Monday's collapse of the White House - with Social Security Phaseout included

Obama's tax cut agreement with the Republicans is an event that has the feel of a heavy curtain ringing down on two largely squandered years of reform. It's tempting to look to other Presidencies for clues on what's happening, like Bill Clinton's after the 1994 election.

But the one thing that's missing from all of them is that today we are in a depression. And we have a Democratic President committed to neoliberal dogma, which at the moment looking a lot like Herbert Hoover anti-recession policies. And while as Tom Tomorrow reminds us Obama is willing to fight some political group, he seems to have little stomach to fight the Republicans. Even though they are bitterly fighting him. And it will get much worse once their House majority is sworn in.

There have been some angry responses to the events of the last few days, before and after Obama caved in to the Republicans. Like Robert Reich, The President’s Last Stand Is No Stand At All: Why the Tax Deal is an Abomination RobertReich.org 12/07/2010. And Jamie Galbraith, Whose Side is the White House On? New Deal 2.0 12/06/2010. Galbraith says, "This isn't a parlor game. The outcome isn't destined to be alright. It will not necessarily end in progress whatever happens."

But if you read one article or blog post this week, I strongly recommend this one, The End of Social Security FDL 12/07/2010 by Nancy Altman, the co-director of the Pro-Social-Security, anti-phaseout group Social Security Works. She explains why the so-called payroll tax holiday is the beginning of Social Security Phaseout.


The massive subsidy for billioniaries in the midst of this depression is bad enough. The temporary payroll tax reduction is even worse. Because it's the beginning of the phaseout of the Social Security program.

In 2008, I would not have believed a Democratic President could or would embrace something like this. he certainly campaigned as the defender of Social Security. Up until Monday, I was hoping that somehow he would decide to fight for Social Security and against phaseout. I wasn't expecting Social Security Phaseout to slip into the tax deal.

But we now have a Democratic President pushing to phase out the Social Security program. It's disgraceful. This is a key thing he was elected in 2008 to prevent.

Tags: barack obama, social security

Elizabeth Drew on Obama's problems with the voters (and the Villagers)

Elizabeth Drew rarely steps far outside the bounds of Beltway Village consensus. But her political analyses are definitely better than the average for the Village.

In her essay In the Bitter New Washington New York Review of Books 11/22/2010 (12/23/2010 issue), she looks cautiously at the political trends and what they portend for the political movement that brought Obama to the Presidency in 2008 and how the Obama Administration itself contributed to the 2010 electoral outcome.

Drew warns against overinterpretation of the 2010 elections, or, better, against careless interpretations. One worrisome factor she mentions is the number of older voters who turned to the Republicans believing they would defend Medicare, a result of their demagoguery during the health care reform debate. Her article has several journalistic observations that caught my eye, like the fact that Joe Biden "was virtually shut out of the dealings with people in Congress in the first two years." She doesn't come to any firm conclusions, though the picture of a President too seriously isolated from his base as well as the larger public comes through. But her essay is also flawed by annoying lapses into Village trivia and the occasional stock Republican-friendly canards, such as the supposedly "common complaint about the Obama White House in the first two years has been that there were no 'grown-ups' around." Remember back in 2000-1 when the Cheney-Bush Administration were "putting the grown-ups back in charge"? Still, it is a well-informed and informative piece by an analyst who actually can read polls and relate policies to politics, and does both in this article.

Sadly, the Village touch shows up in Drew's piece. She says of Republican leaders declining a meeting in the White House - as Jerry Brown also did just last week - "this just isn't done". You can almost here the gasp in her voice. Here we see her indulging the Villagers' pathetic social obsessions about parties:

Last year, a friend of mine was invited to a Hanukkah party that the Obamas gave for prominent Jews (a group with whom there had been tensions), and after the Obamas descended the grand stairway, they stood in the foyer briefly, the President made a few remarks and shook a few hands, and back up the stairs they went. No mingling.

And this could have come from Maureen Dowd or Gail Collins:

In their first two years, the Obamas have seemed a bit tone-deaf: there were too many vacations while people were hurting, especially Michelle's extravagant trip to Spain. (I'm as interested in Michelle’s clothes as the next woman but at the same time think she and her staff are too focused on her looking smashing, which she does. Her wardrobe seems quite extensive for these troubled times.) [my emphasis]

I don't recall seeing even a single poll saying that for either women or men, their opinion of Michelle Obama's wardrobe played even the tiniest role in their vote in 2010. But for the Villagers, these things are very important.

But even though she puts it in the context of manners, I actually think she has a point in the following. And it's been a real problem, by no means limited to Village social events:

Barack Obama's personality has been much mulled over in the past two years, but it seems inescapable that his high self-esteem often slides over the thin line to arrogance, which trickles down (with some exceptions) to much of his staff, some of whom are downright rude to all but a chosen few. Obama has seemed uninterested in anyone but his immediate group, and three of the four members of his immediate circle — Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod — had had no experience in governing. The fourth, Rahm Emanuel, expressed himself with such flippancy, arrogance, and overuse of the F-word that he offended not just members of Congress but also would-be allies of the President.

Tags: est2010 elections, barack obama, obama administration

Iraq War: Ten more years! And more!

Tony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has been fascinating to read on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars over the years. He has a hawkish orientation on both. But he does seem to try to maintain realism about the conditions in both countries, rather than hyping things as going great when they aren't.

