A Different Washington

2012-01-17T19:11:00.000-08:00

January 17, 2012

I become weary of talk of "the American dream," "freedom," and similar patriotic slogans because too often they are cover for something in which we have no reason to take pride. However, at least once a year, on Martin Luther King Day, I abandon cynicism and celebrate those words; to him they meant something.

Eugene Robinson, writing in The Washington Post, noted the aptness of the placement of the King statue, between the Jefferson Memorial, "which honors the man whose stirring words now apply to all Americans, not just a few," and Lincoln Memorial, "a tribute to a leader who shepherded the nation through days much darker than these," and started the process by which the principles of the Declaration became applicable to all. In his famous 1963 speech, King put it this way:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

Dr. King did not pretend that the battle for a share of Jefferson’s vision was over:

. . . One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

. . . When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. . . .

If any people had right to reject Americanism, to reject the notion of a shared heritage, it was those whose ancestors had been kidnaped, sold and enslaved by men mouthing the virtues of America, but King didn’t do that. He began his speech by referring to "the history of our nation." He didn’t make his indictment in terms of the irrelevance of American principles, or of their falsity, but as a demand that they be applied. He recognized and celebrated our founding principles and merely argued that we should live up to them:

I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

Would that every reference to our heritage and principles could be so valid.

____________________

There is another theme to King’s speech: faith. I have been critical of politicians who invoke religion, not least because doing so implies — or shouts — that a some partisan or interested program is God’s will. However, I’ve clung to an ill-defined exception to be applied where the appeal is not to doctrine but to moral principle. King’s address is an example. I would like to be able to add another qualification, that the issue be above politics, but that isn’t possible. Any serious social issue is political in the broad sense, and the campaign for civil rights for black people certainly had its political aspect. Whether or not my rationale makes any sense, I always am moved by these two passages, the second of which closed his speech:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

***

. . . From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

2012-01-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

January 14, 2012

As usual, the current political campaign in part involves a war of words. The choice of terminology plays a large part in defining the issues, and defining the issues goes a long way toward deciding them. One of the current debates is whether to use the word "capitalism."

Republican pollster Frank Luntz recently offered this advice: "Conservatives should not be defending capitalism. They should be defending economic freedom. And there is a difference. The word capitalism was created by Karl Marx to demonize those people who make a profit. We’ve always talked about the free enterprise system or economic freedom." ¹That may be questionable economic or linguistic history, but it’s good political advice: wrapping business practices in the patriotic bunting of freedom, or liberty, always has worked. Calling business "free enterprise" cloaks a multitude of sins. Referring to the free market or, more daringly (leaving out freedom) "the market" or the "market system," also works, as those concepts or labels can be held up as alternatives to (shudder) socialism. However, thanks in part to the Occupy publicity, capitalism and the market have taken a hit, so conservatives probably ought to heed Luntz’s suggestion and harp on "freedom."

A somewhat similar point was made by John Kay, writing in The Financial Times. Referring to a series of articles on "Capitalism in Crisis," he said, "The Financial Times is debating capitalism, but what it is really debating is the future of the market economy." Luntz had dismissed "capitalism" as a Marxist term, but Kay exonerated Marx, claiming that he "never used the word capitalism. But after the publication of Das Kapital, the term came to describe the system of business organisation which had made the industrial revolution possible."²So, to him,"capitalism" is a positive word, but he agrees that it should be abandoned.

(Whether he is correct about Marx may depend on the translation of Capital being used; perhaps the one he relies on doesn’t use the word. I have a copy of Volume I, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, which uses "capitalism" once; referring to another author, Marx said that he "betrays the innermost secret soul of English capitalism."³ However, even identifying the translation may not answer the question. A version of Volume I on the web, attributed to the same translators, uses "capitalism" twice, the other time in the phrase "in the period of capitalism," which my book renders "in the capitalist period."⁴It hardly matters. Marx used the terms "capitalist" repeatedly, as a noun and as an adjective, often substituting "capitalistic" as the latter.)

Kay’s principal point is that "capitalism’ is an outdated word. Today’s business leaders are not capitalists in the nineteenth-century sense. "Modern titans derive their authority and influence from their position in a hierarchy, not their ownership of capital." That is true, and making that clear might spare us blather about risk-taking and entrepreneurship. (It’s odd that a French term, difficult to pronounce or spell, would be the business buzz word. Even George W. Bush, Mr. Real ‘Murican, used it.)

Kay ended his article with this: "Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. By continuing to use the 19th-century term capitalism for an economic system that has evolved into something altogether different, we are liable to misunderstand the sources of strength of the market economy and the role capital plays within it." I certainly agree with the first sentence, but shifting the reference from capital to the market, standing alone, won’t lead to clear thinking. What is needed is a more sophisticated and realistic view of economics, including an awareness of the shortcomings of the market, both as a concept and as the basis of our system. Capitalism, free enterprise, the market, or whatever label next becomes fashionable describes a system which works well if and only if its inherent limitations and daners are recognized and appropriate duties and limitations are imposed.

However, the shift in the terms of reference will have to wait. Mitt Romney’s primary opponents are, in a nice twist on the linguistic tactic, turning "venture capitalism" into "vulture capitalism." That has led to a debate about the virtues of capitalism. Perhaps the C word will disappear during the final campaign, but Romney’s claim that Obama practices "crony capitalism" may keep it alive. No doubt we’ll hear more than enough about freedom and the market too.

________________________________

1. http://thinkprogress.org/ posted by Faiz Shakir on Jan 11, 2012
2. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/86667196-3afc-11e1-b7ba-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1jBRguu00
3. Marx, Capital, Chapter XXIV, § 4 (Britannica Great Books, Vol. 50, p. 296)
4. Chapter XXIV, § 1: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ; cf. Britannica Great Books, Vol. 50, p. 290

2011-12-28T19:14:00.000-08:00

December 28, 2011

It used to be possible, with only a modest amount of hypocrisy or ignorance, to watch A Christmas Carol and feel relief that the conditions Dickens described and Scrooge mocked or ignored had passed into the dustbin of history, banished by progress, material and moral. No longer.

Wealth

Scrooge was a piker. In 2007 (apparently the most data available) the cumulative wealth of the Forbes 400 was roughly the same amount of wealth held by the entire bottom fifty percent of American families. Six members of the Walton family had a combined worth equal to the total wealth of the entire bottom thirty percent.¹⁰⁴

Income

According to the Congressional Budget Office,

• For the 20 percent of the population with the lowest income, average real after-tax household income was about 18 percent higher in 2007 than it had been in 1979.

• For the 60 percent of the population in the middle of the income scale (the 21st through 80th percentiles), the growth in average real after-tax household income was just under 40 percent.

• For those just below the top, the 81st through 99th percentiles, average real after-tax household income grew by 65 percent.

• For the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007.• Between 2005 and 2007, the after-tax income received by the top one percent exceeded the after-tax income of the remaining 80 percent.¹⁰⁵

From another report:

• The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent of households increased from 16.9 percent in 2002 to 23.5 percent in 2007, a larger share than at any point since 1928.

• Income gains have been even more pronounced among those at the very top. The incomes of the top one-tenth of 1 percent of U.S. households have grown by 94 percent, $3.5 million per household, 2002 to 2007 (and more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005).

• The share of the nation’s income flowing to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of households is at the highest level since 1913, surpassing even the previous peak in 1928. ¹⁰⁶

The average Bush tax cut in 2011 for a taxpayer in the richest one percent is greater than the average income of the other 99 percent.¹⁰⁷

Not only do our numbers look awful absolutely, they do so relatively. The GINI index measures income inequality; the higher the number, the more unequal the distribution. The U.S., at 45, has the worst rating among developed nations. Scrooge’s United Kingdom is at 34, Canada at 32.1; the European Union average is 30.6, almost exactly that of Australia.¹⁰⁸

Poverty

An additional 2.6 million people fell into poverty in the United States last year, and the number below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, is the highest in the 52 years the statistic has been kept. The poverty rate was 15.1% in 2010, the highest level since 1993. About 6.7 percent of the population, 20.5 million people, fell into deep poverty, defined by an income less than half the official poverty line. The number of uninsured Americans increased by 900,000 to 49.9 million.¹⁰⁹

Bah, humbug

As the problems resemble those of Dickens’ era, so do the responses of the insufficiently frightened rich:

Home Depot Co-founder Bernie Marcus, referring to Occupy protesters: “Who gives a crap about some imbecile? Are you kidding me?”

Home Depot Co-founder Ken Langone: “I am a fat cat, I’m not ashamed . . . If you mean by fat cat that I’ve succeeded, yeah, then I’m a fat cat. I stand guilty of being a fat cat.”

Former BB&T Bank CEO John Allison: “Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive. This attack is destructive.”

Paychecx Inc. Founder Tom Golisano: “If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit."¹¹⁰

Visitation by ghosts won’t budge this lot.

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104. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/09/385941/walmart-heirs-worth-30-percent-bottom/
105. http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/doc12485/10-25-HouseholdIncome.pdf
106. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2908 ;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/oligarchy-american-style.html
107. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/11/23/375654/bush-tax-cut-one-percent/
108. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html
109. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/us/14census.html?pagewanted=all
110. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/12/20/393090/one-percent-call-occupy-imbeciles/

2011-12-12T14:55:00.001-08:00

December 12, 2011

It is difficult to find a national television news broadcast with which I do not feel compelled to carry on a critical, irritated conversation. I went through PBS, ABC and CBS over a period of years and eventually settled on NBC.

My current complaint has to do with the treatment of weather-disaster news by NBC. Because TV news dwells on such events, large segments of broadcasts have been devoted to them. Some of the stories, including one on Saturday night, have included comments about the large number of major disasters, but I do not recall hearing any reference to global warming, let alone man-made climate change. Perhaps there has been a statement I missed, but certainly there has not been any meaningful discussion.

Why not? The network cannot be unaware of the issue. Does it really think that the science is uncertain? Is it so intimidated by the right that it daren’t broach the subject?

Next-day reruns of The Daily Show have moved to 6 p.m., opposite NBC News, and we’ve switched to watching those. Faux news at least addresses issues, and for real news, I can read the papers.

2011-12-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

December 11, 2011

Usury, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, is
1. Historically, the lending of money with interest.
2. Today, the charging of an illegal rate of interest.
3. An illegally high rate of interest.

However, the second and third definitions virtually have fallen into the first, becoming relics of the past. That occurred in part because many state laws on maximum rates of interest have been superseded by federal law, which is friendly to banks. However, some state laws, including ours, set few limits; Washington’s law essentially is a comprehensive list of exceptions to the nominal limit of 12%.¹⁰² Therefore, between them they have made the definition of usury law —“A law that prohibits moneylenders from charging illegally high interest rates” — equally quaint. The result is to burden ordinary folk with oppressively high interest expenses.

The national average for credit cards is 14.43%; many, obviously, are far worse. Mortgage and auto loans, which are secured, are available at lower rates — the local average for the former is 4.25%, for the latter 5.87% — but there still is a huge spread between interest paid and interest charged. According to a list in the Sunday Seattle Times, the best money market fund yields 0.28%, with the average at about 0.02%. The national average for a 0ne-year CD is 0.35%; the average savings account pays about .2%.

The rates credit cards charge for cash advances, in other words loans, typically are even higher than the purchase rates. Discover recently sent me several checks, inviting me to use them for “cash when you need it” at the jaw-dropping rate of 23.99%, its “standard APR for cash advances.” Even that “will vary with the market based on the Prime Rate.” The prime rate is 3.25%, the lowest it has been since August, 1955, so the Discover rate has nowhere to go but up.

Pay day loans are far worse. They are short-term loans carrying nominal interest rates which sound high but not outrageous, until one notes that the rate is for a very short time period. Washington allows 15% on a fourteen-day loan, an annual rate of 390%.¹⁰³Other states allow higher rates.

Savings rates presumably will rise whenever the economy recovers, narrowing the gap if interest charges don’t also rise. Still, it’s time for Congress and the legislatures to resurrect the concept of usury and impose rational limits on the cost of consumer credit. Not likely, though.

______________________________

102. See http://dfi.wa.gov/consumers/interest_rates_exception.htm
103. See http://www.paydayloaninfo.org/state-information/55 , a Consumer Reports site. The rate actually is 391.07% (15% ÷ 14 x 365)

2011-11-30T20:00:00.000-08:00

November 30, 2011

On Tuesday The New York Times op-ed pages produced another example of ambivalence, or inconsistency, similar to those I mentioned on November 21.

Roger Cohen devoted his column to “the doctrine of silence,” by which he refers to the secrecy with which the present administration conducts various kinds of low-level warfare, including drone attacks and assassinations. The new policy is a “radical shift from President Bush’s war on terror,” but “has never been set out to the American people. . . . President Obama has gone undercover.” His opinion of the new departure is ambivalent: “I approve of the shift even as it makes me uneasy. One day, I suspect, there may be payback for this policy and this silence.”

Most of his discussion was devoted to the risks and benefits of the policy, rather than to secrecy, but his ambivalent approval persisted:

So why do I approve of all this? Because the alternative — the immense cost in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s war on terror — was so appalling. In just the same way, the results of a conventional bombing war against Iran would be appalling, whether undertaken by Israel, the United States or a combination of the two.

There is another alternative: not killing people, a radical notion to be sure, but one which at least should be recognized as an option. To put it in strategic terms, are any of the people we target really a threat to us? Only if Mr. Cohen answers in the affirmative, and ignores any moral objections, could his first comment override his second: “So why am I uneasy? Because these legally borderline, undercover options . . . invite repayment in kind, undermine the American commitment to the rule of law, and make allies uneasy.”

At the end, he turned, more or less, to the secrecy issue: “Just because it’s impossible to talk about some operations undertaken within this doctrine does not mean the entire doctrine can remain cloaked in silence.” However, rather than asking the President to justify the doctrine of silence, Cohen wanted a speech approving his preference for limited, covert operations:

Of course [Obama] does not want to say much about secret operations. Still, as the U.S. military prepares to depart from Iraq . . . and the war in Afghanistan enters its last act [?], he owes the American people, U.S. allies and the world a speech that sets out why America will not again embark on this kind of inconclusive war and has instead adopted a new doctrine that has replaced fighting terror with killing terrorists.

Cohen seems to believe that the covert actions have contributed to “restoring America’s battered image.” It’s not clear to me how assassinations, by air or otherwise, including at least one of an American citizen, shielded from the public and unauthorized by Congress, restore our image, especially, as Cohen acknowledges, they “undermine the American commitment to the rule of law, and make allies uneasy.”

This doesn’t seem to be the season for clear thinking at the Times.

__________________________
101. Glenn Greenwald dissected Cohen’s column to make the point that reporters no longer question authority: “American journalists are the leading proponents not of transparency but of secrecy, not of accountability but of covert decision-making in the dark, not of the rule of law but the rule of political leaders.”

2011-11-21T14:28:00.001-08:00

November 21, 2011

On November 14, The New York Times, in an opinion column and a house editorial, commented on the pseudo-tough mindset of many contemporary conservatives, as embodied in some of the Republican candidates for the presidency. The subject was waterboarding.

The column was by Frank Bruni, one of several new hires on the opinion page. He posed this question: “If we truly believe ourselves to be exceptional, a model for all the world and an example for all of history, then why would we practice torture? Specifically, should we waterboard prisoners?” He answered in the negative, while noting that several Republican candidates are for it despite stressing American exceptionalism. He also appeared to mock Rick Santorum’s suggestion of clandestine missions to kill Iranian scientists. He closed with this: “we have to be careful about how far we go — how merciless our strategies, how self-serving our positions — because the rightful burden of the leadership we insist on is behavior that’s better than everybody else’s, not the same or worse. Exceptionalism doesn’t mean picking and choosing when to be big and when to be small.”

I don’t know whether the parenthetical was ironic or was intended to be taken literally. I would more or less agree with his statement if it were the former. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as revealed in the preceding paragraph: “We face difficult decisions and a tricky balancing act when it comes to keeping this country safe . . . . And there’s no doubt we can’t be as high-minded as we’d sometimes like. I for one am not losing any sleep over Awlaki.” In other words, we should be principled and exceptional except when it’s convenient not to be. Assassinating Iranian scientists isn’t a good idea, but assassinating an American citizen is OK. Torturing a suspect is bad, but obliterating one with a missile is not an occasion for lost sleep.

The Times editorial criticized the Republican candidates’ views on waterboarding, but it too managed to muddle a statement of principle, although on a different subject. It referred to Mitt Romney’s claim that, if he were elected, Iran would not have nuclear weapons, and pointed out that he didn’t explain how he would manage that. It added: “Mr. Obama prudently has not taken military action off the table — no president should — but war would be a disastrous option. It would only set back the program, not end it, and would fan anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment.” If war would be a disastrous choice — leaving aside whether it would be justified — why should it remain on the table?

2011-11-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

November 19, 2011

On November 1, the House reaffirmed that our national motto is “In God We Trust.” As there was no drive to change or abandon it, the reason for this action is not apparent. The vote revealed an odd set of priorities in a country with its economy in shambles and unemployment stubbornly and cruelly high.

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post suggested sarcastically that the choice might be due to semantic confusion: “ ‘God’ and ‘job’ are both three-letter words with the same vowel. House Republicans may have been confused by the similarity, much like the dyslexic agnostic who wonders if there is a dog.” Perhaps the House was concerned that we might succumb to atheism. Perhaps it was an admission that Congress, both houses of which are under direct or indirect Republican control, is incapable of, or ideologically incapacitated from, doing anything useful or even necessary, and so must rely on divine intervention. Saving the planet is an example.

Representative John Shimkus, a Republican of Illinois, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, believes that we shouldn’t worry about climate change because God has promised not to destroy the Earth. At a hearing in 2009,⁹¹ he made his point by quoting Genesis. Following the Flood, he said, God promised Noah: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.”⁹² Q.E.D. Leaving aside whether that should be taken literally, drastic climate change would leave day and night, etc. in place, so I don’t find much consolation there.

However, Shimkus didn’t rely entirely on the Old Testament; he offered this from Matthew: “And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds from one end of the heavens to the other.”⁹³ That seems a bit off the point, but to Shimkus its message is clear: “The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth.” He added, apparently still thinking of Noah, “This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” What about the other hazards of warming? Perhaps he can find a proof text to reassure us that deserts will not expand.

In the same hearing, he argued that there is no need for a cap-and-trade system to limit CO2 emissions because carbon levels were much higher in the age of the dinosaurs, when flora and fauna were abundant; “there is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet, not too much carbon." He reiterated his beliefs last year.⁹⁴ No need to debate the science; it’s a religious issue.

To Shimkus, “God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.” Apparently it also provides all-encompassing prophesy. In other words, everything has been determined. Why then did he run for Congress? He could have stayed home and, equally passively, awaited the improvement or destruction of the world, as the case may be.

A Republican state representative from Minnesota, a member of its House Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Committee, agrees: "It is the height of hubris to think we could [destroy the planet]." (He wants to lift a moratorium on coal-fired power plants). He also argued that we won’t run out of oil or other natural resources: "God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything."⁹⁵

These comments echo the declaration of the co-leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh that it is it is presumptuous to think that man could destroy God's earth. “I refuse to believe,” he told us, “that people, who are themselves the result of Creation, can destroy the most magnificent creation of the entire universe.”⁹⁶ (The other leader is Grover Norquist; he represents a different sort of ideological blindness).

Its being election season (although when isn’t it?), no doubt many more appeals to heavenly aid will be heard. Already, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann have indicated that they were called by God to run for the presidency, following in the footsteps of George W. Bush.

Mixing religion and politics always is a risky business. However, if appeals to religion were merely general and benign — a nonpartisan expression of a desire to do good — its presence in politics would not be so worrisome. Instead, for years now, religion has been a prisoner of the right, where it has been identified with reaction, selfishness and, at least rhetorically, violence.

An aspect of the last is the cozy relationship between religion and guns, two expressions of which I noticed recently. One came from Herman Cain, who told a Republican group “I kinda like my guns and Bible and I ain't going to give them up," producing a roar of approval.⁹⁷The other was contributed by a Representative Poe, Republican of Texas, who illustrated the point by describing with approval a t-shirt worn by a Texas “preacher” reading “I love my Bible/I love my guns.”⁹⁸

On Wednesday the House voted to compel states to allow anyone to bring a gun into any state if he holds a permit from another state, no matter how lax its laws. According to Representative Marlin Stutzman, an Indiana Republican, God issued a divine gun permit: “Mr. Speaker, rights do not come from the government. We are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights.”⁹⁹ In his exegesis, one of those rights is self-defense, which leads him to the Second Amendment, thence to the right to carry a concealed weapon, and finally to a right to carry anywhere. As Gail Collins summarized the heavenly endowment, “Among these rights are life, liberty and a pistol in the glove compartment.”¹⁰⁰

____________________________________

91. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_7h08RDYA5E
92. Genesis 8:21-22
93. Matthew 24:31
94. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44958.html
95. http://www.minnpost.com/donshelby/2011/02/15/25784/picking_science_that_fits_politics
_rep_mike_beard_on_climate_change
96.The Way Things Ought to Be , p. 152
97. http://www.rgj.com/article/20111019/NEWS19/110190429/Herman-Cain-excites-GOP-crowd-Las-Vegas
98. http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/49055/I_Love_My_Bible__amp__I_Love_My_Guns__Congressman_Ted/
99. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkGgbcJ6gMc
100. New York Times , 11/16/11

2011-11-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

November 8, 2011

President Obama has announced that American troops will leave Iraq at the end of the year. Predictably, hawks have denounced the move, and him. To Mitt Romney, “[t]he unavoidable question is whether this decision is the result of a naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government.” The hawks conveniently ignore the fact that withdrawal was contemplated, at this time, by the agreement made by President Bush in 2008. However, somehow it must be Obama’s fault.

Charles Krauthammer, reaching into the past for a slogan, captioned his November 3 column “Who lost Iraq?” and answered himself, not surprisingly, that Obama did. That silly formula, made infamous by its application to China, was entertainingly ridiculed by Mary McGrory during the Reagan years. Referring to the mining of harbors in Nicaragua, part of our strange war against the Sandinista regime, she spoke of the woes of “Patsy Senate, Ronnie's consort.”

