The Blue Voice

With another EU summit coming, Angie demands Post-Democracy 2.0 for Greece

2012-01-28T16:46:00.003-05:00

The euro, the EU and democracy in Europe will have another dramatic day on Monday at the next EU summit. Angie wants to have agreement coming out of that for all EU countries participating, not just the eurozone, to permanently commit to austerity economics, not only in the current depression but basically forevermore.

This can only go on for so long. What can't work will eventually stop working.

And the sovereign debt crisis goes on, in an acute way. Angie's austerity policies can only make the immediate sovereign debt problem worse.

Economist Nouriel Roubini sees Portugal slipping into a Greek state of crisis, probably needing a writedown of the debt. (Roubini prophezeit Portugal griechische Tragödie Financial Times Deutschland [FTD] 28.01.2012) Portugal's interest rates on their bonds have spiked to clearly unsustainable levels. The Portuguese Prime Minister, who not long ago suggested that unemployed Portuguese citizens should consider emigrating to Brazil or Angola, seems to be hiding his head in the side, perhaps for fear of Angie's wrath.

Speaking at Davos, Roubini suggested that Greece might be leaving the eurozone within a year.

And it turns out that the Princess Angela von Merkel may be ready to impose Post Democracy 2.0 in Greece. According to the Financial Times, Angie wants to basically install a financial dictator representing the euro group (read: Germany) to have final say over the Greek budget and expenditures, with the power to override the democratically-elected government. (Though the current debt-collectors' Post Democratic 1.0 regime in Athens previously imposed by Angie is democratic only in a formal sense.) Peter Spiegel and Kerin Hope report in Call for EU to control Greek budget 01/27/2012:

The German government wants Greece to cede sovereignty over tax and spending decisions to a eurozone “budget commissioner” to secure a second €130bn bail-out, according to a copy of the proposal obtained by the Financial Times.

In what would amount to an extraordinary extension of European Union control over a member state, the new commissioner would have the power to veto budget decisions taken by the Greek government if they were not in line with targets set by international lenders. The new administrator, appointed by other eurozone finance ministers, would take responsibility for overseeing "all major blocks of expenditure" by the Greek government.

"Budget consolidation has to be put under a strict steering and control system," the proposal reads. "Given the disappointing compliance so far, Greece has to accept shifting budgetary sovereignty to the European level for a certain period of time."

Angie has lost it. "It" in this case being her sense for democracy.

And since it is the rightwing parties in Europe who have been working nationalist themes for years in opposition to the European Union, this hands them one more political advantage. What Europe, the European Union and the eurozone need more than anything right now is to get Angie out of the ~~European~~ German Chancellorship. (That was an actual Freudian typo on my part there.)

This is obscene:

Athens would also be forced to adopt a law permanently committing state revenues to debt service "first and foremost". ...

Greek voters have already expressed anger about EU attempts to assist in implementing reforms. Horst Reichenbach, the German national who heads an EU task force to assist Greece, was depicted in German military garb by leftwing Greek newspapers when he arrived last year.

Herr Reichenbach received the un-fond nickname in Greece of Third Reichenbach.

And despite IMF General Manager's criticism of Angie's austerity policies this past week, the IMF is joining with Angie to further impoverish Greece and the Greeks:

Even before Germany circulated its proposal, the EU and International Monetary Fund had presented a 10-page list of "prior actions" Athens must implement before the new bail-out is agreed. According to a copy of the document, also obtained by the FT, Greece must cut an additional 150,000 government jobs within three years.

Not so long ago, it was conventional wisdom that a depression could be a danger to democracy. And here is Germany proposing to set aside another major chunk of the superficial appearance of democracy in Greece for the greed of the banksters. This is just awful. And this to override a government that Angie insisted on installing just a few weeks ago for the main purpose of collecting debts for the banks.

From Angie's proposal itself:

Greece has to legally commit itself to giving absolute priority to future debt service. This commitment has to be legally enshrined by the Greek Parliament. State revenues are to be used first and foremost for debt service, only any remaining revenue may be used to finance primary expenditure. This will reassure public and private creditors that the Hellenic Republic will honour its comittments [sic] after PSI and will positively influence market access. De facto elimination of the possibility of a default would make the threat of a non-disbursement of a GRC II tranche much more credible. If a future tranche is not disbursed, Greece can not threaten its lenders with a default, but will instead have to accept further cuts in primary expenditures as the only possible consequence of any non-disbursement. [my emphasis]

Hungary is not the only country in Europe in which democracy is under immediate threat.

Tags: angela merkel, eu, european union, greece, post-democracy

Hopeful sign from the Obama Administration on financial crime

2012-01-28T15:40:00.001-05:00

Even the chronically skeptical Matt Taibbi is hopeful about recent developments in the Obama Administration's approach to financial crime. Matt Taibbi ponders whether Obama's embrace of populist rhetoric is already impacting Wall Street Countdown with Keith Olbermann YouTube date 01/28/2012:

Tags: matt taibbi, obama administration

More on Obama and the SOTU

2012-01-27T21:44:00.001-05:00

I don't think either Newt or Willard Romney is Obama's toughest opponent in the 2012 election. It's Angie.

If German Chancellor Angela Merkel keeps successfully pushing through her austerity policies onto other eurozone lands, it's going to make the European recession worse and very possibly set off a new round of financial crises. Those developments could worsen economic conditions in the US, something Obama and the Democrats don't need politically.

This is all the more reason for them to position themselves as advocates for the 99% and as rock-solid defenders of Social Security and Medicare.

Obama's actions have all too often fallen far short of his progressive rhetoric. But it's also true that, after four years and counting of the current economic depression, the national political narrative has clearly shifted in a more progressive direction, focusing on the very real problems of maldistribution of wealth and the serious economic problems affecting millions. Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address this week certainly reflected that.

As Katrina vanden Heuvel observes in The Occupy Effect The Nation 01/26/2012:

A few short months ago, the corporate media and inside-the-Beltway chatter was all debt and deficits, all the time.

Occupy changed that. It reset the media narrative so it’s more aligned with the true crises of our times—income inequality, downward mobility and economic fairness. It’s also renewed attention to corporate accountability and the corrosive role of corporate money in politics.

We can also question why we're three years into this Administration and still don't have major prosecutions of financial criminals over the actions that brought on the financial crash of 2008. But the fact that a poor settlement that the Justice Department was ready to close with major banks over mortgage issues has been delayed is in itself important. I'm willing to have some hope that the new financial crimes unit will do some real good. Digby writes about Eric Schneidermann and the task force (Ring fencing Hallabaloo 01/26/2012):

The politics suggest to me that while the administration may indeed be trying to "ring-fence" Schneidermann [into being more open to a permissive settlement for the banks], the real purpose is the glaringly obvious: to cover for their failure to settle this. (Isn't the truism in DC that when you can't get something done, form a commission?)The power in that scenario lies exactly where it did before the task force was announced --- with the state AGs, who as far as I can tell are more empowered not less. ... I'm willing to suspend judgment for a while to see if that means Schneidermann is actually a corrupt chameleon who's taken progressives for a wild ride through his entire career in order to sell himself to the highest bidder or whether he believes he can affect this from his perch on the task force.

I don't see this as a sky is falling sort of thing just yet. There are very good reasons to be skeptical and you'd have to be a fool to buy into the premise at face value. But there are worse things than temporarily tabling a bad deal. And there actually are politicians in the world whose self-serving ambitions are dependent upon being perceived as crusaders rather than players. Everything I know of Schneiderman suggests that the former is the path he's chosen.

I guess, for me, it comes down to this: I don't think the administration is nearly as slick as people think and I don't believe that in an election year like this one they will go out of their way to make enemies of their political allies. Everything suggests that they are trying to make at least a rhetorical pivot to a populist(ish) campaign to face the out-of-touch fop, Mitt Romney. It is what it appears to be: plastering lipstick on this pig of a negotiation and pretending they have a path to a cheap settlement in order to keep both the banks and the people on the hook through the election. They are not working with a strong hand.

And she's very right in saying that progressives don't have to back a third party to make a real, constructive impact in this situation: "Even if activists eventually vote for the president, they can cause huge headaches for the campaign in an election year, particularly in individual states. This is when they have maximum leverage and they should use it."

Then there's the military part of his speech, which contained both the strengths and the problems of his foreign policy. Threatening war against Iran is not a good thing.

But he also put on display the problems of the idolatry toward the military that has become a chronic condition of American politics. Our soldiers deserve praise for serving and for doing their jobs well. But all our soldiers and generals are subject to the law and to the critical judgment of the citizenry and their elected representatives.

Charlie Pierce wrote, "Some of the president's base is not going to be happy with a lot of the speech; I'm not overjoyed with the saber-rattling over Iran, or the notion that the American political system is basically supposed to be Seal Team 6." (The State of the Union and a Would-Be 99% Nominee Esquire Politics Blog 01/25/2012) The passage to which he referred was toward the end, where Obama held up the Seals mission that killed Osama bin Laden as some kind of general model for conduct in America: "All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves."

Obama was probably hoping for not just a feel-good vibe but also making another pitch in his endless and hopeless case to appeal to Republicans and conservatives who hate his guts, even when they actually agree with much of his foreign and military policy, including especially the most dubious parts like targeted assassinations.

Laura Flanders (Not A Peep About President's Praise for War CommonDreams.org 01/26/2012) points to another complication of holding up soldiers and the military as a general model of good citizenship in civilian society:

Speaking of the troops, President Obama began: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations."

Post-show pundits on cable news praised the president's comfort with his commander-in-chief role but none saw fit to mention recent news -- of marines urinating on Afghan corpses, say, or Staff Sgt Wuterich walking free after participating in the killing of 24 unarmed men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq. Accompanying Obama's next phrase, "Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example," no one thus far has played vile viral video. The critics have been kind.

And even if there hadn't been so many reports of these kinds of crimes, the whole notion that politics or Congress or the country in general should operate like a small military combat team acting under orders and executing a very specific mission.

This is Obama's "post-partisan" side talking. And his metaphor illustrates how unrealistic that perspective is. We have political differences because people have different interests and different points of view. Some of the worst decisions in American history, like the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, suffered because of too little debate and discussion and disagreement, not from too much.

It's a very inappropriate metaphor for the proper function of democracy.

Finally, Robert Scheer has a good column on the neoliberal assumptions showing in Obama's SOTU, Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton TruthDig 01/26/2012. I plan to comment on it more in a later post.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama

Europa special(s), including Umberto Eco

2012-01-27T00:59:00.001-05:00

Six European newspapers published special sections on Europe, i.e., the European Union. It's notable that the occasion for this special coordinated event is an interview with Angie on the European crisis.

The six are:

Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland)

The Guardian (UK)

Le Monde (France)

El País (Spain)

La Stampa (Italy)

Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)

The Guardian has this piece: Umberto Eco: 'It's culture, not war, that cements European identity' 01/26/2012. This is an interesting observation:

Asked to describe European identity in 2012, Eco says it is widespread but "shallow". "I am using an English word that is not the same as the Italian word superficiale, but which is somewhere between 'surface' and 'deep'. We must change this, before the crisis strips it [Europe] of everything.

"The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate."

Eco's wife is German, he's Italian. He speaks from experience.

I also found this observation of his intriguing:

"... Or does the problem [of European identity] go back to God - the fact that the United States becomes ever more religious as Europe becomes even less religious?

"That's the way it is. Back when Pope Wojtyla was still alive, there was much discussion on whether they should accept the European constitution and the continent's Christian roots. Secular people predominated and they did nothing about it. The church protested. There was however a third way, more difficult, but one that would give us strength today.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.

That is precisely how I see its future. As for religion: be careful. Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to supersitition [sic]. And many who are non-practising still carry around a little saint card with a picture of Padre Pio in their wallets!"

Padre Pio was one of Pope John Paul II's more controversial canonizations, a guy who promoted a notably superstitious version of Catholicism.

Tags: angela merkel, european union

Dems to aggressively wrong-foot Republicans?

2012-01-25T17:06:00.002-05:00

After the experience of the last three years, this is a bit difficult to imagine. But if it does happen, belief in miracles is likely to surge among Democratic base voters: Brian Beutler, Senate Democrats Plan To Put Republicans On The Wrong Side Of The Middle Class TPM 01/25/2012

Senate Democrats are preparing an aggressive legislative agenda to complement the vision President Obama outlined in his State of the Union Address. The goal is to test the idea that the public supports an agenda of aggressive federal action on behalf of the middle class, and that Republicans are locked in a pattern of reactionary opposition, even to popular policies.

The push is premised on the notion that the country has turned the corner on the fights over deficits and the size of government, and that keeping issues of equity and opportunity for the middle class at the center of the national debate will redound to Democrats' political benefit, either by breaking the GOP or by putting them on the wrong side of public opinion.

One of my Facebook friends said that she kept having the feeling while watching Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday, "where have you been the past three years?". And that's kind of my reaction to this.

But Harry Reid showed on abolishing "don't ask, don't tell" and on his push for the Dream Act that he can actually do this well. So I hope they're serious about this.

One of the big political faults of the Obama Administration that caused political problems for him time after time is that he tried to avoid doing just this: going for a full Democratic proposal and seriously fight for, knowing that might lose, or that it could wind up with a compromise that didn't give the Republicans 95% of what they wanted on the deal. The Republicans' willingness to fight and lose on issues important to their narrative and messaging has been a big advantage for them.

Although the part I'm bolding in the following gave me a quick sinking feeling in my stomach:

Congress will first have to clear its plate of the payroll tax cut issue, and other key measures that expire at the end of February. But after that Senate Democrats plan a relentless push on issues with overwhelming public support, knowing full well Republicans have left themselves little space to work with Democrats, and lack the leverage or the positive agenda they'd need to change the subject.

But the payroll tax reduction extension - which has its own problems as policy but those won't be at issue in that fight - itself will be an important moment. The Republicans are almost certain to play chicken with Obama and the Dems over it like they recently did. And if he winds up stumbling along trying various compromise proposals the Reps will inevitably reject, he'll damage his own and the Democrats' messaging yet again before they get to the "after that".

But if they can dodge that bullet - a big if - this sounds right to me:

"We intend to test this theory out by pursuing major chunks of the President's middle class agenda. We’re going to push serious proposals to help create middle class jobs. We're going to defend Medicare. And we will pursue tax reform that makes sense for the middle class," [Sen. Chuck] Schumer said.

Go for it, Dems!

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, democratic party

Obama's SOTU speech and the inside-outside progressive movement

2012-01-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

Pundits will have lots of fun dissecting Obama's Tuesday SOTU speech. The Washington Post has the prepared transcript posted.

The most significant thing about it to me is that it represents the results of the inside-outside effects of the current progressive movement on the Democratic policy. Obama's critical posture toward one-percenters who export American jobs and law-breaking banksters is a result of the Occupy movement. They really did change the political narrative of the mainstream. It's not that Occupy came out of the blue. But they caught the imagination of enough of the public three years into this depression to resonate widely with popular frustration and anger toward the 1% and their destructive misdeeds.

As a campaign speech, it sounds good. Howie Klein, who's not in the habit of being overly generous to the President's partisanship, tweeted, "I bet every Democrat running for Congress in November is feeling pretty good right now. Republicans must want to kill themselves." (I can't see in Twitter's current configuration how to link to an individual tweet.)

Since voters generally see Presidential elections as a binomial choice between the Democratic candidate and the Republican, Obama's framing in the SOTU, this seems to me to be a decent way for Obama to position himself distinctly on the pro-labor, pro-consumer, pro-99% of the binomial divide. I found his description of the bankruptcy and reconstruction of General Motors to be very effective in that regard. I've always seen that as one of his most sensible and progressive measures, and one which presented a clear contrast to the Republicans, who generally wanted to let GM collapse completely in order to weaken the United Auto Workers union.

On the tactical aspect, Democrats do have reason to be concerned about Obama's post-partisan posturing, which has him pepper-spraying his own most impressive presentations that draw a sharp contrast to the Republicans. For instance, he formulated the event that damaged him greatly in the eyes of independents because of his compromising this way: "The greatest blow to confidence in our economy last year didn't come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco?"

This is classic Obama bipartisanship talk: "Washington" is the problem, not the fact that the Republicans are a wrecker party running a strategy of fundamental opposition and obstructionism to Obama's main domestic agenda.

None of the stream of tweets I saw during the speech called out this line, though: "As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors." Why, why, why would Obama or any Democrat think that cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits is good politics? He's referring to the part of "that fiasco" in which the Administration offered the Republicans a deal involving cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. He may get lucky and have the punditocracy ignore it. But that is bad, bad politics and terrible policy. Bernie Sanders did pick up on it and said clearly it was a bad idea on MSNBC afterwards.

I would also note that the policies Obama did specify were largely the standard "left" version of the neoliberal menu that Jamie Galbraith described in 1996 which avoids macroeconomic policy aimed specifically at creating jobs, instead relying on more passive supply-side and so-called business friendly policies: tax cuts to reward desired behavior, education and training, "infrastructure" justified for its benefits for private business, subsidies for emerging technologies not yet developed to the point that private companies can make bundles of money on them.

And emphasizing how he's supposedly cut regulations and opening up more deep-sea oil drilling plays very much to the Republican master narrative on government and the economy. He even dredged up the basically phony Republican point about regulations on milk spills.

And he did threaten war against Iran: "America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal." It's awful policy, though given the current state of politics in which the main criticism of US interventionism that is part of the Presidential campaign is the segregationist-Bircher crackpot Papa Doc Paul, it's probably good politics to defend against the inevitable Republican charges that he's "weak" and "soft" on foreign policy.

War is not a good thing.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, state of the union 2012

Ryan Lizza and "the Obama memos"

2012-01-24T13:30:00.001-05:00

Ryan Lizza's The Obama Memos: The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency New Yorker 01/30/2012 is the kind of insider-baseball story that our punditocracy loves.

And it's an interesting story in its own right. Not least because it gives us a sense of the White House's preferred pitch to the Democratic base.

The pitch isn't too inspiring, though. There's an awful lot of gee, what can a President get done anyway? They (or just Rizza?) oddly invoke Harry Truman as a witness to that fact:

Obama was learning the same lesson of many previous occupants of the Oval Office: he didn’t have the power that one might think he had. Harry Truman, one in a long line of Commanders-in-Chief frustrated by the limits of the office, once complained that the President "has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues. ... The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."

Ironically, what the Truman quote conveys is that Truman was a President who put a great deal of effort into "flattering, kissing and kicking people" to get his proposals passed.

And in the famous give-'em-hell election of 1948, Truman used the Presidential campaign to aggressively blame the Republicans for their obstructionism. The White House operatives who talked to Lizza may be trying to convey that Obama now realizes he has to do that. But I'll believe it when I see it.

The Obama team's version of the Truman strategy so far, and I believe we see it repeated in this article, is more along the lines of, "Golly heck, we thought the Republicans were going to be all bipartisan and helpful and stuff. And, shoot, it's not our fault that they weren't quite like that. Who could have guessed?" Not exactly the Truman pitch.

This following version of the gee-what-can-a-President-do argument I find particularly silly. Already by the end of 2009, Obama was preparing to strike a more conservative note in 2010. Lizza writes:

Axelrod and other Obama political advisers saw anti-Keynesian rhetoric as a political necessity. They believed it was better to channel the anti-government winds than to fight them. As much as it enraged Romer and outside economists, the White House was on to something. A President's ability to change public opinion through rhetoric is extremely limited. George Edwards, after studying the successes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, concluded that their communications skills contributed almost nothing to their legislative victories. According to his study, "Presidents cannot reliably persuade the public to support their policies” and “are unlikely to change public opinion." [my emphasis]

Wow, that's good to know. That means the Iraq War never happened. After all, it was a wild and totally unnecessary idea, and President Bush had only "extremely limited" ability to sway public opinion!

I don't know which is sillier. That the White House would suggest such a thing (if they did), or that Lizza would write it down as though it's an undisputed social science fact. What it is, is a laughable excuse. The George Edwards to whom he refers is the author of On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (2003). His argument sounds very much like an academic attempt at originality that failed. He's reduced in the book to making arguments like this to sustain his conclusion:

Presidents, even those skilled in the rhetorical arts, are unlikely to be directors of change, reshaping the political landscape to pave the way for change. Instead, they are facilitators, whose greatest skill is recognizing and exploiting opportunities for change in their environment. Being a facilitator rather than a director of change has advantages, however. Following rather than molding public opinion makes presidents and their staffs attuned to how issues resonate with the public and thus the potential for exploiting public support to bring about change. [my emphasis]

In a formulation like this, it's hard to see any substantive difference between a President being a facilitator rather than a director of public opinion change. But even with this argument, the candidate who campaigned for Change in 2008 should presumably have been a great position for "for exploiting public support to bring about change." As Christine Lagarde said in her Berlin speech this week, quoting Hippocrates, "Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity." Opportunities pass, and spending three years hoping for a conversion of the Republican Party to bipartisanship on domestic issues was a tremendous waste of opportunity.

In fact, Edwards even makes the case that a President normally has maximum opportunity to be a change facilitator in the early part of a Presidency when the Presidential party has a solid majority in Congress. So even Edwards' flawed conclusions would suggest that Obama should have made a maximum push for his programs at the first of his Presidency. And maybe he did. Maybe he pushed for all he really wanted.

Edwards' argument that Presidents can't further their legislative agenda through a public communications strategy is also heavily based on the ideal of bipartisan compromise. Aggressive public messaging could make the other side angry and make them less likely to compromise and so endangers the President's agenda. Again: Bush, Iraq War.

Lizza, writing about 2009 after the initial stimulus was passed, reports:

Through the rest of 2009, as the anti-government Tea Party movement gathered strength, and conservative voters began to speak of creeping American socialism, Obama’s aides quarrelled over how the President should respond. [Economic adviser Christina] Romer wanted him to press the Keynesian case for his policies—to defend the proposition of increased government spending to fight the recession. Orszag argued that he needed more support from Washington’s deficit hawks, and urged him to create a deficit commission, partly because "it can provide fiscal credibility during a period in which it is unlikely we would succeed in enacting legislation."

It presented Obama with a common Presidential dilemma: Should he use the White House bully pulpit to change minds or should he accept popular opinion? He chose the latter. In his speeches, he began saying, "Americans are making hard choices in their budgets. We’ve got to tighten our belts in Washington, as well." Romer fought to get such lines removed from his speeches, arguing that it was “exactly the wrong policy." She thought the President should emphasize that the government would seek to use taxpayer money wisely, and leave it at that. Instead, he seemed to be accepting the Republican case against stimulus and for austerity. She thought he was losing faith in Keynesianism itself. [my emphasis]

Rizza reports it as a communication strategy. On that score, Romer was very right. Accepting the facile analogy of the federal budgets to family budgets - how many families have their own currency, to name just one of the absurdities of such a comparison - Obama conceded and generally promoting austerity notions that went along with it mainly reinforced the Republicans' push to limit economic growth and undermine Social Security and Medicare.

I also don't believe that it was just a communication strategy. The last three years have given us a lot of evidence that Obama, like way too many Democrats in Congress, actually worry seriously about deficits. The Republicans claim to, especially when there's a Democratic President in office. But I'll believe that there may be a Republican somewhere that actually cares about the deficit when I see Republicans in Congress during a Republican Administration insist on raising taxes for the wealthiest Americans in order to fund the increases in military spending they always demand.

It seems more likely that Obama say the situation in early 2009 as an emergency requiring extraordinary measures that normally were undesirable. To the extent he believes in affirmative government at all, it seems to be limited to the standard, timid neoliberal approach of the New Keynesians in the 1990s: do education and training, build infrastructure in the name of making the private sector more "competitive" in the world, subsidize developing technologies that are not far enough along for private companies to make a bundle off them yet.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama

Christine vs. Angie

2012-01-23T12:51:00.001-05:00

You can't say women are running the global economy these days. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde are certainly two key players in international finance right now.

Lagarde comes down pretty hard on Merkel's "ordoliberal" austerity policies in her message Global Challenges in 2012 (prepared remarks) 01/23/2012.

One of my former professors always made a reference to "my good friend so-and-so" if he was about to rake that particular "good friend" across the coals. Legarde opens with a reference to "my good and highly-respected friends Chancellor Merkel and Minister Schäuble", so you know it's going to be bad.

This presentation takes off from IMF findings that will be released Tuesday which, in Lagarde's words, "will lower growth forecasts for most parts of the world. Even these lower forecasts assume a constructive policy path that is by no means assured."

And she gives a sobering reminder that not so long ago would have seemed commonplace, that a depression can really screw a lot of things up. But in our real existing depression, our ruling elites in Europe and the US seem to have forgotten that to an astonishing extent, to a 1914-level-of-dysfunction extent:

Yet before we indulge in yet another bout of collective pessimism, which is becoming something of a global sport, let me ask a simple question—why did 2011 turn out so badly?

I would argue that it was not because of any fresh wound to the global economy. No, it was driven instead by a lack of a collective determination to reach a cooperative solution. We saw many false starts and half measures in 2011 — in Europe, but also, for instance, in the United States with its debt ceiling debacle.

Put simply, policymakers let an old wound fester, and in doing so made the situation worse.

Looking at it from this perspective, 2012 must be a year of healing. But as Hippocrates put it long ago: "Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity".

And today, it has to be an opportunity of our making. Otherwise, we could easily slide into a "1930s moment". A moment where trust and cooperation break down and countries turn inward. A moment, ultimately, leading to a downward spiral that could engulf the entire world.

Now when an IMF head starts talking 1930s gloom-and-doom, my first instinct is to think, oh, here comes a pitch for deregulation and letting banksters run wild.

But that's not what Legrande does here. She of the creation of the the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and its upcoming successor the European Stability Mechanism (the ESM), "only two years ago, this was heresy". (Yes, by the time we all learn the initials EFSF, they'll change to ESM.) Her comments are made in a fusion of diplomat-speak and bankerese. But she is encouraging policies that are still considered heretical by Angie and and the German banking Establishment.

She argues for expansionary budget and spending policies in the better-off countries to stimulate the economies of the so-called periphery like Greece and Spain; boosting the resources of the EFSF and folding it more quickly than planned into the ESM; addressing the problem of bank undercapitalization head-on; and, the creation of eurobonds or their functional equivalent. She observes that Europe "is at the epicenter of the current crisis and thus key to the global outlook."

She also pushes the Obama Administration for more mortgage relief, though she tosses in a bit of the tired and misguided conventional wisdom about bringing down the public debt. But in the section on the US, she makes this statement that also seems to be a whack at Herbert Hoover economics in Europe:

This brings me to another worrisome tendency in many quarters—to view fiscal policy as a morality play between profligacy and responsibility. Political and market commentary is too often cast in these terms. Yet markets themselves have been schizophrenic about fiscal tightening, at times rewarding it with lower interest rates, and at other times recoiling at the implied growth slowdown and pushing up interest rates.

That's exactly the perspective of Angie's "ordoliberalism", and it has promoted a retrograde, nationalist outlook in Germany toward other European countries.

And I wish this were the actual perspective of the current American President:

One more point: We must not let financial regulation slip off the policy agenda. We simply cannot carry on with the financial sector that gave us the global financial crisis. We need a safer and more stable financial system, one that serves rather than destabilizes the real economy. While policymakers have made a lot of progress, they still need to complete the reform agenda and ensure that the new standards are implemented in a way that is consistent across countries. [my emphasis]

And these remarks at the end are clearly directed toward Bundeskanzlerin Merkel in particular:

But what we must all understand is that this is a defining moment. It is not about saving any one country or region. It is about saving the world from a downward economic spiral. It is about avoiding a 1930s moment, in which inaction, insularity, and rigid ideology combine to cause a collapse in global demand.

The longer we wait, the worse it will get. The only solution is to move forward together. Our collective economic future depends on it.

More than most, Germany understands the virtues of determined solidarity. Through its experiences with its Soziale Marktwirtschaft and unification, it showed what can be accomplished by bringing everybody together in service of the common good. The world needs a strong leadership role from Germany today, and it is Germany’s core interest to provide such a role.

Let me end with a quote from Goethe: "It is not enough to know, we must apply. It is not enough to will, we must do." (Es ist nicht genug, zu wissen, man muß auch anwenden; es ist nicht genug, zu wollen, man muß auch tun). This is the challenge of our year ahead.

Translation: Angie, it's time to get real, now!

Tags: angela merkel, christine lagarde, world economic crisis

Michelle Goldberg on the Presidential race

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

Michelle Goldberg has a good understanding for the patterns of Christian Right thinking. Which means she also has a good insight into Republican base voter thinking, because they are basically identical with the Christian Right, which is largely the same as the Tea Party. So her commentary on the President election could be particularly interesting this year.

She looks at the Newt's culture-war campaign in South Carolina in Newt’s Winning Formula: He Does Scorn and Disgust Better Than Anyone Daily Beast 01/210/2012. She writes:

Last night was a resounding victory for disdain. Gingrich may be a sexual hypocrite, an erratic leader, and a cosseted lobbyist masquerading as a scrappy insurgent, but he is an absolute maestro of contempt, and that is what South Carolina wanted.

Look at what turned his electoral fortunes around. It had little to do with his attack on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital. I didn't meet anyone in South Carolina, including Gingrich supporters, who had anything negative to say about Romney's business record. Instead, the race turned in Gingrich’s favor during the debate on Monday, when Juan Williams asked him whether it might be "insulting" to black Americans to say they should demand jobs and not food stamps, and that poor kids should be put to work as janitors. Gingrich, puffed up with righteousness, went on the offensive. To the crowd, he seemed to be putting Williams in his place. No doubt their hearts pulsed as they imagined him doing the same to Obama. [my emphasis]

Reporting on her encounters with staff and supporters in South Carolina is anecdotal, of course. But Michelle actually knows what to listen for, as she showed in her book Kingdom Comin: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006). She's not like Tom Friedman running into cab drivers all over the world who happen to agree with exactly what Tommy Friedman is thinking about a particular subject at the moment.

