at least one member of Congress who supported the 2009 credit card bill. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and long-standing champion of the financial sector, recently railed against the big banks for not cooperating with financial reform; but he is freer to speak out now that he is no longer seeking reelection. Senator Richard Shelby, the committee's ranking minority member, is steadfastly opposed to reform; he and other top Republicans eagerly await the arrival of largesse from big banks. Hill staffers remark that the financial Godfathers' message is quite clear: If you cross us, we will bury you at the polls. Nothing in the Volcker Rules would change this relationship between Wall Street and Washington.

    It is still possible that the White House could go all-in against the distorted incentives at large banks and the corrupted regulatory structures that have created our "doom loop," and make this the central campaign issue for November. Branding opponents as supporters of too big to fail could get traction, at least if led by an articulate and impassioned president. The gamble would be that pro-reform representatives and senators could swim against the tide of big bank campaign contributions.

    But, even here, there is a problem. After the Volcker Rules announcement on January 21, the White House went all out for the reconfirmation of Ben Bernanke. Bernanke did well during the "rescue" phase of the economic crisis--hence the case for reappointing him. But he was also deeply involved in the disastrous regulatory failures and excessively loose credit policies of 2003-2008, at the Fed and in the White House. And, most disconcerting, in his testimony--and even more in his written answers to follow-up questions--he played down the problem of too big to fail, arguing that regulation could prevent the big banks from getting into trouble.

    Unfortunately, solutions that depend on smarter, better regulatory supervision and corrective action ignore the political constraints on regulation and the political power of today's large banks. The idea that we can simply regulate huge banks more effectively assumes that regulators will have the incentive to do so, despite everything we know about regulatory capture and political constraints on regulation. It assumes that regulators will be able to identify the excess risks that banks are taking, overcome the banks' arguments that they have appropriate safety mechanisms in place, resist political pressure (from the administration and Congress) to leave the banks alone for the sake of the economy, and impose controversial corrective measures that will be too complicated to defend in public. And, of course, it assumes that important regulatory agencies will not fall into the hands of people like Alan Greenspan (or Ben Bernanke), who believe that government regulation is rendered largely unnecessary by the free market.

    Gently backing away from Bernanke--or at least not being so enthusiastic--would have sent a clearer signal that the president is truly prepared to be tough on big banks and their supporters. Unless Bernanke unexpectedly changes his stripes, his reappointment gives up a major hostage to fortune--and to those Democrats and Republicans opposing serious financial reform. Here lies the crux of the problem: The Obama administration lacks an inner core of smart, well-informed advisers who are deeply skeptical of big banks and eager to do whatever it takes to break a cycle that points to financial and fiscal doom. While Paul Volcker's belated ascension from the basement is an encouraging sign, he remains a lone voice in an otherwise inertial regime.

    Rahm Emanuel famously said, "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste." But, as the White House begins to campaign for the November midterms, what has it done differently than any other administration would have? How will it counter anyone who argues, simply and truthfully, that the crisis is over and we wasted it? The Volcker Rules are not the answer.

    Ron Paul: America Is With Me On Foreign Policy (CNBC 2/2)

    See Ron Paul videos collection
    MIT2004:
    That bitch is fine but one dumbfuck. She just stood quite when Ron owned her with "no one has prove of that"

    fullclip16117

    Ron Paul @ 5:17 "Well, we'd be a lot safer if we didn't have so many wars that we start."

    Its so simple and these bloody anchors are looking at him like he's grown a second cock out of his head. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

    fullclip16117

    @ dbertube: Yeah it really is funny how these media jerkoffs really have no idea how things are supposed to work. Since the 90s they've been conditioned to think that wars are begun and ended on the whim of a president.

    Its almost as if they're saying "Get permission? Why would a president do that?" as though things aren't supposed to work any other way. Dumbfucks

    dbertube

    "In your worldview, is U.S. foreign policy a matter of hiding from every geo-political threat around the world and hoping it goes away or hoping that someone else will solve the problem for us?"

    RP: "No, you do it in a Constitutional fashion. If it's a threat to us you go to the Congress and get permission."

    There he goes again, appealing to the Constitution and following his oath of office. The anchors appear to be unaware of such a document (as are most Americans apparently).

    AProbableAnomaly:

    she takes it personally, Paul was being honest. Why disproportionate fear mongering about middle east? Isn't Korea a bigger threat in terms of nuclear weapons? Aren't there more crude dictatorships?

    Ron Paul is concerned with doing things right and with good precedent. Why is she fear mongering to take sides in middle east with all the war crimes going on and everything? Didn't she get the news, the weapons of mass destruction Bush was looking for and used to justify the war don't exist?

    sansez:

    They invited him to discredit him !!?

    Shaunt1:

    Others have the right to weapons just like us and if we aren't hostile towards them even if they attain weapons they won't be a threat to us.

    SinisterSkip:

    "Ron Paul asserted that the world would be a lot safer if the US government didn't start so many wars "

    Amen.

    LeftiusMaximus:

    He hit it on the head "We traded with the Soviets even during the cold war; we still trade with China and they have nuclear weapons. Why cant we trade with Iran?"

    WTFAMERICA:

    Ok so low lip says Iran is "potentially" building a nuclear weapon and basically proves Paul's argument he makes just minutes later that we are fighting wars now because we are afraid we "might" be attacked in the future.

    Then smug smiley just nods his head as Paul constructs an argument that his peabrain can't handle and basically shows that he has the intellectual capacity of a teaspoon. "Well we entered this war after the terror attacks" Yeah and you disregard the last 90 years dumb-dumb.

    diggingforgold:

    Wow CNBC. Nice reporting there. Ganging up on the only guy who seems to know what the hell is going on in this world.

    But as usual, Ron Paul owned all of them. People are waking up. I really hope some good comes out of all this.

    Waterbomg:

    It seems like these reporters only have him on to try and discredit him then they are dumbfounded by the time he's done. lol

    Annuunnaki :

    lol look at the Asian guy, instead of saying Ron Paul just wooped my ass with Logic, extreme reasoning and facts instead he said hahahah " I wish we had more time to continue conversation" lol SHUT UP you Peanut head!

    Seriously though, are there any media news in the USA who are not so pathetic as these guys? It seems like all news media is manipulated by these damn Central Bankers...

    Probesoul:

    Those talking heads cringe when they hear truth.... they've been lying so much that they despise truth. They respond like holy water being thrown on vampires... amazing.

    The guy says to Paul to paraphrase, "Are there any good wars that we are in?"

    These people are sick... they love war, murder, death, national debt and impoverishment...that's what pays their salaries.

    ILNYC1986:

    Media is out of control. It is absolutely insane that CNBC now sounds like FOX news during the Bush Administration. These propoganda outlets need to flushed. Its sickening. Good Job Ron.

    TheSkinzilla:

    The "journalists" are so biased in this interview. I'd swear they're getting kickbacks from the military industrial complex. No country in the world would try take on the U.S. military, so the idea that they need to fear geo-political threats is just absurd. Plus, Paul's plan to quit propping up oppressive dictators and closing Middle East military bases would reduce the threat of terrorism. Ron Paul's points make sense to anyone that puts principle above party.

    sharief25:

    I FUCKING LOVE THIS MAN.....

    when i have kids, I will tell the tale about a good, honest man who lived most of his life fighting long and hard for my freedom.

    [Feb 21, 2010] Why the US has really gone broke by Chalmers Johnson

    Feb 2008 | Le Monde diplomatique
    Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month's stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation's economic life The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room" - the title of Alex Gibney's prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

    As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay or repudiate. This fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

    There are three broad aspects to the US debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defence" projects that bear no relation to the national security of the US. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.

    Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures - "military Keynesianism" (which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic). By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

    Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the US. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world's number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.

    Fiscal disaster

    It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defence budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defence-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The US has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush's two on-going wars, defence spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defence budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

    Before we try to break down and analyse this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defence spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, : "A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicised) basic budget total and double it" (1). Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defence budget is "black"," meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

    There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand - including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defence, and the military-industrial complex - but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defence jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security, has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalised either department for ignoring the law. All numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

    In discussing the fiscal 2008 defence budget, as released on 7 February 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D Hartung of the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative (2) and Fred Kaplan, defence correspondent for Slate.org (3). They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4bn for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7bn for the "supplemental" budget to fight the global war on terrorism - that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4bn to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional "allowance" (a new term in defence budget documents) of $50bn to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This makes a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5bn.

    But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the US military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4bn for the Department of Energy goes towards developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3bn in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt and Pakistan). Another $1.03bn outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and re-enlistment incentives for the overstretched US military, up from a mere $174m in 2003, when the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7bn, 50% of it for the long-term care of the most seriously injured among the 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4bn goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

    Missing from this compilation is $1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5bn to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6bn for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200bn in interest for past debt-financed defence outlays. This brings US spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year, conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

    Military Keynesianism

    Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defence budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world's richest political entity, according to the CIA's World Factbook, is the European Union. The EU's 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the US. Moreover, China's 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the US, and Japan was the world's fourth richest nation.

    A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we're doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the US and enjoys the world's second highest current account balance (China is number one). The US is number 163 - last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the UK that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.

    It's not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On 7 November 2007, the US Treasury announced that the national debt had breached _$9 trillion for the first time. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the "debt ceiling" to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defence expenditures.

    The top spenders

    The world's top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each currently budgets for its military establishment are:

    Rank Country Military budget
    1. United States (FY 2008 budget) $623bn
    2. China (2004) $65bn
    3. Russia $50bn
    4. France (2005) $45bn
    5. United Kingdom $42.8bn
    6. Japan (2007) $41.75bn
    7. Germany (2003) $35.1bn
    8. Italy (2003) $28.2bn
    9. South Korea (2003) $21.1bn
    10. India (2005 est.) $19bn
    World total military expenditures (2004 est) $1,100bn
    World total (minus the US) $500bn

    Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration's policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology, and have now become so entrenched in our democratic political system that they are starting to wreak havoc. This is military Keynesianism - the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

    This ideology goes back to the first years of the cold war. During the late 1940s, the US was haunted by economic anxieties. The great depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of the second world war. With peace and demobilisation, there was a pervasive fear that the depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union's detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR's European satellites, the US sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated 14 April 1950 and signed by President Harry S Truman on 30 September 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the US pursues to the present day.

    In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: "One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living" (4).

    With this understanding, US strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment, as well as ward off a possible return of the depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of 6 February 1961: "The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience" - the military-industrial complex.

    By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in US manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined US military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, US reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.

    Higher spending, fewer jobs

    On 1 May 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, DC, released a study prepared by the economic and political forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. The US economy has had to cope with growing defence spending for more than 60 years. Baker found that, after 10 years of higher defence spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a scenario that involved lower defence spending.

    Baker concluded: "It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment" (5).

    These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.

    It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation's largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E Woods Jr observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all US research talent was siphoned off into the military sector (6). It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

    Can we reverse the trend?

    Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the US spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America's secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.

    The pioneer in analysing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the US preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the cold war. Melman wrote: "From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000bn on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations - the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life, by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration."

    In an important exegesis on Melman's relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes: "According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation's plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over _$7.29 trillion… The amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock" (7).

    The fact that we did not modernise or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools, an industry on which Melman was an authority, are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed "that 64% of the metalworking machine tools used in US industry were 10 years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States' machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end of the second world war. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry."

    Nothing has been done since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment - from medical machines like _proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

    Our short tenure as the world's lone superpower has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: "Again and again it has always been the world's leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It's no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world's leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world's leading lending country. In fact we are now the world's biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone" (8).

    Some of the damage can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that the US urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defence budget all projects that bear no relationship to national security and ceasing to use the defence budget as a Keynesian jobs programme.

    If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don't, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

    [Feb 19, 2010] Violent Backlash Starting

    February 18, 2010 | naked capitalism

    lark

    I have been in tech for 25 years and over this time I've seen the degradation of the profession, due to outsourcing and other consequences of our labor market "flexibility," meaning the rise of contracting and the like.

    I come from a union positive family and my peers in tech were always resolutely anti-union and individualist, even Randian. I thought they were in a fantasy world. Now the corporate predators have destroyed so many of my colleagues, sending their jobs overseas and basically dumping the middle aged. I recognize this suicidal attack response as the cry of a former go-it-alone American professional, now realizing that he was just a cog in a machine which ground him to bits.

    It is a bitter end. But the ideology of this professional class was delusional all along.

    If we are going to fight the corporate predators we have to do it together.

    I used to be a member of a professional association for computer scientists, and they still send me an email newsletter once a week. It is revealing what they think of as "news". It's not the decimation of my profession, the decline of wages, any issues related to outsourcing or H1-B, the decline of computer science as a major. I have gotten this newsletter every week for years and those issues have not been mentioned once. On the other hand, every single week there is an item on efforts to expand the presence of women in the field.

    Now I am a woman, and I appreciate these attempts. But what has happened with the rise of 'identity politics' is the total suppression of any issues related to preserving our middle class, and what that means for jobs: benefits, job security, outsourcing, stagnant wages, etc etc. It's like we gained identity politics but lost the middle class.

    I hate to use these words, I know they are loaded, but the truth is, we need class conscious politics to make a come back in this country.

    Majia Nadesan:

    Amen to the need for labor solidarity. Avenues for collective representation have been destroyed with the collapse of union power. Professional workers were duped into identifying with elite powers, until their work was automated, outsourced, and otherwise subject to surveillance and micro-management. It is time for workers to unite to demand changes in unfair tax codes and lenient enforcement of corporate fraud and tax evasion.

    Traditional political parties are not up to the task.

    Doug Terpstra:

    "But what has happened with the rise of 'identity politics' is the total suppression of any issues related to preserving our middle class…we gained identity politics but lost the middle class….the truth is, we need class conscious politics to make a come back in this country."

    Spot on! Some association journals probably self-censor 'controversy'; others are elite top down propaganda, with soft but calculated, Machiavellian, divide and conquer newspeak.

    I found Stack's twist on the capitalist creed interesting:

    "From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."

    I suspect a lot of Randians are due for painful deprogramming by the end results of socal Darwinism. The virtue of selfishness is an oxymoron; humanity is ready for a new pardigm.

    Breton:

    Lark

    Nice, well said.
    Full of import; this one especiallly:
    "…my peers in tech were always resolutely anti-union and individualist, even Randian."

    Much in this observation.

    The age group you speak of is heavuly indoctrinated into the Cult of the Individual, thinking they are ort will be immune from the purge we are involved in right now….and then you add:

    "I recognize this suicidal attack response as the cry of a former go-it-alone American professional, now realizing that he was just a cog in a machine which ground him to bits."

    It really is that simple.

    Richard Kline:

    lark: "I come from a union positive family and my peers in tech were always resolutely anti-union and individualist, even Randian. I thought they were in a fantasy world. Now the corporate predators have destroyed so many of my colleagues, sending their jobs overseas and basically dumping the middle aged. I recognize this suicidal attack response as the cry of a former go-it-alone American professional, now realizing that he was just a cog in a machine which ground him to bits."

    So lark, I'm interested to here this again confirmed by one from within the profession. My experience has been just as you say, the tech world has been profoundly anti-union-indeed anti-working class-"I'm better than that, I write my own ticket," Randian, blah-blah-blah. Reaganite in thought and deed, Ronnie's their hero, standing up to all those 'identities,' read women, minorities, and immigrants who should be emptying trashcans after hours where their educational cadre belongs, blah-blah-blah. Just the kind of guys always outraged that they had to pay taxes at all.

    -And now the lot of them are screwed in a garbage-disposal, bidding their toes goodbye and feeling that downwardly mobile pressure toward more of the same. None of this retire at 40 (unless they already made it big) stuff anymore. And now that they need to turn to the government for, y'know, _laws_ or something, or to solidarity with other workers against corporate evildoing 'n' so forth they just. can't. STAND it. Being wrong-headed all their lives. So it's GOT to be somebody's fault. Illegal immigrants. "The Chinese." Liberals. Sold-out politicians. All of the usual suspects. . . . But never themselves.

    Speaking of the dude who blew his stack, if he happened to be somebody other than a white male the media would be screaming 'terrorist,' because that's exactly what how he chose to end his days. His decision to murder a number of IRS staffers-with whom he had the folly to personally pick a dispute, which he could only lose catastrophically, all his Randian blay-blah-blah nothwithstanding-makes arguably far _less sense_ than the decision of an Army psychologist in to randomly murder a bunch of folks in uniform in that same state. Far less sense, frankly, though heinous actions both.

    I don't read anything about 'a turn to violence' in this particular act, Yves. The man had a personal dispute going back almost a generation. He destroyed himself with it. But more than that, the lunatic ultra-right fringe has always resorted to petty violence as a means of intimidation, not so petty if one was the target, as the families of those killed in this assault are sure to understand. 'Lynch law,' and all that. A propensity for murdering agents of groups with which the ultra-nut jobs have grievances is hundreds of years old-but has never translated into political impact. The closest any such groups got were occasional coteries of KKK which had local political power in places like south Indiana and rural Mississippi, but even in those states never constituted any _dominant_ political faction. This is something to understand: the Teapotters are NOBODIES, and the reason the exist at all is that some individuals of great wealth are channelling them a few million while other individuals of great wealth are cranking the media squawkbox on it. I'm highly _unimpressed_ by the nut-job, anti-government right, and they will have no impact at all on Wall Street because politicians of any weight, eager to preserve their careers, edge away from outright cranks. Smoothies passing round envelopes stuffed with serious money, those are welcomed by politicians. Which is why we got what we got in 2000. Anyone see any of that organized by the Teapotters, most of whom can't even hold their temper enough to talk to each other.

    Tangentially, I would love to read an in-depth post of your contact with the pollster, and any comparablework by others. That's a substantive issue which has much bearing on the shape of things to come, to me.

    bob:

    I have relatives that I would consider teabaggers. I keep asking them to tone down their rhetoric in the name of self preservation.

    They, like most of the baggers, are completely dependent on the government. They had the luck to pick government employment (and pensions) over private.

    How long do you think that is going to last? I wish that on no one, but for the past five to ten years I feel like cassandra.

    As to my generation and their 3R fetish (reagan, rand, republican). Agree completely. They just want someone else to deal with that. What do we pay you for? Make the decision for me, and if it I don't like it, espect me to come back and yell at you. Don't worry, I pay well.

    Entitlement might be a description if they were even capable of thinking that through. Entitlement requires, at the minimum, the ability to see what you are asking for, and to know where to ask for it.

    The complete lack of real skills and abilities is going to hurt them the most.

    jake chase:

    I read this stuff and much of it makes a lot of sense, and then, right in the middle of the paragraph, is a torching of Ayn Rand which makes me wonder how many of you have ever read a word she wrote?

    You have the wrong enemy. The corporatist predator state relies upon corruption and pull to elevate those who yank the strings for their own benefit. It has nothing to do with individualism, relies upon propaganda masquerading as economic theory, and brute force when all else fails.

    All this sentimental whining about jobs is part of the problem. One of its consequences is the utter destruction of those who remained prudent, saved their money, and now watch their capital vaporized by zero interest rates while the Fed engorges the banksters with free money and pays interest on the phony reserves it created buying worthless mortgage drek in the trillions. Meanwhile, the jobs are at the Census Bureau, in leaf raking, in pie in the sky alternatives from the minds of Al Gore and his ilk. Good luck building a life on them.

    The corporate predator state is not grounded in individualism, but in financial monopoly. Its much balleyhooed CEOs are overdressed tin men moving smoothly from one scam to another, enabled by cheap money and justified in their looting by a legal system which pretends that corporate directors exercise supervision while they simply peddle resumes and line up to cash in themselves. These corporate goliaths destroy jobs while demanding tax relief as the price of creating them. It is the business of corporations to destroy jobs, to replace labor with capital and to move capital to the lowest cost platform. Yet we encourage this by relieving the corporations of tax burdens, and tax the people as the corporations and the banks grind them to dust.

    What is happening is very simple. A small class of well connected thieves and liars have conspired to loot the country. A toadying collection of politicians, pundits, editors, academics, and apparatchiks provides support in exchange for a spot at the trough. Nothing can stop them but organized popular intelligence. Instead, we seem to generate little except ignorant rage.

    What we need is a Constitutional Convention and a return to sound money, just taxation and the rule of law circumscribing corporate privilege, but all the Marxist, altruist gobbledygook only plays into the hands of the looters. Its logical outcome is an Obama, who is behaving exactly the way Rand and Hayek would have expected him to behave.

    Fueling ignorant rage is a recipe for chaos, nothing else.

    RueTheDay:

    "I read this stuff and much of it makes a lot of sense, and then, right in the middle of the paragraph, is a torching of Ayn Rand which makes me wonder how many of you have ever read a word she wrote?"

    I have. I used to be a libertarian, until I realized that the entire philosophy is built upon a foundation of sand.

