Exciting News Version 2.0

Let's try this whole "new blog" thing once more, shall we?  Please check this link for more.

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Exciting News

I have a new home for my blog: http://generationalnavelgazing.org/.  As I explain in the inaugural post there, I'll be working to integrate some elements from this blog over there, including (I hope!) my archived posts, but as of yet it's just a simple blog over there, but much much easier on the eyes.  I look forward to you joining me there in this new (ad)venture of mine.

The Election Outcome

Well, what did you expect?

Panetta, a former director of the CIA, gave a strong defense of counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids, calling them “the most precise campaign in the history of warfare,” and indicated strongly that they’re only going to intensify in the coming years.

“This campaign against al Qaeda will largely take place outside declared combat zones,” Panetta said in his prepared remarks, “using a small-footprint approach that includes precision operations, partnered activities with foreign Special Operations Forces, and capacity building so that partner countries can be more effective in combating terrorism on their own.” He referenced “expanding our fleet of Predator and Reaper” drones and beefing up Special Operations Forces by another 8,000 commandos in the next five years. Even if combat is ending for most conventional units, those forces —already frequently deployed — aren’t in for any respite.  (emphasis added)

The euphemism here is rather amazing.  What does one call it when military combat takes place “outside declared combat zones”?  The word that comes to mind for me is “unconstitutional”, you know, owing to that little part of the Constitution that gives Congress the sole power to declare wars and all, but maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy in my 31 years. 

But notably, Panetta isn’t talking anymore about killing another “10 to 20 key leaders” and declaring victory in the war on terror, as he did in 2011. The “cancer” of the terrorist network has “metastasized to other parts of the global body.” Talk of the Arab Spring demolishing al-Qaida’s “narrative” has given way to fears that al-Qaida is taking advantage of the fall of regional dictators “to gain new sanctuary, incite violence, and sow instability.”

Killing people, who may or may not be militants themselves, does not occur in a vacuum, as those who lose loved ones, but may not have been militants before may be incensed to take up arms in revenge (metastasis, perhaps?) Indeed, there are consequences.

He said that although Obama had initially retreated from Bush’s “global war paradigm” — which viewed the struggle against terrorism as a permanent war — he said a similar mind-set has “reared its head” in the past 18 months. He cited figures compiled by the London Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which alleged that at least 474 civilians have been killed in Pakistan alone and that at least 50 civilians have died in follow-up strikes, in which civilians who came to the aid of victims of previous strikes were killed.

Officially, the drone program is still “classified”, which of course insulates the government from having to “officially” be accountable for the inevitable acts of barbarity that occur when you fire rockets on targets from halfway around the world via computer monitor and joystick.  The American public will remain in blissful ignorance about the drone program, since it has bipartisan support in Washington, and those things that have bipartisan support are generally not talked about, so that the hoi polloi never get a whiff of what their elected officials are up to.  From the Washington Post article linked just above:

Emmerson also waded into the White House election, noting that both President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, appear to be in agreement on the covert use of drones. He expressed surprise that the issue of accountability for torture or other abuses of detainees has not featured in the presidential campaign and “got no mention at all” in Monday night’s foreign policy debate.

Imagine that, a United Nations “special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights” being shocked, shocked I tell you! that the topic of holding our country’s prior leaders accountable for human rights violations did not come up in a debate between the two men running to lead the country!  Accountability is a foreign term to modern American society, at least for those elites at the top of the food chain.  Why give the public any ideas about what true accountability would look like?  Why even provide a rhetorical opening to be questioned about one’s views on charging human rights violators with human rights violations?  The coverup has gone on long enough (ahem, we have been “looking forward, not backward”) long enough that those helping to coverup the crimes may well be implicated themselves.  We have what is called a credibility trap:

A credibility trap is when the regulatory, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform or even honestly address the situation without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

The impetus for changing these policies, for ending the prosecution of wars overseas against unnamed, undeclared enemies, must come from the American people.  Our leaders will not stop, for they are all implicated as well.  Such is the way of the world at the close of 2012.

On Inequality

I’ll try and keep this post short, as I really just want to express one economic principle that’s been roiling around in my gray matter for quite a long time now, but that I believe is worth mentioning.

Put simply, apart from any moral or ethical rationales why we, as a society, might desire to reduce the income and wealth inequality that plagues the United States these days, I believe there is an overriding functional principle that goes largely unremarked-upon, from my observation. 

But first, Brad DeLong, an economist at UC Berkeley who worked in the Clinton Administration, provides some context for why the middle class is ailing so much these days in his analysis of economic inequality:

The decline in our willingness to invest in education: a generation ago, we were the best-educated country among the rich nations of the North Atlantic; today we rank 14th. With fewer well-educated people than the trend would have predicted, supply and demand have raised the salaries of the educated relative to trend; with more poorly educated people than the trend would have predicted, supply and demand have lowered the wages of the less-educated not just relative to trend but absolutely. Add in more minor factors, such as the relative decline in the minimum wage and the coming of globalization, and the upshot is that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the typical white American male with just a high school diploma earns less today than his predecessor of the late-1970s, even though the country as a whole is 70 percent richer per capita. Thus the top fifth of America today outstrips the rest much more than it did a generation ago: their incomes are higher than their predecessors’ as they have kept up with the 70 percent tide of economic growth, while the statistics say that the rest are more-or-less treading water. (emphasis added)

Every person with some money in their pocket is an investor, of sorts.  Each person decides where they will invest their money based upon the value they place on what they expect to receive in return for their money.  Consumer spending makes up approximately 70% of US gross domestic product (GDP), meaning that, when individual consumers, in the aggregate, have less money to spend the economy necessarily takes a hit.  The function of unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other forms of aid to individuals in difficult circumstances (what are called “automatic stabilizers” in economics) not only keep families eating and housed, but also help to maintain at least a modicum of consumer demand in a weakened economy. 

Because each individual consumer decides where to invest/spend his or her money, that means that there are hundreds of millions of individual “pathways” let’s call them, for money to be injected into the economy.  Furthermore, these pathways are geographically spread all over the country, in cities, suburbs, and rural towns, every place that American consumers live, in fact. 

To me, the central conceit of “trickle-down economics,” and its central failing, is that by redistributing wealth upwards, you get fewer people with more of the money who are somehow supposed to continue to drive demand; who are to continue to provide a significant portion of the consumer spending that comprises 70% of our economy.  Would not such trickle-down policies lead to ever-increasing concentrations of wealth, particularly in those locales where the wealthy would tend to congregate?  Would not the spending habits of the top economic percentiles, and the fact that there are numerically fewer persons in those top percentiles, lead to less overall investment/spending in less wealthy sectors of the economy? 

As I sense that I am not making myself very clear, consider for an example a multi-billionaire hedge fund manager in New York City.  While his financial investments are surely global in scope, his spending habits may be relatively confined to the goods and services that specifically cater to the global elite in New York City – the high-priced housing, the waitstaff, the limo services, etc.  Thus, his spending may be concentrated in a relatively narrow slice of the economy, both in terms of the goods and services provided as well as the geographic spread of his spending. 

That billionaire is unlikely to, for instance, spend his money at a mom-and-pop grocery store in urban Detroit, or an agricultural supply shop in the Kansas farmland.  And yet, if the middle-class patrons of these other shops do not have as much purchasing power due to systemic and long-term wage stagnation, what is to happen to those shops, which are likely important to the social fabric of their neighborhoods?  What happens to the sales or property tax revenues that are lost in those communities, whose schools then become chronically underfunded? 