I haven't seen any polling that gets at the subject. But I suspect that the attack on Willard's business practices may reinforce Newt's segregationist culture-war message more than Michelle's interviews are indicating. Because to make the white victimization theme work in connection with economic policies that are intended to give one-percenters like Willard even more wealth and more latitude to do what they do, no matter how damaging it is to the community at large, the Republicans need to cast the enemy of the moment as a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist. One of the services neoconservatives provided to building the current Republican coalition was to articulate and create images that substituted academics, gubment "bureaucrats" and liberal politicians for the image of the fat-and-happy plutocrat feeding on the misery of the people.

But since Newt has an actual plutocrat like Willard to run against, his campaign is using some of the same political imagery the plutocrat George W. Bush, part of one of the richest and most influential families in the United States, used in 2004 against John Kerry.

In other words, it difficult to disentangle negative class images of the wealthy from the culture-war appeals. After all, the entire Republican political project is about getting large number of working people to vote for economic policies that damage their own interests. And to exploit the opportunity the depression and Obama's relatively tepid response to it, the Republicans need to find a way to exploit class frustrations to win votes for an agenda that is entirely directed at comforting the already very comfortable.

Here's a video she did recently, basically warning against third-party illusions on the part of progressives. It's slickly produced, although the way they have her looking off to the side is unfortunately a bit reminiscent of Michele Bachmann's notorious response to last year's State of the Union address - though definitely without the Faraway Eyes:

This appeared at the Daily Beast's controversial Andrew Sullivan article How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics 01/16/2012. The first minute and a half has a bit too much blame-the-hippies outlook for my taste. But then she goes into a useful reflection about how the Christian Right got the power within the Republican Party that they came to enjoy.

Tags: 2012 election, michelle goldberg, newt gingrich, segregation, white racism

Newt takes South Carolina with culture war campaign

2012-01-22T15:45:00.003-05:00

Here's Newt Gingrich's South Carolina Primary Victory Speech, the whole thing from PBS Newshour 01/21/2012:

He strikes a real culture war posture here.

Ben Adler writes about how emphasis in his campaign Cultural Populism Catapults Gingrich to South Carolina Victory The Nation 01/21/2012

The moment that most struck me in Newt's speech is just after 7:55 when he praises Ron "Papa Doc" Paul, who, said Newt, "on the issue of money and the Federal Reserve has been right for 25 years." Say what?! Does Newt want to put the US back on the gold standard? Does he want to abolish the Federal Reserve? Is he making a full embrace of John Birch Society economics here? Newt even used the goldbug term "fiat money", a legitimate term around which the Bircher types like to wrap all kinds of bizarre notions. I figured when I saw Charles Krauthammer's column normalizing Papa Doc that overt Bircherism is more acceptable in the Republican Party tha n it ever has been. I'd be happy to see it turn out like 1964. But overt Bircherism wasn't welcome in the Republican Party in 1964. And FOX News wasn't even yet a gleam in Roger Ailes' eye.

Michael Tomasky describes some of how Newt's segregationist/culture-war talk resonated with the South Carolina Republicans, still angrily carrying on the political tradition of John Calhoun (Newt’s Fury Triumphs in South Carolina Primary Daily Beast 01/21/2012):

How and why? Simply, the debates. Even more simply, the two Moments in the debates: the smackdown of Juan Williams, and the smackdown of John King for starting the second debate by asking about his ex-wife's allegations. There is no question that Gingrich rode those two moments to victory.

In other words: He won by hatin' on the black guy and the liberal media. He hated on them expertly. He fired synapses in conservatives' brains that they barely knew were there. You knew, anyone knew, watching those two moments, that they were absolutely pivotal. It wasn't Newt's ideas. Raise your hand if you think his plan to create local citizens' boards to confer citizenship designations on undocumented immigrants made Tea Partiers across the state sit down over dinner and say, "You know, darlin', I'm really impressed with Newt’s civic-minded immigration ideas." Hands? Thought so.

The segregationist rhetoric will get the Republican base out to the polls, along with organizational help from the Christian Right's get-out-the-vote network. Newt's hard-edged radicalism is a big reason he has such huge negatives.

But I'm definitely restraining my enthusiasm for seeing Newt surging in Republican race because right now he looks like a weaker candidate than Willard Romney against Obama. Lots of Democrats thought the same thing about Ronald Reagan in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. And it wasn't until fairly late in the race in 1980 that Reagan took a clear lead.

The Republican candidate whether it's Willard or Newt, has some definite advantages. We're in a depression with high unemployment and a real possibility for a new recession. And this is the first Citizen's United Presidential election and corporate political spending is already soaring. For a description of what's happening o the latter, see George Zornick, Eleven Shocking Facts About Campaign Finance The Nation 01/21/2012.

Then there's the Democratic candidate. Obama can't seem to give even an inspiring partisan speech without pepper-spraying his own message by talking about bipartisanship or balancing the budget or cutting "entitlements", i.e., Social Security and Medicare. All major factors, unfortunately. How he frames things in the upcoming State of the Union (SOTU, to political junkies) address will be a good indication of his political strategy. I'm leery of the advance publicity about such events; but this piece by Amanda Terkel - based on an anonymous source for no apparent good reason - reports the pre-speech White House spin: President Obama Previews State Of The Union Speech To State, Local Officials Huffington Post 01/20/2012.

He's pointing to his own speech at Osawatomie last December 6 as a model for the SOTU. That was the one that offered combative rhetoric that was inspiring to the Democratic base. But then at the end came the pepper-spraying: "These are not Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values, or 99% values. They're American values. And we have to reclaim them." As Charlie Pierce wrote at the time:

More important, in our current political context, these are very much "99 percent values." They are not one percent values. The One Percent could care less if there ever is a thriving middle class in this country again. They'd sell the entire American middle class to the Somali pirates if there was a buck in it. There may be a political calculation at work here — Embrace the energy of the Occupy movement, Mr. President, but stay the hell out of the damn drum circle! — but the fact remains that the effectiveness of the "We Are the 99 Percent" argument is completely dependent upon its independence from the anesthetic stupor brought on by ameliorative political rhetoric.

It's also been part of Obama's pattern to say nice things that sound good to his Democratic base, then go out and whack the base in some way a day or so later. And the White House is already setting up for this: Alexander Bolton, Obama warns left: You won't like budget The Hill 01/17/12.

Obama's political seems to be really wedded to the "punch the hippies" strategy. But they are never going to be able to out-Newt Newt on the culture war rhetoric - or even outdo Willard on it, for that matter. They would be much better advised to align themselves clearly with "99% values" and can the bipartisanship hokum.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, newt gingrich

The curse of the Democratic Party

2012-01-21T22:23:00.003-05:00

Neoliberalism is the curse of the Democratic Party. The economic kind, not some variation on social policy. The Washington Consensus, deregulate the banks and let the markets run wild but try to keep public services functioning at a minimal level kind. Neoliberalism of the Davos Forum, prophets of globalization kind.

Jamie Galbraith wrote about this back in 1996, as Bill Clinton was facing a by-no-means-sure re-election, in The Surrender of Economic Policy The American Prospect Mar 1996. For some reason, the article at the link now says December 19, 2001, but it's from the March 1996 issue.

Like Obama today, the Clinton Administration had adopted moving toward a balanced budget as a guiding principle of its economics policies. Both Clinton and Obama really seem to believe that a balanced budget is a virtuous goal of policy in itself. But there are a number of reasons making it a central goal of a Democratic Administration is self-limiting and/or self-defeating for Democratic Administrations. Galbraith:

To accept a balanced budget and the unchallenged monetary judgment of the Federal Reserve is, by definition, to remove macroeconomics from the political sphere. Thus, the remaining differences between Clinton and the Congress are over details. Should we head for budget balance in seven years, eight, or ten? Should we cut (or impose) this or that environmental regulation? Do Head Start, the AmeriCorps, and technology subsidies justify their cost? And so on, in long litanies that no one believes will make a fundamental difference in American lives. Even if there were substantial gains to be made by public investments on the supply side, the conservative fiscal consensus precludes them by denyingthe resources.

We have now seen two Democratic presidents--Carter and Clinton--deeply damaged because they did not dispute this orthodoxy in good time and therefore could not control the levers of macro policy. Macroeconomics, not microeconomics, is the active center of power. Practical conservatives understand this. It is no accident that conservatives always seek to control the high ground of deficit and interest rate policy, nor any surprise that liberals defeat themselves from the beginning when they concede it.

Yet, the economics behind this consensus is both reactionary and deeply implausible. It springs from a never-never-land of abstract theory concocted over 25 years by the disciples of Milton Friedman and purveyed through them to the whole profession. Liberals--and anyone else concerned with economic prosperity--should now reject this way of looking at the world. [my emphasis]

But the Clinton Administration in 1996 was apparently guided by some more coherent economic policy theory than the Obama Administration. Galbraith noted that New Keynesians were "a breed found throughout the Clinton administration."

The Obama Administration, by contrast, seems to be relying on a general orientation that said we just needed to shore up the failing giant banks in 2009 and the economy would soon bounce back to a healthy state. Those like Paul Krugman who took the Keynes part of New Keynesian seriously realized, especially after the Japanese depression of the 1990s, that depression economics was still relevant to the present day. But policymakers in the Obama Administration and Europe have fastening onto a bizarre and destructive austerity economics during the current depression.

Galbraith in that article gives a useful and accessible description of one the favorite myths of conservative economics, the "natural rate of unemployment". Galbraith wrote that in 1994, "the natural rate" was "estimated by numerous astrologers at about 6 percent." We don't hear a lot about that today, because even Republicans don't want to say that the depression rates of unemployment are "natural". But if you listen closely to David "Bobo" Brooks talking about "structural factors" or whatever, you can tell there's a similar idea still waiting to justify do-nothing policies in the face of high unemployment. But it's basically a simple propaganda point with no real-world content to it.

We're also seeing today some of the serious repercussions of the Democrats surrendering what these days we call The Narrative on economic policy to the Republicans. Because the Democrats bought onto the concept of the singular virtue of balancing the budget and the general uselessness of macroeconomic policies, now we have a bipartisan consensus in Congress on austerity economics in the middle of a depression.

Galbraith's 1996 article spelled out what a limited menu of policies that even New Keynesianism was offering then:

At the very least, New Keynesian acceptance of the New Classical theoretical structure reduces macroeconomic policy to the fringe role, that of large-scale intervention only in deep and lasting recessions. In all other circumstances, the macro authorities are warned off--as was Clinton himself during his brief Keynesian phase in early 1993.

What then can liberals do? The actual approach of the Clinton administration illustrates: Liberals can favor education, training, adjustment assistance, and other programs that upgrade skills and help workers move from one job to the next. They can support public investments in infrastructure, on the ground that these assist in the international competitiveness of the economy. They can support a combination of research and development assistance to advanced enterprises, alongside efforts to open foreign markets to American products, that help shore up the position of American companies in the world. If they are feeling brave, they can also support a higher minimum wage.

All of these are supply-side measures (except the last, which is a direct intervention in the labor market). Their purpose is to improve the long-term competitive performance of the American economy, on the thought that a more productive economy will generate higher average living standards. The further thought, that these higher averages will trickle down to low-paid production workers, is left as an assumption.

However, if New Keynesians favored "large-scale intervention only in deep and lasting recessions" in 1996, there has been a downright devotion to austerity economics in the Obama Administration. It's interesting to note that, like Obama, Clinton had "his brief Keynesian phase in early 1993" in the early months of his Administration. But Clinton took office with an economy beginning recovery, and in which depression conditions had not taken hold. If Clinton's economics policies in his first Administration were too timid, Obama's have been terrifyingly so.

Galbraith also provided useful observations about the limits of the New Keynesian nostrums, which I summarize here:

Education and Training: They are necessary and critically important but they don't create jobs in themselves. Also, US public schools aren't nearly as bad as conservatives claims they are.

Research and Development: Advances in technology "do not and cannot bring full employment, nor do they bring about a fairer and more just social order. To make science and technology policies the centerpiece of a progressive agenda, while giving up macroeconomics, is absurd."

Infrastructure: Great stuff, but Democrats make a mistake in justifying public works primarily as support to the private sector to make the US more competitive internationally rather than also stressing their value in creating jobs. And in any case, the claimed benefits to private "cost reduction and increased output" are based on thin empirical evidence. Instead, liberals ought to be stressing the value of infrastructure for the people.

And Galbraith stresses that Democrats needed to make fairness in wealth distribution a central issue for economic policy:

Once the basic distribution of income has been set right, further gains in real wages can only happen, on average, at the rate of productivity growth. But to
keep the distribution from getting worse again, these gains should be broadly
distributed, substantially social and only slightly industrial or individual.
In other words, we need to return to the principle of solidarity--that the
whole society advances together.

It took 15 years, a depression, union resistance to Republican Governors' aggressive antilabor push, and the Occupy Wall Street movement to force the Democratic Party to start taking this issues more seriously. And so far, it hasn't gotten beyond lip service.

Democrats need to start listening more to the Jamie Galbraiths, Paul Krugmans and Joe Stiglizes of the world and less, much less to investment bank executives.

Tags: austerity economics, james galbraith

Obama's progressive defenders (one of them anyway) and nails-on-the-blackboard history

2012-01-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

Like Big Thinker Francis Fukuyama, writers such as Huffington Post columnist Bob Cesca who defend the Obama Administration from a position supposedly sympathetic to a progressive viewpoint need some leftist to bash. In Progressives, Obamabots and a Realistic Evaluation of the President 01/19/2012. It bothers him to be called an Obamabot. He tries out an argument that I don't recall having encountered before, which says, well, at least Obama isn't as bad as Franklin Roosevelt:

Historically speaking, no president in American history boasts a flawless record of achievement without dark stains on his record. The chief executive lauded as being the liberal hero of the previous century, Franklin Roosevelt, committed some of the most egregious crimes against humanity in the name of prosecuting World War II, not to mention other, lesser shortcomings. He authorized total war against the Axis powers, giving the military complete latitude to annihilate civilian populations in Europe and Japan using the most deadly weapons of that era. In a modern sense, the firebombing of Tokyo alone would earn Roosevelt an hourly shaming from the progressive blogosphere, if not an outright call for impeachment. Add to it the indefinite detention of the entire Japanese-American civilian population and the authorization/funding of the Manhattan Project ushering in the Cold War nuclear era and progressive heads would be exploding all over the Roosevelt administration's record. But historians, both liberal and unaffiliated, regard Roosevelt in a very different light. The New Deal achievements, Social Security and his posthumous victory in World War II outweigh the questionable deeds along the way.

I'm all for taking a critical viewpoint of all Administrations. The internment of Japanese-Americans never suspected or accused of a crime was and is indefensible.

But Cesca makes a surprisingly sloppy argument. For one thing, the "entire Japanese-American civilian population" was not detained. The internment order did not apply to Hawaii, where actual cases of Japanese-Americans committing acts of espionage had occurred. It's one of the historical facts that illustrates how bad and unnecessary and wrong the detentions were in California, where not a single known case if espionage by a Japanese-American had occurred.

There is also plenty to criticize about the "strategic bombing" of the Second World War. The Army's own postwar studies of their results in Germany and Japan were an early source of some of the most important of them. But it is simply not the case that the US military was given "complete latitude to annihilate civilian populations in Europe and Japan." It's the kind of thing revisionist apologists for the German or Japanese regimes of that time would say.

Cesca summarizes the progressive side of Obama's achievements this way:

By my accounting, and conservatively speaking (small "c" conservative), there are more than 100 achievements of varying importance ranging from the rescue of the economy from the brink of another Great Depression to the rescue of the American auto industry to the largest middle class tax cut in American history to the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. At the very least, and not insignificantly, President Obama's ideas and political savvy paved the way for African-Americans to finally reach the highest political office in the world. The last segregated office is now multi-racial. This can't be understated or ignored. Furthermore, the president just wrapped his third year in office and, much to the chagrin of the far-right, he has at least another year in which to tackle more items on the to-do list.

These items and dozens more are legitimate and undeniable successes, some of them are historically important and many of them are distinctly liberal. Some of them are compromised successes for the sake of passage through a deeply divided Congress and some of them are exacting and untouched. (Various critics note the president had a filibuster-proof 60 Democratic vote supermajority in the Senate for his first two years. This is a fallacy as the Democrats have never been a lockstep caucus. There were at least 10 conservative Democrats like Evan Bayh, Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson who vigorously opposed legislation like cap-and-trade and the public option and who often voted or threatened to vote with the Republicans to filibuster such items.)

Cesca is in part responding to a Newsweek article by Andrew Sullivan, How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics 01/16/2012.

Obama is not playing any long game to enact progressive accomplishments.

The game he's playing as President is clearly better than the game the Republicans would like to play.

But Obama has shown himself to be essentially a cautious, conservative Democrat who has been willing to take some progressive steps like those Cesca mentioned because he needs to do something to please his base. His first three years in office provide little reason to even hope that he will transform himself into an eager progressive leader in a second term.

One of the clearest signs to me that he has never had any progressive long game is the fact that he didn't make the Employee Free Choice Act to reinvigorate union organizing one of his top priorities from the moment he was elected. The Republicans know the labor movement is still a critical element in mobilizing votes for Democrats. If Obama had a long game, he would be doing everything he could to facilitate building the labor movement and getting more workers organized into unions.

Those who are playing the long game are progressives who are working on an inside-outside approach. People like Blue America, who are promoting and raising funds for real progressive candidates like Elizabeth Warren, running for the Senate in Massachusetts. People like Occupy Wall Street protesters, who have already forced the maldistribution of wealth and the need to restrain financial bandits onto the agenda of the two major parties and into mainstream political discussion. People like The Young Turks Cenk Uygur, whose Wolf PAC is challenging the power of organized money in politics and fighting to overturn the reaction Citizen's United decision's notion of corporations as people with the right to spend unlimited money to corrupt the electoral process.

Until there is a powerful enough popular progressive movement that influences the Democratic Party but is not subordinate to it, the 1% will continue to dominate both parties.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, democratic party

Conservative Big Thinker looks for new challenge

2012-01-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

Scene: Two men in comfortable arm-chairs facing each other across a wooden coffee table, in what appears to be an old-fashioned men's club with dark paneled wood walls and tall bookshelves full of books. The older man has his hands folded, gazing thoughtfully as though into the distance, though only the bookshelf opposite meets his gaze. The younger man holds an iPhone toward which he stares intently while listening via earplugs.

The older man signals to a passing waiter: Charles, a third brandy, please.

CHARLES the waiter: Yes, sir, professor.

THE PROFESSOR, looking thoughtfully toward the ceiling: You know, Biff, back in the old days, we conservatives had Great Opponents. Marxists were everywhere, and their hell-spawn the New Deal and the Great Society. We were fighting a lonely battle, out there on the edge of the End of History. Then Reagan went to Berlin and told Gorbachev to tear down that wall. And he did. And the Iron Curtain fell.

BIFF, glancing up briefly: Oh, yeah, I heard them talking about that on FOX.

THE PROFESSOR, taking a brandy from the waiter: Then, we had won. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Everyone wanted to be like the United States. Everyone bought off on the idea that globalization and high tech meant we could roll back regulations and let speculators run wild. Then came 9/11 and everyone agreed that the US should run the world.

BIFF, glancing up more briefly: Uh, yeah. But aren't there some Communists still in China or somewhere?

THE PROFESSOR: Oh, yes, but they're really capitalists, and who really cares about the Chinese anyway? And there are probably some peasants out in India or the Andes or somewhere who make cranky complaints. But everyone loves the system because pretty much everybody's middle class and nobody cares that it's only the filthy rich that are really making out with this thing.

BIFF grunts.

THE PROFESSOR, warming to his subject: But look, Biff. Great Thinkers need Great Challenges. And we don't have any today. Sure, it's fun to sit around and say stuff about Marxists and liberals. It gets hard to remember the old arguments exactly, but nobody much notices when we change them around.

What we need is some new leftists around. Not for real of course, just for entertainment. And there are enough uneducated plebes out there still that could take them seriously. Of course, they need to stop talking about all this stuff about minority rights, we're all soooo tired of that. And this nonsense about women's needs and their rights to their icky bodies and all, nobody who matters takes that stuff seriously.

[Draining his glass:] And they need to forget about promoting unions and social security and health care and all that because we can't afford it any more. But they could complain that maybe sometimes the results of globalization aren't fair [chuckles]. And they could say we need better schools or something. Then we would have somebody new to argue with and we could produce Great Thoughts again.

BIFF [aside to audience]: Here I'm watching the best porno flick I've seen in months, and this old fart is trying to talk to me about politics or something? Why can't he just go back to sleep and ... Oh! Look at that!!

This is my dramatized summary version of Francis Fukuyama's article "The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?" in the Jan/Feb 2012 Foreign Affairs. And this guy is considered one of the conservative Big Thinkers around these days.

Tags: francis fukuyama

European austerity FAIL

2012-01-19T12:23:00.003-05:00

"Rarely has policymaking been this poor," says Jeff Madrick in How Austerity Is Killing Europe NYR Blog 01/06/2012. The policy in question is Angie-nomics, the insistence on austerity policies during a depression on which German Chancellor Angela Merkel has so far successfully insisted. "This is disaster," he writes. And he's right to use the present tense.

We are seeing in real time the effects of austerity economics, and the experience applies to the United States as well as Europe:

Indeed, austerity economics has not worked in one single case in Europe in the last two years. When David Cameron’s government imposed a first round of harsh spending cuts in 2010, it utterly failed to revive the British economy as promised. To the contrary, it probably cut a budding recovery short. Unemployment and the deficit as a percent of GDP remained high. Some pro-Conservative observers I met at the time assured me that the Cameron team, led by George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was pragmatic and would reverse course on austerity if it wasn’t working. Yet when growth basically ground to a halt in late 2011, the Cameron team only doubled down, making further cuts. We need more of the same medicine, they told their citizens, a record number of whom are unemployed. Britian [sic] is a hair’s breadth away from outright recession only two years after its last one.

In November, meanwhile, Spaniards voted out of office a once-popular Socialist government, in part for its failed austerity program of the past year. The Socialists had earlier presided over a boom and even built a budget surplus. But then the housing and banking crises struck and private Spanish banks ran amok. In response, in 2010 the Socialists sharply reversed an earlier stimulus policy, cut spending, and raised taxes to the tune of about 5 percent of GDP. Government debt is still not high in Spain, and interest rates have not risen the way they have in Italy. But economic growth stalled after these measures were implemented, because reduced public spending weakened the demand for goods and services, pure and simple. With Spain’s official unemployment rate now 21.5 percent, the Socialists lost the election badly—paradoxically pushing voters to elect a conservative leadership that is calling for more austerity. In Spain, recession is now inevitable. [my emphasis]

There are certainly true believers in the doctrines justifying austerity economics. Angela Merkel probably is. But one-percenters also see austerity policies as a way to weaken unions, undermine social supports for working families, lower wages, roll back pensions and gain more leeway from necessary but annoying regulations.

But, you may have heard, austerity worked in Ireland! Well, no:

The recent experience of this once booming country should be deeply embarrassing to those who advocate austerity economics. For six months early last year, its national income started growing again after a couple of years of dramatic collapse following its own financial crisis. Ireland guaranteed all the debt of its over-aggressive failing banks to appease investors and then paid for it by cutting social spending sharply. Ireland’s leaders said with almost religious authority that this painful self-discipline was necessary to right the economy, and officials in Ireland and across Europe hailed the country’s brief rebound in 2011 as proof that it works. But then the Irish economy plunged in the third quarter of 2011 at its fastest rate ever. The upturn in the economy proved only temporary under the restraints of austerity economics. It may yet need another bailout.

Madrick cites the measures that could save the euro - we probably should say now, could have saved the euro - but that will not be adopted: making the eurozone into a true fiscal and transfer union; having the European Central Bank act as buyer of last resort for eurozone sovereign debt; and, creation of Eurobonds based on the credit of the entire eurozone but available to use for any country.

The December EU summit was probably the last chance to make a push for such measures in a timely enough manner to bail out the situation. The drama isn't over until it's over. But it's hard to see this plot playing out to a happy ending for the euro and the European Union.

Tags: angela merkel, eu, euro, european union

Barry Eichengreen's summary of the euro crisis

2012-01-18T23:42:00.001-05:00

Economist Barry Eichengreen gives a good summary description of the current euro crisis in the print edition of the Jan/Feb 2012 Foreign Affairs, "When Currencies Collapse: Will We Replay the 1930s or the 1970s?":

The eurozone is divided into a relatively vigorous northern tier with sound finances and a southern one with crushing debts and nonexistent growth prospects. Europe's indebtedness is no greater than the United States', but unlike the United States, Europe has no federal fiscal system to transfer resources from prosperous to troubled regions - and European leaders seem unwilling to create one. At the same time, they are hesitant to write down unsustainable debts for fear of destabilizing the banks that hold them. [my emphasis]

The bolded portion is what the financial jargon of "transfer union" means. Ironically, the transfer of income in the US "transfer union" geographically is largely from richer "blue" states like California and New York to "red" states like Mississippi and Alabama, where majorities of the voters elect representatives who want to cut back on transfers!

The result is that southern Europe has been left to implement brutal fiscal cuts that are pushing its economies deeper into recession, further impairing their capacity to service their debts. Many southern Europeans, suffering severe hardship, have rebelled against their own governments and accused northern Europe of sacrificing their well-being. Many northern Europeans, meanwhile, see their southern neighbors as spendthrift, lazy, and corrupt. Those northerners have become increasingly vocal in saying so and have concluded that more rescue operations would amount to pouring money down a rat hole. [my emphasis]

The all-round destructiveness of this cycle is hard to overstate.

Tags: barry eichengreen, eu, euro, european union

Monday's South Carolina Republican debate

2012-01-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

Monday's Republican Presidential debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was a genuine horror show. Where to begin.

Well, there was Newt Gingrich calling on Andrew Jackson to support his own warmongering foreign policy. He's lucky his tongue didn't burst into flames on the spot. If he had gone on to quote William Faulkner to support some point or other of his, I would have just hurled right onto the screen. That deserves a whole separate post.

Then there was Gov. Goodhair Perry defending those Marines recently in the news for peeing on the freshly-killed corpses in Afghanistan (Josh Voorhees, Charges Against Urinating Marines Expected Soon The Slatest 01/13/2012), starting around 2:05 in this video:

I just have no patience with this stuff. People who defend war crimes are defending and promoting crime. Some liberals/progressive have understandably tried to use this to point out that wars invariably produce atrocities, particular wars like Afghanistan and Iraq that put the occupying soldiers in atrocity-producing situations, as the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls them. "This is a war," writes Allison Hantschel in In Defense of Dana Loesch Firedoglake 01/16/2012. Readers can judge for themselves whether she winds up diminishing the serious of such an incident.

But that is no excuse or alibi for war crimes, including desecration of corpses. Laws of war and rules of engagement are there for good reasons: to put limits on the violence of war; to maintain command authority - things like torturing prisoners and desecrating corpses can have major effects on the mission; and to keep soldiers from coming back from war as murderers and violent criminals. The fact that Goodhair defended the desecration shows how little he respects common decency, much less the law. Most of our soldiers aren't out there peeing on corpses. By defending those who do, he puts them on a level with the soldiers who don't commit war crimes.

At 4:45 in that same video clip, Gingrich starts on his statement that leads up to the Andrew Jackson comment at around 6:15.

Goodhair talked segregationist starting around 2:25 in this video, and Newt picks it up around 7:30 in his discussion of unemployment insurance:

Goodhair in that segment says, among other trash, that the State of South Carolina is "at war" with the federal government, and we SC Gov. Nicky Haley laughing and applauding for it. Since any post on a Republican debate just seems to be missing something if there's not a Charlie Pierce quote included: "South Carolina really isn't the place where you want to make loose talk about being 'at war' with the federal government. Honestly, Governor Goodhair, why don't you just go down to the harbor, throw a rock at Fort Sumter, and make it official?" (The Great Nominating Show Is Nearly Over Esquire Politics Blog 01/17/2012)

Willard Romney does his xenophobic anti-immigrant thing in this clip around 3:00.

That clip also includes the part that got a lot of attention, Gingrich going off on FOX News' Juan Williams at around 9:40.

Charlie Pierce again:

I harbor no sympathy for Williams, who's spent the last two years pretending to be the innocent victim of those jackbooted thugs at NPR — from which, full disclosure, I draw the occasional paycheck — while cashing checks for Fox and writing self-indulgent books that few people read and even fewer people believed. So, when Williams suddenly turned into the Defender of Black People in the debate, everything he'd done in the previous couple of years laboring in the snake-infested vineyards of Roger Ailes should have prepared him for the moment when Gingrich decided to throw 40 years of politically profitable conservative white backlash back in his teeth. For this, the very white Gingrich got a standing ovation from the very white audience for yelling at the very non-white Williams, and if you think the ovation was for Gingrich's stalwart advocacy of the I-73 project, you haven't been paying attention since 1865.

Digby uses that exchange between Williams and Gingrich to analyze the way in which white racism is becoming more and more explicit in the Republican Party. (Straight up racism, no dogwhistle necessary Hullabaloo 01/17/2012)

In this clip, this clip at around 2:05 Gingrich recommends Chile's social security program put in place during the Pinochet dictatorship.

And this one of the last part of the debate has a weird discussion touching on the corrupt bizarreness generated by the Citizen's United decision.

Tags: republican party, war crimes, white racism

Climate change denial

2012-01-17T11:53:00.003-05:00

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been running a number of articles recently dealing with science denial. Steven Cohen and Alison Miller, both of the Columbia Earth Institute, write in Climate change 2011: A status report on US policy Jan/Feb 2012 about the partisan divide on climate change science:

It is impossible to deny or ignore the growing partisan divide that has profoundly influenced the US climate debate, making it more polarized even as climate science has become more definitive. Last year, a Gallup poll found that in 2010, only 30 percent of self-identified Republicans believed the effects of global warming were already beginning, a drop from almost 50 percent in 2007. The percentage of convinced Democrats, however, remained at 70 percent or higher during the same period, according to Gallup. A Pew Research Center poll in October 2010 found similar results highlighting the partisan divide, reporting a 40 percentage point difference between Republicans and Democrats believing evidence that the Earth is warming (Marshall, 2010).