    No matter how you slice it, libertarianism always comes down to the sanctification of private property and contracts into an absolute moral system. Yet their very premises are incoherent. No defense of private property can ever justify, from an ethical/moral standpoint, the private ownership of land and other unproduced natural resources. There have been many attempts (labor-mixing and homesteading theories) at defending it, but all are logically flawed. As for contracts, libertarianism attempts to bypass the two critical issues (asymmetry of bargaining power between parties and asymmetry of information between parties) by creating a binary classification of voluntary agreement vs force/fraud. In reality, any agreement between two parties reflects a spectrum along both dimensions as opposed to an either/or.

    DownSouth:

    Your comment is so replete with cognitive dissonance I don't even know where to begin.

    First you champion rugged individualism: "You have the wrong enemy. The corporatist predator state relies upon corruption and pull to elevate those who yank the strings for their own benefit. It has nothing to do with individualism, relies upon propaganda masquerading as economic theory, and brute force when all else fails."

    Then you turn right around and contradict yourself: "Nothing can stop them but organized popular intelligence."

    The corporatist predator state knows that the only way it can control its helots is to keep them atomized, and that is why it so vigorously promotes the doctrine of individualism that stands at the center of Rand's stealth religion.

    The notion that the lone individual can stand up against some multi-national corporation is nonsensical, and yet this is the grotesque absurdity peddled by Rand and the entire Libertarian-Austrian-Neoliberal constellation.

    RueTheDay:

    Amen to that, Richard. I've been in tech consulting my entire 15 year career, and I have noticed the exact same shift amongst my colleagues. From a libertarian, rugged individualist, anti-government, elitist bent to an "oh my goodness, we really are just a bunch of worker bees and our standard of living is in the process of taking a major dump".

    Dave Raithel :

    Excellent read. My favorite part:

    "The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question-the belief that once you're in the club, you've got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don't need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man."

    Here in Columbia, Misery, locus of the University of Misery, we all (well, some of us) know there's an endowed chair named for Lay (yep, from here, the son of a preacher man) in the Econ Department, filled by a man who counsels the local Democrat Sage, Chris Kelly, to eliminate the state income tax in its entirety and replace it with a sales tax on EVERY retail transaction. And because of something I said to my local Congressman about Scooter, the Secret Service came to visit me. An article like this calls to mind so many pleasant connotations…

    Seriously (not that the above is false, it is all true), a good read.

    Curious College:

    Yves,

    I Have read your blog for about a year now, and I want to say that it, along with Mish's GlobalEconomicAnalysis are two of my primary sources of financial information. I read a good majority, but not all of your articles so forgive me if you offered solutions to some of these questions. Ultimately, what I am wondering is while it is fun (and appropriate certainly in regards to bank bailouts) to hate on the wealthy class, would the average person really be better without globalization and innovation that frankly is motivated in large part by greed. While it may be true that based on govt. statistics average real wages have been stagnant, the average person has better cars, more advanced healthcare (which yes, does cost more), technology that didn't exist 30 years (heck 5 years ago) and much more stuff (tvs, clothes, homes (which people got greedy with themselves)? Ultimately, what I am asking is don't you think that things are way better than most let on. If it would be possible I would love to hear more about solutions going forward, because my generation (I'm a 22 year old finance student) I hope changes things, but right now all that is out there is big business opinions and rabid anti-business opinions that rarely offer enough solutions. Thanks for any response and my apologies for such a long first post.

    Ken Locke :

    I want to get back to what Lark said. What a stunning and poignant diagnosis of the social phenomenon that is Joe Stack. His numbers are legion. Those who bought hook line and sinker the American individualist dream. Of course everything conspired to this boobytrap-the media news popular movies, education, let alone talk radio. And for 30 years the various bubbles seem to confirm this as reality.

    Now the biggest bubble, the bubble of American exceptualism has burst. And the Joe Stacks among us (and who doesn't have some Joe Stack in him or her) is abruptly shunted into the stark landscape of the real world, a world where the needs and the historical actors are colective, the world of our Founding Fathers, and 90% of our history. And as Lark so poingantly describes,Joe's individual rageful self-combustion graphical illustrates that we haven't the collective skills demanded to survive in this world.

    We have to learn a very lot in a short period of time. We have to learn from our own rich history of past movements, anti-monarchy,antislavery, populist,the WWW and early labor union struggles, as well as the antiwar, civil rights and feminist movements. We have to learn what oligarchy is, and how it has been fought in the past(most recently in the 30's but going back as a common thread to the the argumeents in the Federalist Papers.

    In short, as Larks says, we need class conscious politics to come back to this country. The suicidal acts are understandable but tragically futile-even if more directly (and satisfyingly) aimed at Goldman-Sacks. Joe Stacks (and it's a great archetypal name) I hope sparks something deeper in our souls-when we all came together to struggle against arrogant, ruthless and seemingly all-powerful oligarchies.

    dk :

    Robert Reich called it – the extreme left and the extreme right have met up, and the events are pointing in a very scary direction:

    What really worries me is a basic fact, borne out by history. Deep and continuing economic stresses bring out demagogues, xenophobes, racists, and opportunists who channel people's fears and anxieties into resentments against other people. If this awful economy goes on much longer, the extreme right could meet the extreme left in a place called "I'm mad as hell and am not gonna take it any more," and form a third party that attracts everyone who feels disempowered and dumped on - and who want to blame someone else for what's happened to them. Then, watch out.

    http://robertreich.org/post/344459321/what-scott-browns-victory-really-means

    sunny129:

    Any one still imagines the TERRORISM as of purely external threat, this incident bellies that! We have terrorists right in the midst of us – Banksters, the Financial Oligarchy.

    At Davos even a banker admitted to reporter that the perception of them by public is so low that they are just above 'terrorists'!. Politicians, lawyers and used car salesman got promoted up!

    Economy of USA is the 'blood' which can be thrown into seizure and chaos at any time by cyber attack, at any time, from within or any where in the World. Don't forget that people who are mad and fed up includes IT guys!

    we are NOT just talking about a glitch in an accelerator control device(software)in Toyota!

    Siggy:

    Joe Stark, a very sad moment. A very ineffectual act of revolution.

    Lark has a very good point of view.

    We do indeed need to begin to reestablish our class structure. It is my view that the middle class has been under extreme pressure for the better part of 50 years. During that period the consistent problem has been a varying degree of debasement of the currency. The persistent loss in purchasing power has negated the inducement to save. Where one income once supported a household, two are now required. Where we once had notable class mobility we now see that process being stagnated.

    We have an abundance of politically correct concern for the abolishment of class differentiation, so much so that we passed legislation that holds that everyone is entitiled to own a home, even if they can't afford one.

    Joe Stark, may the great providence receive your soul and give it comfort. For us, in your memory, we should begin to consider what genuinely matters in this life. We need to understand how we can compete with countries that follow mercantilist economic policies. We need to understand that our currency must be capable of functioning as a store of value. We need to understand that you can't borrow your way to prosperity.

    It's not that Joe Stark failed in his effort, it's that he failed in his ability to apprehend the reality that he was chasing an image that had left this continent an indulgent and hedonistic generation ago.

    Let us all hope that we can come together to reestablish our middle class. Let us all work to establish a currency that has the ability to serve as a store of value. In that exercise I hope that we will all apprehend that our economic recovery will be sustainable only upon the liquidation of that debt that cannot be serviced. We must all fully understand that what the government might spend as 'stimulus' must either be taxed from us all or be borne by us all by way of the debasement of the currency.

    jbmoore61:

    The minute he chose to fly his Piper Cherokee into a building and harm others was his undoing. One can fight against a government without trying to kill its employees. Now if those employees are coming at you with guns and bullets are flying and you didn't start the gunfight, that's one thing. But kamikazing into a government building occupied by people is another. If he'd hit the building when it was unoccupied, or aimed for the income tax returns mailroom, he might be hailed as a hero. But it just seems that he snapped and threw away his life badly.

    I'd rather try the Martin Luther King and Gandhi non-violent protest approach assuming that the government does not microwave me during the protest with the crowd control ray.

    Dave Raithel :

    The website I saw ended with the following:

    "The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

    The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."

    And not that I expect anybody to read what I wrote, I did write about it ….

    Hugh:

    What is significant in this is not the act but our reaction to it. In more stable, equitable times, his action would be dismissed as that of a whacko, end of story. But as we see here and in other discussions, this view is far from automatic. What is different are the times we are living in. The point you see is not really about whether Stack was nuts or not. It is that almost all of us can identify with his anger and envision the possibility that he wasn't crazy, but hurt, angry, desperate, at the end of his rope. The difference is us.


    Dave Raithel:

    Men – and in more modern times, women – deliberately put themselves in harm's way when going to war. People who play around with game theory will recognize that as risk increases and outcomes turn to certainty, there is no THEORETICAL account for the "dialectical" or qualitative change in one's choices in circumstances (Allais Paradox, Ellesburg Paradox, e.g.) – it becomes a behavioral question as to where on the asymptote one chooses to jump off and get all inconsistent.

    People in finance, as I understand it, do that all the time – except it's other people's lives and money at risk. Joe Stack at least put his flesh in the game, to the end….

    goodrich4bk:

    Just when I thought I couldn't be surprised by the immorality of what we've witnessed from both parties in Washington in the past two years, I read Matt Tiabi's article, here:

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/1

    When I finished it, I sent it to all friends and family, something I've never done before (as an independent who votes for the person not the party, I like to remain open to good ideas from both parties, which is a lot easier if few think of me as partisan). I thought it was so eye-opening that I looked for some mention of it in the mainstream media.

    Nothing. Nada. Zilch. So I went to bed last night thinking: what would it take for his article and ideas to get broad attention? Does he have to fly a plan into a bank building or something?

    SPOOKY! Today I read this dude's manifesto and it's exactly what I was thinking could/might/should happen some day! The radio claims the guy was nuts and his writings were those of a madman, but (not surprising) when I read them myself I was struck by how normal they sound.

    So I suggest each of you read the above article and pass it on to your friends and family so that we don't have to have others take such drastic measures to spread the message that our country has been hijacked by banking and cororprate elites and their paid protectors in Washington.

    mayday:

    The attack on technical professionals, their livelihoods has ended in tradegy beyond this tale. Suicidies, homelessness, homicides. Now, this is almost like a Columbine situation. Such behavior has to be condemned at the same time, realizing the stressors leading up to it, must be done.

    The IRS complaint is real. They literally turned a profession, which is on the level of an attorney or a executive technical marketing strategist or say a financial consultant and turned it literally,to potential poverty. But that's just one aspect of of many on the attack against technical professionals and their careers.

    To understand the IRS code, see this post:

    http://www.noslaves.com/content/joe-stack-suicide-note-what-he-talking-about

    Dave Raithel:

    It is all pretty existential then, isn't it? Could be in a few days we'll know a fuller story and realize the guy was on half-a-dozen meds and slept with dolls. Or it could be in a few days we'll know he really was fucked over by innocent people who were just doing their jobs applying unfair rules in an unfair circumstance because he'd been duped by cabalist readers of the True Meaning of the Constitution (the Income Tax is Un-Constitutional, 10th Amendment gibberish, etc.) Then we're supposed to still say: But he shouldn't have done that. And the argument that he shouldn't will then be what? Suppose he believed no nonsense – that you and I both concurred he'd been fucked over. Still no resistance? Because?

    I first heard this from Al Gouldner, so I cite him when I say it: There are some people you can spit on, and they'll tell you it's raining.

    Some people are not like that. Categorical pacifism is your only trump card – and that is morally indefensible. So now what?

    a:

    I'd agree with most commentators who think it's useful to frame this attack with 9/11. You either defend both acts, or you criticize both.

    I'd be rich if I got a penny every time I heard, "I don't condone what they did, but I understand it." Well, understanding is a form of condoning, a weaker form than check-is-in-the-mail-supporting-the-cause, but still a form.

    I do *not* understanding blowing up a disco of youngsters or crashing a plane into a building or launching a war on an innocent people half-way across the world.


    Dave Raithel:

    The analogy is to?

    Religious fanatics alienated by their straddling two cultures crashing planes into buildings to protest "infidels" desecrating holy lands?

    Global finance capitalism impoverishing non-elites in the third world while pumping profits back to America provoking nationalists to crash planes into buildings….?

    Other than "plane being flown into building", there is no relevant comparison – wait, unless the theory is from Alex Jones Reality, where the enemy is the same (The New World Order) and the 9/11 murders are false flag maneuvers ….

    DownSouth :

    The comments of a, asaramis and Brian at 8:03 p.m. all pursue a common rhetorical strategy, as explained by the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

    Both the temper and the method of non-violence yield another very important advantage in social conflict. They rob the opponent of the moral conceit by which he identifies his interests with the peace and order of society. This is the most important of all the imponderables in a social struggle. It is the one which gives an entrenched and dominant group the clearest and the least justified advantage over those who are attacking the status quo. The latter are placed in the category of enemies of public order, of criminals and inciters to violence and the neutral community is invariably arrayed against them. The temper and the method of non-violence destroys the plausibility of this moral conceit of the entrenched interests. If the non-violent campaign actually threatens and imperils existing arrangements the charge of treason and violence will be made against it none-the-less. But it will not confuse the neutral elements in a community so easily.
    –Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society

    The same rhetorical weapons that a, asaramis and Brian deploy against Yves were also unleashed against Martin Luther King, Jr. Here MLK articulates a most eloquent response to this sort of criticism:

    You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodieness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security, and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable "devil." I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the "do-nothingism" of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.
    –Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

    a:

    "The same rhetorical weapons that a, asaramis and Brian deploy against Yves were also unleashed against Martin Luther King, Jr."

    Wait a minute, this is backwards. MLK: change via non-violence. a: Sure, be frustrated and upset and mad as Hell and try to change things, but don't fly planes into buildings killing innocents. I'm no MLK, but I think I'm pretty close to his views.

    DownSouth:

    a,

    Let's go back to your original comment where you said: "I'd be rich if I got a penny every time I heard, 'I don't condone what they did, but I understand it.' Well, understanding is a form of condoning…"

    Martin Luther King certainly understood the impulse to violence, and articulated this understanding many times. Here's another example:

    The discontent is so deep, the anger so ingrained, the despair, the restlessness so wide, that something has to be brought into being to serve as a channel through which these deep emotional feelings, these deep angry feelings, can be funneled. There has to be an outlet, and I see this campaign as a way to transmute the inchoate rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative channel. It becomes an outlet for anger.
    –Martin Luther King, Jr., "Showdown for Nonviolence"

    And yet even though MLK fully understood the appeal of violence, and the reason for it, he never condoned it, even though the racists repeatedly accused him of doing so.

    bystander :
    February 19, 2010 at 10:02 am
    What DownSouth said.

    He is much more patient and industrious than I…so, my apologies to you, a, for my relative lack of those qualities.

    a:

    Ah, you're not talking about non-violence, but understanding violence (or shall we say suicide attacks in airplanes against innocents in building?) vs condoning it.

    Sorry, but I think you need to read your quotes from MLK again, because they are not saying what you claim.

    MLK: "If the non-violent campaign actually threatens and imperils existing arrangements the charge of treason and violence will be made against it none-the-less. " MLK is saying that those who stage non-violent campaigns will be accused of violence, not they he understands violence.

    "The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and comes perilously close to advocating violence." … but *doesn't* advocate violence.

    I doubt very much that MLK would have ever said, "I understand why so-and-so did this murder or broke this man's leg." He did, of course, understand the rage in the ghetto, but there's a difference between the two.

    i on the ball patriot:

    Complacency, non violent protest, and violence, are all three, broad tiers of response to existing violence - the violence of the state first committed against its citizens.

    If you don't think that violence works, consider then; why does the all powerful controlling state use violence against its subservient citizens?

    Those above who said the Watts riots were ineffective are wrong.

    Yes, the hard ass white racist leaders of the state of California made no concessions to the black community of Watts, but it was the Watts riots, Berkley Free Speech movement, etc., that triggered that hardened state resolve that paved the way for Ronald Reagan to sweep to power, and, for the neo-con philosophy of setting the masses into perpetual conflict with each other, to gain the ear of, and be adopted by, the present day ruling elite.

    Nothing happens in isolation. We live in a continuum.

    Complacency, non violent protest, and violence against the state, are all three, proportional to the violence of the state committed against the citizens of the state.

    Given the increased domestic exploitation of scamericans, which I believe has been intentionally created by the ruling elite, one can only expect things to quickly escalate.

    Yves asks; "Violent Backlash Starting?"

    I would say it simply continues and escalates and people need to wake up to the intentional creation of it.

    Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.

    G Kaiser:

    The point is this, when do you get to a point, where you have to make a point.?
    If you have gone so far and no further, then what do you do.

    I have no reason to believe this guy was seeking to take any lives, and, as far as I know, he didn't. Maybe working for the IRS, FBI or whatever now comes with added risk, that you should be aware of? I don't think this will be the last, on the contrary, I think this is a start.

    The edge has been reached, obviously, and I for one will not condemn or condone, just comment.

    Jojo:

    "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"

    - Issac Asimov

    [Feb 18, 2010] Victory in the cold war was a start as well as an ending by Martin Wolf

    November 10 2009 | FT.com

    "A crisis is a strange way to celebrate an anniversary." This is the wry judgment of Erik Berglöf, chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.* Yet a crisis is what we see in countries that began the march from communism two decades ago.

    So, has capitalism failed, as communism did? In a word, "no". Some transition countries are in crisis; transition is not. The same judgment applies elsewhere: capitalist countries are in crisis; capitalism itself is not. But reform is necessary. The great virtue of liberal democracies and market economies is their ability to reform and adapt. They have shown these qualities before. They must do so once again.

    EDITOR'S CHOICE

    Martin Wolf: Why China's exchange rate policy is a common concern - Dec-08

    Martin Wolf: Tax the windfall banking bonuses - Nov-19

    Economists' forum - Oct-01

    Blog: Money Supply - Oct-07

    Martin Wolf: Turner is asking the right questions on finance - Sep-10

    Martin Wolf: This crisis is a moment, but may not be a defining one - May-19

    For those born, like me, shortly after the second world war, the cold wr was the defining intellectual and political struggle of our lifetimes. With the collapse of communism ended a catastrophic epoch of millenarian politics and the delusion of a rationally planned economy. The freedom offered by democracy and the prosperity supplied by markets won. The fact that communism expired not with a bang, but with a whimper, we owe largely to Mikhail Gorbachev.

    Yet 2009 is a sobering year from which to look back. A year ago, capitalism careered over a cliff. With vast effort, states have put it back on the road. According to Piergiorgio Alessandri and Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England, in a superb new paper**, the total gross value of interventions on behalf of banks has been $14,000bn (€9,400bn, Ł8,400bn). This is state capitalism.

    What then does the crisis mean for the countries that exited from socialism two decades ago? What, too, does it mean for the world?

    For the former, it has meant big falls in output. According to the EBRD, the fall in the gross domestic product of transition countries will average 6.2 per cent in 2009. Declines vary widely: from 18.4 per cent in Lithuania, 16.0 per cent in Latvia, 14.0 per cent in Ukraine and 13.2 per cent in Estonia – depression numbers – to 7.8 per cent in Slovenia, 6.5 per cent in Hungary, 6.0 per cent in Slovakia and 4.3 per cent in the Czech Republic. Poland's economy is forecast to grow this year, by 1.3 per cent. In general, notes the EBRD, "the size of the output declines correlates with pre-crisis credit booms and external indebtedness". The bursting of bubbles hurts.

    These collapses are real and worrying. But they need to be put in context. First, many countries in transition experienced big increases in output after the initial and largely inevitable post-Soviet collapse (see charts). Poland was the star. In general, the successful countries were those that reformed most seriously. Second, surprisingly perhaps, transition countries have made few reversals of reforms. As the EBRD report notes, "government changes since early 2008 have either led to no change with respect to the reform stance, or indeed favoured pro-reform parties". This is quite consistent with what is happening in the emerging world, more broadly. The absence of a credible alternative economic model is evident. Populist adventurism also seems unattractive.

    As recovery begins to gather force across the world economy, the great legacies of the collapse of the Soviet empire – the integration of much of Europe and the concomitant spread of freedom to Russia's borders, if not beyond – remain intact.

    Yet the crisis brings important lessons. The philosopher Karl Popper laid down the right approach. He distinguished the "piecemeal social engineering" intended to ameliorate specific ills from the "utopian social engineering" intended to transform society in its entirety – an aim that, in practice, "has led only to the use of violence in place of reason".

    The reformer must identify the cause of the malady before attempting treatment. In the case of this crisis, the failure lies not so much with the market system as a whole, but with defects in the world's financial and monetary systems. Some of these failings are inescapable. The future is inherently uncertain. Big mistakes will be made. Where prevailing paradigms lead to risk-taking on an excessive scale, corrections are likely to be brutal. Where risk-taking involves large-scale leveraging of the balance sheets of the financial sector, corrections are likely to mean a collapse in both intermediation and the economy. Should collapse not be prevented, the consequences may, history tells us, be dramatic.

