Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Conservative Consensus

by digby

As I read about all the intermural jockeying for power and the discussions of a progressive agenda for the next congress, I can’t help but feel a little bit overwhelmed by the challenge we are going to face in the next few years.

Jonathan Cohn spells it out:

No, Bush hasn’t enacted a conservative version of the New Deal. But, even though some of his most grandiose proposals failed, he has still managed to leave a lasting mark on economic policy–and, through it, the economy. His tax cuts have shifted wealth in this country from the poor and middle-class to the rich. At the same time, they have destroyed the balanced budgets of the Clinton era, creating large liabilities that future governments will have to pay off. If you don’t think that’s a large impact, ask Bill Clinton himself: The large deficits he inherited forced him to shelve many of his early economic plans in 1993. Even if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, he will similarly spend much of his early time in office cleaning up this fiscal mess.

Less high-profile, but no less important, have been the administration’s actions on regulation. Substantially more skeptical of regulation–and regulators–than the Clinton administration, the Bush administration has gutted agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, rejecting proposed new rules on everything from ergonomics standards to tuberculosis protections that were already in the pipeline, while failing to propose new ones. This, too, is the kind of shift that a new president, let alone a new Congress, will find difficult to undo quickly. The regulatory process takes time. And seeing proposed changes through to completion requires sustained political will, particularly when the changes rankle well-connected business groups (as they so often do).

The Bush administration’s impact on the judiciary could be even longer-lasting. The conservatives Bush has appointed to the Supreme Court–where they enjoy lifetime tenure–could easily tip the balance on issues like abortion, privacy, and the limits of executive authority, the latter two being of particular concern given the war on terror. And, speaking of war, look at what the administration has done on foreign policy: It has toppled regimes in two countries, set off a civil war in one of them, committed a large chunk of our Armed Forces to action, and basically redefined the premises of U.S. foreign policy.

These and other such changes will affect Americans–and, in some respects, the entire world–for years to come. And while the voters rejected Bush’s divisive political strategy, it was exactly that strategy–much like FDR’s–that likely made these changes feasible. Imagine that Bush had governed as an accommodator rather than an agitator, as he promised to do as a candidate in 2000. Would he be more popular now? Probably. But would the rich still have their fabulous tax breaks? Would former industry lobbyists be running around the bureaucracy, destroying regulatory agencies from the inside out? Would U.S. troops still be in Baghdad? Probably not.

As Cohn says elsewhere in the piece, “[f]or the last few years, we’ve been in a conservative political period that arguably extended all the way back to the late 1960s, when Kevin Phillips wrote of an “emerging Republican majority.”

This is the fundamental problem we face and I don’t think we have all quite grasped the enormity of that because the Republicans ran and governed during the last 40 years as if the liberals were in control and they were the angry insurgents trying to knock them off. Everyone during this period, including the Democrats, fell for it and believed that underneath it all a liberal consensus existed. But to a remarkable extent, we have had a conservative consensus for some time.

Let’s look at economics. A reader sent me this excerpt from The Economist View‘s Tim Duy, talking about Hayek, in which he excerpts some choice quotes from The Road to Serfdom and explains that even the free market God of the right understood that government was necessary to mitigate at least some of the risk of a dynamic capitalist society. Here’s what I found most interesting about this post, however:

Speaking of Keynes, Robert Skidelsky’s masterful biography includes Keynes’s thoughts on Hayek:

Keynes’s response was unexpected. Hayek’s was a “grand book,” he wrote, and “we all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so well what needs so much to be said.Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Keynes did note, however, that Hayek, by admitting to the need for government to serve a social function, recognized that there was in fact need for a middle ground, but could not determine where to draw it.