The demographics within the Republican Party on climate science denial are particularly interesting:

The division remains even after factoring in education. A 2011 study found that, among Democrats and liberals, levels of education had a strong correlation with not only a belief in climate science, but with individual concern about global warming; however, that same study found the opposite effect in the case of Republicans and conservatives (Hoffman, 2011). This persistent gap suggests that climate change has become an ideological issue - much like gun control, taxes, or regulation - that defines what it means to be a Republican or Democrat (Nisbet, 2009). The US divide over climate change involves more than just an understanding of climate science. [my emphasis]

It's become a "tribal" issue, in other words, a psychological identifier.

But "education" in such surveys can be misleading. Because education also correlates with higher income on the average. This could also suggest that the more affluent Republicans are more willing than working class voters in the Republican base to disregard the dangers of climate change, which wouldn't be surprising. Because money talks, and the climate science denial position is virtually all money talking:

The fossil fuel industry has caused much of the political division on climate change through aggressive action to promote skepticism among the public; the industry, typically through conservative think tanks, has funded opposing scientific opinions, economic reports, and public relations campaigns. For example, in 2005 Chris Mooney of Mother Jones found 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on climate change or maintained affiliations with a small group of skeptic scientists (Mooney, 2005). Furthermore, some climate scientists may have contributed to the political divide by moving past their knowledge of climate change to predict socioeconomic impacts and propose policy solutions that go beyond the scope of climate data and models. This combination of science, policy, and advocacy can undermine non-expert confidence in climate science.

And, in typical authoritarian projection, climate science deniers argue that scientists who do study climate change are mostly corrupted by the pursuit of grant money, which they apparently supposed flows from the fount of what they call Political Correctness, by which they mean stuff they think is politically incorrect. (No wonder they get confused!)

Conservatives opposing anti-pollution regulations have always argued that they represented more gubment regulation that allegedly hurts the economy. Climate science denial is their tool for working concern over global climate change into that long-established partisan and ideological framework:

But it seems climate skeptics are concerned about the validity of climate change mostly because of its implications for regulation of business. The effort to regulate greenhouse gases would eventually entail some level of government regulation of many aspects of daily life, from the cars Americans drive to the electricity that powers their homes and businesses. Those who are wary of big government dislike this potential intrusion.

Critics of climate regulation argue that it will pose an impossible burden on businesses and stifle a weak economy through higher energy prices. At least in the Republican Party, political dialogue throughout 2011 was dominated by the message that government wastes money and takes on duties that should be left to the private sector. Emboldened by electoral gains in 2010, conservatives and Tea Partiers continue to emphasize that government is the problem and an unregulated free market is the solution.

Since more affluent/better educated Republicans tend to give more emphasis to such economic concerns than to the "values issues" like abortion and general hostility to women's rights, that's consistent with the poll findings that better educated Republican are hotter for climate science denial. (Bad pun, I know ...)

Tags: global climate change, science denial

Boy, I'm glad the Republicans don't promote white racism or anything

2012-01-17T09:23:00.001-05:00

Jon Wood, Newt Gingrich Seeks South Carolina Boost From Racially Charged Exchange With Juan Williams Huffington Post 01/17/2012

Tags: newt gingrich, republican party, white racism

New week for the euro crisis, and the Angiebots are grumpy

2012-01-15T18:24:00.003-05:00

"Greece's lesson for policymakers across the world is simple: you can't cut your way back to prosperity." - Larry Elliot

I heard a commentator on Austrian ORF TV say that the euro crisis had take a Christmas vacation.

Now vacation's over. As Heather Stewart explains in Eurozone's fate hangs on whether French humiliation turns to anger The Guardian 01/14/2012:

But this brief hiatus came to a dramatic end on Friday. First, talks in Athens aimed at persuading Greece's creditors to voluntarily accept a writedown on what they are owed stalled, amid rumours that hedge funds – which have insured themselves against the risk of collapse with credit default swaps, and therefore will get a payout in any event – are refusing to join in.

While the markets were still digesting the news of the standoff in Athens, rumours began to emerge that Standard & Poor's was poised to take the axe to the ratings of a string of eurozone countries, including even France. S&P had warned late in 2011, in the runup to the fateful Brussels summit, that it was re-examining most eurozone countries' ratings because it was concerned about their exposure to the sovereign debt crisis and unconvinced by politicians' response.

Then, after the European markets had closed, S&P confirmed that it was, indeed, stripping France of its coveted AAA rating and downgrading another eight countries, from bailed-out Portugal to the island of Malta. Across the eurozone, only Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Luxembourg now retain S&P's top rating.

The European scene does present one encouraging contrast to the US when it comes to the crooked rating agencies. European leaders are inclined to say, "What the hell do these American rating agencies think they're doing? We need to get some honest and independent rating agencies going."

During the ludicrous fight in the US over the debt ceiling last year, the Republicans acted as though S&P were the voice of God when they downgraded the US credit rating. Real interest rates on US bonds actually went down after the downgrade, something that always comes to my mind immediately now when I hear S&P mentioned. How wrong could they have called the situation.

But did we hear our Democratic President, the one now campaigning as the defender of the 99%, scolding the rating agency for being incompetent and/or crooked? He's far too concerned about not ruffling feathers on Wall Street or the boardrooms to do what conservative and social-democratic leaders in Europe are doing in response to S&P's downgrade of eurozone countries' credit rating. To be fair, the Administration did argue publicly that the downgrade was based on incompetence; they weren't totally silent or completely deferential. But as he normally does, Obama decided to pass on a chance to build public support against abuses by the financial sector, including the rating agencies.

As it turns out, part of the reasons Standard & Poor's is giving for their downgrades is that Angie-nomics, the austerity policies that Princess Angela von Merkel is insisting on during this depression will damage the eurozone economies and thereby make the debt situation worse. Austria's Social Democratic Chancellor Werner Faymann scolded S&P. But he and the Austrian President Heinz Fischer, also a Social Democrat, insisted that the downgrade gives more urgency to Feymann's own Angie-nomics proposal to write a "debt limit" into the Austrian Constitution. It's a dumb idea to begin with and will do nothing to help the euro crisis or Austria's own credit rating.

Part of Austria's current vulnerability is that Austrian banks have a lot of lending to Hungarian companies, and Hungary has its own debt and economic problems to worry about even though they aren't part of the eurozone. And they have a political confrontation with the EU pending due to the seriously authoritarian turn of the current ruling Fidesz Party headed by "kookoo autocratic" President Victor Orbán.

But part of the consideration of all the non-German EU countries here has to be avoiding being the first one to pull the plug on their membership in the eurozone and the EU. The prime candidates for that are still Greece and Italy, with Greece likely to be more in the spotlight this coming week. And one encouraging sign is that, if this report by Carsten Volkery is any indication, Neuer Vertrag.Etatsünder bohren Schlupflöcher in den Euro-Pakt Spiegel Online 15.01.2012, other eurozone countries are balking at the key element in Angie's current power-play, which is her demand that the EU (read: Germany) have veto power over all EU countries' budgets. (The actual language has to do with debt and deficit limits and the mechanism for enforcing them.) Volkery sources his story to two Angiebots, Jörg Asmussen and Elmar Brok. Even though Asmussen is SPD, he supports Angie-nomics and is a toady for the finance lobby. Brok is part of the drafting committee for the new budget treaty Angie is pushing; Brok proudly displays a photo of himself with Angie on his website as of this writing.

Angiebot Elmar Brok with the Princess Angie von Merkel

The two Angiebots are obviously disturbed that the lesser nations aren't bowing to Her Majesty Angie's demands without question. Angiebot Brok is bragging that the Angie's negotiators have succeeded in blocking any provisions that might allow the creation of Eurobonds, bonds backed by the credit of the entire eurozone but available to use for expenses of individual countries. Since if the euro is going to be saved - which seems an unlikely prospect to me - Eurobonds would have to be part of the solution, that's really nothing to brag about. But I'm sure Her Majesty is proud of him for being a faithful Angiebot on the matter.

Angie's Foreign Minister Guido just went down to Greece making them an offer he and Angie presumably think they can't refuse, which is more austerity, more austerity, more austerity. (Westerwelle ermutigt Griechen zu weiteren Reformen Welt Online 15.01.2012) The problem is the same as it was in 2009. Greece has too much debt and it can't repay it all. The EU late last year did agree to ask banks to voluntarily take writedowns on Greek bonds. The voluntary part is important, because investors have insured themselves against losses by the use of the financial derivatives known as credit default swaps (CDS). If the default is technically voluntary on the part of the creditors, the CDSes aren't triggered, i.e., the banks that sold the CDSes aren't on the hook for the payouts. This is part of the worry of why even the default by Greece, which has a small GDP, could trigger a European and world financial crisis. European banks are undercapitalized, and derivatives market is still so poorly regulated that the European and American regulators don't know for sure how large private banks' CDS exposure to eurozone debt is. Once the CDSes start triggering, we could be looking at a "Lehman event", or far worse. (The dialogue at the link has some dopey parts.)

As negotiations get down to the wire on the next tranche of aid to Greece, hedge funds are balking on taking "voluntary" writedowns on Greek debt and therefore forgoing collecting on their CDSes. Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot frames the current situation with melodramatic but descriptive imagery (Eurozone crisis: Troika's gunboats will get their way, at a cost 01/15/2012):

The warships have been replaced by spreadsheets. Back in 1850, Greece knew it was in trouble when the Royal Navy arrived at Piraeus. This time, the pressure comes from banks, hedge funds and the team of officials of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the EU, who will take up residence at one of the swankier hotels in Athens.

But his more sober description is also correct: "A three-way game of bluff is currently in progress between the Greek government, the hedge funds and bankers, and the troika (the IMF, the ECB and the EU)."

Bottom line: the European ruling elites are continuing to deal with this crisis with the same level of realism, vision and good sense that their predecessors in 1914 were applying to events of their day.

Tags: angela merkel, austria, eu, euro, greece

Papa Doc Paul and Charles Krauthammer

2012-01-14T15:06:00.002-05:00

We live in a very weird political (and historical?) moment right now. Newt Gingrich is running vivid ads showing some of the ugliest side of American capitalism; he himself is actually saying that rich people shouldn't just take everything.

Not that he means a word of it. Because the fact that he's saying it is bizarre enough in itself.

Then this week, Charles Krauthammer wrote a column that you don't have to be a blithering warmonger or a psychopath to at least partially agree with. He's writing about Ron Paul’s achievement Washington Post 01/12/2012. He's here anointing Papa Doc's Bircherite extremism with a new level of Establishment respectability:

Paul was genuinely delighted with his [showing in the New Hampshire primary], because, after a quarter-century in the wilderness, he's within reach of putting his cherished cause on the map. Libertarianism will have gone from the fringes — those hopeless, pathetic third-party runs — to a position of prominence in a major party.

Look at him now. He's getting prime-time air, interviews everywhere and, most important, respect for defeating every Republican candidate but one. His goal is to make himself leader of the opposition — within the Republican Party.

He is Jesse Jackson of the 1980s, who represented a solid, African American, liberal-activist constituency to which, he insisted, attention had to be paid by the Democratic Party. Or Pat Buchanan (briefly) in 1992, who demanded — and gained — on behalf of social conservatives a significant role at a convention that was supposed to be a simple coronation of the moderate George H.W. Bush.

No one remembers Bush's 1992 acceptance speech. Everyone remembers Buchanan’s fiery and disastrous culture-war address.

At the Democratic conventions, Jackson’s platform demands and speeches drew massive attention, often overshadowing his party’s blander nominees. [my emphasis]

Given Papa Doc's cuddly relationship with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and groups that indulge in them, Krauthammer's praise is all the more remarkable. Krauthammer is a Jewish neocon to whom the only wrong Israel can do is to not be brutal enough to Palestinians and Arabs. And he's offering Papa Doc a new measure of mainstream respectability?

There don't know where Krauthammer is going with this. But it's obvious that he's ready to welcome Bircher "libertarianism" into the Grand Old Party:

Put aside your own view of libertarianism or of Paul himself. I see libertarianism as an important critique of the Leviathan state, not a governing philosophy. As for Paul himself, I find him a principled, somewhat wacky, highly engaging eccentric. But regardless of my feelings or yours, the plain fact is that Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy.

Paul is 76. He knows he’ll never enter the promised land. But he's clearing the path for son Rand, his better placed (Senate vs. House), more moderate, more articulate successor. [my emphasis]

In a couple of ways, Krauthammer is provided two of the standard services of Republican partisan columnists. He is recognizing reality, that Papa Doc and his blunt version of segregationist/Bircher politics is a significant force in Republican Party politics. And he's moving the center to the right; if Papa Doc and his constituents are "the opposition — within the Republican Party", then the Newt Gingrichs and Willard Romneys are the moderate wing of the Party. And so the standard for sacred Bipartisanship moves further and further toward the most hardline positions of the Republican Party.

I also suspect that Krauthammer's good words for Papa Doc represents a recognition that Bircher Old Right isolationism really is based on hyper-nationalism and xenophobia. Papa Doc and his followers may see Israel as part of an ongoing plot for world domination by the Elders of Zion. But Papa Doc is against the entire concept of international law, which means he's down with more powerful countries launching preventive wars against less powerful ones. Papa Doc has explicitly said he had no objection to Israel's bombing an alleged nuclear site in Syria, for instance.

Old Right isolationism of the Papa Doc variety may be an annoyance to neocon advocates of a permanent state of war. But they now it's not a serious threat. The nationalism, white racism and xenophobia is more important to its adherents than non-intervention. Pat Buchanan's career illustrates that wonderfully.

Tags: charles krauthammer, republican party, radical right, ron paul

At least Dany Cohn-Bendit hasn't forgotten what the EU is about

2012-01-12T22:55:00.001-05:00

Dany Cohn-Bendit, head of the Green caucus in the European Parliament, was one political leader who pushed the EU to take action against the authoritarian constitutional changes in Hungary under the ruling Fidesz headed by President Victor Orbán .

Hungary's "kookoo autocratic" Victor Orbán with a like-minded leader

"We have a very serious democratic crisis in Hungary," he said.

He describes Orban as a "Hungarian Napoleon" who "sees himself as a little Hungarian Emperor" and as a "kookoo autocratic" leader pursuing "a radical dismantling of democratic atructures." (Ungarns neue Verfassung.Bewerten 13:19.Cohn-Bendit nennt Orban durchgeknallten Autokraten Die Welt 05.01.2012)

Tags: dany cohn-bendit, european+union, hungary, victor orbán

Big civil liberties concerns for the US

2012-01-12T22:29:00.001-05:00

The mainstream press will be flooding the zone from now until November with news about the Presidential race.

Serious civil liberties currently facing the United States are not likely to get much attention in that coverage. But they remain. Here I'm providing some links and brief quotes about four of them: the corporatization of free speech; deporting American citizens; detention without due process; and, torture.

The corporatization of free speech: bmaz in The Corporatist Free Speech Superiority of the Roberts Court Emptywheel 01/08/2012 looks at the heavy corporate tilt in recent Supreme Court free speech rulings.

Brutal immigration policies that often sweep up American citizens in illegal deportations: Digby, State sanctioned kidnapping Hullabaloo 01/07/2012

Arrest and deterntion without due process: Daphne Eviatar provides and example of the problems those policies continue to cause in The Latest Skirmish in Afghanistan: Hate to Say We Told You So Huffington Post 01/08/2012.

Glenn Greenwald writes about the new law allowing the President to order indefinite detention of anyone including American citizens, a right both the Cheney-Bush and Obama Administration have claimed is within the President's authority even without Congressional authorization (The evil of indefinite detention and those wanting to de-prioritize it Salon 01/08/2012):

The Obama DOJ has repeatedly argued that the Boumediene ruling [requiring habeas corpus procedures for military detainees] should not apply to Bagram, where - the Obama administration insists - it has the power to imprison people with no due process, not even a habeas hearing; the Obama DOJ has succeeded in having that power enshrined. Obama has proposed a law to vest him with powers of "prolonged detention" to allow Terrorist suspects to be imprisoned with no trials. His plan for closing Guantanamo entailed the mere re-location of its indefinite detention system to U.S. soil, where dozens of detainees, at least, would continue to be imprisoned with no trial. And, of course, the President just signed into law the NDAA which contains - as the ACLU put it - "a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision," meaning - as Human Rights Watch put it - that "President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law." Those held at Guantanamo will continue to receive at least a habeas hearing, but those held in other American War on Terror prisons will not. [my emphasis]

Marcy Wheeler writes about the Guantánamo Gulag in Our New Teachers about Rule of Law 01/10/2012:

Gitmo has come to embody many things in this country over the last decade: Bush’s incompetence and criminality, our bigotry and inhumanity, and – as most would like to treat it now – a big political tussle between Obama and Republicans.

But at every turn – from the Bush Administration grasping claiming the piece of land existed outside the rule of law, to the corrupt legal process that created memos authorizing torture there, to Jim Haynes' insistence that "we can’t have acquittals," to the DC Circuit's continued efforts to make sure detainees get no meaningful review of their detention–Gitmo has been about shedding the rule of law. It has been about finding ways for America to defy the law even while maintaining the pretense we still uphold it. [my emphasis]

Torture: Digby has for years now been following the indiscriminate use of tasers by domestic police as torture weapons, which often has fatal results. As she points out in Dispatch from torture nation: execution by pepper spray Hullabaloo 01/07/2012, abuse of chemical weapons by police can also have the same consequences.

And we train them early to adapt to police-state conditions by putting cops in schools to rough up young evildoers: girls who won't pick up crumbs off the floor in the cafeteria, for instance, or spraying perfume on yourself at unapproved moments: Chris McGreal, The US schools with their own police Guardian 01/09/2012; Schul-Polizei.Wie US-Behörden Schüler kriminalisieren Frankfurter Rundschau 11.01.2012.

Tags: torture, guantánamo

Perils of Papa Doc Paul

2012-01-11T17:53:00.001-05:00

There's no way Ron "Papa Doc" Paul and his base constituency are going to be part of a political coalition that could be called liberal or progressive. At the same time, thanks to the nature of our media culture right now, the only kind of broad criticisms of US global military strategy and interventions that most people have heard on TV recently are those coming from Papa Doc. For liberal critics of those policies, Papa Doc's framing is a real problem, not only because of his kooky conspiracy theories but because he often couches them in the false-but-mainstream austerity-economics argument that the US is going broke and can't afford more borrowing or deficits.

Gene Lyons takes on Papa Doc and his movement for the second time in two weeks, Digging in Ron Paul's Survival Kit Arkansas Times 01/11/2012:

While he's often cagey about how he expresses it, Ron Paul's whole history as a conspiracy theorist is right out of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" — the 19th century forgery that's kept anti-Semites buzzing for generations. ...

Reader Mel Birge of Portland, Oregon argues that's precisely why Paul makes such a terrible spokesman. Complaining of "sitting in synagogue for the last dozen years listening to pseudo Middle-East experts give the same frantic talk about the danger of Iran nukes and how the US must stop it," he believes such a war "is no way in the United States' interest."

But he also thinks Paul's "anti-semitic paranoia allows AIPAC, the Neocons and their fellow travelers to paint the entire Iran war opposition with the Ron Paul brush. That's the danger of Ron Paul that you should speak of: He snuffs out substantive discussions on Iran. The media feasts on him and the Neocons love it because he's his own straw man."

Charlie Pierce in his look at the state of the Republican Presidential race, We're All in Romney's Great Adventure Together Now Esquire Politics Blog 01/11/2012, writes that we could have Papa Doc as a visible factor in the Presidential election for months to come:

Which leaves us with the fascinating question of Dr. Ron Paul. He finished a decent second last night, crushing the campaign of Jon Huntsman. He is in an odd place. He is not a contender for the nomination in any real sense. However, he can continue to move through the cycle, not seeking conventional success, but piling up delegates pledged only to him. (If the rumors around Manchester on Tuesday night are true, and Paul's campaign has managed to raise $10 million over the past few days, then he can go on forever. That amount of money to his campaign is $100 million to a more conventional one.) This will give him a center of personal power with which Willard, and the rest of the party, will have to find some way to cope. Paul has stubbornly - and shrewdly - refused to state categorically that he will not bolt the party in the general election. He can string the whole business along, talking in his giddy survivalist code about "fiat money," and nobody will be in any position to take him on. He is going to stay on his own hook; in 2008, across the river in Minneapolis, Paul set up his own convention in opposition to the Republican National Convention. He can do whatever mischief he wants from now until the end of the summer, and nobody's in any position to make him stop. That is the only story left, save for the epic Horatio Alger saga of Willard Romney, Boy of the Streets, proud American, and proof positive that, in this great country, any son of an auto millionnaire and former governor of Michigan can grow up almost to be president. [my emphasis]

Papa Doc is a destructive, retrograde influence in American politics, and not solely inside the Republican Party. But progressive critics of the militarism and interventionism of our current foreign policy also have to deal with the reality that, in the 2012 election cycle, the main general criticism of the current approach to foreign policy that many voters will hear - the only one many voters are likely to register - is that coming from Papa Doc.

That doesn't mean we have to pretend that Papa Doc's general perspective is anything other than the Old Right isolationism and Bircher conspiracy-mongering that it is. The core concept of Papa Doc's foreign policy is hyper-nationalism and xenophobia, which is how it fits in with anti-immigrant and pro-segregation parts of Papa Doc's toxic ideology. And it certainly doesn't mean that the motley crew of segregationists, militia types and assorted cranks who make up Papa Doc's core constituency are even potential allies in any meaningful sense of the word for a progressive movement.

But it does mean that we need to pay attention to which parts of Papa Doc's criticisms of foreign policy are resonating with the public, or have the potential to resonate with a larger audience.

Stephen Walt takes a careful look at Papa Doc's effect on the larger national security debate in Why Ron Paul may actually have something right Foreign Policy 01/06/2012:

... [D]espite his bizarre views on the gold standard, climate change, social security, and the like, Paul has put his finger on a number of issues that could resonate broadly with the American people, especially if discussion were not monopolized by think tanks and insiders who are strongly committed to the status quo. Unlike most foreign policy "experts" in both parties, Paul believes the United States is an extraordinarily secure country, with a robust nuclear deterrent, no powerful enemies nearby, and at present no major power rivals of much significance. He instinctively rejects the paranoia and worst-casing that has convinced Americans that we need to roam around the world trying to remake it in our image (a task, by the way, that we're not very good at). He believes that excessive interventionism and other failed policies are a primary cause of anti-Americanism around the world, and that the United States would be more popular and safer if we focused more attention on trade and diplomacy and domestic issues instead of emphasizing military dominance and overseas meddling. He believes that a bloated national security state and a quasi-imperial foreign policy inevitably fosters greater government secrecy and erodes traditional restraints on executive power. And like former president (and five-star general) Dwight D. Eisenhower, he thinks the current military-industrial complex wields excessive influence on our politics and has become a self-perpetuating engine for counter-productive meddling abroad.

These points are all debatable, of course, but Paul is the only person in the race who even wants to discuss them. The rest of the GOP candidates are mostly competing to see who can sound the most eager for war (usually with Iran) or most willing to toss more money at the Pentagon. Barack Obama is a lot more sensible than they are, but as we've learned over the past three-plus years, neither he nor his national security team are interested in making dramatic changes in America's overall grand strategy. Instead, Obama has emerged as a strong proponent of government secrecy, a staunch defender of maintaining U.S. primacy around the world, and as an enthusiastic user of drones, special forces, and other tools of U.S. power. He did eventually wind down the war in Iraq, of course, but it hardly took a strategic genius to figure out that this was the right course.

Tags: gene lyons, radical right, ron paul, stephen walt

The revolving door, Mississippi version

2012-01-11T11:55:00.002-05:00

Good ole Haley Barbour has finished up his second and final term as Governor of Mississippi. He gained some national attention with his defenses of the Confederate flag and the White Citizens Council. Now, the present-day Cincinnatus is going back to his plow. In ole Haley's case, his farm is the field of influence-peddling politely know as lobbying. Kate Ackley reports for Roll Call, Haley Barbour’s Back at His Old Firm 01/10/2012:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), who left office today, wasted no time in lining up his next career move. As expected, the former uber-lobbyist and founder of BGR Group will return to his old firm, the lobby shop announced today.

In a short statement, the firm said it "is pleased to announce Governor Haley Barbour will return to the firm as Founding Partner." Haley did a stint prior to his governorship as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Barbour, a longtime Washington insider known for his Mississippi drawl, remained a presence inside the Beltway even while serving as governor. In 2009, he was elected chairman of the Republican Governors Association, a position that regularly brought him to D.C. And when he considered a presidential run, he had a long list of former colleagues and clients who were ready to line up in support. [my emphasis]

But Ole Haley left something for his former Mississippi constituents to remember him by. He pardoned four murders on his way out the door of the Governor's office, two of them who had murdered their wives. (Ronni Mott, Barbour to DV Victims: ‘You Can’t Trust Us’ Jackson Free Press 01/10/2012)

Jessica Bateman reports in Karen Irby, 207 others granted reprieves by Haley Barbour Jackson Clarion-Ledger 01/10/2012:

In total, Barbour has granted clemency to 41 offenders in prison for killing and many others who committed violent or sex-related crimes.

... 39 prisoners who were granted clemency committed a slew of other violent crimes, including rape, aggravated assault, assault to a law enforcement officer and armed robbery. Thirty-two of those people received full, complete and unconditional pardons from the governor.

At least seven of the convicts who were pardoned committed sex-related crimes, including rape, forcible sexual battery, gratification of lust and attempted enticement of a child for sexual purposes or prostitution. After receiving pardons, they are no longer required to register as sex offenders.

Bateman provides a comparison with the three previous Governors' pardons:

Compared to past Mississippi governors, former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove granted an unconditional pardon to only one person. He granted 25 suspended sentences or restorations of civil rights, which reinstates the right to vote to felony offenders.

Former Gov. Kirk Fordice pardoned 13, and granted suspended sentences or restorations of civil rights to 26 more. Former Gov. Ray Mabus pardoned five, and granted 68 suspended sentences or restorations of civil rights, although he later revoked those rights from 11.

And former Gov. Bill Allain granted no pardons at all, but granted restorations of civil rights to 28.

Ackley' report quotes Sandy Middleton, executive director of the Center for Violence Prevention, on the message Barbour's pardons of the wife-murderers sends:

"The criminal-justice system works here," Middleton said. "Law enforcement did their jobs."

But Barbour's pardons "flies in the face" of the people who work hard to get these offenders away from their victims, she added, in addition to the victims themselves.

"It just puts us back to square one," when it comes to the people at the receiving end of the violence, Middleton said. The message Barbour sends to them is that "You can't trust us, because we're really not going to protect you."

But Republicans are the Family Values party, remember that.

Tags: haley barbour, mississippi, mississippi politics

Corey Robin vs. the Occupy movement

2012-01-10T14:39:00.002-05:00

Now I'm more concerned than ever about the implications of Corey Robin's ahistorical argument that there is no meaningful distinction between conservative and Radical Right. He's attracted quite a bit of sympathetic attention among progressives for this argument, which puts the stodgy go-slow-or-even-do-nothing conservative in the same boat with the howling reactionary who wants to create a dystopia based on some imagined version of an ideal 19th century.

He makes his case at some length in his book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011) . As a matter of history, I think he's seriously overreaching. I can understand the argument's contemporary resonance, though, given the current state of the Republican Party in which segregationist and McCarthyist talk that would not so long ago have been publicly disowned by respectable business conservatives is now considered normal, mainstream Republican practice.

Now Robin's addressing the Occupy movement in The Conservative Reaction Chronicle of Higher Education 01/08/2012. And this piece presents an uncomfortable reminder that if a stodgy conservative who mainly wants to not rock the boat for the 1% too much is the same as a blithering Bircher or a cornpone brownshirt, then the Birchers and the brownshirts are also no more threatening or obnoxious than your standard Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club member.

Not that Robin is endorsing the Patriot Militias in his Chronicle piece. But he certainly does seem to be advising Republicans, hey, this is the kind of hippie agitation that you need to oppose the way you do it best:

After decades of "compassionate conservatism," "a thousand points of light," and "Morning in America," dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we've forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much. With the roar against the ruling classes growing ever louder, the right seems to be reverting to type. It thus behooves us to take a second look at the conservative tradition, not just its current incarnation but also across time, for that tradition provides us with an understanding of why the conservative responds to Occupy Wall Street as he does. ...

Given the reactionary thruST [sic] of conservatism, Occupy Wall Street may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the right. Thoughtful conservatives have long understood the symbiotic relationship between the right's intellectual - and ultimately political - vitality and insurgencies from the left. Friedrich Hayek accurately observed that the political theory of capitalism "became stationary when it was most influential" and "progressed" only when it was "on the defensive." Frank Meyer, intellectual architect of the fusion strategy that brought together the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the Republican Party, noted that it was "ironic, though not historically unprecedented," that bursts "of creative energy" on the right "should occur simultaneously with a continuing spread of the influence of liberalism in the practical political sphere."

Conversely, conservative writers like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan have worried of late about the intellectual flabbiness of the contemporary right: A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations. But if Occupy Wall Street turns out to be a movement rather than a moment — if it has real staying power; if it moves from public squares to private institutions; if it starts to divest the elite of their privileges and powers, not just in their offshore accounts but in their backyards and board rooms — it could provide the kind of creative provocation that once produced a Burke or a Hayek. The metaphor of occupation is threatening enough; one can only imagine what might happen were it made real. And while the mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years to four good books, they might want to rethink that. They wouldn't be in the position they're in - when, even out of power, they still govern the country - had their predecessors made the same choice. [my emphasis]

That last part is a bit unclear, though he must mean "four more years" of Obama, though it's not at all obvious which "mavens of the right would probably prefer four more years" of the Marxist-Kenyan-socialist-European-Islamunist-atheist Obama to having a Republican in the White House.

In the real world, of course we're seeing pushback from the right over the Occupy movement. And what are we supposed to make of this statement, "A movement that once seemed the emblem of heterodoxy has succumbed to stale thinking and rote incantations"? When the Republicans were prominently congratulating themselves for being the "party of ideas", those great ideas were crackpot things like supply side economics, union-busting, boosting military spending and freeing the wealthiest Americans from the oppressive burden of having to pay taxes to support their country. Pretty much the same "stale thinking and rote incantations" of these days, only marketed a bit more cleverly. Stuff like that may have made Young Republicans think of themselves as "the emblem of heterodoxy" though it more closely resembled what was once called "hardening of the arteries", i.e., old-age dementia.