It turns out that FDR had some views on just this situation, and he addressed those views in a speech in Gainesville, Georgia in 1938:

FDR then went on to speak about how such attitudes affected the nation as a whole, of the consequences of economic inequality and the critical need to provide work and better wages for the "bottom third" of the U.S. population. He insisted it was vital to improve the "buying power" of the millions of unemployed and other workers "who are so under-employed or so underpaid that the burden of their poverty affects the little business man and the big business man and the millionaire himself." Moreover, he also reminded his listeners that better buying power meant not just greater purchases in hard-hit industries but also "many other...things -- better schools, better health and hospitals, better highways."

How much easier and more natural is it for wealth to “trickle upwards” from a base of consumers who have a moderate amount of discretionary income, rather than tenuously existing just above the poverty line?  Henry Ford understood this concept, which is why he famously paid his workers well enough ($5/day in 1914 compared to the industry average at the time of $11/week) that they would be able to afford the Ford cars they were producing. 

Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.

This is not to suggest that Ford single-handedly created the American middle class. But he was one of the first business leaders to articulate what economists call “the virtuous circle of growth”: well-paid workers generating consumer demand that in turn promotes business expansion and hiring. Other executives bought his logic, and just as important, strong unions fought for rising pay and good benefits in contracts like the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers. (emphasis added)

Of course, such a perspective requires that the executive making decisions regarding his or her employees’ compensation take a longer view, beyond simply the next quarterly earnings statement release date, and such management perspectives are sadly lacking in modern business culture on the whole. 

The point, is that each consumer has the ability, in miniature, to set off a “virtuous cycle of growth” in his or her community, depending on the spending choices we make.  Shopping at your local store, rather than online, for example, helps build up that store’s financial position, thus providing the managers more flexibility to someday hire more workers or expand product lines, both investments which cause positive ripple effects to occur further out in the economy. 

But again, if income and wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in fewer hands and in fewer geographic locales, then by nature, those many millions of small virtuous cycles of growth that individual consumers can help to set off all across the country will not be as likely to occur.  This dynamic makes our economy less resilient, as money circulation becomes increasingly driven by the spending decisions of fewer and fewer people, rather than by millions of individuals in many different places.

There is so much more to say on this topic, one blog post can barely scratch the surface.  The main takeaway, though, is that a rising tide truly does lift all boats, as the old saying goes.  And that rising tide operates everywhere, not just in the enclaves of the wealthiest, helping spread and multiply the benefits of a strong middle class in NYC, Detroit and Kansas. 

An Election of Superlatives

Consider the unprecedented nature of the decision we have to make on November 6th between the two major-party candidates.

On the one hand, we have an incumbent President who is also a Nobel Peace Prize winner.  This man, lauded for his efforts to bring “peace” to the world by the perhaps-naive Nobel Committee, is also presiding over the expansion of apparently perpetual secret/shadow wars to kill “terrorists/enemy combatants” on what appears to be a virtually unlimited battlefield through the use of unmanned drone strikes.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . .We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”

On the other hand, we have a fabulously wealthy financier whose belief in “American exceptionalism” is so great that he made (and continues to make) quite a bit of his money through offshoring American jobs to foreign nations, including China, a country that he has vowed to “get tough on.”

Right now a company named Sensata is moving equipment out of a factory in Freeport, Ill., and shipping it to a factory in China. Sensata will be laying off all of the American workers, but first they are making the workers train their Chinese replacements. The workers' last day is the day before our election. Here's the thing: This company is owned by Bain Capital, and Mitt Romney -- who says he is against shipping jobs to China -- will make a fortune from the move to China.

The Sensata employees have set up a camp outside the factory that they call Bainport and are trying to stop the Bain trucks that are moving the equipment out for shipment to China. These soon-to-be-jobless workers have asked Romney to come help them.

This is a tremendous opportunity for Mitt Romney. As the former head of Bain Capital and with all the visibility of a presidential campaign, he could step in and help these workers. It offers him the chance to demonstrate to voters that he means the things he says on the campaign trail, and is not just saying these things to get votes. But Romney has refused.

And one more bite at this bitter offshoring apple:

"Romney's campaign did not deny that he profited from the auto bailout in an email to The Hill, but it said the report showed the Detroit intervention was 'misguided.'"

The truth? On June 1, 2009, the Obama administration announced that Detroit Piston's owner Tom Gores, GM and the US Treasury would buy back Delphi.The plan called for saving 15 of 29 Delphi factories in the US.

Then the vulture funds pounced.

The Nation discovered that, in the two weeks immediately following the announcement of the Delphi jobs-saving plan, Paul Singer, Romney's partner, secretly bought up over a billion dollars of old Delphi bonds for pennies on the dollar.

Singer and partners now controlled the company - and killed the return of Delphi to GM.

These facts were revealed in a sworn deposition of Delphi's Chief Financial Officer John Sheehan, confidential, but now released on the Web.

Sheehan said, under oath, that these speculators threatened to withhold key parts (steering columns), from GM. This would have brought the auto maker to its knees, immediately forcing GM's permanent closure.

The extortion worked. The government money that was supposed to go to save jobs went to Singer's hedge fund, Elliott Management Corporation and its partners, including the Romneys.

Once Singer's crew took control of Delphi, they rapidly completed the move to China, sticking the US taxpayers with the bill for the pensions of the Delphi workers cut loose.

Dan Loeb, a million-dollar donor to the GOP, who made three-quarters of a billion dollars off the legal scam, proudly announced that, once he and Elliott took control, Delphi kept "virtually no North American unionized labor."

In all, three hedge funds run by Romney's million-dollar donors have pocketed $4.2 billion, a return on their "investment" of over 3,000 percent - all care of the US taxpayer. The Romneys personally earned a minimum of $15.3 million, though more likely $115 million - a range their campaign does not dispute.

So there you have it.  Perpetual war from a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a history of profiting off of job offshoring from the man who claims his business acumen makes him uniquely qualified to lift the American economy out of its doldrums and create jobs.  These are the two candidates who will receive the vast majority of votes in less than 2 weeks’ time.

There are other candidates out there, of course.  There is Gary Johnson, the standard-bearer for the Libertarian Party, and there is Jill Stein, the candidate for the Green Party.  And beyond those two (the most prominent of the third parties, due to their being on the ballot in most states) there are countless other candidates to choose from.

It is notable that the two major party candidates would both bring with them more war, and the two primary third-party candidates would both not only end the wars the U.S. is currently engaged in, but cut the military budget and global footprint further than even proposed under the dreaded “sequester”.  Why do we never hear from the third party candidates in the mainstream media (even when one of them gets arrested outside the second presidential debate for “disorderly conduct” for trying to enter the building and participate)?  Could it be that war is always good for business, particularly for the media?  Are Americans not “ready” to hear what these other parties have to say, or is the game rigged to only operate in black-and-white mode, and thus deny a real choice?

I’m certainly not the first person to notice the conundrum that what we view as American “democracy” is truly a carefully-curated pageant that restricts the amount of political choice Americans are presented with.  According to the Commission on Presidential Debates (the CPD, itself a product of a bipartisan agreement between the two major parties) a candidate must receive 15% of support in national polling to be allowed to participate in the prime-time televised presidential debates:

The CPD's third criterion requires that the candidate have a level of support of at least 15% (fifteen percent) of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recent publicly-reported results at the time of the determination.

And how, one might ask, does a candidate receive 15% of public support outside of being involved with the two major party apparatuses?  MONEY!  It certainly worked for billionaire (and anti-NAFTA economic nationalist, I might add) Ross Perot, didn’t it?  He ended up with 18.9% of the vote in the 1992 election, to Bill Clinton’s 43% and George H.W. Bush’s 37.5% after appearing onstage with the two major party nominees – having a well-funded 50-state operation can make outcomes like that happen.

