Month: April 2012

A delusion of confidence

by David Atkins

Krugman:

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

“Investor confidence” and fear of the big bond traders have to be the two most amazing frauds perpetrated on the public in modern history. Neither have a shred of evidence to back them up any more than the notions of heaven and hell do, and yet they’ve been treated as scientific principles on which entire economies should base their decisions.

Yes, there’s some corruption behind the perpetuation of these myths. But not every person in academia, punditry and government all across the industrialized world is taking a payoff. There is such a thing as mass delusion and collective hysteria that cause large numbers of even highly educated people to believe things that just aren’t so. I saw this in bewilderment during the middle of the last decade as everyone I knew rushed to buy real estate even though I counseled them all against it. I wondered if I was actually the crazy one. I wasn’t, of course. The entire world was crazy, believing in the reality of an illusion, propped up by the head-nodding reinforcement of every other intelligent person anyone seemed to talk to. Paying rent was just throwing away your money when you could get rich for doing nothing, just by buying a condo. Heck, everyone knew that.

We’ve been living through just such an era in economics, as entire nations pray at the altar of confidence fairies and tremble at the scowlings of insignificant bond traders. It will look amazingly stupid in retrospect. Yet sadly it probably won’t be the last time it happens.

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For the animal lovers out there:

The maverick has a fainting spell

by digby

Now this is the very definition of chutzpah:

“Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad. This is the same President who once criticized Hillary Clinton for invoking bin Laden ‘to score political points.’

“This is the same President who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn’t ‘spike the ball’ after the touchdown. And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get reelected.

“No one disputes that the President deserves credit for ordering the raid, but to politicize it in this way is the height of hypocrisy.

I hate “commander in chief” hagiography and I find the ad in question to be maudlin and distasteful, but this charge of “politicizing” war coming from a Republican, particularly Mavericky McCain, the man who never met a war he wasn’t for, is a bit much. You want shameless politicizing? I’ve got shameless politicizing:

Like I said, the ongoing campaign argument over which person ordering death from afar is the more “courageous” is wrong no matter who’s selling it. But for John McCain (who put footage of himelf as a POW in pretty much every campaign commercial he ever made) to decry politicizing war and national security is really rich. Between McCain and George W Bush, the aught years were an orgy of self-congratulations, paeans to their own greatness and celebrations of war and killing. They set the standard.

Both sides don’t do it

by David Atkins

In yet another indicator that the tide is slowly turning against the “both sides do it” meme, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have a four-page opinion piece in the Washington Post today, deconstructing the “both sides do it” myth and laying the blame squarely where it belongs: on the insurgent extremist conservative movement in general, and Republicans in particular. A small taste:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach…

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

There’s still some BS in there about how Democrats have also gotten somewhat more partisan, but not nearly as much as the GOP (as if Democrats 30 years ago would have ever voted for tax cuts for the wealthy or bank deregulation?). But baby steps are better than no steps. Remember that Mann and Ornstein are employed by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. They’re not exactly liberal activists.

what is a good government advocate to do in this environment? What is even a so-called “centrist” supposed to do? Insofar as the argument isn’t driven purely by high-level donors and their interests, the argument on the left and center-left has been over whether to continue to be “reasonable”, assuming that voters will realize just how extreme the Republicans have become, or whether to use the Republicans’ own very successful tactics against them.

It would seem that the last three years should be all the political evidence one needs that the forbearance approach of the center-left doesn’t work. Forget whether the policies are good or not for a moment: politically speaking, if forbearance and reasonableness were virtues in politics, President Obama would be a saint. He’s bent farther over backwards to compromise with these people than Gumbi. The result was an even more extremist right wing, an historic devastation for his party in the 2010 midterms, an intransigentlly conservative Supreme Court, and an apoplectic 2012 campaign. Forbearance hasn’t worked–and that’s just the politics of it.

On the policy, the results are awful. It’s not just that extreme conservative policy is bad. Centrist policy is bad, too. The authors speak fondly of the Democrats for compromising with George W. Bush to pass his tax cuts for the rich and No Child Left Behind. They also forget the bipartisan eagerness to invade Iraq. These were bad policies, policies that the American people would have been much better served by Democrats opposing en masse. Back in the Clinton years Democrats and Republicans joined forces to pass NAFTA, banking deregulation, and “end welfare as we know it.” Those were also terrible, misguided policies.