Patsy's upset because Ronnie didn't tell her about the mining. He says "don't you remember that when I told you about all the wonderful things we are doing down there to stop terrorism - bombing airports, burning houses, killing people - I mentioned mines?" But Patsy insists she wasn't told. Still, she hates to be difficult. Ronnie can be so brusque; he does things like accusing her of "losing" countries she didn't know she had.

I suppose that Krauthammer would say that the jibe isn’t fair because we “had” Iraq. His argument does depend on that assertion — we can’t lose something we didn’t have — but in what sense did we have it? As a satellite, possession or dependency? As an ally? As a source of oil? I’d be interested to see the answer, as it also might bear on why we invaded.

At some point, it’s necessary to ask whether we are better off than we were before the invasion of Iraq and, even if so, whether that justifies the cost. The hawkish, or timid, answer, is that we must maintain our security, and that invading, devastating and occupying Iraq was necessary to that end, and continuing to control it also is necessary. Is there any evidence of that? Given that Iraq was not involved in 9-11, the argument that there has been no further attack won’t work.

It is not too much to say that waging war on Iraq was an imperialist undertaking, which makes relevant observations from two books discussing the declining years of the Roman Empire. Both deal with the monetary cost of imperial power.

[I]n the wake of the great crisis of the third century, the provision of security became an increasingly heavy charge on society, a charge unevenly distributed, which could enrich the wealthy and ruin the poor. The machinery of empire now became increasingly self-serving, with its tax-collectors, administrators, and soldiers of much greater use to one another than to society at large.⁸⁹

The same might be said of us; certainly much of the revenue is spent on “national security,” and many have become wealthy from that allocation of resources. The deficit is due in no small part to military spending. As to ruining the poor, here’s the other source:

The effect of military spending on government budgets is plain enough . . .: investments of one kind diminish investments of another. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed." That's not George McGovern whining in 1972. It's Dwight D. Eisenhower just stating the facts in 1950.⁹⁰

Then there is the human cost. On Veterans’ Day we should remember how many American lives have been lost or shattered in this foolish, immoral, unlawful project. There won’t be much thought given to the Iraqi casualties, though; we don’t have a holiday for the victims of unnecessary wars.

__________________________________

89. Edward. N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976), p. 5
90. Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007), p. 75. The Eisenhower quote is from a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953.

2011-11-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

November 1, 2011

I have been critical of conservatives for using inflammatory language, for making outrageous accusations and for obstructive tactics. Is that unfair? Do they have justification? Joe Nocera, one of the recent additions to the opinion pages of The New York Times, would say yes. In a recent column he argued that liberals are responsible for the present state of politics.

On October 22, he noted the anniversary of the rejection, in 1987, of the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He thinks that the nastiness in contemporary politics started then and, since the guilty parties were Democrats, they now are in no position to complain. “His nomination battle is . . . a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be -- and have been -- every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.” I wouldn’t greatly disagree with that if it were simply an historical statement, a description of a single episode. Leaving out “every bit as,” it is a fair critique of aspects of the Bork nomination process. However, Nocera’s claim that the “the line from Bork to today's ugly politics is a straight one” doesn’t follow. It rests on three arguments.

Bork should have been confirmed

This conclusion is implied, but clear. Nocera began by emphasizing Judge Bork’s credentials:

The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of . . . . But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree -- and intellectual firepower -- of Bork. He had been a law professor at Yale, the solicitor general of the United States and, at the time Ronald Reagan tapped him for the court, a federal appeals court judge.

Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual. . . .

He then argued that Bork’s views (he mentioned Roe v. Wade and the First Amendment’s application to pornography) could not “be fairly characterized as extreme.” It is true that Bork’s views on specific legal principles were not as extreme as some claimed, but there was a more general, issue. As Bork conceded, the issue was judicial philosophy. The Judiciary Committee and the Senate decided that his would not serve the Court or the country well, which was correct. One of his supporters offered this test for confirmation during the hearings: whether the nominee’s views were “within the acceptable range of contemporary American legal thought.” The Committee and later the full Senate decided that they were not, and they were right. My comment at the time was this: “He is, I think, outside the mainstream in two related, fundamental ways: he views the law primarily as an intellectual exercise, not as a vehicle for doing justice & equity, and he lacks humane instincts, or as [former Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach kindly put it, judgment.” Ironically, Judge Bork confirmed the former point in a book written following, and largely about, the hearings, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law .

Behavior during the nomination is the cause of inflated rhetoric in the present.

Nocera argued that “[t]he Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics.” I don’t know whether “in some ways” was intended to refer to a specific qualification; if so, it wasn’t stated. In any case, the argument that the nomination battle explains present-day Republican tactics and language is implausible. One might as logically excuse Democratic behavior toward Bork as a reaction to the Hiss hearings.

Nocera offered this as evidence: “For years afterward, conservatives seethed at the ‘systematic demonization’ of Bork, recalls Clint Bolick, a longtime conservative legal activist.” It’s true that some of the attacks on Bork, especially before and during the Judiciary Committee hearings, were full of distortion and exaggeration and, although they didn’t typically include direct character assassination, that was the effect.

Nocera offered two examples. One is a speech by Senator Kennedy, delivered before the hearings, about “Bork’s America,” in which “women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters . . . ." That was unfair and inflammatory, and may have encouraged other excesses. The second is a memo by the Advocacy Institute, “a liberal lobby group” which, according to Nocera, described Bork as "a right-wing loony," and proposed that he be portrayed "as an extreme ideological activist." The former, assuming it was stated in public, was out of bounds, although perhaps too silly to be taken seriously. Whether the latter was fair comment at the time could be debated, but Bork certainly put himself in that category with his 1996 book, Slouching towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and America’s Decline .

Nocera is not alone in finding some long-term effect on attitudes. David Brock, in Blinded by the Right: the Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, said that “[f]or the conservative movement, the hardball tactics of the anti-Bork effort would give license to mount a decade-long campaign of revenge and retribution.”⁸⁷ (He didn’t identify the end point of the decade, but presumably it was the Clinton impeachment). However, the excesses in Republican and conservative rhetoric can’t be traced to the Bork nomination. There are two principal considerations.

First, the rhetoric of the right is characterized by a different type of personal invective. Republicans and conservatives have accused Democrats and liberals of being, at best, less than real Americans and, at worst, traitors. Tea Party signs claiming that the President is a foreigner, a communist, a fascist, or the antichrist are in this mode. During a Congressional election a few years ago, a local political flier attacked the Obama health care proposal as "socialized medicine" and to be sure we didn't miss the point, that this is un-American, it included a picture of a Soviet officer. Senator Rand Paul, referring to oil-spill culprit BP, accused President Obama of sounding "un-American in his criticism of business." There are many examples.

Some rhetoric goes beyond denunciation. Ann Coulter produced the following gem at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2002 (and was invited back):

In contemplating college liberals, you really regret, once again, that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors. . . .

Second, this was not a new phenomenon in or after 1987; it existed at least as early as the McCarthy era. As one reporter put it, “Over the decades Democrats have been targeted by political attack campaigns that employ the same defamation and distortion tactics used in the McCarthy years, campaigns that smear opponents with charges of being un-American, unpatriotic or, as the nation witnessed again during the 2004 presidential election campaign, of giving ‘aid and comfort’ to America's enemies.”⁸⁸

Behavior during the nomination is the cause of obstructive tactics in the present .

At the end of his column, Nocera returned to the first term in his description of “obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair” behavior: “The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.” As with rhetoric, so with intransigence: it’s difficult to take seriously the notion that Republicans stubbornly oppose President Obama’s policy proposals because they still are mad about the rejection or treatment of Judge Bork. They obstruct when they cannot prevail because they adhere to a platform which seeks not only to prevent new progressive initiatives, but to march us backward by many decades. The illustrations of that are too numerous and familiar to require repetition.

As to both points, Nocera didn’t attempt to justify the behavior of contemporary Republicans, but merely shifted the blame, in essence giving them a pass. At some point, present blame for present actions must be assessed, especially for a group claiming to be champions of personal responsibility.

_______________________

87. P. 47
88. Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism, p. 462

2011-10-22T19:03:00.000-07:00

October 22, 2011

Listening to the Republican presidential candidates is enough to make one wonder what is in the water. Their policies and attitudes are so far removed from reality, to say nothing of the public welfare, that it is baffling that they think one of them can be elected on such a platform. Perhaps they know the American voter better than I (which wouldn’t be difficult) but, if so, we’re in a world of hurt.

At this point, of course, they are playing to those usually referred to as the base, or more accurately to the extreme right, which is believed to control nomination. Judging from audience reaction at the debates — cheering executions, mocking the unemployed — that is a sorry bunch. One of the candidates has, however inadvertently, provided us with an apt description of his party and, consequently, of our situation. At first, Herman Cain seemed to be on board only for comic relief, but now he is, according to recent polls, in first or second place. Therefore, let us take him seriously when he says "Stupid people are ruining America.” So they are. He had different people in mind than I do, but in his backward way, he’s right on target.

One obvious manifestation of stupidity is the determination to repeat mistakes, such as cutting spending during a recession or expecting tax cuts to erase deficits. Of course, such policies flow from reactionary ideology, but an ideology wedded to policies which demonstrably don’t work can’t be described as other than stupid.

The rest of Cain’s formula: “But the good news is we can outvote them." Let’s hope so.

2011-09-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

September 14, 2011

I must confess that I skipped most of the stories and columns on the anniversary of 9-11, but I did read a few, two of which are worth mentioning.

Surely the award for the strangest must go to the house editorial in The Washington Post . The column was notable for complacency and a peculiar weighting of the effects of September 11, but more than anything else, it was an attempt to defend the paper’s pro-war position.

It argued that “the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from ‘We will be hit again’ to ‘Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction’ ” The latter position is that “al-Qaeda goaded the nation to curtail civil liberties and construct a monstrous homeland security apparatus while bungling into adventures abroad that birthed new enemies, sapped the American economy and distracted the nation from bigger problems.” The Post declined to endorse the new paradigm: “it would be dangerous if it took hold.”

The editors did acknowledge that not everything has gone well over the past ten years. “The nation stained itself with its treatment of foreign detainees and particularly its use of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that had long been recognized as torture. By refusing to raise taxes to face the new reality, it endangered its fiscal health. The United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence . . . .” Homeland security programs resulted in ”an occasional total lapse of common sense and undoubtedly a large dose of self-dealing in the contractor world. . . .” But these, apparently, are relatively minor matters; on the whole, everything worked out for the best; as the caption of the column put it, “The gains outweigh the mistakes.”

According to the Post , even though “there were excesses in the earliest, most panicked years,” and “hateful acts against Muslim Americans,” there were no major assaults on civil liberties. “The Patriot Act enabled a modest, mostly court-supervised expansion of law enforcement vigilance.” No doubt that is why states and cities passed resolutions condemning the Act. We invaded Iraq based on faulty intelligence, but apparently we were nonetheless right to do so: “The United States must protect itself at home as much as it sensibly can while taking the fight to its enemies overseas. . . .” The Post understands that invading countries is not a perfect solution to security threats; however, that simply leads it back to another rationale for dominating the Middle East: “aggression must be coupled with efforts to promote development and democracy in places that would otherwise breed terrorism.”

In case that isn’t enough backup, here are a few more theories: “The toppling of dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan gave two nations at least a chance at freedom, removed potential havens for America’s enemies and, along with the fall of dictators elsewhere in the Arab world, opened for Muslim-majority countries an alternative path to the medieval caliphate championed by Osama bin Laden.” Note the waffle on “potential” havens. The caliphate was an absurd fantasy, but by invading two countries and prolonging one invasion into the longest war in our history, we’ve provided an alternative dream.

Although it was irresponsible to cut taxes in war time, no big deal: “Over the decade, the United States devoted a far smaller share of its gross domestic product to defense than it did throughout the Cold War. Although it would be nice if those resources could go toward something more peaceful and constructive, the spending is not the cause of America’s economic difficulty.” As I understand the numbers, relative spending on “defense,” including many warfare-related costs not included in the DOD budget, is lower, but not “far lower,” than in the Cold War period. In either case, does that justify the wars? Spending on the wars, whatever its percentage of GDP, is one of the causes of our economic difficulty, along with tax cuts and the bubble-created recession, and it would be more than “nice” if that money had been spent on projects which actually would make us more secure.

Even if we have focused too much on war, the Post thinks that we can be excused: “if the U.S. foreign policy establishment hasn’t paid enough attention to the rise of China or the spread of AIDS, that shouldn’t be blamed entirely on the fight against terrorism; a great power will always have to do more than one thing at a time.” That doesn’t make much sense. If we, the great power, must do more than one thing at a time, why haven’t we?

“None of this means that the United States must remain perpetually at war.” Oh, good. “Having created an enormous apparatus to protect the country, we should be vigilant that it does not exaggerate the threat to justify its existence.” But there still are bad guys out there: “the greatest danger now may be premature retreat from a difficult battlefield.”⁸⁵Weaklings that we are, might be tempted to do that; after all, “it is human nature to be recaptured by the bustle of ordinary life. That we have had the luxury to do so is testament to the dedication of compatriots, in uniform and out, seen and unseen, fallen and surviving, who have fought and worked to keep the country safe.”

The last line is the one that most turns me off to the ten-year remembrance. If it were focused on the sacrifice of the first responders, the murder of those on the planes and in the twin towers, the brief moment of genuine togetherness, then yes, let us remember the date. However, too much of it is in one way or another a justification for the wars that followed, which often takes the form of praise for the soldiers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan “to protect our freedom.” True, it is difficult to face the fact that most of the casualties in those wars were unnecessary and, as to national security, pointless. The dead, and the wounded, and those who gave years of their lives may have believed that they were defending the nation, but the wars have had far less to do with that than with misguided imperial adventures. We should remember them, and honor their loyalty and sacrifice, and provide for their care and for their families, but do so honestly, not use them as props in a tableau of faux patriotism.

The other column dealt with economic aims and effects, and addressed the new “conventional wisdom” which the Post disdains. Jon Talton, in Sunday’s Seattle Times , argued that a goal of the attacks was to “provoke a hysterical American overreaction that would begin bleeding the nation into economic ruin”, and asked, “Mission accomplished?” The source of his comment about al Qaeda’s goals presumably is a taped address by Osama bin Laden, broadcast by al Jazeera in 2004. Here is a summary by CNN:

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration." "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.⁸⁶

Talton stated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “as well as other increased military spending” cost $1.469 trillion through the 2009 fiscal year. He didn’t cite his source, and it’s difficult to establish a firm figure. The studies I found place the direct cost of the wars as of the end of the current fiscal year at about $1.3 trillion, which surely is appalling enough. Talton also noted the estimate by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes that the wars eventually will cost from 3 to 6 trillion. He described examples of waste and crony contracts, which make the costs even more unpalatable.

He turned, rather irrelevantly, to “what might have been, either without 9/11 or with a different American response.” We have “taken no serious steps to address either climate change or looming worldwide oil scarcity, both of which will prove to be major national-security challenges as well as costly to the economy.” Infrastructure is neither well maintained nor, in some cases, modern. Education needs improvement, but we are laying off teachers.

These failures cannot be laid at the feet of bin Laden or the misdirected reactions to 9-11, as he acknowledged. Even without war, we might still have been too foolish to deal with climate change or other issues. Neither the attacks nor the wars required tax cuts, and the economy collapsed for reasons largely unrelated to war spending. However, Talton’s conclusion is apt: “The tragedy is that America still lacks an exit strategy — from any of these challenges and follies.”

__________________________________

85. In a column on Sunday, Jackson Diehl, the Post’s deputy editorial page editor, made a separate argument for staying the course, describing a policy which would have us stuck in Afghanistan at least until 2014. The house editorial argued on Monday that the GOP candidates have gone “AWOL from Afghanistan.”
86. Excerpts from the bin Laden tape are here: http://articles.cnn.com/2004-11-01/world/binladen.tape_1_al-jazeera-qaeda-bin?_s=PM:WORLD
and the full broadcast is here: http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html

2011-09-05T11:44:00.000-07:00

September 4, 2011

Saturday’s Seattle Times carried a story from The Washington Post about Mitt Romney’s problems with tea party voters. Apparently there is a dispute over whether Romney should be invited to speak at a Tea Party Express rally in New Hampshire on Monday. “For some leaders in the tea-party movement,” the article said, this is “the opening shot . . . in an all-out war to make sure the former Massachusetts governor does not win the Republican nomination to challenge President Obama next year.” Tea Party Express had co-sponsored the event with Freedom Works, but the latter “pulled out and planned a protest because of Romney's involvement.” A comment by Matt Kibbe, the president of Freedom Works, was quoted; no other movement leader was identified, so “some leaders” is an exaggeration. Leaving numbers aside, the reporter is confused or disingenuous about what and who the Tea Party is. Freedom Works is not a tea party organization, so its president hardly can be termed a tea party movement leader.

Freedom Works was founded long before the “movement” arose in 2009. Its moving force is Dick Armey, libertarian former Congressman. The Freedom Works Foundation board includes such average Americans as Steve Forbes and the head of an investment management firm which “primarily provides its services to individuals, including high net worth individuals.”⁸¹ Kibbe’s statement — "If every political opportunist claiming to be a tea partyer is accepted unconditionally, then the tea-party brand loses all meaning" — is ironic. Freedom Works’ alliance with tea party groups is opportunistic and Armey’s involvement has caused some resentment among those groups.

Tea Party Express also is suspect as a populist organization, and is almost ephemeral. Its web site ⁸² does not show membership, and perhaps there isn’t any. In 2008, a PAC, “Our Country Deserves Better,” was created by a California public relations firm. It organized a national bus tour to hold rallies to oppose the election of Barack Obama. In 2009, it ran another bus tour, having changed the name from the “Stop Obama Tour” of the previous year to the “Tea Party Express.”^8€ That is being repeated this year. In 2010 it was expelled from the Tea Party Federation, whatever that is, because of racist statements by its spokesman.⁸⁴

The story noted that Romney “appears all too aware of the threat to his campaign from the tea party — particularly since Perry, who is popular with the grass-roots movement, joined the race.” We have here yet another example of the ineptness of the media and its disservice to voters. Assuming that any aspect of Tea Party agitation qualifies as a grass-roots movement, neither of the organizations involved here does so.

______________________________

81. http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=8031946
82. http://www.teapartyexpress.org/
83. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Country_Deserves_Better_PAC#cite_ref-4
84. http://www.thenationalteapartyfederation.com/press_room.html ; http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38299783/ns/politics/t/tea-party-federation-expels-group-over-racial-writing/

2011-09-02T10:50:00.000-07:00

September 2, 2011

The presidential election season is, depressingly, under way and, although the candidates have much to say, none of it is useful. That is not entirely due to their limitations; it is partly a function of the audience to whom they are playing. In the case of Republican candidates, that audience is dominated by the so-called tea party movement, a noisy, manipulated group of extreme conservatives, which forces the candidates into absurd positions (or encourages absurd positions in those already disposed to them). A conservative candidate cannot believe in evolution because a certain limited version of religious belief finds it incompatible. He must deny human contribution to global warming or the effects of pollution because it would be inconvenient to corporations but also because, according to the noted theologian Rush Limbaugh, it is presumptuous to think that man could destroy God's earth. The candidate will advocate teaching creationism even though it has no factual basis. He must denigrate intellect because thinkers are elitists, elitists are liberals and liberals are immoral.

Consider the first test for Republicans, the Iowa straw poll. Somehow, a sideshow to a fundraiser has become a litmus test. It is so, presumably, because Iowa will have the first vote that counts, by way of its caucus, but why do we put up with that? Iowa hardly is representative of the population at large, but failure to do well in its caucus can be fatal.

Worse, the Iowa Republican Party has drunk the tea. Its platform,⁷⁹adopted a year ago, has a few provisions which make sense and a few which are of arguable merit, but it is overwhelmingly a reactionary document, one which a few decades ago would have been the subject of derision even by other Republicans. Here is a summary of its “guiding values and principles for the Republican Party”:

• Consistent with the usual pretense by conservatives that they represent the people, not the elites, the Iowa platform is headed “Declaration of ‘We the People’ of Iowa,” and there are many references to the people, including this: ”The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people.” However, they don’t mean that. "Our founding fathers were very clear in their writings that the United States of America was to be a Republic and not a Democracy (a government of the law and not of the masses)." They interpret “pursuit of happiness” to mean “the right to property.” One might detect a whiff of elitism there.

• True to their adoration of property, the Hawkeye Republicans “support the permanent elimination of the estate, gift, and inheritance taxes, while retaining the step-up in basis to fair market value on the assets in a descendant's [sic] estate.” (The last bit is a nice example of having it both ways). They call for “the U.S. Congress to make permanent all tax relief enacted since the year 2000. . . .” Of course, they advocate abolition of the IRS and, for good measure, abolition of the Federal Reserve, repeal of the Federal Reserve Act, and a return to “the gold and/or silver standard.”

• Perhaps to protect their property from the masses, or perhaps just for the hell of it, the Iowa Republicans want to carry firearms, "open or concealed, without a permit."

• The platform declares that "Progressivism, Collectivism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism and or any other form of ideology contrary to our founding fathers' concept of a republic should be resisted, rejected and considered as an enemy." (Apparently a progressive republic is a contradiction in terms).

• The platform calls for repeal of all minimum wage laws, enactment of a national “right to work” law and elimination of OSHA. (Unions, decent wages and worker safety cater to the masses).

• The Iowa GOP believes that “claims of human caused global warming are based on fraudulent, inaccurate information and that legislation and policy based on this information is detrimental to the well being of the United States.” It opposes cap and trade. It advocates the teaching of intelligent design.

• The Iowa Republicans “believe that health care is a privilege and not a right,” and declare that “with the eminent [sic] failure of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, Republicans should take any and all necessary actions to abolish these programs, over time, and replace them with private solutions.” (This attitude may explain why the United States has fallen to forty-first place in preventing infant mortality).