    Happily, governments and central banks have learnt the lessons of the 1930s and decided, rightly, to prevent collapses of either the financial system or the economy. That is precisely the right kind of "piecemeal social engineering". Similarly, big efforts have been made to rescue the crisis-hit countries of central and eastern Europe. Thus, support from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union has been between 4 and 6 per cent of GDP (or more) for the four eastern European countries that have accepted IMF programmes.

    A similar pragmatism must now be shown in completing the escape from the crisis. That will require substantial rebalancing of global demand. It will also require further reforms. For transition countries, a reversal of financial integration is likely to be costly and unnecessary. The principal goals of reform must, instead, be to make the economy less vulnerable to shocks and to curb excessive credit growth in future.

    Similarly, at a global level, radical reforms must be made in the financial and monetary systems. To put it bluntly, the banking system has been gaming the taxpayer on an intolerable scale. This must end, in one of two ways: the sector must be made subject to the market or become a heavily regulated ward of the state. Again, the curbing of huge credit bubbles must be an integral element in the formation of regulatory and monetary policies. Finally, the dependence of the global monetary system on the currency of an over-indebted superpower is neither desirable nor sustainable.

    Anniversaries are a good time for taking stock. The collapse of Soviet communism was a glorious moment. It remains so, despite mistakes and disappointments along the way. But today's crisis tells us of the failings of a euphoric capitalism. Capitalism will not now perish, as communism did. But the signal ability of liberal democracy is to learn and adapt. We learnt from the 1930s. We must now learn the lessons of the 2000s.

    * Transition Report 2009, www.ebrd.com/pubs/econo/tr09.htm

    ** Banking on the State, www.bankofengland.co.uk

    Guest Post: "More Empires Have Fallen Because Of Reckless Finances Than Invasion"

    While Eric Margolis' entire comment in the Toronto Sun is a must-read, the following two quotes really hit the nail on the head:

    More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion…

    If Obama really were serious about restoring America's economic health, he would demand military spending be slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars and break up the nation's giant Frankenbanks.

    Margolis is right.

    As I have repeatedly shown, war is bad for the economy. According to a Nobel prize-winning economist, the head of JP Morgan and others, the Iraq war and the war on terror in general were huge factors in destroying our economy.

    America is a dying empire, destroying the last of its resources to fight unnecessary wars. Instead of rebuilding our economy so that we can once again be a strong nation, we are wasting trillions fighting those unnecessary wars, thus guaranteeing that we do not have the economic resources to defend ourselves in the future from real threats.

    Don't believe me?

    Well, our military and intelligence leaders say that the economic crisis is now the biggest threat to America's national security.

    And as leading economic historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote in Newsweek:

    Call the United States what you like-superpower, hegemon, or empire-but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power…

    This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force…

    If the United States doesn't come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.
    The precedents are certainly there. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World silver. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. And don't forget the last great English-speaking empire. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

    Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline. Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next.

    And William R. Hawkins (formerly an economics professor at Appalachian State University, the University of North Carolina-Asheville, and Radford University) fills in some details on the fall of the Hapsburg empire:

    Spain was the first global Superpower…With Spain as its political base, and gold and silver flowing in from its American colonies, the Hapsburg dynasty became the dominant power in Europe. It controlled rich parts of Italy through Naples and Milan, and Central Europe from the Netherlands through the Holy Roman Empire to Austria. In the 16th century it added the far distant Philippine islands to its empire. The Hapsburgs held off the Ottoman Turks, whose resurgent wave of Islamic conquest in the 16th century swept across the Balkans and nearly captured Vienna.

    The Hapsburgs went into decline in the 17th century, and while any such momentous event has many causes, for our purposes the focus will be on the economic collapse of Spain, which not only sapped the empire of strength but served to build up the power of its rivals.

    The demands of empire required a strong and growing economy, but Spain did not keep up with the economic expansion that was taking place in other parts of Europe. Madrid's financial base fell out from under its empire. Spain could continue to consume in the short term because of the flow of precious metals from American mines, but it could not produce the goods it needed at home, which in the long-run proved fatal to its standing as a Great Power and as an advanced society.

    Spanish imports were double exports and the precious metals became scarce within weeks of the arrival of the American treasure fleets as the money flowed to Spain's many creditors. What industry there was, along with banking and shipping, was in the hands of foreign owners. As a modern historian, Jaime Vicens Vives, has concluded, "This was one of the fundamental causes of the Spanish economy's profound decline in the seventeenth century, maritime trade had fallen into the hands of foreigners." This, plus the "opening of the internal market to foreign goods," produced a "fatal result." Spain's exports were at the same time under heavy pressure by competitors in third country markets. A nation that cannot control its domestic market will seldom be able to sustain itself in foreign markets, which are inherently less accessible and more unstable.

    Yet, Spanish leaders were deluded by a sense of false prosperity. This is testified by the statement of a prominent official, Alfonso Nunez de Castro in 1675: "Let London manufacture those fine fabrics of hers to her heart's content; let Holland her chambrays; Florence her cloth; the Indies their beaver and vicuna; Milan her brocade, Italy and Flanders their linens…so long as our capital can enjoy them; the only thing it proves is that all nations train their journeymen for Madrid, and that Madrid is the queen of Parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody." A few years later, the Madrid government was bankrupt. The Spanish nobleman had foolishly elevated consumption, a use for wealth, above production, the creation of wealth.

    Historians have traced the flow of Spanish gold and silver across the markets of Europe. Those who "served" Spain by establishing industries to manufacture goods for the Spanish market gained the money. Spain's rivals, France, Holland (which started a successful revolt in 1568) and England, prospered by their trade surpluses, and reinvested the money to expand their own capabilities. Another modern expert on Hapsburg history, Henry Kamen, has cited contemporary sources who referred to 17th century Spain as "the Indies for the foreigner." The military empire of the Hapsburgs became the economic colony of other powers, or, to use a current phrase, Spain was the "engine of growth" for the rest of the continent.

    Where there were jobs and prosperity, there was also rapid population growth, and rising tax revenue. Rival powers were able to field and finance military forces that could defeat the once superior Spanish forces both on land and at sea. The irony of this is that Spain was ruled by a warrior aristocracy tempered by centuries of constant warfare against Islamic hordes and Christian heretics. These nobles looked down on merchants and manufacturers and disparaged their mundane professions only to find that without a strong domestic business class they could not afford the fleets and armies that guarded the empire they had built.

    Today, the American "empire" is also trying to consume more than it produces. The U.S. trade deficit is nearing Spain's nadir of imports being double exports. Both government spending and private consumption are financed heavily by debt. Washington is printing money, the modern equivalent of digging gold out of the ground, rather than earning the means to pay its bills. And the political and military elites are apparently indifferent to the fate of domestic business and industry. Americans must learn … from the Spanish experience … and take corrective action while they still can.

    As for the need to break up the "Frankenbanks", see this.

    Krugman- A Vote For A Republican, No Matter What You Think Of Him As A Person, is A Vote For Paralysis

    Paul Krugman hits the nail right on the head. Now what are we going to do about it?

    The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

    Don't hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don't even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents' obstructionism.

    It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis. But by now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: it goes straight for the capillaries. Sure enough, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, accused Mr. Shelby of "silliness." Yep, that will really resonate with voters.

    After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually - after the country's post-World War I resurrection - became the country's national anthem. It begins, "Poland is not yet lost."

    Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.

    Inside Look At A White House Geared Toward Campaigning, Not Governing by Susie Madrak

    Feb 08, 2010

    Steve Clemons reacts to a close look inside the Obama White House, written by Financial Times Washington bureau chief Edward Luce. Go read the whole thing, Steven's comments are enlightening:

    At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: "A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again."

    Just over a year into his tenure, America's 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington's ways. What went wrong?

    Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons - from Mr Obama's decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president's inability to convince voters he can "feel their [economic] pain", to the apparent ungovernability of today's Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis - and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

    [...] An outside adviser adds: "I don't understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?"

    Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. "There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government," says one. "Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn't happening."

    (This reinforces what I recently wrote about Obama's lack of executive skills. Seems like I'm not the only person who noticed.)

    Clemons calls the piece a "vital" and "brave" article, noting that most of the insider media isn't mentioning it at all:

    But one thing essential to understand is that the kind of policy that smart strategists -- including by people like National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other advisers like Denis McDonough, Tom Donilon, James Steinberg, William Burns, (previously Gregory Craig) -- would be putting forward is getting twisted either in the rough-and-tumble of a a team of rivals operation that is not working, or is being distorted by the Chicago political gang's tactical advice that is seducing Obama towards a course that has not only violated deals he made with those who voted him into office but which is failing to hit any of the major strategic targets by which the administration will be historically measured.

    President Obama needs to take stock quickly. Read the Luce piece. Be honest about what is happening. Read Plouffe's smart book again. Send Rahm Emanuel back to the House in a senior role. Make Valerie Jarrett an important Ambassador. Keep Axelrod -- but balance him with someone like Plouffe, and get back to putting good policy before short term politics.

    Set up a Team B with diverse political and national security observers like Tom Daschle, John Podesta, Brent Scowcroft, Arianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Harris, James Fallows, Chuck Hagel, Strobe Talbott, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others to give you a no-nonsense picture of what is going on.

    And take action to fix the dysfunction of your office.

    Otherwise, the Obama brand will be totally bust in the very near term.

    Tags: Barack Obama, David Axelrod, Healthcare Reform, israeli peace, peace process, Rahm Emanuel, Steve Clemons, valerie jarrett

    Representative John P. Murtha, Ex-Marine and Iraq War Critic, Dies - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

    "The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Mr. Murtha said in November 2005 as he demanded an immediate withdrawal of American troops. He called the Iraq campaign "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."

    Mr. Murtha's long involvement in Pentagon issues and his history of hawkishness made the criticism all the more influential.

    In a statement Monday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called Mr. Murtha "a true patriot" and said that while they did not always agree, "I always respected his candor, and knew that he cared deeply about the men and women of America's military and intelligence community."

    Before speaking out on the war, Mr. Murtha was not much known outside Washington or his district in southwestern Pennsylvania.

    But he was alternately respected and feared by his colleagues on Capitol Hill as he used his influence to funnel hundreds of millions of federal dollars into his hard-luck district, where prosperity had vanished with the decline of the coal and steel industries.

    Mr. Murtha used his position as the ranking Democrat on the Appropriation Committee's military subcommittee to reward or punish colleagues in both parties, depending on whether they went along with the special items, or earmarks, that he tucked into bills for the benefit of his 12th Congressional District. More often than not, they did.

    The chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, once described Mr. Murtha as someone "who likes to get things done with virtually no spoken words."

    Though Mr. Murtha did not go out of his way to win friends among journalists, he understood the power of words. "Let me tell you the facts of life," he often told balky legislators, as he recalled in an interview in 2006. "If you vote against this bill, you won't have any input at all the next time."

    Is Tim Geithner Paying Attention To the Global Economy " The Baseline Scenario By Peter Boone and Simon Johnson

    In an interview that will air Sunday on ABC, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says, ""We have much, much lower risk of [a double-dip recession] today than at any time over the last 12 months or so … We are in an economy that was growing at the rate of almost 6 percent of GDP in the fourth quarter of last year. The most rapid rate in six years. So we are beginning the process of healing."

    The timing of this statement is remarkable because, while the US is finally showing some signs of recovery, the global economy is bracing for another major shock – this time coming from the European Union.

    The mounting debt and deficit problems in Greece might seem relatively small and faraway to the US Treasury – concerned as it is with China's exchange rate and the ritual of G7 meetings, and likely distracted by the major snow storm now hitting Washington DC.

    But the problems now spreading from Greece to Spain, Portugal, Ireland and even Italy portend serious trouble ahead for the US in the second half of this year – particularly because our banks remain in such weak shape.

    Greece is a member of the eurozone, the elite club of European nations that share the euro and are supposed to maintain strong enough economic policies. Greece does not control its own currency – this is in the hands of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. In good times over the past decade, this helped keep Greek interest rates low and growth relatively strong.

    But under the economic pressures of the past year, the Greek government budget has slipped into ever greater deficit and investors have increasingly become uncomfortable about the possibility of future default. This impending doom was postponed for a while by the ability of banks – mostly Greek – to use these bonds as collateral for loans from the European Central Bank (so-called "repos").

    But from the end of this year, the ECB will no longer accept bonds rated below A by major ratings agencies – and Greek government debt no longer falls into this category. The market can do this kind of math in about 20 seconds: If the ECB won't, indirectly, lend to the Greek government, then interest rates will go up in the future; in anticipation of this, interest rates should go up now.

    That is trouble enough for an economy like Greece – or any of the weaker eurozone countries that have been known, for some time and not in an endearing way as the "PIIGS". But paying higher interest rates on government debt also implies a worsening of the budget; this is exactly the sort of debt dynamics that used to get countries like Brazil into big trouble.

    The right approach would be to promise credible budget tightening down the road and to obtain sufficient resources – from within the eurozone (the IMF is irrelevant in the case of such a currency union) – to tide the country over in the interim.

    But the Germans have decided to play hardball with their weaker and – it must be said – somewhat annoying neighbors. As we entered the weekend, markets rallied on the expectation that there might be a bailout for Greece (and all the others under pressure). But, honestly, this seems unlikely. The Germans hate bailouts – unless it's their own banks and auto companies on the line. And the Europeans policy elite loves rules; in this kind of situation, their political process will grind on at a late 20th century pace.

    In contrast, markets now move at a 21st century global network pace. This is a full-scale speculative attack on sovereign credits in the eurozone. Brought on by weak fundamentals – it's the budget deficit, stupid – such attacks take on a life of their own. Remember the spread of pressure from Thailand to Malaysia and Indonesia, and then the big jump to Korea all in the space of two months during fall 1997.

    Tim Geithner and the White House may feel they must stand aloof, waiting for the Europeans to get their act together. This is a mistake – the need for US leadership has never been greater, particularly as our banks are really not in good enough shape to withstand a major international adverse event (e.g., Greece defaults, Greece leaves the eurozone, Germany leaves the eurozone, etc).

    Yes, we subjected our banks to a stress test in spring 2009 – but the stress scenario was mild and more appropriate as a baseline. Many of our banks – big, medium, and small – simply do not have enough capital to withstand further serious losses (think commercial real estate).

    As the international situation deteriorates – or even if it remains at this level of volatility – banks will hunker down and credit conditions will tighten around the US.

    And if the European situation spins seriously out of control, as it may well do early next week, the likelihood of a double-dip recession (or significant slowdown in the second half of 2010) increases dramatically.

    1. I think if these banks and big companies are trying to see this president fail. So if there is a "double dip" recession they would be the cause and everyone who supports their efforts to see this country fail. Just note that if that is the plan be prepare to reap what you sow.

      Jermil

      February 6, 2010 at 9:46 am

    2. Perhaps the lack of concern stems from our ability to continue borrowing from China; the dollar is more attractive if there aren't other viable options.

      zic

      February 6, 2010 at 9:59 am

    3. Ever since our administration decided last year to (literally) buy the banks some time and help them "earn" their way back to solvency, it has been politically invested in

      It's hard to blame Germany, however, for being relectant to throw money at a bloated and corrupt government.

      Bond Girl

      February 6, 2010 at 10:07 am

    4. "Many of our banks – big, medium, and small – simply do not have enough capital to withstand further serious losses (think commercial real estate)."

      Rather than taking further measures to keep reinforcing banks (at taxpayer expense) to preserve the precious credit system as the economy implodes, perhaps we could actually try to keep the economy from imploding?

      StatsGuy

      February 6, 2010 at 10:09 am

    5. When the dust settles, expect third economic status of many of these countries, maybe including the United States. Could the IMF bailout the U.S., dipping into their dwindling coffers? It will be interesting to see if countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal take up similar options of the Latin America countries did by the early 1980s. Domestically, President Obama takes his talking points from Mr. Geithner, instead of the other way around (as reported at the G7 by Financial Times – "Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, will discuss American plans to impose a fee on banks to recoup bail-out costs, and the "Volcker rule", about restricting commercial banks' ability to engage in proprietary trading."). It was rightly pointed out last evening in Paul Solman's continuing interviews on the financial crisis, this time with David Stockman that "the party is over", that government bailouts only rewards the lack of financial discipline and everything else that has gone wrong – and I would also add, as has been enumerated continuously by this awesome blog; it's definitely a case of "hurry up and wait" for the markets to correctly get it right the next time even it's raining cats and dogs out here.

      Beth

      February 6, 2010 at 10:29 am

    6. 'US Leadership'? Just exactly what does that mean? What are the possible alternatives for the US? We bail them out? Ha! Ask US banks to take on high sovereign risk? Pressure other EU countries to bail them out? Germany already has maximum self interest in seeing PIIGS through all this, how is any US 'leadership' going to change the equation?

      I am no fan of Geithner, but this is one time I'd cut him some slack.

      Chris Marino

      February 6, 2010 at 10:34 am

    7. The problem is not the strength of the banks, it's the lack of a systemic risk regulator and the lack of resolution authority.

      If Europe rises to the level of a systemic threat, the only option the United States would have is another AIG bailout – which was: a too-late diagnosis of an existent systemic event and a country with no resolution authority over systemically important entities.

      And Geithner and Bernanke started telling us this when Geithner was still the President of the New York Federal Reserve.

      JCH

      February 6, 2010 at 10:52 am

    8. And don't forget the brewing storm in the China lending story that is now unfolding. The housing bubble in Australia is yet to pop, too. Plenty of big shoes to fall before this over.

      Tom Hickey

      February 6, 2010 at 10:55 am

    9. A short but definitive Analysis of what is Wrong With America Today:

      "Democrat's Economic "Assumption-of-Death".

      "The fatal flaw that produced stagflation in Europe in the 20th is taking hold of America, mistakenly promoted by the erroneous and perverted economic policy – or non-economic policy – of the Obama administration."

      If you are a VOTER, read on pass captions like this:
      ……"All good comes from economic success, and all success comes from the creation of profits. There is no stronger disincentive to profits than taxation."…….

      They are saying,………no need to punish "profits".

      All good Americans should debate and decide on this thesis at;
      http://www.robbingamerica.blogspot.com

      Think about it until 2010…………there is still time "to survive"!

    10. How can you say: '…double dip' when you never recovered in the first place.

      And we're not in a recession but a breakdown crisis of the entire Anglo-Dutch imperial monetary system.

      That means sovereign defaults, massive un-employment (permanent), and un-governability in Western countries.

      Articles like this really hurt us because you marginalize and underestimate the crisis.

      This is not some typical 'business cycle' but a segway into a New Dark Age.

      whitemale08

      February 6, 2010 at 11:29 am

    11. I am fortunate to live adjacent a conservation zone and none of the wildlife seems to appreciate our "crises" which reminds me that our economy is an artificial construct. We can make it work.

      hermanas

      February 6, 2010 at 12:27 pm

    [Feb 2, 2010] "Populism"

    The Baseline Scenario

    Amidst otherwise strong coverage of the growing debate around the nature of finance and the power of big banks, a surprisingly high number of journalists continue to misuse the word "populism".

    For example, in an article on criticism of bankers at Davos, the Wall Street on Saturday morning reported that President Sarkozy of France delivered a "populist broadside" when he said,

    "That those who create jobs and wealth may earn a lot of money is not shocking. But that those who contribute to destroying jobs and wealth also earn a lot of money is morally indefensible."

    The implication, of course, is that some politicians are pandering to "the people" vs. "the elites" – part of a long-standing theme in some interpretations of democratic political conflict. While elites invest and engage in productive activities, the argument goes, plebians from time to time demand excessive income redistribution or punitive taxation or other measures that would undermine productivity and prosperity.

    Or, as President Obama said in March 2009, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."

    Such language reveals a complete misunderstanding of our current situation. (Matt Taibbi has this right, but doesn't go far enough.)

    The problem we face is not that the broader population wants pointless or destructive revenge on a financial elite that has done well. Nor is it the case that, if left largely to its own devices, our major banks will guide us back along the path to sustainable growth.

    The consensus technocratic assessment is simple: We are smack in the middle of a doomsday cycle of repeated boom-bust-bailout (our version; the Bank of England's take). The core issue – banks considered "too big to fail" – was not resolved in or after the crisis of 2008-09; if anything, as these banks have increased in size, the problem is now worse. We are therefore doomed to run headlong into another crisis.

    This view is increasingly the developing consensus of most economists, many people active in financial markets (e.g., judging by reactions to this piece), top policy analysts from right and left, clear thinking central bankers, and pretty much anyone else who follows the news. Elites are deeply split along pro- and anti-big bank lines. Most people who do not have a conflict of interest – i.e., don't work for big banks or the administration – want to see the most dangerous parts of our financial sector reined in and made safer.