If the politics of centrist forbearance from the left are bad, the policy is even worse. It’s not just that the Republican Party has veered far right: the entire policy apparatus in America has done likewise. It needs a sharp, heavy tug to the left just to make it reasonable again.

Good government advocates should want a vibrant, raucous progressive movement in this country. There’s nothing else that will change the current dynamic. It’s not just that the country will be in bad shape, or that progressives will be disappointed. Without a strong left, not even the “centrists” will get what they want, either.

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QOTD: Norman Solomon

by digby

From an extended interview about what makes a healthy progressive ecosystem:

Many on the left are dismissive of representative politics in the US. They feel that the electoral arena – at least at this moment – is a pointless endeavor. How would you convince those reading this to give up an aloof posture, especially when public opinion of Congress is so low?

Norman Solomon: We need to occupy – literally and figuratively – Congressional seats for the 99 percent. Social movements need a healthy ecology, which means a wide array of activities and manifestations of grassroots power. That includes progressives in Congress. I say on the campaign trail that we need our feet on the ground and our eyes on the stars of our ideals.

It’s not good enough to have one or the other. State power matters – we’ve seen that from county and state offices to Washington, D.C. And, as somebody who has written literally thousands of articles, 12 books, gone to hundreds of demonstrations and probably organized hundreds of demonstrations, I believe we always have to be protesting; we always have to be in the streets. It’s not either-or. I want our feet on the ground to include change for government policies. Laws matter. Whether or how they are enforced matters.

I think people sometimes confuse their own individual preferences, talents, strengths and interests with the totality of what an effective movement needs to do. In Latin America, we have seen the tremendous power of combining social movements that permeate the grassroots with the ballot box. Whatever their shortcomings, if you look at what’s happened in Brazil in terms of hunger and in other countries in the southern cone and elsewhere that not more than a couple decades ago were ruled by vicious dictators, they have been implementing genuinely progressive policies. We have an opportunity here to get beyond dualistic thinking and start thinking of synergy rather than this counterposing of our options, which creates a false either-or scenario.

Right now there is a tremendous awakening in this country about income inequality. People are fed up with war, and so many people are seeing that the status quo is a prescription for more suffering. We have to see this time as not for being dogmatic about one tactic or another, but seeing that in the context of non-violent, small-d democratic action here. Another way to put it: it is a historic mistake for progressives to leave the electoral arena to corporate Democrats and Republicans.

Each to his or her own talent and interest. But perhaps we could extend a little good will (or at least refrain from assuming bad faith and corruption) toward those who come at this from different directions?

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Drowning in dirty money

by digby

People who follow politics often reach the conclusion that average Americans are kind of dopey and don’t really understand what’s going on. After all, they often hold contradictory views and vote against their self-interest.

An alarming number of Americans report that their concerns about the influence of donors to outside political groups make them less likely to engage in democracy. Communities of color, those with lower incomes, and individuals with less formal education are more likely to disengage due to concerns about how much influence is wielded by Super PAC donors.

Two in three Americans — 65% — say that they trust government less because big donors to Super PACs have more influence than regular voters. Republicans (67%) and Democrats (69%) uniformly agree.

One in four Americans — 26% — say that they are less likely to vote because big donors to Super PACs have so much more influence over elected officials than average Americans.

Less wealthy and less educated Americans were significantly more likely to say they would be less likely to vote because of Super PAC influence: 34% of respondents with no more than a high school education, and 34% of those in households with an annual income less than $35,000, said they would be less likely to vote.

A higher number of African-American and Hispanic voters also stated that the disproportionate influence of Super PAC donors will discourage them from voting: 29% of African Americans and 34% of Hispanics said they were less likely to vote because of Super PAC influence.

I assume that’s the plan.

Large majorities of Americans believe that members of Congress will favor the interests of those who donate to Super PACs over those who do not — and that Super PAC donors can pressure elected officials to alter their votes.

