Month: August 2013

QOTD: Richard Nixon

by digby

No, not those hideous homophobic slurs. (You can read all about those here.) This is a different quote.

The “aiding the enemy” charge in the Manning case was based on military law, and it is not directly applicable to leakers in other parts of the government or to reporters and publishers. But the theory on which it was based has echoes in the more general espionage laws.

Until recently, its leading proponent was Nixon, who mused on the matter in a meeting in the Oval Office the day after The Times published the first installment of its reports on the Pentagon Papers.

“That’s treasonable,” he said to an aide, “due to the fact that it’s aid to the enemy and it’s a release of classified documents.”

Makes you feel all warm inside, doesn’t it?

Here’s more from Adam Liptak on how the First Amendment is eroded every time a presidential administration decides to “reinterpret” it in order to protect itself from exposure.

The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail. In its failed effort to persuade Russia to return another leaker, Edward J. Snowden, it felt compelled to say that he would not be tortured or executed.

These developments are rapidly revising the conventional view of the role of the First Amendment in national security cases. The scale of disclosures made possible by digital media, the government’s vast surveillance apparatus and the rise of unorthodox publishers like WikiLeaks have unsettled time-honored understandings of the role of mass media in American democracy.

This is so even where the government was the nominal loser. Consider the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who dodged a legal bullet on Tuesday, winning an acquittal on the most serious charge against him: that releasing government secrets to the public amounted to “aiding the enemy.”

But a dodged bullet is still a bullet.

The military judge in Private Manning’s case ruled last year that there was no First Amendment problem with the government’s legal theory. Providing classified information for mass distribution, she said, is a sort of treason if the government can prove the defendant knew “he was giving intelligence to the enemy” by “indirect means.”

The verdict thus means only that military prosecutors did not prove their case. The legal theory stands, and it troubles even usual critics of unauthorized disclosures of government secrets.

“It blurs the distinction between leakers and spies,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld, the author of “Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.” He said the government might have lost a battle but made headway in a larger war by “raising the charge and making it seem plausible.”

Something similar happened in 1971, when President Richard M. Nixon failed to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish the papers is often said to be a high-water mark in the annals of press freedom.

But like the Manning verdict, the decision represented a shift in the understanding of the First Amendment.

“The American press was freer before it won its battle with the government,” Alexander Bickel, the Yale law professor who represented The Times in the case, wrote in his classic 1975 book, “The Morality of Consent.”

“Through the troubles of 1798, through one civil and two world wars and other wars, there had never been an effort by the federal government to censor a newspaper by attempting to impose a prior restraint,” Professor Bickel wrote. “That spell was broken, and in a sense, freedom was thus diminished.”

Worse, from the perspective of the news media, the victory in the Pentagon Papers case was distinctly limited and helped shape the Manning prosecution.

“A majority of the Supreme Court not only left open the possibility of prior restraints in other cases but of criminal sanctions being imposed on the press following publication of the Pentagon Papers themselves,” Floyd Abrams, who also represented The Times in the case, wrote in a new book, “Friend of the Court.”

According to a 1975 memoir by Whitney North Seymour Jr., who was the United States attorney in Manhattan in the early 1970s, Richard G. Kleindienst, a deputy attorney general, suggested convening a grand jury in New York to that end. Mr. Seymour said he refused. A grand jury was then convened in Boston, but it did not issue an indictment.

It’s not all about laws. It’s also about norms. And when the executive branch decides to challenge the common understanding of the First Amendment, it is forever changed, even if the law does not follow. These are matters of consensus and belief as much as they are laws. And we’ve lost that consensus on the meaning of the First Amendment under these last two administrations. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll ever get it back.

Update: None of this is to say that the government isn’t also zealously pursuing its desire to hobble the free press in the courts as well. They’re leaving no stone unturned:

A New York Times journalist whose claim he shouldn’t have to testify in a leak prosecution was rejected, 2-1, last month by a federal appeals court panel asked Friday that the full bench of that court rehear the case.

Lawyers for national security reporter James Risen made the request in a petition filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which is based in Richmond and covers Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

“The Panel Opinion conflicts with every other court of appeals to have decided these issues. Thus, investigative reporters in this Circuit are now the only ones without any protection at all in criminal prosecutions, and consequently, prosecutors will have unfettered access to information about their confidential informants,” Risen’s attorneys declare in their request to have all 15 4th Circuit judges consider the issue.
[…]
The strongly-worded decision eviscerated the notion of a reporter’s privilege—at least one created or recognized solely by the federal courts.