    Even leaders of the global nonfinancial business elite begin to understand what has happened and what comes next.

    The fact that dramatic banking reforms would be popular does not make them populist. It merely means that a broad cross-section of our population has woken up to part of our appalling reality. Sure, they are angry – but with good reason, and the remedies they seek are entirely appropriate. Most of our elites are on the side of the broader population on this issue; only the diseased heart of Wall Street holds out.

    Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Obama administration remains convinced that merely tweaking our existing regulations is the only responsible way forward. Even their new "Volcker Rule" increasingly looks like superficial rebranding without new substance.

    This will go nowhere – except to sad, unnecessary, and complete defeat in the November midterm elections.

    By Simon Johnson

    Populism Just Like Racism! - Matt Taibbi - Taibblog - True-Slant

    It's easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

    via Op-Ed Columnist – The Populist Addiction – NYTimes.com.

    Normally one would have to be in the grip of a narcissistic psychosis to think that a columnist for the New York Times has written an article for your personal benefit. But after his latest article in the Times, in which he compares the "populism" of people who "blame Goldman Sachs" with exactly the sort of racist elitism I ripped him for last week, I think David Brooks might be trying to talk to me.

    I think that's at least part of what's going on in his latest column, which is odd. If I were in his position, I probably would have punched me in the nose for the shot I took at him last week, but the response of David Brooks to being called out as a racist weenie is to write a passionate defense of the rich, one that includes the admonition that while blaming the wealthy is easy and feels fun, truly wise men should "tolerate the excesses of traders."

    I don't want to get into the position of fixating on one guy for personal reasons. Obviously I've done too much of that with Brooks already, and I absolutely promise to give that part of it a rest for a good long while after this.

    But leaving aside any discussion of Brooks the human being, this latest column of his is something that has to be discussed. The propagandistic argument he makes about the dangers of "populism" is spelled out here as clearly as you'll ever see it expressed in print, and this exact thing is a key reason why so much of the corruption that went on on Wall Street in the past few decades was allowed to spread unchecked.

    That's because this argument is tacitly accepted by almost everyone in our business, and most particularly is internalized in the thinking of most newspaper editors and TV news producers, who over time develop an ingrained habitual fear of publishing material that seems hysterical or angry.

    This certainly has an effect on the content of news reporting, but perhaps even more importantly, it impacts the tone of news coverage, where outrages are covered without outrage, and stories that are not particularly "balanced" in reality - stories that for instance are quite plainly about one group of people screwing another group of people - become transformed into cool, "objective" news stories in which both the plainly bogus version of events and the real and infuriating version are given equal weight.

    Brooks lays out the crux of his case his case in his first three grafs of his article:

    Politics, some believe, is the organization of hatreds. The people who try to divide society on the basis of ethnicity we call racists. The people who try to divide it on the basis of religion we call sectarians. The people who try to divide it on the basis of social class we call either populists or elitists.

    These two attitudes - populism and elitism - seem different, but they're really mirror images of one another. They both assume a country fundamentally divided. They both describe politics as a class struggle between the enlightened and the corrupt, the pure and the betrayers.

    Both attitudes will always be with us, but these days populism is in vogue. The Republicans have their populists. Sarah Palin has been known to divide the country between the real Americans and the cultural elites. And the Democrats have their populists. Since the defeat in Massachusetts, many Democrats have apparently decided that their party has to mimic the rhetoric of John Edwards's presidential campaign. They've taken to dividing the country into two supposedly separate groups - real Americans who live on Main Street and the insidious interests of Wall Street.

    Now, there's bullshit all up and down this lede. The first lie he tells involves describing everyone who is a critic of Wall Street as a populist. It's sort of a syllogism he's getting into here:

    All people who criticize Wall Street are populists.

    All populists think of themselves as enlightened and pure, and are primarily interested in dividing society, the same way racists do.

    Therefore, all people who criticize Wall Street are primarily interested in dividing society, just like racists.

    This is obnoxious on so many levels it's almost difficult to know where to start. As for the populism label, let me quote the Alison Porchnik character from Annie Hall (Woody's first wife, in the movie): "I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype."

    Brooks here is trying to say that by criticizing, say, Goldman Sachs for mass thievery - criticizing a bank for selling billions of dollars worth of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities mismarked as investment grade deals, for getting the taxpayer to pay them 100 cents on the dollar for their billions in crap investments with AIG, for forcing hundreds of millions of people to pay inflated gas and food prices when they manipulated the commodities market and helped push oil to a preposterous $149 a barrel, and for paying massive bonuses after receiving billions upon billions in public support even beyond the TARP - that in criticizing the bank for doing these things, people like me are primarily interested in being divisive and "organizing hatreds."

    He is also saying that by making these criticisms, people like me are by implication making statements about our own moral purity and enlightenment relative to others. He goes on:

    It's easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

    Second, it absolves voters of responsibility for their problems. Over the past few years, many investment bankers behaved like idiots, but so did average Americans, racking up unprecedented levels of personal debt. With the populist narrative, you can accuse the former and absolve the latter.

    Stuff like this makes me want to scream. If I'm writing about a bank that took a half-billion worth of mortgages where the average amount of equity in the home was less than 1%, and where 58% of the mortgages had no documentation, and then sold those mortgage-backed securities as investment-grade opportunities to pensions and other suckers - and then bet against the same kind of stuff they were enthusiastically selling to other people - is Brooks seriously suggesting that I also have to point out that the Chinese economy was doing well at the time?

    Yeah, okay, the rise of China is a factor in the overall decline of the American economy, but it has nothing to do with the Goldman story, which is a specific crime story about a specific bank. If I'm writing about a gang of car thieves, what, we're supposed to also mention that the endive crop was weak in that part of the country that year? What the fuck? And this whole business about how criticizing Goldman absolves voters - Jesus, how primitive can you get? Using that logic, criticizing anyone for anything is invalid:

    ME: Well, Ike Turner was sort of a dick because he used to get high and punch his wife in the face all the time…

    BROOKS: But it's so easy to say that.

    ME: It's easy to say that a guy who punches his wife in the face is a jerk? (Scratching head) Well… I guess you're right about that. Would you like me to say it while juggling three chainsaws? Would it be harder to say then, and would you have less of a problem with it?

    BROOKS: But by criticizing Ike Turner, you're absolving all the people who do other bad things. Like purse-snatchers in Central Park, and those kids who keyed my Lexus, and all those baseball players who took steroids! Rafael Palmeiro lied to congress! What about them?

    ME: Dude, are you okay? Your pupils look dilated.

    BROOKS: You're absolving Mark McGwire! The single-season home run record is a fraud!

    ME: (backing away slowly toward the door) Okay, yeah, sure. Listen, I'll catch up with you later, okay? I've got to return some videotapes.

    And so on. The entire argument is literally this nonsensical. If Brooks disagrees with criticism of banks like Goldman, he has a fantastic platform to point out where those criticisms are incorrect. The best platform there is, in fact. But not only does he not go in that direction, he does just the opposite - he concedes that these criticisms are basically true, and chooses instead to argue against the wisdom of making those criticisms, apparently because "bashing the rich" will make them less inclined to "channel opportunity to new groups." The emphasis in this next excerpt is mine:

    So it's easy to see the seductiveness of populism. Nonetheless, it nearly always fails. The history of populism, going back to William Jennings Bryan, is generally a history of defeat.

    That's because voters aren't as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time: First, that the rich and the powerful do rig the game in their own favor; and second, that simply bashing the rich and the powerful will still not solve the country's problems.

    Political populists never get that second point. They can't seem to grasp that a politics based on punishing the elites won't produce a better-educated work force, more investment, more innovation or any of the other things required for progress and growth.

    In fact, this country was built by anti-populists. It was built by people like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln who rejected the idea that the national economy is fundamentally divided along class lines. They rejected the zero-sum mentality that is at the heart of populism, the belief that economics is a struggle over finite spoils. Instead, they believed in a united national economy - one interlocking system of labor, trade and investment.

    Hamilton championed capital markets and Lincoln championed banks, not because they loved traders and bankers. They did it because they knew a vibrant capitalist economy would maximize opportunity for poor boys like themselves. They were willing to tolerate the excesses of traders because they understood that no institution is more likely to channel opportunity to new groups and new people than vigorous financial markets.

    What's so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we've been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting - this idea that the way society works is that the productive " rich" feed the needy "poor," and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for "excesses" might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.

    That's basically Brooks's entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of "excesses" - but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

    And the really funny thing about Brooks's take on populists… I mean, I'm a member of the same Yuppie upper class that Brooks belongs to. I can't speak for the other "populists" that Brooks might be referring to, but in my case for sure, my attitude toward the likes of Lloyd Blankfein and Hank Paulson has nothing to do with class anger.

    I don't hate these guys because they're rich and went to fancy private schools. Hell, I'm rich and went to a fancy private school. I look at these people as my cultural peers and what angers me about them is that, with many coming from backgrounds similar to mine, these guys chose to go into a life of crime and did so in a way that is going to fuck things up for everyone, rich and poor, for a generation.

    Their decision to rig the markets for their own benefit is going to cause other countries to completely lose confidence in the American economy, it will impact the dollar, and ultimately will make all of us involuntary debtors to whichever state we end up having to borrow from to bail these crimes out.

    And from my perspective, what makes these guys more compelling as a journalistic subject than, say, the individual homeowner who took on too much debt is a thing that has nothing to do with class, not directly, anyway. It's that their "excesses" exist in a nexus of political and economic connections that makes them very difficult to police.

    We have at least some way of dealing with the average guy who doesn't pay his debts - in fact our government has shown remarkable efficiency in passing laws like the bankruptcy bill that attack that particular problem, and of course certain banks always have the option of not lending that money (and I won't even get into the many different ways that the banks themselves bear responsibility for all the easy credit that was handed out in recent years).

    But the kinds of things that went on at Goldman and other investment banks, in many cases there are not even laws on the books to deal with these things. In some cases what we're talking about is the highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government, which is both fascinating from a journalistic point of view and ought to be terrifying from the point of view of any citizen, rich or poor.

    And even if I were to accept the Brooksian view of an upper class that must be looked to to fix things and take care of the lower classes and create the needed wealth to help us escape our economic crisis, the whole point is that this upper class he is talking about has abdicated that very responsibility - and, perhaps having reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not worth saving, has taken on a new mission that involves not creating wealth for all but simply absconding with whatever wealth is remaining.

    It's not pessimism or "combative divisiveness" to talk about these problems and insist that they get fixed. On the contrary, it's a very positive view of what citizenship is to believe that everyone has a real role in fixing his country's problems, and that when we identify problems, we should try to do something about them because we might actually succeed.

    On the other hand, telling oneself that when powerful people "rig the game" one should just tolerate it, because one's best hope for seeing the situation fixed rests in hoping those same powerful people fix it themselves - I would describe that as pessimism, or something worse than pessimism. The whole point of America is that we are all supposed to be our own masters, never viewing anyone as being by birth or situation inherently better or more capable than ourselves, and so the notion of relying upon some nebulous class of investment bankers to "channel opportunity" from on high strikes me as being un-American.

    And besides, the fact that a lot of these guys have made a lot of money recently doesn't make them "upper class." They're the same assholes we all were in high school and college, except that they made some very particular moral choices in adulthood, and became criminals, and have now arranged things so that they're going to be tough as hell to catch. And when they fall, which a lot of them will… I mean a lot of these guys are ten seconds from losing it all and spending the next ten years working the laundry room at Danbury or pushing shopping carts under the FDR expressway. And they know it. These people aren't the nobility. They're people just like us, only stupider and less ashamed of themselves.

    That's not a class story. It's a crime story, and it doesn't have a damn thing to do with China.

    [Jan 29, 2010] A Woody Allen Moment

    "When buying and selling are legislated, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators." P. J. O'Rourke
    January 26, 2010 | EconoSpeak

    You may remember the scene from "Take the Money and Run" (if you're as old as I am).

    Over and over, as he was growing up, bullies would pull Woody's glasses from his face, throw them on the ground and smash them.

    Now, as an adult, he is cornered by the police after a failed heist. In a panic, he pulls his glasses off, throws them on the ground and smashes them. "See," he says, "I did it myself."

    Fast forward to Obama post-Massachusetts, offering to shrink the beast all on his own.

    Time to switch role models.

    Min:
    "cornered by the policy"

    Nice slip. ;)

    TheTrucker:
    I can't believe the mileage the Republicans can get out of a nit. But complaining and whining about it is fruitless. The fact is that there are no "representatives" that can stand up to the corporate media. And this was actually true prior to the Supreme mistake. It is true because the, so called "progressives", shot their feet off in 1913 with the 17th amendment and then, they rolled over for the Republican assaults on representative government in 1922 and 1929.

    And they continue to do so, all the while believing that they (the left wing moonbats that believe in Santa, The Good Fairy, and The Big Rock Candy Mountain) can convince the majority that "compassion" (even compassion for the humpbacked silver toad and its possible extinction) should trump "justice" and "liberty". Well, it ain't workin'.

    The rational middle that actually includes Liberals and conservatives is what gets left out by the MSM. And it is because the MSM deals in sensationalism. They seek the headlines that will grab the attention long enough to sell some tires or some soap. The most incendiary headline is the absolute best. And to follow it with that which will stoke the fires is always the most productive for the sponsors. Faux Noise is popular because it amplifies any and all "nits" into being at least an indirect assault on some emotional hot button. Abortion, guns, gays and God are the primaries here, but there are also big "MISTAKES" like the Supremes.

    And once the electorate is divided into opposing "teams" it becomes a sports event where the MSM (based on their favorite pundits) decide what is an "important play" in the political game and what conclusions are to be drawn therefrom.

    Massachusetts would not have placed Brown in the Senate if not for the 17th amendment. Democratic populism is a disaster.

    Is it Time for a 3rd Party By Barry Ritholtz

    January 27, 2010

    Whenever people ask me what my party affiliation is, I respond "Pragmatic Independent."

    The question usually comes up in response to something I wrote. I've been contacted by Republicans, who want me to join or advise their committees. I usually tell them that I find much of their ideology intellectually indefensible, and their marriage to the religious right offensive.

    When I get the same question from Democrats, my response is they seem to not understand how the economy works, are too spineless to get anything done, and are way too politically correct for my tastes.

    I agree with Krugman that Obama has been wimpy, when he should have been relentlessly beating the opposition over the head. Reagan never let the public forget who had driven the country into a ditch, nor did he let Congress forget he was in charge. Imagine his response if the other party rejected his plan for a bi-partisan panel.

    There are notable exceptions - the two NY Senators when I was growing up were statesmen - Jacob Javitz and Daniel Moynihan (a Dem and a Repub). They seem to be part of ancient history. Today, I have to search far and wide to find congress critters who are uncorrupted, understand how business works, and have the balls to call it like it is. Alan Grayson of Florida is the closest thing I have seen to what a modern Congressman should be like.

    We have a Congress that is a Parliament of Whores of who sold themselves to the highest corporate bidder. Why do I want to have any affiliation with either group? And I am not sure if a 3rd party can break the death grip on America the parties have.

    ~~~

    OK, enough political nonsense on this SOTU day. Back to the markets . . .

    21 Responses to "Is it Time for a 3rd Party?"

    1. call me ahab :
      January 27th, 2010 at 7:13 am

      two parties is perfect-

      one to invade other countries- the other to give us great programs like the "great society"-

      sure am glad there are no more poor people and we have conquered large tracts of land in the desert

    2. call me ahab :
      January 27th, 2010 at 7:22 am

      an idea from Obama-

      "President Barack Obama intends to award $8 billion in stimulus funds to develop high-speed rail corridors and sell the program as a jobs creator."- yahoo finance

      definitely an attractive idea- especially out here on the East Coast where there are major corridors and high density-

      forward thinking for a change-

      sure beats buying General Motors

    3. schmoo :
      January 27th, 2010 at 7:33 am

      It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a third party is on its way.

      This is no doubt why Sacramento-based GOP political consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates created the Tea Party.

      I wonder if a functioning third (or fourth) party could actually come about without being controlled by the same apparatchiks from the current political machines running things today.

    4. flipspiceland :
      January 27th, 2010 at 7:36 am

      What??

      "Reagan never let the public forget who had driven the country into a ditch, nor did he let Congress forget he was in charge."

      Sure he was. That's why Congress refused to cut spending to match the tax cuts and caused huge deficit spending.

      WADR, BR, you have got to be kidding that Reagan was in charge.

    5. dougc :
      January 27th, 2010 at 7:37 am

      There isn't a niche for a third party. One already has used our fear of being invaded or killed by a criminal and the other party feeds on our fear of dying of starvation on the street without health care.
      What other primal fear is left?

    6. Patrick Neid :
      January 27th, 2010 at 7:51 am

      "Alan Grayson of Florida is the closest thing I have seen to what a modern Congressman should be like."

      LOL.

      His scamming with Derivium certainly qualifies him!

    7. ItalicBold :
      January 27th, 2010 at 7:52 am

      How long have you been a "Pragmatic Independent."? I think the turning point for me was probably seeing Mike Gravel and Ron Paul in the 08 race call out all the BS of both parties. I am young though, it is beyond me how any old person can still believe in this two party system or want to have any affiliation with either party.

    8. HEHEHE :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:03 am

      George W Bush did not drive the economy into a ditch by himself. He was just the president at the wheel when it hit the ditch. The road to the ditch was paved by Reagan and his deficit spending, a policy that was followed wholeheartedly by every subsequent administration, George W Bush's included. Moreover the velocity of the trip into the ditch was sped up by Greenspan screwing around with interest rate policy every time Wall Street got themselves in trouble. Add to it a Congress this is bought by Wall Street and regulators led by former Wall Street employees we hit the ditch without any airbags or seatbelts.

      You get what you vote for in this country. If you don't want to vote for a third party candidate then vote against the incumbent no matter the party in every single election until things change. You see it in Obama's new found religion. These clowns only wake up when their power is threatened. Of course Obama's "plans for the economy" are going to make things worse and make the final crash even worse. Like an alcoholic switching from booze, to beer to wine, he might delay the inevitable trip to rehab but that's where he's ending up.

    9. wally :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:07 am

      There is really no chance for a third party. The religious wackos took over the GOP by infiltrating it deliberately, and the problem is that you can only do that by an organized, purposeful action. Lobbyists with money have that, people who suffer from religion have that… but common sense has no headquarters, no fundraisers, no war chest, no phone banks, no organizational chart. It will never win.

    10. Transor Z :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:15 am

      Barry, good call on Moynihan. Daniel P. Moynihan was one of the few to have the intellectual chops to back up his political actions.

    11. grumpyoldvet :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:16 am

      speaking of 3rd parties…here's xomething from the las vegas sun…http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jan/24/new-conservatives/

    12. Alan :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:21 am

      In this day and age the problem with a third party is it'll eventually be taken over by grifters–people who will hype populist BS for a buck. Sort of like FNC.

    13. jhellman :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:25 am

      Totally agree. What seems to be the norm is for all those in the middle to ping pong between the two polarizing parties. Things got crummy under Bush so all those in the middle went to Obama with what I am sure were a great many voting that way just to vote against the status quo. Now the opposite happens. Rinse and repeat. Check out this site to see how elections have gone since the start. http://www.uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/index.html As recently as 1912 we had 3 candidates get over 20% of the popular vote. There were also years when parties had multiple candidates run.

    14. Mark Wolfinger :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:37 am

      It's not nonsense.
      It's the CORRECT answer

    15. torrie-amos :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:40 am

      My analysis projected a libertarian presiden in early 2020, yet, obama and the congress and senate have proved to be quite laughable during the whole crisis. Once states start fessing up to being bankrupt, one would guess it could be quicker.

      Face it, most folks are fine with:

      a. gay marriage
      b. abortion
      c. having a strong military, yet, major constraint on invading
      d. cutting off giving money away to every country that breaths
      e. drilling wherever we think oil is
      f. an expanding prosperous middle class

      Perot had a shot based on idea's, yet, he picked a ridiculous running mate, and believed in conspiracy theories, yet, he garned what 23% of the vote.

      HATE MOTIVATES, most folks hate the government due to sheer long term stupidity.

      Whatever what one persons believes are we all are connected by money, government is proving to be wholly stupid and incompetent with money.

      If the libertarians were smart, they'd find somone with brains and charisma, come up with a strategy to win, and go too work. IMHO, they could do it………simply……….HATE MOTIVATES

    16. advsys :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:42 am

      I never quite understand how a third party will fix things. I think eventually both parties are gone.

    17. randyt :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:45 am

      woe! 8 billion for high speed rail. that ought to build at least a mile or so of track and thousands of mexican laborers will be tickeled shitless. as far as a third party, i believe the two we already have are doing a great job at screwing this country, no need to complicate things.

