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Month: August 2011

American idiots

Published by digby on August 8, 2011

American idiots

by digby

I’m sure I’m going to get dinged for this by the usual suspects, but I just have to point out that there are some extremely stupid people in America. Here’s an example.

Paul Krugman writes:

I hear on the grapevine that some people are shocked, shocked I tell you, that I compared S&P to a murderer.

Not that I personally think that’s such a bad thing — and Krugman can be colorful …

But when you look at the column they’re screeching about, this is the offensive passage:

Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

Actually now that I think about it, silly and sophomoric is probably more on the mark. Nobody can be that stupid.

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Full faith and credit (and which S&P Tea Partier is whispering in Paul Ryan’s ear?)

Published by digby on August 8, 2011

Full Faith and Credit (and which S&P tea partier is whispering in Paul Ryan’s ear?)

by digby

When it happened, I said that we should wait and see what the markets do before making any assumptions about whether the S&P was credible in their latest “analysis.” Sure enough, S&P downgrades US credit on Friday and on Monday morning investors rush to flee equities and buy US Treasuries — bonds which are backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government. Somebody should have a pie thrown in his face.

Why are stocks tanking? Well probably, since the S&P has declared that the US must rev up its austerity measures or else (and the American political system seems to be listening to it as if its the Oracle of Delphi) people with money figure that on top of the turmoil in Europe, American insanity means we’ll soon be entering another recession. Huzzah.

Here’s Dr Doom Roubini:

The misguided decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US at a time of such severe market turmoil and economic weakness only increases the chances of a double dip and even larger fiscal deficits. Paradoxically, however, US Treasuries will probably remain the world’s least ugly safe asset: risk aversion, equity declines and a looming slump could even see treasury yields fall rather than rise.

Yup. Here’s The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Debt Remains ‘Gold Standard’

For Treasury-market investors, the next few weeks will settle one of the biggest questions of recent weeks for financial markets: Will those bonds rise or fall if the U.S. is downgraded?

While it’s still up for debate, a growing school of thought is that Treasurys probably won’t be hurt too much by Standard & Poor’s decision. Indications from big holders of Treasury debt — Japan and China — suggest that those countries won’t be dumping their holdings. Analysts also say that U.S. government bonds are likely to remain a haven for investors during the current turmoil.

We’re back in bizarroworld kids. All over TV this morning, none of the usual suspects seem to see anything even slightly ironic in the fact that the S&P downgrade results in a rush to buy these supposedly “unworthy” bonds.

It’s terribly sad to also recognize that with such cheap borrowing costs and lots of interested lenders, the US could easily finance a major stimulus and build the country’s infrastructure back up, hire some teachers, help the states out of their fiscal binds. But no. We’re going to pretend we’re a household and act as though government borrowing is a personal character flaw and force years of suffering on undeserving people for no good reason. I wish I could think of another reason for this other than folly, greed and opportunism.

Matt Stoller has a good piece up today about Standard and Poor’s that everyone should read. It turns out they are quite the political actor. Which makes this comment by Paul Ryan yesterday all the more in need of follow up by the mainstream press:

We passed a budget, which according to someone with S&P yesterday, would have prevented the downgrading from happening in the first place.”

It seems like there’s a story there to me. Who’s the big S&P tea partier who’s pushing Paul Ryan’s budget? Inquiring minds want to know.

As @dsquareddigest tweeted over the week-end:

btw, “shooting the messenger” is the correct thing to do if the messenger is an incompetent asshole making up spurious news. #standardnpoors

Update: This from Dday is instructive too.

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Learning from History by David Atkins

Published by digby on August 8, 2011

Learning from History
by David Atkins

Progressives seeking answers for how to fight back against the centrism fetish at the highest levels of the Democratic Party and a Republican Party careening rightward with increasing momentum have suggested a variety of answers: forget politics and set up “transition towns”; focus on creating a third party; take the fight “to the streets”; keep up business as usual and prevent a Republican takeover at all costs; etc.

But smart progressives would do very well to learn from the successes of the Right–not just in the recent past, but over the last 50 years. Back in the 1960s, Richard Nixon was the ostensible leader of the Republican Party. But he did not lead as the Conservative Movement wished him to. He opened up China, founded the Environmental Protection Agency and generally embraced Keynesian policies. A Limbaugh-style conservative had nowhere to go: both parties were set against the hardcore Conservative view of the world. Barry Goldwater was the beating heart of the Conservative Movement, and after his crushing defeat, the Movement had a set of choices: leave politics altogether, found a third party, or take over the Republican Party. Their choice was to take over the Republican Party:

REPUBLICAN Party leaders, however, ignored the “Goldwater boomlet.” Vice President Richard Nixon, the front-runner for the 1960 Republican nomination, believed that the greatest threat to the party came not from the right but from the left. In July, Nixon met with Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, and agreed to change the party platform to win moderate-Republican support. Conservatives were outraged, referring to the pact, in Goldwater’s words, as the “Munich of the Republican Party.”