“But we have a public financing system for the presidential race!” you might say.  And you would be right, we do.  But again, you get to the chicken-and-egg difficulty of trying to make an impact on the national electorate without the aid of money, which can help one buy media coverage (or without media coverage, which can help one to raise more money):

Minor or third party nominees may also be eligible for federal funding, but the process is a bit more complex.  A minor party candidate's public funding grant is based on a formula subject to the percentage of votes the party received in the previous presidential general election. The candidate is only eligible for general election public funds if the party's candidate received at least 5 percent of the vote in the previous presidential election.

How does one get one’s name and message out to the public without media coverage, so as to achieve polling and electoral support needed to gain access to both the debates (which again, serve to further get one’s name and message out to the public) and to public financing?  How does one raise money without media support, in order to show electoral viability?  How does one get media coverage without money to run ads, which, again, portray a sense of viability? 

Five percent of the national vote may not sound like a high bar to hurdle, but consider that in the 2008 election, approximately 127 million votes were cast.  Thus, you’d need about 6,350,000 votes to make the 5% threshold that would enable your party to access public financing. 

A useful Wikipedia page detailing the 2008 Presidential election fundraising totals shows the overall fundraising and spending breakdowns for the candidates (I’ve only left in the two major party candidates and the Libertarian and Green Party candidates for brevity:

 

Candidate (Party)	Amount raised	Amount spent	Votes	Avg $ per vote
Barack Obama (D)	$778,642,962	$760,370,195	69,498,215	$10.94
John McCain (R)	$383,913,834	$358,008,447	59,948,240	$5.97
Bob Barr (L)	$1,383,681	$1,345,202	523,713	$2.57
Cynthia McKinney (G)	$240,130	$238,968	161,680	$1.48
*Excludes spending by independent expenditure concerns.	Source: Federal Election Commission

To say that the third parties were outgunned in 2008 is a massive understatement.  The Libertarian candidate received about 8% of the 6,500,000 votes he would have needed to cross that 5% threshold to achieve public financing for the next election cycle, and the Green party candidate received about 2.5% of the number of votes needed to achieve 5% of the national vote.  Clearly there is a lot of ground to be made up!

If you view the realm of politics as a market, you will notice that the choices presented by our media and the official apparatus that governs presidential debates comprise a duopoly – there are only two choices, we are told. 

And yet, are there no worthwhile policy ideas beyond the Democratic and Republican 2012 party platforms?  If you care about enhancing the peacefulness of our world, it does not appear that you have a great option among the two major parties this year.  If you care about holding Wall Street accountable for the massive frauds perpetrated on the American public, and want to see the perpetrators go to jail, well you’re not going to find your candidate in the major parties this cycle either. 

Let me be clear: I am in no way, shape, or form arguing that there are not differences between the Democratic and Republican candidates for president this year; such arguments are a frequent meme among political cynics, but they are without merit.  The differences are stark, in terms of foreign policy, fiscal policy, social policy, etc.  Those differences ought not to be glossed over.  I am also not arguing the relative value of one or the other side’s polices at this point, despite my fairly obvious leanings.  Those arguments are for another time.

My point is simply that there are other ideas out there, other voices, and other constituencies that our political system, our democracy, is at present set up to exclude, rather than include.  This amounts to an undermining of free speech, of the free flow of ideas that theoretically characterizes the superiority of a representative democracy over other forms of government.  Let the two major parties have their ideas and policies challenged in an open debate; let the American public be offered something more than a two-party choice. 

Such changes clearly will not happen this election cycle, but through organizing and building constituencies, positive changes can be made for the future to break the two-party hold over political discourse in this country.  I have some ideas on this topic to expand upon at a later date, given the time.

The President’s big speech today

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If you haven’t had a chance to watch this speech, please do, I’ll wait…otherwise, the transcript is here, helpfully provided by the LA Times.  By way of background, the location of the speech today was a city in Kansas where, 101 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech famously calling for a “New Nationalism” and proposing his “Square Deal” to the American people.  Was President Obama being slightly ambitious in his choice of historical contextualization?  Perhaps, but to my mind it was well worth the risk.

Now then.  While this speech was touted as an “economic” speech, the tenor and content ranged far more widely than simple concepts of supply and demand.  President Obama laid out a new framework for the American economy, with the explicit goal being to rebuild and expand the middle class.  He made the argument that government should not try to “fix” all the problems of society, but that government should work on behalf of the people’s interests.

With a forcefulness that has been heretofore lacking in most of his presidential speeches, President Obama called out greed, irresponsibility, and the continuing fallacy that is “trickle-down economics.”  He called for new rules of the road that apply to everyone, not just to Main Street, but to Wall Street as well.  He defended the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, and made a stirring statement about the importance of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its soon-to-be-blocked Director nominee, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. 

One of the more memorable phrases to come out of the speech is President Obama’s term “you’re on your own economics” to characterize the preferred economic plan of the GOP.  The contrast came with President Obama’s insistence that American prosperity, long-term prosperity, is gained together, in contrast to the “YoYo” economic ideas of the GOP. 

But President Obama’s speech led up to what I felt was the culminating point: illustrating for the American people that there is a different form of capitalism available; one that is more responsible and ultimately self-sustaining than the winner-take-all capitalism we’ve endured the past 30 years.  The President spoke of Marvin Windows, of Warroad, Minnesota, and described (skip to the last 7 or so minutes of the video clip to catch it) how the company has never laid off a single worker in its 100+ year history, despite enduring the Great Depression and the ongoing Great Recession.  How did Marvin achieve that feat?  Simple; through shared sacrifice from both the workforce and the management when times have been tough.  The President didn’t get into details, obviously, but his simple illustration of what could be summed up for the audience that change, true change, is within our grasp if we see each other as fellow citizens, and recognize that prosperity will be gained through helping each other out, rather than shorting each other constantly.  Responsible capitalism is what we ought to strive for, rather than a corporate ethos solely driven by the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

The President attacked inequality sharply, broadly, and directly, and proposed some new/old ideas to guide us out of the predicament we find ourselves in as a nation.  If it was a speech somewhat lacking in the soaring rhetoric of campaign Obama of 2008, the sober tone reflected the weighty concerns facing the man as President.  In time, I believe this speech will be seen to be a major one, where he describes the economic goalposts as they have been set for the past number of decades, and proposes that we, as a nation, make the effort to shift them back so that the goal is within the majority’s reach once again.  This speech sets the stage for the 2012 campaign, surely, but it also challenges Americans to greater collective achievements. 

I don’t normally watch presidential speeches, but this one had me riveted from the start.  I’ll give Greg Sargent the last word on this topic, the final paragraph of a typically insightful blog post on the speech:

Political scientists will tell you that individual speeches don’t matter; and that grand themes are very unlikely to supplant the direct experience of the economy as a motivator of voters. But we’ll be hearing these themes countless times between now and election day. And anyone who had hoped that Obama and Dems would make an unapologetically populist and moral case against inequality and economic injustice central to Campaign 2012 should be pretty pleased with what they heard today.

Elite tensions with democracy

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Chris Hayes has been the Editor at Large for The Nation magazine for a few years now, among numerous other gigs, and now has his own show on MSNBC on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  It’s a brilliant re-envisioning of the stale weekly public affairs shows dominated by the same rotating cast of characters, in part because of the sheer diversity of the guests Hayes features.  Sunday’s program had 3 women at the table along with Hayes and another male guest, for example.  Try finding that sort of gender-ratio on “Meet the Nation News Sunday.”  Beyond the guests, however, the show strives to offer a diversity of opinions on a multitude of topical stories, and to dig into the details of what’s happening and why in a way the typical news program is simply unable to.  As a perfect example and segway into my point, in the video above, Hayes lays out an argument as to why the Supercommittee’s failure this past week is in fact a good thing for America; his sentiments are ones that I have been mulling over recently myself.  Do watch it.