The difference between the intellectuals, you see, isn’t really so stark. But for the last 40 years that line has been drawn far over to the right as a function of politics rather than real economic philosophy. The public economic debate has been turned into a simplistic argument over who can provide the best tax cuts and the least regulation because that’s the candy the southern strategy Republicans sold to their conservative base as the best way to defund a government which they claim always spent hard-earned tax dollars on the “wrong” people. (You know what I’m talking about…)

But it didn’t stop with them. I think I wrote before about an earnest young woman I worked with a few years back who was a compassionate liberal, voted for Democrats and even contributed time and money to the cause. One day she came into my office and breathlessly told me, “Finally, I saw someone last night on TV who knows what he’s talking about. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s an economist and his name is Milton Friedman.” To her, Friedman “made sense” because he reaffirmed what she’d been hearing since she was old enough to vaguely pay attention, not because she agreed with his laissez-faire theories. She didn’t even know that’s what they were. It just sounded so reasonable to her (and as Dr. Atrios pointed out here, that little bit of freshman economics can be a dangerous thing.)

The Republicans may have finally jumped the shark, after failing so dramatically at governance, but they have inculcated their thinking so thoroughly into people’s minds that many people don’t even know it. The way most people think about government, and the vocabulary they all use, comes from the Republican playbook. It’s going to take a huge effort to get people thinking about it in new ways. (There are a lot of smart people working on that, thank goodness.)

But right now, we are stuck in the same old groove:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said reviving several popular business and middle-class tax breaks that expired at the end of 2005 will be at the top of his party’s agenda when Congress returns next week for a postelection session.

It’s not that I don’t want to see middle class families and small businesses have some more money in their pockets. I do. I haven’t looked at the economic implication of these tax reductions and maybe they even make sense. But I’m pretty sure this is simple politics (and undoubtedly good politics) in which the Democrats prove their tax-cutting bonafides to the constituency both parties need — the middle class. In today’s political climate, you aren’t delivering, if you aren’t delivering “tax relief.”

That’s as true blue Republican as you can get. And at some point Democrats are going to have to start rolling this back and making the case that delivering for the middle class means providing the safety net and provision for the less fortunate that allows average Americans the freedom to take risks and fuel our dynamic economy — like taking new jobs or starting a new business. Tax cuts are like candy — they taste good, but the individual middle class worker and her family doesn’t get nearly the nutritious bang for the buck that the safety net and government programs do. Liberals and progressives need to start changing the political dialog in ways that talk about risk management and security and fair trade and wage growth — things we really believe in and which can make an affirmative, lasting difference in people’s lives.

There are so many great economists in the blogosphere who are much smarter than I am about these things and who can speak in great detail about policy, so I will leave them to it. But before we get to that I think we are going to have to start thinking about how to make our argument in new terms and talk to people about their relationship to their government in new ways.

My first suggestion for this new vocabulary isn’t really mine, but a reader’s from some time back who pointed out my use of the term “tax burden” was an example of unthinking adoption of conservative rhetoric. He was right. He suggested that we start talking about it as “paying the bills” something that everyone understands. I think that makes sense. You can’t blow smoke in people’s faces by trying to tell them that taxes are “good.” That’s dreaming. But everyone knows that we have to pay the bills and our bill for the services we get — national defense, social security for the disabled and elderly, medical research, roads and bridges,air traffic control, clean air and water, veterans benefits and on and on and on aren’t free. It’s a bill that has to be paid for both the individual and common good. We need the insurance it provides, the pension, the health care (universal someday, old age right now) the health and safety, the security. And there is no free lunch on that stuff, it’s the price we pay to live in a first world, thriving democracy in the 21st century. If you don’t want to pay those bills, move to a third world country and see what not having to pay them gets an average person.

Right now, we are going to have to deal with some rich kids who stole the car, blew the inheritance and ran up a bunch of debt and we are going to have to make them pay it back. Their bills are going to be high for a while. They have plenty of money. They won’t suffer much, even though they should.