A few days later, at the Republican National Convention, an angry Goldwater called on conservatives to “grow up” and take control of the party. And that, according to Brennan, is exactly what they set out to do. At a time when “liberal and moderate Republicans, like the rest of the country at that time and like historians ever since, continued to view conservatives in a one-dimensional mode,” conservatives believed that Goldwater’s popularity, the rise of a conservative press, and the growing strength of conservative youth groups boded well for the future.

Increasingly disillusioned with Republican moderates and with the whole tenor of American political debate, the right began to see organization as the key to political power. In the midst of the 1960 presidential campaign, for example, William Buckley, the conservative fundraiser Marvin Liebman, and almost a hundred student activists met at Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and formed Young Americans for Freedom. Within six months the organization could claim more than a hundred campus and precinct-level political-action groups and at least 21,000 dues-paying members. Using newsletters, radio broadcasts, and frequent rallies, YAF had almost overnight become a powerful nationwide movement.

Had Young Americans for Freedom and other grassroots organizations remained isolated from one another, their impact would have been weak. But in 1961 the political activist F. Clifton White organized a movement to nominate a conservative for President. Traveling around the country, White exhorted conservatives to seize control of their local party organizations and elect conservative delegates to the national convention. The movement orchestrated by White gave conservatives control over the Republican Party and helped to persuade Goldwater to run for President.

Smart progressives would be wise to learn from history. But one needn’t listen to me. Just listen to Thom Hartmann.

It’s not sexy, it’s not exciting, and it doesn’t tickle progressive heartstrings whose roots lie more in the politics of protest than precinct building. But it may be the only way to effectuate the change that will save this country.

The blind fighting the blind by David Atkins

Published by digby on August 7, 2011

The blind fighting the blind
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Of all the darkly comic notes in this New York Times story about S&P’s defense of its downgrade of U.S. debt, the darkest and most droll is almost certainly this:

As early as April, S.& P. had changed its credit outlook on the United States to negative. By July, S.& P. warned that if the government did not agree to a deficit reduction package of about $4 trillion, there was a one-in-two chance a downgrade.

Still Treasury officials claim they were taken by surprise on Wednesday. Just the day before, Ms. Miller and her team met at the Hay-Adams Hotel with a group of senior Wall Street executives who advise the Treasury on its borrowing. None of the members believed that the government’s credit rating would be lowered in the near-term.

On Thursday, the ratings agency informed the Treasury that its seven-person panel would meet Friday morning to assess the creditworthiness of the United States government.

Even then, one administration official said, “We didn’t think they would actually do it.”

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry here. Please forgive me if I quote myself yet again, this time from just two days ago:

The fact is that S&P, for whatever reason—be it political, economic, corrupt or some combination thereof—has desperately wanted to downgrade U.S. debt for months. First came the clearly unfeasible demand that the U.S. cut $4 trillion in spending while eliminating all the Bush tax cuts, even on the middle class. Then came the austerity bill, which was put in place over the top of a snookered public precisely to avoid a credit downgrade. Then came the threat to downgrade our credit anyway. Then came the admission of their $2 trillion accounting error in making the threat. And then came the downgrade in spite of it all. Let’s be clear: S&P was always going to make this move, no matter what we did. The austerity bill was thus an utterly pointless exercise to appease a ratings agency acting in bad faith.

And yet the Treasury Department claims to have been taken aback at the downgrade, in yet another “no one could have predicted” moment, Obama Administration edition.

S&P couldn’t have predicted that the GOP would scuttle ending the Bush tax cuts, even though anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman could easily have predicted it. And then Tim Geithner and friends couldn’t have predicted S&P’s obvious move, even though anyone paying close attention could have predicted that, too.

If this is a all a kabuki conspiracy, it’s the best acted Vaudeville farce of all time. The other alternative is to concede that we’re governed by drooling idiots in Wall St. and Washington alike, largely because anybody with a clue about what’s really going on is relegated to the sidelines and not allowed anywhere near real policy decisions.

Neoliberalism and free market fundamentalism are both used up, obviously failed dead ends in the world of ideas. Yet the proponents of these ideologies both cling desperately to their beliefs, fighting for control of Washington like two people fighting desperately for an inner-tube as they fall out of a doomed airplane, confident that their preferred version of the same policies will save them from certain death. Meanwhile, progressives have all the parachutes, but are strapped, helpless and curiously irrelevant, into the plane as it careens inevitably into the mountains ahead.

And all the clueless media can do is report on who’s winning the seesaw battle for the useless inner-tube, while moaning about how they could both be saved if only they would learn to share it like nice little children.