In Snatching Defeat: Shape and Fund the Future US Posture in Iraq or Lose the War 11/22/2010, he is making a pitch for funding the Pentagon's request for FY2011 for military aid to Iraq. He even slips in a "Friedman unit" (FU), named after columnist Tom Friedman repeated predictions that the next six months will be crucial in the Iraq War. Cordesman's FU: "the most important single national security decision the US must make over the next six months is almost certainly its future civil and military posture in Iraq." (my italics)

But in pitching the urgency of his position, he describes a situation that scarcely seems like the victory from The Surge of 2007 that Iraq War cheerleaders talk about. What he describes sounds a lot like what happened in Vietnam, where the Pentagon built up a South Vietnamese Army that was dependent of high-tech weaponry that the South Vietnamese couldn't use to full effect, massive American aid and supplies, and continuing indefinite air power support from the United States, aka, a continuing American air war:

It also means creating as strong a US military advisory mission as Iraq will accept in order to help Iraq’s government and security forces reach the level of capability needed to provide security and stability on their own. This is a task that is half a decade from being finished and that had been seriously undercut and delayed by Iraq’s budget crisis. It means provide enough initial military aid to put Iraq on a path that can create strong enough conventional forces to defend and deter against threats like Iran – an effort that cannot be completed by 2020. Some form of lasting US presence in Iraq or the Gulf must be prepared to help Iraq until it can rebuild its forces.

Yes, that's 2020 he said. And not as an end date, but as a not-even-possible-to-end-by-then date.


It sounds to me like the Pentagon couldn't win this war. And they can't figure out how to get out of it either.

Here Cordesman makes a pitch that doesn't quite make sense:

If the US does not make this effort, it will almost ensure that it "snatches defeat from the jaws of victory." It will throw away all of the sacrifices and investment in Iraq since 2003, and it will create a critical power vacuum in the Gulf that extends through Syria and Lebanon. It will threaten every US friend and ally in the Gulf area and Levant, as well as Israel. It also will greatly increase the risk of a major confrontation or fight with Iran that could affect the flow of world oil exports, the control of much of the world’s oil reserves, the stability of a fragile global economy, US economic recovery, and the security of every job in America.

What doesn't make sense is that if Iraq can't even be ready to defend itself against Iran until some undetermined time after 2020, Iraq itself is hardly in a position to be a heavy player in regional power politics or even try to invade Kuwait again. Of course, it's not terribly clear why defending against Iran would be a first-rank worry, since Iraq now has a Shi'a government and Iran is a closer ally to them than the United States is. I think somewhere buried in that statement of Cordesman's is the idea that Iraq will (sometime after 2020) return to its pre-2003 role of being a military balance to Iran. And that doesn't make sense either. We effectively cut off that possibility for the reasonably foreseeable future by invading Iraq in 2003 and overthrowing Saddam's Sunni secular regime.

Remember back in 2003 what Paul Wolfowitz said about Iraqi oil revenues financing the reconstruction? From his March 27, 2003 testimony to Congress, as reported by AmericanProgess.org, Questions for Paul Wolfowitz 04/20/2004:

... Wolfowitz testified on Capitol Hill, "There's a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." Wolfowitz also told Congress "oil revenues of Iraq could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years... We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

From Cordesman's 2010 report:

Iraq is scarcely bankrupt, but it can just barely fund its mix of government employees, security services, and state industries. It has been in a budget crisis since early 2009 that has frozen most investment and development and forced Iraq to freeze the manning of much of its security forces and stop funding critical maintenance and military investment.

Iraq is losing most foreign aid and has been unable to fund the transfer of many aid projects and make them lasting and effective efforts. Iraq’s GNP growth masks terrible income distribution, a GDP per capita that averages 158th in the world, and massive under-employment. Its agricultural, industrial, and service sectors are half a decade away from serious recovery. Sadrist and Saddamist mismanagement have crippled its education and health sectors. While Iraq can eventually exploit its vast petroleum wealth, both Department of Energy and International Energy Agency projections indicate that Iraq will not be able to expand its export income enough to meet its needs for at least the next half-decade.

Gosh, Wolfowitz was a little off on that, it looks like.

The Iraq War is just a heckuva war. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, the invasion of Iraq was one of "the world's dealiest and most lawless actions of the last decade." Cooked up by liars, fools and warmongers like Paul Wolfwitz. But by 2016, Iraq could conceivably be able to pay for its current budget needs. And at some undetermined time after 2020, it may be able to stand on its own militarily.

And the Serious People like Little Tommy Friedman, Age 6, who advocated for this are still treated as Serious Thinkers on foreign affairs by our sad excuse for a press corps.

Tags: anthony cordesman, iraq war

Where the US is on the torture issue

Human rights attorney Scott Horton tells the sorry tale in Interrorgation Nation No Comment 11/15/2010:

Since Barack Obama became president, the debate over torture in America has taken a morally corrupt turn. Defenders of the old regime continue to defend the use of torture as essential to the nation's defense. Their claims are contradicted by the facts: torture was used to extract false confessions that fueled, among other things, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says "don't look back" means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers. [my emphasis]

By not pursuing prosecutions of known torturers, the Obama Administration is breaking the law. For an issue so serious, a President should have to worry about being impeached. The Republicans will get the impeachment train rolling in the new Congress, but not on the torture issue. They support torture, even enthusiastically support it. And the Democrats for the most part are not going to oppose the Administration's passive position, even though it too is breaking the law. This truly is "morally corrupt".

The torture issue isn't going away. But it's going to do more damage to American democracy before it's adequately dealt with.