Hayes mentions the recent ascensions to the top leadership posts of two technocrats in Greece and Italy, noting that their jobs, their mandates upon entering office, are to push through deeply unpopular austerity packages over the will of the majority of their supposed constituents. 

Technocracy has suddenly become all the rage amidst the debt crisis of the eurozone. In Greece, prime minister George Papandreou was ousted in favour of the unelected former central banker Lucas Papademos, after he had the effrontery to call the referendum that never was. In Italy, Mario Monti, the unelected former EU commissioner, has anointed a cabinet of academics, bankers and an admiral, without a single representative of Italy’s political parties. This novel step is designed to reassure international bond markets, which have recently pushed Italy’s yields to perilous levels. (emphasis added)

Key takeaway: the political process is anathema to international finance. 

Consider a few short weeks ago when then-Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou had (shockingly!) called for a national referendum to be held on the terms of an European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout plan that would have included harsh austerity measures to be imposed on the Greek people.  The markets crashed, and the two biggest European economies’ leaders reacted with scorn:

At a bruising meeting in Cannes on Wednesday night, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned [Papandreou] that Athens would not receive a cent more in aid until it met its commitments to the euro zone.

Greece was due to get a vital 8 billion euro installment this month and says it will run out of money in mid-December if it does not get the loan.

Despite the turmoil in Athens and uncertainty over the euro zone, European stock markets and the euro rallied in volatile trading as the likelihood grew that Greece would not hold the highly risky referendum.

Note that opening the decision-making process up to those who will bear the brunt of any economic decisions made by the powers-that-be, the citizenry, is tantamount, in this calculation, to introducing high risk into the equation.  The cold logic of finance, of interest rates and debt-to-GDP ratios, does not comport well with the warm inefficient fuzziness of the electorate, with their myriad voices and parochial/familial concerns.  How are the financiers supposed to get their bailouts when the poor rubes paying for it demand something more than the simple extraction of wealth from their country? 

The power relationships on evidence in the foregoing snippet of the Greek referendum situation are revealing: the larger “creditor” economies of France and Germany here acted as front-line enforcers with the wayward Greek leader Papandreou; the EU, a supra-national body of European nations acted in concert with the IMF, another supra-national body representing the strictly monetary interests of client nations, to craft a bailout package for Greece that brings great pain to the Greek people; meanwhile, the Greek people are demonstrating and rioting in the streets by the tens or hundreds of thousands to show their disapproval, and yet, they are pawns in the grand scheme.  What are the Greek people supposed to do when it seems the entire world (particularly the sanctimonious Germans) is blaming them as a people for being profligate – where are they to turn to voice their opinions democratically when the one opportunity they would have had to do so is brutally snatched away from them by shadowy international forces?

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This sordid and ongoing tale of crisis in Europe reveals the flipside to the ethos of globalization that has dominated international politics since the early days of the “Washington Consensus”.  In order to govern worldwide flows of goods, services and capital, world-bestriding structures of governance must be created.  To the extent that those structures are endowed with the authority to act in crises, those actions are by nature going to be out of the direct control of the citizenry of the nations affected, thus denying the citizens of the world recourse to shape the responses of those supra-national institutions.  The structures of these institutions ensure that their responsiveness will be primarily directed towards the largest stakeholders – the largest economies and the largest private financial institutions – thus making the decisions made representative of the policy prescriptions of an even more rarefied status of elites.  Power is thus concentrated further, with the results trickling down upon the rest of us.  And again, we have effectively no recourse to change much at all. 

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The notion that centralization=efficiency, related to the economic concept of “economies of scale,” has reigned supreme in much of the modern industrialized world.  We see these tenets manifested in the superstores we shop at, the industrially-produced agriculture we purchase, and the (public) school systems we send our children to be educated at, for just a few examples.  Our governmental policies, and indeed, the growth of the federal government itself in the past century, has reflected the notion that centralized governance is necessarily better for all due to greater standardization of outputs and efficiencies gained.

And yet, centralization creates with it a certain culture as well, an elite culture where those well-versed in the human power relationships and bureaucratic operations of the institutions influence the direction of decision-making to their own ends.  Centralization creates, not only an institution’s set of substantive actions with which it operates in society, but an entire class of administrators devoted to the upkeep and promulgation of the institution itself through budgeting, revenue collection, inter-institutional lobbying, and so forth.  Institutions, first and foremost, desire to keep existing, thus creating a tension with their public service functions.

I would argue that much of the Occupy-inspired debate currently ongoing in our society is at least in part related to the discussion of how much the public interest is served by various institutions of government versus how much those institutions merely serve as vehicles for particular interests to enact their wills.  The public wants accountability for the financial sector, but the relevant regulators have shown themselves to be rather more beholden to the interests of Big Finance than the public interest (see my posts on housing for more on that).  The public wants more investment in clean energy, yet there is an institutional structure within our government dedicated to fossil fuels, from the military fighting wars that just happen to be in oil-rich regions, to the massive tax breaks and other indirect subsidies for fossil fuels baked into our tax code.  How do we get the changes the populace wants enacted into law?  We have to rely on elected representatives with a slew of other institutional and professional competing interests to act on our behalf – not an easy thing to do, apparently!

The clear answer to these problems appears to be decentralization – a reduction of the scale of decision-making to a more manageable, democratic, and community-oriented size.  The General Assemblies occurring at the Occupy encampments around the country have represented that trend most vividly, as Chris Hayes highlighted in the clip above.  While some efficiency may certainly be lost along the way, democracy and true representation can be gained, ensuring that the rule of an unaccountable elite, such as we are witnessing today, is significantly more difficult to achieve.  Consider the supra-national institutions I’ve noted above – they are, if anything, abstractions of representative government; meta-representative democracies, if you will.  Who are their constituents but other client states and their assorted national economic interests?  Who are their leaders but those who have been most agreeable to said client states and economic interests?  How have you been personally helped by the IMF lately?

I hope to pick up further threads of this discussion in a future post, as there’s a lot to the topic of decentralization to discuss.  As always, your comments are welcomed and appreciated in the comments area below.

The #Occupy movement and the generations

Just a short note of gratitude and no small amount of incredulity at the cross-generational dialogues that have been fostered through and around the Occupy movement, which I and others view as largely a Millenial generation-driven thing.  I was just reading a well-done post by Charles B. Pierce at Esquire’s Politics Blog and noting his tone lamenting the political fecklessness of many of those from his generation now holding the reins of power:

How hard can this be? How hard is it to tell people to get angry at the people who really are making off with their country's wealth and their personal futures, especially when it's the god's honest truth? How hard is it to tell people that they are not the enemy, that to shoot pepper spray into the eyes of a college student is to spit in the eye of everyone else? Please do not hand me concerns for your "political viability." That makes you cowards. The protesters are doing the hard work. They're the ones living in a dozen tiny Argentinas all around this country. They're the ones getting beaten up and tortured, on TV, with chemical agents. They're the ones going to jail. All I'm asking is that you all have their backs, and all you have to do is get up and give a whole bunch of speeches saying so. Right now, they're pretty much out their on an island while empty charlatans like Newt Gingrich and prissy little shmoes like David Brooks are beating them over the head rhetorically, while the cops are more than happy — indeed, damned near gleeful — to do it in person.