The conservative consensus says that low taxes, limited government, individual rights, strong national defense and family values equals a better life. Many people, including many liberals, have absorbed that message into their worldview and it’s going to take some work to unravel it. It won’t happen through issue advocacy. People already favor all the government programs they depend on (and some they that don’t even exist, yet.) But they have been disconnected from government itself — their ownership of it and their obligation to keep it working. Until we successfully challenge the conservative consensus with new language and new ways of thinking about government and politics, it’s going to remain in place. And it’s going to be very difficult to successfully advance the progressive agenda until that changes.

Update: As DB reminds me in the comments, here’s the post I wrote about Bill Sher’s book on this very topic.

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Quiverfull of Kooks

by digby

Following up tristero’s post below, I think the single most disturbing part of the article he discusses, is this:

Meanwhile, Phillip Longman hardly offers a left-wing counterpoint. Instead, he’s searching–at the request of the Democratic Leadership Council, which published his policy proposals in its Blueprint magazine–for a way to appeal to the same voters Carlson is organizing: a typically “radical middle” quest to figure out how Democrats can make nice with Kansas.

“Who are these evangelicals?” asks Longman. “Is there anything about them that makes them inherently prowar and for tax cuts for the rich?” No, he concludes. “What’s irreducible about these religious voters is that they’re for the family.” Asked whether the absolutist position Quiverfull takes on birth control, let alone abortion, might interfere with his strategy, Longman admits that abortion rights would have to take a back seat but that, in politics, “nobody ever gets everything they need.”

Aside from the centrist tax policies Longman is crafting to rival Carlson’s, he urges a return to patriarchy–properly understood, he is careful to note, as not just male domination but also increased male responsibility as husbands and fathers–on more universal grounds. Taking a long view as unsettling in its way as Pastor Bartly Heneghan’s rapture talk, Longman says that no society can survive to reproduce itself without following patriarchy. “As secular and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, people adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default,” Longman argues, pointing to cyclical demographic upheavals from ancient Greece and Rome to the present day, when falling birthrates have consistently augured conservative, even reactionary comebacks, marked by increased nationalism, religious fundamentalism and deep societal conservatism. Presenting a thinly veiled ultimatum to moderates and liberals, Longman cites the political sea change in the Netherlands in recent years, where, he charges, a population decline led to a vacuum that “Muslim extremists came in to fill.” Though individual, nonpatriarchal elements of society may die out, he says, societies as a whole will survive and, “through a process of cultural evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as patriarchy reemerge.”

Longman’s answer to this threat is for progressives to beat conservatives by joining them, emulating the large patriarchal families that conservatives promote in order not to be overrun by a reactionary baby boom. Any mention of social good occurring in regions with low birthrates is swept away by the escalating rhetoric of a “birth dearth,” a “baby bust,” a dying hemisphere undone by its own progressive politics.

Holy fuck, indeed. This kind of thinking has finally gone mainstream and is fully integrated into the debate among influential Democrats. Granted, Longman’s advice to the DLC was to embrace “family friendly” policy but as you can see from his comments, in order to truly embrace these undereducated “Quiverfull” nuts whom everyone thinks need to be part of the Big Tent (birthing and cleaning after everyone apparently)the agenda is going to have to expand significantly. We are already seeing the argument going beyond abortion and extending into the birth control realm.

Let me put it this way: if the Democrats insist on racing the Republicans into the dark ages with this kind of racist, misogynist, anti-intellectual, enlightenment destroying bullshit, we won’t have to worry about “staying on top.” Americans will be soon be living atop a gigantic garbage dump picking through the remnants of their former civilization for enough to eat. It isn’t 1956 anymore and it sure as hell isn’t 1856 anymore. If the US wants to take a trip back to the 18th century that’s fine. I’m sure Europe, China and India would be more than happy to pick up the slack.

This stuff is very thinly veiled Bell Curve nonsense re-packaged to appeal to sexists and homophobes as well as racists. After all, folks, if it was just the aging population everyone was so worried about, there would be no immigration debate, would there?

