February 23, 2012

There hardly could be a dumber way to select a presidential candidate than the way we do it. (The election, determined by the Electoral College, isn’t much better). The nominating process takes forever, subjecting every public issue not only to partisan interpretation but to competition to see who can most distort it. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars, reducing the field to the rich or servants of the rich. The danger that an election will, in effect, by bought, is greater thanks to Citizens United.

An early poll among a fraction of Republican voters in a small, unrepresentative state, forced one candidate, Tim Pawlenty, from the race before the primary season began. Now, after months of debates and attack ads, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and John Hunstman have dropped out, and the race is down to four, none greatly popular with GOP voters, let alone a good choice to be president. To be sure, the present state of the Republican Party all but guarantees a relatively poor choice, but the process aggravates that tendency.

The delegate-allocation process is somewhat less than transparent and not overly logical. Through February 22, the Republicans have held nine contests — four primaries and five sets of caucuses — but not all of the available delegates were determined by those contests; some will be chosen later and the contest results may be influential in the eventual choice or they may be irrelevant. For that reason, the number of delegates awarded to date varies with the source, ranging from something over 200 to about half that number, out of a total of 2,286. After all the expense, effort and mud slinging, that’s where things stand.

February 11, 2012

For many centuries, until well into the Nineteenth, bloodletting was a standard medical practice. Only rarely did it make any sense, and often it was bizarrely counterproductive. An example of this ignorant, programmed reaction is found in a Nineteenth Century novel:

. . . Enraged, the hussar turned around and delivered a blow with all his strength, which cut through Fabrizio's sleeve and entered deep into his arm: our hero fell.

***The sergeant approached the wounded men. Fabrizio had already gotten to his feet; he was suffering little, but losing a great deal of blood. . . .

***After riding an hour, he felt quite weak. "And now am I going to faint?" he wondered. Two girls assisted Fabrizio off his horse; no sooner had his feet touched ground than he fainted dead away. A surgeon was fetched, and Fabrizio was bled. . . .⁵

Is the patient wounded and weak? Drain his lifeblood. One rationale was that the body’s humors were out of balance, and negative humors needed to be purged. Medicine has progressed beyond such ignorant, counterproductive remedies.

Conservative political economics has not. As Paul Krugman noted,⁶ the recent jobs report was good, but we’re far from full recovery. "Policy makers should be doing everything they can to get us back to full employment as soon as possible. Unfortunately, that’s not the way many people with influence on policy see it." Although the economy still is in a deep hole, and borrowing to stimulate it could be done at very low rates, the establishment worries about the debt, which is important but secondary, and about inflation, even though there is very little of it. Austerity doesn’t work, as the example of Europe has shown. But the common wisdom has it that

there’s something wrong with cheap money and easy credit even in a desperately weak economy. I think of this as the urge to purge, after Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury secretary, who urged him to let liquidation run its course, to "purge the rottenness" that he believed afflicted America.

Is the patient wounded and weak? Purge those evil humors.
__________________________

5. Stendahl, The Charterhouse of Parma, pp. 68-71
6. New York Times, 2/5/12

February 5, 2012

A column by Michael Gerson, published February 2 in The Washington Post, but carried today by The Seattle Times, evaluates Mitt Romney as a candidate and speculates on his chances against Barack Obama. Gerson’s analysis is a little wide of the mark in places, but he deserves credit for his ability to turn a phrase, including his (presumably tongue-in-cheek) term for Romney’s flip-flopping: "ideological variability." Noting Romney’s tendency to say dumb things (this time his statement that he isn’t concerned about the very poor), Gerson observed: "The granting of Secret Service protection following Mitt Romney’s decisive Florida victory did not prevent him from immediately shooting himself in the foot" and "There are few things more powerful in politics than the confirmation of a stereotype."