The poll is made even more unrepresentative by the limited number of voters, partly a function of the fee required to participate. Some of the fees and other costs are paid by the candidates, essentially paying for votes. It isn’t even an especially good predictor: the winner has been the Republican nominee only twice in the five events to date. The last time around, the eventual nominee, John McCain, finished tenth. As bizarre as all of this is, the poll results this year forced former governor Pawlenty from the race, almost fifteen months before the election.

One message of the Iowa GOP statement of values and principles is that morality must triumph over facts. “A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally stable nation is to elect virtuous leaders . . .” That is accomplished by requiring that certain values must be present in all candidates for public office: honesty, humility, common sense, personal responsibility, gratitude, sincerity, hard work, courage, reverence, thrift, moderation and hope. There is no mention of intelligence, education, knowledge, judgment or experience. Common sense certainly is a virtue but it is not a substitute for reasoned, informed decision making.

The platform does emphasize education, and in one passage praises critical thinking, but education is to be placed in service of ideology, as in the call to teach creationism as a science. History is to be instrumental: “We support the teaching of the documents and beliefs of our founding fathers, with emphasis on patriotism, citizenship, responsibility, respect for our country and its symbols, and pride in the United States' unique contributions to liberty and freedom, and U.S. history, including its religious heritage.” The last includes the notion that “the basis of our laws and our founding documents are rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” Sex education should not be mandatory and, when given, should stress abstinence. State and federal Departments of Education should be abolished.

The subordination of thinking to morality is nothing new. In the early years of the last century, John Erskine delivered an address, later published as an essay, entitled “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.” He stated the issue by quoting from “A Farewell” by Charles Kingsley:

"Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever." Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other . . . .

There is a strong tendency, persisting if not enhanced today, to believe that we can reach moral results by unaided intuition or by a selective reading — or more likely an unexamined impression — of the teachings of the Bible. (The platform calls for displaying the Ten Commandments in schools; I wonder how many of those who voted for that provision could recite them). Erskine maintained that we have a moral obligation “to find out as far as possible whether a given action leads to a good or a bad end.” However, people who are certain that they have a direct line to ultimate truth are reluctant to reexamine their conclusions, especially if that requires an appraisal of real effects or other distasteful encounters with facts. Erskine noted that his essay was criticized “as a menace to religious faith and a peril to the young,” and “an attack on conventional morals.” The same would be true today.

However, conservatives do not have a monopoly on fuzzy thinking, even though Republican politics is unusual in glorifying it, nor is religion the only problem. The American people in general are suffering from a serious knowledge deficit and a disinclination to think. Numerous surveys have demonstrated ignorance about elementary topics in geography and history. Rejection of evolution is more widespread than belief in the literal accuracy of the Bible. ⁸⁰ Americans need to be better educated, but there is no consensus on how to accomplish that. Meanwhile, Republican candidates and, to a lesser extent Democrats, will continue to pander to ignorance.

________________________________

79. http://iowagop.org/platform.php . I described a few other features in my note of 8/4/10.
80. Forty per cent reject human evolution, http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/four-americans-believe-strict-creationism.aspx , and thirty per cent believe the Bible to be literally true, http://www.gallup.com/poll/148427/say-bible-literally.aspx .

2011-08-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

August 17, 2011

I watched “The American President” last night. It’s a sad state of affairs when a movie can serve as a primer for presidential action. True, we don’t find out whether the President’s conversion from trimmer to bold leader works (other than to bring his girl friend back), but the message, that counting votes and compromising is not always the best policy, deserves attention in non-fictional circles. Michael J. Fox, who plays an aide and the resident voice of conscience, tells President Michael Douglas “People want leadership. And in the absence of genuine leadership, they will listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone.” Today’s cartoon by Ben Sargent gives the same advice to the real President graphically, in both senses: Obama stands next to a wall-mounted box which reads “In case of emergency break glass;” inside is not an axe or hose, but a backbone.

Yes, this is reducing complex issues and a daunting task to simple images, but there is a difference between leading and following, and our President is doing the latter.

More progressive policies would have popular support, although some reeducation about basic economics would be necessary. Constant fear-mongering about spending, deficits and national debt has people confused. The President needs to have a serious talk with them, but this time there must be more than talk. If he were to propose genuinely progressive legislation, dealing with the recession and unemployment, it would be an effective move even if the House remained stuck in the nineteenth century. It would provide an issue on which the House Republicans and their fans in funny hats could be exposed as enemies of the public good.

2011-08-15T19:38:00.000-07:00

August 15, 2011

On July 16, I indulged in a little sarcasm on the notion that President Obama is a liberal, and at other times I have described his political orientation as unsettled but moving rightward. There are those on the left who believe, like those on the right, that they know just where he stands, but describe that position quite differently: to those liberals he’s a conservative now, was a conservative before the debt crisis, and perhaps has been a conservative from the beginning. I came across two columns a few days ago making that argument. On first reading, the claim seemed excessive, but now I’m not so sure; as I’ve looked back over my own comments, I see that I’ve been describing more or less the same situation, although sometimes attributing Mr. Obama’s decisions more to weakness than to intent. Has he always been a conservative in liberal’s clothing? What difference does it make? As to the first question, here is a summary of the argument:

“Obama is one of America's strongest presidents ever and is achieving exactly what he wants. . . . On health care, for instance, Obama passed a Heritage Foundation-inspired bailout of the private health insurance industry, all [sic ] while undermining other more-progressive proposals.” I don’t know whether Obama’s health care plan was in any sense borrowed from the Heritage Foundation, but certainly Heritage now opposes and derides it.⁶⁸However, it may be that any conservative idea is so tainted if embraced by a Democrat that it must be denounced; right-wing opposition to “Obamacare” is violent even though it resembles the Massachusetts plan enacted under Governor Romney, and Romney’s conservative credentials are suspect because of the resemblance. The structure of the Obama plan was not truly liberal, being based on insurance rather than on Medicare (which has made it Constitutionally vulnerable), and he did not fight for the public option, but bringing up health care at all was a risky stance, especially given the Clinton experience. I would be inclined to catagorize his intent as progressive, and his performance somewhere between pragmatic and ineffective.

“On foreign policy, he escalated old wars and initiated new ones.” Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, backed into a quasi-war in Lybia and continued warlike actions elsewhere; certainly there has been no significant change from Bush policies, other than moving the focus from Iraq to Afghanistan. “On civil liberties, he not only continued the Patriot Act and indefinite detention of terrorism suspects but also claimed the right to assassinate American citizens without charge.” On the first issue, it’s fair to say that he has been a conservative from the outset. He pledged to close Guantanamo, which seemed to imply a termination of indefinite detention, but neither has happened. I don’t know whether he entertained the third view at the outset, but it is incredible coming from anyone at any time, and his use of drone attacks and the bin Laden assassination show that there is little he has considered out of bounds.

“On financial issues, he fought off every serious proposal to re-regulate banks following the economic meltdown; he preserved ongoing bank bailouts; and he resisted pressure to prosecute Wall Street thieves.” The first claim is exaggerated; the Dodd-Frank Act (notably the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) and the Credit Card Accountability Act are examples of progress, although failure to appoint Elizabeth Warren is an example of timidity. The bank bailout program seemed to me at the time to reflect dubious priorities and possibly be ineffective, but it has turned out better that it might have. Bankers have not been held to account, and that policy was clear from the outset; Mr. Obama’s choice of advisors was baffling and disappointing, weakening any move toward re-regulation, and certainly showing no intention to require accountability.

“On fiscal matters, after extending the Bush tax cuts at a time of massive deficits, he has used the debt ceiling negotiations to set the stage for potentially massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare — cuts that would be far bigger than any of his proposed revenue increases.” The extension of the tax cuts in December certainly was a conservative result but, given the circumstances, it doesn’t, at least standing alone, demonstrate that he planned to do so from the beginning. He has stated many times that he wants those cuts to expire. The year-end deal strikes me as a pragmatic, if weak, move. He did hold out for unemployment benefits then.

His attitude toward Social Security is more confused than conspiratorial; I’ve discussed that in more detail below. He has, like many others, including the media, muddled the issue by sometimes treating Social Security as a general-fund expenditure. However, his position during the debt crisis does seem to show that he now is prepared to cut benefits. His Secretary of Defense, not content with denouncing cuts in his budget, recommended cutting entitlements rather than “national security.”

The best example of Obama’s present conservatism is found in the debt-ceiling “debate.” The White House proposals, its formulas for a Grand Bargain, were heavily weighted from the outset toward spending cuts, although Mr. Obama gave lip service to tax increases. In any case, contemplating cuts in the midst of what realistically still is a recession was an abandonment of liberal principle.

To here, the quotes have been from a column by David Sirota of August 5, carried in The Seattle Times .⁶⁹ The other principal source is a series of columns by Glenn Greenwald on Salon which have argued consistently that Obama has been a conservative from the beginning. Greenwald cites a number of sources, which in turn cite others. I won’t try to trace each line, but will describe those that seem most pertinent.

The argument is summarized in Greenwald’s column of August 1,⁷⁰where he states, “The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this [debt-limit] bill . . . .” What is that evidence?

On April 13, Greenwald said, “In December, President Obama signed legislation to extend hundreds of billions of dollars in Bush tax cuts, benefitting the wealthiest Americans. Last week, Obama agreed to billions of dollars in cuts that will impose the greatest burden on the poorest Americans.” As all of that happened relatively recently, it doesn’t prove that he has “long wanted” that result, although each added example tends to suggest that. Greenwald continued, “Tax cuts for the rich -- budget cuts for the poor -- ‘reform’ of the Democratic Party's signature safety net programs -- a continuation of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies and a new Middle East war launched without Congressional approval. That's quite a legacy combination for a Democratic President.” It is indeed, although we need to look at the “reform” to see whether it is as much a rightward policy as Greenwald suspects.

He cited, directly or indirectly, several columns and articles for the proposition that Obama, since before inauguration, has contemplated cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, based in part on his comments about an “entitlement crisis.” One such comment supposedly was made in January, 2009, but the references to it aren’t sourced, and I can’t find it. One reference acknowledged that Obama’s views, as to Social Security, had been different earlier: “[D]uring the campaign, Obama suggested the relatively modest step of increasing Social Security’s revenues by raising the cap on Social Security taxes, which would make the income [sic] tax system more progressive and bring more money into the program,” and stated that “Medicare’s problems are bound up in the broader woes of the American health care system.” ⁷¹

Obama has, at times, loosely referred to a Social Security crisis, once in an interview on November 8, 2007,⁷² but stated that there is no crisis in October, 2007,⁷³ in August, 2010,⁷⁴and in April, 2011.⁷⁵ On Meet the Press on November 11, 2007, Senator Obama waffled a bit on what to do about Social Security, but preferred lifting the contribution cap to cutting benefits or raising the retirement age.⁷⁶ In an interview by The Washington Post in January, 2009, he was reported as saying “the nation's long-term economic recovery cannot be attained unless the government finally gets control over its most costly entitlement programs” but quoted as follows: "Social Security we can solve. The big problem is Medicare, which is unsustainable. . . . We can't solve Medicare in isolation from the broader problems of the health-care system."⁷⁷ In his speech on April 13, 2011 he derided the Ryan plan to gut Medicare; he didn’t offer an alternative plan, but he may think that the health care bill will solve that problem. He was muddled about Social Security.

His comments on Social Security over time seem to me to reflect the right instincts, confusion (cutting payroll taxes hardly is a way to improve Social Security funding), some rhetorical inconsistency (or political opportunism), indecisiveness and lack of will, not a reactionary stance. He treats Medicare’s funding problems at least in part as bound up with health care reform. Where he stands on Medicaid is a mystery to me.

There is evidence that the grand-bargain notion came into office with Mr. Obama, although not quite in its recent form. E.J. Dionne wrote this in January, 2009: “To listen to Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag is to hear a tale of long-term fiscal woe. The government may have to spend and cut taxes in a big way now, but in the long run, the federal budget is unsustainable.” There is nothing notably conservative about that statement. Consistent with the formula, there was significant spending early, on stimulus. “There will be signs of [sacrifice] in Obama's first budget, in his efforts to contain health-care costs and, down the road, in his call for entitlement reform and limits on carbon emissions.” The containment of health care costs supposedly was incorporated into the reform act. If right-wing rage is any measure, it and the attempt to cap carbon emissions were very liberal programs. Realistically, they were compromises, avoiding direct government control.

Dionne continued: “His camp is selling the idea that if he wants authority for new initiatives and new spending, Obama will have to prove his willingness to cut some programs and reform others.” That and the vague comment about entitlement reform state the conservative theme. “The ‘grand bargain’ they are talking about. . .involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts -- and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something.” Somewhere along the line expansive, or even very active, government was dropped from the agenda, but the desire to compromise endured.

An interview in Time with Lawrence Summers, also in January, 2009, may shed some light, although in places it isn’t clear whether Summers or Time is speaking. “Summers' immediate task is to convince skeptical Senators that shelling out nearly $1 trillion over two years isn't another exercise in traditional pork-barrel spending but a vital step needed to save jobs and invest in the future.” That certainly sounds progressive. “Summers argues that . . . not only will most of the money go to reviving the economy in the next 18 months, but much of it will also go to projects that could save money over the long term, such as weatherizing 75% of federal buildings and computerizing medical records. ‘The bill does a good job of marrying the twin imperatives of putting people back to work and doing the work that needs to be done,’ he says.”

Then comes the conservative part: “[P]erhaps as early as March, they'll launch their biggest lift with the beginnings of a plan to reform Social Security and Medicare, the two entitlement programs that, even before the economy collapsed, were threatening the Treasury with bankruptcy.” Did Summers say that Social Security threatened bankruptcy? I doubt it. “When Obama unveils his annual budget in late February or March, Summers promises that the President ‘is going to describe the kinds of approaches he wants to take to the entitlement problems that have been ignored for a long time.’ Some options might include delaying retirement, stretching benefits and lifting the cap on taxable earnings.” Whose options were those? Not necessarily Summers’ or Obama’s: “Could one of these prevail? ‘Remains to be seen,’ Summers says.”

As to when Obama’s conservatism set in, there is an alternative theory, that it is a reaction to the 2010 election results: “It all goes back to the ‘shellacking’ Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less.”⁷⁸ However, that doesn’t track: while those results may have pushed him rightward, he had stated in December, 2009 that the theme for 2010 would be deficit reduction, a notably conservative position in the face of chronic unemployment. Therefore, we must conclude that he had adopted a conservative budget position by the end of 2009.

Granting that some of his policies have been conservative from the beginning and even assuming that some that have emerged later were foreordained, does that make him a “conservative?” There are some contrary indications, in addition to those mentioned. A few days ago, new, ambitious fuel efficiency standards were announced for trucks and buses, joining new standards for cars. The Bush ban on stem cell research was lifted. Appointments to the Supreme Court certainly are to the left of Bush’s.

Greenwald offered two more general comments. Obama’s approach is “just a re-branded re-tread of Clintonian triangulation and the same ‘centrist’, scorn-the-base playbook Democratic politicians had used for decades.” In other word, Democrats, as demonstrated by the Carter and Clinton (the era of big government is over) administrations, have become more conservative, so why should we be surprised that Obama didn’t turn out to be a liberal? “Whether in economic policy, national security, civil liberties, or the permanent consortium of corporate power that runs Washington, Obama, above all else, is content to be (one could even say eager to be) guardian of the status quo. And the forces of the status quo want tax cuts for the rich, serious cuts in government spending that don't benefit them (social programs and progressive regulatory schemes), and entitlement ‘reform’ -- so that's what Obama will do.” That suggests that he is a centrist with no convictions.

My impression is a little different, although the result may be the same in terms of predicting behavior. Obama’s views and actions are inconsistent ideologically with each other, which may simply mean that he is a moderate, i.e., someone with a mixture of liberal and conservative views; the conservative side probably is due in part to the rightward drift of the Democratic party, and partly to the deficit. However, his views also have been inconsistent over time. Like any politician, he bases decisions in part on political calculation, and his political calculations often are cautious and defensive, which isn’t surprising: though he hardly qualifies as a strong liberal, right-wing hysterics label him a communist. He hasn’t articulated a vision for his presidency, has no real set of priorities, and, rather than acting, asks us to be patient and wait for better times to come. All of this, especially the caution, may have something to do with his race; the racial slurs, the birther nonsense and the hysteria on the right certainly underscore the difficulty inherent in being the first black president.

In a way it doesn’t matter when he moved to the right, as he’s clearly a conservative now on many issues. However, it poses this conundrum for Democratic voters and strategists: if the more pointed criticisms are valid, if, as Sirota put it, he is a strong president but “dissembling [and] conniving,” if he’s a closet conservative, he should have a challenge from the left in the primaries. But that would help the Republicans and do we want a president who’s even further to the right? The solution: support for (or at least no opposition to) his reelection, and concentration on electing a Democratic House. Enthusiastic support for Obama would tie any liberal in logical knots, but throwing out the House Republicans is intellectually and morally a no-brainer.

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68. http://www.heritage.org/research/projects/the-case-against-obamacare; http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/health-care-reform-in-maine-reversing-obamacare-lite
69. It isn’t available on the Times web site;
see http://www.creators.com/liberal/david-sirota/the-bizarro-fdr.html .
70. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/?page=3 : “The myth of Obama’s ‘blunders’ and ‘weakness’.”
71. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18636.html
72. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21693036/
73. http://www.ourfuture.org/fact-sheets-briefs/2011010212/barack-obama-s-statements-social-security
74. Ibid.
75. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/155773-white-house-social-security-not-currently-in-crisis
76. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21738432/ns/meet_the_press/t/meet-press-transcript-nov/
77. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504114.html
78. “What Were They Thinking?” by Elizabeth Drew, The New York Review of Books, August 18, 2011

2011-08-09T19:30:00.001-07:00

August 9, 2011

It’s no wonder that we misunderstand economic issues. They are complicated and theoretical, and at times seem divorced from ordinary experience. Worst, economics seems to be half politics, which guarantees disagreement among the experts. For most of us, some considerable guidance is required, and that, unfortunately, is just what is lacking in media reports and many editorial columns, which, in addition to reflecting the political orientation of the authors, betray more than a little ignorance. A case in point is today’s Seattle Times house column.

It began with an inaccurate comment on stimulus: “Following the Bush bailouts, the Obama administration has responded to the recession with even larger doses of borrowing and spending. . . . This was the stimulus that did not stimulate. There has been almost no recovery. That may be because the medicine wasn't strong enough, or that it wasn't much of a stimulant.” There was stimulus and there has been recovery, although certainly not enough. At least the writer(s) recognized the possibility that the stimulus was too small or was misdirected, or was of the wrong sort. The conclusion might be to do it again and do it right, but no: “Greater and greater doses are simply unaffordable.” We can’t afford to do it right; the deficit is the most important issue. Even if the latter is true, don’t we want to take the action which will reduce the deficit in the long run? No; only the short term matters: “All the countries in trouble have to cut back.” Austerity is the only course, even though experience shows that it is the wrong course. No surprise there: “[W]hat experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”⁶⁷

The Times cited as authority an unreliable source, Standard and Poors, which has lowered its rating of U.S. bonds. “The reason for the downgrade, S&P said, was that the debt-ceiling deal ‘falls short.’ . . . Stabilizing the debt requires deeper cuts ‘in the growth of public spending, especially in entitlements,’ S&P said, plus the expiration of the Bush tax cuts or equivalent increase in taxes.” Why would anyone would rely on S&P’s opinions? It rated Enron bonds as investment grade until four days before Enron declared bankruptcy. It didn’t downgrade government bonds when the Bush administration ran huge deficits — and guaranteed more in the future — by cutting taxes and waging unnecessary wars. Any agency truly concerned about fiscal responsibility or, as it now claims, about governmental competence, would have denounced that pair of policies. Instead, it busied itself giving high ratings to toxic mortgage packages, thereby helping cause the bubble-collapse-recession sequence which further worsened the deficit it now worries about. To top it off, S&P mangled the numbers in its bond rating analysis but plunged ahead with its downgrade as if getting the math right was of no importance.

Stuck with its source, the Times reluctantly supported the tax-increase part of the formula, sort of: “We concur, in part, on targeted tax increases.” That must have hurt.

Ironically, the editorial ended by describing the situation accurately: “All of which means less medicine from Washington, D.C. There may be some little stimulants made to look like big ones, but essentially the patient is on its own. That is why the market plunged.” Does that suggest that austerity is the wrong plan, that abandonment by the government is the wrong policy? Alas, the Times was unable to follow its observation to its logical conclusion. Voters trying to understand economic issues also are on their own.

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67. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, Introduction, II, 2

2011-08-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

August 4, 2011

It would be pleasant and rewarding to spend my declining years in some creative activity, such as painting or sketching, composing or playing, writing poetry or novels but, alas, such pursuits require talent and I have none, so I watch the culture and its organizational aspect, politics, become increasingly debased and occupy my time by commenting on that pathetic trend.

When Barack Obama was elected, I thought I might have to change title of my blog, or at least modify my explanation of it. However, the fog enveloping Washington, D.C. is heavier than ever.

At least, during the Bush years, the orientation of the administration was obvious. Now its political position is a mystery, but its drift (and I use the word advisedly) is rightward. To add to the muddle, Mr. Obama is denounced by conservatives as a liberal, if not a socialist or worse. This is ludicrous, but repetition of nonsense is effective in creating fog, in confusing voters. George Will joined the bandwagon this week: in 2012, he said, Obama “cannot run from his liberalism.” It’s ironic that, years ago, Will derided conservative campaigning as being limited to shouting “Eek! a liberal!” Now he’s doing it. Back then, at least, liberalism hadn’t yet been driven from the field, so there was something to fear. Will’s comment about Mr. Obama is just tea-party nonsense.

