What to Think

Pharo Christmas 2010

2010-12-10T14:52:00.002-05:00

What To Think About The Midterms

2010-11-03T08:11:00.000-04:00

2010 Midterms

A somewhat larger than usual mid-term adjustment. That will be the conventional wisdom.

In 2008, the conventional wisdom was “paradigm shift,,” “transformative,” etc. In hindsight, the conventional wisdom seems to have missed the mark – widely.

What to think about 2010? First, I suspect that a year from now, the President will be under siege from the various investigations and impeachment hearings that will be launched in the House. The repeal of DADT will be a bitter pipe-dream. The government will be forced to cease any number of critical services, from food inspection to financial regulation. Veterans will be under attack from the government they were once part of. Cap-and-trade will be the Topic That Must Not Be Named, Let Alone Discussed.

Pretty much partisan politics as usual.

Two things worry me the most. The first is that the Dems continue to struggle with leadership. They are focused on good policy (which is why I like them), but they do not believe that leading the people is part of their job. They are tragically wrong. The GOP understands that many voters want someone who seems certain, even passionate, about their beliefs. They further understand that all the passion in the world won’t matter unless a voter feels it, so they shout and bang the table and make outlandish accusations, etc., all of which is loud enough to get through to persuadable voters.

The Dems sound like a round-table discussion on NPR. Their passion is no doubt real, but that authenticity lulls them into thinking that they just need to be themselves for voters to understand how committed they are.

False. Too many voters’ take-away from the Dems is “politics as usual,” a certain sense of entitlement, and a lack of commitment to what matters most.

There’s no doubt that the Dems suffer from a kind of patronizing attitude, and that this attitude is extremely off-putting. Dems also don’t understand the basics of mass communication, often choosing worthy candidates in terms of their positions, work ethic, etc., but who are not telegenic or likable. Nor do they understand basic negotiating techniques, like starting with a position more extreme than what they would ultimately accept. The GOP uses their base for this purpose very effectively, while the Dems seem ashamed of their base. The Dems will need to address these concerns before they can expect a wide embrace of their platform.

Besides the continuing failure of the Dems to understand the need to be seen as fighters, the other concern coming out of 2010 is the impact of corporate cash. For Karl Rove & Co., this was a warm-up. And the experiment is continuing – to qualify for their tax-free status, more than half their funds are supposed to be spent on non-electoral activity, which means they are planning a big ad blitz in the coming months to overturn health care reform and financial regulation. In terms of 2012, Rove will have a compelling argument that investing with him will return good dividends, and I’d be surprised if the GOP didn’t have more or less unlimited money in 2012.

We are on the verge of a new, corporate era of politics. The rules for 2012 will be different. And the corporate interests now believe (correctly) that their ability to spend will bring them subservient pols.

My guess is that the GOP will increase their edge in the House, take the Senate, and almost get the White House in 2012, provided they are running against Obama. If he has been forced from office (or, God forbid, worse), the GOP will likely have no trouble with either Biden or whoever the Dems end up fielding.

It is always disturbing to see otherwise sensible people falling for the Big Con that is today’s GOP. I don’t see any reason to think this basic dynamic is going to be changing any time soon. The march of the United States of America towards third world status will continue with renewed vigor. And the shame is those most responsible will be cheered as deficit-cutting, tax-cutting heroes, and not as simply sadistic bastards, which is what far too many of them really are.

Lincoln Saw It

2010-10-18T13:19:00.003-04:00

Future President Abraham Lincoln in his famous 1858 speech at the Cooper Union articulated the problem he saw of dealing with the slave-owning interests, who could not stop accusing him and his party of undermining their rights to own slaves, notwithstanding a complete lack of evidence:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

This applies today with the same force to so-called conservatives, who constantly complain of government spending and the need for "limited government." They cannot stop damning Democrats, who they falsely accuse of radicalism. Future President Lincoln saw through this non-sense as well:

But you say you are conservative - eminently conservative - while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live;" while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular Sovereignty;" but never a man among you is in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.

As usual, the so-called Conservatives suffer from a mental tic that makes them accuse others of their own sins. Future President Lincoln had a final word for those who claimed that the issue was raging across the land, and that such raging was evidence of the wrongheadedness of Lincoln's claim that he only wanted to preserve the status quo -- the very essence of the word "conservativism:"

Again, you say we have made the slavery question more prominent than it formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your innovation; and thence comes the greater prominence of the question. Would you have that question reduced to its former proportions? Go back to that old policy. What has been will be again, under the same conditions. If you would have the peace of the old times, readopt the precepts and policy of the old times.

Everything old is new again, except of course that history never repeats itself exactly the same way twice. And many Americans think we are simply going through the usual partisan back and forth. I submit that the half-century long failure of the left to develop and execute a push-back strategy is no more small thing, and that their timidity and inaction has already opened the door to destructive forces they are now powerless to pacify absent a great cataclysm.

2010-06-15T17:08:00.002-04:00

"If the next year is going to bring exceptional growth," [UCLA Anderson Forecast director Edward] Leamer writes, "consumers will need to express their optimism in the way that really counts — buying homes and cars. And that is not going to happen if businesses continue to express their pessimism in the way that really counts — by not hiring workers."

The result is an economic Catch-22.

That, in a nutshell, is the scenario that I believe has been slowly unfolding for some time. The thing that people don't seem to realize is that the Catch-22 is not neutral, i.e., it doesn't represent treading water. It is downward. You can reverse the polarity and get the same result: if businesses keep laying people off, people won't have money to spend, so businesses will turn to lay-offs.

Corporation have relied on job-destruction to cover-up a decades long failure to innovate and create the future. Throwing almost all our R&D money into war research for the last 70 years hasn't helped either.

This only ends when the government opens employment offices in every city and gives everyone who wants one a job that puts a roof over their heads and 3 squares a day. The armed forces isn't nearly enough to do it, at least in the absence of an actual conflagration, which is looking more and more likely by the day.

On the upside, the Mets swept a road series.

The Long War

2010-04-07T14:21:00.000-04:00

In the press of daily business, it’s easy to forget that the big picture matters more. (Yogi: “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.”) But in the long run, the most powerful social forces will have their way. (“The arc of history is long, but bends towards freedom:” MLK Jr.)

I don’t mean “Long War” in stupid sense favored by Bush-ites: a turd-polisher to cover the inanity of America’s never-ending wars. I mean it in the sense of the long war to obtain social justice. (WARNING: GLENN BECK DISAPPROVES! A LOT! “SOCIAL JUSTICE CODE FOR …SOCIAL JUSTICE! HOW EVIL!)

If you want to know what the future of our society is, take a look way back into history. Many of our social conventions – the role of “women” in society (in quotes because most of the claptrap about “women” is about rich white women), the sudden reverence of blasto-cyst Americans (anti-abortion), the “problem” of unemployment, etc. – are modern constructs. Early humans struggling to survive didn’t have much of a concern for “creating jobs.”

Many of our current social problems are traceable to the rise of modern conservatism. The key idea of that movement is not only that private enterprise is the only legitimate social structure, but that the government is the enemy of private enterprise and therefore legitimate social order. Government is bad because it re-distributes money from the wealthy to everybody else, both directly by taxation and indirectly by making it harder to become rich (for example, by outlawing child labor or limiting pollution). In fact, it’s the government-hatred that really defines modern conservatism, as veneration of the wealthy can occur without it (think “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous,” or People Magazine).

Failing schools. Failure to invest in R&D. Corporatism run amok. Lack of health care. Global warming. World poverty. Lack of water. The list of our ills goes on and on, and in most cases, can be traced back to a lack of adequate government action/investment by those who have the resources. (It’s a phenomenon that I’ve been thinking of “passionate devotion to wrong ideas.”) A strong government, especially a democratic government, is the best hope that non-wealthy people have to fight the rich and powerful.

The President is in the news today because he is thinking of tackling the Israel-Palestinian crisis directly. (Would that problem be so intractable if wealthy Arabs contributed to the Palestinians’ relief at something like adequate levels?) And here’s the “Long War” part: the Middle East situation is (obviously) not sustainable. A hundred years from now – or two hundred, or a thousand – the fights of today will be forgotten and a new set of issues will be thought to be important. Some kind of settlement – equilibrium – will be reached, the only question is how, when, and what kind. (The future’s coming – no way to stop it!) Will a nuclear bomb obliterating Tel Avis kick off a conflagration that will consume millions of lives for years and years? Will a popular revolution in Iran lead to a new Middle East leader who lays the groundwork for a cooperative diplomatic union that ushers in an era of peace? Will the Americans and Europeans force their clients to accept a deal that the clients themselves eventually come to see as the end of their enmity? Of course, the one thing I can say for sure is that factors that we currently aren’t considering or seeing (“known unknowns” – D. Rumsfeld) will play a major role in events, but that in the long-run, the unsustainable will not, in fact, be sustained.

The rich exploit the poor, the powerful the weak. It’s been true forever, and ain’t going to change any time soon. However. However…there’s a certain back-and-forth, and over the long haul, the poor and the weak are doing better and better. The long arc of history favors the just, no doubt. The question for our public policy makers is what are the best ways forward. Should we let Iran be bombed by Israel? Should the government raise tax rates? Should the US government pledge to re-build Haiti? The actual outcomes of many of today’s important debates is a foregone conclusion. Over the long-haul, the poor will be raised up (a bit), the greatest injustices will be adjusted, etc. But getting there can be hard or easy, take forever or just a week, be destructive or constructive – in short, the means are how we will be judged. We All Know(sm) what the ends are.

Not Worried? Read This

2010-03-25T18:53:00.001-04:00

Despite flat denials earlier this month, the RNC's Young Eagles will be holding an April fundraiser at the headquarters of Blackwater in Moyock, North Carolina.

GOP + Blackwater = Not good, not good at all.

HCR Summit

2010-02-26T15:13:00.002-05:00

OK, apparently none of you know What To Think(tm) about the health care summit, so I will tell you.

You're welcome.

1. The biggest breakthrough was to bring Republican opposition down to earth. Any notion that the Democratic approach is illegitimate, un-Patriotic, etc., was absent, and the lingering effects of this event will make it just a bit harder fro the GOP to continue down that path. The President ("I like calling you that") made them sit up and behave, and made them spit out their stupid ideas in a way that they couldn't be ignored.

2. This was the next step in creating the fissure that will ultimately sever the crazy out of the GOP. For some of those GOPers, like Coburn, for example, there was simply too much temptation to participate in the substance, which means one cannot pretend that the entire undertaking is bogus. See #1.

3. The President modelled how to both confront these guys and stay civil. Several Dems were already pretty solid on this (Clyburn comes first to mind), but many of them got a chance to show that they too could act like grown-ups.

4. It would be pretty hard for any fair-minded viewer of the event to conclude that the GOP was serious in its thinking, or that the Dems hadn't thought pretty hard about their proposal.

5. This event, together with the one in Baltimore, will be remembered for being a sort of watershed for both the Dems and the GOP.

6. Importantly, the GOP was without one its main tactics: shouting down those who would show you to be a liar. The President felt comfortable speaking over fairly vociferous GOPers when he felt that had gone too far. I think this will give a lot of other Dems the courage to do the same, with the effect that their voices won't be drowned out so easily or so often.

7. The event ensures the passage of HCR, and for that matter much else.

8. By staking everything on their nutty worldview, the GOP bet the farm and lost. If they cannot persuade enough voters that government action inherently wrong, they've got nothin.

9. Anyone watching the event would have to conclude that a fair portion of the GOP's senior-most leaders are venal and not bright.

10. Speaking of not bright, how 'bout that Chris Matthews? Even next to dim-witted Chuck Todd he STILL seems dumb.

That is all.

This is the Problem.

2010-02-26T15:00:00.002-05:00

This is why we're not just going to head out of the woods and be OK. So many years of job losses, in a society already weak in the nest-egg department, is going to have consequences.

Freddie Mac reported that the rate of serious delinquencies - at least 90 days behind - for conventional loans in its single-family guarantee business increased to 4.03% in January 2010, up from 3.87% in December - and up from 1.98% in January 2009.

There's another major wave of economic decline heading our way, although none of our leaders appear ready to acknowledge what is fairly obvious.

The Tide is Turning

2010-02-22T10:31:00.000-05:00

The under-appreciated Steve Benen notes that the fissures separating the crazy-right from mainstream politics are leading to isolation:

The remarks were a further reminder of the isolated nature of the Cheney wing -- the dominant wing -- of the Republican Party. The Obama administration's positions are enjoying the support of Powell, Gen. Petraeus, Adm. Mullen, the Pentagon, and national security experts from across the spectrum.

A lot of people on the left are despairing that Dems seem so weak, the right seems to own the media narrative, and we are all hopelessly doomed. And if this particular movie were to roll credits right now, it would surely be so. But this ain't the last reel in the film...

David Axelrod noted to a reporter after a big victory that "you guys" -- meaning his former profession of political reporter -- are always looking backward. You're sitting in the back of the pick-up looking at where we've been. Those who are actually driving the truck -- the candidate and his team -- are looking forward, always forward.

From where I sit, the trivialization of the crazy-right, long thought to be absolutely inevitable, is well and truly underway (apologies to John Cleese). An important step in the process is to have a series of issues that they embrace, but are not embraced by those in the mainstream.

Here comes Colin Powell. (In my mind, he is a sad and mostly pathetic creature, but is a card-carrying member of the mainstream elite.) He says that the claim that the Obama administration is making us less safe is not his view. He comes as close as any card-carrier ever will to saying the claim is nuts.

The idea that we need to start over on health care, or that it is a government take-over, is likewise finding less and less traction in the mainstream. Some sort of health care financing reform seems both desirable and inevitable. So, HCR is another brick in the wall.

The idea that the stimulus was a pork-barrel wasteland that did nothing for the economy is likewise now firmly rejected. I/m sure you can come up with more examples.

The point of all of this is that the steps necessary to dismiss these nuts for a good long time are now being taken. Looking forward, Axelrod-like, it seems clear that the President will pass some sort of HCR, and that some group of non-crazies Republicans will join him. If not, that will lead to the demise of these GOPers. HCR is the thin edge of the knife: those that want to be part of relevant politics in the next half decade or more will have to find a way to appear to be on the side of HCR, while those who go down fighting it will, well, just go down -- to oblivion.

Dems seem unable to imagine a future in which they win. I think the President sees it, and that's why he's not projecting defeatism.

It seems to me the future will be the result of a new wave of pols on the left and right. On the right, lack of sociopathy will become the norm, once again, and restraint, caution, reluctance to accept change, etc., will return as the positive forces society needs. On the left, defeatism and fear will be shown the door, and the new pols will embrace the electorate's growing appetite for change.

Right now, Obama is the leader of BOTH groups. At one point, he may end up on one side or the other. (I'd guess he'd be a more center-right than center-left.) The President is trying to preserve a space for non-insane GOPers, and is also trying to buck up those of his party-members who would really rather just quit.

Is is written in stone that Obama can't yet succeed? Aren't there enough sentient voters left that will reject the crazy and embrace meaningful change? My guess is that the electorate is ahead of the old-school pols and that a majority is way past ready for change - real change, and that they will end up getting it, at long last.

That concludes today's screed.

Here's Someone Who "Gets It"

2010-02-15T10:00:00.002-05:00

Here's an excerpt of a long-ish piece by one L. Randall Wray that finally gets to the heart of my idea about jobs - that the private sector's failure to meet society's needs for employment is not fix-able via half-measures like modest tax incentives:

But what I am advocating is something both broader and permanent: a universal jobs program available through the thick and thin of the business cycle. The federal government would ensure a job offer to anyone ready and willing to work, at the established program compensation level, including wages and benefits package. To make matters simple, the program wage could be set at the current minimum wage level, and then adjusted periodically as the minimum wage is raised. The usual benefits would be provided, including vacation and sick leave, and contributions to Social Security.

Note that the program compensation package would set the minimum standard that other (private and public) employers would have to meet. In this way, public policy would effectively establish the basic wage and benefits permitted in our nation--with benefits enhanced as our capacity to provide them increases. I do not imagine that determining the level of compensation will be easy; however, a public debate that brings into the open matters concerning the minimum living standard our nation should provide to its workers is not only necessary but also would be healthy.

Once our friends on the right (and frankly many on the left!) get over their revulsion at the idea that the government can act directly in the market as a market participant, this is the only way to go. The only question is how much damage will we cause ourselves before we finally take the only step that will work?

Jobs!

2010-02-12T13:18:00.002-05:00

There's hardly a TV talking head or Congress-critter or administration representative who can talk about anything other than JOBS. J-O-B-S! It's as though the crying need for jobs just arose (it has been around for 20 or more years). It's also talked about as though it were a virus that needed a cure -- 'if only the Congress would FOCUS on job creation," or "This year, the Administration's #1 priority is JOBS." Yet another triumph of American obfuscation. The problem is simply a lack of will, a lack of focus, a lack of the 'right idea.' Solutions, people. Solutions.

But of course the truth is far from this preposterous framing. The idea that businesses are not hiring because they lack a tax break is ludicrous. The idea that small businesses aren't thriving due to lack of credit is not borne out by any actual data. However, there's a mountain of data suggesting that the great wealth accumulations in our society are not producing any socially useful result.