Barney Frank wonders where the Occupiers were during the elections of 2010? Give them a politics worthy of their courage and they'll show up. This does not seem to me to be a difficult problem, but it does appear possibly to be the last chance for progressive politics for an awfully long time. You don't need an $850,000 contract to see that.

That second bolded sentence “Give them a politics worthy of their courage and they’ll show up” sounds like one of the best lines I’ve heard this year, for both its succinct razor-edge of truth, to its political astuteness.  This generation out protesting, my generation, is the one that greatly helped President Obama get elected.  We came out of the Bush era scarred (as I’ve noted previously) and looking for a change that Obama appeared to represent.  But more than that, he represented prudent judgment in correctly sizing up many of the true threats to our country (the undercutting of civil liberties domestically and human rights abroad, being cogent for me in particular) and, yes, a courage in his opposition to the Iraq War that was greatly lacking in the politics of those days, and even moreso today.  The reality of President Obama has been drastically different from the representation of Candidate Obama, but at the time, he showed a side of politics that people yearned for.  Show us courageous politicians taking stands that put them on the right side of popular sentiment, particularly in the face of a potential loss of big money campaign donors, and I bet my generation will show up.

So it is with that background in mind that I have been considering the amount of support I see and hear from older generations for the movement now sweeping America.  A close family member informed me that on her recent trip to New York she happened upon an Occupy Wall Street group at a public park (not Zuccotti, mind you) and was very impressed with the “human microphone” and the positive, steadfast energy the group displayed, despite it being an awful, rainy NYC November day.  The Facebook posts I see from Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers, and on up regarding the Occupy Movement evince a strong bond between the generations that I don’t think I’ve ever seen as clearly in my life. 

I had always feared that the elites’ plan to divide the entitlement program pie, and to set those of us in younger generations on a different retirement plan than our parents, threatened to separate the generations (which is probably the point!) and why you still hear many GOP candidates discussing giving young people the “option” of purchasing health savings accounts and the like.  The fact that we’re all working and saving towards a common fund, a common vision, means we’re all in it together, to some extent, despite the fact that the powers-that-be want all that locked-up Social Security and Medicare money to be released to the predations and speculations of Wall Street. 

But now, the elites have played their hand too far.  They’ve effectively united a strong bloc of people across the generations because, let’s face it, we’ve all been looted in some way or another.  We recognize a common enemy: the collusion between big business and big government that works to undercut our rights and to separate an already economically-stratified society into one where you have vastly different justice systems, depending on your standing and net worth (witness this egregious hit-and-run case from Colorado last year involving a “wealth manager” and a cyclist for a great/horrifying example).  There’s no justice for those on the top, but a harsh and exacting justice for those of us not at the top.  Witness the UC Davis pepper-spraying last Friday:

Glenn Greenwald’s take on the UC Davis situation adroitly points towards the larger issue at play in our society:

The UC-Davis Chancellor responsible for the pepper-spraying of her students, Linda Katehi, today went on Good Morning America and explained why she should not resign or otherwise be held accountable: “we really need to start the healing process and move forward.” On a radio program in the afternoon, she expanded on this view by saying: “We need to move on.” So apparently — yet again — the only way everyone can begin to “heal” and “move forward” is if everyone agrees that those in power with the greatest responsibility be fully shielded from any consequences and that their bad acts be simply forgotten. I wonder where she learned that justifying rationale?

We yearn for justice as a society.  The concept of justice embedded in the Constitution argues that those at the top and those at the bottom ought to be equal in the eyes of the law, and yet, the past decade has clearly shown how far our society has gotten from those founding principles.  Occupy, for all of its media-unfriendliness and potential to turn off the “median voter,” is a nascent attempt at reclaiming that original concept of justice.  Justice is anathema to the powers-that-be, as their gains are largely ill-gotten and their positions in society often depend on their being the the best operators within a system of legalized corruption.  The moment their hold on power slips, and they no longer control the levers of power and the judiciary, they will be subject to the comeuppance that has been long in coming, and much delayed. 

Greenwald quotes Rosa Luxemburg’s epic comment to wonderful effect:

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

If you look askance at the Occupy movement, and you see nothing but a bunch of rowdy young people lacking drive and ambition, ask yourself how you’re constrained in your own life.  What cutbacks have you had to make to your hopes and dreams, let alone your financial position?  How many of those setbacks are due entirely to your own poor judgment or over-extension, rather than being at least in part the shock wave from a system of willfully-created asset bubbles and legislatively-endorsed corruption imploding upon itself?  If you trace the origins of your own problems back to their logical starting points, do they solely originate from your decisions?  That is the line of thinking the powers-that-be hope you’ll take away.  Heaven forbid you should look up the food chain to discover how usury has been made legal and how student loans are no longer discharged in bankruptcy; how insolvent banks are allowed to claim the full face value of toxic assets to bolster their bottom lines, and yet how lying to get food stamps to feed one’s two children can net you 3 years in federal prison.  “Justice,” these days, comes at the expense of the rest of us.  We can see this fact in all its harsh reality and find a unity in it, or we can deny deny deny that the mirror the Occupy movement is holding up to our society reflects far more of our collective life experiences of brokenness and unnecessary misery than we’d care to admit. 

Thank you to those of the older generations who see the Occupy movement not as a threat, but as the opportunity for a rebirth.  We need you, and you need us.  We ARE in this together.

Ask and ye shall receive

As a follow-up to my post from last week regarding polling on the question of whether the GOP is purposely sabotaging economic recovery in order to defeat President Obama next year, I thought I’d bring my dear readers’ attentions to the results of two new polls released today that cover similar territory.  I had mentioned that the Suffolk University poll from last week was just crying out for additional data to help discern a trend or not, and it appears we have some further data to work with now.

First off, a Washington Post/ABC News poll of 1,004 adults, with a 3.5% margin of error asked the following question:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your point of view? Statement A: (President Obama is making a good faith effort to deal with the country's economic problems, but the Republicans in Congress are playing politics by blocking his proposals and programs.) Or Statement B: (President Obama has not provided leadership on the economy, and he is just blaming the Republicans in Congress as an excuse for not doing his job.)

Compare the wording to that of last week’s Suffolk University poll:

Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected?

The WaPo/ABC poll is not as clear with respondents about the political intent of any perceived economic sabotage on the GOP’s part – referring to “playing politics” rather than “to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected” – but the underlying message is essentially the same: do you think the GOP is purposely making the economy worse for political purposes?  The results:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your point of view? Statement A: (President Obama is making a good faith effort to deal with the country's economic problems, but the Republicans in Congress are playing politics by blocking his proposals and programs.) Or Statement B: (President Obama has not provided leadership on the economy, and he is just blaming the Republicans in Congress as an excuse for not doing his job.)

Obama making a good effort: 50
Obama has not provided leadership: 44
Both (vol.): 2
Neither (vol.): 2
No opinion: 1

And once again, the results of the Suffolk poll:

Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected?

Yes 49
No 39
Undecided 12

Okay then!  Seems like there could be something more to this meme now.  Greg Sargent pulls out the internals of the WaPo poll, providing more points of interest:

The toplines: Americans agree with the first statement over the second one, 50-44. According to numbers sent my way by the Post polling team, this is more pronounced among moderates and independents:

* Independents favor statement one over statement two by 54-40.

* Moderates favor statement one over statement two by 57-37.

The overall number is lower, at 50 percent, because a hilariously meager nine percent of Republicans believe this to be the case.

Who likes to have their side accused of “playing politics” with anything?  It just sounds offensive when we’re talking about real peoples’ lives and the overall economy, no wonder only 9% of Republicans agree with statement #1.