    18. HEHEHE :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:52 am

      It's true, the DEMS and REPUBS play to these polarizing social issues as a means to divide and conquer while they and the interests behind them that really run the country ( military industrial complex, unions, big oil, Wall Street) rob the public treasury. Any attempt to change that via a third party is co-opted when the DEMS and REPUBS mimic the third party's ideals, though they don't really believe them, and later water them down. It doesn't help that via the entrenched two party system, and lack of public financing of campaigns, that the mainstream media fully supports the above system.

    19. Mark E Hoffer :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:53 am

      "Ballot Access" needs to be front, and center, of any conversation regarding 'Third Parties'..

      like this: "posted Thursday, 30 September 2004
      Supreme Court to hear Libertarian Party ballot access case

      The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will review an election law case brought by the Oklahoma Libertarian Party.

      The party is requesting the right to hold an open primary in the state, which permits only closed or semi-closed primaries.

      "We're taking the position that it's our business, not the government's, as to who votes in the candidate selection process," said Richard Winger, a Libertarian Party member and publisher of Ballot Access News, which examines ballot access for third parties.

      "In Oklahoma, the two older parties have written incredibly hostile ballot access laws in an attempt to keep their competitors small and weak. Having an open primary is a way to get more people involved in our party."

      In Oklahoma, a third party needs to collect more than 51,000 signatures to get on the ballot, a feat no third party was able to achieve this year.

      The case now slated to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, Clingman v. Beaver, was originally filed in 2000. The party lost in U.S. District Court but won in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Oral arguments are expected in December.

      If the party prevails in the U.S. Supreme Court, qualified parties who hold their own primary elections will be able to decide whether all registered voters may participate - or whether the primary should be restricted only to voters registered for that party.

      "This is very exciting, because it's the first time the U.S. Supreme Court has taken an election-law case in which we are the primary plaintiff," Winger said. "We've tried at least 20 times before."…"
      http://www.shadesofgray.blog-city.com/supreme_court_on_ok_ballot_case.htm

      http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=Ballot+Access+Third+Parties+Closed+Primaries

    20. beaufou :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:55 am

      Looking at Massachusetts recent election, a third party would have had a fighting chance.
      Not only is it worrying but absolutely ridiculous to only have a male model with a truck as an alternative when you want to express your frustration with the current administration.

    21. Dexter :
      January 27th, 2010 at 8:57 am

      "That's why Congress refused to cut spending to match the tax cuts and caused huge deficit spending. "

      That was the beauty of the Laffer Curve. You never had to do anything. The money was for nothing, and the chicks were free.

    [Jan 28, 2010] Obama's new triangulation strategy

    naked capitalism

    eric anderson:

    Like Carter? No. Like Clinton? No. More like the captain of the Titanic.

    Except that on Obama's sinking ship, the banksters have already filled the lifeboats. The women and children are SOL. Not to mention the small businesses.

    Is it possible that Obama knows there is no practical action he can take to prevent Great Depression II and all the associated damage that implies? And that he's decided the only thing he can do is try to put on the best veneer possible? Maybe this is why none of his proposals have been serious. He never actually came out with a health care plan. He left it to Congress. He made a non-agreement agreement in Copenhagen and pronounced it as significant progress. The stimulus bill was largely pork - there was little in it to lay a foundation for economic growth. There have been no substantive efforts to reign in the kinds of financial activities that got us into the debt bubble debacle. He hasn't done or proposed anything of substance so far. Why would anyone expect him to start now?

    b.:

    January 26, 2010 at 2:27 pm

    I notice that your chart has "Social Security and Medicare Taxes" combined on the revenue side, and Social Security (color matching income tax) payouts separated from the color-matched Medicare/Medicaid expenditures. That is in tune with the constant scam aliasing of these "entitlements", and predisposes me to skip everything else you write. If Perot (or whoever authored the image) was an honest man, he would color match Social Security revenue against Social Security payouts – fucking right it is an entitlement that is pre-paid and over-pre-paid – match Medicare and Medicaid separately to whatever their revenue sources, and make sure that the syphilitic elephant in the living room – defense spending – was rightly blood-red and not matched to anything.

    If the deficit is so important to you, then you should be grateful for Social Security, because refunding the trust fund with tax dollars to repay the "IOU deficit" that should have never been allowed to happen in the first place (say "lockbox" for me) is the *only* thing that will make obvious that this nation can no longer afford its pervasive idiocy and dishonesty.

    Yes, continuing all that "entitlement drivel" will probably allow the same elites to default on their trust fund liabilities, but even so they will only be able to hold up a plundering already done – the money has been borrowed and wasted, and a partial default on those IOU's is not going to prevent the "emerging" national default.

    Reply

    [Jan 24, 2010] More on Bernanke

    Deflationary Jane:

    I missed that piece yesterday since I read the NYT a day behind. Excellent piece Rich

    'The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation's biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it's not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.'

    exactamundo

    [Jan 24, 2010] They Still Don't Get It by Bob Herbert

    From comments "I feel like Obama has squandered his political capital and good will of the electorate as badly as Bush after 9/11."

    January 22, 2010 | NYTimes.com

    How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.

    The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.

    While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

    The public interest? Forget about it.

    With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.

    A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs. You don't hear about this from the politicians who are always so anxious to tell you, in between fund-raisers and photo-ops, what a great job they're doing. From 2000 to 2008, the number of poor people in the U.S. grew by 5.2 million, reaching nearly 40 million. That represented an increase of 15.4 percent in the poor population, which was more than twice the increase in the population as a whole during that period.

    The study does not include data from 2009, when so many millions of families were just hammered by the recession. So the reality is worse than the Brookings figures would indicate.

    Job losses, stagnant or reduced wages over the past decade, and the loss of home equity when the housing bubble burst have combined to take a horrendous toll on families who thought they had done all the right things and were living the dream. A great deal of that bleeding is in the suburbs. The study, compiled by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, said, "Suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation's poor population since 2000."

    Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people - more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population - fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.

    The question for Democrats is whether there is anything that will wake them up to their obligation to extend a powerful hand to ordinary Americans and help them take the government, including the Supreme Court, back from the big banks, the giant corporations and the myriad other predatory interests that put the value of a dollar high above the value of human beings.

    The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.

    What we'll get instead is rhetoric. It's cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.

    Those at the bottom of the economic heap seem all but doomed in this environment. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston put the matter in stark perspective after analyzing the employment challenges facing young people in Chicago: "Labor market conditions for 16-19 and 20-24-year-olds in the city of Chicago in 2009 are the equivalent of a Great Depression-era, especially for young black men."

    The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation's biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it's not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.

    [Jan 21, 2010] Obama grading his first year's economic performance " naked capitalism

    Obama is a corporatist like other New Democrats of the neo-liberal mold. The schtick – as also used by Schroeder in Germany, Koizumi in Japan and Tony Blair in the UK – is to say the things that progressives want to hear, but do the things that big business wants to be done. You have to give a sop to the base here and there like exempting unions from the healthcare bill's Cadillac policy tax. But, the goal is to curry favor with big business, which is the paymaster of both established parties in the U.S.

    In the 1990s, the so-called Third Way, popularized by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, changed the fortunes of liberals dramatically. Traditionally, the Democratic and Labour Parties were controlled by unions and working class interests – the so-called left wing. This is one reason Democrats controlled the South until the civil rights movement. But, stagflation seemed to discredit leftish policies. In the U.S., the 1980s ushered in 12 years of Republican Presidency. Labour's trip into exile was even longer, 18 years.

    [Jan 21. 2010] "President Obama It's Not Just the Words!"

    A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that "Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street." Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.
    naked capitalism

    A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that "Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street." A full 95 percent said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote. Surprise, surprise, policies do matter.

    But what was the President's reaction? ABC News reported,

    President Obama said today that he feels he lost a direct connection to the American people in his first year in office because he focused too heavily on policy-making.

    "If there's one thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," Obama told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview at the White House.

    The arrogance and presumption of the statement is remarkable. Mr. President, the American people have core values, and they don't encompass political cronyism and tolerance of fraud and corruption. And they go beyond mere reminders that "change takes time".

    Having persuaded himself that his powers of oratory can solve any problem (even minus the teleprompter?), the President patronizingly suggests that his "change" policies were not the problem, but that he failed in the presentation of them. It's more likely that people were profoundly upset that with the "stuff" that the President and Congress were getting done, and his failure adequately to address the immediate crises that he faced in his first year in office.

    When Obama continued the Bush/Paulson moves on the bank bailouts, that was the beginning of the end of his "change" Presidency. Health care was simply the confirmation as large proportion of his base was prepared to cut him slack waiting to see what he would do with the issue. In the end, we got a terrible bill, and no amount of salesmanship or nice speeches will change the substance. It does not even deliver on the promise that got most people prepared to hold their collective noses and vote for it, that of eliminating the practice of rescinding policies on the basis of "pre-existing condition". Read the bill. As Yves Smith has highlighted, it allows an out for fraud. Guess what? Not telling your insurer of a preexisting condition, EVEN ONE YOU DID NOT KNOW ABOUT, is fraud! Unbeknownst to most, fraud is the means under current law that insurers deny coverage. The bill preserves the status quo here. A nursing organization with 150,000 members opposed the bill for this very reason.

    We have major problems in this country: rising unemployment, a stagnating economy, overly expensive health care and a large group of uninsured, which adds to the costs of the latter. How is further enriching insurers and Big Pharma (which the bill does) going to solve the cost problem? Similarly, how has throwing ample financial subsidies at Wall Street, helped the average citizen on Main Street?

    The President expended so much political capital and goodwill placating the likes of Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. Now that they've got their government checks, they can do whatever they like and continue to poison the polity. The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries have followed the playbook, and used the political process the same way.

    I am sure there are some people angered by too much government spending (aka, "socialism") and others who are genuinely peeved that Obama is not spending enough. But more than that, there remains a profound sense of anger, mixed with helplessness amongst most people. The only means by which these people can manifest this anger (without resorting to riots and burning buildings) is via the ballot box. They will likely continue to take it out on people perceived to be the "ins", the main feeders at the trough, versus the "outs", who have got nothing, but the promise of a lot more economic misery. Massachusetts was the first significant political manifestation of this trend, and if his immediate comments are anything to go by, I doubt Obama will interpret the election result correctly, since his faux populism and reliance on "speaking directly to the American people" merely shows how contrived his Administration has become.

    President Obama is providing increasingly disturbing parallels with one of Robert Redford's memorable characters, Bill McKay, from "The Candidate". If you recall how that movie ended, McKay escapes the victory party and pulls Lucas into a room while throngs of journalists clamor outside. McKay then asks his political spin doctor, Marvin Lucas, who engineered the victory: "Marvin … What do we do now?" The media throng arrives to drag them out at that moment and McKay never receives an answer. Today's electorate is waiting for an answer from the President which encapsulates something beyond a mere "change" slogan. Judging from the policies, they've been getting, they aren't happy with the answers.

    [Jan 21, 2010] Democrats Boosting Right-Wing Populism | The Smirking Chimp

    In his triumphant speech on election night, the next senator from Massachusetts should have thanked top Democrats in Washington for all they did to make his victory possible.

    For a year now, leading Democrats have steadily embraced more corporate formulas for "healthcare reform." In the name of political realism, they have demobilized and demoralized the Democratic base. In the process, they've fueled right-wing populism.

    The Democratic leadership on healthcare and so much else -- including bank bailouts, financial services, foreclosures and foreign policy -- has been so corporate that Republicans have found it easy to play populist.

    Fixated on passage of something that could be called "healthcare reform," the Democratic establishment has propagated the myth that enacting such a law is vital to the political viability of the Obama presidency.

    With few exceptions, the most progressive members of Congress have twisted themselves into knots to move with the choreography from the White House. The worse the healthcare bill got, the more they strained to lavish incongruous praise on it.

    Defenders of the current healthcare legislation don't like to acknowledge how thoroughly corporate it is. In the wake of the Senate election in Massachusetts, we're sure to see a new wave of mass emails from progressive groups urging a renewed fight for a public option. But the Obama administration threw a public option under the Pennsylvania Avenue bus well before the GOP victory in Massachusetts finalized its burial.

    Key provisions -- such as a mandate requiring individuals to buy private health insurance without a public option -- are giveaways to mega-corporations on a scale so vast that it boggles the mind.

    Such a federal healthcare law -- massively combining an intrusive government mandate with corporate power -- would be a godsend to right-wing populism for decades.

    Government power should be used for the common good, not for humongous profiteering. But on the near horizon is a law that would further bloat already-bloated corporate coffers while undermining basic precepts of a social compact.

    The mandate places legal, financial and ideological burdens on the individual for healthcare. In the process, at best, many low-income people would only have access to inferior coverage with plenty of holes.

    Rather than affirm the principle of healthcare as a human right, the current scenarios for healthcare reform lay out limited federal subsidies for private insurance premiums -- in effect, an entitlement program in political terms, sure to be vulnerable to the kind of safety-net shredding that has done so much harm in recent decades.

    The current versions of healthcare reform, New York Times economics writer David Leonhardt noted on Jan. 20, "are more conservative than Bill Clinton's 1993 proposal. For that matter, they're more conservative than Richard Nixon's 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn't get it through their job."

    One of the biggest themes -- repeated endlessly by pundits and meme-prone Democrats -- has been the assertion that getting "healthcare reform" signed into law is essential for the political viability of a Democratic Congress and the Obama presidency. But at this point, given what's on the table under the Capitol Dome, the opposite is likely to be the case.

    If Obama signs the kind of healthcare legislation now in the pipeline, it will be a political gift to the Republicans -- and a crowning negative achievement of bad leadership for the congressional majority.

    Key House Democrats declared throughout most of 2009 that they would only support a healthcare reform bill with a "robust" public option. Now the same members of Congress are saying they'll be pleased to vote for a final bill with no public option at all.

    Meanwhile, at the grassroots, many progressives are apt to buy into a false choice between capitulating inside the Democratic Party or staying away from it. But there's another option: an inside/outside strategy that involves openly fighting for progressive power within the party while also organizing outside of it.

    If we want more progressive officeholders, then elections are part of the process: beginning with Democratic primaries this year. Support genuine progressive candidates -- and if you don't see any, maybe you should do some recruiting. There's no time to lose.

    [Jan 21, 2010] Seating Senator-elect Brown - The Caucus Blog

    The question arise: whom Mr. Obama really represents ?
    Jan 20, 2010 | NYTimes.com

    There were immediate signs that the bill had become imperiled. House members indicated they would not quickly pass the bill the Senate approved last month.

    And after the results were announced, one centrist Democratic senator, Jim Webb of Virginia, called on Senate leaders to suspend any votes on the Democrats' health care legislation until Mr. Brown is sworn into office. The election, he said, was a referendum on both health care and the integrity of the government process.

    Beyond the bill, the election of a man supported by the Tea Party movement also represented an unexpected reproach by many voters to President Obama after his first year in office, and struck fear into the hearts of Democratic lawmakers, who are already worried about their prospects in the midterm elections later this year.

    Even so, his election was a sharp swing of the pendulum. The Senate seat held for nearly half a century by Mr. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, will now be held for the next two years by a Republican who has said he supports waterboarding as an interrogation technique for terrorism suspects, opposes a federal cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions and opposes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants unless they leave the country.

    In interviews on election day, even Democratic voters said they wanted the Obama administration to change direction.

    Although the race has riveted the nation largely because it was seen as contributing to the success or defeat of the health care bill, the potency of the issue for voters here was difficult to gauge. That is because Massachusetts already has near-universal health coverage, thanks to a law passed when Mitt Romney, a Republican, was governor.

    Thus Massachusetts is one of the few states where the benefits promised by the national bill were expected to have little effect on how many of its residents got coverage, making it an unlikely place for a referendum on the health care bill.

    Selected Comments

    Christopher

    The false right-left paradigm is alive and well on the blogs and in the analysis of repeaters for the mass media. Brown's rise in Massachusetts is a metaphor for the United States, as this nation in decline continues its march toward fascism.

    The cycle repeats with yet another minion of the international banking cartel and military-industrial complex masquerading as a wolf in sheep's clothing.

    The Reaganesque victory has less to do with Brown's politics, with which many of his supporters apparently disagree. It has more to do with style and rhetoric.

    Aristocratic democracy did not deliver enough of its promises, including universal health care. Representative democracy in form has given way to oligarchy in practice; for, the corporations have merged with the state and seized control of the political process to serve their own interests. According to Mussolini, this is the essence of fascism.

    [Jan 21, 2010] Class Coalitions and Keynesian Fiscal Policy

    I've been rethinking some of my earlier writings (this is almost always true), and have changed my views on the political economy of Keynesian fiscal policy.

    These investment-centered coalitions have proved more durable than consumption-centered ones, although the current crisis, which may yet result in a prolonged period of dampened investment, could put them to the test.

    How does Japan fit into this story?

    Selected Comments

    Barkley Rosser:

    I don't know about Japan, but it is a widely forgotten fact that for a long time both the UK and Sweden usually ran budget surpluses. This meant that expansionary fiscal policy was a matter of reducing the size of the usual surpluses.

    Brenda Rosser :

    A story I read was that the Japanese economy got into trouble when the government used an expansionary fiscal policy to bail out the US (ie provide an increased market for the US TNCs and by doing so reduce the US trade deficit).

    There is such an extraordinary high level of intra-corporate trade between the US and Japan that such a scenario is conceivable.

    Travis:

    Hate to be a party crasher but you are a little late. See:

    Unions, Employers, and Central Banks
    Macroeconomic Coordination and Institutional Change in Social Market Economies.

    Although it should be kept in mind that Sweden did use devaluation until the 80s as a back-door form of accommodation. And in Germany well the fear of inflation I suspect rests mostly on Weimar.

    Peter Dorman:

    Looks like a great book, but more on the intersection of monetary policy and wage bargaining than industrial and fiscal policy.

    I agree that there are many country-specific factors that should be taken into consideration, but I think overall that one can distinguish between investment- and consumption-led macropolicy.

    Hugh:

    Investment-led growth was also export-led by its very nature. It worked because of buyers-of-last-resort in the international system. These policies are and continue to be popular because they result in high profits for exporters and lots of industrial employment. They also, as a secondary effect, lead to a poor trajectory of global demand as profits and wages become repressed systes, US, I'm talking about you.

    travis:

    Peter, I would agree. Everything from the high rates of unionization and the robust training regimes points in the direction of very capital intensive export sector that is highly competitive and where below average producers are forced out. But that is (was) the key with the political economy of both the Swedish and German macro models they are (were) predicated on a very dynamic export sector. It should be little surprise then that globalization began to undermine the particular post war class compromises in the two countries.

    travis:

    The other thing is that I do not know what you mean by non-liberal capitalisms. They certainly were not socialist as in workers as the owners of their means of production, nor state capitalist.

    [Jan 18, 2010] Doubts About Certitude by MAUREEN DOWD

    December 15, 2009 | NYTimes.com

    At the C.I.A. in the '80s, Gates conspired with Charlie Wilson and the Saudis to help the insurgents in Afghanistan turn back the occupation of a superpower. Now he's guiding the attempt of the occupying superpower to turn back the insurgents, some of whom are the same ones he armed to defeat the Soviet Union.

    Trying to do a good thing that also seemed like a strategically brilliant thing - help the Afghan Davids repel the raw aggression of the Soviet Goliaths - we created the monsters that have come back to haunt us, and we learned how little control we have over history.

    We trained a whole generation of jihadists and armed them. We paved the way for the Taliban takeover and the rise of Osama bin Laden. We created the Islamist power in the northwest frontier of Pakistan, swelled by millions of Afghan refugees. We enabled the conditions for bin Laden's safe haven. We contributed to the instability of Pakistan.

    On a rainy day in Kabul last week, I watched Gates climb into the cockpit of a Soviet-era helicopter that Americans use to teach Afghans how to fly. The defense secretary was in one of the same style Mi-17s that he once provided Stinger missiles to shoot down. The absurdity was not lost on Gates, an avid history reader who feels our foreign policy has too often been "an exercise in misread history."

    [Jan 17, 2010] Anger is building up... I love bank that "does God's work" Democrats are in trouble. "Chump change" president probably will be one term president.

    [Jan 13, 2010] Obama to Announce $120 Billion TARP Fee

    Ah, the machinations that Faustian bargains produce!

    The Obama Administration is now caught in its own machinations and is having to backpedal fast and hard from its bankster friendly posture, or at least have the public believe it is executing that maneuver.

    While I cannot fathom the logic, Team Obama clearly decided to throw in its hat with the industry from the beginning, supporting a whole raft of tricks to keep banks from recognizing losses (heavens, might expose that some were bankrupt and require that incumbents be given the heave ho!). It also assisted in the "talk up the bank stocks" effort, since goosing prices would allow some banks to sell shares and save the new Administration the unpleasant task of figuring out how to resolve and recapitalize the sickest bank. It never seemed to occur to them that the best time for a President to take unpopular but productive action is at the start of his tenure. Nor did they anticipate that the public was not as dumb and inattentive as they assumed, and has taken notice of how the Administration has hitched its wagon to that of the plutocrats.