Chinese menu governance: on Westen and more

Published by digby on August 7, 2011
Chinese Menu Governance

by digby

Everyone’s talking about the new Drew Westen piece in the NY Times about President Obama. Westen says that he can’t diagnose someone long distance, but it’s a psychological profile regardless. Sometimes there’s no other way to analyze something like this.

But his observations aren’t new, they are just made more urgent by recent events. For instance, Ken Silverstein’s profile in 2006 called “Obama Inc, the making of a Washington Machine,” (which I wrote about here.) roundly mocked during the campaign, was starkly prescient. Krugman, two years later as well.
I wrote this piece in early 2010 about Garry Wills’ fascinating characterization of the problem as “omnidirectional placation.”


I’ve written quite a bit over the past year about what I call Obama’s “goldilocks” and “one from column A and one from column B” approach to governance. At various times I’ve termed it a problem of “believing their own hype” or a naive assumption that the election itself was so transformative that it had repealed the usual political dynamic in Washington. I have often criticized the president for trying to be all things to all people.

But it takes a writer and observer with the skill of Garry Wills to distill that down to its essence. Here, he reviews David Remnick’s new Obama biography, which charts Obama’s progress as the man who really could be all things to all people. He concludes with this:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.

That’s how I see it too. I honestly think Obama — and his inner circle — believed his own hype. As Wills points out, you can see why they would. After all, Obama had been miraculously successful by believing it up to that point. His followers were nearly delirious with faith that he could do it. It was very tempting to believe that he could single handedly change the dynamics of American politics with his mere presence because it was so hard to believe he could come that far that fast without having super human skills. But it was never even remotely realistic. His history actually showed that he was a natural conciliator and placator which I don’t think was what most progressives thought they were getting. They thought they were getting someone who could hypnotize the opposition into thinking they wanted what he wanted, which is something else entirely.

He’s actually a polarizer, which is completely predictable and not his fault. Sure, being African American enlivens the natural tribal state of American politics, but it would have happened anyway. We are polarized because we believe different things about what America stands for. We define ourselves differently. We have different values. It’s not the first time. In fact it’s defines American politics.

The problem is that the other side believes that our side is illegitimate and they have no obligation to abide by the government’s decisions if they are not in charge. And I continue to be surprised that after a bogus impeachment, an election decided by a partisan Supreme Court decision and a shocking war of choice, the Democrats failed to realize that Republican party no longer believed it needed to abide by the traditions and norms that had been holding together whatever fragile truce existed. This undemocratic streak has been around among the conservatives to some degree or another forever, but it rises up strongly now and then — and it’s been evident since the early 90s that we are now in one of those times when they have become tyrannical fanatics.

The fact that these discussions are going mainstream should be of concern to the powers that be. Liberals are still with the administration for the most part. But the progressive vanguard is rapidly losing heart — many have been waiting for some sign that things were going to change and it’s not happening. In a close election, that could be a problem.
Update: I see by the twitter machine that quite a few people are criticizing Westen’s piece because he relies too much on Obama making speeches and changing the “narrative.” This is a fairly common complaint among the policy wonks because many of them are convinced that the presidency is a powerless office and that political speeches, messages and narratives have absolutely no effect on politics. This is backed up by data that shows elections are correlated heavily with economics and war.
But I think this is one of those cases where the numbers obscure the obvious. Of course, the general conditions on the ground are a prime motivation for voters. But politics in a representative democracy is about convincing people that you are the one looking out for their needs and aspirations and the only way to do that in a complicated world is by telling stories.
If the only thing that mattered in politics was the state of the economy and whether or not the country was at war, one would assume that propaganda was useless, that partisan media like talk radio and Fox News had no impact and that elections were won and lost on the basis of spreadsheet analysis. I think people vote for politicians using the same criteria they use to decide who are friends and who are foes — highly evolved heuristics that developed over millenia. And that comes from tribal identity, speech, tone, attitude and narrative as much as facts, reason and analysis. Humans aren’t computers.
If elections are won on anything but the dry basics of a person’s bank balance and sense of national security — and I do believe they are — then of course a president can make a difference with speeches and stories. The evidence is probably thin because most of them, surprisingly, aren’t unusually good at it. That wasn’t what most people expected from this one, however.

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History’s Greatest Monsters

Published by digby on August 7, 2011

History’s Greatest Monsters

by digby

Behold the new chief analyst for Standard and Poor’s:

The founder of Tea Party Nation claimed liberal ideology is responsible for “a billion” deaths over the last century during a raucous rally here Saturday in support of one of the six Republican state senators facing a recall election Tuesday.”I will tell you ladies and gentlemen, I detest and despise everything the left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me,” said Tea Party Nation CEO Judson Phillips.