In a more rational world the media would help dispel the fog; news reports would concentrate on substance. Instead, TV news and, to a lesser extent, newspapers and their web sites, give us trivia. I don’t know how many times I have seen or heard a breathless report of the doings of some celebrity I have never heard of and wouldn’t care about if I had. When something of importance is reported, the account often has little relationship to facts. Consider an article on the Washington Post web site on the debt-limit deal, captioned, “The moderate middle wins the day.” This is a strange way to describe an overwhelming conservative victory, but the reporters saw it this way: “For weeks, the debt-ceiling debate has been defined by a clash of the extremes; tea party conservatives seeking to dramatically reshape government and committed liberals afraid that doing so would squeeze the poor and the working class.” Nonsense: liberal policies never were part of the mix; the debate was between the right and far right. We have here another example of the media’s aiding Republicans by pretending that liberals are a force, that in this case they are equally at fault for the delay and turmoil.

A few years ago, someone in the Bush White House bragged that “when we act, we create our own reality. . . .'' ⁶⁶ He contrasted and dismissed ''the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from [a] judicious study of discernible reality.'' Unfortunately, his boast was justified. Conservatives no longer are part of the reality-based community and the media are following them into fantasy land.

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66. Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," The New York Times Magazine 10/17/04; http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

2011-07-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

July 29, 2011

On Wednesday I saw two more indicators of how little people on the right comprehend about the debt-ceiling debate or about economics in general.

Donald Trump was quoted on the Post-Intelligencer web site (alas, it no longer is a real newspaper) on the debt crisis: “When it comes time to default, [people are] not going to remember any of the Republicans’ names. They are going to remember in history books one name, and that’s Obama. They’re not going to be talking about Boehner or anybody else . . . ” So, the prime consideration is that, when our economy collapses, that non-citizen socialist will be responsible. Actually, according to news reports, the GOP will get the larger share of the blame, but the Donald pronounced: “I don’t care about the polls.” He knows better.

What about the disaster to the economy if there is a default? Well, gosh, why worry about stuff like public welfare, the stability of the country or paying our bills? Only one thing matters: “The fact is, unless the Republicans get 100 percent of what they want, and that may include getting rid of Obamacare, which is a total disaster, then they should not make a deal other than a minor extension that would take you before you [sic] the election which would ensure Obama doesn’t get elected, which would be a great thing.”⁶⁵ Never mind that the strategy risks disaster; defeating Obama is the only issue. Trump probably never was a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, but his views hardly are unrepresentative of that Party.

The other illustration came via television. At the gym where I work out (too infrequently), there are monitors showing various programs, silently. I had the misfortune to be facing one tuned to CNBC and Lawrence Kudlow. The lack of sound spared me his comments, but at one point the screen showed this legend: “Free-market capitalism is the best road to prosperity.” If Kudlow or his producer are determined to display that bit of propaganda, including the euphemism “free market,” they should be required to read on air Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, which details just how that theory has worked out in practice in Asia, South America, Poland, Russia and occupied Iraq. It is a depressing account which should convince any thinking person that it not only is bad economics but is too often is associated with authoritarianism, quite the opposite of the libertarian promises of its advocates.

65. http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2011/07/26/gop-reject-debt-deal-to-sabotage-obama-trump/

2011-07-24T11:54:00.001-07:00

July 23, 2011

Politics, according to Bismark, is the art of the possible. If only we were so civilized. John Kenneth Galbraith revised the maxim: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” That is where the debt-limit debate stands, between the disaster of default and budget proposals from each side which the other can’t swallow. There is no reason why this should be so; the limit should have been raised without fuss, without posturing, without playing chicken and without vast programs of debt reduction.

Even supposing that this is the proper time to debate the budget, President Obama has moved so far to the right that, if his offer had been accepted, the result would seem, to anyone asleep for the past two and one-half years, as if a Republican president were in office. Conservative commentators cannot believe that the Republican negotiators did not agree to the administration’s proposal and declare victory.

However, a budget victory, even the adoption of a conservative program, is not enough now. The demands of the House Republicans are so extreme that they no longer fall within the realm of rational politics, to say nothing of rational economics. Their demands are driven by a desire to dismantle the federal government. They may imagine themselves in Boston in 1773, throwing tea into the harbor, protesting unfair taxation. However, their true place is 1788, where they join the anti-federalists in arguing against the Constitution and against the creation not only of a national government but of a nation.

2011-07-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

July 22, 2011

I haven’t thought of the space program as one of our priority undertakings, but its ending serves as a metaphor of the decline of the United States: a public undertaking privatized, the abandonment of exploration and cutting-edge science, something we no longer can afford because we refuse to pay taxes, an acknowledgment of weakness and failure, dependance on the Russians.

In describing our present situation, one doesn’t have to search far to find metaphors, similes or other descriptive lines to borrow. A book on my to-read-someday list, primarily due to its provocative title, is Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? We might ask instead: why is there no Democratic Party (or democratic party) in the United States? The presence of three Dinos, one of them the Assistant Senate Majority Leader, in the Gang of Six illustrates the disappearance of such a party, capitalized or not. Consider the Gang’s proposal, as set out in an Associated Press article in Thursday’s Seattle Times :

The plan would simplify the tax code by reducing the number of tax brackets from six to three, lowering the top rate from 35 percent to between 23 percent and 29 percent. That could [!] provide a windfall for wealthy taxpayers. . . . To help pay for lower rates, the plan would reduce popular tax breaks for mortgage interest, health insurance, charitable giving and retirement savings.. . . .

The alternative minimum tax, which was enacted in 1969 to make sure that high-income families pay at least some income tax, would be repealed. . . .

The Gang of Six plan is silent about taxes on capital gains and dividends . . . . The current top rate on capital gains and dividends is 15 percent, well below the top rate for ordinary income.

The plan would lower the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to between 23 percent and 29 percent . . . .

Under current law, the U.S. taxes overseas profits of American corporations but only after they return those profits to the U.S. The proposal calls for a territorial tax system, which would tax only profits made in the U.S. . . .

Once again we will shift the tax burden downward. Another large chunk of national wealth will go to the rich and to corporations.

Even without this contribution by the Gang, our policies made little sense. We cut taxes to lower the deficit, impose austerity during a recession, ignore global warming, and wage unnecessary wars that cannot be won and which we cannot afford. Here’s another apt description of the current state of politics: “The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today, and black's white today, and day's night today . . . .” Cole Porter didn’t know when he had it good.

Although The Times did readers a service by publishing the outline of the plot of the Gang of Six, it hasn’t been as helpful on its editorial pages. Letters to the editor have been a better source of intelligent comment lately than Times columns or house editorials.

At the end of June, a Times editorial inveighed against a $20-per-year tax on auto licence tabs to be used to fund transit. The argument was the usual we’re-taxed-to death stuff, as if the editors and publisher were a) going to notice $20 or b) were truly concerned about the tax burden on ordinary folk. (This is, remember, the paper controlled by the Blethen family, which has campaigned for years in favor of tax breaks for the wealthy). A letter which, to their credit, they published, set them straight: “This tax of $1.67 per month is very reasonable for the benefits we get in return: more public transit and less traffic congestion. . . .” The writer quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (“Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society”) and added a succinct statement of political philosophy: “As people become less willing to pay for services, our society becomes less civil. We become more selfish and less of a community.”

In early July, an editorial in the Times blamed the increase in tuition at the University of Washington on the failure of the legislature to provide adequate funding. A letter pointed out the Times’ inconsistency: “The editorial blaming the Legislature for tuition increases . . . is laudable . . . . But your constant and often strident opposition to any new taxes makes me wonder where you think the legislature will get the money . . . .”

On July 19, Bruce Ramsey, the resident libertarian on the Times’ editorial staff, wrote a column on Social Security. As a preliminary matter, let’s consider the position of an editorial columnist or other writer of political opinion. In a column on Liberty Unbound,⁶² Ramsey criticized a column by Michael Gerson, who in turn had criticized libertarian hero Ron Paul. However, Ramsey made this concession: “Libertarians can rail against Gerson as biased, which of course he is. He is an opinion columnist. Bias is part of his job description.” The same is true of Ramsey and of my modest attempts at commentary, but bias is one thing; getting the facts straight is another. Ramsey doesn’t.

He began his column this way: “Back in May I wrote a column on Social Security. I argued that the system was coming up short, that there is no money in the "trust fund," and that some Americans will have to pay more in taxes or get less in benefits. It is a matter of arithmetic, but some readers loudly denied it. . . .” If by “no money in the trust fund,” he means no cash lying in a drawer, I suppose that he is correct, but I also assume that he is a bit more sophisticated than that. The trust fund consists of U.S. government bonds, which have been the safest investment in the world. If Mr. Ramsey had a private trust fund consisting of such bonds, he would not consider himself broke. Actually, he acknowledged that in his May column: “If you or I had the bonds, we would be trillionaires.” Why the different standard for Social Security?

His answer: “ But Social Security is the government — and an organization's IOUs are not an asset to itself.” The issue is not whether the bonds are a “government” asset; they are an asset of a trust fund. Like any other government bond, they are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. To believe that the government would default on the bonds requires believing that it would default on the bonds in private portfolios and the bonds issued to cover loans by China. Is the U.S. about to default on those?

Leaving aside questions of law and policy, what of the common conservative argument that the government should behave like individuals? By that standard, the government should honor its debt and pay the SS bonds as they fall due. Indeed, it does just that, many times per year. The problem, or opportunity, depending on one’s agenda, is that, up until now, the SS fund ran a surplus, so that redemption of bonds was exceeded by new purchases. The Ramsey theory, beloved of all conservatives, is that the government will cease redeeming bonds now that redemption represents a net outward flow from the general fund.

Until very recently, no one in his right mind would have believed that this could happen, that the United States government would default on its bonds. Our national credit would collapse and our national standing, power and way of life with it. The capture of the House by ignorant reactionaries has made this a possibility, as the debt-ceiling standoff demonstrates. If default occurred, Ramsey’s wish-cum-prediction of trust fund insolvency might come true, though of course he does not acknowledge that self-destructive irrationality would be required to make it happen.

If the debt ceiling were not raised, and default occurred, the American and international economies would collapse, so some face-saving deal is inevitable. If default is not the answer to cheating the trust fund, then we move to the fallback argument along the lines suggested by Ramsey: pretend that the bonds are worthless, so that payment may be ignored or held hostage to a reduction in benefits, or to a rise in the retirement age, or to some other preliminary stage to the ultimate goal of scrapping the system.

The cause of the risk of default, both general and regarding Social Security, is obvious: a refusal to raise taxes on the rich. In any circumstance this would be a position of dubious fiscal and ethical merit; here it is simply immoral. According to Ramsey, those who want the bonds to be redeemed also want to avoid being taxed to accomplish that. Here’s his argument, referring to a letter-writer who demanded that the loans be paid:

[W]hat he was really saying was, "Make someone else pay." That is not a respectable answer. Not for a system built under the assumption that "we're all in it together." It is, however, a sentiment you hear all the time with Social Security and other big budget issues. Whether it's ending the $106,800 cap on Social Security wages, reversing the Bush tax cuts for the top bracket only, or imposing a Washington state income tax for the top 3 percent of earners only, tax proposals often seem to exempt the group making them. Make someone else pay.

Pity the wealthy: we’re all out to get them. I’d be interested to hear Ramsey’s rationale for the cap on SS wages, or the justification for the tax cuts for the wealthy, let alone their perpetuation. (His rationale for opposing the state income tax came down to its “soaking the rich”). Ordinary folk have paid the payroll tax based on the assumption — indeed the promise — that they were funding Social Security. That tax was raised in the 1980s for the express purpose of building up the fund for the wave of retirements now beginning.⁶³ The surplus was borrowed, as provided by law but, because it has been used irresponsibly, redeeming the bonds is more difficult than it should have been. In addition to war, the chief culprit has been tax cuts, overwhelmingly favoring the wealthy. Therefore, leaving aside war, ordinary people have paid regressive payroll taxes so that the wealthy could have income and estate tax cuts; in effect, we’ve lent them, as well as the government, billions. Mr. Ramsey thinks the wealthy should not be required to repay that loan. At least he’s consistent: repayment of debts is optional.

Taxing the wealthy heavily, in addition to making fiscal sense — raising needed revenue — makes moral and cultural sense. Consider, for example, Theodore Roosevelt’s view:

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.

Preventing huge discrepancies in wealth is not based on envy or a desire to avoid obligations, or class warfare, but on the health of society: “At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” TR’s solution: “a graduated income tax on big fortunes,” and “a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”⁶⁴

However, such thoughts are so Twentieth-Century. The Times rounded out the picture Thursday by endorsing the Gang’s plan.

______________________________

62. A libertarian journal, formerly known as Liberty magazine

63. Another of those perceptive letters pointed out that Ramsey is inconsistent as to the relationship of payroll taxes to benefits (do they contribute to the payors’ future benefits of merely pay benefits for those already retired?)

64. New Nationalism speech, August 31, 1910. http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/ index.asp?document=501

2011-07-16T12:50:00.001-07:00

July 16, 2011

There is a story going round that a Democratic administration took office in early 2009. It must be a myth; consider:

• the appointment of a conservative economic team;
• the absence of a jobs program in the face of high and persistent unemployment;
• a plan to drastically cut spending during a long recession;
• extension of the Bush tax cuts;
• acceptance of the notion that Social Security is part of the deficit problem;
• turning our longest war into a seemingly permanent one, ignoring the human and financial cost;
• abandonment of a promise to close Guantánamo, and resumption of military trials;
• bombing Libya and claiming exemption from the War Powers Act;
• continued invocation of the state-secrets defense.

The latest sign is the claim by the new Secretary of Defense that we invaded Iraq because of 9-11, to defeat al-Qaeda.

2011-06-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

June 25, 2011

My dear wife and I play a little game. I suggest that we move to Europe and she shakes her head and rolls her eyes, no doubt wondering why, if I must be foolish, I don’t find a more entertaining format. My motivation has been to save time, expense and discomfort on vacation trips: “if we lived in England, we wouldn’t have to endure nine hours in coach to visit the West Country,” etc. She acknowledges the logic of my argument but points out that housing is expensive there, the dollar is weak, we aren’t exactly wealthy (and even further from that status than three years ago), we’d be thousands of miles from the family, am I going to move all those books and what about the dog? Good arguments all, so I subside.

However, the desire, illogical or not, is growing, and for reasons unrelated to the logistics of travel. I am becoming increasingly depressed about the state of the union and wish — intermittently, perhaps never quite seriously — that I could leave. My remedy may be unrealistic, but the dissatisfaction is genuine and not without basis; here is a brief list:

• wars, costing thousands of lives and driving us into massive debt,
• tax cuts which further increase the debt while creating a financial aristocracy and allowing our infrastructure, physical and otherwise, to crumble,
• cries of “socialism” whenever anything progressive is proposed, such as bringing decent health care to more people,
• a financial system which operates to enrich insiders rather than to support the economy, and which resists regulation but profits from public bailouts,
• conservative rejection not only of compassion, but of the principle of sharing and common enterprise which is fundamental to civilized society,
• libertarian delusions about rugged individualism and minimal government,
• conservative rejection of science and most aspects of reality,
• a flood of guns and libertarian-conservative determination to arm everyone,
• the power of money, hardly a new development, but increasingly dominating politics,
• a Supreme Court content to allow the previous two trends to continue,
• a mania for privatization, in part based on an illusion about efficiency, in part the result of the refusal to tax the wealthy,
• accusations that the President is a foreigner, a communist, a fascist, or the antichrist, many of them masking racial bigotry,
• suppression of unions, undermining of pensions, and denigration of public employment,
• a shallow, often repellant, celebrity-ridden culture,
• ninnies running for the Republican nomination,
• pathetic news media which ignore when they do not abet these developments, and
• a supposedly liberal president who does little to earn the label.

To conservatives, this critique and my proposed solution no doubt mark me as something less than a real American, certainly unqualified to offer opinions about this country, polity and society. I wonder. They too denounce the present condition of the country. Although such true Americans would reject physical emigration, they too wish to escape, into an earlier, more primitive time, dragging the rest of us along.

Like most Americans, I have thought of this as an extraordinary country. I have considered myself lucky to have been born here. I have believed, in the words of the Gettysburg Address, that we are “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” that we have a “government of the people, by the people, for the people. . . .” However, those words no longer describe us, and have been repudiated by Lincoln’s party.

This condition has been developing for decades, but it has come to its full flowering now, and is epitomized, appropriately, by something mundane: the Ryan budget. A book gathering dust on my shelves is entitled Setting National Priorities: The 1980 Budget. Budgets are boring but, as the title states, the federal budget sets, and reflects, national priorities. Ours are a disgrace.

Tony Judt, in his book Ill Fares the Land, noted that “the symptoms of collective impoverishment are all about us. Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid, and the uninsured . . . .” He added that these “all suggest a collective failure of will.”⁵⁹ As to liberals, that is true: will, courage, self-confidence, even real conviction seem absent. As to conservatives, however, the problem is not a failure of will but an ideological inability to address such issues.

Conservatives are fond of claiming that their world view is taken directly from the principles on which the nation was founded, but there is much error and self-delusion in that belief. For example, they refer constantly to “liberty,” but their concept of it is oddly narrow, generally coming down to a defense of business. That does not even have the distinction of being a novel misinterpretation. Judt pointed this out: “Indeed, the thought that we might restrict public policy considerations to a mere economic calculus was already a source of concern two centuries ago.” He noted that Condorcet “anticipated with distaste the prospect that ‘liberty will be no more . . . than the necessary condition for the security of financial operations.’ "⁶⁰ Moving from the Eighteenth Century to the Nineteenth, we find that Hegel also criticized this misuse of terminology and concept: “When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really private interests which are being discussed.”⁶¹ Hegel had in mind the landed aristocracy, but his comment applies as well to the plutocracy that Republicans defend in the Twenty-First.

About all one can hope for is that, undeterred by shame, logic or responsibility, the Right will push the new paradigm to the breaking point, and a disgusted public, finally enlightened, will elect rational officials and demand enactment and enforcement of sensible policies.

___________________________

59. P. 12. Also included in an article in The New York Review of Books, April 29, 2010.
60. Ill Fares the Land, p. 35
61. The Philosophy of History, Fourth Part, Section III, Chapter II, in The Philosophy of Hegel, Friedrich ed., p. 133 (Modern Library)

2011-06-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

June 16, 2011

Recently I came across an apt description of our situation.

The poor grow poorer and the rich become richer: “The distance which separates the rich from other citizens is growing daily . . ." “Their share of national wealth [is] enormous.”

Public finance is a sham: “The most extraordinary of all expenditure is that incurred by war. . . financed . . . entirely by loans. No new taxation was imposed . . . .” “Nobody asked about extraordinary accounts, where the real cost of the war was recorded.”

As to the mentality of the public: “Belief in plots and conspiracies” is a “sign of the credulity of the times.” That mind-set seeks “simple, universal formulae to resolve any problem, no matter how complex.”

Of course, you have guessed that I am playing historical games; those are comments on France shortly before the collapse of the ancien régime.⁵⁷ However, there is little that is really new, so the analogy is instructive. As The Preacher put it, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. . . . There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after.”⁵⁸ In other words, we will continue to make the same mistakes, forever.
______________________

57. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 23, 65, 67
58. Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, Revised Standard Version

2011-06-15T08:58:00.001-07:00

June 14, 2011

Two cartoons sum up the state of political action about the sagging economy and unemployment. Stuart Carlson’s latest ⁵⁵ shows President Obama as FDR, saying: “I was thinking of launching an ambitious, historic public employment program to put America back to work, but then I thought . . . Naaaah!” Today’s by Tom Toles ⁵⁶ shows the GOP elephant at a podium bragging “We starved the beast!” Behind him is a dead cat labeled Economic Recovery next to an empty bowl labeled Austerity. There is our choice: inactivity or counterproductive ideology.

Meanwhile, length of unemployment is at an all-time high and the infrastructure is crumbling.

____________________
55. http://www.uclick.com/client/wpc/sc/
56. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/toles?hpid=z3

2011-06-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

June 13, 2011

This is a postscript of a sort to my posting of June 4. In the last paragraph there, I referred to Page Smith’s use of the term “redemption.” His usage was not casual or unique; the last volume of his U.S. history, published in 1987, was entitled Redeeming the Time .⁵¹ The phrase is borrowed from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. In the course of advising them how to live and to conduct themselves, Paul said, “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”⁵² Modern translations drop the word “redeeming,” and produce something like this: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil.”⁵³ The former is not altogether clear: how does one redeem time? The latter uses more a familiar phrase but it still doesn’t quite track: the word “because” seems out of place; should one not make the best use of time when days are not evil? A more cogent modern version is this paraphrased rendering: “Make the best use of your time, despite all the difficulties of these days.”⁵⁴

Leaving aside the amateur exegesis, when I read Redeeming the Time years ago, I was puzzled by the intent of the title. Having read Dissenting Opinions, I’m convinced that Smith meant to refer to redemption in a way not far removed from its religious meaning. The passage I quoted on June 4 is part of this discussion:

In the United States, the Great Depression turned out to be in some ways a blessing in disguise. It broke the spirit and the resistance of capitalism to widespread social reform. Such reforms, it seems clear, could never have been pushed through Congress in "good times.". . . The second great conflict in our history was finally resolved . . . . First slavery was abolished; then labor was given a "fair share" of the bounty or booty of capital.

So there has been not so much progress perhaps but redemption. Redemption from our most deplorable sins. We have a larger, more humane view of our responsibilities toward each other. . . .

This theme of societal redemption is the heart of the final chapter of Redeeming the Time . “I believe that the tendency of history, of all human institutions is downward, toward complacency, decadence, obtuseness, and coldness of heart, and that we are saved only by the often obscure but heroic efforts of men and women whose passion it has been to redeem the world.” It would not be an exaggeration to say that complacency, obtuseness and coldness of heart characterize much of contemporary politics and that the culture shows signs of decadence.

Smith set forth a number of themes which he thought characterized American history. The principal two, as noted, were the abolition of slavery and the achievement of relative equality by black Americans, and “the making of peace in the war between capital and labor.” A subsidiary theme was “the central role of religion in American history, specifically the Protestant passion for redemption,” appearing in various reform movements. This is a liberal, social, version of redemption. Both the secular use of that term and the content of the social version may offend contemporary religious conservatives, but the “social gospel” comes closer to the spirit of Christianity than the libertarian views of the political branch of the religious right.