    Now some readers might argue that, gee, things look better than the did in March, surely this Team Obama program was not such a bad idea. Well, actually, it was and is. The record of serious financial crises shows that regulatory forbearance (which is letting banks soldier on with the hope they will earn their way out of their messes over time) is more costly than forcing them to recognize losses and recapitlize them. Not only are the ultimate bailout costs higher with the "let 'em off easy" approach, but economic recovery is weaker too.

    Team Obama is now having the contradictions in its stance exposed. If the banks were really healthier due to their own efforts, the salvos against them would be unwarranted. Here they had gone over the brink, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. All these complaints about their earnings and bonuses are mere class jealousy. But no one save the banksters themselves believe that tripe. The banks got massive subsidies during and after the crisis; they continue now with the Fed's super low rates and continued intervention in the mortgage markets (theoretically ending in March, but most informed observers expect the central bank to blink).

    But Team Obama does not want to play up the extent to which the industry has benefitted from public munificence; that only stokes the deserved and correct public anger, which includes the Administration for cutting such a crappy deal with the industry. So it has the PR conundrum of having it be beneficial for political reasons for them to beat up on the financiers, but now being so deeply aligned with them as to make that impossible, save perhaps on a few narrow issues that it hopes will have sufficient peasant-appeasement value. Any full-bore attack would represent an embarrassing change from the Administration's past fawning posture, and would also require the sacrifice of a senior head or two, presumably starting with Timothy Geithner, to look credible. But Obama seems constitutionally incapable of firing anyone, no matter how much it would serve him to do so.

    The sketchy announcement du jour, that Obama will announce a $120 billion TARP fee this week (hhm, conveniently timed to distract attention from the start of the hearings into the crisis and Wall Street bonus announcements) illustrates the bizarre position the Administration is in. Alert readers may recall that Obama was touting the performance of the TARP at his Lehman anniversary speech in September. It repeated that palaver in December. As we noted then:

    Both Obama and the Treasury Department keep talking up the TARP as if it is a money maker for taxpayers, when nothing could be further from the truth. Obama tried this stunt in his anniversary of Lehman speech, and the Treasury continues with the theme, of implying that results for the firms that paid back are representative of what the final results would be.

    If this logic were generally true, that would mean subprime bonds were a good investment too. After all, most borrowers did make good on their mortgages. A late September Moodys mortgage survey that a reader sent me estimated that total losses on subprime RMBS will be about 26%, which means that 74% were money good.

    The problem with the Treasury/Obama three card monte is that the strongest TARP are the ones that paid off first. Things can only go downhill from here. Do you expect AIG to repay the TARP in full? Or the auto companies?

    But you'd never guess that if you took the latest propaganda at face value. From MarketWatch:

    The Troubled Asset Relief Program has generated at least $16 billion in profit so far, the Treasury Department said late Wednesday…

    Total repayments by TARP banks should top $175 billion by the end of 2010, cutting taxpayer exposure to the sector by three-quarters, the Treasury estimated.

    TARP programs aimed at stabilizing the banking system will earn a profit from dividends, interest, early repayments, and the sale of warrants, it added. Bank investments of $245 billion in Treasury's 2009 fiscal year were initially projected to cost $76 billion, but are now forecast to generate a profit.

    Yves here. Did you catch that? This is too clever by half. They are now talking about TARP "bank only" results, which serves to omit the biggest turkeys.

    So let's return to today's story and the PR corner that Team Obama has painted itself in. It isn't willing to do the UK thing and decry banker bonuses as irresponsible and unwarranted. It had Kenneth Feinberg, the pay czar, take a few scalps, but it was clear the Adminsitration had no intention of challenging the financial industry's right to loot and pillage. It isn't even willing to say the profits are due almost entirely to subsidies, hence a windfall profits tax (presumably one focused on capital markets operations, that's where the real juice is) is in order. Heavens, that might lead chump investors to question bank valuations and sell stocks! Horrors, can't have prices that reflect fundamentals when the Administration has been pointing to the improvement in the financial markets as proof its policies are working.

    So the finesse is now to admit, in a reversal of its recent posturing, that yes Virginia, the TARP is losing money (this is the first time they have admitted the obvious). So that means banks need to pony up more for the cost of their rescue. Of course, we omit the complicating factor that AIG has been the biggest black hole, that the deal was retraded four times (or is it five now, I am losing track), and some money flowed through AIG to foreign banks like Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank, who will not participate in this little levy.

    Notice how this finesse keeps the focus on the TARP, the program the public already hates, and diverts attention from the man-behind-the-curtain stuff the Fed has been up to, or the FDIC guarantees on bond issued by the likes of Goldman.

    Thin details as of this hour. From Reuters (hat tip reader Ray D):

    President Barack Obama will announce plans on Thursday to raise up to $120 billion from major U.S. financial firms to cover expected losses from a taxpayer-funded bank bailout, a senior administration official said on Tuesday…

    The Obama administration official said the amount of money raised from the fees would not exceed $120 billion since this was the higher end of conservative estimates of the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

    U.S. Treasury officials expect TARP losses to be much lower than that sum…

    Bloomberg has the same sketch, save suggesting the announcement will come Wednesday, and more stage-setting quotes:

    "The politics on this is really quite easy," said Doug Elliott, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former managing director at JPMorgan Chase & Co. "The public would be supportive of anything up to shooting and burning the bankers."

    Up to? Elliot has clearly underestimated how upset some people are.

    Posted by Yves Smith

    Selected Comments

    attempter:

    They really are in an impossible position, since the absolute goal in all of this has to be to keep pretending that all this worthless toxic paper has any value whatsoever. That's been the great project of Wall St and the government since summer of 07.

    The overriding concern always is to prevent price discovery. To prevent the market from actually finding out what this crap is worth, the way it so ardently wants to.

    Since every bank knows the garbage is worthless, none of them are willing to buy or further compromise their balance sheets by lending.

    So it's up to the taxpayers to shoulder the entire burden. That's why this criminal government will continue to buy MBS. How can it stop at $1.25 trillion? The purchases are the only thing keeping the pretense going at all. The moment they stop the crash recommences. That's why they lifted the bailout limit on Fannie and Freddie to infinity.

    If they can't figure out a way to directly buy the toxic junk from the banks they can at least do it through the GSEs.

    The bailout is permanent, for as long as they can keep it propped up. This is Bailout America.

    Since Obama was lying all along when he promised himself as a reformer, since he never had any intention of doing anything but trying to prop up the status quo, he found himself in this self-imposed bottleneck where he has no choice but to do what he's doing.

    Though his own political ineptitude and the fact that he's a contemptible twerp the banksters can't bring themselves to even pretend to respect has made it look alot worse cosmetically than it had to.

    Like for example the fact that he clings to Geithner. That he's gratuitously relinquished one of history's oldest, easiest political tricks, sacrificing an unpopular subordinate to take the heat off yourself and buy time. That could work – look around and you'll see how many delusional people still cling to the "if only the czar knew" myth.

    But wingnut welfare seems completely wired into the system (it's not just Obama, of course). Nobody can ever longer be fired or even minimally be held accountable for any level of incompetence or crime.

    DoctoRx:

    IMO taking strong action against Big Finance at the outset of the administration would have been just as popular as Reagan's actions against PATCO and the postal workers were. Mostly the only whiners would have been the stakeholders of the companies affected.

    A new broom should sweep clean.

    Robespierre:

    I don't trust any thing that comes out of Obama's administration. As long as bankers' incomes (individuals) are not directly targeted there will be no change. This will never happen. I've seen this before, the issue is not greed, insolvency, liquidity etc. The issue is government corruption. I know we like to think that the USA government is better than most and to enforce this illusion by changing the names of corruption. For instance, we call bribes "campaign contributions", we punish corporations with fines and taxes yet we leave the real perpetrators unpunished. As long as we pretend that all is well with the system there will be no progress.

    DownSouth:

    Yves said: "…the administration hitched its wagon to the plutocrats."

    Is it conceivable that Obama could have been any more mind-numbingly stupid than he has been?

    He had the ordinary people solidly behind him. And he tossed them to the wind. And for what?

    The man who becomes prince through the help of the nobles will find it more difficult to remain in power than the man who becomes prince through the help of the people, for the former will be surrounded by men who will presume to be his equal. As a consequence, he will not be able to command them or control them as he would like.

    But the prince who comes to power through the support of the people will stand alone, and there will be few or none at all near him who will not be disposed to obey him. Besides, it is impossible to satisfy the nobles fairly without injuring others, whereas it is indeed possible to do so with respect to the people, for their wishes have more right, since they seek to avoid oppression while the nobles seed to oppress.

    It should also be noted that a prince can never be secure against a hostile populace because it is numerous, whereas he can be secure against the nobles because they are few. The worst he can fear from a hostile people is to be abandoned by them, but from a hostile nobility he must fear not only being abandoned but also being attacked. Being possessed of more foresight and shrewdness, the nobles will not let slip any change to protect their interests, and they will seek to gain favor with any potential winner. Moreover, a prince must of necessity accept the common people as he finds them, but he can very well do without any particular group of nobles, since he can make them and unmake them at any time by withdrawing or bestowing authority as he pleases.

    –Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

    It is obvious that Obama has convinced himself that he is the quintessential Machiavellian. He got the dishonesty part right. He got the treachery part right. He got the betrayal part right. But there is one part he got horrifically wrong, and that is the part about political calculation.

    Anonymous Jones:

    I love the reference to the Prince. And I completely agree with the underlying assertion in the Prince. Alas, I diverge with you about Obama "having" the support of the people. I think Obama knew he couldn't keep the support of the people if he didn't genuflect before the nobles. The marketing machine of politics is too great now, the people too willingly stupid and confused, to keep them for any length of time without the support of the nobles. I could be wrong on this, but marketers know too much now about the buttons to push to make the rats take a certain path in the maze. You can't lose the support of the money and hope to keep the support of the people. I just don't believe it.

    DownSouth:

    Anonymous Jones,

    Yours is certainly the classical point of view, which, as Hannah Arendt put it, "was to become authoritative for all time up to our own." Arendt explains that:

    In the entire tradition of philosophical, and particularly of political thought, there has perhaps been no single factor of such overwhelming importance and influence on everything that was to follow than the fact that Plato and Aristotle wrote in the fourth century, under the full impact of a politically decaying society, and under conditions where philosophy quite consciously either deserted the political realm altogether or claimed to rule it like a tyrant.
    –Hannah Arendt, "Karl Marx and the tradition of Western political thought"

    For Plato, as Arendt goes on to point out:

    Persuasion had become to him a form, not of freedom, but of arbitrary compulsion through words, and in his political philosophy he proposed to substitute for this arbitrary compulsion the coercion of truth.

    So for Plato, the faculty of speech, which lies at the heart and soul of political action, was "opposed to the perception of truth." Truth, according to Plato, should be divined by "philosopher kings," who, as Reinhold Niebuhr observes, are the ancient forebears of our modern-day "expert-kings" or "scientist-kings." A modern-day manifestation of a "scientist-king" or "expert-king" can be found in the position/person of someone like Alan Greenspan-able to make policy decisions completely insulated from political exigencies.

    The Founding Fathers of our nation were quite leery of the wisdom of the masses, but not nearly so pessimistic as Plato. Too many monarchs–surrounded by their philosophers, scientists and experts–were tyrants. The Hobbesian construct was obviously flawed. There had to be a better way. I like how Robert McAfee Brown, in the introduction to The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, put it:

    The mixture of grace and sin, in both individuals and cultures, works as a potentially redemptive rather than an inevitable destructive ingredient in our political life, to take one example. Niebuhr's most incisive epigram shows why: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." We can use power creatively in the service of justice, and that is our glory. But we can also abuse power destructively in the service of self, and that is our demonry. Consequently, we need built-in safeguards to assure that no individual and no group accumulates too much power.

    Arendt, in the chapter called "Lying in Politics" in her book Crises of the Republic, unloads both barrels into Madison Avenue charlatans like Edward Bernays. "[T]he psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion," she excoriates.

    And for a much more empirical overview I recommend Daniel Yankelovich's Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World:

    Opinion research in the U.S. does reveal a public strikingly inattentive to the details of even the most consequential and controversial policies. This suggests a potential for manipulation. But the research also indicates great stability and coherence in the public's underlying attitudes and values. Americans show themselves perfectly capable of making the distinctions needed to determine what Harwood Childs called "the basic ends of public policy," and of pursuing these logically and clearly. There is a persisting structure to American opinion that belies the picture of a populace helpless before the "engineers of consent."

    Valissa:

    If one pays attention to Obama's political history prior to running for president it becomes VERY OBVIOUS that he has never cared two bits about "the people." His entire career has been spent in political and social climbing and unlike some politicians he never even bothered with leaving a few crumbs behind for the little people. While some people try and make a big deal about his being a community organizer, no one has even mentioned if or how he actually ever helped anyone. This is just one set of reasons why, for the first time in my life, I did not vote Democrat in a presidential election. He is and always has been only interested in his own welfare and those of his rich friends whilst seeking power from and for same.

    Russ:

    Just brilliant, Yves. Thanks for making me ill and smile at the same time.

    Freemon SandleWould`

    Why anyone would think Barack Hu-Sane? Obama would get ANYTHING right makes me question their sanity. All the implied shoulda dones and might have beens in the comments above really throw me.

    I knew from the minute I heard the guy speak the very first time he was not cut from presidential cloth and did not have what it took.

    What would you really expect from a community organizer???? these people do not create GNP. They abscond with it!

    funkright:

    "I knew from the minute I heard the guy speak the very first time he was not cut from presidential cloth and did not have what it took…" Heh? And George W Bush did…? There is no 'presidential cloth', we are all cut from the same fabric.. I may not agree with everything that Obama is doing (or has done), but he's 'no worse' than any of his predecessors. We may have expected too much.

    Dave Raithel:

    I expected ordinary disappointment. Yves Smith and others remind me how extraordinarily disappointed I am. Freemon SandleWould and others remind me to be fearful of who'd be running things if Obama and The Stagnant Dems were not. Mostly I still appreciate that Obama and The Stagnant Dems haven't really fucked things up like Dubya and Company; they've mostly failed to fix anything. What I still haven't concluded is whether they CAN'T, or whether they WON'T.

    Siggy:

    Didn't vote for President Obama. Did want him to succeed, so far he's failing.

    The $120 billion TARP fee is an interesting breech of contract, it appears to have some currency with the public. In some ways it has the appearance of being moral and ethical; yet, it is what it is, a retroactive tax. There's a bit of a Constitutional problem there.

    Everybody seems to see this TARP Fee as a PR exercise. In that vision there is the circumstance of a failing coverup. The Fed and the Treasury failed in their regulatory obligations. The Congress failed in its obligation for oversight of the agencies. This anouncement comes on the opening of the hearings that are intended to devine causes and a course of corrective action. Does this announcement put a pall over the impending hearings?

    A lot of theater going on and very little substance. What's that line in Macbeth; ". . . sound and fury signifying nothing!".

    Our government has failed us. In large part the occurance is the result of our inattention. I sense that all those student loans have been a great waste. Does the public understand that it does matter whether they vote. It does matter what policies that it asks for and receives. Isn't it self evident that what the government doles out must be funded with either taxes or a devaluation of the money supply.

    If you were around for WWII, you may recall rationing and stamps for meat and sugar and gasoline. You may recall the paucity of consumer goods and the forced savings that that experience engendered. You may recall that we were then a creditor nation. If you were around for that event you will probably agree that WWII marked the onset of our recovery from the Great depression.

    It was savings, albeit forced that boot strapped us out of the Great Depression. A very important lesson has been trashed. If you think that government stimulus is going to save our bacon this time, consider the fact that you cannot, in recorded history, find a nation that borrowed its way to a sustainable prosperity.

    alex:

    "If you think that government stimulus is going to save our bacon this time, consider the fact that you cannot, in recorded history, find a nation that borrowed its way to a sustainable prosperity."

    Here's an exception: the US in WWII.

    We were a net creditor in the sense of a foreign creditor, and private savings were high (of necessity), but the US government was an enormous debtor. Industrial production was an enormous fiscal stimulus.

    Moopheus:

    ""The public would be supportive of anything up to shooting and burning the bankers."

    Indeed. If Obama had announced that a B2 bomber squadron dropped a few bunker-busters on Wall Street and bank headequarters, and the survivors were being carted off to Gitmo, people would have cheered.

    NotTimothyGeithner:

    Fees? So the individuals that did committed the fraud will get off scott-free? Wonderful!

    Robespierre:

    Of course they will. Coming soon to a theater near you: Criminals Like Us A Government and Bankers production

    Robespierre :

    This from hearings:

    Blankfein said his firm reaped rewards from government support during the financial meltdown.

    "We believe that the government action was critical and we benefited from it," he said. "The system clearly needs to be structured so that private capital, rather than government capital, is used to stabilize troubled firms promptly before a crisis metastasizes."

    Isn't this the definition of windfall taxes? Here you have a CEO of GS admitting to that. How about it Obama?

    tyaresun:

    The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commision should be holding hearings in Gitmo if not Jordan or Syria for questioning. That is the only way these clowns will talk sense.

    Blurtman:

    Yves,

    Here is another of Geithner's unfatomable AIG cover-up statements which is clearly perjury.

    As you have reported, AIG executive bonuses had become very controversial following the taxpayer bailouts of AIG.

    On November 27, 2008, you reported on this controversy:

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/11/aig-plans-to-pay-retention-bonuses-to.html

    This story was all over the blogosphere and even the MSM in November 2008 and thereafter.

    Geithner testified to Congress that he first learned of the AIG exec bonuses in March 2008, from his staff. Here is one of numerous links that report his contention:

    http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/18/aig.treasury/index.html

    It may come as a shock to many, but Tim Geithner does not have Internet access. Moreover, his boss, colleagues, family and friends are forbidden to discuss relevant AIG stories that are on the Internet and MSM with Geithner.

    So even though news of the AIG exec bonuses was all over the blogosphere and MSM in November 2008, it is not perjury for Geithner to claim that he first learned of the AIG bonuses from his staff in March 2009.

    Right……

    Isn't it a crime to lie when you are giving testimony to Congress? Or is it not a crime?

    Blurtman:

    Correction: "March 2008″ should be "March 2009″

    "Geithner testified to Congress that he first learned of the AIG exec bonuses in March 2009,…."

    Michael M. Thomas:

    Bernanke claims a $42.6 billion profit on paper the Fed bought off Wall Street balance sheets. Might we see the tickets or marks, please – or will these, too, be redacted?

    Michael M. Thomas:

    How about a spur of the moment humane gesture from Blankfein et al: $50 million for Haitian relief?

    b:

    "But Obama seems constitutionally incapable of firing anyone, no matter how much it would serve him to do so."

    This is patently false. During the campaign, and during its first year, the administration has repeatedly fired, or repealed nomination, of staff that became what they perceived as a liability. The distinction is that these were individuals not connected to the establishment. Hence we have tax evaders (Geithner IMF) and felony suspects (Bernanke BofA/Lynch, Geithner AIG) as well as funtionally incompetent (Summers, Harvard endowment) appointed, confirmed, reappointed, reconfirmed. But this has nothing to do with Obama being incapable of firing anyone – quite the opposite.

    Those too serve who fail as desired.

    Valissa:

    "While I cannot fathom the logic, Team Obama clearly decided to throw in its hat with the industry from the beginning"

    Here's a name for starters… "Penny Pritzker" who was Obama's finance chair during his campaign. She's a bankster from way back and from what I've read about her she had plenty of experience with looting the government under other guises before Obama even ran for office. Given the particular set of elites who funded Obama's campaign I don't see how anyone who knew where his money was coming from could possibly wonder why he's been supporting the banskters from the beginning. Quid pro quo, etc, etc.

    As I mentioned in a prior comment, anyone who took the trouble to do a little research on Obama could have predicted this behavior on his part. But people did NOT want to see it… they wanted to believe in him. Most of my friends have come back and said they should have listened to me when I tried to tell them what he was really about or share my research notes on him (HAHAHAHA my thoughts and research notes had no credibility. even with people who respect my intelligence, given the strong force of propadanda and herd mentality). But I have simply responded that I don't think it would have made any difference given the things are today.


    Doc,

    <i>"I guess one thing that does interest me still, is the potential power of the press and the possibility that bloggers may help influence future policy"</i>

    Individuals like Yves are important, but they are important in a very limited way -- only as the crystallizing force for new political parties. In a modern society voices of discontent does not matter much unless they are politically organized. So far the result is negative -- other then teabaggers, I do not see any "proto-parties" gaining strength. This is just widespread, diffused amorphous discontent that can be channeled in unpredictable ways, but so far plays into the hands of Republican Party. Dems will lose some seats this year.

    Historically, road to hell was always paved with good intentions.