The nation's rich and powerful have succeeded so well in convincing their fellow countrymen that their success is warranted that it is now a bed-rock principal of American social thought. Poor people deserve their fate, as do the young, the sick, and most especially the incarcerated. And young Mr. Trump deserves those millions because he has so very cleverly wrung them out of the American economy.

My experience in American business since 1980 or so has shown me that leaders who create shareholder value by simply taking it from those least able to protest -- employees, suppliers, customers. I have not seen American leaders in any great numbers succeed by innovation, commitment to excellence, developing new ideas, new markets. In short, American business leaders succeed by cutting jobs, not by creating them. Of course there are notable exceptions, but the overall drift is clear.

Consider the political orthodoxy that taxing things makes people do them less. This has been twisted by our elite to mean that all taxes mean less economic growth. Even Democrats lack the courage to denounce this nonsense for what it is. But where does the government get most of its money? From the press, one might think it's from beleaguered "small businesses," or from the sweat of our "entrepreneurs." But that's simply false. The vast majority of the government's revenue is from wage withholding -- in other words, job taxes. We have heaped so much of the government's need for money onto wage-earners, no one should be surprised that jobs are in short supply.

I have an idea. Let's tax wealth in excess of say, two generation's worth of expenses, and use those proceeds to eliminate payroll taxes. Let's also tax income in excess of, say, $500,000 per year and use the money to pay for healthcare -- and I mean to include corporations in that. Why shouldn't large business enterprises pay a significant portion of their income as tax? The idea that large businesses need special protection to form and to succeed is borne out by no actual evidence, and there's a fair amount of evidence to the contrary.

And finally, we have tried every trick in the book to get the private sector to create adequate levels of employment, so far with dismal results. I have said this many times over the last several years, but we will not exit this jobs crisis that began so many years ago until the government takes direct action in the labor market. Think Harry Hopkins hiring millions of new government workers in 1934, or government contractors and the military scrounging for every able-bodied adult in 1941. That is the kind of thing that will work. And to be an ongoing solution, those hires have to transition to something that is sustainable, such as alternative energy, healthier food production, improved community services, etc.

It's a hard enough challenge when one wants to do it. But when the entire power elite has for many years preached the gospel that we can do anything EXCEPT the one thing that would work, it's impossible. Unless and until we as a society start to embrace the kind of things that will actually work, we will continue to sputter along, failing a little bit more every day.

That concludes today's screed.

And Another Thing

2010-01-19T12:27:00.002-05:00

I've said before on this blog that I think the underlying economic crisis is far more serious than the "financial" crisis. Long-term economic woes can persist for some time without causing any kind of crisis -- an occasion for noticing and hopefully dealing with the underlying woes. The recent financial crisis -- itself a sort of underlying woe triggered into crisis by the catalyst of the collapse of the housing market -- will be seen down the line as a catalyst of a larger economic crisis.

I have written previously that:

Another undesirable consequence of Wall St.'s demands is that it starves society of research and development.... [A] lot of companies don't have any R&D strategy, so they riff on the products they already have, they move those products into new markets, and they buy-out the competition. Plus, there's always moving work to lower-cost markets and otherwise depriving workers and suppliers of any available pennies in order to make the firm look like it's growing.

This all points to a serious crisis in the world's economy. We have faced and rebounded somewhat from last year's financial crisis. But we have yet to face and rebound from the underlying economic crisis that continues to worsen. I believe that the current downturn shares this feature with the Great Depression.

We exited the Great Depression by providing work to every man and woman we could get our hands on. We came out of the war with enough technological innovation to support a couple of decades worth of improving products and services.

I don't see any such deus ex machina on the horizon, and so don't see any basis to suppose that the long-term decline in our standard of living is going to be reversed any time soon.

While many companies are in fact engines of growth and innovation, it's hard to conclude that the large majority are. We are living at the beginning of a long period of slow-decline -- not entirely a bad thing, to the extent it allows others to climb out of terrible poverty -- and sadly, most Americans are completely unaware of what's been done to them for the last 40 years.

2010-01-14T21:32:00.002-05:00

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

- President Eisenhower

I believe this will soon be the majority view of the current rump of the GOP. However, it will be wrong. This splinter group is a bomb waiting to go off. They are but one or two lucky breaks away from a serious threat to American society. Still, it's intereresting that DDE not only thought this, but articulated it so plainly.

Health Care Reform

2009-12-21T10:36:00.004-05:00

It's been a while, and I thought it was high time to explain What To Think (tm) about the impending health care reform.

First things first. The bill as written is a mess. It's a product of a legislative process that both lacks leadership and has a large faction devoted to promoting ignorance and fear. Here's what's troubling about the bill:

1. No minimum level of coverage. The mandate's analogy to auto insurance is compelling to many people, but there's a huge difference: GEICO and State Farm can compete on price because they cannot compete on coverage. The basic coverage required by state law can be improved, but it's a floor that's also an adequate level of coverage. If a consumer takes only the minimum coverage, they'll be OK in the event of a claim. This omission is largely absent from the current debate -- and it's the #1 thing that makes the bill unlikely to improve anyone's health care coverage.

2. No Pre-existing Condition Exclusion. The health insurance lobby got rid of the "no pre-existing condition" language and have re-instated it as a basis for excluding coverage. Again, this received no coverage, but it's a problem.

3. The "subsidies" are a joke. They do not take into account anything like affordability. It assumes that $90,000 has the same value in Los Angeles as it does in Terre Haute, when it obviously does not. A family in NYC that makes $100,000 and pays $3200 a month in housing expense will be required to pay $15,000 a year or else face a fine of about half that (meaning they pay half and get nothing, coverage-wise). This is ridiculous.

4. It preserves the status quo for half a decade. The bill's provisions won't take effect until 2014. That's more than enough time for the moneyed interests to undo the beneficial effects of the bill.

5. Cost-Containment Is Absent. There's a lot of pilot programs to test various kinds of cost-reduction strategies, but there's no guarantee that even successful programs will ever be rolled out more broadly. Cutting the cost of health care in the US isn't a mystery that has flummoxed the nation's brightest minds for years. It's a goal that it antithetical to the interests of those with access to power.

6. It further codifies the Right's misogyny. Telling poor and middle class women that abortions are not for them is simply wrong. I can't imagine greater hypocrisy than saying abortions are OK only for those that can afford them. This is supposed to be principled? Complaining that you don't want your (federal) tax dollars going to support abortions is like me complaining that I don't want to have my (federal) tax dollars spent on killing innocent Yemeni women and children.

7. Public Option? Yeah. Um, just yeah. This was never going to be the panacea we all hoped it would be. At best, it was something that could grow into something useful, but that wouldn't happen for sometime. And in the meantime, we can come back to this, though I doubt we will. The sad truth is that in the class was in the US, the outcome is clear: the rich have won, and they will never accept quality healthcare for all. Being mean to our poor and weak is the hallmark of our society, and that's not going to change any time soon.

I could go on, but that covers it. There are some reasons to support the bill.

1. It goes far beyond what any Presidential aspirant proposed as recently as 2004. Compared to previous health care reform measures, this is significant. Remember it wasn't much more than a year ago that the President (Bush) vetoed a modest expansion in S-CHIP coverage for children. This bill undoes that veto and then some.

2. It signals to the health finance industry a cultural shift toward reform and meaningful cost control. This is the value of thought leadership. For tens or even hundreds of thousands of people who work in healthcare and its related financial industry, this bill will be an inspiration to consider new approaches, to take on things that were previously thought to be sacred cows, etc.

3. It makes Republicans mad. This is the best reason of all. And apart from the sport of seeing the likes of Jim DeMint and "Doc" Coburn fuming mad, this bill is only possible because of the GOP apporach. Their boycott of the process has meant that there are no "middle ground" bills to attract the weak minded Maine Senators and their ilk. For Dems, it's the Senate bill or nothing -- a choice that's bringing us the Nelsons and the Landrieaus.

Add it all up and I'd vote for it. A half loaf is on offer -- take it! I doubt there will be many benefits from it, but even a few benefits are worth it, and who knows, maybe when the electorate gets a load of their money being shovelled to United Healthcare, they might actually want real coverage. It's not likely, but it could happen! Ponies!

Lousy Air Travel The Least of Our Worries

2009-09-15T15:40:00.003-04:00

Kevin Drum riffs on an Atrios comment that "flying really sucks." Kevin says:

If I can put on my Andy Rooney hat for a moment, doesn't it seem as if this describes most of American business these days? It's not just the airlines. As near as I can tell, consumer-facing businesses these days virtually never think about how they can make things genuinely more convenient for people. Rather, they seem almost obsessively concerned with calculating the maximum amount of pain people will put up with before they finally get pissed off enough to take their business elsewhere.

I think Kevin's on to something significant.

I heard a restaurant evaluator a few years ago talking about restaurants, and he always favored local institutions, whatever it was, from a great Northern Italian to a clam shack at the beach. He described food at big chain restaurants as "just good enough so that you won't swear never to return and mean it." He pointed out that there's no one for whom Olive Garden is the best restaurant, just the most convenient, easiest to park at, and not so bad that one would never return.

A lot of large businesses are run this way: gouge every penny possible from the consumer to the point where you are one cent shy of losing the customer. And, after all, it's a smart way to maximize near term profits.

Smaller businesses that don't have to face the demands of the stock market have freedom to charge what they like, and provide whatever level of service/quality they like.

The problem is that the larger businesses essentially rig the game by using their size -- and ready (ish) access to capital to preclude smaller businesses. That's why nearly every town in the US has the same stores, restaurants, etc.

Another undesirable consequence of Wall St.'s demands is that it starves society of research and development. Air travel benefits in part from the R&D that is done by the government. But a lot of companies don't have any R&D strategy, so they riff on the products they already have, they move those products into new markets, and they buy-out the competition. Plus, there's always moving work to lower-cost markets and otherwise depriving workers and suppliers of any available pennies in order to make the firm look like it's growing.

This all points to a serious crisis in the world's economy. We have faced and rebounded somewhat from last year's financial crisis. But we have yet to face and rebound from the underlying economic crisis that continues to worsen. I believe that the current downturn shares this feature with the Great Depression.

We exited the Great Depression by providing work to every man and woman we could get our hands on. We came out of the war with enough technological innovation to support a couple of decades worth of improving products and services.

I don't see any such deus ex machina on the horizon, and so don't see any basis to suppose that the long-term decline in our standard of living is going to be reversed any time soon.

It's certainly true that some of the decline of the West is the happy by-product of a sort of global equalization which is having the positive effect of lifting hundreds of millions out of abject poverty. But we are also dealing with the consequences of a poorly managed society for the last 40 years or so. (Hardly surprising when one considers that we've had a faction in our society for that period that seems to seek and celebrate poor or non-existent social management).

The Future

2009-09-09T20:12:00.002-04:00

The Dems will win on health insurance reform, and over the next 25 years will argue with the Republicans over various important improvements (which the Repubs will denounce as "expansion of government power" and "employing more and more bureaucrats" or some such).

In the medium- to-long term, say 25 or so years out, the Democrats will in fact have come to take their rule for granted. They will propose foolish ideas and will be taken down over the ensuing 15-25 years, when the latest iteration of the conservative movement again captures political power.

Rinse. Repeat.

I'm inexplicably upbeat and positive about tonight's BHO speech. I saw a few minutes of his Cincinnati speech, and had the experience of thinking I was re-connecting with an old, dear friend after a summer apart. Weird, yeah.

Yup.

Any hoo, I'm sure I'll find more than adequate grounds for pessimism and gloom shortly. Do not be alarmed!

A sustainable answer to the cruel logic of exponential math

2009-09-08T14:32:00.002-04:00

Simply a Deep Thought(tm):

Humans had, for most of our development, millions, thousands, hundreds and even tens of years to adjust to the new problems of our growing species. How best to protect the tribe from animals? How best to store grains? How best to protect our group from other groups who would attack us? How to attack other groups and get their stuff? All of these questions have been addressed with the luxury of some considerable time -- and in a time when significant loss of life was not all that rare.

In the last 200 years, though, our growth has risen to insanely high levels. (Strangely, most population growth experts expect it to top out at some point fairly soon, though why that should be so I have no idea.) We have had to invent, nearly on the fly, systems to handle our basic human needs. We have often done so while incurring large loss of life, and I'm not even counting warfare and genocide - simple death from starvation has been an ongoing catastrophe of enormous proportions.

When I consider the state of our American experiment, I am concerned that we do not have a sustainable model. We still follow an extractive model, and routinely waste enormous resources, lost in our obsession with free markets and social Darwinism.

Social Darwinism is not who we are as creatures. We are hard-wired to be more community-minded, and are obviously striving to get more and more community minded all the time. But we have a hard time imagining a better future, and remain fixed on the structures that have "worked" in the past.

Our society, like so many others around the world, has a jobs/work crisis. Humans need to feel productive to remain happy, and far too many are not producing at anything like their potential. The value of specialization, the value of economies of scale, the power of technological acheivements - these are all forces that free humans from various kinds of work. But we have operated under the impression that the goal is a society where no one has to work, which has sadly led us to a society where not enough people have useful work to do.

In considering the best ways to create work/jobs, we must start to value more highly the need of humans to have meaningful work. Even if it means we "pay" more. We might pay teachers more, even though we might not "have" to. We might "pay" to have more manufacturing work done nearby, even though we could "pay" less for it to be done elsewhere.

I've been trying to formulate a model that would be universal enough to be adopted by almost any society. My thought begins with something like, "for every 2,200 humans, we need one dentist, for every 100,000 humans we need 1,400 farm workers, for every 28,500 humans we need 100 carpenters," and so on. The idea is to have communities that are optimally sized and ensure a wide variety of vocations. A single social unit of say, 300 million, is simply too large to manage. My current thought is to establish something rather like colleges and universities, but these institutions would have missions that do not revolve around education (though some could and would), but would have some focus or speciality. I can imagine a transportation college, where engineers would design forms of transportation and workers could produce it; the rest of the community would work to support that. It's not something I've finished thinking through, so there are a lot of issues. But the core of the idea is to create communities of sizes that would more readily allow adaptation, change and growth over time, so that we wouldn't have to work solely on systems that worked for communities of a half a billion souls or more.

If we don't grab hold of our own destiny, the cruel logic of math will leave us with a single system for all 20 billion of us, in which errors are far more costly, innovation is therefore harder, and far too many will fail to lead the kind of productive and satisfying lives that they could if we only built smarter structures and systems.

Max Blumenthal Is Big

2009-09-04T08:54:00.002-04:00

Max Blumenthal is on Democracy Now! promoting his new book, Republican Gamorrah.

This is a major voice already. His willingness to show the hard-right on camera as they really is by itself a major contribution both to our current discourse as well as to later historical analysis.

This new book takes the already highly-insightful thinking of Richard Hofstadter's in his Paranoid Style and American Politics one step further. He takes the paranoid mind-set that describes so well the Right's perspective, and links that mind-set to what I've always believed was at the heart of their movement: a (sometimes all too accurate) perception by its members that they have failed by the standards they subscribe to.

Blumenthal quotes the amateur philosopher (OK, that's just fun to type) Eric Hoffer to Explain Everything:

“Faith in a holy cause,” Hoffer wrote, “is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

This thought becomes Blumenthal's thesis (likely more of a theme, but hey, it's not a literary society), and is used over and over to illuminate the workings of the current Right at their very most fundamental level. He also introduces readers to some of the charlatans and lunatics who have personally created and led this movement - the actual Right Wing Conspiracy.

Max and I disagree about Obama's read of this history -- he thinks the President doesn't take it on board adequately, I disagree. My own view is that the President is taking a long-ish view, and knows that a success on health care will be the crack in the dam that brings about the destruction of the Lunatic Fringe as a significant force in American society for many years to come.

That destruction will take some time, and the health care win will be but the first big breakthrough. But once Americans come to understand that the government can be a very good solution to many problems, the current RIght will finally have their "emperor has no clothes" moment. We will then be able to enjoy another 40-50 years without their interference.

The Guns of August: How the Republican Right Fired on Health Care

2009-09-02T11:33:00.001-04:00

I think the President understands something that Professor Reich and many others do not: victory goes to the side that understands the power of the counter-attack.

The right has had months to mount their opposition, and have come up with things that we can all accept (like "no death panels"), or things that make no sense ("we don't need health care reform).

When Obama returns to the offensive, he will be able attack a fixed target. I predict he will prevail, and all those who wondered why he "let the narrative get away from him" will have to concede that in the end, we got meaningful health care reform.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The Public Option? It's About Accountability

2009-08-20T16:28:00.001-04:00

Why don't Dems talk about the need to have non-public ownership of an insurance option? Not too long ago, plenty of insurance companies and banks were owned by their insureds/depositors. The vice is the need to post year-over-year profit increases, as demanded (probably justifiably) by the public markets...

I think a lot of older Americans would recall "mutuals" with some fondness. Well that they should, too!
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"I Hate Big Government"

2009-08-10T19:20:00.003-04:00

Don't know where this is from, or who wrote it. I found it on Americablog.com.

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

Quad. Erat. Demonstratum. The government is NOT incapable of doing anything (with the possible exception of bombing people on the other side of the world).