Tags: accountability for torture, torture

Foreign policy justified by fear, enabled by indifference

The American public for a combination of reasons views our general foreign policy with an indifference that seems completely disproportionate to the huge impact it has around the world. But as Stephen Walt suggests in Republic or empire? Foreign Policy 11/29/2010, that indifference may very well be indispensable to that foreign policy even being possible:

Americans think we ought to be managing the whole world, but we shouldn't have to pay taxes or sacrifice our way of life in order to do it. We use our military machine to kill literally tens of thousands of Muslims in different countries, and then we are surprised when a handful of them get mad and try (usually not every effectively) to hit us back. But then we docilely submit to all sorts of degrading and costly procedures at airports, because we demand to be protected from threats whose origins we've been refusing to talk about honestly for years. We are constantly warned about grave dangers, secret plots, impending confrontations, slow-motion crises, etc., and we are told that these often hypothetical scenarios justify compromising liberties here at home and engaging in practices (torture, targeted assassinations, preventive missile strikes at suspected terrorists, etc.) that we would roundly condemn if anyone else did them. We think it is an outrage when North Korea shells a South Korean island and kills four people, (correct), yet it is just "business as usual" when one of our drones hits some innocent civilians in Pakistan or Yemen. We have disdain for our politics and our politicians, but instead of questioning the institutions and practices that fuel this dysfunction, we indulge in fairy tales about so-called leaders who will somehow lead us out of the darkness. [my emphasis]

Tags: stephen walt, us foreign policy

The Mustache (Tom Friedman) on green energy and American power

Tom Friedman's weekend New York Times column The Big American Leak 12/04/2010 is revealing. Not because it has more than the usual low level of insight from the influential columnist. But because it shows the superficiality of his approach

Tommy complains that the United States is losing clout. He doesn't think, though, that it's because some of the most respected and influential commentators acted as cheerleaders for a completely unnecessary war in Iraq. Or because they displayed the attitudes of six-year-olds in doing so, like that guy who said the benefit of the Iraq War was to tell some Arabs somewhere: "Suck.On.This." No, here's Tommy's definition:

Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home. But our politics never connects the two.

Think how different our conversations with Saudi Arabia would be if we were in the process of converting to electric cars powered by nuclear, wind, domestic natural gas and solar power? We could tell them that if we detect one more dollar of Saudi money going to the Taliban then they can protect themselves from Iran.

Think how different our conversations with China would be if we had had a different savings rate the past 30 years and China was not holding $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities — but was still dependent on the U.S. economy and technology. We would not be begging them to revalue their currency, and maybe our request that China prevent North Korea from shipping ballistic missile parts to Iran via Beijing airport (also in the cables) wouldn't be rebuffed so brusquely.

And think how much more leverage our sanctions would have on Iran if oil were $20 a barrel and not $80 — and Iran's mullah-dictators were bankrupt?

Less far-sighted geopoliticians than Tommy Friedman might look at this a bit differently.


If we were moving rapidly toward using green energy, we suddenly would have to worry nearly as much about the problems of the Saud monarchy. Or spreading American military bases around in the Middle East and South Asia which inevitably involve intervening in those countries' politics and increasing temptations to use military power in those places. And creates all kinds of opportunities for "blowback".

If we weren't borrowing so much money from China, we would be borrowing it from somewhere else. Welcome to the 20th century. Not to mention the 21st. Also, if we weren't borrowing from China, people like Tommy Friedman and the neoconservatives would be far more likely to be looking for opportunities to start political and military conflicts with China.

If we had that advancing green energy economy, we wouldn't be so entangled in Middle East politics and wouldn't need to worry so much about Iran. Of course, if oil prices were to plunge, Iran could expect far less export income and would probably perceive they had a greater incentive to use nuclear power for their domestic needs to maximize the amount of oil they can export. And we would still have the same risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, if not a greater one. On the other hand, if we weren't so militarily committed in the Middle East, the US would be less inclined to threaten war, which probably would discourage the kind of constant saber-rattling that has probably inhibited rather than promoted a solution to the Iran proliferation problem.

Tags: thomas friedman

Parliamentary parties, structural deficiencies and big money in politics

Jack Balkin has a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion about the Constitutional separation of power in Parliamentary Parties in a Presidential System Balkinization 11/30/2010. Summarized very briefly, he argues that disciplined political parties that vote as a block make our non-parliamentary governmental system dysfunctional, which allows the Chief Executive to be a member of a different party than that of the Congressional majority.

Digby comments on his post in Parliamentary Mismatch Hullabaloo 12/01/2010. John Amato picks up the discussion in Parliamentary practices have destroyed American Politics C&L 12/03/2010.

Balkin's post is challenging because it looks at a longer-term issue - the Constitutional separation of powers that could only be changed by a Constitutional amendment - and at its implications for the next two years. I want to highlight one of his points up front, with which I very much agree:

... one important step would be to change the rules of the Senate and reform the system of filibusters and holds. Senate reform would mean that important legislation would require only a simple majority of both houses to be sent to the President, and executive branch appointments could be filled with only a simple majority of the Senate.

It would be hard to argue that our system presents challenges that parliamentary systems do not. Including the one he highlights, the fact that the Presidency can be held by a different party than holds the Congress. (And the Judiciary for that matter.) And while the Founders weren't assuming the presence of political parties in the sense we know them today, their guiding vision included the assumption that separation of powers recommended was vital to preserving freedom and preventing tyranny. Put a different way, they intended for the federal government's basic structures to be clunky. Part of the structural problem Balkin is addressing is due to the American use of winner-take-all electoral districts, which have tended in practice to lock in a two-party system, which can exist in parliamentary systems, as well.


But parliamentary systems have their own disadvantages. One present-day cautionary example is Israel, a democratic country with a parliamentary system and many parties. Whether Labor, Likud or Kadima wins a plurality, they typically have to include small, religion-based parties to put together a governing coalition. That has made it difficult in practice for any government to pursue peace negotiations, because the defection of one of the small parties can bring down the government. In another example, though not a typical one, the parliamentary system that emerged from our nation-building in Iraq has been trying for months to form a new government after their last national election.

Balkin argues that by becoming ideologically polarized, the Democrats and Republicans are now functioning largely as "parliamentary parties". And he sees that as unworkable:

The American system has long presumed that in periods of divided government, the President will be able to create coalitions with members of both parties in order to pass legislation. This is possible in part because, at least since the Civil War, and until very recently, American political parties have been agglomerations of heterogenous interests, and relatively ideologically diverse. (During the New Deal, for example, northern liberals, Catholics, and blacks coexisted in the same Democratic party as Southern whites). ... Parliamentary parties in most countries, by contrast, tend to be more ideologically coherent and centrally controlled. ...