Despite the positive role that Smith sees for Protestantism, it seems to me that the Protestant ethic has two serious flaws, at least when it emerges in political action, which have some bearing on our present state. One is that its missionary impulse produces a tendency to insist that the world do things our way, sometimes expressed in lectures and sometimes in action, including military adventures. Smith, writing during (although near the end of) the Cold War, recognized that:

[W]e have . . . managed to become what I am sure the Founding Fathers would have deplored (or do deplore) — that is to say, a menace to the rest of the world, or at least we are perceived by the rest of the world as a menace only slightly less to be feared than the other leading brand. That, of course, is not our view of ourselves; we are full of our famous rectitude and self-righteousness, confident that it is our mission to save the world from its own error and folly in the form of communism or socialism. . . . Our real problem at the moment is not how to save the world but how to keep from destroying it with our constantly and loudly professed good intentions . . . .

The other, more domestic, flaw — and here I’m treading close to heresy — is that the Protestant emphasis on personal salvation encourages a self-centered attitude, to the detriment of social responsibility. Smith also recognized that tendency: “The Protestant Reformation re-formed the intellectual and psychological world of the faithful. It created a new human type, the 'individual," a person free from the constraints of traditional society, a person guided by faith and, above all, by will. . . .” That sort of person is not the ideal citizen.

Throughout his history, Smith referred to two philosophies or attitudes which he termed the Classical-Christian Consciousness and the Secular-Democratic Consciousness. The former is embodied in the Constitution; the latter was the philosophy of the Jeffersonian revolution which followed. The former emphasized human fallibility, while the latter, incorporating the ideas of the Enlightenment, was more optimistic about progress. The New Deal and Great Society represent the high point of that reforming, democratizing impulse and though, according to Smith, it has weaknesses as well as strengths, it is still needed: “Inadequate as the Secular-Democratic Consciousness is in its notion of human nature, we can ill afford to lose it because it has been characterized throughout its history by a Utopian vision and a passion for reform.”

We have not entirely returned to the Classical-Christian Consciousness (especially not to the first half of that), but elements of it are evident, and problematic: “The Classical-Christian Consciousness, on the other hand, has often shown itself relatively indifferent to the issues of social justice and reform, frequently taking the line that poverty, for example, is always with us . . . .” Not surprisingly, Smith thought that we needed the best features of each, but we are further from that now than in 1987.
______________________________

51. Vol. 8 of A People's History of the United States
52. Ephesians 5: 15-16, King James Version
53. Ephesians 5: 15-16, Revised Standard Version
54. The Letter to Ephesus 5:15 et..seq., in Letters to Young Churches , J.B. Phillips translation

2011-06-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

June 10, 2011

Two recent columns by Jonathan Bernstein on the Washington Post ⁴⁹ web page put forth a neat summary of Republican primary-election strategy. With the partial exception of the libertarian candidates, who probably can’t be nominated, those running are “all one version or another of standard-issue conservative.” Standard issue in this reactionary age, that is. How then does any of them break away from the field? Pandering to noisy groups such as The Club for Growth or Tea Parties is one method, but “for the most part, Republicans have already pledged to do whatever their interest groups want.”

So each candidate pushes the envelope because, as Mr. Bernstein puts it, what primary voters want “is a candidate willing to be as radical as they think of themselves as being.” Happily for the candidates, the radicalism needn’t make sense. In fact, the more a notion is ridiculed by the usual suspects, such as the “liberal” media, the better: it feeds the illusion that the right is fighting a valiant battle against the forces of darkness. “Call it the Paul Revere strategy, after the Sage of Wasilla’s skill in turning anything foolish she says into evidence that liberals and reporters are out to get her.”

Bernstein summed it up as follows: “expect to see . . . candidates . . . embrace positions, or say things, that earn them scorn and ridicule from editorial boards and people acquainted with, uh, facts.” Or, as Harold Meyerson put it, “Today’s Republican Party is so whacked, so loony, so fey in the attic, that winning its nomination requires taking positions that will render the nominee unelectable come November 2012.”⁵⁰ I think that this describes the general picture well. The Republican base is, or is perceived to be, up in arms, fearful of creeping socialism, convinced that the American Way is in jeopardy, yearning for a return to Eden. Most of the candidates are adapting to this image, some because they don’t need any urging to be irrational.

However, the front-runner appears to be Mitt Romney, who hardly fits the extremist mold. True, he’s had to seek forgiveness for views held earlier, and the ultra-right may yet push him into some mild form of nuttiness; on Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh declared that Romney’s candidacy is over because he believes in man-made global warming. However, if he’s lucky he can retain a sane image and still satisfy the base by blaming everything they fear and despise on President Obama.

________________________

49. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/santorums-2012-launch-is- only-the-beginning-of-the-craziness/2011/03/28/AG4xYIKH_blog.html; and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-paul-revere-strategy/2011/03/28/AGeamKMH_blog.html
50. http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=when_your_base_is_nuts

2011-06-06T20:12:00.000-07:00

June 6, 2011

In May, 2010 I looked up the Washington Tea Party chapters on the Tea Party Patriots web site ⁴⁶ to see how any of my fellow citizens were members. At that time there were 44 active chapters and a total of 437 members.⁴⁷ I checked back yesterday and found 50 chapters listed, of which one was in Virginia. Does the increase from 44 to 49 groups reflect a larger membership? There is no way to tell. Each group’s web page is in identical format, with five topics: About Us, News, Members, Events, and Projects. The Members page for each is blank. Either membership has fallen to embarrassing levels or the tea party patriots have gone underground.

The former might be the case; membership never matched the pretense that the Tea Party “movement” reflected mass opinion and, as noted below, fewer people seem to be joining than a year ago. I looked at the Events and Projects pages for a few of the sites and found nothing. On some of the sites there were posts by a few people, presumably members, but certainly no indication of great activity or interest.

Some of the groups have their own web sites, in addition to the uniform sites provided by the parent organization, and some of those reveal membership. One, Sno-King 9-12 Commission, lists 123 members. I counted 124, no doubt my error. Of those, 70 joined in 2009, 45 in 2010,and 9 this year. The Moses Lake-Grant County Tea Party Coalition lists 93 members, of whom 37 joined in 2009, 55 in 2010, and only 1 this year. The Puget Sound Conservative Underground claims 586 members. I counted 576; the difference probably is due to a few entries for married couples. Of my 576, 249 joined in 2009, 266 in 2010 and 61 this year. In each case, members are being added at a much slower pace than in the first two years.

There also is a web site for The Washington State Tea Party Movement,⁴⁸ containing a list of 47 group names, of which 3 are dead links. Presumably it is affiliated in some sense with Tea Party Patriots, as it tells viewers “For more information about the Tea Party movement, go to www.teapartypatriots.org.” However, the list of Washington groups is not the same on the two sites. Of 49 on the national site, 15 do not appear on the state page. Of 47 on the latter, 11 are not listed on the former.

Not all of the groups call themselves Tea Parties; 15 do not on the national list, 21 on the state list. Several are “912" groups; as one site describes its members, they are “patriots and fans of the 9/12 Project, inspired by the vision of Glenn Beck.” Some of the sites on the state list do not mention the Tea Party, and others barely do. It is a conglomeration of right-leaning groups.

I may be trying too hard to make sense of this. The definition of a Tea Party organization is loose and we are not talking about large numbers. Tea Parties really are the organizational equivalent of Sarah Palin: their ideas are neither new, nor sophisticated, nor really populist nor, for the most part, useful; their stance is primarily negative; they are ill-informed about government; their influence is less than they like to think, but everyone treats them as if they were significant.

_________________________

46. http://www.teapartypatriots.org/state/washington

47. See post of 5/14/10.
48. http://www.teapartywa.org/

2011-06-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

June 4, 2011

Page Smith, the author of an eight-volume history of the United States, also published a collection of essays entitled Dissenting Opinions. They were written between 1954 and 1983. Some still reflect our circumstances, some not.

One of the early essays, from 1955, is a review of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.⁴¹ Smith’s critique could be a comment on current American political conservatism. The “new conservatives” inspired by Kirk, he said,

offer us a jugful of miscellaneous ideas labeled "conservative thought" and tell us that we must take the mixture for our own good—it is the only thing that will cure us. But we do not swallow ideas like medicine. Ideas . . . must be judged by their historic effects, not by reference to some archetypal truth. But the new conservatives do not know this. They are idealists, Hegelians, for whom the only realities are those ideas that they have poured into their conservative jar.⁴²

The economic notions of Congressional Republicans certainly are examples of this tendency: abstract principles devoid of context and adhered to despite their actual effects.

Smith described the appeal to some of those theories, a description even more on point today than in the Fifties.

[A]t a time when people are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the inadequacies of the old liberal view of the world, they will turn to a set of ideas that are labeled conservative and hope to find refuge there from the terrible dilemmas of our time. . . . . [W]e are tempted by an attractive new orthodoxy that contains much less than the necessary truth and that at worst may simply bestow a spurious intellectual respectability upon political reaction.⁴³

The uncritical response to Rep. Ryan’s nostrums seems to be an illustration of this despair and desperation; certainly the GOP budget is an exercise in conferring respectability on reactionary policies.

The disillusionment with liberalism is only in part a reflection of the shortcomings or excesses of liberal policies. It is as much the result of the decades-long assault by conservatives, abetted by compliant, commercialized news media and accepted by a public with little understanding of government and an institutional memory limited to about six months.

Although conservatives like to pretend that they are somehow preserving national traditions and preventing the conquest of the American Way by foreign ideology, they are in fact proposing to repeal much that characterizes that way, such as economic opportunity and a reasonable degree of equality and security. Merely calling a program “conservative” does not establish its virtue; as Smith noted, “there is nothing about conservatives or about conservatism that contains any built-in immunity to decadence.”⁴⁴

Those impressions of conservative philosophy apply as well to 2011 as to 1955. However, some of Smith’s later comments show their age. He seemed to think that such reactionary proposals had been rejected, that the gains of the Thirties had been preserved. Writing in 1983, he saw permanent progress or, as he put it, “[r]edemption from our most deplorable sins. We have a larger, more humane view of our responsibilities toward each other. We have jettisoned a considerable baggage of outmoded and unjust notions about society and our fellows. We have chastened if not tamed capital. . . .”⁴⁵ No longer; we are returning to the Twenties and beyond.
_____________________________

41. I set out my impressions of that book — at tedious length — in a posting of November 4, 2009.
42. Dissenting Opinions , p. 27
43. Id. at p. 35
44. Ibid.

45. Id. at p. 94

2011-05-31T09:29:00.000-07:00

May 31, 2011

“Compassionate conservatism” always seemed more of a slogan than a reality and, to the extent that conservative political doctrine ever included compassion, it has been expunged.

Reacting to recent natural disasters, the Majority Leader in the House, Rep. Eric Cantor, said “Nobody should underestimate the tragedy here. Our hearts reach out to these families.” Although his heart reached out, his hand stayed firmly in his pocket. He declared that any funding for relief must be offset by spending cuts. Never mind that aid is needed; play fiscal games.

The GOP doctrine of offsetting cuts is, like all of its budget principles, less about controlling deficits than ideology. Therefore it came as no surprise that the offset to a $1 billion appropriation for relief would be a cut of $1.5 billion to an Energy Department program for the production of fuel-efficient vehicles. If an offset were required, a better choice would be to end tax subsidies to oil companies. However, elimination is opposed by House and Senate Republicans.

Ideology, followed blindly, leads to illogical conclusions. Although it granted $1 billion to FEMA for current disaster relief — after claiming its ransom — the Appropriations Committee cut $1.07 billion from other funding for disaster aid and firefighter assistance and training. Accurate and timely forecasting can lessen the suffering from natural disasters, but the House also has proposed to reduce funding for weather satellites.

2011-05-06T19:43:00.000-07:00

May 6, 2011

In a recent column, David Brooks commented on a visit to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He listened to a conference which included a representative of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and he was, for the most part, favorably impressed. That a federal department might have a clue would not come as a surprise to all, but Brooks is a conservative, so the concession is significant.

He described a program designed to provide housing for veterans which uses vouchers to provide for the housing, and observed, "Democrats seem to feel comfortable using vouchers to address housing problems but not education and health care problems." When I first read that, I thought that he might have a point, but he doesn’t, really. Vouchers are merely a method of payment. The arguments have arisen over whether proposed vouchers will provide adequate funding, and whether they serve some purpose other than payment, such as privatization. Health care — the GOP proposal for Medicare, to be specific — raises the first issue, education the second.

One question in the housing program is, apparently, whether effort should be focused on providing housing first, before addressing psychiatric, drug or alcohol problems. The current program assumes that putting a roof over people’s heads is the first priority, and that it aids in dealing with the other issues. Brooks questioned whether that was the best approach, although conceding, with perhaps a touch of sarcasm, that it "produces good homelessness data."

The big question I had was this: How large is the gap between the neatness of data on a bar chart and the messy reality on the street?
***
. . . I was struck by the vast difference between the way a government sees the world — numerically and organizationally — and the gritty and unpredictable way the world sometimes looks to, say, a crime reporter or a homeless veteran himself.

If that had been offered by someone who works in the field, or by a recipient or applicant for aid, it might have force, but what does Brooks know of life on the street? I’ve just finished reading his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, describing a social class he called bourgeois bohemians, hence "Bobos." (Those are rather quaint terms, obviously selected primarily for neologistic utility). Bobos are, in his view, the new elite; they are far removed from the streets, and so presumably is Mr. Brooks, who often referred to himself as a member of the class: " we Bobos;" "we in the educated elite;" "we . . . busy meritocrats." To make that entirely clear, and to establish the virtue of the class, he told us: "I'm a member of this class . . . . Wherever we educated elites settle, we make life more interesting, diverse, and edifying." Some time ago, I accused Mr. Brooks of being smug; little did I know how smug.

He concluded his column with this: "Amid the hot-rhetoric government wars, it was important to see the talent and commitment of real-life government workers running a successful program — and to see the limitations inherent in government planning." It is encouraging to see that a self-appointed member of the elite can find merit in a government program, but what he described are not limitations in government planning. Undoubtedly there are limitations on what any program can accomplish, but that is a rather different matter.

2011-05-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

May 6, 2011

President Obama has decided not to release photos of Osama bin Laden’s body. Given the accounts of his death, that seems wise, as gory pictures could create resentment. Some Americans will be skeptical that bin Laden is dead, but some would be in any case, as the birther nonsense demonstrates.

It would have been better to have brought bin Laden back alive, but that doesn’t appear to have been the mission. Is assassination legal? Few seem to care. Even if justified here, are we on a path from which there is no exit? Very possibly; apparently not even assassination of American citizens is ruled out.⁴⁰

Some insist on giving Bush the credit. That is odd, given that Bush conspicuously failed to find bin Laden, but no odder than much of the pro-Bush, anti-Obama line.

The public appearances of the presidents make a stark contrast. Obama’s announcement of bin Laden’s death was a calm statement, not flight-deck theatrics. When he visited ground zero this week, there was no speech, no bull-horn posing.

We should be leaving Afghanistan. It will be interesting to see whether the present euphoria leads that way or whether we simply will be encouraged in our delusion that we can do anything we set our minds to.

_______________________
40. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/02/04/assassinations ;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/world/middleeast/08killing.html?adxnnl=1&ref=statesecretsprivilege&adxnnlx=1304712955-CymGfGNZyUqIkVVsNxUmGw

2011-04-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

April 28, 2011

And now this from the “you can’t win” department.

President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate. Here are a few of the responses, first from the loyal opposition:
Mitt Romney. "What President Obama should really be releasing is a jobs plan."

The Republican National Committee Chairman. "Unfortunately, his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority - our economy."
Any opportunity for a cheap shot will do.

Here’s a sampling from the birthers and other Obama-conspiracy theorists:
Donald Trump. “I’d want to look at it, but I hope it’s true so that we can get on to much more important matters, . . .” — you know, like the ones he’s been talking about; oh, wait, this is what he’s talked about — “so the press can stop asking me questions about it . . . .” And why did they ask, Don? Apparently recalling that he had stirred this up, he decided that he, not the press, deserved the credit, and preened: “I feel I've accomplished something really, really important and I'm honored by it."

An aide to a Texas Republican who has introduced a bill that would require proof of citizenship from presidential candidates. "What I've seen online, what they produced today, still says ‘certificate of live birth’ across the top. We want to see a birth certificate. The one that we have that says 'birth certificate' is from Mombasa, Kenya, with his footprint on it. He has still not produced an American birth certificate." Actually, the supposed document from Mombasa is titled “Certificate of Birth.” Also, it’s a forgery, but that hardly matters in this debate.

Philip Berg (who filed a lawsuit alleging that Obama was born in Kenya). "I'm not that concerned with the birth certificate. Unless there is evidence that he renounced his Indonesian citizenship, we believe he is an illegal president." That’s one fallback position; here’s another:

Andy Martin (perennial candidate and “King of the Birthers”). "The pressure for his college records is going to become relentless."

Birther Orly Taitz (on the identification of Obama’s father). "In those years . . . nobody wrote ‘African’ as a race, it just wasn't one of the options. It sounds like it would be written today, in the age of political correctness, and not in 1961 when they wrote ‘white’ or ‘Asian’ or 'Negro'." Never mind that Obama Sr. was African in a literal sense.

And we have the all-around, general purpose dimwits, such as
Rush Limbaugh. "The two things about this that really shock me the most: one, that Obama was born at all. I thought it was a miraculous conception. And secondly, that his parents are actually mortals. . . . I mean, here they have presented this guy as 'the Messiah,' as 'the One,' and those people aren't born. They just descend from the heavens." If he’s going to indulge in sacrilegious sarcasm, Rush needs to (re?)read Matthew 1:18-25 although, given his muddled thinking, it might not help much.

It will be interesting to see what effect the long-form certificate will have on the amazingly large fragment of the population which believes that Mr. Obama is not a citizen. It may not be great. For many of them, he would have to change the color of his skin.

2011-04-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

April 26, 2011

Winning the battle of words is a long step toward winning any political battle. The side that defines the terms in which an issue is posed is likely to prevail on that issue, by wrapping its argument in the flag or high principle, or catering to voters’ biases. The caption of a recent, and widely reproduced, Reuters article provides an example: “Pro-defense senators push fight against Gaddafi.” There was a time when war was called war, not defense. We might have a more honest discussion of foreign policy if there were still a War Department, as there was prior to 1947. However, in that year, it was folded into the new Defense Department. Since then, those who want to save or rule the world can describe military policies, expenditures and operations, however dubious, as part of national defense.

The further we go into the twenty-first century the more things resemble George Orwell’s vision of the late twentieth. Our militaristic stance not only makes a mockery of the term “defense,” but comes close to “War is Peace,” a slogan of Oceania, one of the perpetually warring coalitions in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We have many pretty labels for militarism and its methods; consider the name given to the invasion of Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or to the war in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom. (The “enduring” part is accurate, at least). Think of the description of torture as enhanced interrogation.

Such euphemisms are examples of doublespeak, a term coined by the National Council of Teachers of English. It is language that “diverts attention from, or conceals, a speaker’s true meaning. . .making the bad seem good, and the unpleasant attractive or at least tolerable. It seeks to avoid, shift, or deny responsibility, and ultimately prevents or limits thought.” 35

The Republican budget goes beyond doublespeak, to the inspiration for that term, doublethink, Orwell’s word for the core of Oceania’s mind control. This is not merely the use of misleading terms, but “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” The Republican plan to reduce the deficit while cutting taxes is a perfect example.

Are its contradictions the result of deliberate deception or self-delusion? Orwell thought that doublethink was both: “The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.” Another term might be willful ignorance.

How can the right convince people that their programs work and liberals’ do not, when the evidence is to the contrary? Oceania had it down pat. The Party slogan was “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” 36 The Party did that by changing reports of the past, including rewriting news accounts. Our conservatives don’t have that advantage, but are making progress toward the same goal, revising history. They do it directly, by claiming that tax cuts always increase revenue or that Keynesian economic polices never work. They do it by pretending that they always have opposed deficits. They do it by winning the battle of words, by calling regulation of business an assault on liberty, describing financial manipulation as the working of the benign market, labeling imperialist adventures as defense of the homeland, describing inequality as virtuous independence, and labeling any movement toward social justice or shared benefits as socialism.

Not long ago, I mentioned a book entitled Flat Earth News, the title describing the tendency of discredited stories to persist in the news media. A companion in imagery is Zombie Economics,37 which details how flawed economic policies have continued to influence policy, even after repeated demonstrations of their falsity. Other books telling the same dismal tale are Freefall 38 and The Return of Depression Economics.39 Their message is twofold: those policies brought on the current recession and, unless reversed, they will prolong it and lead to another. Not only does the House budget repudiate those lessons, Republican policies, budgetary and otherwise, cancel the last hundred years of history, in the process expunging part of their own legacy, especially anything connected with the embarrassing Theodore Roosevelt.

______________________
35. The Oxford Companion to the English Language, p. 320
36. Oceania quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 270, 44.
37. By John Quiggin (2010)
38. By Joseph Stiglitz (2010)
39. By Paul Krugman (2009)

2011-04-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

April 19, 2011

Republicans are trying to lower taxes on corporations and on the rich prevent regulation of business, cut pensions and benefits (for ordinary folk, not the upper echelons), privatize Medicare, repeal health care, break unions, and gut environmental protection, while General Electric pays no taxes, executive compensation boggles the mind, and hedge fund management fees — peaking above a billion dollars per year per manager — are taxed as capital gains. Consider this description:

I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war... against working people... and even many in the middle class of our society. The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress... At virtually every level, I discern a demand by business for docile government and unrestrained corporate individualism. Where industry once yearned for subservient unions, it now wants no unions at all... Our tax laws are a scandal, yet corporate America wants even wider inequities... The wealthy seek not to close loopholes, but to widen them . . . .

Actually, that was a comment by a frustrated labor leader, explaining his resignation from a presidential advisory board, in 1978.33 He no longer could pretend that there was labor-management cooperation. The assault by business and the wealthy which emerged in the Seventies only has intensified.