The Face of Joblessness

2009-07-23T08:47:00.005-04:00

This photo is so full of longing, dispair, defeat, desparation.

I suggest looking at it full-size.

Once again our society faces an employment crisis, and we seem to have no better way out than these folks did 70+ years ago.

I'm not certain I see a viable way forward at this point. We need literally millions and millions of jobs. Our leadership seems bereft of any idea of how to do that. (Me? I got plenty of ideas...)

Ten years after this was taken, these girls were women, maybe having lost someone dear in the war. They stood, however, at the start of a new age of economic opportunity. I hope today's 8, 10 and 14 year-olds stand someplace similar in 2119...

I think this sums it up

2009-06-29T08:42:00.001-04:00

Had to get much clearer than the great Tom Toles:

We Are Pissing Away our Assets

2009-06-23T12:22:00.003-04:00

This photo-essay is something that has really stuck with me. Detroit is experiencing in a couple of decades what Philadelphia experienced over a century.

I am posting it here so I can find it easily. It is beyond haunting...

Apology Fliers

2009-06-16T21:59:00.005-04:00

Don't really know if this is really true or not, but it's an example of what one could do justce-wise if one weren't constrained by ossified values from the millennia before last:

A woman judge in Turkey has ordered a wife beater to personally distribute 1,000 leaflets apologising for the act, the Turkish media reported on Tuesday.

Judge Aslihan Limon, 28, in the northern town of Arac served the ruling on Mustafa Kadinci who was accused of hitting his wife and then locking her up after a row.

Apology Fliers. Imagine what we could do if all we were trying to do was provide the best justice system we could, based on effectiveness, fairness, etc. rather than on constraining Anglo-Saxon ideas form 10-something.

Healthcare, Smhealthcare

2009-06-16T13:16:00.002-04:00

President Obama writes me:

The campaign to pass real health care reform in 2009 is the biggest test of our movement since the election. Once again, victory is far from certain. Our opposition will be fierce, and they have been down this road before. To prevail, we must once more build a coast-to-coast operation ready to knock on doors, deploy volunteers, get out the facts, and show the world how real change happens in America.

And just like before, I cannot do it without your support.

So I'm asking you to remember all that you gave over the last two years to get us here -- all the time, resources, and faith you invested as a down payment to earn us our place at this crossroads in history. All that you've done has led up to this -- and whether or not our country takes the next crucial step depends on what you do right now.

I think the world of the President, in general. I know he will not embarrass us, he will not do overtly dumb things, he will often do good things, and occasionally very good things. But I'm starting to get a rather panicky feeling...

I've been listening to the debate the last several weeks, and all I hear is mandates and tax credits. And something about gateways or collectives. I know I didn't vote for that. I thought I was voting for universal health care. But this administration starts off by saying that we will never acheive that, so let's settle for some bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo and reforms and affordability and call it a day.

And then he asks me to throw my support behind it.

Look (as the President is so fond of saying), no person in this country should be unable to get healthcare because of an inability to pay. Ask me to work for that and I'm there tomorrow. But to ask me to work for a tax credit, for Clintonian incrementalism, for a no-illegals guarantee, for a public option -- well, as the President would say, "come on now."

Leading a mass movement requires embracing inspirational ideals. It requires pushing for the changes that the people are clamoring for. Many people like their insurance just fine, says the President. That's because they're not sick. To get welfare programs for the poor, people who are not poor had to be convinced to get on board. Mr. President, let's see you do some convincing that every American deserves health care, even if he/she can't scrape up the $890 a month it's going to cost.

Isn't Supply-Side Economics Debunked By Now?

2009-06-15T11:44:00.001-04:00

The question I'd like to ask every politician who opposed tax increases and favors cuts to social services is this:

"You are placing a rather large bet on the idea that the budget is best balanced on the backs of the weakest, the neediest, the sickest, etc., and that we must not under any circumstances ask the rich to contribute even one cent more, all on the theory that increasing taxes will cause more harm in the long-run by discouraging enterprise. Given the size and social importance of this wager, can you tell us what evidence you have that this theory is true?

2009-06-08T12:40:00.002-04:00

John Cole says:

The unemployment situation is getting worse than was expected, something we all knew anyway:

(And I'm not going to remark on the Thing We All Know(tm)

Here's What To Think(tm):

I don’t think people have processed just how serious is the trouble we’re in. We have been created job-less people at an alarming rate for some time. That is translating, as personal savings are exhausted, the kindness of family and friends is dwindling, and assets are being liquidated, into more foreclosures and evictions—some of which will also contribute to the coming commercial real estate collapse. (So says Atrios, so it must be true.)

We may get to a point where the external indicators agree we have nowhere lower to go. But that won’t mean we start climbing back up. Our economy has been so distorted for so long that it will take a long time to get it right again.
When was the last time housing was affordable? When could most families handle paying their own tuition bills, or health insurance premiums?

Which industries are going to be creating new jobs in adequate quantity any time soon? (Search your heart and you’ll know it ain’t alternative energy, at least not in the next 5 years.)

We are in serious trouble. This is not ordinary ebb-and-flow of the business cycle. Yes, the business cycle still exists, and yes it will eventually stop swinging negative and start swinging positive. But we’ve learned in the recent past that an economy that is in a statistical growth period can still be a hard place to find a place to live, educate the kids, and take care of the sick.

This Is A Good Example

2009-05-31T21:27:00.003-04:00

Great post about CA's problem which shows how balancing the books on the backs of the poorest, sickest, ailing, etc. is now the overt and explicit policy of the CA government. It is no longer Something We All Know(tm) but never say out loud. This is out loud for sure.

When NY Gov. Paterson have his first speech on NY's budget woes last fall, he went in this order: First, the sick. Then the old. Then the little kids. Then students. But never, ever, the hedge fund managers -- that would be wrong!

Ah-nolt's experience is CA is eerily reminiscent of Ron Reagan's stint in the governor's mansion and then White House. "Tax Cuts! Yea! Pay for Them By Cutting Government Waste (And Yes I Mean Those Welfare Queens)." Who knew such a tough-but-compassionate guy would end up creating whole new generations of homeless people.

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/05/as-arnolds-political-career-dies-how.html

Jeebus.

2009-05-31T08:04:00.003-04:00

Today's NY Times is a perfect example of dumb-ness masquerading as insight. On the front page of the site, the headline manages to blame President Obama for "push[ing] the issue of 'identity' back to fore front."

Seeing it in context is worse. This - likely intentionally -- makes it sound like the President caused this controversy by dint of his nominating a Latina judge. WRONG. EPIC fail.

The controversy is caused by the barely-concealed bigotry of what passes for the leadership of the Republican party. Where is Steele denouncing Rush and Newt? Where's Boehner distancing House Republicans from these people?

The NY Times manages to locate the center of gravity on this in exactly the wrong place. Further evidence, I suppose, that no one with critical thinking skills reads the NY Times before it is published.

I've Never Seen It Put Better

2009-05-28T11:11:00.001-04:00

Bob Herbert:

America has become self-destructively shortsighted in recent decades. That has kept us from acknowledging the awful long-term consequences of the tidal wave of joblessness that has swept over the nation since the start of the recession in December 2007. And it is keeping us from understanding how important the maintenance and development of the infrastructure is to the nation’s long-term social and economic prospects.

It’s not just about roads and bridges, although they are important. It’s also about schools, and the electrical grid, and environmental and technological innovation. It’s about establishing a world-class industrial and economic platform for a nation that is speeding toward second-class status on a range of important fronts.

It’s about whether we’re serious about remaining a great nation. We don’t act like it. Here’s a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school.

We can’t put our people to work. We can’t educate the young. We can’t keep the infrastructure in good repair. It’s hard to believe that this nation could be so dysfunctional at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. It’s tragic.

'Nuff said.

What It Means To Be a Republican

2009-05-11T14:10:00.002-04:00

In the dust up over former Vice President Cheney's recent appearance promoting torture, there was a revealing bit that shows what being a Republican means to old Dick:

"I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."

"So you think that he's not a Republican?"

"I just noted he endorsed the Democratic candidate for president this time, Barack Obama," Cheney said. "I assumed that that is some indication of his loyalty and his interest."

In fact, old Dick even went so far as to explicitly proclaim that "maintaining our loyalty and commitment to those principles is vital to our success" as Republicans.

Seems to me that Dick's view is that being Republican means marching in lock-step loyal formation. Obedience to orders would seem to be a core Republican virtue, at least according to old Dick.

HHS Secretary

2009-04-28T11:51:00.004-04:00

Dear Republicans,

Do you think your concerns about Gov. Sibilius' reproductive rights record might be a wee bit, I don't know, WAY, WAY out of proportion to the real issues here on Planet Earth?

Thank you for shutting up and getting out of the way.

Signed,

One With A Brain

2009-04-23T14:40:00.002-04:00

Reader JB at TPM has this insight:

Now that Bush is gone, there is nothing and nobody else for the Republicans to turn to. They can either try to build a new identity for the party from scratch, or they can remain loyal to what they know, as so many 1930s-era Republicans remained loyal to the legacy left by Coolidge and Hoover. The latter course obviously doesn't offer much hope for the future (unless President Obama crashes and burns), but at least it promises safety for the present to the majority of Congressional Republicans representing safe Republican constituencies.

There's two things worth noting. First, those 30's era Republicans who remained loyal to Hoover and Coolidge in fact passed on their legacy -- to Barry Goldwater, Ron Reagan and ultimately George W Bush.

Secondly, there's a certain irony in the fact that Republicans took jerry-mandering to new heights, thinking it would enable them to hold onto their "permanent" majority. However, it seems to be having the effect of forcing Republicans to stick with a failed ideology, thereby ensuring their trivialization. Funny how that works.

I Just Gotta Say

2009-04-22T14:13:00.002-04:00

We live in a mass society. 300 million in America alone. And the days when most people were more-or-less self-reliant are long gone -- centuries gone. We have stumbled into a sort of social agreement. Leaders make the choices for us: what work shall there be, who gets to do what, who can live where, will there be education or health care or entertainment.

These leaders have a powerful responsibility. Should there be a social breakdown, restoring order can be difficult, and take decades. What we're living through now is a failure of monumental proportions. Of course, the leaders of our society have been failing in various ways forever -- world poverty stands as a pretty powerful rebuke, for example. And failing to build a society that is sustainable, that provides more and more opportunity for more and more people, that delivers a kind of social justice -- that is the crime which has been committed.

We are coming to realize that we need to re-think our society from the ground-up. Of course, doing so is a wonderful opportunity to avoid past mistakes (and make all new mistakes!). But the fact that we must do so in an environment of crisis is to be regretted, as it was avoidable.

There's nothing natural, or inevitable, or "inherent in the system" about our current woes. On the contrary, many leaders have failed, time and again, to take the right path. While we all bear some blame for suffering our leaders, at the end of the day the leaders themselves must bear the brunt of the responsibility.

I fear that our society has not yet figured out that the people who led us to this point are still hanging around trying to save their skins. We can get better leadership by demanding it, of course. But one of the things that the new leaders must handle is getting rid of the ideas of the old leaders. In these times, it seems, that includes getting rid of the notion that we need to return to a consumer-ist society where "shopping" is a primary activity, where borrowing is "necessary" for consumers to live a good life-style, or that failed businesses must be given new leases on life to redeem their failures.

Things Were Pretty Bad Before The Crisis...

2009-04-22T14:03:00.002-04:00

In all the talk about the economic crisis, a fact that get overlooked, one that I think may well prove to be the reason that this recession is fundamentally worse (i.e., harsher, deeper, more prolinged, likely to never truly end, etc.) is that we were already in dire straits:

The recession in Flint, as in many old-line manufacturing cities, is quickly making a bad situation worse.

Most of the coverage in the papers is by (and for, in the case of the NY Times) people of means -- people who had largely escaped the slow decline of the American economy for the previous decade or more.

The recession simply made real to the richest Americans what was long real to everybody else: we had built an economy that was failing to meet the needs of the society it was supposed to serve.

Paging Governor Perry

2009-04-18T10:56:00.002-04:00

Texas Governor Perry to the white courtesy phone, please.

I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

- Famous 19th Century Illinois Politician

Another Deep Thought

2009-04-18T10:50:00.002-04:00

Josh Marshall has a deep thought:

Conservatives are so incensed by warnings about the threat of right wing radicalism that they're considering overthrowing the federal government.

I note as oddly absent in the whole Perry-Texas-Secession debate any reference to the fact that the right of a State to secede via unilateral declaration was the causus belli of the Civil War. The non-Perry-Texas-Secession party prevailed, decisively (or so it seemed at the time).

“I Must Have Somebody,”

2009-03-23T13:07:00.001-04:00

Both Frank Rich and Arianna Huffington seem to be developing a case of the vapors. Both cite Geithner as the problem in the administration’s efforts to respond to the unraveling economy. Huffington wants him fired. He is, these and others say, too close to Wall Street. Too invested in the culture of corporate greed. Too close to the problem as NY Fed President. Too…something. The idea seems to be to get someone who is outside the system, someone who is not invested in the banks’ survival to Do the Right Thing. (Maybe Spike Lee is available?) It almost seems that the chorus of would-be Simon Cowell’s are crying for anybody to replace Mr. Geithner.

First, the evidence that Geithner is not succeeding is thin to non-existent. Other than picking off elements of his plans that seem ill-advised, the main thrust of the criticism is that his thinking is too conventional, too wedded with restoring the status quo ante. But the technical measures of the performance of the markets aren’t so clear that Timmeh must go.

Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, this is no time to panic. Let’s remember we’re 10 weeks into this thing. Whether Geithner’s plan is smart or dumb should be judged at least in some measure by how well it works.

We need to remember that the criteria for judging his work is not comparison to a perfect person or an ideal Treasury Secretary. A rigorous standard of judgment would suggest a reasonable, successful Treasury Secretary as the baseline for comparison. (A fair standard of comparison would be to compare Geithner to a hypothetical Secretary Phil Gramm, since that’s who we would likely have if we didn’t have Obama making the call.)

Pundits and voters have a hard time imagining the challenges Geithner faces. My guess is that the level of reliable information is appallingly thin. But does it make sense to share that with the public? Is knowing that our regulatory apparatus is dangerously broken something that will help or harm our situation?

We don’t know, by definition, what we don’t know. When Al Gore was asked a few years ago how accurate was the press’ coverage of the Clinton administration in terms of correctly divining what was really going on, he answered (paraphrasing here) “about 5%,” meaning that 95% of what was important was simply missing from the press. Geithner and Obama have a good deal more information than we do, and if their actions seem curious or ill-advised in light of what we know, the likeliest explanation is that they know things we don’t, and in light of what they know, they are acting reasonably and responsibly.

An example. People like to agitate for ending “zombie banks,” those institutions that are dead but haven’t been buried. But which ones, exactly are dead? While we as savvy consumers of news may feel confident saying, “why Citibank and BoA, silly,” that may not be so clear once one starts digging in a little. If the Obama administration seems to be proceeding more slowly than we would like, it may be because caution really is the best strategy in light of all the circumstances. After all, what are the chances, really, that the steady-eddie Obama who we all watched in the election and the transition, who carefully weighed his options and then took decisive action, is suddenly flummoxed, or suddenly under the spell of the Wall St. elite? To me, that seems rather far-fetched.

(I do think Obama has made a communications error in not having Democratic surrogates get off of the “bail-out” terminology. It has allowed a straight rhetorical line to be drawn from the excessive lavishness of the lifestyles of the rich and powerful to the doling out of trillions to try to steady the markets and stop the downward spiral of the economy. We are not bailing out banks; nor are we bailing out counter-parties; we are bailing out creditors and shareholders, and ultimately the borrowers, of these institutions. Some of these folks are rich, and a means test to ensure we are not using taxpayer dollars to pay for luxury is warranted (and I suspect in the works). But a lot of these folks are 401(k) plans, teacher retirement plans, local governments, and others who have seen their means melt away.)

It’s easy to take pot-shots at the plans that are being developed urgently to respond to an unprecedented crisis. One thing that’s little discussed is that whatever steps the US may take could be easily rendered futile if other governments don’t act in harmony with us and each other. Building a coalition of numerous independent governments is going to take a little time.

It’s always easy to criticize, and as voters and readers and pundits that’s something we all know. During the Civil War (another unprecedented crisis forced on an incoming administration), Lincoln was bedeviled by the appaling lack of generalship available to the Union forces (especially compared to those of the confederacy.) Senators (who then as now are basically nothing more than extra-pompous pundits) were crying for the head of McClellan, Lincoln’s top general. Lincoln had no great love of McClellan, but a Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War demanded his resignation. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account in Team of Rivals (p. 428),

“When Lincoln asked who they proposed to replace McClellan, one the committee members growled, “Anybody.” Lincoln’s reply was swift. “Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”

Geithner may well not be perfect. (Fairly clearly, Obama isn’t perfect either. Just ask parents of kids trying to qualify for the Special Olympics.) But for Obama, he must have somebody. Who, exactly, does Ms. Huffington propose as an upgrade to Geithner?

2009-02-13T22:06:00.001-05:00

I think the Republicans are om the verge of defining anyone who receives any benefit from governmental activity as a Democratic constituent.