Here’s David Brooks on the subject a few months back:

I suspect that if more people had the chance to focus exclusively on child-rearing before training for and launching a career, fertility rates would rise. That would be good for the country, for as Phillip Longman, author of “The Empty Cradle,” has argued, we are consuming more human capital than we are producing – or to put it another way, we don’t have enough young people to support our old people.

Plenty of young people want to come to America and would be more than happy to pay into social security to support all of us old codgers. They just aren’t the “right kind” of people, if you know what I mean. So get to breeding, white bitches. You’ve got work to do.

I am all for having a big tent. But there is no political party on earth that is big enough for me and people who believe that liberalism’s great hope is to create policies that encourage women to have 14 children so we can “outbreed” the competition and make sure the wrong people don’t come in and ruin the place. That’s where I head for the exit.

Update:
Here’s an interesting article by Michele Goldberg, of “The Rise Of Christian Nationalism” fame on the subject of childlessness and happiness (as in “the pursuit of” — another one of those bedrock American values people seem to think are fungible these days.) For a great many of us, the pursuit of happiness is not possible unless life offers freedom to choose how we will live our lives.

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The Quiverfulls

by tristero

I can’t improve on what Justin exclaimed about The Quiverfulls (also see here): Holy Fuck!

I’ll add only two things. First of all, note the language they use, how by having lotsa kids they are helping to take the country back from the commie-feminist-homosexual-al Qaeda lovers.

This isn’t the language of religion. This is the language of far right political operatives. And sure enough, if you read The Nation, you learn that one of the scumbags that inspired the Quiverfulls was a Holocaust “revisionist,” to use Kathryn Joyce’s disgusting euphemism for Holocaust denier.

As for those who think that the Quiverfulls somehow contradict the notion that christianists are engaged in a war on fucking, well… with all due respect to Justin’s great quip, I suggest you read very carefully what they are saying. If that’s fucking, God help us all.

Secondly, since someone is bound to mention it in comments, yes, I do recall very well that Bach had 20 children (21, if you count PDQ). And for a very good reason.

Someone had to copy all that music he was writing every week and hiring copyists then as now could get really pricey.

Today, I have no doubt that Bach would do as all the rest of us do. He’d get a Mac (or PC) and a copy of Finale and have a lot less kids.

Did You Know That San Francisco Is 28 Feet From New York City?

by tristero

It’s true!

(If you’re a christianist, that is.)

Faith Based Boy Genius

by digby

This is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong with the Bush administration. They are magical thinkers:

Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his “metrics” were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.

His confidence buoyed everyone inside the West Wing, especially the president. Ten days before the elections, House Majority Leader John Boehner visited Bush in the Oval Office with bad news. He told Bush that the party would lose Tom DeLay’s old seat in Texas, where Bush was set to campaign. Bush brushed him off, Boehner recalls. “Get me Karl,” the president told an aide. “Karl has the numbers.”

I think what shocks me the most about this article is that it reveals that Rove actually believed they would definitely win based on his magic numbers. I assumed he was “projecting” confidence as any political strategist would do. I honestly didn’t know he was delusional.

And this delusional man’s power was unprecedented for a political advisior. In many ways he has been running the country for the last six years:

In his acceptance speech, Bush thanks Rove, calling him simply “the architect.”

“Everyone in the room knew what that meant,” says Washington Post reporter Mike Allen. “He was the architect of the public policies that got them there, he was the architect of the campaign platform, he was the architect of the fundraising strategy, he was the architect of the state-by-state strategy, he was the architect of the travel itinerary. His hand was in all of it.”

February 2005

Rove is promoted. President Bush announces that he will now be assistant to the president, deputy chief of staff and a senior adviser, the title reflecting influence over both politics and policy. Rove also gets a new office, just steps away from the Oval Office.

With Bush re-elected, Rove is thinking long-term. He intends to use both politics and policy to create a permanent Republican majority. He designs a legislative agenda that he hopes will lead to future Republican gains. High on the list: an overhaul and partial privatization of Social Security, and the appointment of “strict constructionist” judges who will reverse what many Republicans see as judicial activism. “I think what they are trying to do is bigger than the Great Society, and approaches the New Deal,” says Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall. “They aren’t kidding around.”