However, it also put the Obama Administration in an awkward position. Just days after the Justice Department issued new guidelines seeming to back away from prior intrusions on the work of journalists, prosecutors obtained a ruling that set back the rights of reporters’ to resist such inquiries. The case also created the possibility that the Obama Justice Department could wind up arguing against the press in a Supreme Court fight over reporter’s privilege.

It’s remarkable how often words don’t match actions with our government these days. In any number of areas. I guess it’s done to assuage critics and give those on either side of an issue a way to argue their position. Something for everybody.

.

.

We won. They’re losing. It’s important to remember that.

by David Atkins

As Washington prepares to self-immolate over yet another budget showdown, it’s worth remembering the context that brought us here. Republicans, with a perplexing assist from the President himself, forced us into an appalling fixation on austerity and a backlash against Obamacare. That might have been understandable in the wake of the 2010 elections which swept Republicans into office.

But 2013 is not 2011. Democrats won an election defending Obamacare and the idea that government has a postiive role to play in helping boost the private sector out of a recession. Moreover, demographic trends are hurting the Republican Party–trends that will only increase in harm as the GOP clings to its message of austerity for the poor and middle classes.

Greg Sargent explains what that means for the upcoming budget battle:

It isn’t 2011 anymore, but we’re facing another series of crises that are quite similar. Dems have a chance to do far better this time. Today’s jobs numbers only underscore the urgency of not capitulating to any more austerity demands, and make it all the more crucial that Dems push hard back to swing us back in the other direction.

On the debt ceiling, this means no negotiating, no matter what. The GOP demand for more spending cuts in exchange for a debt limit hike is a nonstarter — period. The defund-Obamacare campaign should be treated as the buffoonish con game that it is. When it comes to funding the government, the picture gets more complicated. Probably the best we can hope for, given current GOP dysfunction, is a short term funding of the government at current levels. But the long term is what matters. Dems must continue pushing hard to split off Republican Senators who seem inclined to try to compromise with Dems, and they must make sure that the demand for more stimulus spending — on infrastructure, for example — is part of those conversations, as unlikely as it seems that it will bear fruit. Dems must continue pushing for a long term replacement to the sequester that increases spending levels, replaces cuts partly with new revenues, and prioritizes job-creation and economic growth. This may seem futile but Dems should continue articulating these priorities as forcefully as they can while refusing to get drawn back into the austerity frame that has held sway for so long.

Greg is right, of course. And it seems that most Congressional Democrats were either on board with this notion from the beginning, or have gradually come round to seeing that austerity in a recession is a fool’s errand, that the GOP is implacable, and that there’s no advantage in playing Republican-lite.

The only question is, will the President finally see that as well and stand firm against more cuts?

With Republicans in control of the House and most state legislatures, and poised to possibly gain control of the Senate in 2014, it’s easy to forget that they’re still a Party drowning in civil war, lack of message, and demographic doom. They’re drowning, and if they refuse to take a moderate life boat, the best option is throw them an anvil.

.

.

The Queen of Versailles

by digby

Just … oh my:

Sally Quinn, The Washington Post journalist and Editor in Chief of On Faith, let NowThis News into her DC crib to show us everything we wish we could have in our own homes. A pool, a tennis court and a lot of Warhols are just a few of the awesome features in the house that Abraham Lincoln’s son once owned.

h/t @tnapoles

Climate change is not just killing people. It’s already making people kill each other.

by David Atkins

It’s not just the increasingly frequent and potent natural disasters. Climate change is also already making people kill one another:

US scientists found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall correlated with a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, as well as group conflicts and war.

The team says with the current projected levels of climate change, the world is likely to become a more violent place.

Marshall Burke, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: “This is a relationship we observe across time and across all major continents around the world. The relationship we find between these climate variables and conflict outcomes are often very large.”

The researchers looked at 60 studies from around the world, with data spanning hundreds of years.

They report a “substantial” correlation between climate and conflict.

This stands to reason, of course. That’s why the Pentagon is worried about climate change as one of its key policy concerns:

One of the Pentagon’s top strategists said climate change is fundamentally altering how the Defense Department (DOD) evaluates future conflict areas.

Daniel Chiu, the deputy assistant secretary of DOD strategy, said climate change has the Pentagon thinking about impacts on global food and water scarcity, mass migration and the potential for those issues to ignite clashes around the world.