We’re in the midst of a debate about massive deficits and national debt. How did that condition come about? Democrats must accept their share of the blame, but a major factor is that Republicans, having abandoned their traditional fiscal conservatism, have been content, when in power, to cut taxes and to run up deficits, leaving it to Democrats to pick up the pieces and to take the blame for the measures required to sort thing out. Here is a description of the modern strategy:

And what if the traditionalist-conservatives are right and a... tax cut, without corresponding cuts in expenditures, also leaves us with a fiscal problem? The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future, and will leave it up to his opponents to tidy up afterwards.

Again, not a new idea; Irving Kristol wrote that in 1980.34 We are now in one of those interregna, i.e., a Democratic administration, and President Obama is saddled with the tidying up.

The future which the Kristol plan shaped is, inevitably, one of massive debt, now leading to calls for a drastic shrinkage of government. The Ryan budget, just passed by the House, is the blueprint for that future. It purports to reduce the debt without raising taxes. In a rational world, that would get laughed off the stage, but now it treated as a sensible proposal.

Few conservatives have been as candid about tax cuts as Mr. Kristol. Most pretend that they have no cost, that they are in every way positive. That notion has taken various forms. There is the Kemp-Wanniski-Laffer version: cutting taxes stimulates business, which produces increased revenue. The notion has taken the Cheney form — deficits don’t matter — but that isn’t operative during a Democratic administration. It has taken the Greenspan form — cut taxes because it would be a bad idea to pay the debt down too quickly — but again the political situation is not congenial. Bush’s tax cuts were justified by the supposed surplus, or by the worsening economy, or by the need for investment, depending on the season. Tom DeLay stated the original principle that in war time, nothing is more important than cutting taxes.

Not everyone needs to be deluded regarding the effect of cuts; many just don’t want to pay taxes. Some libertarians believe that taxation is theft. Grover Norquist wants to starve the government to the point that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Some people seem to think that, whatever their purpose or effect, taxes are evil and must be exorcized. Some seem unaware that services cost money. Probably the most important factor is that no one likes to pay taxes, and those who like it least have the most influence.

When the Ryan plan was announced, news reports followed the familiar path of least resistance, describing the plan in the author’s terms, noting none of its flaws. On NBC, the reporter didn’t mention until the end of her bit that the plan includes more tax cuts for the rich, apparently not considering that an inconsistency. A Washington Post editorial noted several problems with the plan but commented that “it is brave of Mr. Ryan to risk the inevitable — and, indeed, swiftly ensuing — condemnations of the plan as an assault on seniors and the poor.” Brave? How about biased and blindly doctrinaire? Other reports and comments also spoke of the plan’s boldness or the author’s courage. Should we praise that sort of “courage”? The condemnations swiftly ensued because condemnation was in order.

Later, Rep. Ryan was given a spot on the Post op-ed page for a column entitled “A Budget for the 21st Century.” The caption is a joke but, although his sense of direction is off, he may well lead the way.

President Obama, not unaware of these developments, gave a speech last Wednesday, laying out a different plan. I missed the speech, but thought that there would be some mention of it on TV the following day. However, NBC News, looking more like Entertainment Tonight, ignored it.

I’ve now read the transcript of the speech. It was disorganized, and flawed politically and economically, but it more or less correctly analyzed the situation and proposed an approach to rectifying it. However, it has received remarkably little attention. When it has been noticed, it has been called partisan, as if the GOP plan were not. The bias in coverage is especially surprising given that Mr. Obama’s plan generally makes sense and Mr. Ryan’s does not.

The President called for cooperation and praised past examples of it, but was blunt as to his view of the principal source of the deficits and national debt. Debt was incurred before 1981, he said, somewhat understating the extent. “But as far back as the 1980s, America started amassing debt at more alarming levels, and our leaders began to realize that a larger challenge was on the horizon.”

At this point, he began to mix together the general fund deficit and Social Security, an error he never quite corrected. “They knew that eventually, the Baby Boom generation would retire, which meant a much bigger portion of our citizens would be relying on programs like Medicare, Social Security, and possibly Medicaid. . . . To meet this challenge, our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation's deficit . . . .” However, Social Security had been restructured and separated from the general budget in 1983; he ignored that, by implication folding Social Security into the general fund and into its deficit.

As to the 1990s, he praised “historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush, then made by President Clinton, by Democratic Congresses and by a Republican Congress.” However, Mr. Obama overstated the effect: “As a result of these bipartisan efforts, America's finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.” There was a surplus, but primarily because of Social Security taxes. Many believed that we were on track to pay down the debt, leading to the Greenspan theory noted above, but the forecasts of endless surplus were too rosy and soon evaporated. Even so, the President’s next comment is justified:

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program — but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts — tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country. . . .

After pointing to the tax cuts as a major problem, he made this odd comment: “if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.” This implies that the tax cuts were justified, but simply unfunded; which programs does he think should have been scrapped to pay for them?

When Mr. Obama took office he inherited not only debt but a recession, which necessitated further deficit spending. However, his attention now is on reducing the deficit. “By 2025, the amount of taxes we currently pay will only be enough to finance our health care programs -- Medicare and Medicaid -- Social Security, and the interest we owe on our debt. . . . Every other national priority - education, transportation, even our national security — will have to be paid for with borrowed money.” That is a very strange statement. It again runs together Social Security and general fund expenses —Medicare and Medicaid — and blames them for sopping up most of the revenue. I’m surprised that the Republicans haven’t quoted it.

The President presented a summary of the negative effects of high debt levels. One might quarrel with the particulars, but unquestionably the debt has reached an unsustainable level. He then returned to a formula laying the blame largely on social programs:

Around two-thirds of our budget -- two-thirds -- is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security. Two-thirds. Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans' benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20 percent. What's left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else.

Apart from running the first three together, creating what Paul Krugman derides as the socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid budget ploy, Mr. Obama neglected to state the size of the “defense” budget, let alone comment on its massive wastefulness. He said that most approaches to the deficit focus on the 12 percent, which won’t do: “any serious plan to tackle our deficit will require us to put everything on the table. . . .” There’s another invitation to mess with Social Security..

“Now, to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives . . . .” “It's a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.” Does it accomplish that? Apparently he thinks so, as he didn’t challenge the arithmetic. However, “the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we've known certainly in my lifetime.” The fundamental change would be wrought, in his view, by a 70 percent cut in clean energy, a 25 percent cut in education, a 30 percent cut in transportation and cuts in Pell Grants, an oddly restricted list. Oh, we need to add Medicare: a few paragraphs later, he said, of the Ryan budget,

It's a vision that says America can't afford to keep the promise we've made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you're a 65-year-old who's eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn't worth enough to buy the insurance that's available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck — you're on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

I don’t know whether the numbers are correct, but the conclusion is.

The President then turned to the most glaring example of illogic and bias: although we can’t pay for education, clean energy, Medicare or Medicaid, we can somehow afford still more tax breaks for the wealthy. He noted that ordinary Americans have lost ground while, thanks in part to those tax cuts, the rich have become richer. He threw the favorable comments about the Ryan plan back at the silly reporters and columnists who made them: “There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there's anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill.” No doubt that is why his speech was labeled “partisan.”

“This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.” It’s also about drastically reducing the size of government, not merely changing its priorities. Toward the end of the speech, he acknowledged that:

This larger debate that we're having -- this larger debate about the size and the role of government -- it has been with us since our founding days. And during moments of great challenge and change, like the one that we're living through now, the debate gets sharper and it gets more vigorous. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. As a country that prizes both our individual freedom and our obligations to one another, this is one of the most important debates that we can have.

If it were a good faith debate, yes, but it is not. The Republican aren’t interested in finding the right size of government; they want to shrink it until it can’t inconvenience the wealthy and powerful.

The President’s counter-proposal necessarily is sketchy at this stage, but he gave a few particulars.

He led off with the ever-popular cuts to discretionary domestic spending. That will build on “the savings that both parties agreed to last week.” Those, however, appear to be largely illusory. He’ll preserve “core investments that we need to grow and create jobs,” such as medical research, clean energy technology, new roads and airports, broadband access, education and job training. Doing that and reducing spending will be quite a trick but, at this point, he mentioned the most obvious source of savings, defense.

“So just as we must find more savings in domestic programs, we must do the same in defense. . . . .We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but we're going to have to conduct a fundamental review of America's missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world.” That is indeed necessary, but I’m not optimistic that the review will be anything close to fundamental or even that very substantial cuts will be made.

“The third step in our approach is to further reduce health care spending. . . .” He rejected the Ryan approach, and noted that the health care law will save money. He went after the insane provision in the drug-benefit law prohibiting the use of the government’s bargaining power to lower prices. He hinted at a new compensation formula for health care providers.

At this point he belatedly drew a distinction between general-fund expenditures and Social Security. “While Social Security is not the cause of our deficit, it faces real long-term challenges in a country that's growing older.” He didn’t specify the challenges nor propose a solution.

“The fourth step in our approach is to reduce spending in the tax code, so-called tax expenditures.” That is an interesting way to describe a tax law which doesn’t raise enough money, but it’s safer to attack expenditures than to suggest that more revenue is required. “In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans.” But no more. “We can't afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.” Bravo, if that’s a real pledge, and not just rhetoric.

Later in the speech Mr. Obama talked of raising taxes, but his discussion was muddled. “Some will argue we should not even consider ever -- ever -- raising taxes, even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It's just an article of faith to them. . . .” So it is; are we going to raise taxes? “I say that at a time when the tax burden on the wealthy is at its lowest level in half a century, the most fortunate among us can afford to pay a little more.” Is he proposing a tax increase or merely talking about letting the Bush cuts expire, equating that to a tax increase as the Republicans do? Instead of clarifying that, he went off in another direction: “I don't need another tax cut. Warren Buffett doesn't need another tax cut. Not if we have to pay for it by making seniors pay more for Medicare . . ..” There he seems to be referring to the Ryan proposal for still more cuts. Probably his aim is to prevent a further extension of the Bush cuts and any new cuts.

He also called for capping itemized deductions, limiting them “for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.” Wait for the cries of class warfare.

We “should reform our corporate tax code as well, to make our businesses and our economy more competitive.” I don’t know what that means, nor what he had in mind for simplification of the tax code.

The President acknowledged that some Democrats don’t want to cut spending until the economy is fully recovered. He proposed to deal with this by using “a scalpel and not a machete to reduce the deficit, so that we can keep making the investments that create jobs.” That makes sense as a long-term strategy, but won’t do much to create jobs now

He concluded by saying “I don't expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today.” Of course not, but it isn’t smart to say that. Once again, he has started compromising before the negotiation has begun.

_______________
33. Douglas Fraser, quoted in Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (2010), pp. 131-32
34. "The Battle for Reagan’s Soul," Wall Street Journal, 5/16/80; quoted ibid at 233.

2011-04-14T19:17:00.001-07:00

April 13, 2011 Well, they blinked again.

Republicans are fond of accusing Democrats of weakness, usually meaning that they are reluctant to send others off to war, or to put people in prison forever for minor crimes, or that they otherwise exercise mature judgment. However, the recent performance of Congressional Democrats and the President validates the libel, albeit with a change of subject. Capitulation to the Republican terms for avoiding a government shutdown was weakness with a vengeance, so to speak.

The President already had adopted a Hooverish counter-stimulus posture, but that was not enough for the GOP, which suddenly is aware of, and aghast at, the deficit and the national debt. The Party formerly governed by Cheney’s complacent formula — “Reagan proved deficits don't matter” — now finds them to be a threat to Life as We Know It.

John Boehner forced on Mr. Obama and on the equally compliant Harry Reid an absurd new Continuing Resolution: absurd in its general outline, and absurd in that it was only an outline, to be filled in over the next few days by Congressional staff. The following is, more or less, what emerged from the staff rooms, taken from a report of the House Appropriations Committee.

The claimed cuts are reductions from the FY 2010 budget, organized more or less by executive department:

•$3 billion from Agriculture, including $10 million from food safety inspection. The report states that the Resolution “includes $6.75 billion for the Special Supplemental Feeding Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC),” but doesn’t mention that it cuts the program by $504 million.

•$10.9 billion from Commerce, Justice and “Science.” However, much of the “cut” reflects the ending of the census, which accounted for $6.2 billion* in FY 2010, and $1.885 billion* in unspecified “rescissions.” This section also prohibits funding for the establishment of a Climate Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

•$1.7 billion from “Energy and Water.” The report adds, “These significant cuts further the House Republican commitment to deficit reduction and reining in the size of government...”

•$2.4 billion from “Financial Services and General Government,” including the Treasury Department. This includes a cut of more than $800 million from funding for construction of new federal buildings. The plan would make no change to funding for drug task forces and programs to assist small businesses but, according to a Washington Post article, would block a funding increase, sought by the administration, for the Internal Revenue Service to hire additional agents. There is an increase of $13 million for the Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and $74 million for the Securities and Exchange Commission, so the White House apparently won a few minor skirmishes.

•$784 million from Homeland Security. The arithmetic in this one is impossible to follow, but the net departmental cut equals the cut in “FEMA first responder grants”.

•$2.62 billion from Interior, of which $1.6 billion is cut from the Environmental Protection Agency, $49 million from climate change funding and about $13 million each* from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. As the report concedes, or boasts, 61% of Interior’s cuts are at the expense of the despised EPA.

•$5.5 billion from Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and related Agencies. The resolution “terminates funding for more than 55 programs, for a total savings of well over $1 billion,” and “cuts two programs funded in ObamaCare . . . “

•$103 million from the Legislative Branch. This seems like a worthy saving, but may merely facilitate cramming legislation through without adequate review.

•$504 million from State and “Foreign Operations.” This is made up of a $377 million cut to U.S. contributions to the United Nations and international organizations, a $130 million cut to international banks and financial institutions and $73 million from family planning activities, which add up, however, to $580 million. It also “maintains pro-life policy provisions carried in fiscal year 2010,” and includes a prohibition on pay raises for foreign service officers.

•$12.3 billion from Transportation, Housing, Urban Development and related Agencies. The bill “eliminates new funding for High Speed Rail and rescinds $400 million in previous year funds, for a total reduction of $2.9 billion from fiscal year 2010 levels.” It also reduces funding for transit by a total of $991 million and includes “contract authority rescissions of $3.2 billion” for highways.

The committee report touts its accomplishments with little restraint: the legislation ”will prevent a government shutdown, fund the entire federal government until September 30, 2011, and provide essential funding for national defense.” It “will cut an unparalleled nearly $40 billion in federal spending.” The effect of the bill will be “the largest non-defense spending cut in the history of our nation . . .” It will “continu[e] the trend of budget reductions to dig our nation out of our dangerous deficits and debt for years to come.”

The non-defense qualification was a necessary concession. The negative numbers listed above add up to 39.81 billion, and there is in addition a proposed .2% across-the-board cut to non-defense spending, bringing the total to 39.89 billion, or “nearly forty.” However, two paragraphs later the report concedes that this includes 12 billion already agreed to in earlier resolutions, so the cuts in this deal are about 28 billion.

Even that requires ignoring defense spending, which will increase by these amounts:

• $5 billion to the Defense Department. “The bill also includes an additional $157.8 billion for overseas contingency operations (emergency funding) to advance our missions abroad.” It isn’t clear whether that is included in the 5 billion.

• $600 million to Military Construction/Veterans Affairs. Therefore all of the bragging is about saving $22.29 billion (39.89-12-5.6), about .63% of the benchmark 2010 budget, or .59% of the administration’s proposed FY 2011 budget.

The Washington Post article commented that some of the supposed cuts are fiscal gimmicks. The plan eliminates funding for four Obama administration “czars,” but those positions are vacant. A cut of $3.5 billion for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, would affect only “states that make an extra effort to enroll children. But officials with knowledge of the budget deal said that most states were unlikely to qualify for the bonuses and that sufficient money would be available for those that did.” There is a cut of $4.9 billion from the Justice Department’s Crime Victims Fund, “but that money is in a reserve fund that wasn’t going to be spent this year.”

The deal also sets the future legislative agenda to some extent. It requires that the Senate debate and vote on repealing the health care law and on ending federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

The ideological slant is obvious, including cuts to anything which might be considered stimulus spending, such as construction. The ideological focus leads to matters having nothing to with the budget, such as a provision preventing Guantanamo Bay detainees from being transferred into the United States for any purpose, and a prohibition on the use of any funds, federal or otherwise, to pay for abortions in the District of Columbia. As Rep. Ryan said of his similarly focused plan, “This is not a budget. This is a cause.”

* These figures are from a detailed listing of cuts which accompanied the committee report.

29.Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, p. 291

30. http://republicans.appropriations.house.gov/_files/41211SummaryFinalFY2011CR.pdf . Except as otherwise noted, the numbers are from that report.

31. http://www.washingtonpost.com/todays_paper/A%20Section/2011-04-12 /A/10/18.0.2370818597_epaper.html

32. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/rep-paul-ryan-budget-13300209

2011-04-11T18:32:00.000-07:00

4/4/11 Postscript to March 14

In his farewell piece Rich said, in effect, that the pressure of writing a weekly column was one reason for the move:

[William] Safire, a master of the form, was fond of likening column writing to standing under a windmill: No sooner did you feel relief that you had ducked a blade than you looked up and saw a new one coming down. . . .That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambiguous conclusion.

Although Rich’s weekly column was longer that most, he found himself “hungering to write with more reflection, at greater length at times . . . .”

Now Bob Herbert has left, leaving another hole not easily filled. He wrote twice weekly, which would create even more pressure. His farewell expressed similar concern:

The deadlines and demands were a useful discipline, but for some time now I have grown eager to move beyond the constriction of the column format, with its rigid 800-word limit, in favor of broader and more versatile efforts.

As to subject matter, he said that he was moving on with “the intent of writing more expansively and more aggressively about the injustices visited on working people, the poor and the many others in our society who find themselves on the wrong side of power.” I wonder whether “more aggressively” implies that limitations were placed on his columns. Rich said not, as to his.

Rich had a kind word for another pundit: “some columnists are adept at keeping their literary bearings over long careers — George Will is a particularly elegant survivor among the generation of columnists ahead of mine . . . .”

Will, many years ago, described a columnist’s challenge: “Writing is not hard," wrote Stephen Leacock. "Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy—it's the occurring that's hard." Occurring twice a week would seem to be a challenge, but Will claimed an advantage. “Actually, the ‘occurring’ is not hard for someone blessed with a Tory temperament and sentenced to live in this stimulating era. Today, even more than usual, the world is generously strewn with fascinations and provocations.”

That is a surprising observation from a conservative, having been written in the second Reagan year, but I take his point. If the world around one is unattractive and even seems foreign, “occurring,” i.e. having a critical comment, is not difficult. When he wrote that, Will was a traditional conservative — a Tory as he put it — a disciple of “Burke, Newman, Disraeli and others who were more skeptical, even pessimistic, about the modern world than most people are who today call themselves conservatives.” Therefore the advent of the age of Reagan might leave him still dissatisfied.

“What a columnist writes in his capacity as a columnist is necessarily episodic, but there are continuities, and mine are conservative convictions,” Will said. However, he placed some distance between his concept of conservatism and some others. “The most familiar and fashionable variety . . . tends complacently to define the public good as whatever results from the unfettered pursuit of private ends. Hence it tends to treat laissez-faire economic theory as a substitute for political philosophy, and to discount the importance of government and the dignity of the political vocation.” Unfortunately, that brand of conservatism is still with us, and is dominant.

2011-04-03T21:03:00.000-07:00

April 3, 2011

My first reaction to the rioting and killing in Afghanistan — in retaliation for the burning of a Koran — was to think that we should abandon this barbaric land to its fate. Why should we continue to put not only Americans but other foreign nationals in harm’s way? But if the test for abandonment is disdain for religious primitivism, then we would need to withdraw from Florida, where the ritual Koran-burning took place, and it wouldn’t stop there; religious fundamentalism, some of it issuing in acts more violent than book-burning, isn’t confined to Florida. We’re in no position to make religious, or antireligious, judgments.

However, the question I put is, I think, valid, with some modification: Is whatever we are doing in Afghanistan worth all the loss of life: American, Afghani and other? Also, what justifies the financial cost?

Wars, unless they are purely defensive, always raise questions of justification. Our recent adventures certainly pose that problem. None of the excuses for war in Iraq hold water. The President’s rationale for the bombing of Libya is confused and unconvincing. The invasion of Afghanistan was, plausibly, justified as a campaign against al Qaeda, which was a proven threat to our security. However, that hunt failed early on, and at this point it does not even seem to be an excuse for the continued operations.

Some months ago, The Seattle Times carried a column by David Sirota in which he lamented our inability to learn from experience, citing, among other examples, the failure to draw appropriate lessons from Vietnam, leading to the long-term occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Among other causes, he cited the failures of journalism.

Although Sirota’s reference was primarily to electronic media, the Times helpfully provided proof in the same edition. It devoted much of page one to a story about a murder elsewhere in the state, not important news except to those involved. The Times relegated to page four a report from The Washington Post that we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars building bases in Afghanistan which will not even be completed when the withdrawal is supposed to begin this summer, and which are intended for use by American forces. In other words, the withdrawal may be a farce and the occupation endless.

The Times, to its credit, has advocated withdrawal on its editorial pages, and the news department recognized the implications of the base-construction story, captioning it “Plans indicate long stay for U.S. in Afghanistan.” The placement of a less important story on the front page may reflect a realistic business decision, but it constitutes a failure of journalism, a small one, but part of a pattern.

Military fatalities total 2,388, 1,521 of them American. The monetary cost runs to nearly three hundred million dollars per day ²⁵and that is just the budgeted cost. As Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have shown, the actual, long-term cost is much higher.²⁶Yet the media more or less ignore Afghanistan — The Pew Center estimated that four per cent of media coverage was devoted to it in 2010 ²⁷ — and report the budget debate with little reference to the elephant in the room.