But parliamentary parties are not well designed for the particular forms of give and take that are generally required in a presidential system. In a presidential system, members of different parties are expected to regularly cross party lines to form coalitions on particular questions (rather than on the formation of a government as a whole). Ideologically coherent and politically polarized parties do not perform these functions particularly well. Indeed, the most recent example of the rise of parliamentary parties in the United States is the party system shortly before the Civil War, in which political compromise increasingly became impossible.

He thinks that the Democratic minority in the new House will be as obstructionist as the Republican minority has been in the outgoing one. And that "is a disaster in the making for the political system in which we live".

I have reservations about his analysis. As he points out, we have had "parliamentary parties", i.e., parties able to enforce consistent discipline on voting in Congress on major issues, in the living memory of anyone alive today, except in recent years, according to Balkin's analysis. And since that's the case, we can't really say based on American experience that disciplined parties are unworkable in this system.

Another reservation is one he articulates in his post: the Republicans are far more disciplined than the Democrats. "Perhaps ironically, given their anti-European rhetoric, the Republicans behave more like a European-style parliamentary party than the Democrats, who still retain more moderates in the House and Senate."

A third reservation is his argument that "there is no reason to think that the Democrats will not eventually adopt many of the same tactics that the Republicans have perfected if, once again, they find themselves out of power." I'd have to say that this flies in the face of much of what we've seen these past two years. I can't improve on Digby's comment on this point. Her "Tip and Ronnie" reference is to the story, one of the favorite anecdotes of our Pod Pundits, that House Democratic Leader Tip O'Neill and President Ronald Reagan used to have huge political fights in public during the day and get together in the evening and have a beer together:

I actually think there is every reason to believe the Democrats will not adopt many of the tactics Republicans have perfected because they are just not temperamentally equipped to do it. I think they will continue to pretend, as the media still does, that the beautiful world of Tip and Ronnie will return if only these awful people would just stop making their congressmen and Senators do things they don't want to do until they are pushed hard by the people to change their ways. At this point they do not have a whole lot to lose by losing --- the revolving door takes very good care of them if they promise not to make too many waves, which is exactly what they hate.

She gets at something Balkin's post ignores, which is that there are good reasons we have different political parties. Thomas Jefferson, the first leader of what evolved into today's Democratic Party, thought it was a matter of deep-rooted human inclinations, in which some people are eager to adapt to the future and "embrace change" (to use a current favorite management buzz-phrase) while others are just stodgy conservatives. Okay, he put it more eloquently than that, but you get the point.

James Madison had a more materialistic explanation in the famous Federalist #10:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. [my emphasis]

Glenn Beck would likely take this as evidence that Madison was a Marxist, but this was written before Karl Marx had even been born, decades before actually, and the word "socialism" hadn't even been invented yet.

The paralyzing debility in our system today is the dominance of money, particularly in campaigns. This problem Balkin essentially dismisses with a resigned sigh: "The system of campaign finance that helps parties control their members seems well entrenched."

But it would be easier to change the campaign finance system than to institute a parliamentary system in the US. And, in any case, recent American experience gives very good reason for thinking - I would say dead certain - that the wide-open, deeply-corrupt approach we have to campaign financing that the Roberts Supreme Court made even worse this year with the Citizens United decision would corrupt a parliamentary system just as it has corrupted our current system. It is that more than what Balkin calls the Presidential system of government that is making our national government "pathological and unsustainable in the long run" and producing "bad and ineffective government that will harm the national interest" and creating "persistent forms of political pathology", to use his description of the problem.

Another key point is one raised by John Kenneth Galbraith in The Culture of Contentment (1992), and one I hope to discuss here in more detail soon. The dynamics of our politics means that that the more affluent voters tend to have a favorable view of government not being able to respond to problems promptly. If you live a gated community with its own security force, to take one example, you don't necessarily care if the federal, state and local governments take action to prevent layoff of public safety personnel. Why should you pay taxes for services that benefit someone else anyway? On a more macro issue, if the weather generally seems tolerable to you, you may just as soon see the government delay action on global climate change indefinitely because, hey, what do you care if some Third World coastal city gets flooded out of existence 50 years from now?

The delay of federal action that results from the institutional dysfunctions that Balkin identifies, in other words, itself often serves perceived class interests. Taking the urgently needed steps now on global climate change might mean that the Koch oil billionaires might have to shell out more money for pollution-control equipment, or won't get to profit from deepwater oil drilling as much as they might want to. A lot of dysfunction in the federal government isn't simply an unfortunate by-product of political developments. To a major extent, it's a conscious goal of the powerful and well-funded Republican Party.

Tags: citizens united decision, democratic party, republican party

Conservative David Brooks and liberal (?!) Ruth Marcus agree: Grandma should eat catfood

Social Security Phaseout seems to be the most popular idea among the Beltway Village. Washington Post's alleged liberal columnist Ruth Marcus took the place of Sleep Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour Friday as David "Bobo" Brooks' discussion partner on the Political Wrap (12/03/2010). Bobo and Ruth both agreed that the Catfood Commission's recommendations are wonderful, i.e., that Social Security should be phased out and Grandma left to live on catfood, if she can afford it. Both agreed that this is the only "adult" thing to do because of the terrible menace of the deficit. Neither mentioned that Social Security does not contribute to the deficit. Bobo quotes Lenin supposedly saying (in some context back in God-knows-when) that the worse things get, the better. Republican Leninism? Or just Bobo babbling?



We're seeing a serious breakdown among the political and media elite. What Robert Reich says at his blog in The Truth About the Federal Budget Deficit That Noone [sic] Is Willing to Tell 12/02/2010 applies to Ruth and Bobo's discussion as to much else:

Rarely before in American history has there been more disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation. Washington is obsessing about the projected federal budget deficit. Everyone else in America is worried about jobs.