They weren’t serious people though and Tom Edsall and the rest of the Washington press corps should have known very well by then. Ron Suskind had chronicled the dysfunction inside the Bush administration as early as January 2003:

DiIulio defines the Mayberry Machiavellis as political staff, Karl Rove and his people, “who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.”

“Remember ‘No child left behind’? That was a Bush campaign slogan. I believe it was his heart, too. But translating good impulses into good policy proposals requires more than whatever somebody thinks up in the eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered.”

Weekly meetings of the Domestic Policy Council “were breathtaking,” DiIulio told me. As for the head of the DPC, Margaret La Montagne, a longtime friend of Karl Rove who guided education policy in Texas, DiIulio is blunt: “What she knows about domestic policy could fit in a thimble.”

When DiIulio would raise objections to killing programs—like the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax credit for the poorest Americans, hailed by policy analysts on both sides of the aisle, that contributed to the success of welfare reform—he found he was often arguing with libertarians who didn’t know the basic functions of major federal programs. As a senior White House adviser and admirer of DiIulio’s recently said to me, “You have to understand, this administration is further to the right than much of the public understands. The view of many people [in the White House] is that the best government can do is simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive change. If that’s your position, why bother to understand what programs actually do?”

[…]

Five days later, on July 9, at the administration’s six-month senior-staff retreat, DiIulio writes that “an explicit discussion ensued concerning how to emulate more strongly the Clinton White House’s press, communications, and rapid-response media relations—how better to wage, if you will, the permanent campaign that so defines the modern presidency regardless of who or which party occupies the Oval Office. I listened and was amazed. It wasn’t more press, communications, media, legislative strategizing, and such that they needed. Maybe the Clinton people did that better, though surely they were less disciplined about it and leaked more to the media and so on. No, what they needed, I thought then and still do now, was more policy-relevant information, discussion, and deliberation.”

Part of the problem, DiIulio now understood, was that the paucity of serious policy discussion combined with a leakproof command-and-control operation was altering traditional laws of White House physics. That is: Know what’s political, know what’s policy. They are different. That distinction drives the structure of most administrations. The policy experts, on both domestic and foreign policy, order up “white papers” and hash out the most prudent use of executive power. Political advisers, who often deepen their knowledge by listening carefully as these deliberations unfold, are then called in to decide how, when, and with whom in support policies should be presented, enacted, and executed.

The dilemma presented by Karl Rove, DiIulio realized, was that in such a policy vacuum, his jack-of-all-trades appreciation of an enormous array of policy debates was being mistaken for genuine expertise. It takes a true policy wonk to recognize the difference, and, beyond the realm of foreign affairs, DiIulio was almost alone in the White House.

“When policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver, you’ll get a lot of oops,” he says.

A lot of oops.

Karl Rove never got Bush a mandate and yet advised him to govern as if he’d won in a landslide. (Maybe he showed Junior some “metrics” that proved that even though he had a tiny majority, it meant his wingnut policies were hugely popular.) And he’s been as responsible for the awful state of American politics and malfeasance in office as anyone in the White House. He barely escaped indictment earlier this year.

Can somebody explain to me why the taxpayers are still paying his salary?

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Freeper Geeks With Problems

by digby

So this nutball who’s been sending white powder to liberals and media celebs turns out to be a freeper. Imagine my surprise.

But it turns out that he’s an odd wingnut sci-fi freak too — and he’s been on a rampage to purge the canon of all those dastardly sci-fi lib-symps.

From Dover Bitch:

Beam them all up, already

A quick Google search for the utter prick who sent white powder to Nancy Pelosi, Keith Olbermann and others yields this dilithium crystal, apparently sent by him to SciFi Channel:

With the passing away of Lexx ends an intriguing albeit smarmy experiment in sci-fantasy. One that breaks with conventions, or should I say, cliches of TV sci-fi of the ’90s. The politically correct pabulum, the multicultural indoctrination, the Bladerunner motifs, and not the least—the steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return!?