    Guest Post: Nice Work Creating New Terrorists, You Morons

    Preface: This is admittedly somewhat peripheral to economics and business. However, terrorist attacks cost many billions of dollars in damage, and could severely depress consumer sentiment and "animal spirits". And, as I have previously written, unnecessary wars hurt the economy. See this and this.

    American civilian and military leaders have been creating new terrorists through their:

    (1) Use of torture

    and

    (2) Killing of innocent civilians- especially children – in Arabic countries.

    Torture

    A high-level American Special Ops interrogator says that information obtained from torture is unreliable, and that torture just creates more terrorists. Indeed, he says that torture of innocent Iraqis by Americans is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place.

    A former FBI interrogator - who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects - says categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence. On the other hand he says that torture actually turns people into terrorists.

    A 30-year veteran of CIA's operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, :

    "This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn't work - it doesn't - but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize."

    Former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke says that America's indefinite detention without trial and abuse of prisoners is a leading Al Qaeda recruiting tool.

    A former U.S. interrogator and counterintelligence agent, and Afghanistan veteran said,

    Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo.

    The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found:

    "The administration's policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies … strengthened the hand of our enemies."

    Two professors of political science have demonstrated that torture increases, rather than decreases, terrorism.

    Killing of Innocent Civilians

    The former number 2 counter-terrorism expert at the State Department says that military attacks in Iraq increase terrorism.

    Indeed, Al Qaeda wasn't even in Iraq until the U.S. invaded that country.

    After the U.S. military handcuffed and then killed a bunch of Afghan kids, thousands of Afghans are protesting the brutal killings, chanting 'Death to America!'.

    Nice work creating new terrorists, you morons.

    Anyone who thinks this is a partisan issue should read this.

    In related news, not only are the U.S. government's actions creating more terrorists, but "reforms" made to the intelligence agencies have made it MORE DIFFICULT to stop the terrorists they've created.

    Idiots.

    Michael:

    Well all these wars are basically about economics aren't they?

    At the very best they're `fighting for peace and democracy'. Which is only so that chucky-d's (mcdonalds), coca-cola, disney and microsoft can sell more crap to even more people without being blown up.

    Or for energy, for obvious reasons.

    Or more conspiratorially so that the arab world region can never climb out of the dark ages.

    It's ALL about economics. The torture and illegal incarceration are just side-shows anyway – having wars against nations are a pretty good recruiting tool too. And they're direct outcomes from the same sort of mindset as that which drove the failed banks into the ground. e.g. justified in whatever i do, so long as it's for my benefit.

    avrymann:

    War is a business, the largest in the world. Look at the defense budget. It is massive, and that doesn't count the off budget and hidden items that are most certainly illegal. Don't take my word for it. A certified American war hero, Marine General Smedley Butler finally realized that he and his troops were providing the muscle for big business by enforcing their will in other countries to enrich business and impoverish the masses. He wrote the book, War is a Racket.

    Trainwreck:

    This goes hand in hand with the fear-mongers that constantly tell us to "fear the next terrorist attack!" Well guess what, fear is the primary tool of terrorism and once you cave into fear, terrorism works. Once fear becomes infectious, overreaction is often the result.

    We need to suck it up and find our courage once again as a nation. Will future terrorists attacks occur? Yes. Should we be vigilant against terrorists to our utmost? Yes. Should we react with fear every time a terrorist attack occurs or is attempted? Hell no!

    Find your courage and stop flinching Americans.

    And when we do react we should do so in a measured rational way, not fueled by fear or the need for vengeance (or any other emotion for that matter).

    mmckinl:

    Well … Washington is exactly correct … The US is harassing, bombing, based in, fighting wars in at least 8 Muslim countries … Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and with Israel's help … Palestine…

    We have injured, maimed, dislocated and killed millions of Muslims … the vast majority of these, innocent men, women and children … The survivors, their friends and family are certainly not amused by "Our Freedoms" …

    Jerry:

    The itemized reasons offered by Bin Laden, Hamas and Al Qaeda for waging war on the West and endless and ever changing. They first said that 9-11 was perpetrated because the "infidels" occupied the holy land and that the West instituted sanctions against Iraq. Both of those reasons have ceased to exist, yet the Islamic teerorists continue to wage war against America. Thus, it is preposterous to say that torture and unintended civilian harm are the cause the Islamic hatred of America. They will find a reason to hate no matter what the West does. They actually hate the West because of our many freedoms that permit things like fair treatment of women.

    Ronald:

    As a Vietnam Vet I can tell you nothing new is happening today regarding these issues. Americans killed hundred of thousands of civilians in Nam with the free fire zone. The question becomes why Americans are so blood thirsty? Iraq War had a 70% approval rating before the bombing, Afghanistan military buildup and deployment has been just as popular. I could go on and on but lets make sure we understand that the general public support these activities and will continue to do so unless middle and upper class whites are drafted and die in large numbers and taxes are raised to pay for the effort.

    Vynny G.:

    The War on terror was something that was necessary when it was started, after 9/11, as we could not just stand there and let them attack us like that without a strong response. However, the fact that 8 years later there is still no clear strategy and no victory in sight, is troubling.

    As far as torture goes, that reflects the mentality of the previous administration more than anything else. One only needs to listen to Chaney's recent barking to see how we were able to sink so low under his "leadership".

    Vinny

    Ishmael :

    I lived on a US military base during Vietnam. There was a sign over the gate as you left that said the following - "You are now entering the most dangerous place in the world, a US highway."

    Yes, 3,000 people died on 9/11. During the average year, 40,000 people die on a US freeway. During the average year 400,000 die from cigarettes. Shortly after 9/11 approximately 135 people dies in the fire at a little rock and roll bar in Rhode Island.

    America suck it up! None of us are going to get out of here alive.

    M:

    "The War on terror was something that was necessary when it was started, after 9/11, as we could not just stand there and let them attack us like that"

    Vinny,

    I'm just a regular reader here, almost never post. I always look forward to reading your comments, but I can't understand the basis of the above-mentioned quote.

    The fact that Bush-Cheney DEMANDED to be kept off-record and unsworn at the 9-11 cover-up exercise. (Notice I didn't call that an investigation.)Says more than words could say.

    So, I don't get your "them attack us".

    My take is that it was a copy of the "1933 business plot under Roosevelt ", but this time it was carried out successfully. The variant was that this time "business" was in the US Vice-President Chair. No need to overthrow anything. Just an enabling event, like a "pearl Harbour"

    To advance American oil interests in Iraq.

    Afghanistan was also rolled in the mix, but left destabilized enough to saunter to blitzkrieg another arab nation to the proverbial stone age.

    Also, Vinny, you must know that the Bush spawn are known associates of the Bin Laden's. Of course, Grampa Prescott Bush was an associate of none other than the Third Reich leadership. Look up American Gangsterism.

    So, I am not really sure what you mean by "them."

    Richard Kline:

    There are three reasons why controlling regimes resort to torture as an act of policy (as does the US); two functional, and one disfunctional. Understood in detail, the picutre is even more odious than it would appear on the surface, but rather less irrational.

    The ostensible reason for torture is to get good intelligence. This is not one of the three reasons why states _actually_ pursue torture, btw, but let's review whether there is any validity in the ostensible reason. Torture does _not_ supply reliable intel. This has been studied repeatedly, and the answer is the same. There have been detailed investigations of the results of torture under the Nazi regime pursued by the Germans and torture in the USSR (both kept extensive records). People told the torturers whatever would be believed starting with what the torturers wanted to hear: intel value, zero (0). The results for the French in Algeria are more complex, to which I'll return below. Regarding the value of actual intel from tortured individuals, it was still low and always problematic. Then there is the issue Yves emphasizes in this post: tortured people hate those who oppress them, and become deeply engaged with retaliation and resistance. The primary reason that the US became a target for mass acts of terrorism by jihadist revolutionaries _resident in other countries_ is that we deliberately as an act of policy did, and continue to do so more than ever, train, fund, direct, and participate directly in torture and repression inflicted by regimes and governments in those other countries directed at both those jihadists and any other civil organization not bought and sold to the policies there. We created 9/11; it was inevitable as a derivative of our policy of a generation prior; it only surprised me that it took so long. Torture directed by the US now explicitly only makes us more foes, this is fact, and has many historical examples.

    What produces good intel? Collaborators. Buying in resistance is far, far more effective in securing control of a population than repression, and collaborators are essential at every level for that outcome. The ostensible reasons for torture then fail. What are the actual reasons?

    The first reason for inflicting torture is repression, to call it by its name. The tortured individual matters little. The real point is to intimidate the great mass of people who might not comply, protest, or otherwise resist the authority inflicting torture. Many of them knowing that, say, if they went to a protest they might be kidnapped off the stree, beaten in prison and raped, just aren't goint to go. Pretty obvious, right? The issue is to make a docile, conforming public of the target population by generating the common knowledge that and noncompliance has steep costs. In a situation where the mass of the population is desparate, this is insufficient. But in a situation where the mass of the population is getting by and a minority is desparate, this approach is quite successful. Those getting by are intimidated to make no resistance by the ongoing operations against the desparate who are receiving exemplary punishment. In such a situation, having ongoing torture of 'a terrorist few' is very useful for the state involved; "Don't mess with us," is the message. Especially if 'the terrorist few' are generally unpopular with the masses, e.g. the Black Panthers, the PKK in Turkey, and in fact most jihadists in their countries of origin. Consider Thatcherite Britain for a recent example. Exemplary punishment is one rational reason why state authorities torture, accepting the blowback as a cost of keeping power.

    The second reason for inflicting torture is to induce collaboration. Now, those tortured sometimes collaborate, but they aren't on the whole reliable. But if many are faced with the prospect that they _might_ be tortured OR they could be rewarded with significant priviliges or one-tme gains for cooperation, than a significant number will freely offer cooperation. And to keep their handlers happy, such collaborators _must_ generate good intel or other useful results. Now, many powerful regimes (though by no means all weak regimes) already have numerous rewards that they can offer without having to resort to torture, and the more effectively coopted individuals are the more effective the control of the state. So why, considering that, resort to torture with the blowback that it tends to generate rather than pay off collaborators? To hold down the going rate. If one has carrot _and_ stick, the price may be half a carrot; if one is only handing out carrots, the price may be two or three, and collaborators may only come forward when it is convenient for them rather than useful for the authority in question. The second reason for resorting to torture is to induce kapos and running dogs on a least cost/most results basis.

    Collabortion has been essential to all successful occupying powers and to nearly all successful suppressions of popular insurgencies. The French in Algeria produced most of their results by inducing collaborators on a carrot-or-stick basis. The Israelies have done the same for sixty years and counting. The Nazis crushed all popular resistance groups in Europe, high-falutin cinema of the present notwithstanding, by the using collaborators and quisling regimes (with the exception of the Serbs who, for reason of ethinic configurations in their area had no viable path to collaboration). Nearly all good Soviet domestic intel came via inducing collaboration as an alternative to execration.

    The third reason for an authority inflicting torture as an act of policy, the dysfunctional one, is, as skippy notes, for revenge. Pure and simple. "We have the power; you don't; we can kill/maim/torture you anytime we feel like it because we just don't like you." Revenge is typically compounded by racism or its near-equivalents. We tortured Native Americans for hundreds of years until they were completely out of sight and out of mind. They hated us and resisted us the more for it, but we didn't care because if just felt so good. The record of the British in Ireland is quite similar: the hostility which followed from torture and repression was high cost, but it never threatened Britian or British control and so was seen as the prerogative of empire. For many in the US, the torture of Muslims on is exactly for that reason: racism and lynch law. But this is a prerogative of the powerful. If the otherside can hit back, there's incentive not to resort to torture. It is exactly because the power disparity is so great that the 'torture of contempt' is resorted to, as an affirmation of the torturers of their status as exempt from reprisal and hence super-powerful.

    Not a pretty picture is it, friends? And make no mistake: torture as an act of US policy didn't start on 12 Sep 01. We have pursued it continuously for one hundred years as a policy act of government. There was recent mention of the US occupation of the Philippines online in the context of insurgency. Everything we do now in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Pakistan and Yemen inevitably to follow, was pioneered there. From 1947 on, we have trained torturers for the many regimes which our policy actors happened to feel on a given day were useful to us. Without pause, or change. We _made_ Iran our enemy in exactly this way. Just as we make ourselves more enemies continuously, under Democrat and Republican alike. Because to ensure our commercial hegemony we actively seek as a country to induce docility through intimidation, shake loose quislings and rats, and make those we despise grovel helplessly. Look at the facts, and the conclusion is obvious. No country is sufficiently large or well placed to make us stop, either.

    Will there be _real_ payback for us from the rest of the world in time, I wonder? Or will we collapse from our own incontinence and come back a smaller version of ourselves on the world state before the former happens? I would like to think that we could/would/might reform ourselves, but the last thirty years put the lie to that hope. We had a shot at doing so in the 1980s, but that was the road not taken. Too many took the fork to the right, and now we've got the Devil to pay. Ol' Nick is wrapped in the red, white and blue, and if he doesn't look down the street too many of us can find him simply by looking in the nearest mirror. Not an edifying picture.

    DownSouth:

    Richard Kline asks: "Will there be _real_ payback for us from the rest of the world in time, I wonder?"

    I live in Mexico, which by sheer weight of propinquity has borne the brunt of US imperial aggression for over 150 years.

    What we see now is the US imperialist class, because its rape and plunder have been thwarted by steadily growing resistance around the globe, turning its guns inward upon its own population.

    But you don't see dancing in the streets here, a celebration of the fact that many Americans are now reaping what they have sewn for so long. And I believe the reasons are twofold:

    1) If the American empire were to implode, the transition from US global hegemony to a new world order could be very painful, and

    2) If a global hegemon is a necessary evil to maintain world order, perhaps the US has not been the worst of empires. When one looks around at who might replace the US-China for instance-there is concern that the new hegemon could be worse, maybe much worse, than the US.

    Drew Westen Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010 Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator

    As the president's job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent, the Democratic base has become demoralized, and Independents have gone from his source of strength to his Achilles Heel, it's time to reflect on why. The conventional wisdom from the White House is those "pesky leftists" -- those bloggers and Vermont Governors and Senators who keep wanting real health reform, real financial reform, immigration reform not preceded by a year or two of raids that leave children without parents, and all the other changes we were supposed to believe in.

    Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

    What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

    What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

    The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.

    Leadership, Obama Style

    Consider the president's leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there's a conflict, because if there's a conflict, he doesn't want to be anywhere near it.

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    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    [Nov 27, 2018] terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Another words that reinforces neoliberal rationality is "growth", Modernization and

    [Nov 27, 2018] The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union

    [Nov 25, 2018] Let s recap what Obama s coup in Ukraine has led to shall we?

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

    [Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    [Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-)

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    [Nov 10, 2018] US Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Killed 500,000 by Jason Ditz

    [Nov 14, 2018] Is Orwell overrated and Huxley undertated?

    [Nov 14, 2018] Nationalism vs partiotism

    [Nov 13, 2018] The US's trajectory as it is, clearly parallel's the Soviet Union and Russia's situation during the mid-80's

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

    [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

    [Nov 11, 2018] Trump's Iran Policy Cannot Succeed Without Allies The National Interest by James Clapper & Thomas Pickering

    [Nov 10, 2018] The Reasons for Netanyahu's Panic by Alastair Crooke

    [Nov 09, 2018] Khashoggi Was No Critic of Saudi Regime

    [Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

    [Nov 07, 2018] There is only the Deep Purple Mil.Gov UniParty. The Titanic is dead in the water, lights out, bow down hard.

    [Nov 07, 2018] America's Vote of No Confidence in Trump by Daniel Larison

    [Nov 05, 2018] Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer

    [Nov 03, 2018] Neoliberal Measurement Mania

    [Nov 03, 2018] Kunstler The Midterm Endgame Democrats' Perpetual Hysteria

    [Oct 25, 2018] DNC Emails--A Seth Attack Not a Russian Hack by Publius Tacitus

    [Oct 25, 2018] Putin jokes with Bolton: Did the eagle eaten all the olives

    [Oct 23, 2018] Leaving aside what President Obama knew about Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations were ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or were rogue operations unknown in advance by the leaders and perhaps even directed against them

    [Oct 22, 2018] Cherchez la femme

    [Oct 20, 2018] I am most encouraged by the apparent Putin's realisation that the First Strike is possible now if not even likely. If the Russians expect an attack they are much less likely to be totally surprised, as usual. In fact, never in history was such attack by the West more likely than now, for various reasons which would take a while to explain.

    [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

    [Oct 18, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon by Robert W. Merry

    [Oct 16, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon

    [Oct 10, 2018] A Decalogue of American Empire-Building A Dialogue by James Petras

    [Oct 09, 2018] The Skripals Are an MI6 Hoax - 'Not Worthy of Ladies' Detective Novels' - Israeli Expert Demolishes UK Case

    [Oct 08, 2018] British intelligence now officially a by-word for organized crime by John Wight

    [Oct 04, 2018] Brett Kavanaugh's 'revenge' theory spotlights past with Clintons by Lisa Mascaro

    [Oct 02, 2018] The Kavanaugh hearings and the Lack of Radical Action

    [Oct 02, 2018] Kavanaugh is the Wrong Nominee by Kevin Zeese - Margaret Flowers

    [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

    [Sep 29, 2018] Steve Keen How Economics Became a Cult

    [Sep 29, 2018] The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 29, 2018] Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez

    [Sep 27, 2018] The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.

    [Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us

    [Sep 25, 2018] The entire documentary "The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire" by Michael Oswald is worth watching as an introduction to the corruption in the global finance industry.

    [Sep 24, 2018] Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues.

    [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets

    [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

    [Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

    [Sep 15, 2018] Why the US Seeks to Hem in Russia, China and Iran by Patrick Lawrence

    [Sep 15, 2018] BBC is skanky state propaganda

    [Sep 14, 2018] European media writing pro-US stories under CIA pressure - German journo

    [Sep 14, 2018] English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte s Bought Journalists Suppressed

    [Sep 14, 2018] The book Journalists for Hire How the CIA Buys the News Dr. Udo Ulfkotte was "privished"

    [Sep 11, 2018] If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed

    [Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

    [Sep 09, 2018] DNC Papadopoulos's UK contact may be dead

    [Sep 08, 2018] Plutocracy Now! by Michael Brenner

    [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

    [Sep 07, 2018] Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a legitimate request to neoliberal MSM - Stop Bugging Me About The New York Times' Trump Op-Ed

    [Sep 07, 2018] Neomodernism - Wikipedia

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards

    [Sep 02, 2018] Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia.

    [Aug 30, 2018] Just worth noting that in the hand-written notes taken by Bruce Ohr after meetings with Chris Steele, there is the comment that the majority of the Steele Dossier was obtained from an expat Russian living in the US, and not from actual Russian sources in Russia

    [Aug 28, 2018] A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

    [Aug 24, 2018] The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM

    [Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

    [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive

    [Aug 19, 2018] End of "classic neoliberalism": to an extent hardly imaginable in 2008, all the world's leading economies are locked in a perpetually escalating cycle of economic warfare.

    [Aug 18, 2018] Corporate Media the Enemy of the People by Paul Street

    [Aug 18, 2018] MoA - John Brennan Is No Match For Trump

    [Aug 18, 2018] Sanders behaviour during election is suspect, unless you assume he acted as sheep dog for hillary

    [Aug 18, 2018] I blame Brennan for MH 17 crash in Ukraine.