Bobo and Ruth both say they've noticed that Democratic base voters - or at least their few media colleagues who reflect those attitudes - are not pleased with President Obama's timidity. But Ruth seems to think that just means all Serious People need to think about the State of the Union message in January, the next landmark dramatic moment in the Village script.

Tags: social security, us economy

A key to a solution in Afghanistan? Or an official daydream?

The Nov-Dec issue of the Army's Military Review features a piece by Lt. Col. Mark Johnson called Reintegration and Reconciliation in Afghanistan: Time to End the Conflict. The title might suggest that the article is arguing its time for NATO to start withdrawing from Afghanistan. But that's not the topic.

Johnson writes about two related programs, one called "reintegration", the other "reconciliation". Reintegration involves lower-and mid-level "Taliban" fighters agreeing to stop fighting for the resistance, going back to their communities and at least passively cooperate with NATO and the Afghan government (referred to in this article by one of those ubiquitous military acronyms, GORoA). Reconciliation involves higher-ranking "Taliban" leaders. Johnson discusses the two in the article as essentially one program.

The article explains how the program is supposed to work and presents it in an optimistic light. But you don't even have to read between the lines to see Johnson's explicit statements about how the effort is underfunded and that confidence in the central "GORoA" isn't great among much of the population. And it requires only a little imagination to wonder whether what is being described is really just a bureaucratic fig leaf on a program for bribing village elders. And when I read things like this, the phrase "wishful thinking" comes to mind:

The Afghan people are tired of conflict and do not really care who provides them opportunity, security, and justice, as long as they can live and raise their children in peace, without fear of being maimed by an insurgent-emplaced roadside bomb or killed in an "escalation of force" incident because they were driving too close to a coalition convoy.

Really? People in Afghanistan don't care whether they are ruled by foreign occupiers from "infidel" countries? I've never been to Afghanistan. But the history of that country just in the last few decades when the US has been actively intervening strongly suggests otherwise.

Tags: afghanistan war

Free speech and disruption of soldiers' funerals (Corrected)

I just came across this op-ed from a couple of weeks ago by Jim Zumwalt, Why protests at funerals should be tolerated Stars and Stripes 11/16/2010.

The issue in question is the protests being staged by the far-right, bitterly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, at soldiers' funerals around the country. In a lawsuit now before the Supreme Court, Albert Snyder v. Fred W. Phelps, Sr., the court is considering whether free speech permits such protests.

I hesitate to comment on a case like this where I have dug have not dug into the details. But what I've thought about this issue all along is that there surely must be a legal way to prevent the actual disruption of funerals, presumably most of which are religious services of some kind. Freedom of speech and assembly also means protection against people disrupting church services or other legally-held events. On the other hand, I never thought that a group, even one with as noxious a message as Phelps' group, could or should be completely prevented from hold a demonstration in the general proximity of a funeral.

Zumwalt's op-ed made me more curious about the specifics of this case. Like many such arguments, he relies on speculation about implications on other kinds of speech, anti-Islam speech in particular.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, radical right

More from Joschka Fischer on what's at stake in the future of the European Union

This is an earlier article from Joschka Fischer than the one I quoted yesterday. But it gives a good reminder that a depression of the kind the world economy seems to have entered can have far-reaching consequences, though he lists some qualitative differences between today's situation and those of the Great Depression of 1929. And he continues (Our Post-Modern Crisis Project Syndicate 05/31/2010):

For all these reasons, the global crisis will not be devastating in the same way as the Great Depression was. Indeed, our current predicament has all of the hallmarks of a "post-modern" crisis. But we need to ask ourselves where and how the energies unleashed by this crisis will be discharged, because there can be no doubt that they will be discharged one way or another. After all, the evidence so far suggests that the crisis is here to stay for a long time, with unforeseen eruptions, such as the recent adversity in Greece and surrounding the euro, as well as inflation, stagnation, and populist rebellion.

Indeed, there are good reasons for believing that the Tea Party movement in the United States, connected as it is with the economic disaster that followed Lehman’s collapse, is one of the channels of the energy released by the crisis. Developments in Greece or Hungary make it easy to imagine failed European states if the EU unravels.

The fact that the current global crisis is a post-modern one does not make it any less dangerous. Post-modern crises entail post-modern risks, resulting in disintegration and implosion of power vacuums, not the danger of classical wars. But, given European governments’ behavior, the urgent question presents itself: Do these governments have any inkling of what is at stake at the table where they sit playing roulette with history? [my emphasis]

Maybe we should be calling this the Postmodern Great Depression.

Tags: european union, recession, joschka fischer

Dean Baker describes the housing bubble and how it hammered consumer demand

Economist Dean Baker shares his calculations of how the housing bubble ended up in the current depression (or Great Recession, if you prefer) in Beating Up On Brad DeLong TPM Cafe 11/28/2010:

The story of the bubble is painful, yet simple. Beginning in the mid-90s nationwide house prices diverged from a 100-year long trend. By the peak of the bubble in 2006, house prices were more than 70 percent above their trend level. This created more than $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth.

This wealth drove the economy in two ways. It had a direct effect in propelling construction, which peaked at 6.2 percent of GDP, about 2.5 percentage points above its post-war average. The bubble wealth also lead to a huge surge in consumption -- through the long-known housing wealth effect. With a wealth effect of 5-7 cents on the dollar, the bubble would have been expected to lead to $400 billion to $560 billion in excess consumption demand.

When the bubble burst, consumption predictably plummeted. Throw in another $6 trillion in lost stock wealth and we get a decline of $600 billion to $800 billion in consumption. (The stock wealth effect is estimated at 3-4 cents on the dollar.) ...

This gets a total loss in annual demand of more than $1.2 trillion. Note that the financial crisis appears nowhere in this story. Exactly what mechanism do we have in the private economy for replacing $1.2 trillion in private demand in a short period of time?