______________________

25. Using the FY 2011 budget, $113.5 billion, the daily figure is $310,958,904. The FY 2012 proposal is $107.3 billion, or $293,972,603 per day. See http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gNQ3JbWwd6t-PzkuECkRJvsAlNkA

26. The Three Trillion Dollar War

27. http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/02/592-american-died-afghanistan/

2011-03-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

March 30, 2011

Several items on the web this week illustrated the condition of the news media. The last contained a comment with broader application.

1. One of the most popular online news sites, The Huffington Post, has been acquired by AOL, which may not be good news. I respect Arianna Huffington, and have read two of her books, but The Huffington Post already had drifted downhill. In addition to running, typically in the right-hand column, various junk items (celebrity scandals, oddities, anything to do with sex, etc.), the writing frequently has been cute, i.e., barely literate. Headlines often use the word “fail,” apparently meaning “failure.” Monday’s example: “The funniest Fox News fails.” * (One of the examples was a Fox caption, under a shot of a female reporter: “Awaiting President Obama’s Arrival in Me,” with the comment, “adding ‘ain’ is just too much work.” Adding “ure” apparently is as well.

On Tuesday there was a link on the main page, “Death of the New York Times Book Review Good for Books?” Clicking on it led to a page on which the caption was “Death of the New York Times Book Review?” That changed the question, but both implied that the Review was about to be, or might be, dropped, as did the title of the article, “The Death of the New York Times Book Review: And Why That Is a Very Good Thing for Books.” The matter was not exactly clarified by the article’s opening statement: “This week, the New York Times goes behind a paywall. Good riddance. The section that will least missed is the book review....” Eventually it dawned on me that this referred to the Times’ decision to sell subscriptions to its web edition and limit free access, which doesn’t quite equate to the demise of the Review. (The “Good Thing for Books?” part of the caption referred to the author’s opinion that the Review is a wretched publication with no taste).

* Postscript 4/26/11. The Huffington Post ran a feature today on grammatical errors. In itself that’s a little ironic, but it added the perfect touch by asking us, as to each example, to "rate this grammar fail."

2. Newspapers and other publications have had a dilemma ever since the internet became a major form of communication. If all of the content is available on line, will people cease buying the paper? If there is a charge for online access, will viewers simply go elsewhere? A common solution is to make some content available on line free of charge but require a subscription for the rest. This can be done by designating which articles or features are free and which not, or by allowing a certain number of free readings, but charging for complete access.

The New York Times has opted for the latter model, requiring a subscription for full access, but allowing everyone twenty free “article views” per month. (The definition of that term is complex, to say the least). The new system may have begun operation, although the references to it are remarkably opaque. On Tuesday’s web page, there was this announcement: “The Times’s plan for digital subscriptions to NYTimes.com and mobile apps began Monday.” Does that mean it went into effect Monday? We were referred to a statement by the publisher, which informed us: “On Monday, The New York Times took a major step forward as we introduced digital subscriptions in the United States and the rest of the world.” Does that mean that the limit of twenty began Monday? If so, do I get twenty through Thursday, or does my first limit include April? Are we dealing with calendar months or does each period begin on the twenty-eighth? How does the Times keep track? Does this mean more cookies? One would think that the Times could write a clear description.

For me, at least, this timing is ironic: with the departure of Frank Rich and now of Bob Herbert from the op-ed pages, and the announcement that the Week in Review section will be “reinvented” (an ominous sign), twenty per month probably will be sufficient for my needs.

3. In an op-ed ²⁴ on the Washington Post Tuesday, Katrina vanden Heuvel asked “Are there no standards for punditry?” She was referring not to columnists but to former officials who, though disgraced, are invited to tell us what to think, and to the media which give them a platform. Her examples, all apt, were Donald Rumsfeld critiquing the attack on Libya, Alan Greenspan on how the administration is holding back a recovery and, best of all, Oliver North on the need for Congressional approval of military actions. She noted the contrast between the easy forgiveness of public figures and the frequent demands for accountability and personal responsibility aimed, for example, at teachers and students.

“Public officials who have failed spectacularly in office should have the common decency to retire in disgrace.“ Their continued influence is indeed an odd phenomenon. She joked that in Britain, disgraced officials are dumped onto the House of Lords. We seem to have the same mind set — once an official, always in some sense a respectable member of the club — but, lacking a titled aristocracy, we treat ours as elder statesmen. “In America, they become pundits and are offered a stage to argue the same ideas that earlier brought the nation to near-ruin, rewriting history to fit their theory.”

4. Ms. vanden Heuvel ended her column with this observation as to those retired eminences: “As Talleyrand said of the restored French monarchy under Louis XVIII, they have ‘learned nothing and forgotten nothing.’ ” That leads me to economic policy. I just finished a book by Paul Krugman entitled The Return of Depression Economics. Its lesson, easily verified by observation, is that those in charge of fiscal and monetary policy seem to learn little from experience, but vividly remember discredited theories, in many cases because their ideology requires that. Not only are we seeing a return of Depression economics in the sense that the economic situation resembles that period, but our leaders, especially members of Congress, are intent on implementing policies which bring on or prolong depressions. ___________________

24. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-there-no-standards-for-punditry/2011/03/28/AF9o4iuB_story.html?hpid=z5

2011-03-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

March 24, 2011

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama didn’t make much sense, and it became ironic immediately as he devoted his acceptance speech to a discussion of war. It has become more so as we have escalated the war in Afghanistan and now have joined, in some ill-defined way, in bombing Lybia. In an interview on Wednesday, the President acknowledged this: he “noted the irony of being a Nobel peace prize winner who ordered the US military into action on the eighth anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but he said the goal in this case was humanitarian.” The “immediate goal” was to prevent Qaddafi's army from conducting an attack on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.²² What is the ultimate goal? Is it merely humanitarian or is it strategic: a desire, to borrow a phrase, for regime change? If it is the former, it is selective; if the latter, dubious.

General Carter Ham, the US commander for Africa, seems to believe the first. He has said that the mission is to protect civilians, not to support the opposition, that Qaddafi has not been targeted and that we are not looking for him. The General said that Qaddafi might remain in power after this exercise.

However, the President said on Tuesday, “It is U.S. policy that Qaddafi needs to go.”²³ He has stated that, at least as an aim, before. On Wednesday, although making the statements above, he returned to the regime-change mantra: "Keep in mind we don't just have military tools at our disposal in terms of accomplishing Qaddafi's leaving. We've put in place strong international sanctions. We've frozen his assets. We will continue to apply a whole range of pressure on him."

Mr. Obama added this to his comment about the Nobel Prize: "I'm accustomed to this contradiction of being both a commander-in-chief but also somebody who aspires to peace. We're not invading a country, we are not acting alone. "We are acting under a mandate issued by the UN security council." Possibly apart from the denial of an invasion, that statement, and the one above, are straight out of the Bush playbook: Mr. Bush also told us that, though patient, he had lots of tools at his disposal; although a war president, he declared himself to be a man of peace; we did not act alone in Iraq but had a vast coalition; although there was no direct UN mandate, violation of earlier UN resolutions was sometimes the excuse for the Iraq war. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq received the blessing of Congress, however indirectly stated and, in the case of Iraq, deceptively acquired and imprudently granted. The current operation was launched by the President with no pretense of advice and consent, let alone a declaration of war. The criticism that he was too slow or irresolute could be defended only on a world-policeman theory, and is inconsistent with the complaints now emerging about not seeking Congressional approval. The decision was, if anything, made with too little thought and reflection; it seems to have been almost off-handed, and it has engaged the President’s attention only occasionally.

Perhaps the results will be positive on balance, but if so, that will be by accident.

_________________________

22. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/23/obama- gaddafi-military-mission-libya

23. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/mar/22/barack- obama-gaddafi-video . The statement by Gen. Ham is on the same video clip.

2011-03-18T10:49:00.001-07:00

March 18, 2011

In his willingness to compromise with the Republicans in Congress and in his unilateral budget cuts, President Obama may be falling into the error FDR committed in the midst of the Depression. Worried about deficits and influenced by cautious advisors, he cut back on spending in 1937 which, along with tightening by the Fed, brought the recovery to a halt. He repented before long, and the economy improved even before the war took the curse from deficit spending.

Even though the current recession — technically it’s over, but no one believes that — isn’t as deep as that of the thirties, Obama’s challenge is, by some measures, greater. Another war isn’t an option. The deficit and debt were out of control before the recession began, thanks in no small part to the Bush wars and tax cuts. The economy is structurally weaker now; manufacturing, the obvious base for a recovery, has been gutted by foreign competition and outsourcing.

The President faces an opposition as wedded to the past as in the thirties and he doesn’t have much support for such measures as public works, even if he were inclined toward them. However, public spending is necessary, even if unpopular, and despite the worries — perfectly legitimate but for now secondary — about the deficit and debt. The clear solution is to wind down the wars much more rapidly than planned and spend the savings on infrastructure, research and other useful projects. That probabaly would stimulate the economy more than the wars and would create a base for further expansion.

I know, I’m practicing economics without a license, but some things seem obvious. For (I hope not misplaced) support, I appeal to the experts:

Today, no serious economist holds the view that war is good for the economy. The economist John Maynard Keynes taught us how, through lower interest rates and increased government spending, countries can ensure that the peacetime economy operates near or at full employment. But money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain: had it been spent on investment—whether on plants and equipment, infrastructure, research, health, or education—the economy's productivity would have been increased and future output would have been greater.²¹

We need to focus on survival, with luck on prosperity, and forget about hegemony.
__________________

21. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, p.115.

2011-03-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

March 14, 2011

The op-ed pages of the two most consequential newspapers, The Washington Post and The New York Times, have sustained losses, the Post by the death of David Broder and the Times by the resignation of Frank Rich.

Rich provided insightful, common-sense liberalism, of which there never is enough. I have criticized Broder in recent years, and at times his centrism seemed to me to be undeclared conservatism, but moderate conservatives are even more an endangered species than liberals so, by whatever label, he will be missed.

2011-03-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

March 13, 2011

There has been a fair amount of comment to the effect that President Obama isn’t taking enough action in response to the uprising in Libya. What that should be isn’t always clear, but establishing a no-fly zone is one demand. The criticism probably is encouraged by the fact that Obama hasn’t been very active about anything, but part of the impetus is the usual armchair militarism.

There is one prominent dissenter, however. George Will, in a column on March 8, set out sixteen rhetorical questions, all suggesting that intervention would be as bad idea. As to the no-fly proposal, Will asked, reasonably, “Could intervention avoid ‘mission creep’? If grounding Gadhafi's aircraft is a humanitarian imperative, why isn't protecting his enemies from ground attacks?” More fundamentally, “The world would be better without Gadhafi. But is that a vital U.S. national interest? If it is, when did it become so?“ It’s unfortunate that the last question was not asked — and answered by Bush and Co. — before invading Iraq.

2011-02-26T20:34:00.000-08:00

February 26, 2011

A postscript to the second paragraph of yesterday’s note: if reporters don’t consider plausibility, they need at least to listen carefully. Here’s an example from World Wide Words:²⁰ “During the devastating floods in Queensland, Australia, the front page of the Morning Bulletin of Rockhampton on 6 January included the headline ‘30,000 pigs swept away in flood’.” The next day, the paper featured this correction: “What Baralaba piggery-owner Sid Everingham actually said was ‘30 sows and pigs’, not ‘30,000 pigs’.”
________________________

20. See “Sic!” at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ydyt.htm#N6

2011-02-26T10:46:00.000-08:00

February 25, 2011

I have just finished reading a book entitled Flat Earth News, by a British newsman, Nick Davies. It’s a critique of the news media, here as well as in the UK. He argues that they publish and broadcast many stories which are false, misleading or incomplete, but are as resistant to correction as the ancient belief about the shape of the earth. (In the age of Limbaugh, is that an old notion?)

He offers several explanations, including the commercialization of television news departments and the obsession of newspapers with the bottom line, both leading to understaffing and the consequent reliance on various types of PR. He also cites the practice of reporting what people say, however illogical or suspect, on the ground that the statement is news. There is the strong tendency to take whatever line is currently fashionable and therefore safe. Stories, regardless of merit, spread because each news agency copies the others. Finally, the selection and presentation of news caters to the interests, beliefs and intellectual limitations of the audience.

We are witnessing a prime example of flat earth news: the widespread claim in articles, columns and editorial cartoons that reducing the deficit requires tinkering with Social Security. The kindest explanation is that this originated in an honest misunderstanding. The Social Security system will need some adjusting in the next few years because outlay has caught up with income. It is not a problem requiring an immediate solution, because the trust funds will cover outlays until about 2037. However, because both Social Security and the government’s general fund need attention, the latter because of a huge deficit, the two become confused, and people think that “fixing” Social Security is necessary to a reduction of the deficit. In fact, the only contribution SS has made to the deficit is to make it look smaller. Government reports long have shown a composite number, combining the SS surplus with a general account deficit, burying the former and making the latter look less awful.

Attempts to point out the fallacy haven’t had much impact. One who has tried is Rep. Pelosi, who said recently, “Whatever we do for Social Security is not about reducing the deficit, it is about strengthening Social Security — the solvency of Social Security. Those are two separate, different questions." She made the same point some months ago:“When you talk about reducing the deficit and Social Security, you’re talking about apples and oranges.”

However, there is too much chatter on the other side, and some of the confusion is intentional, coming from those who want to eliminate, privatize or cut Social Security. One ploy is to treat Social Security and Medicare as one, even though they are separately funded. Since general fund revenue provides about three quarters of Medicare B and D funding, they have a direct impact on the deficit. Leaving funding sources aside, Medicare poses a more serious long-term problem because of the increase in the cost of medical care. Treating the two programs as one serves to mislead people into thinking that SS is in trouble too. Paul Krugman has pointed out that fallacy more than once, with an equal lack of success.

The Health Care Act will improve the financial status of Medicare,¹⁹ but conservatives want to repeal it. That too seems to be a mix of misunderstanding and ideology.

______________________________

19. On this and other points, see the Social Security Trustees’ Report,
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.html

2011-02-23T12:14:00.000-08:00

February 21, 2011

One of a city’s functions, it seems to me, ought to be to provide reasonably smooth road surfaces, on which one could drive without worrying about blowing a tire, ruining the suspension or — here I am being demanding — not having a jarring ride, with the car dropping into a hole or hitting an obstruction every ten feet. Alas, a vain hope.

There should be a pothole test for elected officials. When the percentage of the pavement covered by potholes exceeds a certain level, say 20%, recall should be automatic. The arterial nearest our home is approaching the critical level. Recently, someone drew white circles around each hole. This has the effect of making them easier to see and therefore easier to avoid, so it may have been a gift from a public spirited citizen. I’m hoping though, that it was the work of a city crew, and that repair might follow.

Many of the potholes are depressions around small metal plates. Exactly what the function might be of openings that small escapes me, but presumably they are important to someone. The major annoyance is the massive number of larger plates, the manhole covers. Like the smaller ones, many are poorly leveled, but at best they create a washboard surface. Even the relatively well-leveled ones cause a constant succession of bumps, so that the modern street is about as smooth as cobblestones, although less durable. Progress.

I assume that undergrounding of utilities has contributed to their proliferation, but there is an incredible number of them. If we must have that number, at. least they could be placed so that one could avoid them: at the edge of the lane or in the middle where they could be straddled. Perhaps their placement may be an exact science, and they need to be exactly where they are. That would be the only excuse for spreading them all over the roadway, so that avoiding them would require levitation. However, I suspect that placing most of the manholes exactly where one’s tires must go is less a matter of science than of total disregard for effects, or of simple incompetence.

Yes, there are far more important matters, and I’ll return to complaining about them soon.

February 18, 2011

In 2004, Washington voters adopted, through Initiative 872, the “top-two” primary election system, which sends to the final election the two candidates receiving the most votes, regardless of party label. The constitutionality of that system was challenged by the Republican, Democratic and Libertarian Parties in 2005, and it has been in litigation ever since. The Initiative was defended by the State, and by the Washington State Grange, which had sponsored it.

The constitutional principle at issue is whether the new primary infringes on political parties’ associational rights, which the U.S. Supreme Court has decided are protected under the First Amendment. Included is the right not to associate. The format allows candidates to state a party preference on the ballot, in the form “prefers ______ Party.” The question is whether that statement implies a connection of some sort and therefore amounts to an involuntary association. The Parties claim that it does, and that it forces them to associate with people they have not endorsed, have not chosen to associate with, and might not approve of.

The Parties prevailed in U.S. District Court and in the Court of Appeals but, in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the law was not void “on its face,” i.e., void under any set of assumptions. There remained the possibility of its invalidity “as applied” which, in the Supreme Court’s opinion, became an issue of disclosure and disclaimer: has the State made it clear to voters that the declaration of party preference does not imply association or endorsement? Stated otherwise, will voters be confused by that declaration? On remand, the District Court allowed the Parties to amend their complaints to add allegations based on the forms and procedures in use under the new law.¹⁴

There also was a secondary issue regarding Precinct Committee Officers, officials of the Republican and Democratic Parties, who have been listed on the primary ballot. Anyone voting in the primary could vote for a PCO, and the Parties argued that such an arrangement also violates their associational rights.

Trial was set for November 15, 2010, continued to January 18, 2011. Motions for summary judgment were filed by the State and the Grange in support of the initiative, and by the Democratic and Republican Parties challenging it.

On January 11, the District Court granted the State’s and Grange’s motions as to the principal issue, and dismissed the Parties’ complaint to that extent,¹⁵holding that the ballot and information distributed by the State eliminate the risk of misunderstanding. (The court’s exact language, which may have created a problem, is discussed below). Therefore, except for Precinct Committee officers, the new ballot and system are valid.

The Republican and Democratic Parties’ motions were granted as to election of PCOs. Not surprisingly, the District Court found that the Parties’ associational rights were infringed by allowing unaffiliated voters to help select a party official. “The system allows non–party members to vote for officers of the political parties, and the First Amendment does not permit Washington to impose that type of membership when the parties have not so consented.” Including PCOs on the ballot always has been an anomaly: why should party officials be chosen in a public election? It remains to be seen how the State will deal with this, but the most logical solution would be to drop PCOs from the ballot.

A judgment formalizing the result was entered on January 20. I assume that the Parties will appeal (they have until February 19).¹⁶

Will the decision as to the principal issue survive? Unfortunately, the District Court’s opinion increases the risk of reversal. Its ruling is as follows:

“The Court concludes that I-872 as implemented in partisan elections is constitutional because the ballot and accompanying information eliminate the possibility of widespread confusion among the reasonable, well- informed electorate” (emphasis added).

Its rationale cites the Supreme Court’s decision for the following proposition, which is a slightly different statement of the same principle:

The standard by which the Court must evaluate the possibility of widespread confusion is from the perspective of a reasonable, well-informed electorate. See Wash. State Grange, 552 U.S. at 456 (emphasis added).

However, that standard is not set forth on that page of the Supreme Court’s opinion, either in terms or in substance, nor does it appear in terms anywhere. Here are the passages in which the italicized words appeared (emphasis again added):

. . . We are satisfied that there are a variety of ways in which the State could implement I-872 that would eliminate any real threat of voter confusion. And without the specter of widespread voter confusion , respondents' arguments about forced association and compelled speech fall flat.” (Majority opinion)
If the ballot is designed in such a manner that no reasonable voter would believe that the candidates listed there are nominees or members of, or otherwise associated with, the parties the candidates claimed to “prefer,” the I-872 primary system would likely pass constitutional muster. (Concurring opinion of Chief Justice Roberts)
There is simply no basis to presume that a well-informed electorate will interpret a candidate's party-preference designation to mean that the candidate is the party's chosen nominee or representative or that the party associates with or approves of the candidate. (Majority opinion).

It isn’t clear whether the two statements by the majority were intended to be combined into a single standard. Certainly the three cannot be merged, at least as stated; Justice Roberts’ requirement that no reasonable voter be misled is more demanding than the majority’s “absence of widespread confusion,” with or without the “well-informed” qualification.¹⁷ Linking the three, as the District Court has done, makes the State’s burden lighter than that proposed by the majority or by Justice Roberts: it need only prevent widespread confusion among reasonable, well-informed voters. The Supreme Court’s failure to articulate a clear test may have led the District Court into devising one. Perhaps the Supreme Court will accept it or, goaded by Justice Scalia, it may reconsider its decision.

In his dissent, Scalia pointed out that the analysis by the majority was incomplete: “association” is a two-way process. The majority only dealt with the question of whether the ballot implies that the Parties have associated with the candidate, in the sense of endorsing, approving, accepting, or whatever it is that parties do. Justice Scalia pointed out that the connection can run the other way: “it seems to me quite impossible for the ballot to satisfy a reasonable voter that the candidate is not ‘associated with’ the party for which he has expressed a preference. He has associated himself with the party by his very expression of a preference . . . .” That is undeniable and, to Scalia, unacceptable: ”The views of the self-identified party supporter color perception of the party's message, and that self-identification on the ballot . . . impairs the party's advocacy of its standard bearer.” I think that the entire association argument lacks merit, for reasons stated elsewhere,¹⁸ but that isn’t the law. In any further appeal, the Court will subject the ballot language to scrutiny and a majority may adopt Justice Scalia’s view.

However, there is a flaw in his argument. It is doubtful that the right of non-association prevents an unblessed candidate from declaring a party preference, at least in most contexts. As Justice Roberts put it, “there is no general right to stop an individual from saying, ‘I prefer this party,’ even if the party would rather he not.” Scalia argued that making that statement on a ballot is different than making it elsewhere: “The ballot comes into play "at the most crucial stage in the electoral process — the instant before the vote is cast.". . . It is the only document that all voters are guaranteed to see, and it is the last thing the voter sees before he makes his choice. . . . " In making that argument, Justice Scalia relied on California Democratic Party v. Jones , in which he wrote the majority opinion, and which struck down a blanket primary on the ground that it violated parties’ right of non-association. However, the issue there was different: whether the election format forced the parties to associate with voters they hadn’t accepted. That is applicable to the PCO issue — selection by voters at large — which the District Court distinguished and decided as Scalia would have, but not to the party-preference declaration.