Our third poll of the day, which Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler argues constitutes a “trend,” (I would agree) is one commissioned by the liberal blog DailyKos:

Also on Monday, liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas publicized the top lines of a PPP poll he commissioned, which closely mimic the the Post/ABC survey: “50% think GOP intentionally stalling economy, incl 51% of Indies, & 15% of GOPers. Details Tuesday.”

So here we have three polls showing broadly similar results to similarly-worded questions (although the exact wording of the DailyKos poll will be out tomorrow) and which also show that a majority of independents ascribe to some version of the notion that the GOP is deliberately sabotaging the economy.  As we are all surely aware now, the vast and growing “middle” of the electorate is where the true electoral battleground lies for 2012 (and virtually every modern election) so it would appear that President Obama has the upper hand with this crucial slice of the populace, no?  Steve Benen, echoing Greg Sargent, notes the inherent danger of the polls’ findings for the President:

Though in theory, it should, this won’t necessarily give President Obama a boost. The degree of national cynicism is so intense, many Americans may simply assume Republicans are sabotaging the national economy, but take their frustrations out on the president anyway. As Greg noted, “The number who see Obama as a strong leader is now upside down (48-51), suggesting yet again that even if Americans understand that Republicans are deliberately blocking Obama’s policies, they may conclude that his failure to get around them just shows he’s weak or ineffectual.”

Voters’ understanding of the political process is severely limited, and many Americans likely fail to appreciate the role Congress must play in policymaking. There are no doubt plenty of voters thinking, “Sure, Republicans are sabotaging the economy, but why can’t Obama just go around them?” unaware of the fact that, on a grand scale, this isn’t an option. (emphasis added)

Indeed, President Obama’s failure to “get around” Congress is the true reason why he’s embarked on his “jobs tour” the past couple months – taking his message directly to the people of America, urging them to contact their Congressmember and tell them to act on jobs and the economy.  In a broad sense, it appears the efforts are paying off, according to Josh Marshall.  Furthermore, the amount of braying from the GOP about “class warfare” from the President has increased proportionally as his jobs message has caught on.  Witness Rep. Eric Cantor’s aborted speech about “income inequality” (note: he canceled the speech when it was revealed that Occupy protesters planned to respond to him by exercising their free speech rights) and Rep. Paul Ryan’s speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation largely predicated on the notion that America needs to preserve its heritage of economic mobility through surprise! not raising taxes on the wealthiest among us.  (Note: he’s wrong about our economic mobility rates compared to other countries.) 

So where does all of this data leave us now?  Well it would seem that President Obama needs to work closely with the Democrats in Congress to present a focused message (not easy with Democrats, ever) regarding the GOP’s obstructionism.  Pushing the “sabotage” message, in concert with more polling data showing similar results to those presented here, will force the media to cover the sabotage meme more widely and thus put the Republicans on defense on job creation – exactly the situation they hope not to find themselves in heading into a still-very-unsettled GOP presidential primary season and an election year.  President Obama’s rather limited moves last week on student loan reform, homeowner relief and jobs proposals for veterans might represent a good-faith show of effort for those skeptical independents and moderates doubting his leadership, and they could marginally influence his standing with those key constituencies.  But overall, those moves show the Presidency’s economic weakness vis-à-vis Congress, and the relative ineffectiveness of the Executive branch’s sprawling bureaucracy to help improve peoples’ lives in a truly meaningful way.  Coordinated actions between the Executive and Legislative branches are what is needed, but until Obama and the Democrats can find leverage points to force the Congressional GOP’s hands on job creating legislation, it is unlikely the President will be able to do much more than chip away at the margins of the economic problems facing this country, winning message or not.

Even the Super Committee gets a bailout

A headline from today’s Los Angeles Times:

Congressional leaders jump in to save 'super committee'

In an effort to end the deadlock on deficit reductions, party leaders, especially on the Republican side, are meeting behind closed doors with members of the panel.

Okay, so perhaps we’re talking more about a legislative bailout of sorts, but is it not a perfect microcosm of the depravity of American politics that a panel convened due to the failure in leadership on the part of our “leaders” to figure out “responsible” ways to rein in fiscal deficits over the summer (“responsible” in Washington-speak meaning “measures that maximally shift any deficit-reduction burden onto the backs of the coddled lower and middle classes so as to spare the overburdened upper classes from having to pony up anything further in the way of taxes”) and which is now faced with “failure” (here meaning an automatic triggering of across-the-board cuts to the sacred cows of both left and right, in this case the entitlement and defense spending, respectively) due to fundamental disagreements on how much and how best to stick it to the lower and middle classes, is now being furiously “saved” by leadership so as to continue its “noble” work of further impoverishing millions who are already struggling.  Note the journalist’s framing of the issue at stake here:

Failure to reach a compromise by Thanksgiving to slash $1.5 trillion from the nation's deficits over the next decade could send shock waves through the fragile economy, as happened during the summer debt ceiling standoff. Failure would also trigger automatic budget cuts that both parties want to avoid. (emphasis added)

The implicit assumption in the highlighted sentence is that the economy could be roiled by the “failure” of the Super Committee to reach agreement on deficit reduction measures other than those mandated in the trigger agreement.  To be more specific, in this framing, the markets will react negatively if deficit reduction agreements of sufficient size and scope are not reached by the Super Committee.  Indeed, I agree with this analysis, but for reasons other than those the journalist implies.

The markets may well face turmoil whatever the outcome of the Super Committee, because whether the Super Committee is “successful” or not, the vast majority of Americans lose in some way or another, facing elite-imposed austerity for what is a manifestly elite-generated economic crisis.  Austerity, as has been witnessed in Europe the past few years, may work to reduce budget deficits in the short run, but in the longer term, as government spending is reduced, that compounds with reduced recessionary spending by consumers as well as businesses, thus leading to less consumer demand, hence more layoffs, hence lower tax revenues, which leads to calls for further austerity…the cycle is virtually endless.  You then may get calls for a government to sell off or privatize public assets in order to create revenue, which ultimately reduces public wealth and resources in the long run.  Counter-cyclical government spending is designed to stimulate demand in the short-term, in order to create positive spillover effects for the private sector and to avoid demand slackening to the point that you have a wave of business closures with the attendant layoffs and structural deformations of local/regional/national economies.  The counter-cyclical government spending notion is the linchpin of Keynesian economic theory, and despite their professed love of free markets, many Republicans tend to like the Keynesian view of government spending policies as a remedy for a sick economy, at least when it comes to defense spending 

Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the panel, said the attempt to undo the triggers “reflects a total lack of seriousness.” Adding that such efforts would not be successful, he said they were “the result of people trying to escape the fundamental choices before us, and one of those choices is whether or not we are willing to end special interest tax breaks to pay for defense.” The White House is also highly unlikely to approve such actions. The president is averse to the military cuts, but saw the threat of them as a way to pressure Republicans to reach a deal. “There is more fear this time,” Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, said about the anxiety being expressed by military contractors in his district. Mr. Brooks said he voted against the debt-ceiling legislation because of the possibility of deep Pentagon cuts.

--

Republicans have expressed more alarm about possible across-the-board cuts in Pentagon spending than Democrats have voiced about cuts in domestic programs that would also occur. Many safety-net programs for low-income people, like Medicaid and food stamps, would be exempt from automatic cuts. And Medicare payments to health care providers could not be reduced by more than 2 percent.  (emphases added)

Yes yes, make sure to protect the all-important “job creating,” “100% private-sector” defense contractors, and pay no attention to the mewling from the general public about the austerity they must contend with.  We must ensure the revenue stream for government to the contractors is uninterrupted, lest their fraudulent schemes for bilking taxpayers out of their hard-earned money are subjected to closer public scrutiny!