If I read him correctly, his point is that the financial crisis of 2008 may have exacerbated the crisis. But the core of it is the collapse in consumer demand caused by the housing bubble. And I think there's a lot to be said for that view.

Tags: dean baker, us economy

The Villagers are convinced that Social Security Phaseout is a great thing

Michael Hirsh in his analysis 'An Adult Conversation' about Budgets National Journal 12/01/2010 put on display the Beltway Village's completely fatuous obsession with phasing out Social Security via bipartisan harmony, aka, Democrats caving to the Republicans. The Catfood Commission issued a report that hasn't gotten a majority vote, even though its membership was stacked by President Obama so that it leaned heavily to those who support Social Security Phaseout.

There's not a word in Hirsh's analysis about the devastation that Social Security Phaseout would cause. For that matter, he doesn't both to say that Social Security Phaseout is the whole point of the cynical exercise. Hirsh gets all tingly at the bipartisanship:

You could almost forget, sitting there, that those whom Alan Simpson called "the workers of the dark arts" -- the lobbyists, the interest groups, the ideologues -- were waiting to pounce just outside the hearing room, to end this bipartisan "adult conversation." It was all so civil and positive, as if two years of bitter ideological battles over the size and nature of government had never taken place. Even Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., sat somewhat startled as Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Jeb Hensarling of Texas, two leading [rightwing] House Republicans serving on the president's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform -- better known as the deficit commission -- saluted Spratt as an honorable colleague who had moved the budget debate forward. "I wish you'd said it before," said Spratt, the soon-to-depart chairman of the budget committee, to laughter in the room. "We never did sit down and ... search for common ground."

The self-styled "adults" in the Village - who regard Little Tommy Friedman, Age 6, as a wise commentator - all know that God meant for old people to be sick and hungry and get by eating catfood and die early. So for them, gutting Social Security, the highly successful social insurance program without which most of the elderly in the US would be below the poverty level, is an indispensable sign of Seriousness (Village version).


Actually, that last quote from Spratt doesn't indicate a lot of bipartisanship went on. And the Catfood Commission member have failed to come up with anything close to a consensus. That in itself is a victory for Social Security supporters. But they've energized the zombie of Social Security Phaseout even in their failure. The next big test for the Obama Administration will be his State of the Union (SOTU) address in January. The Villagers expect him to be "adult" and offer those nice Republicans Social Security Phaseout in the SOTU in exchange for, well, none of the Republicans yelling out "You lie!" during the speech, or something equally substantial.

Hirsh spins out the Village fantasy on the issue:

Interviewed after unveiling of the commission’s final report – which called for $3.9 trillion in deficit cuts over ten years -- both liberal and conservative members described arriving at a couple of common realizations after eight months of study: one, of just how deep America's fiscal hole was; and two, just how central the issue had become to the concerns of average Americans worried about their children’s futures. "One thing we all learned on this commission is that the problem is much bigger than we thought," said Bruce Reed, the executive director. "Americans went through budget crises of their own over the past two years, and they want us to deal with ours." [my emphasis]

If our star pundits could read an opinion poll, they would know that the deficit is low on the list of public concerns. And that what concern is expressed is shallow.

Gene Lyons described the silliness of the analogy that Bruce Reed uses that - and why it's foolish for Obama and the Democrats to use such talk (Sure, the government is just like your family Salon 11/24/2010):

Democrats have been using this dreadfully misleading metaphor to showcase their "seriousness" to Washington media courtiers for years. Conservatives, of course, always use recessions to try to frighten people into cutting Scrooge McDuck's taxes. (Good times, too: The official rationale for the Bush tax cuts was it'd be imprudent to pay down the debt too fast.)

Remarkably, the public doesn't appear to be buying.

A week or so before Erskine and Simpson volunteered themselves to speak for a commission that hasn't yet voted, CBS News released a poll. What do Americans want the new Congress to focus upon next January? Fifty-six percent cited "economy/jobs." Second was "healthcare" at 14 percent. "Budget deficit/national debt" polled at 6 percent. If my e-mails are any indication, many of those are people who can't distinguish one from the other. [my emphasis]

Michael Hirsh, on the other hand, pats pro-Phaseout Democrats for caving to the Republicans in an "adult" manner on "entitlement reform", the Republicans term for Social Security Phaseout:

Accordingly, some political courage was in evidence. Some Democrats began to gingerly talk about touching their "third rail" -- entitlement reform -- while some Republicans talked about raising more tax revenues by reforming the tax code. "Every member of this commission gets it: This debt is like a cancer," co-chairman Erskine Bowles said afterwards. "There’s no turning back. ... Together I think we have started an adult conversation."

Maybe these "adult" Democrats can strike an "adult" compromise with the nice Republicans: we give you Social Security Phaseout, and you Republicans agree to eliminate the home mortgage interest deduction! Yeah, that will play well for the Democrats in 2012.

Even though the Catfood Commission hasn't even been able to issue a stock bipartisan report to be quickly forgotten, Hirsh sees hope that we can all come together to phase out Social Security. He declares that the Commission report that the Commission itself didn't even endorse passes the all-important Goldilocks test - both "the right" and "the left" criticize it!

Indeed, within hours of the meeting, the attacks began from both sides. Tamara Draut of Demos, a liberal think tank, called the commission members "out of touch" and said their plan "ignores the need for immediate public investments to spur job creation, relies too heavily on discretionary spending cuts, and slashes Social Security at a time when fewer Americans can count on a secure retirement." On the right, Anton Davies of George Mason University called the spending cuts "window dressings," arguing that the commission has proposed only "one-tenth of what we need to balance the budget."