But the relative lack of mildly disruptive activism like that of the Occupy movement certainly hasn't slowed the radicalization of the Christian Republican White People's Party. On the contrary, Occupy is forcing even the Republicans to give some lip service to helping working families. Even though much of it looks more like dementia than either "the emblem of heterodoxy" or "stale thinking and rote incantations". Will Bunch reports on Rick Santorum campaigning in New Hampshire (The Santorum surge isn't working Attytood 01/09/2012):

He chose to devote his entire speech to his tax and pro-manufacturing policies – completely avoiding any mention of his signature issues like abortion and family values. Instead, he made a blatant pitch for working class votes.

"Imagine, the president of the United States standing up and saying everybody should go to college in America," Santorum said of President Obama at one point "What intellectual snobbery is that?! Not every person wants or needs to go to college or should have to go to college. Hard work, getting skills, getting training, whether it’s at a trade school or whatever, is good work and important work." He then claimed that Obama instead wants to "redistribute wealth" to those who don’t get into college.

The fact that someone considered a credible if faltering Republican Presidential candidate within their Party is holding up college attendance as a sign of "intellectual snobbery" is a good example of how in the real existing Republican Party of 2012, it's hard to make a meaningful distinction between stodgy conservative and drooling reactionary.

But that's not what Robin is doing in the Chronicle article. It reads more like he's pointing to the Occupy movement and telling Republicans, you need to go after these people!

I also notice that, in the paragraphs at the end of the article, he talks about if the Occupy movement achieves such-and-so and if they achieve this other thing. But in the first paragraph quoted above, which is the second paragraph in the article, he talks about "movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up." I know that some of the activists see that as an ultimate goal. But in real time, there is no way that the Occupy movement is about to stage some massive general strike and bring on an apocalyptic change that would "reorder society from the bottom up". Any politician or police chief - or anti-terrorism official - who sees the Occupy movement that way at this moment is likely smoking some of that Ron Paul Bircher weed.

Tags: corey robin, occupy movement, reactionary mind

The weakness of US banks

2012-01-09T14:43:00.002-05:00

Ed Harrison writes in The expansionary fiscal contraction bust Credit Writedowns 01/08/2012:

If you argue that austerity works in cutting deficits over the longer-term but the short-term pain is worth it, that’s a different argument than the one Republicans are making – and one not likely to get one elected, which is why they’re not making it. But even so, the spectre of debt deflation looms heavily as much in the US as in Europe. After all, BofA is not trading in the single digits because of irrational despondence. The banking sector in the US is still very sick – and will remain so for the foreseeable future. [my emphasis]

Debt deflation means when the value of debt held by the lender as an asset decreases. A bond purchased at a market price of $1,000 may decrease in its market value due to changes in the borrower's credit status. A decrease in assets with liabilities unchanged means a decline in the equity ratios of the lender and therefore a higher vulnerability of the lender to unfavorable business and economic events.

The best time to tackle the real problems of the banks was in 2009 when the Obama Administration first came to office and had maximum credibility among the public in undertaking to fix the problems of the financial sector. Obama's timidity and deference to the financial lobby had seriously negative consequences.

A crackup in the eurozone - a very possible and likely event - could take down some big American banks and compound US economic problems.

President Obama was being cautious in 2009 in his approach to the financial crisis. After the recklessness of the Cheney-Bush Administration, caution didn't look all bad. But sometimes caution produces sub-optimal decisions and policies.

Tags: us economy, world economic crisis

Republicans, Party of the proletariat?

2012-01-09T13:58:00.000-05:00

Republicans, Party of the proletariat? That's what David "Bobo" Brooks would have us think, anyway. And someday I'm going to find out how the word "proletariat" leaked into English to mean "working class" when "working class" is a perfectly good English version. I know who transitioned it from French into German (conservative Catholic social theorist Franz von Baader), but not how it made it into English.

In any case, Charlie Pierce in This Is Why Mitt Romney Is Unemployable Esquire Politics Blog 01/09/2012 explains that the depression has brought overt class factors more to the front of American politics, despite Rick Santorum's bizarre claim that America is a classless society and therefore it's a sin for a Republican to use the phrase "middle class". Pierce:

It's becoming abundantly clear that, all Santorum aside, this election is fundamentally going to be about class. The Republicans already have talked about blue-collar jobs and middle-class anxiety more in this cycle than they have in the previous two or three combined. And, even if the Republicans had given the whole business a good leaving-alone, the White House is going to force the issue anyway. Unemployment is not going to drop below eight percent before the election. The income gap is not going to go away, either. The basic inequities forced on the country by the looting of the economy in the first decade of the century are alive and well. They are going to bite hard at both parties. But only one candidate is so uniquely vulnerable to their political effects.

He also notes with a jab at the punditocracy, "I suspect, though, it just might have a little something to do with the Occupy people who, as we all know, have no coherent agenda that anyone can identify."

Our Pod Pundits, and more generally the hermetically isolated group we still call our political press corps, are notorious for adopting "scripts" about candidates, as Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby elaborated well in the years before he fell in love with the Tea Party. As soon as Rick Santorum began to look like a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, they settled on a script for him in which he is the "working class" candidate.

Bobo flogged the idea in two columns last week. Ron Brownstein, another thoroughly conventional pundit, took it up in Santorum's Appeal National Journal 01/05/2012. Like Bobo, he wants to describe the evolving demagoguery of the Republican Party without reference to the decades-long Southern strategy that now has Republican Presidential candidates making undisguised racial appeals to their white base:

The first sign of the populists’ growing influence was in the presidential runs of conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan in 1992 and 1996. Buchanan, a brilliant if often intemperate political packager, offered a combustible mix of social conservatism, protectionism, isolationism, nativism, and populist attacks on elites that all embodied the embattled sense of decline among many blue-collar Americans. After shocking Bob Dole in the 1996 New Hampshire primary, Buchanan’s “peasants-with-pitchforks” crusade fizzled in South Carolina. But he demonstrated that there was an audience within the GOP for an edgy collection of views that unnerved the party’s traditional business-oriented leadership. [my emphasis]

It's part of the conceit among the Beltway Village that they are really in touch with Real Americans, aka the "white working class" in Bobo's formulation. And because they know the Real Americans so well they know that what appeals to them is that "combustible mix of social conservatism, protectionism, isolationism, nativism, and populist attacks on elites." Pat Buchanan's appeal in the Republican primaries in the 1990s turned out to be limited, as Brownstein notes there. But why let inconvenient facts spoil a good script?

This is an interesting glimpse at the Village outlook:

With equal passion, Santorum pledges both to end abortion and revive American manufacturing (albeit through tax cuts, not the trade barriers Buchanan favored). Within minutes at the same appearance, he can alternately sound like Pat Robertson and Dick Gephardt.

In 2008, the GOP primary electorate was split almost in half between voters with and without a college education, the line that generally divides the managers and the populists. Romney is a comfortable choice for all but the most ideological managers. Santorum will become a serious threat to Romney only if he can unite the populists.

In his views, style, and background, Santorum should be a much easier fit for those voters than Romney. But it’s not clear that Santorum, any more than the rest of the Republican field, has fully contemplated the implications of an electoral coalition that now relies so heavily on blue-collar and older whites. While most of those voters passionately oppose government spending they view as transfer payments to the undeserving, they are equally determined to protect the programs they believe most benefit them - Social Security and Medicare. [my emphasis]

It's an article of faith among even Village pundits (like Mark Shields) who must surely know better that it's absolutely essential that Social Security and Medicare ("entitlements") have to be slashed or done away with entirely. But here Ron Brownstein displays at least momentary awareness that these programs are very popular.

Brownstein's eliding of the Republican base into "blue-collar" Real Americans is a bit more sophisticated than Bobo's. But it's essentially the same trick. They are coming from the same assumption: the Real Americans are uneducated and bigoted and they support the Republicans for unworthy reasons. Unlike Establishment pundits who admire Republicans for wanting to slash "entitlements" and let Grandma eat catfood.

Using college education as a dividing line between "working class" and others is common among our Pod Pundits. I haven't dug into the voting statistics recently to see just how that assumption is wrong. But it's a lazy and misleading assumption even on its face. If we use any half-reasonable definition of working class, it would include both factory and office workers in non-management roles. And a large portion of that group has some college education or a college degree. On the other side of the definition, some considerable portion of non-college educated people work as contractors, store owners, or as other kinds of small businesspeople, forming a considerable portion of the classic "lower middle class".

The advantage to Republicans of having an image around election time of being the Party for working people is obvious. Why our Big Pundits accept it so lazily is another question.

Ben Adler at The Nation does a good takedown of this notion in Rick Santorum Is Not a 'Working-Class Candidate' 01/05/2012. Will his policies really appeal to working-class voters generally? Adler writes, "The totality of Santorum’s domestic policy agenda is to cut spending. This shouldn’t even pass for conservative economic populism."

In another column, Republican Candidates Attack Labor 01/09/2012, Adler comments on the fact that the current crop of Republican Presidential candidates are overtly hostile to organized labor.

There was a time, not so long ago, that Republicans in a Presidential race would at least pretend to have some kind of tolerant attitude toward unions. Adler writes, "Gearing up for their January 21 primary in the notoriously anti-union state of South Carolina, Republican presidential candidates have recently begun demonizing organized labor."

Tags: labor movement, santorum, republican party

State of the Iran War agitation

2012-01-08T16:50:00.002-05:00

LobeLog Foreign Policy has started a weekly Iran Hawk Watch, of which Jasmin Ramsey's 01/06/2012 installment is here. That blog is a good source of reality-based news on US-Iran conflicts.

Suzanne Maloney in Obama's Counterproductive New Iran Sanctions: How Washington Is Sliding Toward Regime Change Foreign Affairs Online 01/05/2012 describes both the risk:

The Obama administration has argued that "pressure works," pointing to past reversals by the Islamic Republic, including the grudging and belated acceptance of a cease-fire to end its eight-year war with Iraq. Yet this formula disregards two critical points: first, Tehran has been under tremendous pressure to change its security policy throughout its entire post-revolutionary history, yet that policy has proved remarkably durable. Second, Iran's major concessions have come not simply as a product of pressure but because of the declining utility of the original objective. In this instance, however, the tables are turned. The more Washington corners Tehran, the higher the value of a nuclear deterrent becomes in the eyes of the leadership.

And the hope:

Although this suggests more friction ahead, it does not mean that a military clash is absolutely on the horizon. Neither side wants war: not Washington, which has worked assiduously to meet the president's timetable for winding down the two other military engagements in the broader Middle East, and not Tehran, which prefers the more familiar (and lower-risk) options availed through proxies and terrorist activities. A prolonged low-intensity struggle -- with plenty of blustery rhetoric and diplomatic hardball -- is now the new normal.

But she qualifies this by pointing out that US policy seems more than ever direct toward regime change, which virtually insures that the US diplomacy toward Iran will be focused on threatening war.

Vali Nasr in Hard-line U.S. Policy Tips Iran Toward Belligerence Bloomberg 01/04/2012 argues that the Iranian leadership is moving toward a more active response to US and European pressure. The financial blockade the Congress authorized Obama to impose, though leaving him discretion on whether to implement it or not, is a particular concern:

In recent months, Iranian protesters have brazenly attacked the U.K. Embassy in Tehran. Iran has claimed to have downed a U.S. drone, put on 10-day war games simulating attacks on U.S. ships, and threatened to push oil prices to $250 a barrel and to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of all oil trade passes.

This defiance marks a change. Until recently, Iran had absorbed economic pressure from abroad. It had remained silent in the face of covert operations aimed at slowing the progress of its nuclear program, brushing off the destructive Stuxnet computer worm, apparently a joint U.S.-Israeli project. But the government has been embarrassed and unnerved by multiple assassinations of its scientists and by suspicious explosions at its military facilities. One blast killed the general charged with developing Iran’s missile program. The attacks have shaken the country’s security forces.

The ruling clerics are also worried about the impact of economic sanctions, which have greatly reduced Iran’s access to global financial markets, created shortages of imported items, and increased inflation and unemployment. The rial has fallen to its lowest point against the dollar, and capital is fleeing the country at an alarming rate. The government has been forced to scrap numerous infrastructure projects, especially in the oil- and-gas sector.

These hardships have caused popular discontent. The next set of sanctions may bring street protests. Iran’s rulers fear a repeat of the demonstrations of 2009. They now see the U.S. policy on Iran -- of toughening sanctions and also, at the United Nations, addressing Iran's human-rights record and support for terrorism -- as one aimed at regime change. [my emphasis]

A war with Iran would be a really, really bad idea.

We in the United States need to get back to the idea that war is a failure of foreign policy, not a goal to be sought, much less make war and the threat of war the predominant tool of foreign policy in the Middle East.

Tags: iran, iran war

Bobo goes to bat for Rick Santorum, twice in one week

2012-01-06T16:31:00.000-05:00

David "Bobo" Brooks has a particular place in the Republican political ecosystem. He speaks like a guy with a college education. And he offers calm, seemingly reasonable justifications for the nastiest characters and the goofiest ideas the Republicans serve up to the public at any given time.

Now, he's a leading member of the punditocracy. So he's obligated to pooh-pooh the significance of minor candidates in a Presidential race. Until the Very Serious People register them as serious candidates or leaders. Since the 2010 election, he's been swooning over Paul Ryan, who is an immensely talented actor who does a very convincing impression of being a soulless android. But Bobo admires him as a courageous leader and serious idea man because he wants to abolish Medicare and published a plan that hardly pretended to add up that would accomplish that goal.

Bobo has a "tell". When he's speaking on the PBS Newshour or some other talking-heads venue, the tell is when he lowers his voice, puts a very earnest-serious look on his face, and start speaking as though he's choosing his words very carefully. Then you know that he's defending some particularly egregious Republican cause and being moderate and non-threatening.

It may be some policy that is impractical and/or destructive, which Bobo will explain is entirely benign. It may be some Republican in good standing who has said something more appalling than the average daily Party output, and Bobo will clarify how it will appeal to the Real Americans. Bobo is a leading expert on Real Americans - white people who vote Republican, in the Boboverse. Because he makes periodic anthopological studies out in The Heartland to discover what simple and charming things are delighting them these days.

Here's Bobo's basic schtick (A New Social Agenda New York Times 01/05/2012):

I’m to Rick Santorum's left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion. I'm also put off by his Manichaean political rhetoric. He seems to imagine America's problems can best be described as the result of a culture war between the God-fearing conservatives and the narcissistic liberals. [blah, blah, etc.] ...

But having said all that, I'm delighted that Santorum is making a splash in this presidential campaign. He is far closer to developing a new 21st-century philosophy of government than most leaders out there.

Yes, Bobo is practicing how to pump Rick Santorum as a visionary political leader and natural statesman. Rick Santorum, the Christian nationalist who's up to his holier-than-thou eyeballs in Washington's legalized corruption.

Much of the rest of his column reads like an adaptation of a list the Santorum campaign e-mailed him, produced by someone combing through every piece of legislation the former Pennsylvania Senator voted for to find some provision that might make him sound less mean than an angry rattlesnake. Compassionate Conservative 2.0.

Classic Bobo: "Santorum believes Head Start should teach manners to children." Awwww...

Because, you know, blah people's children just don't learn manners at home, as Santorum's fans will be glad to explain to you.

And this is a classic Boboism, putting a fresh, polite face on the segregationist transformation of the Republican Party: "Main Street Republicans like Romney usually beat social conservatives like Santorum because there are just so many more of them in the Republican electorate. But social conservatives and libertarians often provide the ideas that Main Street leaders co-opt."

For reality-based analysis on Rick Santorum, you can check out Will Bunch, Wednesday, The Rick Santorum that America doesn't know Attytood 01/04/2012 and John Baer, Santorum’s strong showing: What does it mean? Philadelphia Daily News 01/03/2012.

Tags: david brooks, santorum

Ron Paul fans vs. "China Jon", or, what Old Right isolationism looks and sounds like

2012-01-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

Like I said yesterday, the Patriot Militia/Bircher crowd that are Papa Doc Paul's core supporters are not allies for a progressive movement except on the most narrow, technical basis that their views may occasionally coincide.

The relationship of this video to Papa Doc's own campaign is somewhat murky. But it's a good example of how the xenophobia and white racism of Papa Doc's base can be entirely consistent with their allegedly antiwar position. And does this ad sound antiwar to you? It's called Jon Huntsman's Values and has a YouTube date of 01/04/2012:

Sam Stein writes about the ad in Jon Huntsman Denounces Nasty, Jingoistic Video Allegedly Made By Ron Paul Supporters Huffington Post 01/06/2012.

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul, white racism

Sounds like Huey Long in Louisiana back in the day

2012-01-05T20:00:00.002-05:00

I know I just quoted Charlie Pierce in the last post. But he's very quotable. In Esquire Politics Blog 01/05/2012, he reports:

To sum up: The governor of Michigan has been granted the power to suspend unilaterally the democratically elected government of any city based on criteria that he alone can determine. He will then install a crony to run the place, generally at a higher salary than the mayor whom the governor has chosen to replace. This crony will be fully in charge of all city government functions. He will determine what company gets the contract to pick up the garbage. He will determine which company will plow the roads. I am sure, of course, that cronyism and favoritism will not infect any of these decisions, because that only happens when people are elected to do these jobs, not when they're appointed by a governor who been given himself alone the power to do it. ...

(And, yes, my friends who are Ron Paul fans, by his lights, a state is empowered to do everything that is being done in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan, if that state chooses to do so. That's why Ron Paul's concerns for civil liberties are a mile wide and an inch deep.)

Since all the Republicans declare themselves to be passionate lovers of the Constitution, it worth noting this from Art. IV, Section 4: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government ..."?

So I'm sure our President and former professor of Constitutional law will step in and put a stop to this nonsense immediately, right?

Tags: authoritarianism, michigan

Papa Doc Paul, antiwar politics and the significance of mainstreamed Bircherism

2012-01-05T19:25:00.002-05:00

Tuesday's Iowa primary didn't mark the end of the discussion and debates on the left side of the American political spectrum over the politics of Ron "Papa Doc" Paul, the guy who, in Charlie Pierce's words, "played footsie for his entire career with a bunch of cowflop brownshirts plotting revolution down at Goober's Gas 'n Sip."

A hardcore Southern segregationist and xenophobic Bircher conspiracist, in other words. Complete with absolute crackpot theories about gold and "fiat money". The latter is a technical term for currency whose value is not tied to a physical commodity like gold or silver. In Papa Doc's neck of the political woods, it means that US currency is actually worthless. (I'm not making this up.)

I definitely have been coming down on the side of the debate that says Papa Doc is a far-right segregationist who I have no interest in supporting or promoting in any way. I don't admire him. I don't think he's "principled." I think he's a mean old white guy who's a hardcore Southern segregationist and xenophobic Bircher conspiracist and scamster, though he's likely genuinely fanatical enough to believe a lot of what he says, and what he pretends he didn't write or even know about in his infamous newsletters.

I do think that Matt Stoller has a point in saying that Papa Doc's prominence in this campaign has posed an important challenge to liberals and the Democratic Party: "Ron Paul's stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order." (Matt Stoller, Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals Naked Capitalism 12/29/2011)

I'm coming from an inside-outside perspective on what the Democratic Party base needs. There needs to be genuinely independent movements like Occupy and the peace movement that continually criticize the current state of affairs from outside the Democratic Party national security state/neoliberal consensus. And there needs to be primary challenges within the Democratic Party at all levels to assert those goals and values. It worked for the Christian Right/Movement Conservatives/(latest label:) Tea Partiers in the Republican Party. Something more positive and constructive can make a similar change in the Democratic Party.

But delegitimizing the current national security-state consensus isn't going to be easy or quick - although events like a war with Iran could conceivably cause a rapid shift of intensity in opposition to militarism. It's almost by definition unpredictable, just as no one could have easily predicted something like the resonance of the Occupy movement at this time last year. In January of 2011, "the 99%", "one-percenters", even "occupy" didn't have the same meaning they do today, a reflection in language of a real political shift in society.

The real significance of Papa Doc's campaign this year is that Bircherism - Old Right isolationism and conspiricism - are now an influential part of the criticism of US militarism and interventionist foreign policy. The are not allies or potential allies in anything that remotely deserves the name of a progressive or left political movement.

They may agree with progressives on this issue or that. Individuals like Papa Doc and Baby Doc (Rand Paul) may have an occasional pungent criticism of some foreign policy foolishness or some civil-liberties outrage in between warning of the dangers of race war and paper money.

But Birchers are not progressives. The don't much care for democracy. Or black people. Or liberals. And their foreign policy comes from the same mindset that makes them despise immigrants. They will not be supporting humanitarian relief for Darfur. They won't be supporting arms-control treaties or the International Criminal Court or international law. They will not support helping any country that still might want to ask us for advice on how to develop democracy. For that matter, it's a Bircher commonplace that the Constitution created a republic, not a democracy and that democracy is evil. They are perfectly at home with flat-earther Christian nationalism.

Gene Lyons weighs in on the Papa Doc question, and really gets it right in Ron Paul, still loony Salon 01/04/2012. He reminds us that even on the positions he supposedly shares with progressive, Papa Doc is coming from a whole different place:

Look, this guy’s no more a Libertarian than I’m a Rastafarian. Even when he’s right, as on bombing Iran, he’s wrong. (Hint: It’s about the Jews.) What he’s got against the federal government is the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Anyway, call me old-fashioned, but sanity matters.

Also at Salon, Gary Weiss makes similar point in Progressive beer goggles for Ron Paul 01/05/2012:

What I find objectionable about Ron Paul is very much related to his positions, which I view as an organic whole, divergent from progressive values on every single vital issue, including the foreign policy views that are the main attraction he holds for some liberals. Unlike Greenwald and Stoller, I don’t find any solace in his positions on foreign policy, or his desire to disentangle the U.S. from Afghanistan. I can’t quite so comfortably carve out Paul's views on defense and foreign policy.

This is also an intersting piece from a conservative who once worked for Papa Doc: Eric Dondero, Statement from fmr. Ron Paul staffer on Newsletters, Anti-Semitism Rightwing News n.d., apparently from 12/26/2011. According to him, Papa Doc takes the standard far-right isolationist line on US participation in the Second World War. But Dondero's also kind of clueless about the actual history of the Second World War; he seems to think the entire official purpose of the war was to stop the Holocaust, which was in reality a side-effect of the defeat of Germany. It wasn't the causus belli, as the lawyers say.

Katha Pollitt can be annoying to a lot of people, including me at times. But she is basically right about Papa Doc in Ron Paul's Strange Bedfellows The Nation 01/04/2012: "Ron Paul has an advantage over most of his fellow Republicans in having an actual worldview, instead of merely a set of interests - he opposes almost every power the federal government has and almost everything it does."

Tags: radical right, ron paul

Gary Sick: If you like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ...

2012-01-05T11:05:00.000-05:00

Gary Sick, an expert on Iran and its foreign policies, takes a look at the current state of relations between the US and its allies, on the one hand, and Iran on the other in an important piece, Who’s Afraid of the Ayatollahs? Gary's Choices 01/04/2012. Toward the end, he includes this warning about a war of choice against Iran that American hawks are promoting and have been promoting for a while:

These are the same illusions of righteousness and impunity that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As General Zinni memorably noted, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you're going to love Iran. Those who suggest that a U.S. military confrontation with Iran would be surgical, limited, and one-sided are many of the same people who eight years ago assured you that the invasion of Iraq would be a cakewalk. ...

An impeccable array of U.S. and Israeli security officials have spoken openly of the absolute folly of going to war with Iran and have warned against exaggerating either the threat or Iran’s intentions. Those voices include the top military leaders and intelligence officials in both the United States and Israel.

After a decade of war and trillion dollar deficits, the United States should be well aware that such adventures can do us real harm. An important set of experienced voices continue to call for a return to negotiations. Iran says it is willing. We risk greatly and unnecessarily if we ignore the chance. [my emphasis]

He notes that even among Republicans like Willard (Mitt) Romney who paint the supposed Iranian threat in apocalyptic terms, it also simultaneously taken for granted that the US has an overwhelming superiority to Iran in the force it could apply to defend against an Iranian military move in its neighborhood perceived to be hostile to US interests. And he writes:

Without questioning the logic of this proposition, just how worried should we be about Iran? How much harm can Iran actually do to us?

This question is important since, despite all the scare talk, the United States and its allies are actually conducting their relations with Iran as if they were entirely immune to any retaliation. Such policies include the use of drones for both reconnaissance and attack; covert (or officially deniable) actions, such as the Stuxnet worm introduced into the Iranian nuclear infrastructure and/or assassinations of suspect individuals; displays of military force; and destructive unilateral sanctions.

He warns against the faith that the Obama Administration puts in such acts, because in fact they are "misleading and ultimately dangerous" - and not only in Iran. Obama has expanded covert warfare considerably, based on what we know in the public record.

I haven't followed the drones-in-Iran story closely, but this was news to me: "At least two other U.S. drones had previously been downed over Iran, though they were apparently shot down, not commandeered."

He also notes that Iran may have scored again on the covert front: "Little noticed was the Iranian announcement that it had rolled up a CIA espionage ring in Iran. If true, this is the third time since the revolution that a major U.S. spy ring was neutralized."

Sick also warns that asymmetric methods don't apply only to guerrilla warfare. Referring to the cyber-attacks on Iran's nuclear power program, he writes:

Iran has a very highly developed cyber warfare capability of its own, with a battalion of young, skilled IT engineers. Until now, they have focused primarily on putting down the incipient revolt that followed the contested elections of 2009. In that effort, they were much more efficient than the Egyptians, or Syrians or other Middle East nations who have tried to stop use of the internet for social and political mobilization. But what happens next?

The United States and all other developed industrial states rely on computer-driven systems for their most mundane and most sensitive services, everything from waste disposal sites to dams to nuclear plants. Cyber warfare specialists are openly worried about the vulnerability of these systems to a sophisticated cyber attack. And such attacks, if well planned, leave no discernible fingerprints.

As in the case of the stealth drone, are we as invulnerable as we thought? What if a power plant in your vicinity suddenly and mysteriously exploded or ran amok? You probably would not blame your national security officials, but you might be wrong. In cyber warfare, the playing field is much more level than in conventional warfare.

If such a thing happens, it won't be very helpful for our politicians and pundits to be cluelessly asking, "Why do they hate us?"

In the real world, those whiz-bang black ops programs often don't work nearly so well as they do on TV and in the movies. If the United States is firing rockets from drones, or conducting sabotage operations or other covert military missions, assassinating scientists or other civilians the US Administration of the moment decides needs killin', all those are acts of war. For all the annoyance they cause us, the airport inspections by the TSA can't protect Americans from every risk that stems from our reckless and ill-advised covert wars.

Economic sanctions aren't as always clean and easy as we might like to imagine them:

More recently, the U.S. Congress has been insisting on sanctions against Iranian banks that, in effect, make it impossible for Iran to sell its oil. That is the equivalent of a military blockade of Iran’s oil ports, arguably an act of war. And these sanctions are being imposed unilaterally, without reference to the United Nations Security Council. Members of Congress can go home to their districts and boast about how tough they can be on Iran, and in an election year that is worth a few votes. President Obama seems unwilling to buck the tide, despite his better judgment.

Iran has responded with harsh words, indicating that if Iran’s oil lifeline is cut off, others will also find their access to world oil markets imperiled. Iran does not need to close the Strait of Hormuz to make a point. Its words make it clear that an act of war by the United States will be treated as such by Iran. Even the threat of a confrontation immediately drove the price of oil above $100 per barrel, which has effects on economies struggling to recover from the recession. [my emphasis]

War with Iran. Really not a good idea.

Tags: gary sick, iran, iran war

The Citizen's United Presidential election is officially underway

2012-01-04T17:46:00.003-05:00

Charlie Pierce reminds us that the Iowa caucuses were the first official vote in the first post-Citizen's United Presidential election (Santorum's Demi-Victory Hangs the 2012 For-Sale Sign Esquire Politics Blog 01/04/2012):

The American political system is profoundly deformed. It is deformed by the now limitless power of unaccountable corporate money. (I would remind folks that, in 1972, unaccountable corporate money in a Republican campaign safe was what the Watergate scandal ultimately was all about.) Nothing that happened last night in any way changes that. The American political system is also deformed by the nearly limitless power of concocted narrative, reinforced by an elite political media locked into a self-contained, airless universe, and completely incapable of recognizing a luxurious farce even when there right in the middle of it. For six months, we have heard from the more polite precincts of this universe that the Republican field is made up of second-raters. (Politico, The Daily Racing Form of that universe, ran a piece only just yesterday saying exactly that.) Rick Santorum's sudden ability to garner 25 percent of the Republican caucus voters in Iowa last night doesn't change that simply because it happened. When that unaccountable corporate money is the silent engine behind the creation and maintenance of concocted narrative, the system cannot prevail left to its own devices.

This is the beginning of a watershed election in the history of the country. It is the first presidential campaign that we have had since the turn of the last century that has to be contested while everyone involved has to cooperate in the fiction that the whole process isn't completely for sale.

And if I haven't linked to it before, Tim Dickinson did a long piece for Rolling Stone last year on How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich 11/09/2011:

"It's a vicious circle," says [Nobel laureate economist Joe] Stiglitz. "The rich are using their money to secure tax provisions to let them get richer still. Rather than investing in new technology or R&D, the rich get a better return by investing in Washington."

It's difficult to imagine today, but taxing the rich wasn't always a major flash point of American political life. From the end of World War II to the eve of the Reagan administration, the parties fought over social spending – Democrats pushing for more, Republicans demanding less. But once the budget was fixed, both parties saw taxes as an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to raise the money required to pay the bills. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford each fought for higher taxes, while the biggest tax cut was secured by John F. Kennedy, whose across-the-board tax reductions were actually opposed by the majority of Republicans in the House. The distribution of the tax burden wasn't really up for debate: Even after the Kennedy cuts, the top tax rate stood at 70 percent – double its current level. Steeply progressive taxation paid for the postwar investments in infrastructure, science and education that enabled the average American family to get ahead.