At least 91 contractors holding contracts worth $270 billion were the subjects of civil fraud judgments -- and in some cases criminal fraud convictions as well, many of which resulted in fines, suspensions or debarments. Even so, Defense Department contracting officers still assigned $4.9 billion worth of work with these companies after the fraud was uncovered, the report said.

The contractors identified in the report include such blue-chip entities as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Pratt & Whitney, IBM and even the Yale medical school.

All this to say that the markets will likely react poorly to any austerity measures in the US beyond what has already been enacted, because corporations and the markets recognize that consumer demand is the weak link in the American economy at this time, not the impending threat of governmental default due to an overly burdensome public debt load (unless it is a default threat created out of Congressional dysfunction, as it was this past summer).

“You’ve got to stimulate demand growth,” said Indra Nooyi, CEO of Purchase, New York-based PepsiCo, in an interview. “Until we stimulate primary consumption, the cash will continue to sit on the sidelines.”

The companies’ warnings follow a cut to the U.S. credit rating on Aug. 5 and a two-week rout in global equity markets as investors dumped stocks in favor of gold and Treasuries. With three European countries having required bailouts, concern over weakening demand and rising unemployment is spreading. A report yesterday said confidence among small businesses fell in July for the fifth consecutive month as the sales outlook dimmed.

The quotations above are from August, but we find ourselves in virtually the same situation today (check the report headlines for the past number of months) with weak consumer confidence and corollary spending levels. 

So here we witness a massive effort by our top elected officials to save a budget-cutting process that will likely impoverish our nation and citizens still further in order to spare from cuts one of the more fraudulent, yet highly-entrenched sectors of the national economy, while managing to simultaneously increase future budget deficits due to reduced tax revenues (driven by weak consumer spending, once again).  These are the priorities and policy solutions of our elected officials these days.  Tell me that isn’t a chilling thought.  Once again, on whose behalf do they truly work?

Is the GOP purposely sabotaging economic recovery for political gain?

What do you think?

A Suffolk University poll was released today that polled registered voters in Florida and asked a key question:

Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected?

Now, I have been telling many of my friends and relatives (much to their collective chagrin, I’m sure) that the political and economic situation in the country – continued high unemployment, political stalemate in Congress, a disillusioned citizenry – means that, politically, the Republicans would have the most to gain electorally if the economy remains stagnant.  As Bill Clinton’s pollster James Carville famously quipped in 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid.”  Conventional political wisdom (and a fair amount of political science research) points to the notion that, electorally, the president generally bears the most responsibility for the state of the economy in voters’ eyes, rightfully deserved or not. 

The corollary to this situation we face today is that, in a cynical political calculus, the Republicans can increase their chances of taking the White House in 2012 if they actively work against economic recovery.  It sounds sinister to even suggest such a thing, doesn’t it?  Well, what do you think the popular view of the situation is among Florida voters?

Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected?

Yes 49

No 39

Undecided 12

49%…that’s something, ain’t it?  Meanwhile, the partisan split on the polling is quite fascinating as well:

As expected, most registered Democrats (70 percent) agreed that Republicans are intentionally hindering the economy and hurting Obama, but independents (52 percent) and even some Republicans (24 percent) also agreed. (emphasis added)

Independents are often regarded as the lily-white souls who just can’t bear partisan conflict in politics, so the fact that 52% are siding with Obama on this question might reflect a majority view among that crucial demographic that the obstruction is coming from only one party.  The 24% of Republicans who agree with the question could reflect a small group of Republican voters who are willing to acknowledge such scorched-earth tactics from the GOP, and they may even approve of such tactics in order to defeat President Obama.  There is at least one big caveat to drawing too much out of these poll numbers; it’s not a national poll, it’s only Florida voters, so the applicability to other voter groups is negligible.

All that being said, however, this poll represents something new for this election cycle: acknowledgment that the political calculus for Republicans favors maintaining and/or increasing the economic misery for the American populace.  Left-leaning writers and bloggers have been discussing this issue for months, but the fact that such a notion has penetrated into the rarefied air of a respected polling organization’s survey questions is something entirely new. 

As Steve Benen notes, this single poll cries out for verification and/or contradiction, but that can only be done by further polling – polling that will have its results reported by the media, which will be forced to actually acknowledge the nature of the “sabotage” question asked, thus potentially raising the question in the minds of the viewing American public.  Such a situation does not bode well for the GOP, as their strategy of getting away with massive legislative obstruction (as seen in Sen. Mitch McConnell’s blocking of a vote on the President’s infrastructure bill in the Senate today) relies upon the median voter not grasping the nuances of parliamentary procedure in Congress to directly link such obstruction to the GOP’s actions.  Hiding in plain sight, as it were, with plausible deniability built-in.

For a long while, such actions appear to have worked, in a Pyrrhic sense, what with President Obama’s approval rating steadily dropping since mid-June. And yet, Congress has not been immune from blowback. Congress’ collective approval rating is now averaging 12.7%, according to RealClearPolitics.  Congressional approval ratings are historically virtually always lower than those of the President, but with a CBS News/NY Times poll recently showing Congress to only have a 9% approval rating (the lowest ever recorded since the poll was first launched) Americans are increasingly angry at their elected representatives these days.  The flipside of President Obama’s dropping poll numbers from the summer, as seen in the link above, are that his positives are now increasing again as he has honed his message on jobs and the economy.  All the GOP has had to offer are a bunch of blockades of legislative procedure and empty “jobs proposals” full of the same sorts of ideas they’ve been promulgating since Reagan’s presidency. 

Our politics is beyond broken these days, it is now actively heartless too.  Our representatives seem not to have much of an inkling of what “representing” Americans means, given the widespread and massive suffering amongst and all around us.  Witness Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), Chair of the Armed Services Committee, writing to the New York Times to argue contra Paul Krugman that he is anything but a closet defense Keynesian:

Congress is charged by the Constitution with providing for the common defense by raising and supporting our armed forces. We don’t spend tax dollars to protect American jobs, but to protect American lives. As such, it is accurate to point out that cuts in defense spending will cripple a critical industry, result in huge job losses and erode our ability to provide for the common defense. (h/t Kevin Drum)

I don’t know, is it just me, or does it not seem that “protecting American jobs” seems like exactly what we ought to be spending our precious and vanishing tax dollars on in the interest of “common defense”?  Have you seen our defense budget lately?  Methinks the Pentagon is doing just fine, thank you.  Why not use some Congressional intervention on behalf of the American people, rather than defense contractors, who have had bonanzas yearly since the “War on Terror” began?

Would that we had representatives working on our behalf…perhaps Congress ought to be the next venue for some Occupy-flavored civil disobedience?

#OccupyWallStreet: The precursors to the occupations?

I was just reading Christina Romer’s very well-done piece in Sunday’s New York Times, making the case that announcing nominal GDP targeting should be the Federal Reserve’s next policy move (I encourage you to read the article for the details).  Here’s the key section I’d like to highlight:

HOW would this help to heal the economy? Like the Volcker money target, it would be a powerful communication tool. By pledging to do whatever it takes to return nominal G.D.P. to its pre-crisis trajectory, the Fed could improve confidence and expectations of future growth.

Such expectations could increase spending and growth today: Consumers who are more certain that they’ll have a job next year would be less hesitant to spend, and companies that believe sales will be rising would be more likely to invest.

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Though announcing the new framework would help, it probably wouldn’t be enough to close the nominal G.D.P. gap anytime soon. The Fed would need to take additional steps. These might include further quantitative easing, more forceful promises about short-term interest rates, and perhaps moves to lower the exchange rate. Such actions wouldn’t just affect expectations; they would also be directly helpful. For example, a weaker dollar would stimulate exports.