Republicans continued to complain, however, that, whatever the bill’s original purpose, it had been stuffed by Democrats with “anything they wanted,” as Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, put it.

I think they may want to rethink that.

Analytical Folly

2009-02-12T12:54:00.002-05:00

With so many pundits carping about Obama's struggles in getting his stimulus bill passed, noting that he has taken hits for a lack of bi-partisanship, for a lack of pleasing the progressive left, his naivety in dealing with Washington, etc., it's worth remembering that the correct analysis is not comparing his performance to a utopian ideal President, but to the actual likely alternative: one John Sydney McCain.

Would President McCain be performing better or worse? My guess is that President McCain would be locked in mortal combat with the Democratic Congress over the question or whether to include any spending at all, not the extent and nature of spending.

Just sayin'...

Rich

2009-01-24T16:20:00.002-05:00

The very definition of rich.

And somehow irony-free.

Tick Tock

2009-01-19T00:21:00.000-05:00

Crazy good.

Floored. Read to the end.

2009-01-15T18:41:00.002-05:00

The amazing Billmon had a piece earlier this week that has a simply jaw-dropping conclusion. I won't spoil the fun, but the piece is about how Russians weren't inclined to look at past crimes in the Soviet era, and wondering if something very similar isn't underway here.

There is just a yawning disconnect between the nature of the crimes allegedly committed (and, in many cases, essentially admitted): waging aggressive war, torture, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy -- to the point where it would probably take an army of Patrick Fitzgeralds and a full-time war crimes tribunal a year just to catalogue them all -- and how the story is being treated in the corporate media.

Read it all. To the end.

Jobs. Now.

2009-01-15T13:20:00.000-05:00

We are at the end of a decades-long jobs crisis. The only way out is to ensure that every American who needs a job can get one. And that the jobs that are available will pay enough to cover decent housing, food, transport, health care, etc.

Tax cuts will not do it (as we have amply demonstrated over many, many years. Government "infrastructure" plans, as now discussed, are simply too little to make the difference we need.

The federal government needs to take the lead in direct job creation. To me, success will occur when there is a jobs center in every town in the nation where anyone can go to get an actual job. If that means the government has to create some "make-work" jobs so be it. But I think we could get to work addressing any number of our crucial chalenges right now: alternative energy, education that works, affordable housing. All of these require a lot of work, and we have a lot of people who need work. The market has failed to re-allocate these people to these needs; the government has to step in and short-circuit a process that the private sector either cannot do, or will take decades to do.

At some point, the government can sell of the assets it will have created, and can use the proceeds to start to pay down the government's debt.

That's the end-game. Everything else we do -- keep Citibank afloat, give Detroit money to make cars no one wants, give consumers checks for $300, etc. -- is just pushing peas around on our plate.

We need large and decisive moves, and we need them yesterday.

2009-01-02T17:25:00.001-05:00

This is nearly the greatest video I've ever seen.

Nearly. (h/t John Cole)

The Truth, Circa 4th Century

2008-12-06T21:44:00.003-05:00

The truth, maties:

"What keeps you from giving now? Isn't the poor person there? Aren't your own warehouses full? Isn't the reward promised? The command is clear: the hungry person is dying now, the naked person is freezing now, the person in debt is beaten now-and you want to wait until tomorrow? "I'm not doing any harm," you say. "I just want to keep what I own, that's all." You own! You are like someone who sits down in a theater and keeps everyone else away, saying that what is there for everyone's use is your own. . . . If everyone took only what they needed and gave the rest to those in need, there would be no such thing as rich and poor. After all, didn't you come into life naked, and won't you return naked to the earth?

"The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry person; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the person who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the person with no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help."

Basil
4th Century

Thanks to Adventus.

2008-11-25T12:21:00.003-05:00

Sometimes, the people on TV don't know what they're talking about.

In my experience, most of the time most of the people on TV have no idea what they're talking about.

I especially like the laughing, smirking dismissal of the Fox business analysts when Peter Schiff correctly predicts that the real estate and stock markets will not in fact go up no matter what.

BHO - Not a Liberal?

2008-11-23T09:25:00.001-05:00

The great Glenn Greenwald writes that those who are disappointed by BHO's non-"progressive" appointments have been deceiving themselves.

So many progressives were misled about what Obama is and what he believes. But it wasn't Obama who misled them. It was their own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered.

I think BHO plays a more subtle game than this right-left, progressive-conservative sport we've been stuck with for so long. Until quite recently, many thought of universal health care coverage as a strictly lefty, progressive thing. Same with opposition to the Iraq war.

The American people, it seems to me, moved away from the right towards a more progressive, more practical "center," and BHO rode this movement as much as led it. Cokie Roberts still thinks pro-choice is "left," even though a substantial majority favors it (and has for some time).

I don't read BHO as "progressive" or "liberal" or "centrtist" or frankly anywhere along the ideological spectrum that we've used as short-hand for so long that we seem to have forgotten what it ever stood for. Well, that plus the fact that an extreme faction arose in our nation which tried to yank the country to the most extreme views through intimidation and deception.

It's certainly wise to look at BHO's actions so far in the context of his campaign rhetoric: he promised pragmatic solutions, focus on the things we all agree on, de-emphasis of things where we seem unable to agree, a hatred of ignorance, stupidity, and the veneration of things that work. For the life of me, I can't characterize that as left or right, really. (I read it as left since I think of progressives as pragmatics; others, maybe most, disagree.)

I'm looking forward to holding BHO accountable to the nation's wishes, but I'm starting to hear a strain of discontent that he is not 100% lined up with some agenda. Well, no one is. But I still expect to see compelling results, just as we did in the two successful campaigns (and so far, successful transition effort) he's already run.

2008-11-11T11:52:00.004-05:00

This is from Mr. Fish at Harpers:

Me likee.

Hey! I Know How to Fix the Economy and Finally Realize the Dream of Democracy!

2008-11-10T11:33:00.004-05:00

Change, via Atrios:

CHICAGO -- Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly "wired" presidency.

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.

I think this misses it -- wide. The opportunity here is much bigger than an excellent e-mail list. It's a chance to engage Americans with its own government using a series of tubes on a new and more meaningful level.

BHO is a techno-geek. He "gets" it. I think one of his initiatives will be a re-technologicalization of the federal government. Sort of like Al Gore and the internet, but married with his "re-inventing" government work.

The federal government had made many software companies and tech consultants rich with an unending series of technological drives. (This isn't too different than what most companies have been doing, either. I'll come back to this.) But there hasn't been a, ahem, transformative exploitation of technology into the fabric of government itself. I think (hope) someone with a higher pay grade than mine (mine being "lowly citizen") will see that this is a multiple-goal serving opportunity. It is aimed squarely at making the government more competent, making it more cost-effective, creating jobs and spurring socially worthwhile R&D.

Here's an example. Why can't I go on-line and browse all my tax records, with ease. BHO has talked about a tax system in which the government basically prepares your return for your review and approval. Why not go with that idea in spades? Here's another: if McDonald's can spy on its workers via webcams, why doesn't the US do the same to monitor working conditions (and if not cams, then whatever remote, automated sensor makes sense)?

This could spark a trend in businesses to do similar things. Con Ed might actually allow me to do simple and easy transactions with them. I might be able to look at the Gap website and see the actual in-store availability of the jeans I want. Or have my cel phone easily configurable and transparent to my computer?

When cars and telephones first came on the scene, there was a rush of great fortunes made in those industries. But after a little while, those technologies transformed not only the economy but society itself. We are at the start of this second, more transformational, wave, and the historical trend could well prove to be a key to turning our economic fortunes around.

We Win!

2008-11-05T13:55:00.003-05:00

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."

- Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States, on the occasion of his swearing in as President following the resignation of Richard M. Nixon, 37th President of the United States and godfather of the modern Republican movement's success.

In 1968, RFK said, "There's no question that in the next 30 or 40 years a Negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as PResident of the United States." Prescient.

Today begins the next era of American history. The previous period, beginning in 1964 or 1968, was defined by a rising reactionary movement determined to wipe out the legacy of the New Dealers, and unafraid to resort to the most extreme political tactics to do it. As Krugman notes this morning, it was an era that culminated in Monsters --

Monsters like Tom DeLay, who suggested that the shootings at Columbine happened because schools teach students the theory of evolution. Monsters like Karl Rove, who declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to terrorists. Monsters like Dick Cheney, who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people.

Today we begin the ascent to a new and better world, one that presents some of the greatest challenges we have faced in many years, but also one that holds the promise of a world where progress is no longer the enemy ("hopelessly liberal"), but is the cherished and desired goal.

One Landslide, Please

2008-10-31T21:52:00.006-04:00

This image pretty much sums up the "ground game" for McCain.

This is from the must-read fivethirtyeight.com. Go read the whole post. The lack of actual enthusiasm on the ground is killing these guys.

This is us in Alaska:

The enthusiasm gap is going to pay significant dividends.

Wow. Just, wow.

2008-10-30T17:44:00.002-04:00

From The Hartford Courant, via Dkos:

A little more than a month earlier, teacher Joyce Ben-KiKi had Aron and his classmates each send letters to a famous person as part of a language arts lesson. Ben-KiKi wrapped the exercise around well-known children's book character "Flat Stanley," so along with the letters, the children each tucked a Flat Stanley figure they had made into each envelope.

"I told them not to expect a letter back," Ben-KiKi said. "I told them these people are very busy and most likely will not write back."

The list of recipients was impressive: Yankee third basemen Alex Rodriguez; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz; Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. John McCain.

Obama was the only one to write back. Two other boys, Avshalom Drescher and Zachary Goldberg, both 8, also wrote to him, but Aron was the first to get a reply.

Obama's three-page letter to Aron described Flat Stanley's visit with him and his staff in Washington, D.C. It chronicled their busy day together, which included coffee with constituents, a Senate committee meeting and a trip to the gym. It also had historical facts about the U.S. Capitol, details of Obama's job and a confession from Obama.

"Sometimes I get a little nervous before talking in front of a crowd, but Flat Stanley helped me practice the speech," Obama wrote. "He made me recite it in front of him and then even gave me some advice so the speech would go smoothly. Flat Stanley is really a great coach."

To any parent who has dealt with a Flat Stanley project, this is impressive. Obama so gets it.

A Happy GOP Halloween

2008-10-30T11:55:00.003-04:00

A hilarious Top 10 List from comedy-writing legend Frank Santopadre, moored for now at VF.

Happy Halloween --

So, How're We Doing, Election-wise?

2008-10-28T23:23:00.002-04:00

We are in as good as a position as a party could hope for. The other side is on the ropes, and the trends all seem to favor our side. I think in the national polling numbers there will be some tightening as we get into the final couple of days. But I think that's more than offset by the gains in key states. Not too long ago, Pennsylvania was thought to be a swing state. No more. Florida was out of Obama's reach - the media thought old Jews couldn't get past their racism. Then Ohio was a firewall for McCain. All of these states will, I believe, come over to our side on Tuesday. And who would have thought that Virginia -- Virginia!! -- home of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and hordes of bible freaks -- would be on our side. I think there's even reason to be hopeful about Indiana and North Carolina.

If Obama does as well as I think he will, the Republicans will suffer an unmistakable rebuke. I have long thought that there would be a sudden collapse of the Republican movement, a sort of "emperor-has-no-clothes" moment, and I think it's here. A perfect storm of events have come together to throw those drowning bums anvils. First is the large generational shift in party identification that seems to occur about every 35 years or so. Then, the election of a moron who screws up everything he touches, and manages to bankrupt the government, sink us into not one but two endless wars, destroy an iconic American city, and on his way out drop a nuclear weapon into the gears of our economy. Throw into the mix the arrival on the scene of a once-in-a-generation leader like Obama, add in the empowering effect of new technologies, and top it all off with a Republican field the least-bad of which was John McCain, a man of whom someone said, "even his friends don't like him."

We are in the midst of one of history's turning points, like the onset of the Great Depression or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And while it seems like what we are seeing is the end of an era (which we are), we are also witnessing the very earliest stages of the next. Our future is likely to be marked with widespread economic hardship, a frustrating inability to improve our lots, and no real end in sight. But it will also be marked by a renewed spirit of unity, a re-focusing on the good things that make America one of the "good guys," and finally an economy poised for sustained growth while not also killing the planet simultaneously.

The greatest challenge for us all is how to create jobs that pay a living wage, and I'd very much like to solve at least enough of that puzzle to employ some folks and earn enough for myself. But for now it's like trying to peer through think fog -- the outlines of something are there, but I can't quite tell what. I do know that my current situation if not altered will lead me through an existence which will bring me nothing but regret.

More Perfect Union and a Better Ashely

2008-10-28T12:54:00.002-04:00

This spoke to me when I heard it, and want to recall it now -- it's from the final part of Barack Obama's More Perfect Union speech on race, March 18, 2008, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

This Ain't No "Credit Crunch." This is Total Economic Meltdown

2008-10-24T08:40:00.000-04:00

This Ain't no "Credit Crunch." This is Total Economic Meltdown

When the economy is growing, it's because there are a series of cycles that overlap and are re-inforcing an upward spiral. Wages go up and spending goes up. Spending goes up and wages go up. But just as this spiral can continue despite significant obstacles, it can also go down. Which is what's happening now.

Wages stagnate, spending (after borrowing every last available cent) drops. Spending drops, companies lay-off, and there's less income, and less spending. And so on and so forth. Chinese steel orders are cut because the manufacturers perceive that demand for their products is down, so steel tanks (as do stocks as traders think the Chinese manufacturers' point-of-view is an insider's (i.e., accurate and not already in the markets' prices).

Corporate earnings are declining, and that feeds the downward spiral. The question on everyone's mind is, "when do we hit bottom?" My view is that we've still got the worst ahead of us, and that it will take a decade to dig out.

Far too many companies have spent the last 25 years not innovating. Car companies are everyone' favorite whipping boys these days, but the same can be said for many others. From technology to food production, from health care to energy, we have failed as a society to invent the future, instead simply mining the past for current profits.

Almost all our economic sectors have their assets badly misallocated. Many people talk about the need to re-invent energy as a renewable resource not just to replace imported oil but as a sort of jobs program. But the same is true for almost every sector.

I live in NYC so I see a growing retail space vacancy problem. Owners of stores are holding them empty because they cannot find credit-worthy tenants. There are of course lots of people who need jobs and could make a go if it in a storefront, but they lack the credit. So we end up with idle assets: empty stores, which over time will lose their value as the street becomes less vibrant and a poorer retail environment, and the under-utilized people, who will not contribute to society at a level of which they are capable. I give this example as a short-hand way of illustrating what I take to be the central problem in our economy.

We have so mismanaged our assets that we have severely damaged the ability to produce jobs and income. Our leaders have frittered away our opportunities for many, many years. The phrase that seems to come to mind over and over is "eating the seed corn." (See? I did too grow up on a farm!) I have not clearly understood for a decade what, exactly, many companies did. Dell computers makes computers, and for a while will have crazy growth as everyone needs one. It can even extend that growth as they introduce ever-faster machines. But a day arrives when the need for a new computer just isn't there, and Dell is in trouble.

We're not entering a period when there are no jobs, and no business has success. But it will be a period when there are many fewer jobs, many more unemployed, and many businesses will fail. Government has been starved of resources for so long it will not be able to help much. In fact, all of our "safety net" mechanisms have been starved for resources and overburdened with demand, it's hard to see how we don't end up with Depression-like work camps and the like before we're done.

In fact, perhaps just to provoke a bit, I wonder where it's written that the Depressions is some kind of floor of economic misery. Who says it can't get worse than that? Surely not I.

This is going to be an ugly ride, rife with tragedy, suffering and despair. Of course there's a chance that I'm wrong, and of course I hope I am. But when I look at most companies in the US, I don't see a lot of reason to hope.

Conservatives for Change

2008-10-23T12:34:00.000-04:00

I found this video quite moving. As someone from a Republican upbringing who still counts many conservatives as friends and family members, this spoke to me. It's a testament to the faith that the Obama campaign is based on that Americans will rise to the occasion and -- perhaps only after trying every other alternative -- Do the Right Thing.

People on the other side are not all venal, are not all ignorant, are not all selfish. Some have been misled; some allowed themselves to be misled, and still others allowed their selfishness a too-prominent place in their thinking. Northerners had to make common cause with the slave-holders in the South in order to break away from England. In doing so, both parties recognized their common interests as Americans.

How fiitting, then, that an African-American is leading us to the common ground once again -- in what may prove one of our darkest hours...

They Asked Nicely

2008-10-20T23:38:00.002-04:00

The nice people at Moveon.org asked me to post this for all to see. I'm famously responsive to polite requests. Pass the ketchup?

TOP 5 REASONS OBAMA SUPPORTERS SHOULDN'T REST EASY

1. The polls may be wrong. This is an unprecedented election. No one knows how racism may affect what voters tell pollsters—or what they do in the voting booth. And the polls are narrowing anyway. In the last few days, John McCain has gained ground in most national polls, as his campaign has gone even more negative.

2. Dirty tricks. Republicans are already illegally purging voters from the rolls in some states. They're whipping up hysteria over ACORN to justify more challenges to new voters. Misleading flyers about the voting process have started appearing in black neighborhoods. And of course, many counties still use unsecure voting machines.