How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne O’ Bannon, etc., etc. It is time to end their reign of Left-wing innuendo, their anti-American, anti-mankind cynicism and fatalism

.(more here…)

“…steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return?”

Issues?

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Poppy’s Last Rescue

by digby

It seems to me that with the new narrative of Junior having to put his codpiece between his legs and beg for daddy and daddy’s old family retainers to once again bail him out it’s a good time to reprise a little vintage Molly Ivans:

Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father is that, “He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.” He did. For one year. Then his family moved to a posh neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the second-best prep school in town (couldn’t get into the best one) before going off to Andover as a legacy.

Jim Hightower’s great line about Bush, “Born on third and thinks he hit a triple,” is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth — he’s been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn’t admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn’t just get a head start by being his father’s son — it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School).

He got into the Texas Air National Guard — and sat out Vietnam — through Daddy’s influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of FANGers, as regular Air Force referred to the “Fucking Air National Guard,” included not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but some actual black members as well — they just happened to play football for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father.

He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some fellow Yalies.

Everybody knew this before they voted for him. But they thought they were voting for backyard bar-b-que pal not president. They also assumed that he listened to his father. Not so:

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.'”

Just two months ago, Junior told Brian Williams:

WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.

BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.

WILLIAMS: You talk shop?

BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”

(He left out the fact that Senior muttered under his breath afterward “… but you are an idiot.”)

Now, he’s widely seen as having to call in his daddy’s consigliere and top spook. He can’t be happy about that.

But the truth is that even daddy’s rich, loyal pals can’t bail him out of this one.(Read this if you want to see just how hopeless the situation seems at this moment. It’s a nightmare.) I suspect that the best they can hope for this time is to stanch the bleeding until they can safely whisk him back to Crawford, dump the mess on the next guy and try to blame the Democrats for the failure.

I hope people understand that James Baker and Robert Gates are in the Bush family business not the “wise old sage who will do what’s right for the country” business. Indeed, their entire lives have been devoted to bailing out Bushes.(And they haven’t always been successful. Jimmy may have pulled one out for Junior in Florida, but he was called back, much against his will, to get Poppy re-elected and failed.) Their job is simply to try to save Junior from ignominy and that is not necessarily what is in the best interest of the US or Iraq.

It is clear that no matter what this country does now in Iraq, it is impossible to
“fix” in any substantial way. We didn’t just break the pot at the Pottery Barn, we blew up the whole neighborhood. Going in was, as James Webb wrote back in 2003, “the greatest strategic blunder in modern memor” the war’s execution has been the greatest series of tactical mistakes in modern memory — so much now that it’s impossible to see a way out that even leads to some kind of authoritarian stability, much less democracy. And it’s very, very easy to see how it can lurch out of control in a dozen different ways.

James Baker and Robert Gates and Joe Lieberman aren’t magicians. And they are not going to let anybody say they and Junior “lost Iraq.” Don’t get your hopes up about these “grown-ups.” They are just looking for a way to keep Bush (and in joe’s case, himself) from looking like a loser — and real withdrawal (as opposed to cosmetic) is not going to accomplish that. Everything they do for the next two years will be to save Bush’s face and the Republican party, period.

I’m sorry to be so cynical, but I lost any hope that the Bush administration was capable of doing the right thing a long time ago.

BTW: George W. Bush has engendered more nicknames than any other president, I think. I have certainly used my share and even coined a fairly popular one. But I have used “Junior” more often than any other, mainly because I know it’s the one that probably bothers him the most. Back in the 2000 campaign Bush made a famous stop on Oprah and gave himself away:

OPRAH WINFREY: Here’s another viewer who e-mailed us with a question for you. Here it is.

MAN: Governor Bush, what is the public’s largest misconception of you?