    [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

    [Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

    [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

    [Aug 10, 2018] On Contact: Casino Capitalism with Natasha Dow Schull

    [Aug 08, 2018] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

    [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

    [Aug 08, 2018] Neoliberal Newspeak: Notes on the new planetary vulgate by Bourdieu and Wacquant

    [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

    [Aug 05, 2018] How identity politics makes the Left lose its collective identity by Tomasz Pierscionek

    [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

    [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

    [Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

    [Jul 23, 2018] Doublethink and Newspeak Do We Have a Choice by Greg Guma

    [Jul 23, 2018] The Prophecy of Orwell's 1984. Totalitarian Control and the Entertainment Culture that Takes Over by Edward Curtin

    [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

    [Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

    [Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Jul 20, 2018] Tucker Carlson The Cold War Is Over. The World Has Changed. Time To Rethink America's Alliances

    [Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

    [Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

    [Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

    [Jul 16, 2018] Five Things That Would Make The CIA-CNN Russia Narrative More Believable

    [Jul 16, 2018] Why the Media is Desperate to Reclaim its Gatekeeper Status for News Zero Hedge Zero Hedge

    [Jul 15, 2018] Peter Strzok Ignored Evidence Of Clinton Server Breach

    [Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus

    [Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

    [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

    [Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

    [Jul 05, 2018] Britain's Most Censored Stories (Non-Military)

    [Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

    [Jul 03, 2018] Corruption Allegations are one of the classic tools in the color revolution toolbox

    [Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

    [Jul 03, 2018] When you see some really successful financial speculator like Soros or (or much smaller scale) Browder, search for links with intelligence services to explain the success or at least a part of it related to xUSSR space , LA and similar regions

    [Jun 26, 2018] Identity politics has always served as a diversion for elites to pursue stealth neoliberal policies like decreasing public spending. Fake austerity is necessary for pursuing neoliberal privatization of public enterprises

    [Jun 25, 2018] The review of A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey by Michael J. Thompson

    [Jun 21, 2018] The neoliberal agenda is agreed and enacted by BOTH parties:

    [Jun 19, 2018] How The Last Superpower Was Unchained by Tom Engelhardt

    [Jun 18, 2018] American Pravda The JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

    [Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

    [Jun 17, 2018] The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit by Stephen F. Cohen

    [Jun 17, 2018] Neoliberalism as socialism for the banks

    [Jun 14, 2018] Problem with US and British MSM control of narrative

    [Jun 13, 2018] Sanction Trump not Bourbon

    [Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

    [Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

    [Jun 10, 2018] Trump and National Neoliberalism by Sasha Breger Bush

    [Jun 10, 2018] Trump and National Neoliberalism, Revisited by Sasha Breger Bush

    [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

    [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

    [Jun 06, 2018] Neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving money to their friends

    [Jun 06, 2018] Why Foreign Policy Realism Isn't Enough by William S. Smith

    [Jun 06, 2018] Trump Voters, Your Savior Is Betraying You by Nicholas Kristof

    [May 31, 2018] Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent's Stealth Takeover of America by Lynn Parramore

    [May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

    [May 30, 2018] How Media Amnesia Has Trapped Us in a Neoliberal Groundhog Day

    [May 29, 2018] Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA by Elizabeth Lea Vos

    [May 27, 2018] America's Fifth Column Will Destroy Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

    [May 27, 2018] Northwestern University roundtable discusses regime change in Russia Defend Democracy Press

    [May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

    [May 23, 2018] Mueller role as a hatchet man is now firmly established. Rosenstein key role in applointing Mueller without any evidence became also more clear with time. Was he coerced or did it voluntarily is unclear by Lambert Strether

    [May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

    [May 22, 2018] Cat fight within the US elite getting more intense

    [May 22, 2018] Can the majority of the USA be made to see that neocons will ruin the USA, and that their power must be liquidated ?

    [May 20, 2018] Yes, Neoliberalism Is a Thing. Don't Let Economists Tell You Otherwise naked capitalism

    [May 20, 2018] "Free markets" as a smoke screen for parasitizing riches to implement their agenda via, paradoxically, state intervention

    [May 14, 2018] You will never see a headline in WSJ which reads something like FBI spy infiltrated the Trump campaign .

    [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

    [May 09, 2018] Trotskyist Delusions, by Diana Johnstone

    [May 03, 2018] Alert The Clintonian empire is still here and tries to steal the popular vote throug

    [May 03, 2018] Mueller's questions to Trump more those of a prosecuting attorney than of an impartial investigator by Alexander Mercouris

    [May 03, 2018] Skripal case British confirm they have no suspect; Yulia Skripal vanishes, no word of Sergey Skripal by Alexander Mercouris

    [May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

    [May 03, 2018] The 'Libya model' Trump's top bloodthirsty neocon indirectly admits that N. Korea will be invaded and destroyed as soon as it gives up its nukes by system failure

    [Apr 21, 2018] Amazingly BBC newsnight just started preparing viewers for the possibility that there was no sarin attack, and the missile strikes might just have been for show

    [Apr 21, 2018] It s a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.

    [Apr 15, 2018] The Trump Regime Is Insane by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Apr 30, 2018] Neoliberalization of the US Democratic Party is irreversible: It is still controlled by Clinton gang even after Hillary debacle

    [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

    [Apr 27, 2018] A Most Sordid Profession by Fred Reed

    [Apr 24, 2018] Class and how they use words to hide reality

    [Apr 24, 2018] America's Men Without Chests by Paul Grenier

    [Apr 23, 2018] Neoliberals are statists, much like Trotskyites are

    [Apr 23, 2018] How Neoliberalism Worms Its Way Into Your Brain by Nathan J. Robinson

    [Apr 23, 2018] The Tony Blair Rule: The Truth Takes 15 Years to Come Out, Skripal Countdown Starts Now - Simonyan

    [Apr 22, 2018] The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite

    [Apr 22, 2018] The Crisis Is Only In Its Beginning Stages by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Apr 21, 2018] On the Criminal Referral of Comey, Clinton et al by Ray McGovern

    [Apr 20, 2018] Stench of hypocrisy British 'war on terror' strategic ties with radical Islam by John Wight

    [Apr 19, 2018] The Neocons Are Selling Koolaid Again! by W. Patrick Lang

    [Apr 18, 2018] The Great American Unspooling Is Upon Us

    [Apr 17, 2018] Probable sequence of event in Douma false flag operation

    [Apr 17, 2018] Poor Alex

    [Apr 16, 2018] British Propaganda and Disinformation An Imperial and Colonial Tradition by Wayne MADSEN

    [Apr 11, 2018] It is long passed the time when any thinking person took Trump tweets seriously

    [Apr 10, 2018] The Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21, 2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad.

    [Apr 09, 2018] Ghouta is Arabic for Reichstag Fire by Publius Tacitus

    [Apr 09, 2018] When Military Leaders Have Reckless Disregard for the Truth by Bruce Fein

    [Apr 09, 2018] Trump Is He Stupid or Dangerously Crazy by Justin Raimondo

    [Apr 05, 2018] The Three Most Important Aspects of the Skripal Case so Far and Where They by Rob Slane

    [Apr 05, 2018] An Interview with Retired Russian General Evgeny Buzhinsky The National Interest

    [Apr 03, 2018] This Washington Post Headline Is Fake News

    [Apr 03, 2018] Exercise TOXIC DAGGER - the sharp end of chemical warfare

    [Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov

    [Apr 02, 2018] Russia 'Novichok' Hysteria Proves Politicians and Media Haven't Learned the Lessons of Iraq by Patrick Henningsen

    [Apr 02, 2018] The Litvinenko Conspiracy

    [Apr 01, 2018] Big American Money, Not Russia, Put Trump in the White House: Reflections on a Recent Report by Paul Street

    [Apr 01, 2018] Does the average user care if s/he is micro-targetted by political advertisements based on what they already believe?

    [Apr 01, 2018] UK may have staged Skripal poisoning to rally people against Russia, Moscow believes

    [Mar 31, 2018] FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible for anthrax attack! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq.

    [Mar 31, 2018] RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past

    [Mar 30, 2018] The Death Of The Liberal World Order by Leonid Savin

    [Mar 29, 2018] Giving Up the Ghost of Objective Journalism by Telly Davidson

    [Mar 27, 2018] The Stormy Daniels scandal Political warfare in Washington hits a new low by Patrick Martin

    [Mar 28, 2018] Deep State and False Flag Attacks

    [Mar 27, 2018] Indian Punchline - Reflections on foreign affairs by M K Bhadrakumar

    [Mar 27, 2018] Let's Investigate John Brennan, by Philip Giraldi

    [Mar 27, 2018] Perfidious Albion The Fatally Wounded British Beast Lashes Out by Barbara Boyd

    [Mar 25, 2018] A truly historical month for the future of our planet by The Saker

    [Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica Scandal Rockets to Watergate Proportions and Beyond by Adam Garrie

    [Mar 24, 2018] Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia by James Petras

    [Mar 24, 2018] Assange Suggests British Government Was Involved In Plot To Bring Down Trump by Steve Watson

    [Mar 24, 2018] Did Trump cut a deal on the collusion charge by Mike Whitney

    [Mar 23, 2018] Inglorious end of career of neocon McMaster

    [Mar 22, 2018] If it's correct, the Brits made a very nasty error that shows the true nature of their establishment.

    [Mar 22, 2018] Military at CNN

    [Mar 22, 2018] Vladimir Putin: nonsense to think Russia would poison spy in UK

    [Mar 22, 2018] I hope Brennan is running scared, along with Power. It's like the Irish Mafia.

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

    [Mar 21, 2018] Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared by Ray McGovern

    [Mar 21, 2018] Arafat and Litvinenko: an Interesting Turn to a Mysterious Story

    [Mar 21, 2018] Washington's Invasion of Iraq at Fifteen

    [Mar 21, 2018] Whataboutism Is A Nonsensical Propaganda Term Used To Defend The Failed Status Quo by Mike Krieger

    [Mar 21, 2018] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

    [Mar 18, 2018] Powerful intelligence agencies are incompatible with any forms of democracy including the democracy for top one precent. The only possible form of government in this situation is inverted totalitarism

    [Mar 16, 2018] Corbyn Calls for Evidence in Escalating Poison Row

    [Mar 16, 2018] NATO to display common front in Skripal case

    [Mar 16, 2018] The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern "journalists are either unemployed or prostitutes"

    [Mar 16, 2018] Are We Living Under a Military Coup ?

    [Mar 16, 2018] Will the State Department Become a Subsidiary of the CIA

    [Mar 14, 2018] Russian UN anvoy> alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia s reputation by Julian Borger

    [Mar 14, 2018] UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack

    [Mar 14, 2018] Jefferson Morley on the CIA and Mossad Tradeoffs in the Formation of the US-Israel Strategic Relationship

    [Mar 12, 2018] New Huge Anti-Russian Provocation ahead of Russian election by Robert Stevens

    [Mar 12, 2018] The USA has become completely an oligarchy run by a convoluted mix of intellignce agences and various lobbies with a fight going now on at the top (mafia 1 vs. mafia 2) for grabbing the leftovers of power, revenue, war spoils, etc

    [Mar 12, 2018] There is no democracy without economic democracy by Jason Hirthler

    [Mar 12, 2018] Colonizing the Western Mind using think tanks

    [Mar 12, 2018] State Department's War on Political Dissent

    [Mar 11, 2018] Washington s Century-long War on Russia by Mike Whitney

    [Mar 11, 2018] Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia by Kit

    [Mar 11, 2018] The Elephant In The Room by Craig Murray

    [Mar 11, 2018] It is highly probably that Steele and Skripal knew each other

    [Mar 11, 2018] Ramping Russophobia is the most convincing motive for the Skripal attack

    [Mar 11, 2018] I often think that, a the machinery of surveillance and repression becomes so well oiled and refined, the ruling oligarchs will soon stop even paying lip service to 'American workers', or the "American middle class" and go full authoritarian

    [Mar 10, 2018] Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in Obama policy and HRC campaign long before any Steele s Dossier. This was a program ofunleashing cold War II

    [Mar 10, 2018] Habakkuk on 'longtime' sources

    [Mar 10, 2018] From Yeltsin to Putin: Chubais, Liberal Pathology, and Harvard's Criminal Record

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time

    [Mar 10, 2018] They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

    [Mar 08, 2018] We don t have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn t found it yet! is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there s that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found

    [Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case?

    [Mar 08, 2018] In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports.

    [Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

    [Mar 08, 2018] A key piece of evidence pointing to 'Guccifer 2.0' being a fake personality created by the conspirators in their attempt to disguise the fact that the materials from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' were obtained by a leak rather than a hack had to do with the involvement of the former GCHQ person Matt Tait.

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    [Mar 06, 2018] Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network by Norman Solomon

    [Mar 06, 2018] The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge

    [Mar 06, 2018] The current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. But this hysteria is concentrated at the top level of media elite and neocons. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves due to the crisis of neolineralism.

    [Mar 04, 2018] Generals who now are running the USA foreign policy represents a great danger. These men seem incapable of rising above the Russophobia that grew in the atmosphere of the Cold War. They yearn for world hegemony for the US and to see Russia and to a lesser extent China and Iran as obstacles to that dominion for the "city on a hill

    [Mar 03, 2018] Top NYT Editor 'We NYT supports and follows the "national security" line (whatever that means)

    [Mar 02, 2018] The main reason much of the highest echelons of American power are united against Trump might be that they're terrified that -- unlike Obama -- he's a really bad salesman for the US led neoliberal empire. This threatens the continuance of their well oiled and exceedingly corrupt gravy train

    [Mar 02, 2018] Fatal Delusions of Western Man by Pat Buchanan

    [Mar 02, 2018] Contradictions In Seth Rich Murder Continue To Challenge Hacking Narrative

    [Feb 28, 2018] Perjury traps to manufacture indictments to pressure people to testify against others is a new tool of justice in a surveillance state

    [Feb 28, 2018] Another SIGINT compromise ...

    [Feb 27, 2018] Alfred McCoy The Rise and Decline of US Global Power

    [Feb 27, 2018] On Contact Decline of the American empire with Alfred McCoy

    [Feb 26, 2018] It looks like Christopher Steele's real role was laundering information which had been obtained through continued Inquiries of the NSA mega-file by our Ambassador to the UN

    [Feb 26, 2018] Democrat Memo Lays Egg by Publius Tacitus

    [Feb 26, 2018] Why one war when we can heve two! by Eric Margolis

    [Feb 25, 2018] Democracies are political systems in which the real ruling elites hide behind an utterly fake appearance of people power

    [Feb 25, 2018] Russia would not do anything nearing the level of self-harm inflicted by the US elites.

    [Feb 23, 2018] NSA Genius Debunks Russiagate Once For All

    [Feb 22, 2018] Bill Binney explodes the rile of 17 agances security assessment memo in launching the Russia witch-hunt

    [Feb 20, 2018] Russophobia is a futile bid to conceal US, European demise by Finian Cunningham

    [Feb 19, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial by Ray McGovern

    [Feb 19, 2018] The Russiagate Intelligence Wars What We Do and Don't Know

    [Feb 19, 2018] Russian Meddling Was a Drop in an Ocean of American-made Discord by AMANDA TAUB and MAX FISHER

    [Feb 18, 2018] Had Hillary Won What Now by Andrew Levine

    [Feb 16, 2018] A Dangerous Turn in U.S. Foreign Policy

    [Feb 16, 2018] The Deep Staters care first and foremost about themselves.

    [Feb 15, 2018] Trump's War on the Deep State by Conrad Black

    [Feb 14, 2018] The Anti-Trump Coup by Michael S. Rozeff

    [Feb 14, 2018] A Russian Trump by Israel Shamir

    [Feb 12, 2018] The Age of Lunacy: The Doomsday Machine

    [Feb 12, 2018] Too many sport disciplines, too much cheating, too much money and too many politics involved in the Olympic

    [Feb 12, 2018] Ike's Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Is Alive and Very Well by William J. Astore

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

    [Feb 11, 2018] How Russiagate fiasco destroys Kremlin moderates, accelerating danger for a hot war

    [Feb 11, 2018] British spy who meddled in US elections disappears

    [Feb 10, 2018] The generals are not Borgists. They are something worse ...

    [Feb 10, 2018] More on neoliberal newspeak of US propaganda machine

    [Feb 08, 2018] Control of narrative means that creation of the simplistic picture in which the complexities of the world are elided in favor of 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' dichotomy

    [Feb 03, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis Habakkuk on 'longtime' sources

    [Jan 30, 2018] Washington Reaches New Heights of Insanity with the "Kremlin Report" by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Jan 30, 2018] The Unseen Wars of America the Empire The American Conservative

    [Jan 29, 2018] It is OK for an empire to be hated and feared, it doesn t work so good when Glory slowly fades and he empire instead becomes hated and despised

    [Jan 28, 2018] Russiagate Isn t About Trump, And It Isn t Even Ultimately About Russia by Caitlyn Johnstone

    [Jan 28, 2018] The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Russiagate Isn't About Trump, And It Isn't Even Ultimately About Russia by Caitlyn Johnstone

    [Jan 27, 2018] The Rich Also Cry by Israel Shamir

    [Jan 27, 2018] As of January 2018 Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, is starting to look like something Trump should have done sooner.

    [Jan 27, 2018] In a Trump Hunt, Beware the Perjury Trap by Pat Buchanan

    [Jan 27, 2018] Mainstream Media and Imperial Power

    [Jan 26, 2018] Warns The Russiagate Stakes Are Extreme by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Jan 25, 2018] Russiagate as Kafka 2.0

    [Jan 24, 2018] The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate by Ray McGovern

    [Jan 24, 2018] Whistleblower Confirms Secret Society Meetings Between FBI And DOJ To Undermine Trump

    [Jan 24, 2018] Brazen Plot To Exonerate Hillary Clinton And Frame Trump Unraveling, Says Former Fed Prosecutor

    [Jan 22, 2018] Joe diGenova Brazen Plot to Frame Trump

    [Jan 22, 2018] Pentagon Unveils Strategy for Military Confrontation With Russia and China by Bill Van Auken

    [Jan 22, 2018] If Trump is an authoritarian, why don t Democrats treat him like one? by Corey Robin

    [Jan 22, 2018] Clapper may have been the one behind using British intelligence to spy on Trump.

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Associated Press is reporting that the Department of Justice has given congressional investigators additional text messages between FBI investigator Peter Strzok and his girlfriend Lisa Page. The FBI also told investigators that five months worth of text messages, between December 2016 and May 2017, are unavailable because of a technical glitch

    [Jan 22, 2018] How Michael Wolff duped the White House into giving him access to Trump's aides by Allahpundit

    [Jan 22, 2018] EPIC: CNN Host GOES OFF On Anti-Trump Michael Wolff for what he did on Live Tv

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

    [Dec 31, 2017] Where's the Collusion

    [Jan 20, 2018] What Is The Democratic Party ? by Lambert Strether

    [Jan 19, 2018] #ReleaseTheMemo Extensive FISA abuse memo could destroy the entire Mueller Russia investigation by Alex Christoforou

    [Jan 19, 2018] No Foreign Bases Challenging the Footprint of US Empire by Kevin B. Zeese and Margaret Flowers

    [Jan 17, 2018] Neoconning the Trump White House by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

    [Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer

    [Jan 15, 2018] CIA had an agent at a newspaper in every world capital at least since 1977

    [Jan 14, 2018] Sic Semper Tyrannis The Trump Dossier Timeline, A Democrat Disaster Looming by Publius Tacitus

    [Jan 14, 2018] Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart -- Say Hello to Fancy Bear

    [Jan 13, 2018] The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate by Ray McGovern

    [Jan 12, 2018] The DOJ and FBI Worked With Fusion GPS on Operation Trump

    [Jan 12, 2018] There are strong suspecions that Fusion GPs was CIA front company

    [Jan 10, 2018] Surrounded by Neocons by Philip Giraldi

    [Jan 08, 2018] Someone Spoofed Michael Wolff s Book About Trump And It s Comedy Gold

    [Jan 06, 2018] Russia-gate Breeds Establishment McCarthyism by Robert Parry

    [Jan 06, 2018] Trump's triumph revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington

    [Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein

    [Jan 02, 2018] Some investigators ask a sensible question: "It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?"

    [Jan 02, 2018] Neocon warmongers should be treated as rapists by Andrew J. Bacevich

    [Jan 02, 2018] What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears

    [Jan 02, 2018] Jill Stein in the Cross-hairs by Mike Whitney

    [Jan 02, 2018] Who Is the Real Enemy by Philip Giraldi

    [Jan 02, 2018] American exceptionalism extracts a price from common citizens

    [Jan 01, 2018] Putin Foresaw Death of US Global Power by Finian Cunningham

    [Dec 31, 2017] Brainwashing as a key component of the US social system by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Dec 31, 2017] EXCLUSIVE FBI s Own Political Terror Plot; Deputy Director and FBI Brass Secretly Conspired to Wage Coup Against Flynn Trump

    [Jan 14, 2019] Nanci Pelosi and company at the helm of the the ship the Imperial USA

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    [Jan 13, 2019] Tucker Carlson Routs Conservatism Inc. On Unrestrained Capitalism -- And Immigration by Washington Watcher

    [Jan 13, 2019] There is no free market! It's all crooked by financial oligarchy!

    [Jan 12, 2019] Tucker Carlson Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it's infuriating Fox News

    [Jan 12, 2019] Tucker Carlson has sparked the most interesting debate in conservative politics by Jane Coaston

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

    [Jan 11, 2019] Blowback from the neoliberal policy is coming

    [Jan 11, 2019] How Shocking Was Shock Therapy

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

    [Jan 08, 2019] The smaller the financial sector is the more real wealth there is for the rest of society to enjoy. The bigger the financial sector becomes the more money it siphons off from the productive sectors

    [Jan 08, 2019] Rewriting Economic Thought - Michael Hudson

    [Jan 08, 2019] The Financial Sector Is the Greatest Parasite in Human History by Ben Strubel

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

    [Jan 07, 2019] Russian Orthodox Church against liberal globalization, usury, dollar hegemony, and neocolonialism

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    [Jan 04, 2019] Veteran NBC-MSNBC Journalist Blasts Network in Resignation

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

    Sites

    Continued ...

    Etc

    Society

    Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

    Quotes

    War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

    Bulletin:

    Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

    History:

    Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

    Classic books:

    The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

    Most popular humor pages:

    Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

    The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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    Last modified: March 12, 2019