In addition, Justice Scalia’s argument seems to me to be internally inconsistent. His concern is that the “electorate's perception of a political party's beliefs is colored by its perception of those who support the party,” but his focus is on the ballot: “When the state-printed ballot for the general election causes a party to be associated with candidates who may not fully (if at all) represent its views, it undermines both these vital aspects of political association.” If we accept Justice Roberts’ view that there is no general right to forbid statements of association, then throughout the campaign any candidate is free to state his party preference while saying things the party disapproves. However, the candidate’s party preference on the ballot states no views. If the voter has paid attention during the campaign, he already has been influenced by what the candidate says, and the party has had no remedy. All that the voter sees on the ballot is a name and a party preference, which can’t mislead him as to what the party believes. At worst, he will vote for a candidate that the party doesn’t like but, had he followed the campaign, the voter could have done that with malice aforethought. According to Scalia, the ballot is crucial but, taken alone, it has no effect on voters’ perceptions; only permitted communications have that effect.

Justice Scalia’s remedy is to convert the ballot into a campaign document, by permitting parties “to disclaim on the general-election ballot the asserted association or to designate on the ballot their true nominees.” This doesn’t entirely make sense; on the general election ballot, the disfavored one(s) and the party’s “true nominee,” of any, may not appear. Perhaps he meant to refer to the primary ballot. In any case, let’s hope that the Court does not follow his lead.

____________________________

14. The events to this point are summarized in my note of June 18, 2010.
15. http://www.sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/Courts%20Order%201-11-11.pdf
All of the documents in the case are available on the web site of the Secretary of State, http://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/toptwo.aspx
16. Apparently an appeal was filed February 11. The records of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit are not a model of clarity. The Secretary of State’s website does not mention an appeal.
17. However, Justices Roberts and Alito joined the majority opinion, so perhaps they did not see any conflict.
18. See my note of April 19, 2002.

February 11, 2011
An article in the Washington Post pointed out that a Palin nomination would be a gift to Obama and quoted a Republican consultant: "She is the Obama White House's secret weapon to wipe out the GOP on election day 2012." Palin hardly is a secret nor is the expectation that she would be a weak candidate. However, the article and the quote lead to the more general point, that Obama’s chances of reelection are enhanced by the putative GOP field. Those who have been mentioned as contenders comprise an impossibly large field, and some will fade early, but the list is interesting: Pawlenty, Romney, Huckabee, Palin, Barbour, Jindal, Gingrich, Giuliani, Huntsman, Pence, Thune, Santorum, Daniels, Bachmann, Trump, Perry, Ron Paul. Some, including Jindal, Perry and Trump simply are difficult to take seriously (Jindal and Perry deny that they are running). Some have so much baggage as to warrant being eliminated at the outset: consider the frequently-demonstrated ignorance of Palin and Bachmann, the marital histories of Gingrich and Giuliani, Gingrich’s ouster as Speaker, Barbour’s gaffes on race, Santorum’s thumping defeat in 2006.

These folks already are throwing bricks at one another. Trump offended at least part of his audience at CPAC by stating that Paul can’t be elected. Perry has denounced Romney’s Obama-like health care plan. Santorum speculated that Palin skipped CPAC because she’s more interested in appearances that pay big fees; Palin suggested that Santorum is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, not only an unusually insulting charge but an odd reference coming from one not notably progressive. Intramural warfare is a new and risky departure for Republicans. Democrats often have fallen into that mode, and sometimes have survived, but the GOP, especially in recent years, has owed its success to tight control of the message, and a more contentious model may be fatal.

Of course, Republican policies also should be fatal. The GOP rails against the national debt but insist on tax cuts, and vow to repeal the health care law even though it will lower the deficit. Virtually no one in the country admires big-business CEOs, but Republicans advance their interests. At a time when the country faces serious challenges and many problems are technically daunting, they disparage scientific findings and wallow in ignorance. They attack not only the administration the people chose, but American government as a concept, and denounce various aspects of the culture, while professing patriotism and extolling American exceptionalism. They praise the Constitution but introduce bills to gut it. Faced by problems of the twenty-first century, they yearn to return to the nineteenth, if not earlier. Even their youngest members sound old.

Logically, the only question for 2012 should be the margin of the Republican defeat. If only.

January 29, 2011

The President’s State of the Union speech was artful and quietly assertive. It not only defended his policies of the past two years but treated them as achievements. It proposed new government initiatives. At the same time, it promised cooperation with the opposition, tied some of the initiatives to business expansion and even nodded toward conservatives’ illogical fixation on medical malpractice reform. Assuming that any future success depends on the President’s reassuring conservatives that he’s not an alien and liberals that he’s not an apostate, it probably was well designed.

However, it may have been too artful, too much a mixture of themes. The comments above are based on reading the text.⁹ When I listened to it live, it struck me as being tilted too far toward business. It may be that conservatives made the opposite misreading; if so, some haven’t bothered to give it a second look.

Even without careful study, the address should have convinced any rational listener that Mr. Obama is not a socialist — well, let’s say any listener who knows what socialism is. Unfortunately, few conservatives do. Paul Broun, a Republican member of the House, offered a timely illustration. On Tuesday night, apparently during the address, he tweeted, "Mr. President, you don't believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism." (One might ask whether those are mutually exclusive beliefs, but no matter). Given an opportunity the following day to amend, Dr. Broun doubled down: "I stick by that tweet," he said, and added his definition of socialism: "Mr. Obama believes in central government where the federal government controls everything in our lives. That's socialism."¹⁰ Actually, that describes neither socialism nor Obama’s program. As to the definition, the Congressman might consult a dictionary.

Socialism:
1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property
b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.¹¹

Mr. Obama hasn’t advocated abolishing private property or nationalizing the means of production.

However, let’s ignore the misuse of the term and look at what the Congressman and so many others claim is happening. Democratic leaders, he said, “believe the government should do everything for everybody and take care of every human endeavor, whereas Republicans. . . overwhelmingly believe in freedom [and] the free market." Republican commitment to the free market is not absolute, but in general he’s right about that point, and belief in the merits of the market hardly is illogical. However, the President’s address virtually was an ode to business — “No country has more successful companies;” “We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business;” “Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation” — so it’s difficult to see what the issue is. A conservative reasonably could believe that the federal government regulates too much, but to claim that it will “do everything for everybody and take care of every human endeavor” is nonsense. The Congressman added that the "philosophy of big government" that Democrats promote is "killing the free enterprise system," a bizarre claim given the state of corporate profits and the stock market.

I’m all for a discussion of what government should do and how it should do it, but that discussion will be useless if we merely bandy labels and misrepresent the facts. It’s difficult not to conclude that conservatives argue as they do out of fear that a rational discussion of what needs to be done and how best to do it would not go their way.

There were a few progressive proposals in the address. The President recommended ending tax breaks for oil companies; he hinted that the Bush tax cuts for the rich should expire, but he needed to say that only because he wouldn’t stand firm last year.

Paul Ryan, Congressman from Wisconsin, gave the Republican response. (Perhaps we should say the official response; Michelle Bachmann, who is suffering from a severe case of self-importance, offered another). Ryan, who was concerned mainly with economic questions, began on a conciliatory note: “Tonight, the President focused a lot of attention on our economy in general - and on our deficit and debt in particular. He was right to do so, and some of his words were reassuring.” Ryan conceded that the fiscal and economic mess has developed over many years: “Our debt is the product of acts by many presidents and many Congresses over many years. No one person or party is responsible for it. There is no doubt the President came into office facing a severe fiscal and economic situation.”

Nevertheless, the present mess is Obama’s fault: “Unfortunately, instead of restoring the fundamentals of economic growth, he engaged in a stimulus spending spree that not only failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs, but also plunged us even deeper into debt.” The Congressman seems unaware that deficits are both unavoidable and useful in a recession, and impugning stimulus as mere spending doesn’t change that.

He’s a little harsh, and disingenuous, on the jobs issue. Total private employment in January 2001, the beginning of the Bush first term, stood at 111,634,000. (I’ll follow the practice in presenting the tables,¹² and drop the last three digits, so that becomes 111,634). Employment dropped through July, 2003, when it stood at 108,231. It then rose through December, 2007, reaching 115,574. Then it fell again, so that at the beginning of the Obama presidency, it was 110,961. It fell further, to 107,107 in December 2009. The preliminary figure for December, 2010 is 108,453. Mr. Obama claimed, in his address, that “more than one million private sector jobs [were] created last year, which is correct (108,453 - 107,107), but employment is down 2.5 million during his term (110,961 - 108,453). However, President Bush saw the number drop by 4.6 million during his last two years in office (115,574 - 110,961). That leaves little room for accusations by Republicans.

Actually, Ryan’s criticism is still further off. The job losses under Obama happened prior to the stimulus plan’s taking effect some time in late 2009; there have been gains every month since December 2009. In addition, job losses would have continued without the stimulus; the CBO estimates that at least 1.4 million jobs were saved.¹³

Rep. Ryan continued to stress that the fiscal danger is a new one: “A few years ago, reducing spending was important. Today, it's imperative.” “What was a fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis.” In a sense, that is true, although again the facts aren’t flattering to Republicans nor, in this case, to Rep. Ryan. President Bush inherited a surplus, so Rep. Ryan’s vote for the tax cut in 2001 might be considered merely imprudent. However, by 2003, the surplus was gone, and we were at war, so his vote for another tax cut that year was, by any standard, irresponsible. His vote in favor of the resolution which led to the invasion of Iraq was, solely from an economic point of view, also disastrous. Those cuts and the war are major contributors to the debt he now worries about. Does he now acknowledge past error? Does he suggest bringing the troops home and otherwise restraining “defense” spending, or letting the tax cuts for the rich expire at the end of the present extension? Hardly. In the strange world which Republicans inhabit, neither war nor tax cuts contribute to deficits.

His view of the national debt is apocalyptic: “We face a crushing burden of debt. The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy, and grow to catastrophic levels in the years ahead. . . . No economy can sustain such high levels of debt and taxation. The next generation will inherit a stagnant economy and a diminished country.” The level of debt indeed may be unsustainable, and many of us tumbled to that before a Democrat was elected President. The problem with the level of taxation is that it is too low relative to the deficit and the debt.

Most of the rest of his address was ideology, some of it posing as analysis, not surprising from a fan of Ayn Rand. For example, “Health care spending is driving the explosive growth of our debt. And the President's law is accelerating our country toward bankruptcy.” The former has an element of truth, but the latter does not. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that “the President’s law” will lower the deficit by $143 billion over ten years, but Speaker John Boehner has dismissed the CBO report, and Rep. Ryan simply ignored it.

_____________________________

9. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0126/State-of-the-Union-transcript-2011-Full-text-of-the-president-s-speech
10. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20029697-503544.html
11. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
12. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost
13. http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=1326

January 15, 2011

In Tucson on January 8, six people, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, were killed and fourteen were wounded, including a Congresswoman. Not surprisingly, the shooting has generated a great deal of comment. Apart from expressions of shock, grief, sympathy, and praise for those who came to the rescue, those comments have followed five main themes (which, for simplicity, I’ll refer to by number): (1) gun control is too weak; (2) violent language and images coming from the right are part of the background to such attacks; (3) in reply to the second, it isn’t fair to blame the right; (4) mental health programs are not adequate; (5) we should forgive and forget the ugly rhetoric, and use the tragedy as an opportunity to come together and move on as better people.

The easiest argument to make is (1), that the shooting illustrates the need for stricter control on possession of firearms. To many of us, the flood of guns and the weakening of controls is as insane as the killer could be. However, even if one rejects the leftist call for severe limitations, there can be no rational argument in favor of allowing obviously disturbed people to carry guns, nor for the sale to the public of assault weapons, including the oversized clip used in this case. The federal law prohibiting such clips was allowed to expire, and Arizona, identified in a timely article ¹ as revealing the future of the GOP, has gone almost to the permissive extreme, not even requiring a permit to carry a gun. Of course, calls for more control have been denounced by pro-gun conservatives, but their position is insupportable.

Some of the opinions which advocated gun control rejected theme (2), the indictment of violent rhetoric. The Washington Post house editorial produced a nice twist on an old slogan: “metaphors don't kill people - guns kill people.” Richard Cohen, in the same paper, offered a similar formula: “Six people are dead and 14 wounded in Arizona not just because a man went crazy or political rhetoric has gotten too raw, but because they were shot. It's the gun that did it.”

Theme (2) has generated the most heat, in part because of misconstruction of the liberal argument. The debate began with statements by the Sheriff of Pima County:

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government — the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. . . .
I think that when the rhetoric about hatred, about mistrust of government, about paranoia of how government operates and to try to inflame the public on a daily basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has impact on people especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.²

In an interview by an incredulous Diane Sawyer, the Sheriff seemed to draw a causal line from right-wing agitation to the shooting, and much of the counter argument (3) has focused on the supposed illogic of making that connection. Pointing out that there is no evidence of a direct connection is a fair response to the Sheriff’s version, but it is only a partial response, and most of the criticism under (2) has been more nuanced.

Keith Olbermann offered the most earnest denunciation ³ of vicarious violence: “We need to put the guns down. Just as importantly we need to put the gun metaphors away and permanently.” He denounced Sarah Palin for her gunsight map (which she referred to in a tweet urging followers “Don’t Retreat, Instead — RELOAD!”)⁴, along with Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sharron Angle, Jesse Kelly and Rep. Allen West (see below). His view of the causal connection was ambiguous, but still valid:

. . . Even if . . .Loughner was merely shooting into a political crowd because he wanted to shoot into a political crowd, even if he was somehow unaware who was in the crowd, we have nevertheless for years been building up to a moment just like this.
Despite the You Tube videos of what appears to be Loughner referring specifically to the 8th Congressional District of Arizona, Gabby Giffords’ district— assume the details are coincidence. The violence is not. The rhetoric has devolved and descended, past the ugly and past the threatening and past the fantastic and into the imminently murderous.

There were predicable reactions to Olbermann’s comment, one underscoring his point by suggesting that he be assassinated. While his speech was characteristically sententious, the notion that violent acts arise from a violent culture is neither novel nor groundless. By a tragic irony, Rep. Giffords noted the danger well in advance. Last March the door of her Tucson office was smashed, possibly in retaliation for her vote for the health care bill. Interviewed afterward, she pointed out that "We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list . . . the thing is that the way she has it depicted has the cross-hair of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they've got to realize there's consequences to that action."

Another counter-argument is that violent images are not found only on the right, so it is unfair to criticize it. Olbermann admitted that nasty rhetoric could be found on the left as well, including a remark of his. However, this predominantly is a phenomenon of the right, and there is no shortage of examples. In June, 2010 the Pima County Republicans posted an announcement of a fundraiser, held at a shooting range, for a tea-party candidate running against Rep. Giffords. The notice invited supporters to “Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly” (lack of punctuation in the original).⁵ Or consider the political philosophy of Sharon Angle: "If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are going to start looking for Second Amendment remedies. . . . The first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.” Olbermann criticized West for telling his supporters that they should make his opponent afraid to come out of his home. He went beyond that: drawing a parallel to Nazi Germany, West said,”You must be well-informed and well-armed because this government that we have now is a tyrannical government.”⁶Others are worse; these are notable for being mainstream Republican.

Some of those who made the counter-argument, theme (3), were not content to point out that there is no evidence of a connection between this event and such provocations as the Palin map. They seemed to deny any possibility that inflammatory rhetoric ever could have a negative effect. One such argument came from the former psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer. Dismissing the causal argument, he said:

A climate of hate? This man lived within his very own private climate. "His thoughts were unrelated to anything in our world," said the teacher of Loughner's philosophy class at Pima Community College. "He was very disconnected from reality," said classmate Lydian Ali. "You know how it is when you talk to someone who's mentally ill and they're just not there?" said neighbor Jason Johnson. "It was like he was in his own world."
His ravings, said one high school classmate, were interspersed with "unnerving, long stupors of silence" during which he would "stare fixedly at his buddies," reported the Wall Street Journal. His own writings are confused, incoherent, punctuated with private numerology and inscrutable taxonomy. He warns of government brainwashing and thought control through "grammar." He was obsessed with "conscious dreaming," a fairly good synonym for hallucinations. This is not political behavior. These are the signs of a clinical thought disorder - ideas disconnected from each other, incoherent, delusional, detached from reality.
These are all the hallmarks of a paranoid schizophrenic.

Psychiatry is high on the list of fields I know little about, but it strikes me as odd that he is prepared to diagnose based on the second-hand reports of laypeople. It is odder that a psychiatrist would ignore cultural influences and declare that someone simply is crazy. Loughner, as noted, spoke of government brainwashing; was that concept self-created or might it be floating about?

Loughner posted several text videos; they include the comment about brainwashing and grammar.⁷ Most of his arguments are nonsensical, although often presented in the form of syllogisms.⁸ They certainly could be interpreted as revealing a considerable degree of detachment from reality, but they include political references (including “don’t trust the current government”), and a theory of a new currency which is only marginally goofier than others on the web. As Olbermann conceded, this all may be coincidence, but rushing to dismiss the cultural element and to relegate the event to an otherworldly realm of mental disturbance is more political argument than psychiatry.

George Will, another contributor to the Post op-ed page, offered an analysis which is a cross between Krauthammer and Glenn Beck:

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

This goes several illogical steps beyond the point at issue. Will mocked an implication by the New York Times of an indirect connection between the shooting and comments by Republicans and Tea Partiers; here is the relevant comment from the Times editorial:

. . . [Loughner’s] paranoid Internet ravings about government mind control place him well beyond usual ideological categories.
But he is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery. With easy and legal access to semiautomatic weapons like the one used in the parking lot, those already teetering on the edge of sanity can turn a threat into a nightmare.
***
It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge . . . .(emphasis added).

Will quoted only the italicized words, adding “The ‘directly’ is priceless.” But it is priceless only if the suggestion of any connection is absurd. What is so outrageous about the suspicion that demonizing people leads, directly or indirectly, to violent acts against them? Even the direct-indirect dichotomy is largely beside the point. We aren’t sitting as a jury in a tort action; proximate cause isn’t the issue. It’s whether a violent political culture increases the likelihood of violent acts.

To state that the gunman was disturbed hardly makes the conservative case. It is, after all, the already unbalanced who are most likely to turn rhetoric into action.

Even if we knew nothing of Mr. Will’s work, it would be surprising that someone who makes his living offering opinions would denigrate the power of ideas, and indeed he does not always do so. In the Post, on January 27, 1998, he offered, as an excuse for impeaching President Clinton, the suspicion that the Democratic Party "is the incurable carrier of the 1960s virus of disdain for the civilized restraints and values of normal Americans." Disdain for civilized restraints is a viral disease: one couldn’t ask for a better refutation of his present position.

The issue is not whether this shooter heard and acted on the hints by Palin, Kelly, or any other specific ranter. It is that, whatever the trigger in any given case, the background — the atmosphere, the culture — is not irrelevant. The point is not that the babblers are responsible specifically, but that they are irresponsible generally.

The responses under theme (3) have offered another argument, that the rhetoric liberals have condemned is a form of protected speech, and that denouncing it is an offense against the First Amendment. However, to my knowledge, no one has proposed a ban on speech, and pointing out that violent rhetoric has consequences probably won’t prevent its recurrence.

Theme (4) is made up of comments pointing in different directions. Some have references to mental health issues seem to be attempts to turn the discussion from themes (1) and (2). Some argue, perversely, that liberals are to blame because mental health programs didn’t prevent this shooting. Others, such as the Post editorial, sensibly advocate more outreach and treatment for people like Loughner. Unfortunately, budget cuts make that unlikely

The final theme is exemplified by the President’s speech at Tucson on Wednesday.

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate -- as it should -- let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.
The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

It was the right note for the occasion, and is good advice independent of the context. However, civility is a mutual undertaking. We can but hope.

____________________________

1. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083023
2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/09/clarence-dupnik-arizona-sheriff_n_806440.html
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq38Nnf4pOw .

Incomplete text at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40981503/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/#
4. http://twitter.com/SarahPalinUSA/status/10935548053 ; http://www.facebook.com/notes/sarah-palin/dont-get-demoralized-get-organized-take-back-the-20/373854973434
5. http://www.blogforarizona.com/blog/2010/06/jesse-kelly-event-is-this-wording-intentional.html
6. http://www.therealallenwest.com/ Click on “West: Take up arms against the government.”
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6F9_OLQjrA&feature=related
8. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VCXwAMiwZY&NR=1&feature=fvwp

January 2, 2011

The proliferation of college bowl games is good for two constituencies. First, weak teams are invited which otherwise would celebrate the holidays at home. Our Washington Huskies, with a six and six record, are a good example, although the Dawgs redeemed themselves and justified the bid by upsetting a Nebraska team which had humiliated them in September.

The other beneficiaries are companies we’ve (I’ve) never heard of, who are recruited to sponsor bowls, some of them traditional, some new: unrove Humanitarian Bowl, R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl, Beef 'O' Brady's St. Petersburg Bowl, San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl, New Era Pinstripe Bowl, Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl, Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl, TicketCity Bowl, BBVA Compass Bowl. A few sponsors are known companies, but less than household names, producing the GoDaddy.com Bowl, AutoZone Liberty Bowl, Valero Alamo Bowl, MAACO Las Vegas Bowl, Meineke Car Care Bowl. Chick-fil-A is known, at least here, only because it has been in the bowl-sponsorship business for a few years.

Judging from the probable size of some of the companies, naming rights must be pretty cheap.

The number of games doesn’t reflect an increase in interest in football, at least on the part of those who broadcast them. Both the camera and the announcers spend much of the time focused on something other than the field. The camera wanders over the stands and the sideline or shows a replay or an interview and, if we are lucky, returns to the field just as the ball is snapped. It’s fourth down; will the offense go for it, punt or try a field goal? Who knows? The announcers are babbling and we’re looking at somebody in the stands in a weird getup. Increasingly, broadcasts resemble real-time highlight films.

It’s tempting to see this as an exemplar of our short-attention-span culture, in which discussion of important issues is reduced to slogans that fit on bumper stickers or Tea Party signs.