3. October surprise. In politics, 15 days is a long time. The next McCain smear could dominate the news for a week. There could be a crisis with Iran, or Bin Laden could release another tape, or worse.

4. Those who forget history... In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote after trailing by seven points in the final days of the race. In 1980, Reagan was eight points down in the polls in late October and came back to win. Races can shift—fast!

5. Landslide. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, passing universal health care and a new clean-energy policy is going to be hard. Insurance, drug and oil companies will fight us every step of the way. We need the kind of landslide that will give Barack a huge mandate.

If you agree that we shouldn't rest easy, please sign up to volunteer at your local Obama office by clicking here:

http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31260&id=14523-7834674-WHaPnlx&t=1

Things We All Know(tm): Republican Ideas Are Wrong; McCain Terrible Candidate

2008-10-16T10:33:00.003-04:00

The voters for some reason are waking up to something that they already knew: the policies that define the Republican party are wrong. Trickle-down? Wrong. Unregulated businesses and markets? Wrong. Small government? Wrong. And let's not get started with making rape victims take their rapists' babies to term, or the idea that what ails our education system is a lack of competition -- competition which we all know has been disastrous for the health care system.

I heard Brian Lehrer on WNYC this morning discussing the debate. He said, almost as a self-evident fact, that when the discussion turned to the economy it was bad for McCain. He later said that McCain had had limited success moving off of the recession, which was good for him because he can't really talk about the recession. It's not his strong suit.

This elides the truth which Brian knows perfectly well: he disguises the truth -- the Thing We All Know(tm) -- in an effort to appear even-handed. Brian says McCain "can't really talk about' the recession, but what he really means is that Republican ideas about the economy are now widely discredited by huge margins of both public opinion as well as expert opinion.

John McCain is of course a terrible candidate. He is probably the nominee because he was perceived as the least bad alternative in a field rich with disastrous choices. Barack Obama is of course a wonderful candidate, and barely won the nomination in a field with two superstars and several second tier candidates who were strong -- one became his running mate. These are thoughts one will never hear in the mass media, even though We All Know(tm) they are true.

The Blogosphere Saves Civilization

2008-10-15T11:58:00.001-04:00

The Rise of the Liberal Blogosphere has a valid claim to helping save civilization.

Everyone knows the famous episode in Peanuts in which Charlie Brown prepares to kick a football with Lucy as the ball holder. Charlie Brown runs up to kick, and Lucy snatches the ball away, with Charlie landing flat on his back. And then Lucy promises that this time – this time – she’ll be a good ball holder and that Charlie Brown should try again. And this time – this time – she once again snatches the ball away. This was a running gag over some considerable period of time, with the same result every time: Lucy offers assurances, Charlie Brown is skeptical but finally agrees to trust her one more time, and Lucy invariably betrays that trust.

For a lot of Democratic voters, the party can seem an awful lot like Charlie Brown, with a succession of Lucys: first, of course, Tricky Dick himself, but certainly his progeny like Mike Deaver, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. So as Democratic voters approach every election, there’s a strong skepticism that this time will be any different. Will the Democrats’ earnest appeal of positions on relevant issues finally be taken to heart by the voters, or will we once again have substance snatched away only to have a campaign revolve around patently silly issues like flag-burning, “law and order,” the Panama Canal, a spouse’s psychiatric treatment, a young man’s experiment with marijuana?

Many of us are finally seeing a different outcome, at long last. Finally, this time – this time – the ball is not being moved. Finally, this time – this time – the ball is steady and the kick looks to be good. Our man Obama seems finally to have broken some kind of spell that Republican magicians have had over voters for 40 years.

Obama is a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. He is our Ronald Reagan – a personable champion of our cause who has an uncanny ability to communicate our agenda in ways that appeals to a broad swath of voters on both sides of the political divide. Unlike Reagan, he is also a smart and savvy campaigner, having run a virtually flawless campaign that is not only succeeding on its own terms (i.e., putting Obama in the White House), but is also re-defining political campaigns for all time.

But Obama’s personal qualities – his charisma, his competence, his communications skills, his visions – don’t tell the whole story. Many Democrats believe that Obama alone is the difference – that he is what Kerry, Gore 2000, Dukakis, Mondale, McGovern, maybe even Clinton, were not. While those candidates certainly had negatives that contributed to their losses (or in Clinton’s case, to his inability to enact much of the progressive agenda), there was another powerful force that worked against their success. That worked, in fact, hand-in-glove with the Nixons, the Roves, the Atwaters.

The media was and in many cases still is an eager abettor of right-wing smear campaigns. The right figured out that many reporters simply would not stand up to basic bullying – assertiveness, yelling, name-calling, calls to supervisors, etc. The right was fortunate that the media was becoming corporate-ized, which meant hiring actors to portray journalists rather than journalists. The corporate media was selling likeability, and had no need of credibility. As long as viewers and readers showed up, the only goal was to spend as little as possible on the people producing the content.

But there’s a new kid on the block. With roots tracing back to the right’s vendetta against Clinton, a new generation of writers and thinkers collided with a new generation of publishing tools that gave direct access to viewers. No longer were large capital investments necessary to publish professional-quality work. Even television could be produced with little or no cost. And underlying this happy marriage was the rise of on-line advertising, which allowed the most successful writers and producers to earn their living. And while these bloggers didn’t supplant the actor-journalists, they attracted an audience of key readers and viewers. Political insiders, media, academics, intellectuals, government personnel and opinion leaders of all sorts were attracted to the credibility that these bloggers offered. And that has made a key difference.

Newspaper journalists are less likely to gullibly swallow the right’s smears. Cable “news” readers have discovered that it’s good for ratings to be skeptical. People who work in mass media have discovered that high quality analysis and reporting are now easily available, and that if they spurn it they will be made to feel foolish. Political operatives now understand that things said on video will circulate widely enough that they cannot be ignored. And citizens have discovered that they can participate in an political dialogue that makes sense to them, and more, have discovered that they organize, canvass, donate and agitate for the values that are important to them.

The left has already established the first great stars of the blogosphere. Kos, of course, but also Josh Marshall (now emperor of TPM Media), the writers of group blogs like Americablog, Think Progress and First Draft, and single stars like Digby, Atrios, John Cole, Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Steve Benen, Matt Yglesias, and Kevin Drum. These people have contributed to the triumph not only of the left, but of reason and democracy. (The right’s early stars, Glenn Reynolds, Jonah Goldberg, Katherine Lozez, Atlas Shrugged, NRO, Redstate, etc., have either already crashed and burned, or are about to get swallowed up. The real starts of the right have not, in my view, really emerged yet. Sullivan is sort of an exception, and the “new right” (Douhat, Larison, etc.) may yet emerge. But the serious writers of the right – those that will define a conservatism that is actually helpful to society, rather than to the rich and powerful – have not yet appeared.)

So, like the Irish monks of the late Dark Ages who can reasonably be said to have saved Western civilization, the lefty blogosphere has a claim to civilization-saving. These are golden days – salad days – that will be long remembered as a time when the forces of good finally rose up and vanquished (for a time) the forces of evil. It doesn’t happen very often, and it’s something to be savored when it does. The next three weeks are about as good as it gets.

Talk to Your Parents...About John McCain

2008-10-15T06:40:00.002-04:00

A great send-up of those anti-drug ads. Not to be missed.

Don't Vote!

2008-10-15T06:37:00.002-04:00

Here's another video that we'll want to look back on during the long, cold winters ahead under President Obama.

The Great Schlep

2008-10-15T06:35:00.003-04:00

I know this is old news, but I want to have this handy...it's a little raw, language-wise. But it might just be moving Florida into the Democratic column.

It also establishes "douchenozzle" as a part of the English language once and for all.

The many contributions of one Sara. Silverman!.

The End of Nothing

2008-10-09T12:48:00.003-04:00

The inestimable John Cole at Balloon Juice things this is the end of McCain campaign's honor. Maybe. He suggests that he is now playing princiaplly to a core group of dead-enders.

This won’t be the end of these Republicans (a la the Whigs), nor some kind of retreat to the woods to re-group a la 1964. These wing-nuts are not going to be marginalized. Nor are they going to change their minds. They are fifty million strong. Look at an electoral map and see how much of the US is under their sway.

Everyone is myopically fixated on the election, for understandable reasons. But for the extremists of the right, elections are just bumps in the road. We won’t get to December 1 without the right and the media ganging up on Barack and his "numerous and growing scandals and missteps." If you think that Bill Clinton was hunted, that was Elmer Fudd time. These guys have an army dedicated to the preservation of ignorance, fear and poverty.

We win nothing on November 5. Wait—we win the right to be derailed and abused for four or eight years.

This is What I'm Talkin' About

2008-10-08T08:02:00.002-04:00

This is sticking the knife in and twisting slowly...

This is the moment the first Obama administration began.

Putting the Knife in - And Twisting. Slowly.

2008-10-07T23:25:00.002-04:00

I forget the exact point, but at one point Obama decided to hit back on McCain's charge of "green behind the ears" and "doesn't understand." In a rhetorical one could not teach someone how to do, Obama pivoted toward the camera and said (paraphrasing), "John, you're right. I don't understand. I don't understand ..." And McCain jumped in, in his best boys-on-the-bus how-about-a-dirty-joke manner, and said (paraphrasing), "hehh...at least we agree on something." And it came off as inappropriate. And Obama gave him a look that said it all. It said, "You is my bitch." (Only in a much nicer, completely unracist way.) Which to me was "sticking the knife in."

And then he began to twist it. Slowly.

Obama resumed his thought the way a parent does when an insolent and ill-mannered child interrupts for the 18th time for no reason at all -- none -- and says (paraphrasing), "I don't understand how someone can look at a deadly serious issue like Iran and joke, "bomb bomb bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. I don't understand how someone can support attacking a country that posed no threat to us..." And so on.

Of course, McCain was dead on arrival. Barring an increasingly unlikely unexpected deus ex machina, we just saw the beginning moments of the Obama administration. Obama took the evening as yet another of the many conversations he has with groups of people about his ideas for moving forward. And his opponent was some kind of automaton "Hall of Almost Presidents" robot-cadaver. Plus, he is... well, him.

I'm starting to be able to write the words "Obama administration" because I am no longer scared that Americans are gonna fall for the GOP crap yet again. We're not out of the woods, but things are looking as "good" as can be expected.

James Wolcott's Wet Dream -- And Mine!

2008-10-07T07:48:00.000-04:00

I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity.

I really don't think that's too much to ask, even in these frugal times.

Reminds me of my own description of the depths to which I'd like these people sunk:

Senator in Hearing Room to Witness: Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican Party?

Now What?

2008-10-06T10:04:00.001-04:00

Obama has staked the last few years of his life, and his entire political future, on the next 29 days. He has spoken of his campaign as essentially a bet – a bet that enough Americans are ready to vote for their own interests rather than be distracted by irrelevancies like personal smears.

It is a bet that Democrats have made repeatedly, and have lost repeatedly.

If you look back over 2000 and 2004, you can find lots of articles and columns about “Why This Time It’s Different.” Generally, the theme is that –finally! – Americans have had enough, and will ignore the smears and elect the candidate who is truly interested in helping them. The parallels to Lucy and Charlie Brown, and his never-ending belief that this time – this time – Lucy will not yank the football away from his foot at the last second, as she has done the last 27 times in a row – are unavoidable. Are the American people getting ready to yank away from Democrat’s feet the football of electoral victory?

Sure, the polling now looks strong. And Americans famously react only to crises, which the media seem to have agreed is what we’re having now. Oh, and the Democrat this time out is not the same unlikable loser who lectures the electorate on why his policies are clearly the better choice. This time, our guy is likable and able to articulate Democratic ideas in non-condescending and quite understandable manner. And their guy is more or less Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

So one might think that this time – this time! – it’ll be different. In my heart of hearts, I think so too. (That un-killable optimism is likely part of why I incline leftward.) But I am scared that the smear-storm that’s being unleashed in key states will have enough effect to turn what should be a romp into a nail-biter – which gives the GOP the chance to cage enough votes and lose enough precinct tallies to pull off yet another victory.

In a better America, we wouldn’t need to spend so much of our social energy fighting off those whose only goal is domination and plunder of their countrymen. In a better America, we could count on each other not to give in to fear and panic, but to stand up for one another and give each other a hand when we really need it. In a better America, the GOP would nominate candidates who are happy to compete on the basis of their ideas, not on the basis of how awful they can make the other guy seem.

Tick-tock. Lucy is getting the ball ready, and in just 29 days the Democrats will take a run up to her toe expecting to kick the ball to the moon and back. Will fear prevail? Time will tell.

Is There Anything Better Than This?

2008-10-03T08:33:00.001-04:00

I can't imagine a more encouraging or more beautiful image. The future will NOT suck. If this doesn't make you proud of your nation, nothing will.

How Quickly We'll Forget

2008-10-03T08:21:00.001-04:00

What Debate?

As predicted, the great Veep Debate is concluded and swiftly receding into the forgotten swirls of dim memory – where it undoubtedly belongs. The job of VP is to be ready to jump in if the need arises – both candidates appeared to be in good health, so they met the threshold standard.

I thought the debate was surprisingly on issues, which is a credit to all three participants. I would have guessed that Governor Palin would have spent most of her time on the Smear BandWagon, which is the only logical strategy for the McCain campaign. I’m surprised that she didn’t go on and on about Tony Reszko and Rev. Wright for 90 minutes. (Such an approach has the added benefit of lessening or even eliminating the need for any policy knowledge or even knowledge of the parties’ positions.) Whether it was Governor Palin, Senator McCain or other facts, the fact that the Republican nominee didn’t just wallow in the mud was a surprise.

Joe Biden turned in an indisputably “A+” performance. (The “+” is for the emotional choking up, which I swear to God I believe was authentic.) His opening speech was pedantic, wonky, overlong and dry – which I think set a mood in which the mud-slinging would have seemed jarringly out-of-place (though I doubt it changed Governor Palin’s tactics in any way.) Biden landed any number of solid blows in the form of calmly explaining why Republican ideas were nutty. Fair-minded viewers would have a hard time ignoring the essential logic and truth of his pronouncements, nor could they easily ignore his steady and calm demeanor, contrasted with her chirpy, nervous and screamingly-unready manner. On any number of occasions, she retreated to “local anchor” syntax. I almost expected her to throw it to Joe for the latest on the weather.

Expectations had been lowered by the Couric interviews, so that her rising to the level of, say, the interviews with Hugh Hewitt or Sean Hannity was hailed as victory. But her embrace of non-standard English, her spurning of the norms of conversational logic, her glaring nervousness, her evident lack of both education and intelligence – cannot have served her or her cause well.

Palin’s performance may have been enough to stanch the bleeding of support on her side, though I suspect her principal will soon give voters new reasons to distrust him. And in a contest in which her side is losing, she did nothing to move toward victory, which in the Real World is the relevant standard.

One last thought: how can a majority of Alaskans watch this and think they have a great Governor? My guess is Palin will have her hands full finishing out her term and winning any election again. Getting a show on Fox News, though – well, I think Todd will just love the fishing in Chesepeake Bay when the Palins move to DC.

Easily Forgotten

2008-10-01T11:18:00.002-04:00

Sarah Palin and the $700 billion rescue package are both likely to end up in the dustbin of our collective consciousness, and sooner than the current media storm would suggest would be the case.

Palin will undoubtedly acquit herself acceptably tomorrow night. The expectations for her have been pushed –largely by her own campaign – to the level where if she doesn’t blubber or throw-up she wins. And Biden will say something – almost anything will do – that the media will latch on to to provide balance to the story they want to write: “Both Candidates Make Missteps.”

The NY Times has twin leads today, “Experience, Often Tripped Up” and “Past Debates Show a Confident Palin, at Times Fluent but Often Vague” (which replaces an earlier headline about “Two Personas,” which was pretty close to gibberish. (In fact, the entire Palin piece seems to lack any critical analysis.) So the narrative is already set that will determine the outcome.

And come Monday morning, events will have by-passed the Veep Debate and it will begin its journey to forgotten-hood. Most people will conclude that neither Biden or Palin is their first choice, and will return to focusing on the actual candidates, both of whom can be counted on to make some news fairly quickly after the debate – and in the case of McCain, if it goes really quite badly, probably even during the debate so that the story will be forgotten all the quicker.

But can the same be said of the Big Bail-Out? Surely, it seems, the Bail-Out is The Most Significant Event of Our Time. But my guess is that the same phenomenon will swallow it up before too long. Major economic events are still to come, perhaps even in the next few days if not weeks. The coming months will bring news of the effects of the so-called credit crisis as businesses begin failing in non-financial sectors. (Little discussed because of the Big Bail-out is the Small Bail-out ($25 billion) for the auto industry. I can remember when a much less impactful loan guarantee for Chrysler was thought to be the End of Capitalism As We Know It.) And the stories are coming will make us soon forget the days when we thought all we had to do was give a guy named “Hank” three-quarters of a trillion dollars and all would be well.