Any evaluation of Romney as a candidate should consider the weakness of his primary opponents: taking Bachmann, Perry, Cain or Santorum seriously would be an act of faith and, although Gingrich may not be out of the running yet, he too falls into the joke category. Only Ron Paul is a real political force, but he probably is too much the libertarian to be acceptable to most Republicans. Given the field and Romney’s funding and organization, the nomination should have been virtually automatic. Most seem to think that it is now, but Gerson noted that "political inevitability can be confounded by the smallest things." He referred to the final election, but the principle still applies to the nomination.

One knock on Romney is that he is not conservative enough; "moderate," bizarrely, has become a term of contempt. An article in today’s Post goes a long way toward refuting the charge of insufficient conservatism, declaring that Romney is "the stealth tea party candidate." That conclusion is based in part on Romney’s shifts to the right but also on a much more perceptive evaluation of the Tea Party than in most of the reporting on the "movement." The writer, Theda Skocpol, co-author of a new book on the subject, described what she and her colleague discovered:

Initially, we assumed that government spending is the chief irritant for the tea party, but we soon realized that anger about illegal immigrants rivals that concern. . . .

After all, tea partyers see themselves as hard-working Americans whose taxes should not fund benefits for "freeloaders." Along with illegal immigrants, low-income Americans and young people loom large as illegitimate consumers of public benefits and services. In tea party thinking, they are all asking for more than they have earned.

Romney has responded by taking a strong anti-immigrant stance and, although his recent remark is considered by most to be a gaffe, "Many tea partyers think the poor are coddled by government and nod their heads in agreement when Romney says he is ‘not concerned about the very poor’. "

Obama’s health-care reform law also fits into tea party views on immigration. Much of the group’s indictment of the president rests on the fantasy that he wants to give free health care — not to mention a blanket amnesty and citizenship privileges — to undocumented immigrants, thus securing millions more votes for himself and the Democratic Party.

Romney has, with no apparent sense of shame, pretended that the federal program isn’t virtually identical to the one he approved for Massachusetts, and must go.

It is supposedly a Tea Party principle to oppose government bailouts, but the authors, in interviews, "rarely heard tea partyers condemn Wall Street capitalists for receiving them. Instead, they contend that corrupt government officials and policies to help minorities buy homes were responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008 and 2009." Blame also is shifted from private businesses to the quasi-public Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; Gingrich has suffered from his tie to the latter.

Dr. Skocpol hasn’t been misled by all the hype about the grass-roots nature of the Tea Party

. . . .Indeed, the tea party is about more than bottom-up activism. Long-standing far-right advocacy and lobbying groups, such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, have been part of the movement from its earliest days. Such operations are funded by corporations and ultra-conservative billionaires. . . .

The priorities of the wealthy Tea Party backers are low taxation and light regulation. Romney, perhaps because of his former or supposed moderation, didn’t initially attract support from that quarter, but now he’s a true believer, endorsing and "improving" on the backward Ryan plan.

To the extent rank-and-file Tea Partyers have a priority, it is, in Dr. Skocpol’s words, "[p]ushing the Republican Party to the hard right and denying Obama a second term." That hints at a factor not explicitly mentioned: racial hostility.

"In Romney, the tea party has found the ultimate prize: a candidate loyal to the movement’s agenda, but able to fool enough pundits and moderate voters to win the White House at a time when the tea party has lost broad appeal." That may well be so. Apart from Gerson’s point that unanticipated factors may intervene, there are two reasons to think — hope? — that the outcome will be different. Acceptance of Romney by the far right, whether called the Tea Party or otherwise, may not be complete, prompting many to stay home, and independent voters may not be convinced by a Romney reconversion to moderation and conclude that a hard right turn is a really bad idea.

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!"

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." ¹ That 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."² So, 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."⁴ It 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

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.

_____________________________________

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/

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.

3/17/12

Tonight, NBC News managed to report on the mid-summer temperatures across much of the nation without any reference to the banned subjects or any sort of explanation, even though it tried (unsuccessfully) to explain why The Godfather became (did it?) an iconic movie.