Tags: 2012 election, citizens united decision, republican party

Mr. Brooks investigates the Real Americans

2012-01-04T17:19:00.002-05:00

David "Bobo" Brooks is already practicing to explain how Rick Santorum has a down-home ability to speak to those Real Americans Out In The Heartland. In Workers of the World, Unite! 01/02/2012.

The title is a play on Bobo's mind-bend conservatism in claiming, "The Republican Party is the party of the white working class." (my emphasis) Bobo is playing one of his favorite little tricks there. Maybe one of these days I'll spend some effort to unpack this particular Boboism, which relies on a particular definition of "working class" and a head-fake around the fact that the Republican base relies so heavily on Southern whites with more than a residual admiration for racial segregation.

But what Bobo means by "white working class" here is the same thing Sarah Palin means by Real Americans: good Christian white folks who vote Republican. What's bothering these Real Americans? Bobo puts on his anthropology hat and explains. "They sense that the nation has gone astray: marriage is in crisis; the work ethic is eroding; living standards are in danger; the elites have failed; the news media sends out messages that make it harder to raise decent kids."

No jobs? No money? No unemployment insurance? No, what the Real Americans are worried about is the erosion of the work ethic among, uh, you know, those people.

But, Bobo says, sometimes "a candidate will emerge who taps into a working-class vibe — Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin." Their supporters are the Real Americans, in other words.

And now, Bobo has discovered just before the Iowa caucuses that Rick Santorum is resonating with the Real Americans!

This is Bobo's schtick, making even the wackiest ideas from leading Republicans sound sensible and reassuring. Sure enough, he gets around to saying that Rick "don't-look-at-my-dog-that-way" Santorum, "represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system. Perhaps, in less rigid and ideological form, this working-class experience will someday find a champion."

Although I'm not sure he serves that purpose by including this story, which I never heard before:

Santorum does not have a secular worldview. This is not just a matter of going to church and home-schooling his children. When his baby Gabriel died at childbirth, he and his wife, a neonatal nurse, spent the night in a hospital bed with the body and then took it home — praying over it and welcoming it, with their other kids, into the family. This story tends to be deeply creepy to many secular people but inspiring to many of the more devout.

I can't say I've ever heard of this custom ...

But if Bobo tells us it speaks to Real Americans, he must be right. Because he ventures out to an Applebee's every couple of years and does current research on them.

Tags: david brooks, santorum

Frederick Clarkson and Michael Lind on Papa Doc Paul

2012-01-03T15:58:00.003-05:00

Unlike the mainstream political press, progressive bloggers have made some real efforts to wrestle with Ron "Papa Doc" Paul's quirky ideology. Some attempts were more successful than others.

I continue to insist that the key to understanding Papa Doc is to see him for what he has been his entire career, a hardcore, unrepentant Southern segregationist and Bircher conspiracist.

Frederick Clarkson, who understands the far right very well, writes in Will Ron Paul Fall after his Surprise Rise? Talk to Action 12/28/2011

Paul also owes considerable thanks to national media that have not devoted much serious reporting to his campaign, perhaps because of his standing in the polls, was not taken seriously as a candidate. Meanwhile, in a remarkable election year twist, his libertarian anti-drug war, and old time isolationist foreign policy views have been taken by marijuana reform and anti-war progressives as a reason to crossover and support Paul in Iowa and elsewhere, while down playing or ignoring his unsavory views that are consistent with the depth and breadth of his support from the far right in the U.S.

Election rules vary greatly by state, and in Iowa it happens that the rules allow for non-Republicans to vote in the GOP caucuses in Iowa. Therefore dedicated antiwar activists (including independents, Greens and Democrats) in the absence of a Democratic challenge to Obama, are planning to turn out for Paul. In so doing however, they are aligning themselves with a man who is about much more than the handful of (important) matters where their views converge. Paul is not only seeking to appeal to theocratic evangelicals, but is also the candidate of members of such anti-progressive entities as the neo-Nazi group Stormfront and the John Birch Society. [my emphasis]

Michael Lind, who has pretty much always been nervous about the Democratic position on "culture war" issues, nevertheless also knows the Radical Right well. In Race, liberty and Ron Paul Salon 01/03/2012, he writes:

Should we be impressed if Paul says that as a personal matter he would oppose such things, while defending their legality? It is hard to see any daylight between an overt racist and someone who claims to oppose racism or anti-semitism, but also denounces the only effective ways to put a stop to them—that is, civil rights laws. If you argue that private racism is bad but anti-racist laws are worse, and if you have no problem with the state’s coercive power when it enforces racism but object to coercive state power only in the service of anti-racism, then you cannot complain when others draw their own conclusions about your motives (even if, unlike Ron Paul, you did not publish white supremacist newsletters for years under your own name).

Lind also points out the key reality-denying aspect of the "libertarian" ideology:

Libertarians typically argue that only government, backed by military and police power, can be tyrannical. Lockean republicans in contrast believe that private power located in the for-profit or non-profit sectors can be tyrannical, as well. By means of their agent, the state, the sovereign people legitimately can protect themselves from predation by private sector tyrants as well as public sector tyrants. ...

Some libertarians concede the legitimacy of government coercion in protecting property rights. But in doing so, these libertarians, like Ron Paul, give up any principled objection to government coercion. They simply want government coercion to be used for some purposes—protecting property rights—and not others—enforcing civil rights.

Bircher "libertarianism" means primarily for rich, mean old white guys to do whatever they want to whomever they want.

And that's what Papa Doc is about.

Tags: michael lind, ron paul, radical right

President Obama, Social Security and the payroll tax cut

2012-01-03T09:00:00.003-05:00

Robert Kuttner (Social Security: Secure With Obama? Huffington Post 01/01/2012) favors the substitution of general fund revenues for Social Security taxes, which is what is being done to replace the revenue lost to Social Security through Obama's payroll tax holiday of 2011, that he just got extended by two months. There will be a new debate over it in February.

This is one place that abstract thinking about potential possibilities needs to give way to the real existing situation in the politics of Social Security. Kuttner describes well two main arguments against the payroll tax reduction:

First, it will never be a good time politically for either party to vote to raise Social Security taxes on working people, even once the economy is back in recovery. So the trust funds will be permanently reliant on subsidy from general government revenues. That, say critics, will make it seem less solvent, and less like an earned benefit, further softening Social Security up for privatization.

Second, if we are going to increase the deficit to stimulate the economy, tax cuts -- even on regressive payroll taxes -- are the weakest form of economic stimulus. Dollar for dollar, public investment is far more effective. So, even though the millionaire battle is a good one, Democrats are once again playing on Republican turf, where the issue is defined as who is the more reliable defender of tax cuts.

And he responds to those concerns this way:

In fact, there is no good reason why Social Security has to be funded entirely by payroll taxes. No less than Franklin Roosevelt, in the program's original design, projected that as more and more workers became eligible, general government revenue would have to be part of its financing. And the payroll tax, capped at $107,000 of income and levied on the first dollar of earnings with no deductions or exemptions, is one of our most regressive taxes. Subsidizing Social Security with general revenue is good policy. As long as the system is substantially financed by payroll taxes, the benefit still feels earned.

The devil, of course, is in the details. Making up the Social Security gap with a tax on millionaires is a double win. It makes the tax system more progressive, and it starkly poses alternatives in a way that plays to progressive strengths.

As a matter of pure progressive taxation, yes, it would be ideal if we had a progressive income tax that funded Social Security and pretty much everything else on which the federal government spends its money.

But liberals and progressives and been battling for the last three decades against the Republican insistence on making the federal tax system more and more regressive. And in the gubment-is-bad attitude that the Republicans promote - and too often the Democrats, also! - one of the political firewalls around Social Security has been that people have a sense that "I'm paying into this and I've earned the benefits." In the current environment in which opponents of Social Security make fake arguments about the system running out of money, the payroll tax reduction does strengthen that argument's credibility, as Kuttner's own statement of the objection says. He underestimates the significance of that argument.

Even worse, though, is that his article fails to answer the question its title poses: is Social Security secure with Obama? Because Kuttner doesn't mention in his argument that Obama has proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. Obama is not fighting to preserve Social Security, he's fighting to cut it back.

Given that reality, supporters of Social Security have every reason to doubt that the payroll tax holiday approach to tax relief is a good idea.

Yes, it's a political victory for Obama that he made the Republicans look bad on opposing tax relief for working people. But he's not defending Social Security. And, as Kuttner rightly points out, he's not even doing a decent job of defending the political victory that the tax fight does represent, limited though it may be. Because Obama and his team can't seem to restrain from pepper-spraying their own useful messages:

At the same time, Obama still has a worrisome tendency to position himself above partisan politics and to blame something called "Congress" for legislative blockage rather than blaming the source of the blockage, namely Republican obstruction and extremism. According to the deputy press secretary Joshua Earnest, quoted in the lead political story in Sunday's New York Times, Obama's election year strategy will be to attack "the image of a gridlocked, dysfunctional Congress and a president who is leaving no stone unturned to find solutions to the difficult financial challenges and economic challenges facing the country."

Say what? Who made Congress dysfunctional and gridlocked? Can't Obama savor a partisan victory in which he just helped Republicans marginalize themselves on a popular issue like payroll tax relief without reverting to a posture that accords his own party and the Republican opposition equal blame? [my emphasis]

The last three years of evidence would suggest that, no he can't. And the core of his post-partisan aspirations is the notion of a Grand Bargain: beginning the phaseout of Social Security and Medicare in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to a symbolic increase of taxes for the wealthy which will be quickly rolled back, while Social Security and Medicare are more likely to be permanent casualties.

Tags: barack obama, social security

Papa's Doc's foreign policy

2012-01-02T14:28:00.002-05:00

Ben Adler at The Nation addresses Three Myths About Ron Paul 01/02/2012, #2 of which is his segregationist brand of libertarianism and #3 of which is his foreign policy: "Just because Ron Paul opposes imperialism and unnecessary invasions of foreign countries doesn’t mean he has a liberal or progressive bone in his body. Paul is a nationalist and isolationist, staunchly opposed to multilateral organizations."

He links to this piece by Michael Cohen, The World According to Ron Paul Foreign Policy 12/23/2011, which looks at Papa Doc's foreign policy in more detail.

I've been concerned pretty much since the Iraq War started or thereabouts over the way in which neo-Confederate and Old Right isolationist sources like Antiwar.com - which I've quoted numerous times, though normally with a disclaimer about the source - were establishing a presence among war critics for their brand of far-right ideology. Papa Doc's popularity suggests that it's a siren song that some left-leaning critics of US interventionist foreign policy find it hard not to be attracted to.

Cohen writes:

The problem, however, is that there is far more to Paul's view than just his opposition to U.S. military adventurism. Paul also believes that the United States should depart from all international organizations and global alliances. This includes not just NATO, but also the United Nations and the World Health Organization (he introduced legislation to this effect as recently as this March). He stridently opposes NAFTA, all free trade agreements, and even U.S. membership in the WTO on the grounds that free trade should be free of government interference, global rule-making, or apparently dispute mechanisms. He is opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants and believes that securing America's borders should be the "top national security priority."

What about foreign aid? Paul wants to end it completely -- with some vague exceptions made for disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. He claims that "foreign aid never works to achieve the stated goal of helping the poor of other nations." Finally, there is a darker element to Paul's foreign policy views -- a healthy degree of conspiracy-mongering. He has warned against the so-called NAFTA super-highway and the North American Union, a supposed plan to turn the North American continent into an economic union with a single currency and open borders along the lines of the European Union. Paul has even introduced legislation to prevent this non-event from occurring. He has also claimed that the United Nations "wants to influence our domestic environmental, trade, labor, tax, and gun laws" and that "its global planners fully intend to expand the U.N. into a true world government, complete with taxes, courts, and a standing army." [my emphasis]

What some of Papa Doc's left-leaning sympathetic commentators seem to miss is that Papa Doc's rabid nationalism, xenophobia and paranoid conspiracy-mongering are integral parts of his foreign-policy thinking. His antiwar positions don't exist on some parallel track. They are part of a hardcore Old Right isolationist strand of thinking that constitutes an exceptionally ugly tradition. Neither Adler nor Cohen call out climate change as a particular concern. But Papa Doc is also dead set against any kind of international agreements to reduce greenhouse gases. And, for that matter, against any and all domestic government regulations that would control pollution of any kind. Because that would violate the liberty of rich old white guys like the Koch brothers to poison the air, water and soil as they like.

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul

While the EU fiddles, democracy in Hungary ...

2012-01-02T11:54:00.002-05:00

"When the question is asked, when did Hungary devolve into a one party state from a multiparty democracy, the answer is now." - Marc Chandler (of Brown Brothers Harriman), A Quiet Putsch in Hungary? Credit Writedowns 01/02/2012

It was once conventional wisdom that a depression on the scale of the Great Depression could create favorable conditions for overthrowing democracies.

Like the self-destructive effects of austerity economics in a depression, that lesson doesn't seem to have sustained itself very well into the current depression.

The European Union, which was designed to be a bulwark of democracy, is obsessing over the sovereign debt crisis which the incompetence of the EU's main leaders (Angela Merkel in Germany, Nicolas Sarkozy in France, David Cameron in Britain) have made far worse with their frivolous non-solutions focused on implementing Herbert Hoover economics.

They are concerned, however, from Hungary's departure from bankster orthodoxy on the governance of their central bank, which Chandler also describes.

Angie's arrogant insistence on replacing the governments of Italy and Greece with debt-collection regimes in itself is badly damaging to democracy. The EU itself has overridden democratic institutions in those two countries by those actions. They are scarcely in a position to take a strong stand against authoritarianism in Hungary when they are focused on giving private banks' profits priority over democracy in the eurozone.

The new conservative government in Spain had promised not to raise taxes. Within a few days of taking office, they had to reverse that promise and propose tax increases. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Angie were in agreement this had to be done. So the Machtwort came from Berlin, "Yes, you vill raise ze taxes."

There is an EU summit coming up at the end of this month, at which Angie is scheduled to present the language of the treaty changes she's demanding. The proposals would essentially give the EU (read: Germany) the final say over national budgets, much as Angie is now exercising informally with Spain. It's hard to imagine that it will fly. It won't do anything to save the euro as long as Germany is dictating austerity budgets during a depression. We'll see over the next couple of months.

Tags: angela merkel, hungary

Again on Papa Doc Paul and Old Right isolationism

2012-01-02T09:00:00.002-05:00

Andrew Bacevich is right when he argues that "isolationism" is a bogeyman used by the US foreign policy establishment to stigmatize criticism of American interventionism. Actual isolationism in the sense of the isolationists of the 1920s and 1930s is not advocated by either Republicans or Democrats - with a small but important exception. And the fact that some many liberals and progressives these days seem to be unfazed by the accusation of "isolationism" is a healthy thing. Well, mostly.

The Patriot Militia/John Birch Society crowd that operates at the overlap between the Republican Party and far-right fringe parties like the Constitution Party do advocate the kind of Old Right isolationism whose tradition runs from the anti-League of Nations crew after the First World War to the America Firsters of the early 1940s to Pearl Harbor conspiracists to the John Birch Society and to today's militia movement and Koch Brothers-type billionaire rightwingers.

And to the brand of Republicanism practiced by Congressman Ron Paul of Texas and his song, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, aka Papa Doc and Baby Doc.

The Papa Doc brand of Bircher Old Right isolationism does have some appeal to otherwise left-leaning critics of current US interventionist foreign policy. I continue to think that's more of a sign of desperation than of nuanced political advocacy on the part of his admirers on the left.

You just cannot understand the brand of dogma that people like Papa Doc is pushing without realizing that Papa Doc is a hardcore, unrepentant Southern segregationist and Bircher conspiracist. Period. Full stop.

And, yes, I'm sure that Papa Doc's Christian heart is as pure as the driven snow. And that he's entirely innocent in advocating policies that are most at home among far right militia types and that is white racist, xenophobic, anti-democracy, bitterly anti-labor, opposed to any and all arms-control treaties and honest-to-God for real anti-Semitic. Did I also mention overflowing with absolute crackpot theories about "fiat money" and the North American Superhighway and the United Nations and more besides? It's not a matter of ad hominem dismissal of his ideas. It's that you just cannot understand his foreign policy worldview without understanding the Bircher conspiracist worldview of which they are an integral part.

Glenn Greenwald discusses Papa Doc's policies in Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies Salon 12/31/2011.

Glenn links to segment of The Young Turks that among other things mentions favorably a melodramatic anti-intervention ad from Papa Doc. Philip Weiss also praises the ad in The Ron Paul moment – bad and good Mondoweiss 12/22/2011, calling it a "genius video Paul just did opposing our occupation of foreign countries." It's called If China Attacks America (JUST IMAGINE) YouTube date 12/04/2011:

But I doubt very seriously that Papa Doc's Bircher/Patriot Militia base takes this as an ad about peace and love. They will process that business about a foreign military occupation in Texas in terms of black-helicopter fantasies about a secret Mexican army hiding in America ready to pounce at the signal of our Marxist Kenyan Islamunist America-hating President. (And it's really pretty cheesy on the face of it.) Remember, in the militia-movement fantasy-world, the federal government is an occupying force in Texas and other states. You know, the "Zionist occupied government" in Washington (headed by that Marxist Kenyan Islamunist America-hating President) that these folks are terrified of?

Glenn's pieces are always worth reading. But I just think he misses the boat on this whole Papa Doc business. I can certainly agree that we don't have to "see all political issues exclusively as a Manichean struggle between the Big Bad Democrats and Good Kind Republicans or vice-versa." But we should also see Papa Doc Paul for who he is.

I don't believe Papa Doc is someone who has a quirky mixture of progressive antiwar views, earnest civil liberties concerns and hardline rightwing attitudes on the economy, immigration, abortion and just about everything else under the sun. He has spent his career catering to a political underworld to whom all US foreign policy is part of a big Jew Commie plot. His position on civil liberties is that the federal government should do absolutely nothing whatsoever to remedy even the grossest violations of civil liberties by states and localities.

Glenn is very good about analyzing the often cynical and, yes, brutal nature of the Obama Administration. He is not so good at seeing the deep cynicism in the segregation, Old Right isolationist viewpoint Papa Doc has spent his entire political career right into 2012 promoting and supporting.

The bottom line on Papa Doc still is, he's a flaming rightwinger!

See also:

Matt Stoller, Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals Naked Capitalism 12/29/2011. To his credit, unlike many other commentators on the left, Matt digs into the neo-Confederate "libertarian" ideology that is a big part of Papa Doc's and his supporters' worldview. He also speaks from some personal experience working with Papa Doc's staff on Capitol Hill. And he plausibly suggests, "Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order."

Michael Tomasky, Democracy Journal, Ron Paul's America Spring 2008, reviewing Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism by Bill Kauffman (2008).

Tags: isolationism, old right, ron paul

The US in the world: discussion on "The decline of the American empire"

2012-01-01T16:01:00.002-05:00

This Aljazeera English segment of the regular program Empire, The decline of the American empire first aired on 12/29/2011, has a good panel discussion with four American participants of the general question of the US military role in today's world. There is an accompanying article, The decline of the American empire 01/01/2012 and a Transcript: Decline of the American empire 12/30/2011.

At just after 41:00 in the video, panel participant Susan Glasser, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, refers to the current situation as "a global crisis of capitalism". It's an accurate phrase, and one that I'm happy to see edging its way into "respectable" discussion.

The problem with many of these decline-of-American-empire analysis is that they often put emphasis on a conservative argument, that the current level of US national debt is unsustainable and threatens the health of the economy. This is just not the case.

We do hear that argument in this Empire special. But it also discusses the economic strength of the US and the role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

One person in the special also mentions that the US military budget, large as it is, represents about 3% of the GDP.

Neither debt nor "entitlements" nor crowding out of civilian investment is going to force the reduction of US commitments. But the level of military commitments the US has now does face resistance from other countries. Military spending is public spending, and it does compete in priority with other spending. We may not have a militarized economy in terms of percentage of GDP. But we do have a militarized political culture which risks unnecessary wars and corrupts our democratic institutions.

It's astonishing and disturbing that the Democratic President of the United States, with the now-explicit support of Congress, claims the right to assassinate anyone, including American citizens, anywhere in the world that the Executive Branch designates as a "terrorist" without the requirement for any legal charges or due process of law. And the courts, with some exceptions (that are minor in light of the seriousness of the problem), have refused to stand up against the Constitutional violations that have become an integral part of the War On Terror. And even though the suffering of American soldiers makes limit intrusion into public consciousness, it is substantial and consequential. The possibility and reality of "blowback" is also inherent in our current highly interventionist foreign policy.

We live in a national security state predicated on the existence of an imaginary worldwide state of war. It's an amazing state of affairs. And it will continue to corrupt and diminish democracy in the United States until that fantasy is dispelled and the level of military commitment significantly reduced.

Militarism isn't the only problem for democracy and freedom in the US. (See Bush v. Gore, Citizen's United.) But it is a major problem that the American public can't afford to ignore if we're serious about keeping a democratic government.

Tags: militarism

Hungary and democracy in the Angiefied European Union

2011-12-31T14:58:00.000-05:00

The most obvious symptom of the failing of the European Union was the replacement of the Italian and Greek governments in 2011 at the demand of the EU to be replaced, without new elections, by "technocratic" governments whose only real task was to collect debts for the banks, i.e., keep payments on their sovereign debt current by slashing government spending and dismantling much of their public social net.

Austerity economics is terrible policy in the middle of a depression, no matter what kind of government is pursuing it.

But a couple of contrasts in the field of democracy are especially telling. In 2000, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) won a plurality in the national election. The FPÖ was headed by Jörg Haider, then seen as the model "yuppie fascist" in European politics because of his repeated expressions of admiration for various aspects of the Third Reich. We now know that he was more interested in being on TV than in becoming a new Mussolini. He created a split-off party and, in 2008, died in a car wreck after getting drunk with a pal of his at a well-known gay bar in Klagenfurt, the capital of his home state, Carinthia.

But in 2000, the prospect of an Austrian government headed by an admirer of the Third Reich was taken seriously. The EU imposed "diplomatic sanctions" on Austria. Which really weren't terribly harsh. They essentially meant that Austrian diplomats in Europe wouldn't be invited to as many dinner parties as they would normally expect. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing in Austria about this (figuratively speaking!). But it was a clear statement by the EU nations that democracy was a baseline requirement for participation in the Union. Because they EU was always about political union on the basis of democracy for the purpose of preserving peace in Europe.

And it was effective. Austrian President Thomas Klestil, the head of state, agreed with the FPÖ and the second-place conservative People's Party (ÖVP) that the ÖVP would form the government with the FPÖ as the junior partner, without Haider as a minister in the national government. (Typically, the head of the junior coalition partner gets a Vice Chancellorship and the Foreign Ministry.) When the ministers were selected and formally proposed to Klestil, he rejected two of the FPÖ ministers because of particularly impolitic comments that had made.

In other words, the EU was prepared to defend democracy. The replacement of the Greek and Italian governments for the convenience of the European banks during 2011 had a very different look. And the contrast becomes even more dramatic when we think about what's happening in EU member state Hungary, where an elected government is taking far more drastic steps to establish authoritarian rule there than anything the Austrian government did under the ÖVP/FPÖ coalition.

Paul Krugman has been calling attention to the situation in Hungary under the ruling Fidesz party in his New York Times column and blog. As Charles Hawley reports for Spiegel International,'Democratic Deficiencies' Abound in Hungary 12/21/2011, "Media, churches, the judiciary and even the Hungarian central bank are all to be more tightly controlled by Fidesz officials in government."

What, you haven't heard the EU howling about Hungary abandoning democracy? Me neither. But let's be fair. The EU is expressing concern about some aspects of Fidesz policies. The ones that trample on neoliberal economic orthodoxy:

Meanwhile, Orban's legislative frenzy appears to be ruffling feathers with the European Union once again. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has reportedly written to the Hungarian prime minister asking him to withdraw a proposed law which some say would threaten the Hungarian central bank's independence. "I would forcefully advise you to withdraw two pieces of cardinal law now in front of parliament," Barroso wrote, according to the Hungarian news website origo.hu.

The law would change the bank's management structure and also that of the committee which sets interest rates. Both the EU and the IMF, in Budapest to negotiate measures to help insulate Hungary from the euro crisis, left abruptly last week due to concerns about the law. [my emphasis]

Drastically restricting freedom of speech and the press, curtailing religious freedom, fixing election laws Southern-segregationist style to secure indefinite Fidesz rule - why the bleep should Angela Merkel and her subservient EU bureaucracy care about stuff like that?

But threatening the sacred independence of the central bank, now that's something that has to be dealt with!

Angie and her junior partner Nicolas Sarkozy have transformed the EU. And definitely not in a good way.

The independence of the central bank is a neoliberal fetish. Sound economics as practiced by the Very Serious People who have wrecked the world economy says that the central bank should be independent of direct political control. Which is a good idea up to a point. But it's not the kind of thing that written on some sacred stone tablets of democracy somewhere. One of the problems of the euro is that the European Central Bank (ECB) is that it is independent but required by its (foolishly designed) EU legal framework to concentrate on controlling inflation and not acting as buyer of last resort for eurozone sovereign debt. How a country or the EU establishes the framework for a central bank's operation may be more or less advisable. But only in some extreme situation, such as setting it up to function as organized corruption (see the 19th-century Bank of the United States), is it a matter of basic democratic institutions.

I've never forgiven Walter Russell Mead for ridiculously calling the Cheney-Bush Administration "Jacksonian". And I generally don't think much of his analyses. But (stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day), in "Fascist Zombies" From Hungary Threaten EU The National Interest 12/22/2011, he manages to at least say some things that are reasonable, such as, "we are learning in Hungary, [the EU's] resources to defend democracy in an erring member state are not great. ... In Greece the problem is financial; in Hungary it is political."

Of course, Mead seems to approve of the Herbert Hooverish insistence that austerity economics and removing of protection for workers and ordinary citizens from the worst consequences of systemic economic failure are wonderful things. And, in connection with that sentiment, he makes the observation, "If voters refuse to make sensible choices, sooner or later they will lose the power to choose." It's not clear from this just how upset Mead actually is about the attacks on democracy in Hungary or about the EU's failure to do anything about it.

Which brings me to this latest piece of degeneration of politics in Angie's Christian Democratic Union (CDU): CDU-Finanzexperte."Griechen legen Hände in den Schoß und wir zahlen" Die Welt 30.12.2011. Hans Michelbach is head of the German Budestag's (lower house of Parliament) Finance Committee, and thus one of the leading figures on finance questions in Angie's party. He's saying outright that even the government Angie installed in Greece late in 2011 - which was approved by the Greek Parliament in at least technical compliance with democratic and Greek sovereign processes - should just be ousted and replaced by an EU trusteeship!

There was a time, not so long ago, that a senior German politician publicly demanding the ouster of a democratic government in Greece or any other European country would have been a scandal, even cause for an early retirement from politics. There's no indication in the report that Angie endorses Michelbach's demand. But this is the Angiefied CDU. Given her behavior toward Italy and Greece, I actually would not be surprised if she were encouraging this kind of threat against Greece.

What will she threaten to defend democratic institutions in Hungary? Don't hold your breath waiting.

Tags: angela merkel, hungary, jörg haider

Friday Papa Doc

2011-12-30T14:16:00.000-05:00

Robert Scheer, Marginalizing Ron Paul Truthdig 12/29/2011:

[Papa Doc said,]"... The Bill of Rights has no exemption for 'really bad people' or terrorists or even non-citizens. It is a key check on government power against any person. This is not a weakness in our legal system; it is the very strength of our legal system."

That was exactly the objection raised by The New York Times in its own excellent editorial challenging the constitutionality of the NDAA. It should not be difficult for those same editorial writers to treat Ron Paul as a profound and principled contributor to a much-needed national debate on the limits of federal power instead of attempting to marginalize his views beyond recognition.

Papa Doc, The War on Religion LewRockwell.com 12/30/2003 (this and the next one via Digby):

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government's hostility to religion. ...

The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. Throughout our nation's history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility. Moral and civil individuals are largely governed by their own sense of right and wrong, and hence have little need for external government. This is the real reason the collectivist Left hates religion: Churches as institutions compete with the state for the people's allegiance, and many devout people put their faith in God before their faith in the state.

Aside from the Christian dominionist distortion of history on the Founders view of separating church and state, it's also curious that a "constitutionalist" who idolizes the Constitution would say that it and the Declaration are "both replete with references to God." Declaration of Independence (which has no legal force): # of references to "God": 1; Original Constitution: # of references to "God": 0; # of references to "Lord": 1, in "the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." Bill of Rights: God references, 0; Amendments 11-27: God references, 0.

Jay Ackroyd, Newt Eschaton 12/24/2011:

It looks like Iowa voters caucus-goers might be in the process of turning Ron Paul into a Newt. ...

And much hand-wringing will ensue on the left, as they try to decide whether or not they like a racist anti-war isolationist who favors a society of bare-foot, pregnant women smoking dope in the kitchen.

Charlie Pierce, There Is No Republican "A Team" Esquire Politics Blog 12/28/2011: "The current frontrunning crazoid is a guy who played footsie for his entire career with a bunch of cowflop brownshirts plotting revolution down at Goober's Gas 'n Sip."

More Pierce on Papa Doc (And the Mitt-Trippers Stumble On... 12/28/2011):

It also means you, Ron Paul. If you're going to play footsie with the gunz-and-ammo crowd for your entire career, including those elements of the gunz-and-ammo not entirely disposed to sharing the country with people darker and/or more Jewish than they are, then you had to know that, sooner or later, our longtime supporters were going to collide with your newer, younger supporters who like what you say about Iran and the Bill of Rights, and that this collision wasn't going to make you look like a bold coalition-builder. It was going to make you look like somebody trying to raise a militia at Bonnaroo. So defenses like, "I dunno what went out there under my name" aren't going to cut it.