“How we at the Department of Defense need to think about it — not again because we desire any of those to come about — but, frankly, so we can play our part in preventing those types of negative scenarios from emerging in the future,” he said Thursday at an event hosted by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Chiu said climate change presents challenges that are not of the “traditional military-on-military, state-on-state” variety.

Climate change will generate greater need for humanitarian and disaster-relief aid, Chiu said. He referenced extreme weather events that are intensified by rising sea levels and warmer waters associated with climate change.

That means the DOD needs to engage in more collaborative efforts with other nations and nongovernmental organizations, he said.

Right now, climate change is seen as a niche issue that only “those climate people” care passionately about. But soon it will begin to shadow over every single other policy debate until nothing can be discussed without taking it into account. It’s will soon go from niche issue, to major issue, to the only issue that matters.

.

Famous emoprog Fred Kaplan on the boys and their toys

by digby

Yes, as some of us have been saying for a long time, if you build it, they will use it:

The father of the atomic bomb made this observation in 1951 while testifying before a panel that wound up revoking his security clearance as a result of reports that he’d opposed going ahead with the much more powerful hydrogen bomb. He was explaining to the panel why he’d initially supported the H-bomb project—it was so “technically sweet” that “the moral and ethical and political issues” dropped by the wayside.

Technical sweetness may explain how the National Security Agency put in place the massive surveillance programs that Edward Snowden has revealed in recent weeks.

Consider this. The core mission of the NSA, ever since it was founded in 1952, has been “signals intelligence”—intercepting all manner of communications sent or received by the enemy. The task has been getting more challenging as the means of communication have evolved from radio antennae and the telephone to satellites, fiber optics, cellphones, and the Internet. It has become harder still in the past dozen years, as the enemies to be tracked have expanded to include not only nation-states, but also amorphous, decentralized terrorist groups.

And so, when the NSA’s allies and affiliates in the corporate software world came up with devices that can intercept, sift through, collate, and parse patterns from everything, in near-instantaneous time—well, it was all so “technically sweet,” the natural inclination among those in charge would have been, as Oppenheimer said, to “go ahead and do it.”

Yes, yes and yes. I would say the same logic applies to the drone war as well. And none of this is any more benign than the “technically sweet” temptation to create weapons that could destroy the entire planet. It is obvious to me from what we’ve seen of the Big Kahunas in charge of our surveillance state (like Keith Alexander) that this is exactly what happened.

It’s easy to see the logic by which the NSA managers widened the scope of their surveillance. At first, they focused on tracking traffic patterns. Some phone number in the United States was calling suspicious people or places in, say, Pakistan. It might be useful to find out whose phone number it was. It might then be useful to find out what other people that person has been calling or emailing, and then it might be useful to track their phone calls and email patterns. Before you know it, they’re storing data on millions of people, including a lot of Americans. Then maybe one day, they track someone—a phone number or email address they’d never come across before—engaged in some very suspicious activity. They wish that they’d been tracking this person for some time, so they could go back and see if a pattern exists without having to wait for one to emerge.

Then they learn that they can do this; new technology makes it possible. So they scoop up and store everything from everybody. They even convince themselves that they’re not “collecting” data from American citizens (as that would be illegal); no, they’re just storing it; the collecting doesn’t happen until they actually go retrieve it from the files. (James Clapper, director of national intelligence, actually made this claim.)

And they rationalize that it is necessary to keep the country safe — they are, in the words of Lloyd Blankfein when he explained how Wall Street was saving the world from economic catastrophe, doing God’s work.

A widespread criticism of the intelligence failure on 9/11 was that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the other pertinent agencies had tracked down a lot of facts—a lot of data points—but they didn’t, or couldn’t, “connect the dots.” I’ve never completely bought this notion; a lot of the failure stemmed from routine screw-ups. But let’s stipulate there’s something to it. What if new technology could give the NSA so many dots, a seamless stream of dots, all the data points in the world—the fantasy-come-true of universal surveillance—that nobody would need to connect the dots, because the dots practically connect themselves?

They would need some legal authority for this, so they ask the FISA court—created by Congress in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—to rule on whether this is permissible, and the court complies. Specifically, it rules that they can do this, as long as the material they’re storing is “relevant” to an investigation of terrorism, and the court buys the logic that the agency might need to go fetch data retroactively in such a probe. Therefore, everything is “relevant.”