More than two-thirds of all respondents (68%) — including 71% of Democrats and Republicans — agreed that a company that spent $100,000 to help elect a member of Congress could successfully pressure him or her to change a vote on proposed legislation. Only one in five respondents disagreed.

More than three-quarters of all respondents — 77% — agreed that members of Congress are more likely to act in the interest of a group that spent millions to elect them than to act in the public interest. Similar numbers of Republicans (81%) and Democrats (79%) agreed. Only 10% disagreed.

Honestly, I wish I could come up with some stirring words to make people feel differently, but I can’t. When they’re right, they’re right. American politics is drowning in money and I can’t blame average working people for figuring that it’s every man and woman for themselves.

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Blue America wants to give you a Thank You gift

The problem in a nutshell

by David Atkins

A local progressive activist and friend pointed me to an amazing section from Thomas Frank’s recent book Pity the Billionaire. It’s a succinct description of Democratic ideological malaise, laid out in no-holds-barred prose for which Thomas Frank is so justifiably famous, and it tells the tale of what has happened to much of the institutional “left” as well as anything I’ve seen:

Terminal niceness

The problem is larger than Obama; it is a consequence of grander changes in the party’s most-favored group of constituents. No one has described the new breed of Democrat better than … Barack Obama. “Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means – law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists,” reminisced the future president in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope:

As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. … They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital.

“I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met,” Obama confesses a few paragraphs later. So he has. And so has his party. Today’s Democrats have their eyes on people who believe, per Obama’s description, “in the free market” almost as piously as do Tea Partiers.

Class language, on the other hand, feels strange to the new Dems; off limits. Instead, the party’s guiding geniuses like to think of their organization as the vanguard of enlightened professionalism and the shrine of purest globaloney.

As a result of their retreat from populism, Democrats have spent the last several decades systematically extinguishing opportunities to broaden the base of their support.

They did little, for example, as their former best friends in organized labor were scythed down by organized money. This was no ordinary misstep, by the way. Labor is one of the last institutional bearers of an ideology capable of countering the market-populist faith; had its voice been strong in 2009, things might have played out very differently. Instead, Obama and Company pretty much sat on their hands as the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector sank lower than at any point in the 20th century. The fatuity of it all, one would think, has surely become obvious to Democrats: They have permitted nothing less than the decimation of their own grassroots social movement; the silencing of their own ideology. Thanks to this strategy, large parts of America are liberal deserts, places where an economic narrative that might counterbalance the billionaire-pitying wisdom of El Rushbo is never heard and might as well not exist.

The effects of a wrenching recession, on the other hand, aren’t likely to touch the new, well-to-do Democrats directly. They know bad things are happening, yes; they express concern and promise to help the suffering, of course; but the urgency of the recession is not something they feel personally. It is not a challenge to their fundamental values. It is, rather, an occasion for charity.

Oh, but a country where everyone listens to specialists and gets along – that’s a utopia these new Dems regard with prayerful reverence. They dream of bipartisanship and states that-are-neither-red-nor-blue and some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future where the culture wars cease and everyone improves their SAT scores forevermore under the smiling, beneficent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries.

Rule by Ivy League technocrats wouldn’t be so bad, actually, if the technocrats weren’t so easily blinded by the circumstances of their own wealth. And if they weren’t so often just dead wrong regardless of their level of corruption.

It’s bad enough that when I look to hire people at a professional level or when I seek assistance and volunteerism on a political level, I automatically distrust anyone from an Ivy League school or with a Ph.D. I’ll take the B.A. or M.A. from a state school instead, as those folks tend to be less paralyzed by self-doubt, less apt to share views with Thomas Friedman and David Broder, and more inclined toward common sense.

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Oooh baby: The recurring dream of the Man Called Petraeus

by digby

Feel the thunder:

After Republican leaders rightly criticized Senator Obama, a former state legislator with merely two years in the U.S. Senate, for being unqualified to be commander-in-chief and leader of the free world during the 2008 campaign, it would be an irony if they selected Marco Rubio, a former state legislator with merely two years in the U.S. Senate, as vice president in the 2012 election.

Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie will almost certainly not be the vice presidential nominee for the simple reason that they don’t want to be president. Both declined to run for the top job because, if rumors are to be believed, they were unwilling to undergo the rigors and personal scrutiny that a presidential campaign brings. If they were unwilling to do so for the presidency, why would they do so for the much lesser prize of the vice presidency?

Paul Ryan, meanwhile, is too valuable to the GOP in the House. As one of the more serious-minded legislators in the party, he would be wasted on the vice presidency.

I think what they need is man. A Real Man. One of those men who makes other men feel more manly just looking at him. A man who can make women forget all about their own freedom and throw themselves into his strong embrace.

I think you know that man. The only man:

That leaves David Petraeus. Petraeus served as commanding general of both wars the U.S. fought over the last decade, headed up central command, and is now director of the CIA. And, of course, he had the courage and professionalism to serve in a deeply unpopular war and, remarkably, come out with his reputation enhanced. Probably no person alive has a better grasp of the international situation, America’s role in the world, and the limitations and capabilities of American power.

Petraeus has nearly universal name recognition and is one of the most well-respected figures in the country. A year ago only 11 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him, according to Gallup, half that of Christie. And as a non-partisan figure he has not been tarnished by the partisanship and mud-slinging of recent years. Additionally, Petraeus would bring foreign policy expertise to the ticket, balancing Romney’s focus on economic issues. If Obama really intends to claim that his foreign policy accomplishments should earn voters’ respect, there is no one in the country with more credibility than Petraeus to take Obama’s argument apart.

Some people seem to be forgetting themselves. I don’t think it’s quite respectful enough to refer to him as David Petraeus. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to call him General Petraeus, or someone might think someone hates the troops. Let’s not forget our manners here:

He would bring gravitas and seriousness to a campaign season that, so far, has been more memorable for the parade of not serious GOP challengers who, thankfully, had the decency to drop out. His intelligence and ethic of public service would be a good match for Romney’s own.

Indeed. And it would set him up nicely for 2016 when Republicans are likely to be yearning for a man in uniform. (When are they not?)Nobody has more salad on his chest than The Man Called Petraeus. The cause endures, the hope still lives, and the wetdream will never die.

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Unfunny Twits

by digby

It’s been obvious for decades that there is a painfully puerile streak in the right wing. All you have to do is listen to the creepy, juvenile insults of Rush Limbaugh on any given day (like today) to get the picture. Ann Coulter and Dana Loesch are simple clowns. The twitter wars are rife with headache inducing “I know you are but what am I” exchanges.

But Monica Crowley never struck me as a member of the braindead junior high insult club until today:

Fox News’ Monica Crowley reacted to news that Sandra Fluke is engaged by tweeting “To a man?” on Thursday.

Fluke, a Georgetown law student, stepped into the national spotlight when Rush Limbaugh attacked her as a “slut” and a “prostitute” for advocating employer-covered contraception. On Thursday, it was announced that Fluke is engaged to her long-time boyfriend.

It’s just such an incredibly lame Limbaugh-esque insult. Fluke, after all, was called a “slut” for days on Limbaugh’s show for allegedly demanding her birth control be paid for.(“She can hardly walk, she’s been having so much sex!”) Now she’s a lesbian?

Crowley, naturally, replied by saying that “the left” doesn’t have a sense of humor. But on some level she must realize that she’s sunk so low that she’s just another right winger vomiting up an insult that doesn’t make sense, even by their own low standards.

Try to keep up, conservatives: lesbians who are also “sluts” don’t need birth control to prevent pregnancy. They might need it for health reasons, but any promiscuous behavior will not be affected by their access to contraception. So, if you’re going to insult someone as a slut for advocating for birth control, calling them a lesbian a month later just makes you look stupider than you already look. Which I wouldn’t have thought possible, since needing affordable birth control doesn’t make you a slut in the first place — and even if Fluke were a lesbian, who gives a damn? Peeling back the layers of idiocy in these insults could take days.

Twitter is a weird medium for certain people. There’s something about it that just connects directly to their ids, and they can’t help but let their real selves show. They seem to think they’re just hanging out with their pals and they talk the way they usually do. It’s very revealing. Of course Monica Crowley did work for Richard Nixon, so she learned at the Master’s feet.

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