But he also finds a good word for Papa Doc - well, context-creating words would be a better description - in "Appearing to Be a Racist" — a Strategy Still 12/29/2011:

You know who also thought that "appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990's"? The same people who thought it was a good political strategy in the 1960's, '70's, and '80's. The same people who hired Lee Atwater. The same people who looked at the white-supremacist backlash against the triumphs of the civil-rights movement and saw, not a outbreak of lawless racism, but a golden political opportunity, and who built a political movement out of the remnants of American apartheid, and who allowed that movement to take over an entire political party until all that's left is what you see now, parading through the streets of Iowa, or working in the state houses to deprive minority voters of the rights for which they paid so dear a price.

It was more than Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, boys. It was the entire Republican party, and the conservative "movement" that energized it. It's why Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about "states rights" in Mississippi, not half-a-mile from the spot where murdered civil rights workers were buried in a dam. It was welfare mothers driving Cadillacs and young bucks buying steaks. It was the slandering of Lani Guinier as a "quota queen." It's all those ID laws in all those states, and the phony ACORN scandal, and virtually everything said by every GOP presidential candidate on the subject of immigration and, in case you haven't noticed, it's an awful lot of the problems your people have with Barack Obama. It's what the pathetic Willard Romney is talking about when he talks about "the entitlement society." It's too late to get out from under it now. Without "appearing to be racist" as a good political strategy, there would be no modern Republican party. Modern conservatism would have ceased to exist after the debacle of 1964. Don't be fobbing it all off on poor Ron Paul.

Tags: 2012 election, ron paul

Papa Doc Paul and executing LGBT people

2011-12-29T14:36:00.002-05:00

Pema Levy & Benjy Sarlin report for TPM on some of the fine Christian white folks Ron "Papa Doc" Paul has supporting him in Death Penalty For Gays: Ron Paul Courts The Religious Fringe In Iowa 12/28/2011.

The headline refers to Nebraska pastor the Rev. Phillip Kayser, of Dominion Covenant Church, who supports capital punishment for homosexuality: "Kayser confirmed to TPM that he believed in reinstating Biblical punishments for homosexuals — including the death penalty — even if he didn't see much hope for it happening anytime soon."

They also report on Papa Doc's Iowa state campaign director:

Kayser’s allegiance to the Paul campaign may reflect who the campaign has chosen to sell Paul to the churches. Mike Heath, who became Ron Paul’s Iowa state director this fall, has spent his career on the Christian right. In Iowa, Heath has focused on outreach to the religious community in the state, where Paul has made an effort to target evangelical voters.

Heath spent 14 years running the Christian Civic League of Maine (which has since changed its name). As a prominent figure in Maine, Heath slowly alienated the Christian right in the state with his extreme tactics. In 2004, for example, he launched a witch hunt to out gay members of the Maine legislature, asking supporters, according to the Portland Press Herald, to “e-mail us tips, rumors, speculation and facts” regarding the sexual orientation of the state’s political leaders, adding, “We are, of course, most interested in the leaders among us who want to overturn marriage, eliminate the mother/father family as the ideal, etc.” The result was that his own organization suspended him for a month.

“He’s a well-known conspiracy theorist about the ‘gay agenda,’” says Travis Kennedy, chief of staff for the House Democratic Office in Maine, who says Heath was a big figure around the capital for many years. Heath made more enemies than friends, says Kennedy, whose “offensive and aggressive” tactics put off even his allies on the Christian right. In 2007, Heath played a big part in opposing a sexual orientation anti-discrimination ballot measure which ultimately passed by a wide margin. On Heath’s new job in Iowa, Kennedy said, “I’m not surprised he’d be hired in a state far away from Maine. He has a pretty poor reputation around here.”

From 2008-2010, Heath served as chairman of the board of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. AFTAH is a fringe, anti-gay organization and has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for promoting false information. For example, the organization and its founder, Peter LaBarbera, have published false reports about LGBT people, including allegations that they live shorter lives and that they are prone to pedophilia. LaBarbera disputes the SPLC’s label.

“Peter LaBarbera is among the most fringe elements of the anti-gay industry in America today,” Michael Cole-Schwartz, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, wrote in an email to TPM. “You’d be hard pressed to find another group that is so singularly focused on telling lies about LGBT Americans.”

Also worth reading on Papa Doc: Lizzy Ratner, Ron Paul and the left Mondoweiss 12/28/2011.

Bottom line: Papa Doc is a FLAMING RIGHTWINGER!

Tags: ron paul

Krugman on the depression

2011-12-28T23:53:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman states the issue succinctly (The Defeatism of Depression 12/27/2011):

There is nothing — nothing — in what we see suggesting that this current depression is more than a problem of inadequate demand. This could be turned around in months with the right policies. Our problem isn’t, ultimately, economic; it’s political, brought on by an elite that would rather cling to its prejudices than turn the nation around.

Tags: paul krugman, world economic crisis

2011 retrospective: Occupy Wall Street and press corps disconnect

2011-12-28T15:50:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to avoid the ever-popular year-end lists or retrospectives. But what the heck, here's one of my favorites from 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the cluelessness of the mainstream media in evaluating it, much less recognizing its potency. Here The Young Turks memorialize what may be the most emblematic moment on US mainstream TV news for 2011, Occupy Wall Street Attacked by Erin Burnett YouTube date 10/05/2011:

And this brilliant Halloween spoof by The Alyona Show's Alyona Minkovski 10/31/2011, Halloween:'Seriously, Protesters?!':

Tags: alyona minkovski, occupy movement, occupy wall street

Ron Paul, the drug war and the rightwing mind-bend

2011-12-27T22:13:00.001-05:00

One thing I've experienced pretty much my entire adult life is that when I try to follow the thought process of far-right crackpottery is that I get to a certain point and I feel like my brain is being twisted out of shape. That's kind of my signal to step back and say, this just doesn't making any freaking sense, and it's foolish to try to treat this as logic gone awry and instead start thinking about clinical explanations.

The original Hawaii Five-O series had an episode in which Andy Griffith played the patriarch of some hillbilly family cult that murdered people and then stole their money. (I'm a Family Crook - Don't Shoot!) When McGarrett and his team finally caught them, the matriarch of the group (Joyce Van Patten) explained they thought it was a sin to steal. McGarrett asked her then why did they kill to get their money. She explained cheerfully that if they were daid, it wasn't stealing to take their money. Even the reliably unflappable McGarrett was a bit "flapped" by that, getting a totally perplexed expression with a sound-track wrinngggg noise to go along with it.

That's what I mean by the mind-bend moment. The first time I recall experiencing it was from a story my mother was telling me. She worked at the local public health department in our town in Mississippi. Sometime circa 1972, she got a call from a guy who grew up as one of our next door neighbors. He had grown up to be a hardcore white racist and of course was a big supporter of the county's third-rate "segregation academy" that whites had set up so their children wouldn't have to be put in a situation that made them nominally equal to black students. This guy called the health department one day and was ranting at my mother because he said that the health department was spreading a rumor that kids at the seg academy had head lice. Which wasn't true, but this guy was totally convinced and was going off on her, even though she didn't set the department's policies in any case, which he certainly knew.

Stuff like this can't be explained by misunderstandings or twisted logic. In segregationist thinking, accused the pure white children at the seg academy of having head lice would be hanging a favorite segregationist stereotype of African-Americans onto the teenage members of the supposed higher race. Somehow, this metastasized through some strange projection mechanism into being a plot by the gubment-run health department to accuse the seg academy of something that segregationists would make up about black kids. It was just whacked.

I also got that feeling today when I read about the defense that Ron "Papa Doc" Paul's supporters are making against the latest publicity about his hardcore segregationist, white racist politics. Papa Doc, you see, has criticized the drug war and has even criticized it for having racist origins. So if he's racist he's also kind of anti-racist, too. Or something. [Sensation of brain being twisted sets in.]

David Dayen takes a cautious analytical look at that argument in On Ron Paul and Progressivism FDL News 12/27/2011.

Ryan Grim provides some historical background from his own research on the politics of race and drugs in Ron Paul: Drug War In U.S. Has Racist Origins Huffington Post 12/27/2011.

David writes:

Those defending Paul on the racism charge do make a keen argument, that his critique of the US drug war is in its own way a condemnation of historical racism. ...

I don’t think you can separate virtually any figure supporting the drug laws in this country from the roots of racism, if you wanted to make the connection. So you have to choose between someone who allowed unfortunate racist comments to go out under his name, but who parted ways with the policy most likely to put minorities in chains over the last century, and more mainstream figures, who abhor such public expressions of racism but support these structurally racist policies.

Here's the thing. I get that that for some people untangling Papa Doc Paul's words can be confusing. But there's a key to processing them: Papa Doc is a hardcore, unrepentant Southern segregationist and Bircher conspiracist. Period. Anyone who thinks Papa Doc opposes the drug war because he thinks it's racist against black people, or thinks he gives a flying flip about the Constitution for anyone except rich old white guys, just doesn't understand what a segregationist is. And though it's true that the war-loving Republicans get upset at his nominal criticism of various wars, his reference-point is xenophobic Bircher isolationism, which is completely consistent with Papa Doc's anti-immigrant nativism. The reason someone like Dave Neiwert, who knows the American far right as well as anyone I could name, is consistently harsh about Papa Doc is because Dave does understands very well where Papa Doc's coming from.

Both David's and Ryan's posts include Papa Doc's reference to the origins of the drug war, both apparently without recognizing what he's saying in the Bircher context. Here's the passage in question from Ryan's piece which David also quotes:

In 1988 Paul made a presidential campaign stop at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws while running on the Libertarian Party ticket. "What was so bad about the period from 1776 to 1914?" Paul wondered, referring to a time in American history when drugs were legal on the federal, and, in many towns, local level. "In the 20th Century, the doctors, like all business people, decided that there ought to be a monopoly. 'If you wanted a little bit of codeine in your cough medicine, it would be much better if you come to me so I can charge you $25 for a prescription.'"

Paul, in a speech aired at the time on C-SPAN went on. "Before the 20th Century there was none of that and it was the medical profession as well as many other trade groups that agitated for the laws. And you know there’s a pretty good case made that this same concept was built in with racism as well. We do know that opium was used by the Chinese and the Chinese were not welcomed in this country," Paul said. "We do know that the blacks at times use heroin, opium and the laws have been used against them. There have been times that it has been recognized that the Latin Americans use marijuana and the laws have been written against them. But lo and behold the drug that inebriates most of the members of Congress has not been touched because they're up there drinking alcohol." [my emphasis]

Papa Doc doesn't want the government to regulate medicine or drugs, whether it's an inadequately tested drug from Big Pharma or fake cancer cures from "alternative medicine" scamsters. The stuff about racism is just fluff for Papa Doc and his brand of Patriot Militia "libertarians."

Yeah, they want rich white people to have unrestricted access to their recreational drugs of choice. But if poor blacks, Latinos and "white trash" wind up robbing good Christian white folks to be able to buy their drugs and state governments send them to prison in far disproportionate numbers, will President Papa Doc's Justice Department under Attorney General Joe Arpaio step in to do something about it?

If you think there's even a tiny chance of that happening, you really, really don't know segregationists!

Tags: ron paul, segregation, white racism

Ron Paul is still a FLAMING RIGHTWINGER!

2011-12-26T14:01:00.000-05:00

Charlie Pierce summarizes Ron "Papa Doc" Paul's politics in one pointed paragraph (The Other Problem with Ron Paul Esquire Politics Blog 12/23/2011):

Look, the man's a hoot and all, and he was right on Iraq and he at least talks the talk about civil liberties, which in the current Republican debate is roughly the same thing as shouting your opinions into the engines of a 747. But the man's views of many of his fellow Americans are straight out of a anti-fluoridation handbill that somebody stapled to a telephone pole in 1957. He apparently ascribes to a view of FEMA that is roughly the same as the one that powered the X-Files movie a few years back. ("FEMA - the secret government," hisses Martin Landau, before They do away with him and stuff him in the trunk of a car that explodes.) He attaches himself to assessments of the civil-rights movement that would have embarrassed J. Edgar Hoover. He trafficks with racists, and conspiracy nuts, and he has spent his career marinating in the most toxic sauces of the lunatic Right, the noxious brew that the more respectable Republicans are happy to serve up to the mouthbreathers in their base, as long as it doesn't leach into the Chateau Petrus in their hospitality suites. That's what's happening now, some discreet ratfking to make sure that Crazy Uncle Ron doesn't interrupt too severely the relentless march of Willard Romney. Nevertheless, these newsletters are a look into the political world according to Ron Paul, along look backward in time through the prism of genuine American nativist bigotry. [my emphasis]

The newsletters to which he refers there are the ones that were a lucrative source of income for Papa Doc 20 or so years ago. The invaluable Dave Neiwert explains in The Freedom To Oppress: Why Ron Paul's Old Racist Newsletters Matter C&L 12/26/2011:

Let's face it -- Ron Paul's lame denials about his repulsively racist and homophobic newsletters of the '80s and '90s on CNN should permanently lay to rest everyone's favorite myth about the man, i.e., that he's a "straight shooter" and an "honest man". No he's not. He's a liar.

Anyone who can make millions of dollars for years off a notorious newsletter with their name on it and then later look into a camera and claim with a straight face: "I didn't write them. I didn't read them at the time. I disavow them. That's it" -- that man is a liar, pure and simple. Especially when you can find videos as recent as the above 1995 interview on C-SPAN in which he clearly embraces the content of those newsletters.

That alone should tell us everything we need to know about the man. The facts: Ron Paul had a significant role in determining the editorial direction of his newsletters, which were edited and largely written by Lew Rockwell and a staff under his direction. And yes, those newsletters were ugly, racist, homophobic, and bizarre excursions in right-wing extremism, extraordinarily popular with militiamen and other far-right "Patriots". But then, that would be because Paul built his political career in pandering to such extremists.

Conor Friedersdorf did a piece for The Atlantic last week (12/22/2011) called Grappling With Ron Paul's Racist Newsletters that Dave accurately characterizes as "a thoughtful and nuanced take on the matter" but which nevertheless "also makes excuses for the inexcusable," i.e., he's willing to give Papa Doc a pass on white racism. Friedersdorf winds up arguing that, well, those newsletters weren't so nice and Papa Doc was at least complicit in them; but for his supporters, Papa Doc looks like the candidate who "would do the most to square American government with the highest ideals of our polity". And he expresses his sympathy for the notion that Papa Doc's "policies, the ones he would champion in general election debates and pursue if elected, are the most moral on offer among the GOP contenders."

Dave's not so willing to mealy-mouth Papa Doc's ugliest political traits away:

Well then, let us consider whether or not Paul's policies would be moral ones. And we know, as he has expressed over many years on many occasions, what the outline of his policies would look like: eliminating the income tax, dismantling the IRS, dismantling the Fed, returning to the gold standard, and radically gutting the federal government and its power, notably including its power to enforce civil-rights laws and to protect minorities. It was only recently, after all, that Paul reaffirmed that he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That agenda, as it happens, matches up with the agenda that has long been promoted by the most racist elements in American politics of the past two generations and more -- the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, the Klan -- as well as by a variety of extremists with deep roots in far-right anti-Semitism, such as the John Birch Society (with whom Paul has enjoyed a long association).

And while they may employ vicious racism and bizarre extremism in their rhetoric supporting this agenda -- something largely absent from Paul's -- their reasons for pursuing an agenda identical to Paul's supposed "freedom" agenda have to do with the way they define "freedom" -- that is, as the freedom to oppress other people.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has shown some enthusiasm for the fact that Papa Doc's antiwar positions seem to be giving him a boost in the upcoming Iowa caucuses. But in this segment from the 12/22/2011 show, he and his panel of commentators address the question Is Ron Paul racist?, including one of the excuses Conor Friedersdorf makes for him:

Tags: david neiwert, ron paul, white racism

Christmas Truce of 1914

2011-12-25T00:01:00.008-05:00

This is still my favorite Christmas story after the original.

German and British troops fraternize, Boxing Day, 1914

It's my Christmas blogging tradition to post about my favorite modern Christmas story, the Christmas Truce of 1914. It was a spontaneous, unofficial truce during the First World War that occurred all along the lines between the English and French, on the one side, and the Germans, on the other, at Christmas time.

This is a song by John McCutcheon about the event:

I'm going to be repeating some things I've posted in previous years. But classic Christmas stories deserve to be retold over and over.

This following photo showing German and British troops on Christmas Day 1914 appears on the dust jacket of Der kleine Frieden im Grossen Krieg [The Little Peace in the Great War] (2003) by Michael Jürgs with the caption, ("Es hat niemals einen guten Krieg und niemals einen schlecthten Frieden gegeben") ("There has never been a good war and never a bad peace").

Most of us could think of a war we considered good in some way and likewise a peace that was less than good, but the basic sentiment is sound.

Stanley Weintraub, author of Silent Night: the Remarkable 1914 Christmas Truce wrote about the event more briefly in The Christmas truce: When the guns fell silent Independent 12/24/05. (Original link dead; copies here and here) A French film has been made about it, called Joyeux Noël.

Describing the Christmas Truce, Weintraub writes:

By Christmas morning, no man's land between the trenches was filled with fraternising soldiers, sharing rations, trading gifts, singing, and - more solemnly - burying the dead between the lines. (Earlier, the bodies had been too dangerous to retrieve.) The roughly cleared space suggested to the more imaginative among them a football pitch. Kickabouts began, mostly with balls improvised from stuffed caps and other gear, the players oblivious of their greatcoats and boots. The official war diary of the 133rd Saxon Regiment says "Tommy and Fritz" used a real ball, furnished by a provident Scot. "This developed into a regulation football match with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great matter. Das Spiel endete 3:2 fur Fritz." Other accounts, mostly German, give other scores, and British letters and memories fill in more details.

And he laments:

A Christmas truce seems in our new century an impossible dream from a more simple, vanished world. Peace is indeed, even briefly, harder to make than war.

William Faulkner projected the Christmas Truce on a much larger scale in his novel A Fable (1954). (English professors seem to think it's not technically a novel but literally a fable but don't ask me to explain the difference.) This 1968 Signet paperback edition pictured the protagonist as a Christ figure, and Faulkner indeed uses Christian symbolism heavily in the novel/story/fable:

For some reason, Faulkner wrote part of this book on the wallpaper in one of the rooms of his small mansion in Oxford, MS, Rowan Oak. You can still see it there.

Simon Rees writes about this amazing event in The Christmas Truce FirstWorldWar.com 08/22/09:

Today, pragmatists read the Truce as nothing more than a 'blip' - a temporary lull induced by the season of goodwill, but willingly exploited by both sides to better their defences and eye out one another's positions. Romantics assert that the Truce was an effort by normal men to bring about an end to the slaughter.

In the public's mind the facts have become irrevocably mythologized, and perhaps this is the most important legacy of the Christmas Truce today. In our age of uncertainty, it comforting to believe, regardless of the real reasoning and motives, that soldiers and officers told to hate, loathe and kill, could still lower their guns and extend the hand of goodwill, peace, love and Christmas cheer.

Indeed it is.

Other accounts:

The Christmas Truce of 1914 The Long, Long Trail n.d., accessed 12/24/2011

December 15, 2011

‘Operation Silent Night’ tells of another Christmas miracle Fayette Tribune 12/15/2011

Peace on the Western Front, Goodwill in No Man's Land — The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce Past Imperfect (Smithsonian blog) 12/23/2011

Claudia Becker, Erster Weltkrieg.Als Briten und Deutsche Weihnachtsfrieden schlossen Die Welt 23.12.2011

Damien Fletcher, Carol Ann Duffy's moving tale of World War Christmas truce Daily Mirror 23/12/2011

Gary Kohls, The Christmas Truce of 1914 Consortuium News 12/16/2011

Michael Omer-Man, This Week in History: The Christmas Truce of 1914 Jerusalem Post 12/18/2011

Spitalfieldslife.com, 11th December, Christmas Truce My Tower Hamlets 12/11/2011

Tags: christmas truce of 1914, first world war

The two-party system dilemma and inside/outside politics

2011-12-23T14:20:00.000-05:00

The US electoral system is based on winner-take-all voting districts. In the general election, whatever party wins the most votes, even if it's a plurality considerably below 50%, win the seat.

Historically, this has created a strong incentive toward a two-party system. In parliamentary systems with proportional representation, a party that wins only 20% of the vote in a statewide or nationwide election gets 20% of the seats in the parliament. The winner-take-all system creates a powerful incentive for candidates and voters to coalesce around parties that have a strong shot at winning 50%+1 of the votes in a given district.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks recently interviewed Rocky Anderson, who is mounting a third-party Presidential campaign, one with a level of support such that it may be that none of us will hear of it again. Even in this short segment, they address a key element of the two-party dilemma:

Our two-party system is deeply entrenched. The current Democratic Party can trace its organization lineage back to Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s. The Republican Party was founded in 1854. Their ideologies have obviously changed considerably over that time, to put it mildly. But the organizational durability of both parties is long.

Which means that the progressive movement that is today actively trying to break the corrupt hold of the 1% over the political system will need an inside-outside strategy to be effective. The Democratic Party needs to be democratized by party challenges to the more conservative Democrats, which certainly includes any Democratic officeholder who is not willing to make a serious, hardline fight to prevent cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Primary challenges to recalcitrant incumbents has been a key element in the success of Movement Conservatism in taking over the Republican Party, Movement Conservatism being essentially synonymous with the Christian Right and the Tea Party. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005):

The relationship between the brokers and the base is symbiotic. On issue after issue, party leaders have responded not to the center of congressional opinion (much less of American opinion) but to the interests and demands of their base, aggressively structuring agendas and alternatives to please the hard Right. Yet party leaders have done more than work with the party material they have— they have sought to tame or weed out politicians deemed feckless and to elect or elevate those deemed loyal. The base plays a crucial role in this process of recruitment and discipline. They certify and work for conservative candidates, they keep conservative issues and ideas in the spotlight, and they threaten the politically wayward with excommunication. And so, election by election, the pull of the base grows and the sway of the center declines. ...

The cross-party replacement of Democrats by Republicans in the South, moreover, is not the only cause of increased Republican conservatism. Almost as important ... is the replacement of Republicans by Republicans. When Republicans defeat or succeed other Republicans, they are generally much more ideologically extreme than their predecessors. This is considerably less true, it turns out, among Democrats.

Perhaps the biggest finding, however, is that Republican members of Congress generally head right once in office. Such "adaptation" (as [Sean] Theriault calls it) has been a major cause of the increasing ideological extremism of the Republican Party, nearly equaling the replacement of existing members of Congress in its aggregate effect. Again, the same is not true of the Democratic Party. The bulk of congressional adaptation, notes Theriault, "occurs within Republican Party members" as they march steadily rightward over their careers. [my emphasis in bold]

Meanwhile, elections roll around every year, and Presidential elections every four years. for today's progressive movement, an inside-outside strategy would mean primary challenges and campaigns for office at all levels within the Democratic Party, and at the same time having organizations and causes that bring pressure on Democratic incumbents without being directly or de facto dependent on the Democratic Party establishment.

Individuals who disapprove of President Obama's hostility to Social Security and Medicare, for instance, but who also know the Republicans would be worse for ordinary people on policies across the board, can contribute time and/or money to candidates or candidate-recruitment groups like Blue America who will take a more progressive line. Which certainly should include hardline support for Social Security and Medicare.

Having candidates like that in the field will not only get better Democrats elected. It will also bring real pressure on the President and other elected Democratic officials to get with the base's program.

Support for independent progressive organizations and causes like actively pro-choice women's rights groups, environmental activist groups, Occupy groups, pro-immigrant groups, even the ACLU and other civil-liberties groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, are all ways of bringing pressure for constructive change without people being obliged to vote for Democratic candidates they find disappointing, or worse.

Paul Krugman uses the new regulations on mercury as an example of how it does make a real, concrete difference in people's lives whether Democrats or Republicans control the national government. (The Meaning of Mercury 12/22/2011) Noting that the new regulations will save literally tens of thousands of lives and avoi8d other serious health problems, he writes:

The point that strikes me most, however, is that this shows that it matters who holds the White House. You can complain about Obama’s lack of a strong progressive agenda, which I sometimes do, or wonder what good it is to hold the White House when the other side blocks every attempt to do good through legislation. But mercury regulation would not have happened if John McCain were president.

Elections have consequences, and this is one delayed consequence of 2008 that will make a big difference.

This does not mean that supporters of Social Security and Medicare should stop criticizing Obama and other Democrats who are in the pockets of various lobbyists over the next year. On the contrary, progressive primary challenges to one-percenter Democrats in 2012 is one of the most constructive things that could happen! As Hacker and Pierson point out, that has been one of the main ways one-percenter Republicans brought the country to the point where Newt Gingrich and Ron "Papa Doc" Paul are major players in US politics.

But at the same time, that doesn't mean we have to pretend that it makes no difference whether a Democrat or a Republican sits in the White House or which Party controls Congress, statehouses and state legislatures. It does matter, a lot.

Tags: democratic party

US reporting on the eurozone crisis

2011-12-22T16:37:00.002-05:00

RT America is one online alternative channel available that focuses on a US audience. RT, formerly known as Russia Today, is a Russian state-owned company. How independent it is from the point of view of media critics and scholars, I'm not sure. I'm mainly familiar with it through The Alyona Show that comes Monday-Friday, hosted by Alyona Minkovski. She has a variety of guests, ranging from left-leaning commentators to Heritage Foundation libertarian free-marketers and public figures like Lawrence Wilkinson. I was listening to one of their financial shows the other day and one of the commentators was babbling on a world government being created, which he also described as the "new world order", which of course sounds like Ron Paul/Patriot Militia kind of conspiracy thinking.

(Update: The comment was from Max Keiser, prompted by Stacy Herbert, on the Keiser Report Ep. 225 12/20/2011, starting around 8:50)

Alyona reported on the eurozone crisis on the 12/21/2011 edition of her show. In this video, she chides the US mainstream media for largely ignoring the European economic/financial crisis, beginning around 2:30 (MSM: Oblivious to Eurozone Crisis):

In another segment of The Alyona Show, two business reporters join Alyona to discuss the eurozone issues. They reference recent alarming statements by IMF head Christine Lagarde, such as this (IMF chief Christine Lagarde warns that global economic outlook is 'gloomy' YouTube date 12/15/2011 from Telegraph TV):

That Alyona Show discussion segment, Should EU Leaders Gets Hands Out of Crisis?, is here:

Lauren Lyster of RT America's Capital Account basically says she doesn't really understand the crisis, but she thinks that EU governments should just stop trying to do anything to save either the banks or euro. Lyster often sounds like she's looking for a gig on CNBC or even FOX News for her next career move.

Simone Foxman of Business Insider came off as better-informed than Lyster. But Foxman blundered in saying blithely that American banks are financially sound. With Bank of America skating on the edge of financial survival and with the MF Global bankruptcy, why would she say that? Even Lyster flagged that comment as problematic, rightly mentioning the large but unknown risk exposure big American banks have on financial derivatives.

This was a disappointing segment, especially coming with the buildup that we're seeing stuff the mainstream media isn't telling us.

Lauren Lyster's concept that everyone in the world is as clueless as she about possible solutions to the euro crisis is really sad. Because she could read, for example, Jamie Galbraith's piece on the euro crisis, The crisis in the Eurozone Salon 11/10/2011. He links to the papers from a conference on the eurozone that provide analysis and sound suggestions for solutions, Financial Crisis in the Eurozone.

The eurozone crisis is likely to have major effects on the US economy and thereby on the politics of 2012. We could certainly use more and better reporting on it in the main US news outlets.

Tags: alyona minkovski, eu, eur, european union

2012 Presidential election - the horse race

2011-12-22T09:00:00.004-05:00

The 2012 election is well underway. And our national press is treating it as even more of a celebrity "reality show" than ever. How far through the looking glass are we when we all know that "reality show" means a completely staged game show (Survivor) or a celebration of celebrity for the sake of celebrity (Keeping Up with the Kardashians)?

Focused on the horse race and the celebrity fest, our Pod Pundits are speculating happily about the Republican primary contest. With no horse race on the Democratic side - unfortunately! - the focus of the coverage right now is on the squabbling among the Republicans, an unattractive scene to most viewers.

But the front-loading of the primary season means that in a couple of months, the Republicans are likely to have a presumptive nominee. Then there will be nine months of focus on the horse race between the Republican nominee and Obama for the general election, with the celebrity spectacles of the Party conventions in the summer as half-time show entertainment.

Despite Obama's relatively strong showing in the polls right now for the general, it's going to be difficult for him to get re-elected. Unemployment is high and there are no visible signs for most people that conditions are likely to improve substantially. Europe is sliding into a recession, and even China is showing signs of being on the verge of a housing bubble that is about to pop. A new recession (the "double-dip") is possible in the US, especially if the euro crisis hammers the US financial system, which is very likely. The biggest private casualty of the euro crisis to date has been Jon Corzine's MF Global, a US-based company.

In the real world, it's hardly possible to fully separate policies from style in Presidential campaigns. But if we talk about it in terms of style, Obama's rhetorical gifts aren't as potent as they were in 2008, because the political context is different. Then, soaring but vague speeches about hope, combined with concrete proposals, some of which proved more durable than others, were confronting an unpleasant old man (John McCain) defending a Republican Administration that had become politically toxic.

Conventional horse race calculations would say that the incumbent President needs to make his opponent the issue. But the incumbent also has to defend his record, with which the public generally is not so impressed. And Obama has seriously impaired the effectiveness of his own rhetoric by his repeated cave-ins to Republican political bullying and blackmail, most notoriously over the debt-ceiling limit this past year. That seems to have been a jump-the-shark moment for his credibility as a negotiator with the Republicans, a no-turning-back moment in the sense that it will be hard for anyone to have high confidence that he will be willing to go to the wall for things his says he will fight hardest to achieve.

He's also spent three years now building a narrative in support of conservative economics - yes, conservative economics, not matter how hysterically the Republicans may characterize his austerity policies. In this case, his rhetoric about the government needing to tighten its belt just like families sitting around the proverbial kitchen table really seems to reflect his policy preferences. But it makes it far more difficult for him to draw a favorable contrast between his economic policies and those of the Republicans.

Two of his best issues could have been and should have been Social Security and Medicare, where he could have posed as defending them against the Republicans. But after he and his deficit commission chairmen and Democratic negotiators in Congress have repeatedly offered up serious cuts in benefits in both programs, it's hard to see how he can draw a strong contrast. Worse, the Republicans will use his proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare against him, even though their approach would be far more drastic.