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Probably that I’m running on my daddy’s name; that, you know, if my name were George Jones, I’d be a country and western singer.

He’s got to be loving this:

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Squeeze Play

by poputonian

Thinking a little more about the politics of economics, I’m reminded again of historian David Hackett Fischer’s book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, in which he noted a 16th century period when rising prices and economic inequality took a heavy toll on society. The book was published in 1996, before everything changed. Doesn’t this description sound familiar?

These many responses to rising prices — social, demographic, economic, monetary, fiscal — interacted in combinations of increasing power. For example, the price-revolution caused falling real wages and rising returns to capital, which caused the growth of inequality, which increased the political power of the rich, which led to regressive taxation, which reduced government revenues, which encouraged currency debasements, which drove prices higher.

I understand that we aren’t in a period of rampant inflation, but we might be soon. At the same time, we have seen the increased political power of the rich, a move toward more regressive taxation, and reduced government revenues.

Weep as you read Fischer’s fascinating conclusion, and notice the inescapable parallels to what we see today, particulalry about aggregate demand and the cost of fuel [all emphasis mine]:

This inquiry began with a problem of historical description about price movements in the modern world. Its primary purpose was to describe the main lines of change through the past eight hundred years. The central finding may be summarized in a sentence. We found evidence of four price-revolutions since the twelfth century: four very long waves of rising prices, punctuated by long periods of comparative price-equilibrium. This is not a cyclical pattern. Price revolutions have no fixed and regular periodicity. Some were as short as eighty years; others as long as 180 years. They differed in duration, velocity, magnitude, and momentum.

At the same time, these long movements shared several properties in common. All had a common wave-structure, and started in much the same way. The first stage was one of silent beginnings and slow advances. Prices rose slowly in a period of prolonged prosperity. Magnitudes of increase remained within the range of previous fluctuations. At first the long wave appeared to be merely another short-run event. Only later did it emerge as a new secular tendency.

The novelty of the new trend consisted not only in the fact of inflation but also in its form. The pattern of price-relatives was specially revealing. Food and fuel led the upward movement. Manufactured goods and services lagged behind. These patterns indicated that the prime mover was excess aggregate demand, generated by an acceleration of population growth, or by rising living standards, or both.

These trends were the product of individual choices. Men and women deliberately chose to marry early. They freely decided to have more children, because material conditions were improving and the world seemed a better place to raise a family. People demanded and at first received a higher standard of living, because there was an expanding market for their labor. The first stage of every price-revolution was marked by material progress, cultural confidence, and optimism for the future.

The second stage was very different. It began when prices broke through the boundaries of the previous equilibrium. This tended to happen when other events intervened–commonly wars of ambition that arose from the hubris of the preceding period. Examples included the rivalry between emperors and popes in the thirteenth century; the state-building conflicts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the dynastic and imperial struggles of the mid-eighteenth century; and the world wars of the twentieth century. These events sent prices surging up and down again, in a pattern that was both a symptom and a cause of instability. The consequences included political disorder, social disruption, and a growing mood of cultural anxiety.

The third stage began when people discovered the fact of price- inflation as a long-term trend, and began to think of it as an inexorable condition. They responded to this discovery by making choices that drove prices still higher. Governments and individuals expanded the supply of money and increased the velocity of its circulation. In each successive wave, price-inflation became more elaborately institutionalized.