I assume he’s counting the many murders by miscarriage and masturbation, because otherwise”the left” is responsible for a quarter of all deaths* during the 20th century.

*I can’t vouch for these numbers. From what I can tell, all of this is highly speculative. But they’re in the ballpark of what I saw around the internets.

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Yes, both sides are wrong

Published by digby on August 7, 2011

Yes, both sides are wrong

by digby

So the president’s spokesman Dan Pfeiffer is pushing back on Villager Mark Halperin’s insistence that “both sides” are to blame for the S&P downgrade.

@Markhalperin my point is that compromise is possible, but to date GOP hasn’t been willing. This isn’t a case of both sides being wrong.

I just have to say that this isn’t true. Both sides are wrong. Terribly wrong. But it’s not because they have been equally intransigent in dealing with the deficit, but because we shouldn’t be focusing on the deficit at all.

I am once again struck by a very creepy feeling of deja vu, going back about eight years or so when Democrats were arguing furiously with the Bush administration about its relentless push to go into Iraq without UN authority. “My God,” they cried, “this thwarting of international norms is terrible, we cannot unilaterally invade a sovereign nation! We must have the world on our side!” Bush dutifully went to the UN and they diddled around for a couple of months before the whole thing blew up and Bush went in with his “coalition of the willing” without UN support.

But the problem was never that he didn’t have UN authority. It was that he wanted to invade Iraq at all. It wouldn’t have mattered if everyone in the UN had signed on to that lunacy, it still wouldn’t have made any sense.Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, inspectors were in there and not finding any WMD and the whole operation was likely to inspire even more terrorism and isolate the US at a time when it needed friends not enemies. Everything about it was ridiculous, but half the Democratic party signed on anyway and the other half argued against it on procedural and technical grounds. It was the very height of the up-is-down Bush era.

Now, like then, we are in a headlong rush to solve a problem that isn’t a real problem and in doing so we’ll make the real problems we face even worse. Cutting spending and raising taxes is not the right thing to do at the moment. It’s true that the wealthy are doing well and can afford to pitch in more in taxes — and should. But this is not a one-sided deal, is it? The deal is for the wealthy to pay a little bit more in taxes in exchange for cutting the safety net.

Liberals are all out there today pointing out that the S&P said that Republicans refusing to pay taxes was the major factor in their decision. The White House is pointing out that the Democrats were more than willing to do everything that was requested. We are all standing up and saying “see, they wouldn’t meet us halfway, the selfish jerks! This is on them!” I get that. On a partisan level it makes some sense to try to avoid blame for the downgrade.

But making this claim also means we are all signing on the Grand Bargain, in which a few rich assholes paying the equivalent of tip money is equal to senior citizens and sick people being asked to give up a much large percentage of their meager income, health and security. Just as the problem with Iraq really wasn’t that Bush failed to follow proper international processes, the problem with the Grand Bargain isn’t that Republicans failed to agree to revenues. The problem with the Grand Bargain is that it’s a very, very bad deal for ordinary people and the exact wrong policy to fix the real problems in this country, regardless of whether or not the GOP kicks in some revenue — which it won’t. All of our protests about the UN process didn’t really add up to much in the end. And we are still in Iraq.

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Grasping at the Brass Ring of Centrism by David Atkins

Published by digby on August 7, 2011

Grasping at the Brass Ring of Centrism
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

The leaders of the two parties in Washington react to S&P’s downgrade:

“It happened on your watch, Mr. President,” Representative Michele Bachmann said, drawing applause at an afternoon rally in Iowa. “You were AWOL. You were missing in action.”

The White House blamed Washington’s polarized political climate for the downgrade. “We must do better to make clear our nation’s will, capacity and commitment to work together to tackle our major fiscal and economic challenges,” the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said in a statement.

That is simply awful. Bachmann’s rhetoric is as emotional, crisp, understandable and clear as it insanely misguided. It is a strong message with a clear point. The Administration’s messaging is confusing, lacks all emotional clarity, and is redolent of weakness. Not once in the Administration’s response to the S&P downgrade did they mention the word “Republican.” There is no fight left in the Administration, no driving narrative, no emotional core on which to hang one’s hat except a continued and desperate clutch at the brass ring of “compromise.” Whatever that means.

If these are really the messaging positions going into 2012, progressives might as well ignore the presidential election and focus on winning local races instead.

The brilliant Drew Westen can take it from here:

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting a million immigrants in two years, breaking up families at a pace George W. Bush could never rival in all his years as president.

The real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes — but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right.

As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.

The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems…

A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.

But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise.

Barack Obama would be well advised to hire Mr. Westen as his political consultant. But then, if he were willing to do something so unbecoming of the Great Compromiser, he would have hired Mr. Volcker and Mr. Krugman as his financial advisers, and headed off this catastrophe in the first place.