What, And Who, Killed The Economy?

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, writing for Salon, sum it up: it’s the dramatically widening inequality of incomes… and plain and simple GOP ignorance, “failing Econ 101,” as they put it. Here’s a sample:

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So how did we end up in this state? How did America become a nation that could not rise to the biggest economic challenge in three generations, a nation in which scorched-earth politics and politicized economics created policy paralysis?

We suggest it was the inequality that did it. Soaring inequality is at the root of our polarized politics, which made us unable to act together in the face of crisis. And because rising incomes at the top have also brought rising power to the wealthiest, our nation’s intellectual life has been warped, with too many economists co-opted into defending economic doctrines that were convenient for the wealthy despite being indefensible on logical and empirical grounds.

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We can keep on pursuing this course until the nation’s… and the world’s… economies collapse. Or we can “suddenly” remember that we’ve been here before, in the second half of the 1930s, and that we know how we got out of the Great Depression. I could say “the choice is ours,” but hey, it’s not as if we had a democracy or anything… [/snark]

Krugman And Noah: ‘Crankocracy’

Paul Krugman follows Timothy Noah in noting that Citizens United has made America not so much a corporatocracy as a “crankocracy” … a government by oddball billionaires who form super PACs of their own. Krugman points out that the crankocracy has been going on “for decades,” not with formerly illegal campaign contributions but with think tanks, comfy positions between jobs for politicians and their families, etc. Krugman summarizes it this way:

For what the money of rich cranks does is ensure that bad ideas never go away — indeed, they can gain strength even as they fail in practice again and again. The notion that wonderful things happen if you cut taxes on the rich and terrible things happen if you raise them has a stronger hold than ever on the GOP, despite the experience of the Clinton tax hike and the Bush tax cut. Climate denialism gains force even as the planet warms. And so on.

And now a hand-picked Supreme Court (to which Obama’s contributions have made no difference in the balance of power) has handed the keys to the Ferrari to the senescent “teenagers” of the American family. Buckle up; here comes the crash…

The State Of The Nation

Please read William Rivers Pitt’s piece, Let the Million Flowers Bloom. Allow yourself a short span to fathom the list of activities Pitt compiles, things being done by government entities at literally all levels. Then read it again.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy-oriented mind to believe that we in America are headed straight to Hell, based on a simple list of well-established facts. While I believe there are some conspiracies, I am very disinclined to believe they are typically perpetrated by our governments; I find it more than distasteful to imagine that municipalities are organizing against our well-being. But facts are facts, and Pitt has spent years establishing a reputation for getting his facts right. His facts on NYC’s treatment of the Occupy movement are almost certainly right. Who would you rather believe? Michael Bloomberg? And how far behind can the rest of us be, if they’re collecting retinal scans of peaceful protesters?

Pitt says that GeeDubya Bush is finally getting his wish expressed in his attempt at a “Total Information Awareness” program. The technology to do such a thing has been available for a decade at least, and if it is now a mission of the No Such Agency to establish such a database, it will almost certainly happen. As a first step in preparing ourselves, we might want to contemplate how we will live in an era in which individual privacy is effectively nonexistent.

After you’ve figured that out for yourself, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to have some time to contemplate what comes next. Or maybe not. If I were in my 20s or 30s, I might seriously consider emigrating. And if that’s not an option for you…

Welcome to America! Enjoy your stay!

Another Bipartisan ‘Grand Bargain’?

The mind recoils. But apparently it’s in the works, probably to be sprung on us after the elections. According to David Dayen, The Hill (see below for link) says that, in Dayen’s words, “Republicans have joined a bipartisan working group that is preparing a document on deficit reduction.” Yes, of course, some Democrats… with full White House support… are rumored to be ready and willing to cut “Medicare and other social programs” (Dayen).

Not surprisingly, this is apparently in part the work of Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House minority whipped. Whip, I mean… yeah, whipped. Damn, I did it again! I wonder why that keeps coming out…

Then there’s this, which Dayen quotes from The Hill:

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The core House group of roughly 10 negotiators is derived from a larger Gang of 100 lawmakers led by Reps. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Health Shuler (D-N.C.), who urged the debt supercommittee to strike a grand bargain last year.