The “credit crisis” (which has been ongoing for some time now), and the “Wall St. Meltdown” are simply symptoms of a deeper and more serious problem. The truth is – and this is Something We All Know ™ -- we are experiencing a jobs crisis. The reason mortgage-backed securities (and other “asset-backed” securities like those backed by car loans and credit-card receivables) are losing value is because consumers aren’t making their payments. And the reason is that they do not have the funds to do so. (Of course, the market for these securities is crashing in part due to the fact that everyone is trying to unload them all at once – and the only takers are true bottom-feeders.) It’s not abusive lending tactics, nor pushing too hard to get more people into home ownership, or any of the other proposed “root” causes.

Too many Americans (and others elsewhere in Developed World) have not been earning enough for quite some time. In fact the explosion of consumer debt reflects the fact that consumers have not had other sources of funds, and have turned to borrowing to maintain lifestyles. Surely some have done so improvidently, borrowing for lavish homes, vacations, expensive vacations and schools, etc. But an awful lot of the debt that consumers have taken on has been to cover something fairly close to the basics – food, shelter, clothing, etc.

I believe we are nearing the end of a long cycle of rich and powerful people taking more and more from everyone else. I can recall a time when most companies provided pensions on which one could comfortably live. I can recall a time when most employees earned enough to cover a home, a car or two, a decent lifestyle – all on top of a non-working spouse. I can recall when employers needed to pay their employees enough so afford their products. (Yes, I am nearing “Old Codger” status.)

The consequences of this long decline will be far more wrenching than the $2500 that the government says we need to spend to “bail-out” “Wall St.” (The plan is, of course, not a bail-out at all but rather an expensive recapitalization, and the interests being bailed out aren’t the Wall St. financiers but the equity holders of the financial institutions that will benefit.) We are nearing a time far more like the Great Depression than most Americans now think, with challenges that will absolutely dwarf the current “Wall St. Crisis.”

Really?

2008-10-01T09:21:00.002-04:00

Really? Is this the guy that some 50+ million Americans think should be our next President? It's bad enough that a majority of Arizonans have supported this guy.

John McCain is not different now than he was. All that has changed is that more people are paying more attention to him and discovering the truth: this is someone deeply unsuited to the Presidency.

Whither Armageddon (Quick Hits)

2008-09-30T12:47:00.000-04:00

Armageddon was originally slated for last Friday. Then Monday. Now Thursday.
Maybe those predicting Armageddon are wrong. I’m just sayin’.

I’m all for some kind of rescue plan. Is it too much to ask that the nature of the problem be explained to the voters so that the proposed solutions can be evaluated? If the $700 billion dollar checkbook for Hank P. is so unpopular but also so necessary, why isn’t the corrective educating the public? Might also work on some of the nay-sayers in Congress…

Debates are unlikely to have much impact. They’re the potato chips of political seasons – craved, savored, gone quickly and without much in the way of nutritional value. My guess is that Palin in fact does fine, Biden probably manages a gaffe or two so that the newspapers can have a “on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand” tone, and come next Monday we’ll have forgotten all about it.

I keep seeing real progress in the polls, but worry that McCain will mount a comeback on the next Obama gaffe. (Sen. Obama is only almost perfect.) Plus, as I’ve said numeous times, there’s no inbalance that I would find acceptable except 299,999,999 to 1. (You see, I want Cindy Lou to vote for out guy.) Perhaps I’ll start to feel more confident once Obama is north of 60%.

Commercial real estate is the next great crisis. In addition to the new slums of abandoned and half-built exurbs, we will soon face block after city block of empty retail as the explosion of retail bank branches becomes an implosion and the current lack of other credit-worthy tenants worsens. And then we will have yet another new class of asset owners – people who own buildings with retail spaces – desparate for help. Having spent years essentially hoarding valuable assets, these guys are next in line to learn the lesson that assets lose their value if not put to productive use.

How's Our Side Faring Now?

2008-09-26T11:33:00.000-04:00

A good friend asks: Seriously, how do you think our side is faring now?

In the Presidential level, we’re faring really quite well, especially in light of the fact that about half of all Americans are dumb or ignorant or both and – dammit! – proud of it!

Barack Obama is the real deal. I don’t mean he is some messianic, once-in-a-lifetime fount of charisma and wisdom (although he surely has his moments.) When I say he’s the real deal I mean that the intelligence and wisdom, the compassion and empathy, the pragmatism and effectiveness, the competence and confidence that we see are not fake. Unlike say, Mr. “Reformer With Results” Bush or Mr. “Deregulator? Me? No Way” McCain, who don public personas that have very little to do with their actual personas.

Obama is running a close to flawless campaign for President. If he does not succeed and become President, there’s very little to look back on and wish for a do-over. (Though one does wish the Hillary Clinton supporters would have understood how primary elections work and that the idea of her running to the very last moment did not serve the party well.)

I first saw Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, when he made a speech that simply took my breath away. At the end of it, I could only say, “That man’s gonna be President one day – one day soon, if we’re lucky.” I have not wavered in my conviction since – to this day.

Barack is slowly reassuring undecided voters (and likely some who had thought of themselves as McCain supporters) that he is someone who can be trusted. Undecideds and likely McCain voters believe that McCain is someone who has been vetted by 25+ years of service of on the national stage. This belief supports many of their ideas about McCain – he’s “experienced,” he’s “a known quantity,” he’s “steady and reliable.” Simply by dint of his love of appearing on Meet the Press (he is one of the, if not the most, frequent guests in the venerable history of that program), and the cooperation of a majority of Arizona voters, he has become someone most Americans can imagine in the Presidency. Barack Obama is working hard to earn the same level of comfort, and has accomplished much, in a much shorter time period. And unlike McCain who has had an uniquely valuable activist base in the form of national political reporters and pundits, Obama has achieved much over this same base’s strong objections.

If the Republicans were running in a united fashion behind a traditional Republican – someone like Mitt Romney or Bob Dole, Barack Obama would have a fairly steep hill to climb, and if successful would like squeak by. But the Republicans are doing no such thing. Instead, they have chosen an outsider who has made a career of publicly bashing Republicans to burnish her image as a “maverick.” Of course, when it comes time to vote he votes the party line – his 2008 voting record (the shortest of any Senator), is 100% consistent with the Bush administration. This would include his vote IN FAVOR OF torture – a vote most reporters seem either unaware of or unable to understand.

John McCain is a deeply unserious person. I first heard him speak during his many appearances on the old Don Imus show on WFAN in New York. John would call in, the boys would fall all over themselves beating up on various liberal targets, John would tell a story about his glory days making Viet Nam safe from Communists, and finally the talk would turn to current events. McCain was (and is) an expert Senator. He is able to talk about current events in a way that makes it seem that he supports all reasonable sides, understands everyone’s legitimate concerns, and knows that we have to get the right outcome. Which is every case was the Republican Party position. His Senate record shows him to be what he in fact is: a deeply conservative Senator from what has been a fairly conservative state, pretending to be something else because it gets him invited on Meet the Press.

Sadly, I believe McCain has entered a new phase in his life. I think there are undeniable signs that he is struggling with either ordinary old-age dementia, early Alzheimers, or some other condition. He is never without a handler. He goes on The Tonight Show with his wife. He cancels on Dave Letterman and promises to return with Sarah Palin. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham take turns being attached to his side. (Even yesterday morning when McCain arrived at the Capitol for his, um, whatever it was he did (is it too strong to call it “killing the deal that would have staved off The Second Great Depression? Probably…), there was Joe Lieberman waiting at the curb to meet McCain’s limo and escort him up the stairs.

So we have a contest between youth and old age, vigor and decline, intelligence and ignorance, grass-roots enthusiasm and top-down party discipline, dedication and power-grabbing. The financial sector meltdown is clearly a wildcard in this process, and certainly has the potential to change to game in either direction. McCain could yet somehow yank victory from what looks by all indications to be defeat.

But in his long career, McCain has not shown the shrewdness or intelligence to do so, while his opponent has repeatedly shown that hard-work and talent can be used with discipline to accomplish great things. So I remain quite bullish on our chances, and can even imagine that this will yet become the landslide that has seemed pre-ordained for two years.

Exsqueeze Me?

2008-09-25T15:17:00.001-04:00

Evidently, World War III has broken out.

I wonder what McCain will suspend next?

The Largest Tax Break In History

2008-09-25T08:29:00.000-04:00

We have been conditioned to think of “tax breaks” as something other than “welfare checks.” When the government wants rich people to do something, rather than simply require them to do it (which would be too presumptuous), it gives them the money to do it and asks them nicely to get on it. Which they generally never do.

Giving the richest Americans tax breaks for the past 8 years has been defended as necessary to ensure adequate job creation. Well, we taxpayers upheld our end of the bargain – we gave them the money. But then the rich people didn’t use it to create jobs. Businesses weren’t invested in, factories weren’t built, workers weren’t hired. Instead, the money sat around in various “safe” investment vehicles, accumulating. Until eventually, like any under-utilized asset, the money began to lose its value. Net result: rich people took our money and frittered it away. And like Ronald Reagan’s beloved and largely mythical welfare queens, they did in fact spend it on lavish lifestyles and not much else.

One might think that having watched this strategy fail again and again that at some point enough people would yell “stop” and bring this nonsense to a halt. But one would think wrong. The current “bail-out” could just as well be called a “tax-cut” for Wall St. And just like the previous trillions in tax-cuts, the money is to be handed over with no strings attached. Create jobs or don’t. Invest in businesses or don’t. Lend or don’t.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the money will not be used for any socially useful purpose. Not for creating jobs, not for investing in businesses and not for lending. And the reason is more than just that this has never worked yet and is therefore unlikely to work this time. There’s a deeper root cause that is one of the Things We All Know™ but don’t speak about.

VC’s, investment bankers, traditional banks, mortgage lenders and other hoarders of capital (even rich uncles, the so-called “angel investors”) are not investing and lending and have not been for some time. The reason is not because they don’t have the money. Money they’ve got (and will shortly have in some quantity). What they lack is credit-worthy borrowers.

The current crisis was originally billed as a “sub-prime lending” crisis. Then a “mortgage crisis,” and now a “credit crisis.” (Actually, the credit crisis was already well underway concurrently with the so-called mortgage crisis.) But these names all mask something I think deep down We All Know™: that the nation’s borrowers do not earn enough to pay any more loans back. In fact, they are already saddled with more debt than they can service.

The real crisis is a jobs crisis. We have arranged our society’s resources in a way that benefits too few people at the expense of too many. We need to re-direct resources toward activities that will create jobs. My man Obama wants to do this immediately I the energy sector, which is of course a good idea. But I think he’ll find when he gets his head around this that what he wants to do in energy we’ll need to do in sector after sector. From food to cars to education to healthcare to consumer goods to services. All of it needs to be re-structured so that Henry Ford’s old idea – that his workers need to make enough money to be his customers – in once again true. And once we’ve done that here, we need to export that reform across the world.

That ought to keep us busy for the next half-century.

There is no shortage of work that needs doing. There is no shortage of raw materials. There is no shortage of labor. What’s been lacking is the leadership to ensure that these inputs are organized and managed in a renewable and productive way for the benefit of the maximum number of people.

Why Is This So Hard for John O’Brien To Grasp

2008-09-24T11:23:00.001-04:00

I attack John O’Brien, I do. And I do baselessly, without any real justification other than he seems to be in charge of spouting nonsense on CNN in the mornings. So I attack – kid, really. And I kid with nothin’ but love, baby.

All news and public discourse has been cancelled and replaced with the words “$700 Billion Bail-Out.” Oh sure, sometimes one hears, “Wall St. CEOs” or “Wall Street to Main Street,” but the basic message is the same: Crisis! Panic! Need Trillions Now!

There seems a quite unexpected backlash forming and ready to strike back in the form of truly arch speeches, commentary and letters to the editor. (And if you think one Adolph Q. Hitler would have been able to stand up to invective like that, you’ve got another thing coming, buster.

Atrios is promoting a speech from a Congresswoman who clearly explains in terms most kindergartners could understand why the Bail-Out That Ate Cable TV News is a hoax. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D, OH (Toledo) was on the floor of the US House of Represenatives making sense. (It may be that a permit is required for this. I don’t really know.) Watch it:

This current crisis just the first of several. While it may the largest in terms of money, the others will consume overall the vast majority of our tax dollars. Requests for additional bail-outs are coming from the auto industry, the airline/travel industry, and likely the Land of Farming before long.

As Obama has said of our foreign policy thinking, it is well-past time for us to end the mindset that makes these bail-outs possible. If a private sector actor is in need of financial aid, why don’t we look at it as an investment. We should be willing to lend money, or guarantee money, or as here just give it away, only when the benefits are clearly defined in a hard, quantitative manner, with clear lines of responsibility for ensuring a meaningful degree of accountability for the promised results.

That doesn’t seem so hard, now does it? If the nice people at our nation’s banks (meaning of course any bank or sort-of bank with employees here, even if its shareholders are an ocean away) want some taxpayer money, what are they willing to offer? Can they promise a certain number of new jobs? Guarantees of maintaining existing levels of jobs? Increasing wages? Lower prices (and how much lower)?

I am obviously no expert in this area, but the older I get the more I am learning to trust my own judgment and common sense. And for the life of me I cannot understand why our leading politicians and other leaders (and Tom Brokaw, I’m looking at you) cannot summon the courage to call “BS” on a proposal as half-baked as this.

If an educational official showed up and day and said, “Quick, I need a half-trillion by next Tuesday, or else all of your children are gonna wind up dumber than rocks,” they’d be laughed right out of town. The request for an infusion of money into the financial sector may well have an element of actual need, perhaps even an element of urgency. But if either of these things are true, we’re gonna need more than President Paulson’s word on it.

George Carlin Was Right

2008-09-22T13:39:00.000-04:00

Watch this, maybe more than once. I think it is 100% correct.

1.8 Trillion Dollars Is A Lot of Dollars

2008-09-22T12:19:00.001-04:00

Most people don’t know what the government does with their money. A lot think that the money is used for pork (something like 3% of the annual deficit – we’re talking tens of billions, folks). Or for that matter, what a new bomber costs ($2 billion).

Here’s some detail from the always-interesting Chris in Paris at Americablog.org

For the US budget, here are a few examples from Bush's budget in 2007:

* Veterans' benefits at $73 billion

* Education was $90 billion

* Interest on US debt was $244 billion

* Medicare $395 billion

* Defense was $548 billion

* Social Security was $586

So all of a sudden, we can come up with $700 billion – no wait, that’s $1.8 trillion. If we don’t hurry up and give them what they want, it’ll probably be $2.6 trillion soon. (Go ahead, think I’m kidding.)

What does Obama’s health care plan cost? $50-60 billion a year for the first 10 years, which Republicans are certain is far too expensive.

On top of just the insane price tag, there’s the question of whether this will fix anything…(And this leaves aside the distrurbing parallels to the Iraq War run-up, where asking questions and tying the Executive's hands was thought to be Dangerous and Unpatriotic).

I keep coming back to the idea that we keep failing to speak about what is really important (i.e. Things We All Know ™). WHY aren’t banks lending to each other or to business or individual customers? Well, a huge infusion of cash would suggest that the reason is that the banks lack the funds to lend.

Wouldn’t that mean there was a lot of pent-up demand for loans that wasn’t being met?

I doubt many believe that the problems in our economy is not enough debt.

I’m keeping my eye on the ball. I believe that we have deeper and more serious economic problems than big financial institutions lacking adequate funds to lend. (I suspect they lack adequate funds to operate, for what it’s worth, and that the Big Scary Crisis is fueled by images of people having to take sacks of gold coins to the Pathmark. Likely as true of Mr. Hussein’s WMD’s and 45-minutes’ away drones.)

I think banks aren’t lending not because they lack funds but because they lack credit-worthy customers, both business and individual. I suspect that many companies will soon find that they too lack customers, as too many people simply have inadequate incomes.

We are on a decelerating downward spiral, the end point of which is surely not Goldman Sachs getting a trillion or two bucks. The end of this spiral comes when companies can’t meet their payrolls, workers drain all their funds and assets, and we end up at something very like a standstill.

And getting the great organ-grinder grinding again is 1000 (a trillion?) times more difficult than it would be to keep it going.

“Keeping it going” meaning that we should take that $700 billion (or $2.5 trillion) and use it for direct job creation: public works, loan guarantees to businesses using the money to create jobs, etc. We will also want some of that money available to pay for public relief – food stamps, short-term housing, rent assistance, etc.

Right now, only those who do not need credit can get it. There’s no use in making it even easier for them when there are tens of millions of Americans who need something even more pressing than a better rate on their car loans: jobs, groceries, gasoline, etc.

Things We All Know(tm) About the Liberal Media

2008-09-20T09:21:00.000-04:00

For many years now it has seemed to me that there are unspoken premises underlying much of our political (and general for that matter) discourse. When it comes to the media, studies routinely show higher levels of Democratic Party registration, for example. Of course, this doesn’t translate to liberal coverage, and in fact may be part of the reason why the mainstream media bends over backwards to accommodate Republicans. But the presence of liberal bias amongst members of the media is well-documented.

Of course there are other groups who suffer from the same “liberal bias.” College faculties, for example. Or people with advanced degrees. The frame of “liberal bias” is of course a creation of the Right, foisted on our society by their, um, “assertiveness” (as recently confessed by cerebrally-challenged cable talker Joe Scarborough).