The catch, as we now know, is that all of this—the ever-expanding surveillance in time and space, the reasoning behind it, and the FISA court ruling that approves it—has evolved at such high levels of secrecy that only a handful of people in Congress (very few people anywhere outside the NSA, and probably not all that many inside) know anything about it. This, it turns out, is what Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, meant when he cryptically said, way back in October 2011, that “there are two Patriot Acts in America”—the one that anybody can read and a “secret interpretation that the executive branch uses” but that nobody on the outside knows about at all. The public Patriot Act allows “bulk” collection of data; the secret interpretation defines “bulk” far more bulkily than anyone could have imagined.

Please read on, especially if you have found yourself wondering exactly how it is this thing unfolded.

Kaplan has some ideas about how to fix it with which you may or may not agree. But the most important thing is that he acknowledges what happened here. The NSA is a runaway agency. And it needs to be reined in.

.

How does Chris Hayes manage to escape the Snowden Distraction Ray? 


by digby

Virtually everyone on MSNBC these days is shrilly denouncing the decision to allow Edward Snowden asylum — while simultaneously declaring that it is preventing them from discussing the policies and programs they, as devoted civil libertarians, so very much want to discuss but can’t because Snowden is distracting them. It’s very moving to watch them in their plight, held hostage by the Snowden story they profess to loathe even as they pick over it in minute detail hour after hour, squirming, unable to turn away. Poor things.

Still, I thought it was only fair to show that the network is capable of transcending the inexorable pull of the Snowden Distraction Ray for one hour a day. That would be the hour that Chris Hayes has the helm. He does something very unusual on this story. Instead of getting visibly angry and interrupting anyone who suggests ever so slightly that Snowden shouldn’t be burned for the heretic he so obviously is, he offers up a spirited debate between people with varying opinions on the issue. It’s rather startling to hear it, but once the novelty wears off you find that it’s quite informative.

But here’s what’s completely shocking. Before giving the Snowden story a fair hearing, he manages to accomplish what all those other hosts and commentators say is impossible to do in their hours and hours of airtime: he opens his show with a full segment about what Snowden has revealed and how the congress is responding to it.

Imagine that:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Some of the other hosts should ask how he managed to escape the powerful Snowden Distraction Ray long enough to discuss the information he revealed and what it means. Maybe they could try it some time.

.

.

Helping out his political soulmates

by digby

This makes sense:

The Conservative Party has hired Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina for its general election campaign team, BBC Newsnight has learned.

Sources confirmed that he would act as a campaign strategy adviser to the Conservative party.

A lifelong Democrat, Mr Messina masterminded the US president’s successful 2012 re-election campaign.

The political parties in Westminster are readying themselves for the general election, now under two years away.

There are already established links between UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s team and Mr Obama’s Democrats.

In 2012 Mr Cameron visited the US in a trip widely seen as an endorsement of Mr Obama
In the run-up to the TV debates of the 2010 UK general election campaign, the Tories brought Obama adviser Anita Dunne over to advise Mr Cameron on how to handle the debates, which are a familiar feature of US presidential races.

Then, in the year of the presidential election, Mr Cameron flew to the US in a trip interpreted by many as an endorsement of Mr Obama. Mr Cameron travelled with Mr Obama to watch a college basketball match in the crucial swing state of Ohio, and heavily praised the US president in his state dinner speech.

One might wonder why American Democrats would work for the Tories. Or maybe not.

Recall:

Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, assured a group of Democratic donors from the financial services industry that Obama won’t demonize Wall Street as he stresses populist appeals in his re-election campaign, according to two people at the meeting.

They’re all on the same page.

.

QOTD: Tracey Byrnes

by digby

 … Fox News financial commentator. It’s actually from 2010, but the sentiment is a fresh as if she said it yesterday:

250,000 dollars a year is not rich. You’ve lived in this city long enough to know that. It’s not rich for a family of four sending kids to college. It actually is close to poverty.

I hate to say it but it’s not just idiotic Fox News correspondents who say this.  I’ve heard quite a few liberals make the same point, including one prominent lefty who said that you can’t live in Los Angeles on less than 300k a year.

There has been a lot of this in recent years.  Here’s just one more example:

Bankers aren’t optimistic about those gains. Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.