And Obama's increasingly bizarre commitment to bipartisanship as some kind of governing principle in the face of an authoritarian, uncompromising Republican Party blunts his message. His Osawatomie speech earlier this month showed Obama at his partisan best. But in middle of making an eloquent case for progressive values (that he apparently doesn't actually share), he pepper-sprayed his own more confrontational rhetoric with bipartisan nonsense.

This isn't at all new for him. One of his best moments as President came when he denounced the highly partisan Supreme Court ruling in Citizen's United two years ago. (President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People 01/23/2011) "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," the President said. Not loony as Newt Gingrich's recent segregationist talk about ignoring court rulings Republicans don't like and arresting judges that irritate them. But that was a strong, even historic statement by an American President saying that a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court was a threat to democracy itself, putting it in the league with Dred Scott decision and the infamous, partisan anti-New Deal rulings by the Nine Old Men (as FDR polemically referred to the hostile Supreme Court).

Yet even there, he tossed out bipartisan references and declared this as his plan of action: "I instructed my administration to get to work immediately with Members of Congress willing to fight for the American people to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision. We have begun that work, and it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done."

You can't build public support for dealing with a problem of crass, narrow partisanship and outright corruption on the High Court by pretending that everyone is on the same side. Although I was glad at the time to see Obama saying "it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done." If the President is attacking the Supreme Court for threatening "our democracy itself" with a bad ruling - and he was, rightly so - it's essentially a solemn obligation for him to make it "a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done."

Can you remember the last time you heard the President mention Citizen's United?

No wonder the Republicans call him President Pushover when they're not on TV calling him a Marxist Kenyan anti-colonialist Islamunist who hates America.

Obama has gambled his re-election on two major assumptions: that bailing out the giant banks would be the main thing that would be needed to get the economy back on track and make 2012 Morning In America II; and, that independent voters were more interested in seeing bipartisan process tilted heavily toward Republicans' favored positions than they are in seeing progress on substantive issues.

Incumbency has great advantages in terms of setting the agenda, familiarity with the candidate and the ability to attract large amounts of campaign money. It's not easy to unseat a sitting President. And as unappealing as Obama's Herbert Hoover economic policies are, most people who pay close attention to the Republican candidate's policy proposals will find them worse, if not downright terrifying.

Still, Obama's is looking at a re-election fight in a depressed economy, possibly with unemployment on the rise and a year of bad economic news; his credibility has been seriously compromised, especially by the debt-ceiling fiasco; and, his ability to draw favorable contrasts to the Republican candidate is mitigated in a major way by his own conservative economic-policy inclinations and his almost-obsessive pitches to a bipartisanship that doesn't much interest even most independent voters.

It's going to be a long election year.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, citizens united decision

Hoping for Obama 2008, and for a pony

2011-12-21T13:18:00.000-05:00

What's that saying, "hope dies last"?

Tom Schaller enacts what has become a Democratic progressives' ritual, one that has us periodically hoping against hope and evidence that President Obama will pivot to being what he could have been, a real progressive leader.

Tom's take is in Opportunity knocks for Obama Salon 12/21/2011. He thinks the Republicans' rejection of the payroll tax extension could provide Obama a platform to stand up to the Republicans and condemn them for being perpetual patsies for the 1%.

This is a bit of a sign of desperation on its face, since the payroll tax extension is a deeply flawed policy in its effect on the fight to save Social Security, at a time where better tax-stimulus alternatives that are essentially just as easy to implement are available. Dean Baker is right when he says, "there is zero reason that this tax cut should be tied to social security in any way."

Here's Tom Schaller's fond fantasy about the politics:

Obama’s presidency was supposed to restore some balance to the perverse economic and political power imbalance between the wealthy and the working. His was supposed to be the presidency that would change the way Washington’s political rules and rulers operated. His was supposed to be the presidency that corrected the nation’s economic course. His was supposed to be the presidency that brought together “Democrats, independents and even some Republicans.” His was supposed to be the presidency of hope, the presidency of change.

Well, here’s his big chance to deliver. He shouldn’t let congressional Republicans go home for Christmas without a victory on the payroll tax cut extension. He can’t let their stalling tactics break him. He should call out the radical House Republicans by name, welcome their hatred, and direct Americans’ ire right back at them. Occupy the Capitol, if he must. Because this is not just the fight of his presidency — it could very well be the fight for his presidency.

I'm actually very sympathetic to plea Tom makes here. He wants Obama to be Obama 2008. I want that, too. But can we really picture Obama 2011 welcoming the hatred of the economic royalists as Franklin Roosevelt famously did in 1936?

Like the rest of us who nurture these same hopes, Tom knows that reality casts a grim pale over that pleasant fantasy that has barely enough plausibility to be still thinkable:

Although presidents risk looking petty when targeting opponents by name, this is not a political situation where fingering them squarely will backfire. Both parties know the Tea Party wing of the House Republicans, whose radicalism even House Speaker John Boehner is unable to understand, no less control, is blocking a two-month payroll tax cut extension in order to exact unrelated concessions. So why did he conclude his press briefing Tuesday with plaintive entreaties not to “play brinksmanship” games? To win in politics, sometimes politicians must call their enemies out, and be willing to go to the brink themselves by pointing a finger of blame squarely at those who deserve scorn. Calling out John Boehner is a good start, but the president should go a step further and call out the GOP’s Tea Party wing. [my emphasis]

Could anything short of massive psychiatric intervention to engineer a personality change persuade Barack Obama to act like this appeal envisions? The answer to Tom's bolded question, of course, is that Obama is too committed to one-percenter neoliberal ideology to take a semi-confrontational posture like this without pepper-spraying his own confrontational message in real time.

We saw on the public option for his health care plan that Obama is willing to fight. Fight the base of his own Party, that is. We saw in the fight on extending the Bush one-centers' tax cut, the debt ceiling fight and how many other times how he fights the Republicans.

I wish he were different, too. Maybe, just maybe, his re-election fight will persuade him to act like that fabled creature, Obama 2008. Don't they say that hope dies last?

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, tom schaller

Papa Doc Paul and today's Republican Party

2011-12-21T11:49:00.002-05:00

Joe Conason asks the right question about Ron "Papa Doc" Paul: "What is it about the kindly old doctor that attracts some of the most violent and reactionary elements in society to his banner?" (The Lethal Fantasies Of Dear Old Ron Paul National Memo 12/21/2011)

Conason briefly recounts Papa Doc's history as "a perennial favorite of the John Birch Society and kindred extremists on the right" because of his general opposition to the 20th century, forget the 21st.

In that column, he doesn't address Paul's isolationist and civil-liberties issues that make him occasionally attractive to progressives. The depth of Papa Doc's libertarian views is indicated by his opposition to abortion choice. He may not like the gubment spying on Patriot Militia groups, but he doesn't think libertarian freedom includes women's reproductive choice over their own bodies.

Paul's Old Right isolationism is based on a narrow nationalism which opposes all international alliances and treaties, including arms-control treaties. He does allow that trade agreements can be acceptable. After all, they can help drive the wages and living conditions of American workers down to Haitian levels, which would fit in well with his Bircher libertarians Utopia.

Conason defines Papa Doc's political significance this way:

There is little reason to worry about the policies of a Paul administration, despite his current lead in the Iowa polls. But the rise of the Tea Party and the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party have created a space for Paul's lethal fantasies, which if enacted would return us to the bad old days of mass poverty, rampant pollution, racial supremacy, and all the other ills that characterized the America of the robber barons. [my emphasis]

Tags: joe conason, ron paul

Art Pope, another wealthy political buccaneer given vastly greater power by "Citizen's United"

2011-12-21T09:00:00.004-05:00

Marc Farinella, a Democratic political consultant who was Obama's 2008 campaign director in North Carolina, and is now an adviser to the state’s Democratic governor, Beverly Perdue, says, "In a very real sense, Democrats running for office in North Carolina are always running against Art Pope. The Republican agenda in North Carolina is really Art Pope’s agenda. He sets it, he funds it, and he directs the efforts to achieve it. The candidates are just fronting for him. There are so many people in North Carolina beholden to Art Pope — it undermines the democratic process." Farinella contends that the Citizens United decision is likely to make the problem worse. Because Variety Wholesalers is privately owned by the Pope family, Pope "has access to huge quantities of corporate funds," which now can be channelled freely into politics. Still, Farinella notes, “there are very few people in North Carolina who understand who Art Pope is."

- From Jane Mayer, State for Sale New Yorker 10/10/2011

The article is from a couple of months ago. But it describes another rightwing multimillionaire whose ability to have an outsize effect on elections has been magnified by the atrocious Roberts Court Citizen's United decision. His main area of influence is North Carolina. But the new field for the exercise of oligarchical power that Citizen's United provided is nationwide.

Obama's words back in January of 2010 just after the Court handed down this awful decision were very descriptive:

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. ...

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don't. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.

Whether the President is giving enough attention to a problem that "strikes at our democracy itself" is another question. (President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People 01/23/2011) We'll see if the President tries to use his 2012 campaign to build up a public mandate to change the result of which he said - back then, anyway, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest." Because the Art Popes and the Koch Brothers and likely-minded wealthy rightwingers are making use of the Roberts Court decision that "opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy."

Tags: art pope, barack obama, citizens united decision

Dean Baker on why the payroll tax holiday is a problem

2011-12-20T17:00:00.002-05:00

Following up on two earlier posts today, one quoting Dean Baker and the other on the payroll tax holiday, I see that Baker has commented on the payroll tax holiday! From Obama's stimulus failure Guardian 12/19/2011, where he puts it into the context of the longer reluctance of the Obama Administration to apply the level of stimulus needed to create a strong economic recovery:

As stimulus, this [the payroll tax holiday] is not an especially good measure. On a per-dollar basis, tax cuts will be much less effective, especially with people carrying so much debt, than direct spending. Furthermore, many of these tax dollars will go to better-off tax payers who are less willing to spend than moderate income families. The Making Work Pay tax credit was much better targeted.

Finally, there is zero reason that this tax cut should be tied to social security in any way. As it stands, the trust fund is held harmless because the lost tax revenue is reimbursed from general revenue. But why even raise this as a potential issue for social security; why not just give everyone a tax cut equal to 2 percent of their wages up to $110,000? The only reason to tie the tax cut to social security is if the intention is to raise issues about the social security tax at some future point.

The response of the Obama people to this complaint is that this is the only tax cut that the Republican Congress will approve and that we badly need the stimulus. The second claim is definitely true and the first one may well be also. But if that is the case, it only speaks to the incredible failure of this administration to define the agenda and speak honestly about the economy. It's not surprising that they don't have the political support for more effective stimulus when they abandoned the effort to make the case almost two years ago. [my emphasis]

Tags: dean baker, social security

Dean Baker explains the eurozone mess

2011-12-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

Dean Baker provides an accessible explanation of the euro crisis in The eurozone crisis is not about market discipline Aljazeera English 12/19/2011:

The eurozone crisis is most definitely not a story of countries with out of control spending getting their comeuppance in the bond market. Prior to the economic collapse in 2008, the only country that had a serious deficit problem was Greece. In the other countries now having trouble financing their debt, the debt to GDP ratio was stable or falling prior: Spain and Ireland were actually running budget surpluses and had debt to GDP ratios that were among the lowest in the OECD.

The [2007-8] crisis changed everything. It threw the whole continent into severe recession. This had the effect of causing deficits to explode since tax revenues plummet when the economy contracts and payments for unemployment benefits and other transfer programmes soar. Spain was hit especially hard by this contraction because it had a huge housing bubble. This bubble fuelled an enormous construction boom that went bust after the crash.

Ireland saw its debt explode because it got stuck with a huge bill from bailing out its free-wheeling bankers. It is possible that its financial system could have been kept intact at a lower cost to taxpayers by forcing creditors to take losses. [my emphasis]

Iceland did just that, let their larger banks in trouble go bankrupt, let their stockholders take losses and reorganized them as clean banks. Ireland, on the other hand, took the bad loans onto the books of the state and ran their debt much higher to do it. Even then, Ireland had not overborrowed. They just became a target of the bond speculators - after having been praised by fans of neoliberal economics as a deregulation success story.

He also describes the failures of the European Central Bank (ECB), both in allowing bubbles like the one in Spain to grow to the point they did and now in fighting against the entirely necessary and sensible policy of having the ECB act as the lender for eurozone countries' bonds. He doesn't mention that the ECB is constrained by law in that regard, though there are immediate workarounds. And if the EU-minus-one countries can change their treaties to enforce Herbert Hoover austerity economics that will only make the debt crisis worse, they could also have adjusted the law to allow the ECB to play that role in a direct and straightforward way.

Baker puts it into its broader social and political context, with reference to one of the political spin-offs in the US:

People should recognise this process for what it is: class war. The wealthy are using their control of the ECB to dismantle welfare state protections that enjoy enormous public support.

This applies not only to government programs like public pensions and healthcare, but also to labour market regulations that protect workers against dismissal without cause. And of course, the longstanding foes of Social Security and Medicare in the US are anxious to twist the facts to use the eurozone crisis to help their class war agenda here.

The claim that the countries in Europe are just coming to grips with the reality of modern financial markets is covering up for the class war being waged on workers across the globe.

It's a bit strange that "class war" has become a respectable term, I assume because the Republicans have been using it against any policy that might interfere with corporations plundering the country as they like. I guess "class struggle" is still taboo in political discourse. Even though "class war" is actually a more severe image!

Tags: dean baker, eu, euro, european union

The real problem with the payroll tax holiday

2011-12-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

Charlie Pierce spells out clearly the political problem with President Obama's "temporary" payroll tax cut: it allows the opponents of Social Security to portray it as a welfare program that is draining tax revenues from hard-working families to give to unworthy types. Here's his version from The Truth About Our Payroll Tax Cut Esquire Politics Blog 12/19/2011

In our current political climate, and in the political climate that is likely to prevail for the balance of my lifetime, it's almost impossible to reverse a tax cut already in place because of the same dynamics that make it almost impossible to levy a tax increase on any group of people with sufficient clout to resist it. One of the reasons we're in the mess we're in today is that George W. Bush rammed through tax cuts the benefits of which accrued for the most part to the richest people in the country. He then launched two off-the-books wars and passed a new Medicare entitlement that was paid for largely through the sale of magic beans. And even with all of that, and even with all of official Washington having conniption fits over The Deficit, the government is ripping itself apart trying to rescind only those parts of the Bush tax-cuts that benefited the richest members of society. Nobody who can fight it ever gives back a tax cut. Ever.

Given that, there is no reason to believe that the payroll tax-cut will be any different. Restoring the payroll tax to the level where it was before the payroll tax-cut was passed — 6.2 percent from the current 4.2 percent — means that an average taxpayer will get socked with a 48 percent real tax increase one day that he didn't have the day before. (In fact, this is precisely what the White House is arguing at the moment in connection with the Republican shenanigans in the House.) It's going to take some powerful convincing to make me believe that this tax cut is ever going to go away because I don't think there ever again will be enough politicians with the gumption to tell their constituents that their taxes need to be raised. Better to con them with austerity plans that will convince them that it is their patriotic duty to make their own lives worse. At least, with those, that sweet, sweet corporate money keeps rolling in for the next campaign.

That being the case, it's hard to see how this is good for the long-term stability of Social Security. The bite that the payroll tax-cut is taking out of the system's dedicated revenue stream is supposed to be made up out of general revenues. But that hardly seems politically tenable, either. It seems to throw Social Security firmly into the roiling abyss that is our current argument over federal spending, which can't be good. If you can cut the EPA's funding, and if you can slash asthma relief for urban children, it seems to me that, sooner or later, you can take a whack at the $120 billion or so that are supposed to be transferred to the Social Security trust fund from general revenues. You then present the country with a Social Security "shortfall" and, suddenly, privatization is back on the table again.

Franklin Roosevelt insisted on having a dedicated funding stream for the Social Security social insurance fund, to emphasize that it is social insurance and to give people a clear sense that they were contributing to their own retirement security through the tax. That arrangement has been an important part of the program's secure political support.

Since the Obama Administration has periodically pushed for a Grand Bargain involving the phaseout of Social Security and Medicare, they have removed the partisan firewall that the Democratic Party has long maintained around both Social Security and Medicare. It's hard to imagine the Administration didn't also have in mind how the payroll tax "holiday" - which as Pierce says, could easily become permanent - could open a new line of attack against Social Security.

There are other options such as a tax rebate of a similar amount that could be structured to go to everyone who pays payroll taxes.

An adherent of Keynesian economics like Robert Reich finds the payroll tax idea attractive because it's easy to implement and provides additional funds to people who are most likely to spend it immediately and therefore provide a stimulative effect to the economy. But the political problem it presents for Social Security that Pierce explains so well is real.

Tags: social security

Honoring public figures when they die

2011-12-19T11:32:00.002-05:00

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued that the only truly unselfish kind of love we experience is love for the dead. Because one has no hope of reciprocal reward in loving a person who has passed away.

While this is an insightful and even beautiful thought, it would be hard to defend it unequivocally. Freud's concept of mourning deals with how the ego holds on to the cherished individual even after their passing, a process not without elements (ego needs) that could be called selfish. Familial and inheritance considerations can also affect both the public and the individual experience of mourning, again elements not without their selfish aspects.

And the public mourning of famous individuals moves into a different dimension, in which selfish or partisan interests often stand at the forefront.

Glenn Greenwald recalls how this process worked in a thoroughly propagandistic way with the passing of Ronald Reagan. The media was happy to cooperated with Republican politicians in canonizing him as a secular - or even more than secular - saint. (Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths 12/17/2011):

... the most notable aspect of that intense public ritual was the full-scale canonization of this deeply controversial, divisive and consequential political figure. Americans - including millions too young to remember his presidency - were bombarded with a full week of media discussions which completely whitewashed Reagan’s actions in office: that which made him an important enough historical figure to render his death worthy of such worldwide attention in the first place. There was a virtual media prohibition on expressing a single critical utterance about what he did as President and any harm that he caused. That's not because the elegies to Reagan were apolitical - they were aggressively political - but because nothing undercutting his deification was permitted. ...

The key claim there was that "politics is put aside." That’s precisely what did not happen. The entire spectacle was political to its core. Following Woodruff's proclamation were funeral speeches, all broadcast by CNN, by then-House Speaker Denny Hastert and Vice President Dick Cheney hailing the former President for gifting the nation with peace and prosperity, rejuvenating national greatness, and winning the Cold War. This scene repeated itself over and over during that week: extremely politicized tributes to the greatness of Ronald Reagan continuously broadcast to the nation without challenge and endorsed by its "neutral" media - all shielded from refutation or balance by the grief of a widow and social mores that bar one from speaking ill of the dead. ...

Though he became more popular after leaving office (like most Presidents), it was that week-long bombardment of hagiography that sealed Reagan’s status as Great and Cherished Leader. As media and political figures lavished him with politicized praise, there was virtually no mention of the brutal, civilian-extinguishing covert wars he waged in Central America, his funding of terrorists in Nicaragua, the pervasive illegality of the Iran-contra scandal perpetrated by his top aides and possibly himself, the explosion of wealth and income inequality ushered in by "Reagonmics" which persists today, his escalation of the racially disparate Drug War, his slashing of domestic programs for the poor accompanied by a deficit-causing build-up in the military budget, the racially-tinged (at least) attacks on welfare-queens-in-Cadillacs, the Savings & Loan crisis resulting from deregulation, his refusal even to acknowledge AIDS as tens of thousands of the Wrong People died, the training of Muslim radicals in Afghanistan and arming of the Iranian regime, the attempt to appoint the radical Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, or virtually anything else that would undermine the canonization. The country was drowned by a full, uninterrupted week of pure, leader-reverent propaganda. [my emphasis]

Glenn makes an important distinction that loops back to Kierkegaard's concept: "This happened because of an unhealthy conflation of appropriate post-death etiquette for private persons and the etiquette governing deaths of public figures. They are not and should not be the same." Honoring the departed out of love or personal respect does include the kind of unselfishness to which Kierkegaard referred.

As the title of Glenn's article indicates, he is applying these reflections to Christopher Hitchens' passing and the generally highly positive commentary he received in even left-leaning media. As he puts it, Hitchens " particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writings but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent."

Not least among those was his rabid support of the Iraq War. Glenn retweeted a comment by cartoonist Matt Bors, "Why aren't Iraqis writing tributes to Christopher Hitchens?"

And he suggests that the general cheerful refusal to take Hitchens to task in the commentary last week has a lot to do with the Look Forward Not Backward view of the Iraq War: "Part of that is the by-product of America's refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq."

Tags: christopher hitchens, glenn greenwald, iraq war, ronald reagan

Bad Lip Reading does Ron "Papa Doc" Paul

2011-12-17T17:10:00.002-05:00

Speaking of Papa Doc, the Bad Lip Reading folks have done a bit on him recently. Their schtick on their videos of politicians is not so much to be satirical as goofy. But they are entertaining. (Their one of Romney is still my favorite.) And they do work in some satire based on the politician's public persona. This one gets in a dig at Papa Doc's insanity as well as his long and friendly relationship with white racism.

Tags: ron paul

Obama and arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, committing civilians to military custody in the US

2011-12-17T17:01:00.002-05:00

President Barack Obama has a terrible record on civil liberties. The fact that any of the authoritarian Republicans running for their Party's nomination to run against him would be worse - Ron Paul included, maybe especially Ron Paul - doesn't change the fact that Obama's record is terrible.

Will Bunch comments on the latest sad piece of evidence of this (President Obama: A tough-talking coward Attywood 12/15/2011):

Barack Obama had a remarkable chance to be that most courageous president in American history. He became the 44th president after a dangerous, generations-long slide of a national security state run amok was punctuated over the last decade by some of the most outrageous abuses in America's long history -- the acceptance and carrying out of unlawful torture and the establishment of a gulag of prisons, some secret and one in Guantanamo Bay that stood for the world as a dark beacon of everything that had gone off the tracks in the 2000s. At the very core was the chucking of the longstanding right of habeas corpus, that anyone suspected of crimes -- no matter how henious -- would get a day inside a court in what was once the world's greatest criminal justice system.

But President Obama was not courageous. He is a coward. He did the easiest, most politically expedient things. He backed down from closing Guantanamo without a fight, asserted a right to hold terror suspects forever without facing trial, ordered and successfully carried out the extra-legal killing of an American citizen, and now he's about to sign a bill that not only ratifies some of those terrible things but broadens his power to hold even citizens indefinitely. [my emphasis]

This is part of an ugly trend that has produced an increasing criminalization of public protest, as we had seen in the grimly militarized responses of many urban police departments to the Occupy protests. It's also the case that some of the ugliest responses occurred in cities with Democratic mayors.

Will mentions Papa Doc Paul, too: "Sure, you could vote for the only one candidate who opposes that, in Ron Paul, but Paul would carry a ton of awful baggage along with his flouride-frightened pals from the John Birch Society into the White House. Who wants that?"

He's being generous to Papa Doc here. A Papa Doc Presidency would very soon - like before Inauguration Day - discover that the Republic was being urgently menaced by dangerous Communistoliberals and scary black people and that them thar Islamunofascists actually were as bad as other Republicans have been saying. And the "libertarian" civil liberties fluff would be out the door.

Small-d democracy needs both an active protest movement on a variety of fronts outside the Democratic Party as well as a Democratic Party that's a lot more Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt and much less Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover.

Tags: barck obama, obama administration, will bunch

War is over: the official end of the Iraq War

2011-12-16T13:53:00.000-05:00

Man verweist Regenten, Staatsmänner, Völker vornehmlich an die Belehrung durch die Erfahrung der Geschichte. Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben.

[One refers regents, statesmen, peoples above all to instruction through the experience of history. But what experience and history teach is this: that people and governments have never learned anything from history and {never} acted according to lessons that were there to be drawn from it.] - G.F.W. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History

The Iraq War is over for the United States. I was about to say "officially" over, but I suppose that's questionable. The last pullout of combat troops is on the last day of this year. And Charlie Pierce reminds us that "the war never will truly be 'over' until the authorization to start it in the first place is expunged from the law books." (The Unpaid Bills of the Iraq War Esquire Politics Blog 12/15/2011)

The President gives his view of the war's end in President Obama and the First Lady Speak to Troops at Fort Bragg 12/14/2011:

The New York Times featured the Pentagon's staged goodbye ceremony in a photo spread accompanying their story: Thom Shanker, et al, In Baghdad, Panetta Leads Uneasy Moment of Closure 12/15/2011. The story does give some indication of the miserable situation that we finally declared victory and agreed to leave, since our allied Shi'a-majority government in Baghdad refused to agree to leaving the troops the Pentagon and the Obama Administration wanted under the conditions the Americans demanded:

Almost nine years after the first American tanks began massing on the Iraq border, the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission here, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics and left a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.

As Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta marked the occasion with a speech in a fortified concrete courtyard at the Baghdad airport, helicopters hovered above, underscoring the challenges facing a country where insurgents continue to attack American soldiers and where militants with Al Qaeda still regularly carry out devastating attacks against civilians.

The butcher's bill for Americans, according to the Times: "4,487 American lives, with 32,226 more Americans wounded in action, according to Pentagon statistics."

Two American bases are still open until December 31, and the American "troops that remain are still being attacked daily". Some US military trainers will also stay there, and undoubtedly some military and CIA black ops will continue, as well.

Despite all the hype about adapting to counterinsurgency, the US intervention bears striking resemblances from start to finish with the Vietnam War. Hype aside, the Pentagon did the same as they did in Vietnam; they stood up Iraqi armed forces built largely on the American model that are heavily dependent on US air and logistical support for optimal functioning:

Iraq’s military has critical weaknesses in a number of areas, from air defenses to basic logistical tasks like moving food and fuel and servicing the armored vehicles it is inheriting from the Americans and the jets it is buying. There are shortfalls in military engineers, artillery and intelligence.

"From a standpoint of being able to defend against an external threat, they have very limited to little capability, quite frankly," Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the departing American commander in Iraq, said in an interview after the ceremony.

President Obama observed the impending end of the Iraq War with conventional platitudes not all that different from those featured in war speeches over the last century. No Lincolnesque invocations of mystic chords of memory, much less of Lincoln's sense of humility and tragedy. Obama from the official White House transcript, Remarks by the President and First Lady on the End of the War in Iraq-Fort Bragg, North Carolina 12/14/2011:

We know too well the heavy cost of this war. More than 1.5 million Americans have served in Iraq -- 1.5 million. Over 30,000 Americans have been wounded, and those are only the wounds that show. Nearly 4,500 Americans made the ultimate sacrifice -- including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg -- 202. So today, we pause to say a prayer for all those families who have lost their loved ones, for they are part of our broader American family. We grieve with them.

We also know that these numbers don't tell the full story of the Iraq war -– not even close. Our civilians have represented our country with skill and bravery. Our troops have served tour after tour of duty, with precious little dwell time in between. Our Guard and Reserve units stepped up with unprecedented service. You've endured dangerous foot patrols and you’ve endured the pain of seeing your friends and comrades fall. You've had to be more than soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen –- you’ve also had to be diplomats and development workers and trainers and peacemakers. Through all this, you have shown why the United States military is the finest fighting force in the history of the world. ...

As Michelle mentioned, we also know that the burden of war is borne by your families. In countless base communities like Bragg, folks have come together in the absence of a loved one. As the Mayor of Fayetteville put it, "War is not a political word here. War is where our friends and neighbors go." So there have been missed birthday parties and graduations. There are bills to pay and jobs that have to be juggled while picking up the kids. For every soldier that goes on patrol, there are the husbands and the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sons, the daughters praying that they come back.

So today, as we mark the end of the war, let us acknowledge, let us give a heartfelt round of applause for every military family that has carried that load over the last nine years. You too have the thanks of a grateful nation. (Applause.)

Part of ending a war responsibly is standing by those who fought it. It’s not enough to honor you with words. Words are cheap. We must do it with deeds. You stood up for America; America needs to stand up for you.

But all the maudlin speeches in the world about our "fallen heroes" and how we "know too well the heavy cost of this war" won't bring a single one of them back. Nor will it repair the death and destruction the war brought to Iraq in the name of saving it.

We owe our "fallen heroes" and their families and every American citizen a clear understanding of how the disaster known as the Iraq War came about, including a full formal accounting of the crimes committed during it, especially the torture crimes and the blatant murders that were part of it. And, yes, there should be a full formal accounting of the war crimes committed by American soldiers and the conditions and command actions that brought them about and, all too often, ignored them or covered them up or minimized them. The Times' Michael Schmidt reports on new findings on the Haditha massacre, which the Pentagon apparently intended to (literally) commit to flames: Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq 12/14/2011:

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

In my mind, refusing to fully account for crimes like these equates rogue American soldiers who casually or carelessly murdered civilians to the actions of soldiers who did their duty and to our "fallen heroes".

No doubt, those who committed such crimes and the commanders who enabled them or covered them up would love to cover their actions with the aura of heroism and ritual worship of "fallen heroes" that our all-too-war-minded President is happy to indulge. And since Obama is deeply committed to Look Forward Not Backward - when it comes to torture, war crimes and official corruption but not to press efforts to expose criminal actions like James Risen's reporting on illegal domestic surveillance - we can't expect him to press for a serious evaluation of the "Lessons of Iraq", much less prosecution of war crimes.

Charlie Pierce argues:

On Wednesday, the president said that the Iraq War belongs to history. This, of course, is true. So, for that matter, does whatever he had for breakfast that morning. But history is not just all the stuff that happened in the past. It's why all that stuff happened in the past. It's who made all that stuff happen in the past. Until that accounting takes place, the war does not belong to history. Vietnam doesn't even fully "belong to history" yet. Our politics are still fought out over the fault lines created during that previous exercise in waste and treachery. I suspect — nay, I fear — that a great effort will be made among our political elites not to let that happen again here. Nobody will want to be "divisive." We will move forward. It will not be allowed to affect our current politics, except as a handy tool with which the war-hungry claque in our conservative foreign-policy elite can bang the president over the head a few times.

The Iraq War will "belong to history" in the sense that it will be buried there.