Yet even outside the hearing room one does feel the slow gathering of a consensus, like wisps of humid air before a storm. Among the bellwethers in determining if that consensus ever gathers force will be Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling, both of whom withheld their final votes on the plan but made positive noises that clearly delighted Bowles and Simpson. "I believe this commission has been a success," said Ryan, echoing Bowles' sentiment that "it has helped us move this conversation more to the adult level." Hensarling actually suggested that he’d "like to see this plan come to the floor," albeit likely without his vote. [my emphasis]

In the Bizarro world of the Beltway Village, being criticized by "both sides" is a virtue in itself. here how it works:

Liberal: The sky is blue.

Conservative: No, the sky is yellow.

Pod Pundit: The great Maverick John McCain says the sky is green, and he's being attacked "from both sides." This shows the Maverick's greatness and seriousness, being willing to reach across the aisle and deal with both sides. And he's proposed a reasonable compromise to have Congress officially declare the color of the sky an open question but to condemn calling the sky blue as dishonoring our troops. What a Maverick!

Tags: catfood commission, social security

Joschka Fischer on the future of the euro and the EU

With all the bad signs for the future of economic policy in the US and Europe and the very negative turn in politics that will come with the Republicans have a majority in the House, this was a piece of bad news that still really impressed me with how bad it is.

Joschka Fischer, the former Foreign Minister of Germany (1998-2005) and former head of the Green Party there, has been one of the leading pro-Europe politicians in Germany. That means, he has pushed to strength the European Union as, first of all, an institution to secure democracy and peace. As he explains in Avanti Dilettanti! Project Syndicate 11/30/2010, he now thinks it likely that the euro will not survive the current economic crisis:

The failure of the euro – and thus of the EU and its Common Market – would be the biggest pan-European disaster since 1945. That this outcome is possible – despite protestations to the contrary by all involved – reflects the willful ignorance and lack of imagination of Europe's heads of state and government. Otherwise, they would recognize that the financial crisis has long become a political crisis threatening the EU's very existence, and thus that a permanent crisis-resolution mechanism for debt-distressed members, while clearly needed, requires a permanent political crisis-resolution mechanism in order to succeed. [my emphasis in bold]

This would be a major setback, a seriously big deal, for democracy and peace in Europe. The incentive of becoming part of the European Union has been a major spur for the countries of central and eastern Europe, the Balkans and Turkey during the last two decades to establish stable democratic institutions and secure legal systems.


Fischer is no soothsayer. But he knows the politics of Germany and the EU extremely well. And, ironically, the only way he sees likely to preserve the euro and the forward development of the EU is for the political leaders in Germany and France to take actions that would likely cost them their positions in the next elections:

With the status quo it will be hard for the euro to survive. This permanent political crisis mechanism is, however, nothing less than a well-functioning economic union. The alternatives are therefore either forging ahead with real economic union and further EU integration, or regressing to a mere free-trade area and the renationalization of Europe. ...

[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel will have to explain the inconvenient truth to Germans that the price of having the euro is inevitably a transfer and economic union, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will have to make clear to the French the price of a real economic and stability union. The political risk for both of them will be anything but small, but the alternative – the failure of the euro – is unacceptable for both countries.

Any eurozone political leader whose primary consideration now is re-election will face certain failure by meeting this historical challenge. But European priorities have to be the primary concern in this crisis – even at the price of losing office. On the other hand, taking this historic initiative would, relative to fainthearted tactical maneuvering, substantially increase politicians' chances of re-election later.

What Germany and France are facing in this situation is the dilemma that John Kenneth Galbraith discussed in the US context in The Culture of Contentment (1992): more affluent voters and the politicians who represent them tend to have a heavy preference for avoiding solutions to well-known but longer-term problems that involved potentially inconvenient short-term measures. To preserve the euro and the EU, the taxpayers of France and Germany would have to contribute even more than they are already doing to promoting employment and avoiding deflation in countries that are the hardest-hit, like Greece and Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

The pressures working against the survival of the euro and therefore of the EU are partially described by Paul Krugman in The Spanish Prisoner New York Times 11/28/2010 and Eating the Irish New York Times 11/25/2010.

The potential costs to democracy of this current depression in both the US and Europe are serious. And will be made more serious by the Herbert Hoover economic ideas currently ascendant in both.

Tags: european union,, joschka fischer

Offshore drilling: the Obama Administration gets it right! At least on Wednesday

The Obama Administration announced Wednesday: Atlantic, eastern Gulf closed to offshore drilling till 2017 McClatchy News 12/01/2010.

I'm rushing to blog some praise for the Administration on this. Because the way things have been going, it won't surprise me if they bargain this away or just back off from it completely by Friday.

But for the moment, let's give the President and his normally oil-industry-flunky Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar credit for doing something right! It even applies to parts of the Gulf of Mexico.

Tags: obama administration, offshore drilling

Economic policymaking in the grip of some really bad ideas

Sometimes bad ideas just take over. In economics and politics, policy ideas notoriously show the effects of what the very comfortable think will benefit them. But sometimes even the cynically self-interested can talk themselves into believing their own hype. And for whatever combination of reasons, something like magical thinking seems to be playing a large part in the formulation of current economic policy, not just in the Obama White House but in Germany, Japan and other major economies, as well.

Economist Brad DeLong joins the laments that Paul Krugman has been shouting in his columns and blog posts about the return of Herbert Hoover economics, even though there is overwhelming empirical evidence that it makes recessions much worse than that would be in comparison to an aggressive policy of fiscal stimulation by the federal government.

In The Retreat of Macroeconomic Policy Project Syndicate 11/25/2010:

I would confidently lecture only three short years ago that the days when governments could stand back and let the business cycle wreak havoc were over in the rich world. No such government today, I said, could or would tolerate any prolonged period in which the unemployment rate was kissing 10% and inflation was quiescent without doing something major about it.

I was wrong. That is precisely what is happening.

How did we get here? How can the US have a large political movement – the Tea Party – pushing for the hardest of hard-money policies when there is no hard-money lobby with its wealth on the line? How is it that the unemployed, and those who fear they might be the next wave of unemployed, do not register to vote? Why are politicians not terrified of their displeasure?