A fourth stage began as this new institutionalized inflation took hold. Prices went higher, and became highly unstable. They began to surge and decline in movements of increasing volatility. Severe price shocks were felt in commodity movements. The money supply was alternately expanded and contracted. Financial markets became unstable. Government spending grew faster than revenue, and public debt increased at a rapid rate. In every price-revolution, the strongest nation-states suffered severely from fiscal stresses: Spain in the sixteenth century, France in the eighteenth century , and the United States in the twentieth century.
Other imbalances were even more dangerous. Wages, which had at first kept up with prices, now lagged behind. Returns to labor declined while returns to land and capital increased. The rich grew richer. People of middling estates lost ground. The poor suffered terribly. Inequalities of wealth and income increased. So also did hunger, homelessness, crime, violence, drink, drugs, and family disruption.
These material events had cultural consequences. In literature and the arts, the penultimate stage of every price-revolution was an era of dark visions and restless dreams. This was a time of lost faith in institutions. It was also a period of desperate search for spiritual values. Sects and cults, often very angry and irrational, multiplied rapidly. Intellectuals turned furiously against their environing societies. Young people, uncertain of both the future and the past, gave way to alienation and cultural anomie.
Finally, the great wave crested and broke with shattering force, in a cultural crisis that included demographic contraction, economic collapse, political revolution, international war and social violence. These events relieved the pressures that had set the price-revolution in motion. The first result was a rapid fall of prices, rents and interest. This short but very sharp deflation was followed by an era of equilibrium that persisted for seventy or eighty years. Long-term inflation ceased. Prices stabilized, then declined further, and stabilized once more. Real wages began to rise, but returns to capital and land fell.

The recovery of equilibrium had important social consequences. At first, inequalities continued to grow, as a lag effect of the preceding price revolution. But as the new dynamics took hold, inequality began to diminish. Times were better for laborers, artisans, and ordinary people. Landowners were hard pressed, but economic conditions improved for most people. Families grew stronger. Crime rates fell. Consumption of drugs and drink diminished. Foreign wars became less frequent and less violent, but internal wars of unification became more common and more successful.

Each period of equilibrium had a distinct cultural character. All were marked in their later stages by the emergence of ideas of order and harmony such as appeared in the Renaissance of the twelfth century, the Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento, the Enlightenment of the early eighteenth century, and the Victorian era.

After many years of equilibrium and comparative peace, population began to grow more rapidly. Standards of living improved. Prices, rents and interest started to rise again. As aggregate demand mounted, a new wave began. The next price-revolution was not precisely the same, but it was similar in many ways. As Mark Twain observed, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Misleading Reuters Headline

by poputonian

Elton John wants “hateful” religion banned

LONDON (Reuters) – Elton John has said organized religion should be banned because it promotes homophobia and turns some people into “hateful lemmings”.

“I would ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it,” the British singer said in an interview with the Observer newspaper on Sunday.

“Religion has always tried to turn hatred toward gay people. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it is not really compassionate.”

The singer, who tied the knot with long-term partner David Furnish in a civil ceremony last year, said he admired the teachings of Jesus Christ, but disliked religious bodies.

The headline ambiguously implies that Elton wants some religion banned, the hateful kind. From his full quote, it’s clear he wants all religion banned.

Reuters should be more careful with its headlines.

Fun With The House Money

by poputonian

Several posts ago, commenter JEP noted:

We need talented and determined writers to produce the long, detailed historical work that will reveal the total amount of taxpayers’ money that the federal government gave to rich and powerful people from 2001-2007.

It is then, and only then, that Americans will have any hope of learning the truth and consequences of Karl Rove and George W. Bush. Everything else, conservatism, religious issues, terrorisim, Iraq, everything, is just the means and the public relations required to transfer the money without anyone noticing or asking questions.

By the time this historical work is produced, if it is produced at all, no one will have any interest in the crimes of this administration, all the principle actors will be dead or otherwise beyond prosecution and the interest earned on the transfered money will be enough to purchase another six years of one-party rule.

James has it right. For example, if a ruling party (Republican) transfers wealth from State to Industry in the form of a drug benefit program that guarantees income (at taxpayer expense) to private firms, what is the quid pro quo from industry, if it’s not to help get the ruling party re-elected?

Likewise, if gas prices drop more than a dollar a gallon in the several months leading up to an important election, a price drop that puts the cost of fuel below its market equilibrium, should the profits foregone by the oil companies be considered campaign contributions made to the incumbent party? It would appear, after all, that the purpose of the price drop was an attempt to buy the election.Call it pluto-reciprocity, or some such name.