But there is an alternative frame which reveals a Thing We All Know™. Why do journalists, college professors, PhDs, etc., all appear to favor liberal policies? Are they craven? Corrupt? Unfair? The Right tells us it’s because they were indoctrinated by their liberal kindergarten teachers. (Yet another group with the dreaded “liberal bias.”)

Maybe the reason why all these elites prefer liberal policies has nothing whatsoever to do with these groups and a great deal to do with the policies. Why is there such a strong correlation between intelligence, education and liberalism, on the one hand, and ignorance, illiteracy and “conservative values” on the other?

Might not the answer be that modern Republican ideas are inferior? That they are – for want of a more polite term – stupid? In fact, for some decades now, they have been engineered specifically to delude the easily-deludable.

Modern Republicans committed a long time ago to a program of embracing hair-brained schemes if they could be used to manipulate enough dumb voters to come their way. Here’s a revealing list:

1. Trickle-down economics
2. The “Laffer Curve” (i.e., cutting taxes raises revenues)
3 Imminent Soviet/Communist take-over of the US/World
4. Sovereignty of the Panama Canal (US sovereignty)
5. School Prayer
6. Anti-Flag Burning
7. Bussing
8. Anti-Abortion
9. Anti-Gay marriage
10.Immigrant bashing
11.Anti-Stem cell research
12.Anti Heart-transplant surgery.
13.WMDs
14.Protecting “Under God” in Pledge of Allegiance
15.Terry Schiavo
16. Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment

I could go on, and I invite you, dear readers, to do so in the comments. But you get the point. These are dumb things. Let’s be plain. And the fact that many smart people reject them is not evidence that the smart people are being unfair, or are corrupt, or victims of previous “liberal” brainwashings.

The ultimate Thing We All Know™ here is the old saw that “reality has a liberal bias.” And in truth We All Know This. The culture warriors of the right know perfectly well that they are peddling, at best, a mild corrective to excesses of a mainstream consensus.

And right now, one Thing We All Know™ is that McCain is horribly unprepared to be President, as is his VP pick. And I think if we’re being really honest, We All Know that Barack Obama is the man we need and will make the nation proud.

At least those of us with enough on the ball to resist the silly games of the Right.

Welcome to the Soup, Rich Folks!

2008-09-19T08:44:00.000-04:00

A Much Bigger Picture

The news of course is 100% dominated by “coverage” of the “Wall St. Crisis.” I’ve just given you as much useful information as you’d get from watching 100 hours of MSNBC and CNN simultaneously.

Our man Barack (he’ll always be “Barry” to me) seems to have Old Grumple-puss well in hand. I understand Sen. McCain dribbled some creamed corn down his chin while talking to NBC’s Anne Curry, which of course is very good news indeed for one Rudolph Giuliani. So let’s take a look at the economic “meltdown” that Brian Williams is suddenly a big expert on.

The economic mess seemed to me well reflected in a Margaret Warner piece last night on the Lehrer News Hour. The first thing that hit me was just what a thoughtful and articulate journalist Margaret Warner is. She’s the real deal. She hosted a segment with a bright and articulate economist from a Chicago investment firm as well as Jane Bryant Quinn, clueless commentator, columnist and all-around purveyor of Convention Wisdom. What these three very bright and well-paid women discussed for 10 or so minutes was how the Wall St. Crisis affects “you,” by which they meant, of course, themselves and each other.

Should I move money out of my 401(k)? Are my brokerage accounts at Merrill safe? Just how diversified should my portfolio be? And what about gold (goddammit)?

What struck me was that these rich people are scared. Scared because this Wall St. business may well affect them – rich people! Can you imagine! There is an outside chance that when the chips fall, EVEN PEOPLE WITH LARGE SUMS OF MONEY may get roughed up. For these guardians of the conventional wisdom, this was Serious Business Indeed.

Well rich folks, welcome to the soup! For the last 30 or 40 years, our society’s leaders have dithered while powerful interests (is “Lobbyists for the Rich” too crude?) have run rough-shod over the rest of us. Ordinary Joes (and Janes – and why can’t “Joe” be a universal signifier any way?) have had to take it on the chin as employers walked away from any obligations to them. First it was job security. Then pensions. Then physical facilities. (You know anyone with an office with, you know, “walls” and a “door”? Those things used to have “windows!” Amazing!) Then more and more “productivity” gains – more work, same pay. Then just less pay. Can 2000 people do what 3000 people were doing yesterday? Harvard MBAs assure us that they answer is a resounding “Y-E-S!”

In fact, the entire history of business in the United States over the last several decades has been a tale of shifting wealth away from workers, then customers, to senior managers and shareholders. Enormous pay is needed to motivate people to be CEOs. (It’s hard work!) (Can two CEOs do what three CEOs did yesterday? Harvard MBAs assure us, “Don’t be silly. Pass the caviar.”)

Republicans, and then most Democrats, came to believe that people respond to taxes because it hit their pocket book. (Never mind that most people don’t really know what percentage of their total revenue is paid in taxes, or how much that percentage has gone up and down over the years.) So if we want wind-power, just give people a tax break and soon windmills will be spouting up all over. (I had to swerve this morning to avoid one that had gone up overnight in the middle of the LIE. (I kid.))

But what is the one thing that the government has relentless taxed the most? Labor. The vast majority of tax revenue comes from taxes on labor, a k a “income taxes.” Capital musnt’t be taxed – that would be B-A-D! So we tax labor and as a completely foreseeable result, jobs are scarce and getting scarcer.

So capital accumulates. And accumulates. But, Harvard MBAs assure us, this is very good, since all that capital is available to be invested in things that create – wait for it – jobs! That’s right, give rich people enough money to satisfy their most craven wants, and then give them some more, and presto: jobs! Fantastic, no?

Fantastic, yes, I’m afraid. All that capital has done little to create jobs. It has just stood around and like any underused asset, it is wasting away. Banks are literally being handed checks for billions and billions of dollars in the hope that they will lend it. But they aren’t making loans, mostly because they can’t find borrowers they think will be able to repay.

And that, my friends-s-s-s, is the rub. The pot we’re in (and for those just joining in, “Welcome Rich People! Come on in!”) is a much more dangerous pot than all the Anne Currys and Brians Williams’s can ever hope to grasp.

We have more or less killed our ability to create jobs. We need to massively re-distribute resources so that more of us can earn a decent living, sadly, however, at the expense of hedge fund managers being able to hire Eric Clapton for their kid’s Bar Mitzvah. And we have spent the last 30 years convincing ourselves that the one mechanism that could actually accomplish this feat – the federal government – is not only horribly inept but actually downright evil. (That’s a fact, says Fox News.)

Business leaders will not suddenly wake up and say, “Hey, I know! Let’s violate our legal obligations to our shareholders and start maximizing value not for the shareholders but for the benefit of the most people, employees, customers, and so on. Yeah!”

It is the provenance of the government to lay down the law, even to businesses. (I know some of you are thinking, “No! Un-possible! How could that be? Doesn’t government work for business?” And I can see why you might think that.)

But the truth is the government is the only mechanism we have, and we have spent the last 10 years using it to saw tin cans in half so that it is now terribly useless as an instrument for reforming society.

We are in the midst of a perfect storm. The issue is not banks holding bad loans, or a mortgage crisis. Americans are not going to find getting a car loan or a mortgage “harder.” There’s a reason for the foreclosures. People aren’t earning enough money. Why don’t people just buy health insurance when their companies don’t provide it? Because like the companies themselves they can’t afford it! A spending spree fianced by easy credit is ending, and the results are as painful as they were predictiable.

But that’s not the half of it. American businesses have not embraced innovation, opting instead for lay-offs, outsourcing and all manner of cost-cutting. There is a price coming due on that front. We have massively under-invested in education, a foolishness for which we will be paying the price for decades to come. We have, more or less, been eating our seed corn, and now it’s gone.

It is one of the unspoken premises (which I like to call “Things We All Know™”) that things are so bad that we must look all the way back to the Depression for comparisons. And many Harvard MBAs are quite certain that this is nothing like that. Well, on this I agree with them. But their small-mindedness leads them to conclude that 1929 and the Great Depression is some kind of floor, below which it is not possible to fall.

Who says? Why should 1929 be the floor? Aren’t there the elements present for something much worse? I am sad to say that I believe they are. And even electing a great man like Barack Obama will not be enough to save us, any more than FDR was able to save our grandparents from the Great Depression.

Hang onto your hats, kids! We’re in for a wild ride!

Whew!

2008-09-18T08:05:00.003-04:00

New experiment. I'm going to try to post something everyday, reflecting my views as of that moment.

And as of this moment, I have to say, "Whew!" The polling is back to where it was before the conventions, with Obama slightly ahead and moving into an electoral college lead. Which is of course very good news indeed.

Overnight, McCain seems to have messed up an interview with a Spanish radio or TV outlet. Evidently, after being asked seriatim about various Latin American leaders, he was asked about the Spanish president (not a PM?), and persisted in speaking as though he were a left-wing Latin American thug (i.e., in the "Chavez-Castro Club"). Even when the reporter tried to steer him back, he seemed not to get it, and continued on his platitudinous way. (As they do.)

Oh, and the global financial markets are melting down and will soon be naught but rubble where once great wealth had been. The ranks of the unemployed and poor will welcome the many ex "investment bankers" and even the occasional "former big law partner."

Which of course is good news for Rudy Giuliani.

The last few days seem like they have been rough on poor old John McCain, who seems increasingly out of it, as though he had yet to learn his new talking points.

I've also noticed that he seems to never be without a handler, and I don't mean in a political sense. I mean in the sense of a handler for someone who really can't be left by himself in public. While I wish the man no ill and nothing but love, baby, I'm concerned that there is an accumulating body of evidence that indicates that Senator McCain's mental acuity may be declining to the point where even the Republicans -- the Republicans who foisted an Alzheimers-struck Ronald Reagan on us and kept it a secret for more than a decade -- cannot cover up his unfitness for high office. (Of course, he could be bed-ridden, unable to feed, clothe or clean himself, and convinced that his nurses are all working for that damn Ho Chi Mihn, and still be in the middle of the Senatorial pack, mental acuity-wise).

All of this -- the way the markets seem to indict the Republicans' laissez-faire-ism, the increasing "losing it-ness" of the Republican candidate, the collapse of the media's short-lived love affair with Governor Palin, the continued exudence of competence by Obama, the developing main-stream-media narrative that McCain is lying -- should be reflected in the polls in the next few days. Barring the unexpected (and wouldn't that be a neat trick), I'm hoping to see Barack open up a decent lead and ride it all the way to what one can only pray will be a right-good thumping of Arizona's hard-core, dishonorable senior (and yes folks, I mean senior) Senator.

Apples to Apples, Part II

2008-09-05T16:20:00.002-04:00

A Worrisome Turn Toward the Dark Side

2008-09-05T16:18:00.000-04:00

It seems like the Republicans have been breaking through one moral boundary after another, from the preposterous witch-hunts of McCarthy to the outrageous use of government apparatus for political gains by Nixon, from Willie Horton to smearing Max Cleland. So a claim that the Republicans have made a platonic shift to evil has to be viewed with some skepticism. Nevertheless, I worry that such a claim may be valid.

Watching the Republican Hate Fest ’08 this week, I heard a line that really resonated: when did unplanned unwed teenage pregnancy become a good thing? Thinking about it, it occurred to me that nearly all of the Republican talking points were as divorced from reality as their claim that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was a joyous event. In fact, viewed through this prism, the entire Republican enterprise seems to be nothing more than political marketing run amok.

Even their biggest ideas are self-evidently false. Lowering taxes creates jobs. Life begins at conception. Liberals love to tax people. Democrats want high taxes and big government. Obama doesn’t know enough to keep us safe. Sarah Palin is terrific. People just want the government to get out of the way. Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

The issue is campaigning and governing by slogan. And not slogans that neatly summarize a complex thoughts into something memorable. In fact, it’s the opposite: slogans as a way to disguise something unpalatable as something palatable. We see it all the time. The “PATRIOT” Act. “Compassionate Conservative.” “The Ownership Society.” “Support the Troops.” In every case, the actual meaning is almost perfectly contradicted by the reality.

So far, it’s more or less business as usual, though far more so for the Republicans, whose actual beliefs are way outside the mainstream and who must therefore work harder to disguise those beliefs to try to get elected.

But there was something about watching Republican after Republican get in front of a camera and describe Palin as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Had Obama picked a comparable light-weight, there’s no doubt the choice would be greeted as prima facie evidence of his dangerously bad judgment. And I believe that on some level Republicans know perfectly well that McCain’s choice is wrong-headed, but are so committed to their cause that they are fine with denying what they know to be true.

And there’s the rub. A movement this large, even if unable to win national office, that is so dedicated, so zealous, so free of honor, is a danger. I am concerned that these people could convince themselves of anything. And I think we saw that this week in St. Paul when the party faithful embraced the idea that off-shore drilling was, virtually overnight, an urgent national priority. Six weeks ago none of them had even heard of it; three weeks ago their own leader was against it, and a week ago none of them cared a jot about it. And now they are ready to lead their party unto death in defense of it.

Very committed zealots who feel they are free from the constraints of reality are a dangerous threat to civilized society. Ask the Germans.

Apples to Apples

2008-08-20T07:42:00.001-04:00

Many Americans have been told by the media that John McCain has more experience. The “right” experience, in the words of the recent LAT poll. Well, it’s undeniable that McCain has more experience, but the current framing of this issue is inherently unfair and misleading. The truth is that in a fair comparison, Obama is the far more experienced candidate.

In 1983, McCain was 47 years old – the same age as Obama is today. Through family connections and family wealth, he was able to win a hotly contested primary and then a general election as a member of the US House of Representatives. He had previously worked in PR at his father-in-law’s company, and served 22 years in the US Navy, retiring with the rank of captain. He led a small training squadron (apparently ably), and also acted as the Navy’s liaison to the US Senate. He did not earn a major sea command. He had struggled at Annapolis, and barely managed to graduate. His record as a pilot was checkered.

In 2008, Obama has already leapfrogged McCain at the same point in his life by entering the US Senate two years ago. Obama has routinely garnered academic achievements and honors, including the highly coveted and prestige presidency of the Harvard Law Review. He has taught Constitutional Law at one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools for over a decade, written a best-selling book about forging a new way forward for America, and spent decades as a community organizer helping deserving Americans get the break they needed to get ahead.

The “experience gap” is really nothing more than the “age gap.” I can speculate about what Obama might have accomplished by his 72d birthday – more accolades, more concrete change, more leadership. (No need to speculate about McCain since age 47 – he’s mostly been an extremely conservative doctrinaire Senator from a conservative state with a gift for seeming to be on all sides of every issue.) But without that speculation being added into the mix, comparing Obama at 47 to McCain at 72 becomes nothing more than saying that one of these candidates is 25 years older than the other one.

If Obama’s experience is not “right,” or “enough,” or “adequate,” that’s because he is 47 years old. If the American people think 47 is simply too young to be President, that it certainly their prerogative. As is their right to think that 72 is simply too old. But to dress this age-ism up as “experience gap” is misleading.

McCain vs Obama: Victim vs. Empath

2008-06-18T13:23:00.001-04:00

McCain vs. Obama

I heard Fareed Zakaria talking with Brain Lehrer on WYNC yesterday on the topic of differences between McCain and Obama on foreign policy. Fareed thought that there was a time when he would have said not much separated the two, but that McCain had taken several positions recently which made him think there were meaningful differences. (The main change seemed to be McCain’s recent idea to rid the G-8 of Russia and China, which is of course plainly counter-productive.)

What struck me though, was how little appreciation Fareed had for the enormous differences between the two candidates. His idea about politics seems to rest on an entirely left-brain approach where one simply compares the competing policy proposals and selects the one which is more closely matches one’s own idea of the best policy proposals. For me, it's far more telling as a determinant of the kind of governance we can expect is the emotional and psychological make-up of the candidates.

I often joke with people that if the people making Campbells Soup ads think they are selling soup, they’ll make unsuccessful ads, whereas if they think they are selling love, redemption, acceptance, etc., they’ll end up selling lots of soup. I don’t think McCain’s or Obama’s policy proposals are what will have the biggest impact on our society, any more than Candidate Bush’s passion for a Patient’s Bill of Rights made much difference to our health care system. Instead, the fundamental character of the person is the biggest determinant of the kind of governance we will get.

To me, the fundamental character of a person is best described in emotional and psychological terms. For example, I think the Current Occupant (h/t Garrison Keillor, of course) suffers from the effects of the terrible trauma he suffered as a child when his younger sister suddenly fell ill and passed away. His feelings of powerlessness in the face of random, inexplicable tragedy – feelings which were steadfastly ignored by his parents – are the direct cause of his misguided efforts to “protect” the US – and his inability to stop talking about the paramount importance of doing so. I think that’s what is behind his idea that he himself is personally responsible for the nation’s safety, and he is surely not going to wait around for other nations to act if doing so jeopardizes his protective (preventive) mission (as he had to do with tragic results as a child). In fact, it is this impatience that leads others to perceive that they are spurned and rejected. They are.