How many of you reading this article feel that our government is “willing to do whatever it takes” to get us out of this persistent unemployment crisis, with all of its attendant suffering and economic misery?  I’d bet not a one of you – I certainly don’t think our government is trying its best to fix things.  Of course, it depends on how one defines “government” I suppose, but if you initially think of our elected branches, since we voters have the most direct control over the executive and the legislative, then no, the “government” in that sense is definitely not working on our behalf! 

And really, how ridiculous is it that the government of the wealthiest country that has ever existed can’t even act in a coordinated manner to stem the suffering of a massive segment of its population?  Or perhaps even more sinister, it appears that the government won’t act to stem the suffering.  Our elected officials have abdicated virtually any and all responsibility until after November 2012 in order to best position themselves politically and rhetorically for the electoral battles to come.  Sure the President is still hammering away on his newfound populist message, his “jobs proposal,” and is taking actions on behalf of homeowners, student loan borrowers, and prescription drug patients, among others, but let’s be honest folks, his track record on the “following-through-on-populist-sentiments” score ain’t that great…(see option, public for an example).

So now we face the absurd reality that the Federal Reserve, the quasi-governmental entity that is perhaps the least-democratic, most-opaque, and most removed from the basic economic reality of most Americans is being pushed to solve our jobs crisis through pure monetary policy.  The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of preserving price stability as well as maintaining full employment, and the main critique of the Fed for many years has been that it has focused virtually exclusively on the former (in the form of interest rate targeting) while wholly neglecting the latter.  Despite the fact that it has been broadly apparent that allowing interest rates to rise somewhat would facilitate the creation of more jobs, the interest rate hawks within the Fed have consistently put a stop to any of those practices, warning of mythical “bond vigilantes” who will decide that US Treasuries are no longer worth investing in if the interest rate rises even a smidge, despite massive evidence to the contrary.  (The counterpoint, of course, is that investing in Treasuries represents the safest investment one can make in the troubled and volatile world markets, as while the state of the US debt and economy overall might cause debt holders concern if the rest of the world were in better shape, the relative position and strength of the US economy in the current world economy makes it a better investment vis a vis other sovereign bonds.)  But I digress.

Why are people occupying so many public spaces in so many cities across the United States and abroad?  I think it is precisely as a response to the massive systemic failure we’ve witnessed at all levels of our government to actually make a positive impact on the vast majority of Americans’ lives.  This is not to say that Americans en masse are waiting for government aid or action or anything like that, rather that the silliness we are witnessing playing out on Capitol Hill and in the White House, the constant tit-for-tat, is leading Americans to see their government as willfully sitting on its perfectly-capable hands, rather than deigning to lift a finger to tilt the scales of justice even minutely back on their side. 

A significant portion of these Occupiers likely played a large role in electing President Obama in 2008 – the sense of triumph in that election was not simply due to the historical nature of electing the first African-American president, but because Obama appeared to represent a turn of the page, or perhaps, a close of the book, from the utter depredation of the Bush Administration, hollowed out to a shell of itself in the end due to its sheer lack of competence.  Post-Katrina America had scars, deep scars affecting the national sense of whether the government was truly acting in our interests or not if it could bungle emergency management so completely. 

Obama represented a shift towards competence, towards smart folks who looked at the data to get things done and make decisions…and yet, after the health care debate, the pyrrhic victory of an apparent giveaway to the health insurance industry, combined with the Wall Street-friendly nature of the new Administration, and the declaration that many of the high-level prosecutions that many desired for actors both inside and outside of government were to be strictly off-limits by Obama and Attorney General Holder marked a certain continuity between the Bush and Obama Administrations: elites are coddled, bailed out, and constantly regaled, no matter their transgressions.  The little people, the 99%, have no place in this insular Washington-Wall Street-Pentagon calculus.

The election of Obama, in this narrative, represents not the shift, the hope, the change that people were hoping for, but the continuation of the perpetual insult to the nation’s sense of values and fairness – an insult that, prior to the rise of the Occupy movement was largely undefined and nameless for many Americans.  Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, bank bailouts, auto bailouts, the death of the public option, no Wall Street prosecutions, no torture prosecutions, warrantless wiretapping, unmanned drone strikes on countries and civilians we aren’t at war with, wars that are declared against enemies that are largely undefined…whose heads roll for any of these awful decisions? 

The failure of our institutions, and the growing widespread understanding of that fact, as I alluded to a few weeks ago, and more obliquely, in the title of my last blog post “Don’t think it’s not bipartisan, it is,” is profoundly bipartisan.  It had to be to manifest itself so clearly to so many at just this point in time.  Just as you would likely not have a Tea Party had John McCain won, the nature of the Occupy movement, if it were to exist in an alternate world under a McCain Administration, would be very different to what we see today.  It took the failure of Obama, the landslide-elected change agent to bring justice, to bring accountability to the corrupt elites of this country, for the Occupy movement to spring up.  In this case, perhaps the Change that is thus far unrealized will be the catalyst for the realization of the true Change, whatever that may be. 

The bipartisan failure is a wholesale indictment of the entire construct of democracy in this country, and has likely soured many in the Millenial generation on the act of voting itself.  Perhaps democracy, as it is now constructed, is not in fact the method for enacting the change we wish to see in the world?  Could it be that the leverage points upon which the entrenched interests and powers can bring their influence to bear on candidates and nominating parties in our democratic system are simply too numerous and too porous?  The vast constellation of special interests funding candidates these days ensures the ascendance of a certain type of candidate: one who must be conversant in the ways of money, though preferably not “of” money (they’re easier to control with the promise of high-paying post public service jobs, you see) and who have hewn lines that conform to the dominant economic and social memes of the day, thus ensuring the continued preservation of the entrenched classes.  Any “change” will thus be marginal, minimal, the scraps thrown to those too poor to afford their own public affairs divisions or hired-gun lobbyists to press their case in the halls of power. 

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter whether Obama speaks the right words, or even whether he follows through on his newly populistic leanings with actual substantive legislative victories; the narrative is no longer his to drive, nor is it the GOP’s or the Tea Party’s.  They are reacting, all of them.  Consider:

Occupy Wall Street has already achieved a stunning victory – a victory that is easy to overlook, but impossible to overstate. In just one month, the protesters have shifted the national dialogue from a relentless focus on the deficit to a discussion of the real issues facing Main Street: the lack of jobs -- and especially jobs with decent benefits -- spiraling inequality, cash-strapped American families' debt-loads, and the pernicious influence of money in politics that led us to this point.

To borrow the loosely defined terms that define the Occupy movement, these ordinary citizens have shifted the conversation away from what the “1 percent” -- the corporate right and its dedicated media, network of think-tanks and PR shops -- want to talk about and, notably, paid good money to get us to talk about.

What were you reading about daily in the newspapers as recently as 6 weeks ago?  Austerity austerity austerity.  What did the Occupy movement bring to the table?  Non-manufactured talking points that actually speak to people.  Something you can bring home to your family and discuss at your kitchen table as a concept that everyone understands, intuitively.  Fair wages, decent jobs, non-criminal banks, supporting your neighbors and your community.  These are American values, no matter what the cable news pundits say who myopically search for the “demands” of the Occupy movement despite the hundreds and thousands of protest signs shouting demands right at them. 

People want a fair shake, for themselves, their children, their coworkers, their neighbors, their fellow churchgoers.  That’s pretty much all I’ve come up with, at the end of the day, and it’s pretty simple.  How we get to the fair shake for all is the more complicated problem.