That will not pay all the bills. And until those bills are paid — until the proper people pay the proper recompense for what they did to this country, to that country, and to the world — the Iraq War is not over.

Speaking of maudlin, Pierce is the only writer I can think of how can pull off using the word "nay" and not have it sound maudlin. I wouldn't even try.

But what he says is very true. President Gerald Ford adopted a Look Forward Not Backward approach to the lessons of the Vietnam War, too. Obama's approach this week to the experience of the Iraq War has not been substantively different. The Vietnam War does haunt American politics, as Pierce say, as well as military strategy and popular understanding of war.

It was almost exactly 27 years between the notorious helicopter flights from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1974 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I hope Americans who remember the Iraq War will do a more thorough job of shaping a more realistic antiwar consensus over the next 27 years. Maybe someday there will be no more Dick Cheney's in the world. But none of us now living will be around to see that day. If we don't want future Cheneys to do what Dick Cheney and his collaborates did in the Iraq War and their war on the US Constitution, understanding the Iraq War thoroughly is an important safeguard against that.

The more I learn about history, the more modest my expectations become about humanity's ability to learn constructive lessons from the past. But if the human race has managed to go since 1945 without creating a world-devastating nuclear holocaust even though we had the means to do so, that in itself is reason for hope.

Tags: barack obama, dick cheney, iraq war, war crimes

Angiefying the European Union

2011-12-16T12:08:00.002-05:00

Angela Merkel has an impressively disastrous record as German Chancellor. She has made herself the most powerful politician in Europe at the moment. She has a larger role in European leadership than any German Chancellor since, uh ... let's not go there.

Pack Hockenos looks at this phenomenon in The Merkelization of Europe Foreign Policy 12/09/2011. He opens with these memorable images:

No[t] so long ago, France was the political driver and Germany the economic motor of the European Union. "Now," remarked former European Commission president Romani Prodi in February, it is Merkel "that decides and Sarkozy that holds a press conference to explain her decisions." This searing image could be embellished with the 24 EU members cowering in the press room -- and Britain now watching through the window.

The article is especially good at describing the longer-range political dimensions, which often are neglecting in the economic analyses which are understandably being cranked out right now. But Hockenos does make clear what a disaster Merkelnomics is for the countries subjected to it:

Merkel's short-sighted, audaciously Germany-first reaction to staunch the eurocrisis is the Germanization of European monetary and fiscal policy, foremost the codification of its obsession with tight money, fiscal purity, and budgetary orthodoxy. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, she insists that what's good for Germany is good for everybody else, too. It's clearly not. And with the world's leaders begging her to do "whatever it takes" to stave off global calamity, she's doing it with Sarkozy at her side and over the heads of the now completely irrelevant European "voters" ("subjects" is the more fitting word). This is a catastrophic mistake, which, politically, vastly expands the EU's centralized authority while robbing it of even the fig leaf of democratic legitimacy it had sported. Moreover, the economics of Berlin's Germanocentric prescriptions for the eurozone compound the very problems that landed Europe's weaker economies in the mess they're in right now. [my emphasis]

The whole article is worth a read for anyone interested in understanding the mess in the EU right now.

Tags: angela merkel, eu, euro, european union

Climate denial marches on

2011-12-15T18:34:00.000-05:00

Gene Lyons takes on Republican climate denial in his 12/14/2011 column, Why do people still deny climate change? Salon. He summarizes the sad state of the politics of climate change in the US:

In GOP circles, it’s considered sensible to warn against the grave threat of Shariah law being imposed in Oklahoma, but weeks on end of rainless 110 degree afternoons, not so much. Democrats like President Obama appear to have concluded that global warming is like gun control, where reasoned self-interest has little chance against well-organized fanaticism. So why bother?

He links to an October 2010 paper by Clive Hamilton, Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, which discusses the mass basis for climate denialism. Climate denialism hasn't spontaneously arisen from some general conceptual bias, of course. It has been heavily promoted by the energy industry, including the Koch brothers, following on the model used by the tobacco industry for years to constantly dispute the established science and medical knowledge on smoking.

Hamilton notes that the concept of peer review of scientific papers goes back to the British Royal Society: "Since the founding of modern science, matters of fact have been established through the common assent of those qualified to judge under rules laid down in the 17th century by the Royal Society."

He also ends by noting that the global climate change crisis dramatically emphasizes how problematic the sharp distinction people have traditionally drawn between Humanity and Nature is:

Developments in climate science have revealed a natural world so influenced by human activity that the epistemological division between nature and society can no longer be maintained. When global warming triggers feedback effects, such as melting permafrost and declining albedo from ice-melt, will we be seeing nature at work or human intervention? The mingling of the natural and the human has philosophical as well as practical significance, because the “object” has been contaminated by the “subject”.

Climate denial can be understood as a last-ditch attempt to re-impose the Enlightenment’s allocation of humans and Nature to two distinct realms, as if the purification of climate science could render Nature once again natural, as if taking politics out of science can take humans out of Nature. The irony is that it was Enlightenment science itself, in the rules laid down by the Royal Society, that objectified the natural world, putting it on the rack, in Bacon’s grisly metaphor, in order to extract its secrets. We came to believe we could keep Nature at arms-length, but have now discovered, through the exertions of climate science, something pre-moderns took for granted, that Nature is always too close for comfort.

Or, as The X-Files' Fox Mulder put it more colloquially, you should always respect Nature, because Nature has no respect for you!

Tags: gene lyons, global climate change

The EU's self-destruction, Thursday edition

2011-12-15T15:31:00.002-05:00

Tony Barber elaborates on what a schmuck British Prime Minister David Cameron showed himself to be at last week EU summit in Euro summit was British diplomatic debacle Financial Times 12/13/2011 :

The nation that prides itself on a Rolls-Royce diplomacy appears triumphantly capable, at critical moments of EU history, of driving itself straight into a ditch. This is what happened in Brussels last week when David Cameron, the UK prime minister, found himself outnumbered by 26 to 1 at a summit of European leaders. ...

That said, the EU summit in Brussels stood out for the way that Mr Cameron and his Downing Street inner circle appear to have excluded from their calculations whatever advice Britain's professional diplomats were ready to supply. Responsibility for the isolation in which he found himself lies squarely with Mr Cameron and his entourage's closest members: William Hague, foreign secretary, and Sir Jon Cunliffe, the prime minister's European affairs adviser, who has a hard-edged Treasury rather than a silky diplomatic background.

In a broader sense, responsibility for the debacle lies with the anti-EU die-hards that make up a larger and more vocal element of the Conservative parliamentary party than at any time since Britain joined the old European Economic Community in 1973. Their influence is all the greater because Mr Cameron depends on them for his House of Commons majority.

Neither Mr Cameron nor his advisers appeared to grasp, in advance of the summit, how spectacularly a last-minute attempt to exploit the eurozone's debt crisis to extract regulatory concessions for the City of London [the British financial industry] would backfire on Britain. In everyone else's eyes, the point of the summit was to approve swift, forceful steps for preventing the eurozone's collapse - a scenario with immeasurable consequences for the world economy. [my emphasis]

He also notes that Cameron "waited until the summit to present his fellow [EU] leaders with the detailed British demands".

The PBS Newshour interviewed Hague on Monday, presenting his talking points for an American audience, oozing smugness and arrogance. (British Foreign Secretary: 'We Should Be in Europe but Not Taken Over by Europe' 12/12/2011). I don't see what he has to be smug about. The British public may have initially reacted with rally-around-the-flag sympathy. But Cameron's performance at the summit was a debacle, and a dumb one at that. And one that may have negative consequences for Britain for decades to come.

The current weakness and apparently eminent downfall of the European Union a disaster of historic proportions. Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy are the first and second in line for the main responsibility for this 1914-level of bad leadership. But Britain was the third of the three major partners in the EU, and they bear major responsibility for the current failure as well, especially after Cameron's performance at the summit and since.

Nartin Wolf writes, "We are witnessing a lethal interplay between fears of sovereign insolvency, emerging sovereign illiquidity and financial stress." (Germany has to make a fateful choice Financial Times 12/12/2011) And he explains:

In the absence of strong institutions, the attitudes and policies of the core country have become crucial. I admire Germany's reconstruction after the second world war and after unification, the commitment to economic stability and its first-class exports. Unfortunately, these are insufficient. German policymakers persist in viewing the world through the lens of a relatively small, open and highly competitive economy. But the eurozone is not a small, open economy; it is a large and relatively closed one. The core country of such a union must either provide a buoyant market for less creditworthy countries when the latter can no longer finance their deficits, or it has to finance them. If the private sector will not provide the finance, the public sector must do so. If the latter fails to act, a wave of private and public sector defaults will occur. These are sure to damage the financial sector and exports of the core country itself, as well.

The failure of Germany's leaders to explain these facts at home makes it impossible to solve the crisis.

And he mentions what is so little discussed in the current crisis but is nevertheless critically important, the effect on Germany itself of the eurozone disintegrating and Germany going back to the D-mark or a euro with just a few countries, if any other countries would be so foolish as to agree to that:

The German people should be made aware the results would include a soaring exchange rate, a massive decline in the profitability of Germany's exports, a huge financial shock and a sharp fall in gross domestic product. All this would be apart from the failure of two generations of efforts to build a strong European framework around Germany itself. ...

Germany must choose between a eurozone disturbingly different from the larger Germany it expected, or no eurozone at all. I recognise how much its leaders and people must hate this choice. But it is the one they face. Chancellor Angela Merkel must dare to make that choice, clearly and openly.

I would question whether earlier Germany leaders expected the eurozone to be a "larger Germany". The moralistic Angela Merkel, cheerfully subservient to the greedy and self-destructive European financial lobby, clearly has been treating it that way.

Tags: angela merkel, david+cameron, eu, euro, european union, william hague

Waiting for Franz Ferdinand

2011-12-14T18:43:00.002-05:00

Wolfgang Münchau thinks it's Summer of 1914 for the eurozone. All that's lacking is the euro-equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Vergebliche Euro-Rettung.Die Ruhe vor dem großen Knall (The Calm Before the Big Crash) Spiegel Online 14.12.2011.

Both the IMF and the OECD are projected a downturn in the world economy that will heavily affect Europe going into the new year. The EU summit agreement does not empower the European Central Bank (ECB) or the European sovereign bailout fund to act as a borrower of last resort for eurozone countries' bonds. It does not provide the kind of debt relief that Greece and Italy and maybe Spain actually need. It does not create eurobonds whose credit-worthiness would be based on the eurozone as a whole. It does not address the bank crisis in Europe. And it does not create a "fiscal union" (even though German politicians may call it that) or a "transfer union" in which wealthier members systematically subside the less wealthy.

Besides that, the actual treaty language isn't ready yet for the formal changes to be approved by the EU-minus-one nations. And there are real question as to whether the agreements as currently discussed will directly conflict with treaties governing the EU countries, which would require Britain's approval, as well, which will not be forthcoming.

It's a house of cards, in other words. Even the Post Democracy 1.0 regimes in Greece and Italy can't show that they will meet their austerity cuts and revenue targets, which even if they did would only make their debt problem worse. There should be a contest for the euro's goodbye theme song. This is a good possibility:

Münchau writes that no European leader really wants the euro to fail, because the immediate economic consequences are likely to be some degree of really bad. But European leaders also have neither the will, nor the imagination to put through a meaningful solution. As he puts it, "Wir sind also jetzt schon an dem Punkt, wo das, was nötig ist, um die Krise zu lösen, schon längst nicht mehr mit dem überlappt, was politisch und rechtlich möglich ist. ("So we are know at the point where that which is necessary to solve the crisis is no longer overlaps with what is politically and legally possible.")

It could be a default by one of the harder pressed countries that sets of the collapse, Münchau notes. Or a bank crisis, or someone spilling a sack of rice. When it comes, it's likely to move very quickly to a crash of the euro. It's unpredictable enough that it's hard to even speculate about what might be left, e.g., some remaining mini-euro zone of a few countries. But after this, who besides Germany would be interested in such a thing?

Tags: eu, euro, european union, wolfgang münchau

Documentary on the Tea Party

2011-12-14T14:45:00.002-05:00

This is an Aljazeera English Fault Lines episode, Politics, Religion and the Tea Party YouTube date 12/13/2011:

I especially like the way this report discusses the Tea Party in the context of Christian Right domination of the Republican Party. Our political press in the US developed the habit of talking about the Tea Party as though it is somehow distinct and separate from the Christian Right. This documentary puts in a more realistic context, which is that both the Tea Party and the Christian Right are separate but near-identical manifestations of the Republican base.

I would add that both manifestations are obsessed with the same key enemies: black people, hippies, foreigners, gubment programs that might help some black or brown person somewhere somehow, to name some of the more prominent ones. Of course there are Muslims and the Kenyan radical anti-colonialist Marxist President who wants to impose Sharia law, Jews who don't celebrate Christmas, George Soros, liberals, Democrats, gays and lesbians, Nancy Pelosi, etc., etc., etc.

The report does pick up one favorite but incorrect piece of the Christian Right's founding story. What started the Christian Right in the organized, political form that we know it today was not the abortion issue. It was the Carter Administration's decision to deny federal tax breaks to racially segregated schools like Bob Jones University.

Tags: christian right, tea party

Greek Post Democracy 1.0 and the debt repayment

2011-12-13T13:35:00.000-05:00

I just read an article from a German historical journal, Vierteljahresheft für Zeitgeschichte, about how various social tensions can threaten democracy. It was by Horst Möller, "Gefährdungen der Demokratie.Aktuelle Probleme in historishcer Sicht" ("Danger for democracy: current problem in historical perspective") 3/2007, and was written before the dimensions of the depression that began in 2007 were clear.

He cites some interesting facts from the years between the First and Second World Wars. But when he discusses what he sees as the main problems that are manifestations of the dangers to democracy, it turns out that the crisis of democracy has to do with those silly, irresponsible ninety-nine percenters, not all of whom are weekly to meekly agree to neoliberal policies that will reduce the income and opportunities, eliminate their jobs, wreck their retirement security and give their homes to the banksters.

If the rabble would just stop moaning and groaning and just agree to the demands of their betters, this democracy thing would work just fine. The bankers and businesses could buy their politicians in the free market, and the invisible hand will take care of the deserving. If some of the Small People don't come out so well, then they made Bad Choices in life, I guess.

What will the one percent have to do to solve these annoying problems of democracy that let peasants have a say in how they are governed?

We have relevant cases in Greece and Italy, where Angela Merkel's EU replaced the elected governments of those countries with new governments whose sole purpose is to act as creditors' deputies, i.e., bill collectors for the giant European banks holding their bonds. These Post Democracy 1.0 governments were approved through the technical forms of parliamentary legitimacy. But they are governments of "technocrats" who are not supposed to be subject to all those ninety-nine percenter scruples that so concern Horst Möller and other advocates of the Brave New World of neoliberal economics.

How is Greek Democracy 1.0 fulfilling their main function?

Reuters reports (Greece's Jan-Nov budget deficit widens 5.1 pct y/y 12/13/2011), "Greece's budget deficit continued to widen in November as austerity-fuelled recession cancelled out much of the extra revenues the government was hoping to raise through emergency taxes, data showed on Friday."

According to Pleite-Griechen.Athen spart wieder nicht wie EU und IWF versprochen Die Welt 13.12.2011, Greece's economy is likely to shrink by as much as 5% this year, after three previous years of annual decline, while national debt has increased in numerical terms and tax receipts are lower than expected. Algebra is brutal here: increasing debt divided by shrinking economy equals a higher debt-to-GDP ratio, making full repayment even less likely. And lower tax receipts than projected mean less money to pay off the debts. The awesome outcome of austerity economics as a solution to a sovereign debt crisis.

Paul Krugman writes (No Draghi Ex Machina 12/12/2011):

What Anglo-Saxon economists need to understand is that the Germans and the ECB really, really don't share our worldview; they really do believe that austerity is all you need. And all indications are that they will cling to that belief, even as the euro falls apart — an event they will insist was caused by the fecklessness of the debtors. Given a choice between saving Europe and remaining righteous, they'll choose the latter.

What.A.Mess

Tags: austerity economics, greece

Glenn Beck discovers white racism among Tea Party supporters

2011-12-13T12:07:00.002-05:00

Will Bunch points out how a political myth has taken root that recasts the Tea Party in the image of Occupy Wall Street (The accidental truth-teller: Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and race in America Attywood 12/12/2011):

In recent months, a myth has been allowed to fester and take root about how the Tea Party Movement came about, and what it stands for. In particular, it is the falsehood that the Tea Party came about because of anger against the 2008-09 bailout of big banks and Wall Street. It was disturbing to see this lie repeated so often -- usually in the context of trying to make forced and ultimately confused comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- and not just in the usual conservative media sources, either.

He cites instances of this spin from the New York Post and FOX Business.

He doesn't cite this instance, from President Obama speech at Otawatomie a week ago:

But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or even sometimes understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets -- and huge bonuses -- made with other people’s money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we’re still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs and the homes and the basic security of millions of people -- innocent, hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities but were still left holding the bag.

And ever since, there’s been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness. Throughout the country, it’s sparked protests and political movements -- from the tea party to the people who’ve been occupying the streets of New York and other cities. [my emphasis]

But Bunch does refute the story with a bit of recent history:

The rise of the Tea Party had nothing to do with bank bailouts.

Remember, the federal government and the Bush administration (remember them?) started bailing out Wall Street and the banking industry in the fall of 2008, six months before the first Tea Party rally, or anything remotely like it. There was no great outpouring of anger from the rank-and-file of the American right. The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was signed into law by Bush on Oct. 3, 2008. It was supported by Bush's successor, then-Sen. Barack Obama, but it was also supported by Sen. John McCain, his running mate and future Tea Party queen Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and even by none other than Glenn Beck. Simply put, there was no Tea Party movement, and no public protests by conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in 2008.

Instead, the Tea Party formed within days of Jan. 20, 2009, the date that Barack Obama became America's 44th president. The famous "Tea Party rant"by Rick Santelli credited with helping to launch the protests wasn't about bailing out banks or Wall Street but the idea that Washington would provide relief for middle-class homeowners who were under water. Another seminal moment came less than a month into Obama's presidency when a young Seattle conservative activist named Keli Carender organized a public protest. Against the bank bailouts and TARP? No. It was against the first major action of the new president, the $787 billion stimulus proposal that included infrastructure projects, saving blue-collar government jobs, and tax cuts (yes, tax cuts) for the middle class. [my emphasis]

Bunch did a considerable amount of original reporting on the Tea Party, including a book about it, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama (2010).

Glenn Beck, weirdly enough, managed to say on FOX Business last week that some Tea Party sympathizers were motivated by white racism. Which, of course, is not supposed to exist any more in the Republican Party.

Not that this represents some newly-found reality-testing skills on Beck's part. He brought this up in the context of accusing Newt Gingrich of being the same kind of "big government progressive" that he calls Obama. Go figure.

But, as Bunch puts it, "any dose of honesty is a breath of fresh air, even if emerges from the fetid swamp of Beck, Inc." And he explains:

But whatever his reason, the idea that Beck re-injected into the national conversation -- that race and the Tea Party are linked -- is an important one. The media needs to re-ground itself in the fact that on the playing field of social movements, Occupy Wall Street, despite its flaws, is rooted in a reality of billionaire-bought economic injustice, while the Tea Party is based heavily on an emotion. The ideology that was created in the wake of that emotion -- distrust of any government steps to ease a jobs crisis, distrust of elites even if that means not believing in established science such as man-made global warming -- continues to steer the current debate, even if actual Tea Party activists have all but vanished the scene. [my emphasis]

Tags: occupy movement, tea party, will bunch

ILWU and Occupy Oakland's call for a one-day shutdown of West Coast ports today (Corrected)

2011-12-12T13:17:00.001-05:00

I have to agree with Laura Clawson about this one: Occupy Oakland attempting port shutdown despite union opposition Daily Kos 12/12/2011.

The Occupy Oakland group is pushing for a one-day strike at all West Coast ports ~~on Tuesday~~ today, December 12, even though the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) opposes it. The key to their remarkable success in the one-day general strike call in November was the participation of ILWU members by walking off work at the port. Technically, it was a wildcat action because it was not formally called by the ILWU. But Clawson is undoubtedly right in saying that the ILWU "tacitly supported" the November action.

If the organizers of this action don't have some very firm agreement, formal or otherwise, with the ILWU to do a strike, it's very unlikely to work. Not a smart move, from what I can see. We'll see what happens ~~tomorrow~~ today.

ILWU president President Robert McEllrath addressed the strike call in a 12/06/2011 letter: Message from Pres. McEllrath: We share Occupy’s concerns about America, but EGT battle is complicated:

The fact is that the story of corporate greed and its impact on the working class is the story of the 99%, and, of course, this reality connects us all. ...

Most recently, groups directly connected to the Occupy movement and other loosely affiliated social media groups have called for the shutdown of certain terminals and the West Coast ports. At the same time, these groups seek to link these shutdowns to the ILWU’s labor dispute with employer EGT. None of this is sanctioned by the membership of the ILWU or informed by the local and International leadership. Simply put, there has been no communication with the leadership and no vote within the ILWU ranks on EGT associated Occupy actions.

Further, since our November 22, 2011 press release clarifying our position regarding third-party protests to occupy West Coast ports on December 12, 2011, we have been the subject of much criticism from individuals affiliated with the Occupy movement. This is shortsighted and only serves the 1%. We ask only that our internal process be respected and that whatever transpires not be in our name as we have not taken part in the call for that action.

Reading between the lines of McEllrath's statement, he may be concerned that some well-organized left-wing sect is using the Occupy movement as a cover to get political influence in the ILWU. I'm just guessing there. But small, sectarian leftwing groups operate that way. Typically, if they do get control of a successful independent activist group of some kind, they effectively destroy it but use its reputation for a while to recruit members into their main organization. And a genuine mass movement like Occupy attracts such groups like flies to honey.

Tags: ilwu, occupy movement

Postmortems on the Herman Cain campaign

2011-12-12T09:00:00.002-05:00

Herman Cain's now-ended campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination opened a useful window into the politics of race in today's Republican Party. For many whites who don't much like African-American at all, Cain is a model for what a "good Negro" should be. Above all, he rejects the notion that white racism is a problem for black Americans.

Chauncey DeVega says goodbye to the Herman Cain Presidential campaign in The Final Herman Cain Round-Up: the Race Minstrel Meme; Cain as Affirmative Action Baby; Ishmael and Crouch Go Hard WARN 12/06/2011. Vega has been a pungent critic of what he calls Cain's "race minstrelsy". He provides a handy set of links for Cain campaign round-ups. Or is that wind-ups?

One of them is Mark Anthony Neal, Performing Herman Cain Huffington Post 12/05/2011. Neal writes that "Cain's candidacy has been shrouded in so much absurdity, that it's hard to see him as anything other than a performance artist." And he gives a good description of the minstrel show aspect of Cain's performance:

Both Obama and Cain's vocal performances are reminders of the role that the voice has played in establishing the "authenticity" of Blackness. One hundred years ago when Black "black-faced" minstrels were in open competition with White "black-faced" minstrels over who were the real "darkies," the tipping point occurred with the development of the phonograph and the "talkies" (motion pictures with sound), and the ability of Black artists -- most prominently Bert Williams -- to approximate Blackness in sound (as opposed to the use of black vernacular language) in ways that were more challenging for White "black-faced" minstrels; Al Jolson simply sounded like he was trying to sound Black.

Despite his "sound of Blackness" Cain had been successful reaching a broader audience than expected, in large part of his deft negotiation of racial nostalgia and racial accommodation -- none which makes him any less Black or so-called self-hating, but simply more willing to work within the constraints of a highly racialized society, on that society's terms. It goes without saying, perhaps, that Cain is a racial throwback.

The oft-cited example of Cain's experiences at Morehouse College in the 1960s, where his father insisted that he "stay out of trouble," in an era when Black college students were indeed starting trouble and changing the world for the better -- even at an institution known today for its marked social conservatism. This admission on Cain's part, no doubt strikes a chord for potential voters who still read President Obama as postmodern Black Power radical, as embodied in the frank racial talk of his life partner Michele Obama during the throes of the 2008 primary season.

That bit of autobiographical positioning on Cain's part was easy; more deliberate -- and complicated -- has been his performance of spirituals, at any number on campaign events. His willingness to take on the role of the minstrel -- the American brand of traveling bards who traveled the country, telling stories of far away lands, and not to be mistaken with the "black-faced" variety, who traveled the land embodying "the other" in Blackness -- has in some way been a stroke of performative genius, no matter how uncomfortable it makes the Black rank-and-file feel.

Cain's troubles around sex and sexual harassment also fit nicely into a negative white stereotype of black men, despite the fact that his defenders like Rush Limbaugh accused liberals of being the ones harboring such stereotypes. Psychological projection plays an outsize role for today's Republicans.

From the conservative fundamentalist camp, we have:

Cal Thomas, We're a Bipolar Country When It Comes to Adultery NewsBusters 12/05/2011. Short version: the country is going to hell in a handbasket because some time around 1969, people started committing adultery.

Wade Burleson, Lessons from Herman Cain: The Blood of Christ Cleanses My Conscience to Serve God 12/06/2011. Short version: Republicans sinners who get caught should perform the proper public rituals of repentance.

Brother Al" Mohler, For Christian Men: The Lessons of Herman Cain 12/05/2011. short version: we like Republican minstrel-show African-American types but they shouldn't get caught with their pants down.

Especially knowing what a chronic mealy-mouther Brother Al is, it's hard not to read his column as how-to advice for ministers and church officials to cover up affairs more effectively.

Tags: al mohler, herman cain

PBS report on EU-minus-one summit deal

2011-12-10T19:27:00.000-05:00

This PBS report on the EU summit just concluded (What Would Debt Deal Mean for Euro, European Union, U.K. 12/09/2011) focuses on Britain's role, typical of much of US reporting on Europe. The Anglo-centric view doesn't give a good understanding of the problem the EU and the eurozone face.

This report on the basic news about the deal (European Leaders Agree to Closer Financial Ties, but Cameron Holds out 12/09/2011) shares the same weakness:

Tags: eu, euro, european union

EU Summit

2011-12-09T12:53:00.000-05:00

The latest EU Summit is over. Twenty-six of the 27 EU nations have agreed to make a new treaty outside the main EU one, which is called the Lisbon Treaty, to institutionalize austerity economics in their constitutions. In the middle of the worst economic period since the Great Depression.

Oh, and Britain balked at the treaty change.

This will not solve the euro's problems. Britain's refusal to go along is another big step toward the dissolution of the EU as it currently exists. The latest summit outcome is a prescription for accelerating the budding recession in Europe, aggravating the sovereign debt crisis, bringing down several of Europe's already-weak large banks, and sweeping away decades of patient diplomatic work to build peaceful and stable relations among European nations.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

The stock markets didn't seem to be much perturbed on Friday, for whatever that's worth. European stocks went up, and as of this writing the Dow Jones looks on track to regain its losses of Thursday.

But however the stock market processes things on a given day, this is bad news, politically and economically. Europe's latest solution for the euro and banking crisis there is to double-down on austerity economics. Continue doing what's turned an easily-manageable debt crisis in Greece to a existential crisis for the European Union and a real threat of another global financial meltdown. And no way does the latest deal create a firewall for the United States against Europe's economic and banking problems.

A world on Britain's balking. What British Prime Minister David Cameron refused to do in the wee hours of Friday morning was to agree to the EU Treaty change that Princess Angie von Merkel was demanding. If the blankety-blank neocons hadn't spoiled the word "objectively" for a generation or more, I might say that objectively it's not a bad thing that Britain is well down the road to splitting off from the EU completely.

But politics is politics, so it's much more complicated that that. In terms of the real purpose of the EU - to promote peace and democracy and cooperation among nations in Europe - Britain should have been a full partner in the EU. Given economics grow rates in the rising BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and demographic trends in the BRICs and the rest of the world, without an effectively unified European Union, Europe and its individual countries will be minor players, bit players even, in world affairs during the 21st century. Britain cutting itself loose from the EU - which is what's happening with this latest move - means that in foreign policy they are choosing to be a permanent appendage to the United States in foreign policy.

On the other hand, as long as Britain's political class seems completely locked in to Britain's being a permanent appendage to the United States in foreign policy anyway, and the US' global dominance foreign policy strategy inclines the US to favor a weak EU, achieving a politically unified EU with a common EU foreign policy would require forming a revised EU without Britain's presence. In that sense, Britain's own distancing itself from the EU is not a bad thing from the viewpoint of the EU project.

But today's EU leaders, especially Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy, have effectively made the political and foreign policy goals of the EU project secondary or tertiary themes. The "Merkozy" duo are turning the EU into an enforcement mechanism for neoliberal economics, to which even democracy has to be sacrificed, as we see in Post-Democracy 1.0 in Greece and Italy right now.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has been an anti-Europe jackass in his actions this week. He is pandering to the nationalism of the strong anti-Europe of his Conservative Party. And, of course, to the British financial lobby, commonly referred to as "the City of London" or just "The City," similar to how "Wall Street" stands for the US financial lobby. Dany Cohn-Bendit, head of the Green Party caucus in the European Parliament, says, "Cameron is a coward" for not facing up to the anti-Europe Tories.

We could say that it's a smart move on his part not to agree to writing arbitrary budget deficit and debt restrictions into a binding international treaty. But here's where we would have to say "objectively". Because Cameron is as committed to foolish austerity economics as Angie and Nick are. Cameron is using a disaster capitalism/shock doctrine approach in Britain, using the depression as an excuse to achieve neoliberal goals of deregulation and dismantling of the parts of the government that particularly benefit the 99%. And he was very public about poking the other EU leaders in the eye, declaring in Bushian style, "I said before I came to Brussels that if I couldn't get adequate safeguards for Britain in a new European treaty then I wouldn't agree to it. What is on offer isn't in Britain's interests so I didn't agree to it."

On the other hand, since the EU is obviously on the fast track to self-destruction, why shouldn't Cameron score some cheap political points with posturing against it? The real question is which will be the first eurozone country to tell Angie to take her Ordnungsökonomik and her austerity treaties and go jump in a lake somewhere.

Tags: britain, david cameron, eu, european union