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And it’s all being negotiated… and apparently already drafted… in secret. That seems to be the pattern of legislation lately: we peasants don’t get to see the action. Sometimes we get to see it after it’s in place as law; sometimes not even that. Sometimes it’s implemented in trials held in ordinary courts at law; sometimes it’s litigated in secret courts. (I have no reason to believe this particular law will be secret, only the process of legislating it.) I never thought I’d live to see the day. But it’s here: we not only do not control our government, we aren’t even witnesses to it.

I’ve never been a fan of “bipartisanship” … why have parties, if they don’t oppose each other? But even if “bipartisanship” is something I have to accept as today’s reality… why all the secretiveness? If the shit is about to hit the fan, can’t we be given at least a minimal opportunity to duck?

In Addition To Those In Poverty, Many American Families Are ‘Near Poor’ – What A Surprise!

According to the New York Times, poverty statisticians at the Census Bureau, which compiled the figures at the request of the Times, were surprised at the finding of “51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line.” This is in addition to the 46 million Americans living in poverty (that’s the 2010 figure, the newest I could find).

Anyone who is old and not wealthy, or any non-wealthy parents of young children, could have told them this: all of us know one or more people or entire families in this situation. But if the stats were a surprise, I hope their publication is widely acknowledged. I do not expect that, but hope springs eternal.

The NYT made sure it included lots of dismissive comments from a variety of right-wing organizations, which were especially critical of the use of the intuitive term “near poor.” But anyone who has ever been near poverty knows what it feels like. And in a society that loudly proclaims and projects the good life for everyone, as the US has done for decades, if you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, even if you’re just barely making it, it feels terrifying.

Mitt the Shit has made it clear that he intends to fund yet another tax cut by shredding the safety net… Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, raising the retirement age, etc. To those who are contemplating voting for Romney, I ask this: are you middle-class? are you doing OK, more or less? are you employed? are you medically insured? is your house paid for? are the kids all graduated from college? Yes to all of that? One final matter: “… you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”

The Last Colony? Probably Not

David Dayen of FDL writes about Europe’s Plan to Colonize Greece:

In a previously-secret document, European countries demand Greece to institute 38 specific changes to their government structure as a condition of the bailout.

[extended quote  from CNBC] …

This is a colonization document. The Eurozone will take over almost every aspect of Greek society. And this will be a blueprint for any other poor Eurozone member that gets itself in trouble.

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(Boldface mine.) So how does this play out for the citizens of the world’s oldest democracy? Here’s Dayen again:

Here’s just some of the fallout: Some Greek workers will actually have to pay for their own jobs. These public employees will go without pay for a month, and the cuts to pension and health funds mean that employees will return some funds. This is not just a cherry-pick: up to 64,000 Greeks will be without pay this month. The austerity packages so far have cost Greeks over 5,600 euro per household. And remember, the Eurozone wants many more of these measures.

No wonder people took to the streets!

The course of the entire affair suggests so many of the purportedly fictional conspiracy theories I’ve read over the years that I can’t help perceiving this as a realization, an actual conspiracy of the über-wealthy (isn’t it interesting that I feel compelled to resort to a German modifier to express the excess?), who have been wondering for decades if not centuries, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent [form of government]?”

Representative democracy is popular only among people who see it as the most effective long-term guarantee not only of their safety and security but of their freedom. On the other hand, there are people accustomed to buying whatever they want, including safety and freedom, completely apart from and with disregard for any form of government, and never mind the cost to themselves… let alone to others. For the most part, these wealthy and powerful individuals stay in the background, content to run the world’s governments by remote control. But something has changed in the very nature of the supposedly civilized world, something that allows the 1% (actually probably more like 0.001%), the “masters of the universe,” to feel secure in operating in the open, disdaining utterly the needs of mere mortals in the 99% as they pursue domination for wealth’s sake and for its own sake. It’s like something out of a bad novel… but it’s nonfiction.

To my mind, the takeover of Greece is an early step in the process of economic domination of the civilized world. In America, our turn is coming. (Some may say that our turn is happening right now; I’m not quite prepared to go that far yet: things will get worse.)

(“The Last Colony” typically refers either to Washington, DC [see the film by Rebecca Kingsley], or to Puerto Rico, or to a sci/fi novel by John Scalzi, which I haven’t read. At least I can feel fairly confident that if I’m stepping on any toes in using the phrase, I have a lot of company.)