Economic questions abound, too. ... Why is the idea, common to John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher, and Walter Bagehot alike, that governments must intervene strategically in financial markets to stabilize economy-wide spending now a contested one?

It is now clear that the right-wing opponents to the Obama administration’s policies are not objecting to the use of fiscal measures to stabilize nominal spending. They are, instead, objecting to the very idea that government should try to serve a stabilizing macroeconomic role. [my emphasis]

David Dowd in an essay on the economists Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) talks about how Adam Smith in his classical economics did not assume that the operations of individual businesses were somehow inherently benign or that individual businesspeople were virtuous as a rule:

Nonetheless, Smith advocated a political economy absent of institutional controls of State or church over businessmen. Instead, and to transform the particular 'private vice' of businessmen into social well-being, Smith famously depended on 'the invisible hand' of market competition. ...

As the eighteenth century ended, such a hope could be seen as realistic; as Veblen was writing The Theory of Business Enterprise [1904] harsher realities had prevailed. Half a century later, when Galbraith wrote American Capitalism [1952], an economist who still believed in the benign rule of market competition as providing economic safeguards had to be bewitched by ideology, not responding to facts. [my emphasis]

(From "The virtues of their defects and the defects of their virtues: Reflections on John Kenneth Galbraith and Thorstein Veblen" in Michael Keaney, ed. Economist with a Public Purpose : Essays in Honour of John Kenneth Galbraith [2000].)

The understanding of economics for many of our policymakers, including leading figures of the Democratic Party including the President, seems to have largely reverted to an earlier age, as DeLong laments in his post. Neoliberal dogma, which is essentially Herbert Hoover economics for the age of "globalization", is prevailing over pragmatic interests. At least over the interests of the majority of the people.

Tags: us economy

A mild evaluation of the latest Wikileaks dump from Timothy Garton Ash

Our Pod Pundits are no doubt disappointed that the Wikileaks cables aren't brimming with sex and current "horserace" political speculation. So much of our proud [gulp!] American press is bitching and moaning about how that naughty Wikileaks is publishing boring news about war and nuclear proliferation and international laws and stuff. Booo-ooooring. By Beltway Village standards, anyway.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash (US embassy cables: A banquet of secrets Guardian 11/28/2010) discusses some of the ways in which the current batch of documents, which will take even experts a while to sift through, is a boon for people who actually may care about the information and the major topics they touch:

The historian usually has to wait 20 or 30 years to find such treasures. Here, the most recent dispatches are little more than 30 weeks old. And what a trove this is. It contains more than 250,000 documents. Most of those I have seen, on my dives into a vast ocean, are well over 1,000 words long. If my sample is at all representative, there must be a total at least 250m words – and perhaps up to half a billion. As all archival researchers know, there is a special quality of understanding that comes from exposure to a large body of sources, be it a novelist's letters, a ministry's papers or diplomatic traffic – even though much of the material is routine. With prolonged immersion, you get a deep sense of priorities, character, thought patterns.

I'm trying to imagine CNN's Gloria Borger trying to get out a line like that last sentence. I picture her sputtering, mouth hanging open in blank outrage at who-knows-what, saying, "Priorities? Thought patterns? Who cares? 'Character', yeah, that's the stuff. What sort of catty things are in there of people insulting Hillary Clinton?"


Don't get me wrong. There's definite entertainment value in seeing fatuous pundits saying impossibly dumb things and reacting in inexplicable ways to trivia. The problem is that this is what US television passes off as "news".

Garton Ash's short evaluation in that piece is that the most recent batch of leaks shows American diplomats in a generally good light, looking competent and perceptive. He does repeat the stock official arguments about how confidentiality in diplomatic communications is important, etc. But he also makes this important observation:

Most of this material is medium-and high-level political reporting from around the world, plus instructions from Washington. It is important to remember that we do not have the top categories of secrecy here – Nodis (president, secretary of state, head of mission only), Roger, Exdis, Docklamp (between defence attaches and the defense intelligence agency only). What we have is still a royal banquet.

As examples of quality work by US diplomats, he offers the following:

As readers will discover, the man who is now America's top-ranking professional diplomat, William Burns, contributed from Russia a highly entertaining account – almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh – of a wild Dagestani wedding attended by the gangsterish president of Chechnya, who danced clumsily "with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans".

Burns's analyses of Russian politics are astute. So are his colleagues' reports from Berlin, Paris and London. In a 2008 dispatch from Berlin, the then grand coalition government of Christian and Social democrats in Germany is compared to "the proverbial couple that hated each other but stay together for the sake of the children". From Paris, there is a hilarious pen portrait of the antics of Nicolas (and Carla) Sarkozy. And we the British would do well to take a look at our neurotic obsession with our so-called "special relationship" with Washington, as it appears in the unsentimental mirror of confidential dispatches from the US embassy in London. ...

More broadly, what you see in this diplomatic traffic is how security and counter-terrorism concerns have pervaded every aspect of American foreign policy. But you also see how serious the threats are, and how little the west is in control of them. There is devastating stuff here about the Iranian nuclear programme and the extent not merely of Israeli but Arab fears of it ("cut off the head of the snake", a Saudi ambassador reports his king urging the Americans); the vulnerability of Pakistan's nuclear stockpile to rogue Islamists; anarchy and corruption on a massive scale in Afghanistan; al-Qaida in Yemen; and tales of the power of the Russian mafia gangs, that make John le Carré's latest novel look almost understated. [my emphasis]

The predominance of military and terrorism concerns is the immediate legacy of the Cheney-Bush Administration, whose dubious legacy in those areas the Obama Administration is largely continuing. But it's also evidence of the corrosive, militarizing effects of Andrew Bacevich's version of "the Long War", which includes the Cold War and the interim between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, as well as the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) that continues today though the Obama Administration has retired that particular label and acronym.

Tags: wikileaks