I’m still learning about the early experiences of McCain and Obama, but already I can see a fundamental difference in their characters. McCain seems to me to be primarily about being a victim – a quality he had long before he was so horribly victimized by the North Viet Namese. His high school nickname of “McNasty” is some evidence of this – a person who lashes out to protect himself from too-painful feelings. My guess is that John developed a sense that he was never going to be good enough for his ultra-successful dad – a sense that he was being expected to perform to a very unfair standard. John strikes me as someone who is always probing for acceptance – that’s what those back-of-the-bus bull sessions are: a chance for John to get acceptance.

As a leader, my guess is McCain would be quick to see the US as a victim, a nation that is being subjected to unfair standards. (It is of course true that the US is indeed expected to conform to a standard of behavior higher perhaps than any other nation. My own view is that that expectation is entirely fair. I doubt McCain would see it that way.) McCain would be quick to take offense, and quick to take action to challenge those he sees as confronting him (i.e., holding him to an unfair standard). His famous temper is a testament to the extent he feels slighted unfairly – in other words, victimized.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, could not be more different. I read him as being Mr. Empathy. He is quick to understand others. He readily shares similar experiences. But he does not leave things there. He generally pivots to his own ideas of how to help. His policies seem to be based on fully understanding how those impacted by them will perceive them, the result of his starting with understanding as best he can how others see and feel things.

An Obama foreign policy would be based on understanding the viewpoints of other nations – which by itself would instantly bolster American credibility and prestige. His actions would proceed organically from his understanding of how others perceive their own worlds, and therefore would be far more likely to be welcomed and far more likely to be productive. Domestically, Obama has already begun the process of people making more of an effort to understand the needs and feelings of others, something that the Republican revolution of the last 40 years has specifically targeted (“Are you better off today than you were 4 years ago,” Reagan famously asked). His empathetic nature is quite disruptive to the conventional wisdom.

We have a clear choice, not between competing policies but between competing personalities. We can choose a perpetual victim, someone who is constantly striving for acceptance and spurning those perceived as authorities (people with unfair expectations). Or we can choose an empathizer who can synthesize the needs of various individuals into harmonious compromises and solutions that provide a real chance of achieving success.

The Coming Craze for Confrontational Journalism

2008-06-02T16:52:00.002-04:00

These past 10 years, many on the left have been appalled at the roll-over-and-rub-my-belly style of US journalism as mainstream journalists have vied with each other to see who loves Republicans the most. Not surprisingly, there's been a hailstorm of criticism about this.

Just in time for the return of the Democrats to power, the US mainstream press is about to shake off its journalistic slumber of the past 12-15 years and get back to basics: constantly hectoring the President about his many scandals and missteps, while making sure the opposition gets PLENTY of air time to bring these issues to the attention of the American people.

Wait for it, people. It's coming. And it will be just as ugly this time as it was under Clinton.

2008-06-02T11:07:00.003-04:00

I don't usually waste my beautiful mind on the musings of confirmed half-wits like Billy Krystal. As a kid, I had two dogs, Spot and Frisky. ("Naming Things" was evidently not a course that either of my parents excelled in.) Either one of them, both long-gone to doggie heaven of course, had more insight into American public affairs that Billy. Yet neither has a newspaper column. Oh the injustice!

According to reliable sources, Billy is mad that BHO didn't talk more about the military at a recent commencement address. This brought home to me a idea I've been toying with the last few weeks about the nature of Republican-ism.

Republicans are famously derisive of governmental powers and responsibilities. But with one glaring exception -- the military. in fact, in their current mis-adventure in the Middle East, they are endeavoring to accomplish every task -- building schools, caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, etc. -- solely with military resources. In many cases, those resources are in fact outside contractors (wouldn't want to leave out those poor shareholders!), but even they are largely militarized servants of the DoD. (And speaking of which, boy oh boy are we well defended! Who knew we faced such threats!).

Not just overseas. The only appropriate manifestations of the US Government to these loonies are military ones. That's why they've accepted such quasi-military icons as police and firemen. (Firemen!). Perhaps we can convince them on skycaps and doormen.

For reasons only their psychoanalysts could fathom, these authority-lovers see the only legitimate branch of government as the military. Imagine their surprise when young President Obama switches things around!

I really can't wait for these unreconstructed Birchites to return to their richly deserved place of ridicule and obscurity.

Accountability, Please

2008-06-01T10:26:00.002-04:00

The DNC just bent over backwards to give props to the state delegations of Florida and Michigan. The so-called leaders of these state delegations -- the same maroons who decided to proceed with primaries in spite of a clear rule not to, and in spite of their sister states' respect for the same rule -- claimed that not seating these states' delegations would imperil our chances in the fall. So, seated they are.

Let's have an accountability moment, then. We were told that these guys needed this sop to win. They have it. Now, let's see them deliver Michigan and Florida this fall. If we don't carry them, I want to have an accountability moment and call these calls on the carpet.

Being right matters. Ignoring the rules, gaining special favor at the expense of your peers, pleading special circumstances just because one doesn't like the outcome, and then failing to deliver -- is not right.

Negative Attracts Negative

2008-05-09T07:28:00.002-04:00

The great Chris “Mad Dog” Russo recently appeared on an HBO show hosted by the almost equally great Bob Costas to talk about the phenomenon of sports talk radio. Chris essentially plays as a character a louder, more combative version of himself on his talk radio show on WFAN in New York. But on Costas’ show, as I suspect in real life, Chris is a bright and insightful guy.

Russo made the point that sports talk tends to emphasize the negative. IF a NY sports team messes up, or a player messes up, his show will go on and on, beating a dead horse, analyzing the failure. On the other hand, of course, positive achievements are mentioned, analyzed and discussed, but far more rarely and far more briefly. Russo observed that negativity was simply inherent in the medium. It reminded me of Michael Moore’s observation about local news – the old “if it bleeds it leads.”

Whether there is something inherently negative in the non-fiction media, or whether the people who control it make it negative for other reasons, there can be no real doubt that such media does tend to emphasize and gravitate toward negative stories. I don’t think that this phenomenon began as a product of any kind of political bias.

However, of the two political parties, one has a similarly inherent negative bias. The Republican party, especially under the modern reign of the Reagan-Bush crowd, is inherently negative. Their political position is often summed up by friend and foe alike as “smaller government, lower taxes, less government intervention.” This is a critique – a negative reaction. Their whole movement is a nothing more than a sustained complaint.

In thinking about the way in which the media seems obsessed with giving Republicans positive coverage and the Democrats negative coverage, there are several important factors to consider. (Two current examples to consider: Obama’s pastor is nearly wall-to-wall, while McCain’s spiritual endorsers are barely covered, and McCain’s independently wealthy wife isn’t going to release her tax returns (no big deal), while John Kerry’s independently wealthy wife didn’t release her tax returns (scandal!).) Certainly the fact that Republicans hold reporters accountable for their stories in a way that the Democrats do not is such a factor. The fact that the media is controlled by people who are sympathetic to Republicans for business reasons is another. The fact that most beat reporters are in fact liberal and therefore end to overcompensate for their personal bias is another.

But I do think one such factor is this inherent negativity of the medium. The press likes to emphasize negative stories. It’s what they’re focused on. The Republicans are the party of Negative Stories. There’s a natural affinity between the media and the Republicans, a sort of symbiosis: the press needs negativity, the Republicans need air time. This is particularly true since their views are held by a stubbornly small minority, they need to whip up support more strenuously. Plus, their way of whipping up support is not to tout their own ideas (of which they have none), but rather to demonize and attack the Democrats – a perfect topic for the press, just as demonizing the hapless goalie or unlucky quarterback makes for compelling sports talk radio.

The press is likely to have an affinity for the Republicans as long as the Republicans remain addicted to their aggressively negative ways. Of course, this addiction may last forever, but there is always a chance that in their search for votes, the Republicans of the future may conclude that they need to develop some ideas of their own. As Judy Temuda (sp?) used to say “it could happen.” Right?

Update: A clear example of this is in this morning’s Washington Post. A story is prominently featured about a federal arts commission objecting to a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. as excessively confrontational and vaguely totalitarian. (It is being sculpted in China, to boot.) This negative story will receive far more play than the earlier positive story announcing the statue’s design in the first place.

You'd Be Scared, too

2008-05-04T15:09:00.002-04:00

If you were Iran, you'd be worried, too.

This Guy

2008-05-02T08:16:00.001-04:00

This guy, Arthur Silber, must get paid by the word, but his writing reflects both genuine insight as well as the level of outrage that I would have thought would be all-too-common by now.

I guess after America is completely lost people will get upset.

Some Things the President Says are NOT True

2008-05-01T08:33:00.004-04:00

Tort reform is NOT the solution to the health care crisis.

Drilling for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge is NOT the solution to our energy problems.

Large unfunded tax cuts to wealthy Americans will NOT address the crisis in job creation.

Al-Qaeda is NOT the greatest threat to US national security.

Sending a 2d aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf to menace Iran does NOT make us safer or reduce tensions in the area.

Finally, John McCain is NOT a maverick straight-talker.

Now you know what to think.

Audacity of Hope

2008-04-30T09:56:00.002-04:00

Hard to see any reason to hope that 2008 will be any different than previous Presidential elections. The press' piling on the "Wright Affair" is just a sample of the nonsense that will be peddled throughout the election (no matter who the Democratic nominee is).

It's easy to blame the press, which no doubt bears a large share of the responsibility for ending the madness. But where are the Democratic 527's running Hagee ads? Where are the elected Dems who are calling on McCain to denounce, repudiate, etc.?

We cannot expect to be successful if we don't show vigor in our campaigns. Kerry came to be seen as ineffective in his responses to Swift Boat, just as Obama risks the same thing here. (And if HRC were the leader, or the candidate Republicans feared more, then she too would be portrayed as unable to stop the media firestorm over "Pardon-gate" or whatever phone-baloney controversy was ginned up to smear her.)

Unless a majority of individual voters is somehow able to form and elect leaders who are both committed to change and have the skills to bring change about, there's no hope. And so far, I'm not seeing anything like the necessary majority of voters. I want to believe in my fellow Americans and their essential goodness, but when I overhear them talking about Obama and Hillary, I wonder if there are enough open minds left...

A Pennsylvania Thought or Two

2008-04-23T12:54:00.000-04:00

We’ve now managed to piss away some large amount of money – let’s call it $25 million, shall we? – on an mostly pointless contest in Pennsylvania. The silver lining, of course, is the energy created amongst Pa. Dems and new voters, which of course is not nothing. But I doubt many donors to either BHO or HRC would be happy to see their money going for a general energy-raising exercise.

Listening to Pa. voters, I’m struck by how disconnected they are from the reality of the Democratic race. I wouldn’t want to say how prevalent this attitude was, but many of the voices I heard in the media seemed to be choosing between the two as if either one might win.

I find it odd that so many voters were persuaded that HRC had a legitimate shot. It is surely a testament to her campaign effort that she was able to attract 55% of Pa. voters to what is surely a losing cause. It’d be like Huckabee winning Pa. (He did get 11%, and Ron Paul 14%!)

In fact, HRC’s best argument is one she dare not utter publicly: even as a dead certain loser, some 55% of Pennsylvanians were willing to throw their vote away on her.

I hope BHO now ceases firing HRC’s way and only focuses on McCain. I think that was their strategy before they got suckered into mounting a full-scale (but not, despite HRCs claims, a maximum-scale) effort in Pa. I think super-delegates will be impressed not only with his lead in the delegate count, but also at how effective his attacks against McCain are.

It’s time for BHO to declare victory in the battle for the nomination and move onto the general election. (He could also use a few days off, from the look of things in Pa.)

Accountability Free Media

2008-04-21T10:39:00.002-04:00

Bill Clinton famously said that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. There you have it. The Republican party is behind their nominee, just as they always are. The problem is whether they can get the independents and swing voters who have come to loathe Bush.

Does anybody remember like two months ago when the Entertainment Media was dead certain that McCain was going to struggle with getting his right-wing on-board? I'm certain that Timmeh all the way to Howie and back again were 100% that McCain had a big problem on his hands with getting all those who hated him jazzed about his campaign.

No? No one remembers? Strange, I have this definite recollection...

What Do I Think?

2008-04-16T09:29:00.002-04:00

I think we’re on the verge of a very long economic contraction. I think we have pretty much eaten our seed corn and are going to have many long cold winters ahead.

For many years, American businesses have relied as much on cost-cutting as they have on actual innovation and market expansion. There has been a steady drip-drip-drip of wealth being transferred from workers to shareholders. Whether via the on-going down-grading of working conditions (glamorous Manhattan offices to low-cost suburban-sprawl office parks, offices and desks to cubicles, lunches at nearby eateries to sandwiches at the desk, etc.), the slashing of financial compensation to workers (loss of pensions, loss of healthcare coverage, loss of wage increases), or just the introduction of numerous productivity enhancers (PCs/e-mail, cel phones, Nextel radios, etc.), the overall trend has been to squeeze value from workers – value that gets reflected in the company’s “performance.”

The problem with cost-cutting-as-growth is that it cannot go on forever. I heard a phrase a while ago that really stuck in my mind: “things that cannot go on forever don’t.” And I think we’re finding out the hard truth of that right now. American businesses can’t find much more to cut. There’s no place cheaper than rural China to out-source to. Low-cost reporters, paralegals and engineers in India are getting scarce. We already have our workers in cheap metal buildings with shaky heat/A/C. Businesses have gone to this well for likely the last time for quite some time.

So businesses must rely on innovation and market expansion for growth. But the problem is that it cannot come up with new products successfully. Besides making somewhat faster and cheaper laptops, what is Dell going to do? Sell TV’s? Refrigerators (see Blockbuster to Buy Circuit City)? The dread “service contracts”?

In considering what will our businesses do, we’re all inclined to think that through sheer power of will, good old American pluck, and a little bit of luck, we’ll pull through. After all, we’ve been slogging along for some time OK, and we’ve been OK. Plus, we’re optimistic people and tend to think things will work out OK just because it’s how we view the world. That doesn’t mean, however, that the world is going to conform to our perceptions of it.

We have spent that last 25 or more years squandering our future – a future that I believe is arriving now. We have decided to starve our government half-to-death, so that the majority of our social problems have as their root cause lack of adequate resources. I take this drive to “cut taxes” as another part of the general trend of transferring wealth from those with less (i.e., consumers of governmental services) to those with more (those who would otherwise be paying for those services).

We’ve gotten the idea into our heads that those with great wealth deserve every last penny of it, and have no real obligation to the rest of society. Reagan-Bush economic theory is that the more we give the best-off, the better off everyone else is. This is just plain wrong, but it’s easy to see why millionaires promote it as a serious political-economic philosophy.

We’ve failed to invest adequately in our education system, and now are falling behind because of it. We’ve failed to invest in our health, and are reaping the rewards in an epidemic of obesity and other treatable and preventable diseases and conditions. We have failed to invest in technology that would allow us to throw off oil dependency when it becomes no longer affordable.

We have weakened our governmental and public infrastructure so much that it will simply not be available to help its citizens when most needed. It will be years before our governments can be wrestled out of the hands of the super-rich and returned to the control of the majority of voters.

We have borrowed massively to pay for things we have merely consumed. It’s one thing to borrow $1,000,000 to build a factory. But to borrow $1,000,000 to pay for a huge picnic is quite another. And far too much of our borrowing has been for picnics, not enough for factories.

Perhaps worst of all, we have abandoned our sense of community. Ronald Reagan began the job of killing it when he announced that the relevant question is “are you better off today than you were 4 years ago.” He appealed to the divisions in our society, using fear of others as the basis for his politics. Wealthy people had always used some version of this “divide and conquer” approach, and Reagan breathed new life into it. He also ushered in an era when substance no longer mattered on any level, and hastened the “juvenilization” of our public discourse.

These same people have worked hard to ensure that America is isolated in the world. Americans have little interest in helping other nations. Americans have little interest in other nations, period. We’ve once again retreated to the castle keep and pulled up the drawbridges, hoping the world will leave us alone.

Our ability to be part of a meaningful community has been obliterated – taking away the one thing that Americans might otherwise use to weather the coming storm and make a better future.

For years, wags have warned that we were mortgaging our future. As a society, we mostly ignored these warnings. I think that the future is now, the bill is due, and we just don’t have the money to pay it.

I have hope that Sen. Obama will ascend to our leadership and be our generation’s FDR. But remember FDR didn’t make the crisis go away, he just helped us cope with it. And the crisis didn't end for 15 years -- and even then only following a catastrophic war.

Things No One Says, Pt. 543

2008-04-15T16:20:00.002-04:00

“My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants,” Mr. Obama said. "

I more or less agree, though I wonder whether HRC isn't getting more than the benefit of the doubt? Time for "Shoe On the Other Foot."

A. Hillary leads -- I think the pressure on Obama would be immeasurably greater. There'd be a kind of "Oh, let him run, for Gawd's sake, he's inspirational and healing -- it shows we care about the Black vote."

B. McCain leads over a rival -- say Huckabee. Pretty much see A above. We all agreed that the Huckabee thing was basically harmless and cute, and since he was such a hoot on Colbert and SNL and stuff, let him go."

To me, HRC is getting a break. Whether it's because of her gender, her "insider" bona fides, her actual smarts and charm and humor (which are considerable), I couldn't say. But I do think mouthing the platitude about "let her run" reflects a bit of a break.