The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.
“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

Your heart just bleeds …

Here are the Daily Show segments about the Fox News coverage of the minimum wage protests happening in cities all over the country:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

If it’s classified it must be true

by digby

Bruce Schneier points to a new study that says people trust secret information over public information. Which explains why so many in congress are so eager to believe classified government briefings:

In one experiment, we had subjects read two government policy papers from 1995, one from the State Department and the other from the National Security Council, concerning United States intervention to stop the sale of fighter jets between foreign countries.

The documents, both of which were real papers released through the Freedom of Information Act, argued different sides of the issue. Depending on random assignment, one was described as having been previously classified, the other as being always public. Most people in the study thought that whichever document had been “classified” contained more accurate and well-reasoned information than the public document.

In another experiment, people read a real government memo from 1978 written by members of the National Security Council about the sale of fighter jets to Taiwan; we then explained that the council used the information to make decisions. Again, depending on random assignment, some people were told that the document had been secret and for exclusive use by the council, and that it had been recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. Others were told that the document had always been public.

As we expected, people who thought the information was secret deemed it more useful, important and accurate than did those who thought it was public. And people judged the National Security Council’s actions based on the information as more prudent and wise when they believed the document had been secret.
[…]
Our study helps explain the public’s support for government intelligence gathering. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that a majority of Americans thought it was acceptable for the N.S.A. to track Americans’ phone activity to investigate terrorism. Some frustrated commentators have concluded that Americans have much less respect for their own privacy than they should.

But our research suggests another conclusion: the secret nature of the program itself may lead the public to assume that the information it gathers is valuable, without even examining what that information is or how it might be used.

I’m sure there are many ways this can be psychologically explained. But I think it comes down, once again, to how much you generally trust authority figures. If you’re like me, you’ve seen enough in life to be skeptical of power. Others tend to think the best of the people in charge. Perhaps it’s more temperamental than anything.

So I suppose it’s only natural that I would gobsmacked at this latest concept gaining currency among the cognoscenti in which we’re told that the secret government agencies’ “culture” is such that we needn’t worry about them misusing the information they’re gathering on Americans. Perhaps I’ve just read too much history, but I’m going to guess that those who live and work in that culture have no more integrity as individuals (or are no more legitimately concerned about the threats we face)than those who were exposed just 30 years ago as having relentlessly spied on Americans for political reasons — on a bipartisan basis, by the way — for decades.

When you’re young you tend to believe that the time in which you live is unique and that the past is irrelevant because the world has evolved into something totally new. You get old and you realize that just isn’t true. Humans have not changed. The nature of power has not changed. All the reasons we had nearly 250 years ago for the Bill of Rights are still operative.

I’m afraid anyone who thinks that this government is incapable of doing today what it did in the cold war because it’s “different now” is being naive. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda, yadda yadda. This is a nation that just had to publicly declare that it would not torture and execute someone who revealed that our government was collecting massive amounts of personal data on its own citizens and people all over the world. And that was because only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia execute more people each year than the US. And I think we all know our recent little issues with torturing people. To not be suspicious of such a government’s intentions is just plain daft.

In my mind, it’s an obligation of citizenship to keep an eye on these things.

.

The link between Wall Street and Main Street is shattered. It’s time to confront what that means.

by David Atkins

Three cheers and another glass of champagne for the ownership society: the stock market has hit a new record high. It’s true that this does come on the heels of slightly less depressing news for the real labor force, with weekly jobless claims at near 6-year lows. But that’s a pretty low bar to set in what still amounts to a jobless “recovery.”

In a sea of infuriating public policy decisions and even more upsetting media coverage of those decisions, probably the most frustrating is the near total silence on the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street. Stocks have been floating at and near record highs for years now without a positive effect on real jobs. Slightly better news on Main Street has led to a new record surge on Wall Street. But the reverse effect in which stock gains are supposed to lead to job gains simply hasn’t materialized at least since the crash if not well before. While the housing bubble temporarily boosted both the consumer and financial sectors, it was the housing bubble itself rather than the concomitant Wall Street surge that truly benefited Main Street.

There are many reasons for the shattering of the link between Wall Street and Main Street; they have been decades in the making. But the disconnect is very real.

And it has profound consequences for public policy. For starters, of course, the entirety of supply-side economic thinking is based on the idea that inflating the assets of the wealthy will lead to more jobs for working people. If inflating middle-class assets like housing leads to dangerous bubbles while boosting stock values that largely benefit the rich does nothing for the greater economy, the entire edifice of conservative economics comes crashing down.