It’s Not Just Mitt Rmoney (sic)

Paul Krugman points out that in America the demonstrable rise in economic inequality is combining with decreased social and economic mobility across classes to cause a rise in the number of adult children of powerful people who assume powerful positions themselves.

I suppose if America lasts long enough, it might reinvent the British class system.

Schlesinger On FDR, The Wealthy, And The New Deal

This is a rather long paragraph I’m quoting, but I think you’ll find it worth your time. It’s from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Coming of the New Deal, first published in 1957 1958, pp. 496-497:

One American who was not much surprised was the President. He had known the rich too long and too well to take them very seriously. His upbringing as a Hudson River Squire had given him a sense of superiority over mere millionaires, and nothing he had seen in the years since Hyde Park and Groton led him to suppose that money conferred wisdom. He declined to pay the rich the compliment of fearing them. He thought rather that they inclined to be ignorant and hysterical. For a moment, perhaps, he had hoped that the humility induced by depression might endure. Certainly his attempt at business-government cooperation in 1933 was sincere enough. The “challenge to industry” implied in the National Industrial Recovery Act was still for him, in March 1934, “a great test” to see how business leaders could operate for the general welfare. But, in the meantime, he was losing faith in business motives. “Now that these people are coming out of their storm cellars,” he complained, “they forget that there ever was a storm.” He believed that a “rather definitely organized effort” had been made in the fall of 1933 to destroy the New Deal and it seemed to him that this drive was being renewed in the spring of 1934. Speaking at Green Bay, Wisconsin in August 1934, Roosevelt suggested that for a certain kind of businessman confidence could evidently be restored only by repealing all regulatory laws. “If we were to listen to him and his type, the old law of the tooth and the claw would reign in our Nation once more.” And business talk about “liberty” left him equally cold. “I am not for a return to that definition of liberty,” he said crisply in October, “under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few.”

Compare with Barack Obama and today’s Republicans… and weep for our nation.

The Downfall Of The Public Good

The perennially thought-provoking Robert Reich writes on The Decline of the Public Good, leading us from a more progressive era in which public institutions were valued and founded and funded, through the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, where such institutions were deprecated, to the present, where the virtual absence of public funding for public institutions threatens to bring an increasingly lame, undereducated, underpaid society… a society incapable of producing or consuming, a society lacking (apart from the tiny sliver of the population that is very wealthy) in wealth of any kind, material or intellectual… to its knees and then to its downfall. Reich targets the focal fallacy of conservatism:

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The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds, and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens, and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good — improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

In subsequent decades — through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War — this logic was expanded upon. Strong public institutions were seen as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism, and then communism. The public good was palpable: We were very much a society bound together by mutual needs and common threats. …

But in a post-Cold War America distended by global capital, distorted by concentrated income and wealth, undermined by unlimited campaign donations, and rocked by a wave of new immigrants easily cast by demagogues as “them,” the notion of the public good has faded. Not even Democrats any longer use the phrase “the public good.” Public goods are now, at best, “public investments.” Public institutions have morphed into “public-private partnerships;” or, for Republicans, simply “vouchers.”

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Reich then observes how, for example, Mitt Romney derides and despises the very basis of the public good, while threatening to render what he calls the “entitlement society” nonviable. If only we could depend upon Barack Obama to provide credible, effective resistance to this intentional destruction of the public good… but Obama merely mouths the same platitudes in slightly different language, and our public institutions are in the same danger as they are under Republicans. It is exasperating, and that is putting it mildly.

As a society, we have quite simply two choices. We can restore the concept and practice of the public good to its rightful place at the center of our governmental and institutional processes. Or we can watch ourselves descend into squalor, poverty and ultimately chaos. There are no other options.

Glenn Greenwald On ‘Immunity And Impunity In Elite America’

… published by Al Jazeera. Worth your time to read. I don’t doubt a lot of people are crapping in their pants over the article… and where it is published.

UPDATE: Greenwald and his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, are featured in this week’s FDL Book Salon. I want! But Houston Public doesn’t have it yet. (Yes, they have his other three books; it’s no vendetta against Greenwald.)