But it’s not just the way conservatives describe the economy. Even progressives and liberals in Congress use language that suggests the link between Wall Street and Main Street still exists, but that it has simply become blocked or frayed. “Gains on Wall Street haven’t reached the middle class,” one often hears–as if it should naturally happen but for some evil gremlin getting in the way.

There’s a reason that even liberal politicians won’t say the chain has been broken, and a reason why the media largely refuses to even report on the phenomenon: the implications are terrifying. If helping Wall Street doesn’t actually help Main Street, then the foundations of the capitalist economy are shaken to their roots. Capitalist economics is supposed to be a virtuous circle: companies generate profits which generate reinvestment, which generates employment, which boosts demand, which in turn generates higher profits. When certain industries take on too much weight or grow obsolete, or when supply outstrips demand, there are temporary but necessary corrections called recessions that keep the system in check.

But what if profits don’t generate reinvestment and companies simply hold onto the loot? What if “reinvestment” takes the form of financialization rather than real product development? What if boosting productivity means mechanization that leads to job losses, rather than job gains? What if the few job gains that do accrue, happen in countries with such depressed wages that middle-class workers in advanced economies (the ones who create the demand for high-cost, profitable products) simply cannot compete?

And what if, in order to disguise this phenomenon, policy makers attempted to bribe the public with free trade agreements that lowered the cost of imported electronics and plastic toys while quietly destroying domestic jobs? What if policy makers’ next step in a failing wage environment was to boost asset prices like housing so that the currently middle-class homeowner could feel artificially wealthy, all while obliterating any prospect that the next generation could afford even a modest home in areas with strong job markets without help from their parents? What if the low-skill job market deteriorated to such an extent that young people needed an outrageously expensive college education or more–and only in the “right” fields–to attain any sort of job security, all while policymakers refused to lift a finger to help make that education more affordable? And what if policy makers made it easier for underwater Americans with failing wages to take on debt via credit cards, while doing nothing to prevent predatory lenders from taking advantage of them?

In that world, the virtuous circle of capitalism becomes a death spiral. Recoveries become shorter and more jobless. Recessions and depressions become longer, even as asset markets remain curiously “healthy.” This happens a few times until eventually supply-side Wile E. Coyote runs out of demand-side cliff and comes crashing at terminal velocity into the canyon below. At that point all it would take is a few terrorist acts or natural disasters to tip much of the industrialized world into darkness and collapse.

That sounds too bleak to be true. But again, consider the trendlines. Even if jobs start to slowly return in the short term, the next recession will see even sharper job losses, with muted financial sector effects. We’re already supposedly a long way into the current “recovery.” How long until the next recession, even absent Congressional budget shenanigans this fall?

This is not a question anyone wants to think about, because it would require reorienting the entire perspective of the economy. How do you keep people fed when there are no jobs for which they qualify? How do you run an economy when qualifying for jobs requires going $100,000 into debt? What happens when mortgage costs severely outpace rental costs, even with tax incentives? How do you secure wage increases when companies can increasingly hire overseas and even relocate in another country for 1/20th the cost? What do you do when companies can increasingly make products faster and cheaper by firing workers rather than hiring them? What do you do when the hottest new up-and-coming companies valued at hundreds of millions of dollars or more, only actually hire a few hundred or maybe a few thousand employees at best? How do you hold the financial sector accountable when Wall Street’s cold is Main Street’s flu, but Wall Street’s vigor doesn’t improve Main Street’s condition? And how do you manage it all when robots are getting smarter and smarter, people are living longer and longer, and the world is getting flatter and flatter?

No one wants to even try to answer these questions, because the answers–be they conservative (let the weakened many die and the strong few survive) or liberal (much more centralized, regulated global economies)–are each scary and radical in their own ways. There is a reason that politics here and around the world are becoming more divisive than ever. There are very serious problems that are frankly only being addressed by the “extreme” ends of the political spectrum, even as the neoliberals and corporate conservatives continue to attempt the maintenance of the status quo hoping that we can go back to late 20th century economics and everything will be fine.

We’re well past the point of no return on that one. It’s a brave new world that demands brave people creating untried solutions. Unless the neoliberals hold their ground all the way to collapse and social unrest, one side or the other is going to take the reins. It’s just a question of which one, and whether alternative solutions are implemented in ordered or disordered fashion; with empathy and justice, or greed and social darwinism.

Only one thing is certain, however. The link between Wall Street and Main Street has shattered. The virtuous circle has been broken. Those who choose to ignore that fact and its consequences do so at their own peril.

.