Surrender Sanity

I cannot believe the toxic environment in which our public policy plays out these days.  There appears to be a well-funded campaign fomenting the politics of resentment.  There also is a campaign of disinformation that continually puts out lies about our economy and our history.  Much of it seems to be rooted in the same kind of anti-intellectualism that plays to fundamentalists of all sorts.  These are people that believe in myths, ideologies and religion without question and seek to demonize any one that brings facts, education, and knowledge to the table.  It is a well-funded campaign and it will bring down our country if we do not stop it.

I see the obfuscation most clearly in economics because that’s my field. Evidently you do not need any particular background in economics in order to write articles on the economy for major newspapers.  Last night, BostonBoomer brought up Ezra Klein and a subsidiary column by Matt Yglesias.  Both of these guys are young and their degrees are in the esoteric subjects of philosophy and literature.  I guess a few years of writing articles makes you an economics pundit in the eyes of the Village.  Klein and Yglesias have written things in defense of the Obama administration’s handling of policy based on a tic tock narrative written by Suskind that shows clear misunderstanding of both fiscal and monetary policy.  It makes me wonder if either of them have ever seen an IS-LM curve and worked through basic policy implications of macro supply or demand shocks.   Ygelsias appears to confuse the Board of Governors with the Open Market committee which shows a lack of knowledge on basic institutions too. A few graduate courses in financial institutions or monetary policy would clear that up pretty quickly, but sadly it will never happen.

Last week, I was beyond horrified by Lori Montgomery’s laundry list of lies on social security. Many of these falsehoods were subsequently repeated by the WAPO ombudsmen yesterday in her defense.  Lori basically called social security “cash negative” by completely ignoring the interest payments received by the social security trust fund from investments in US Treasuries.  Her defender used pretzel logic to attach the social security program to the general budget. That’s a pretty astounding level of bad information for an article that got printed as special on the front page of a major newspaper.  Anyway, it’s disheartening that so much bad information is getting out there about basic economic stuff but it doesn’t stop there.  Just think climate change science, genetics, fetal development, and simple evolution.  That doesn’t even count the malinformation planted by Fox News and the right wing blogs like Red State, Hot Air, or anything connected to Brietbart.  I’m a committed independent, and seeing this nonsense coming from “journalists” on both sides of the US coin just about has me in a total state of despair.  There’s obfuscation on all kinds of things these days and I point to these examples because I know they’re wrong and they come from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

I read two op eds this weekend that are playing into my thoughts about this.  The first is one in the NYT called “The Politics of Austerity” by Thomas B. Edsall.  Edsall is a long time journalist. The other comes from The Economist which never actually gives a byline to a writer.  Its op ed is called “America’s missing middle” with the subtitle “The coming presidential election badly needs a shot of centrist pragmatism”.  Frankly, American discourse and policy not only needs a shot of pragmatism, they need a dose of reality-based economics and politics.  I should mention that I’m not going to use reality in the sense that corporate media uses reality these days.  After all, corporate media has brought us ‘reality’ TV which is the most fictional form of ‘entertainment’ around as far as I can see.  It appears that the same set of villagers that got played by Kim Kardasian and her dream wedding are being played daily by political ideologues like Brietbart, the Koch Brothers, and the Chicago school of Economics and the Chicago School of Politics.  This is what happens when information, money, and power concentrate in a few hands. Average Americans are fed a steady diet of shit that’s meant to get them to act against their own best interests and each other.

So, let me first quote a few things from Edsall who writes that austerity is more of a political ploy than anything based in economics.  He writes on how extremists have basically pitted one taxpayer against another in this current toxic political environment.  Blowhards with agendas get to say whatever they want, unchecked, as long as it suits the plutocracy.  We’re in the process of throwing our children, our elderly, our veterans, our public servants like teachers, public health providers, and public safety officials straight under the bus in order to maintain unrealistic tax structures that benefit the few but have been sold as helping the many who aren’t lazy, shiftless, and criminal.

The new embattled partisan environment allows conservatives to pit taxpayers against tax consumers, those dependent on safety-net programs against those who see such programs as eating away at their personal income and assets.

In a nuanced study, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol and her colleagues at Harvard found that opposition to government spending was concentrated on resentment of federal government “handouts.” Tea Party activists, they wrote, “define themselves as workers, in opposition to categories of nonworkers they perceive as undeserving of government assistance.”

In a March 15 declaration calling for defunding of most social programs, the New Boston Tea Party was blunt: “The locusts are eating, or should we say devouring, the productive output of the hard working taxpayer.”

The conservative agenda, in a climate of scarcity, racializes policy making, calling for deep cuts in programs for the poor. The beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately black and Hispanic. In 2009, according to census data, 50.9 percent of black households, 53.3 percent of Hispanic households and 20.5 percent of white households received some form of means-tested government assistance, including food stamps, Medicaid and public housing.

Less obviously, but just as racially charged, is the assault on public employees. “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” declared Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.

For black Americans, government employment is a crucial means of upward mobility. The federal work force is 18.6 percent African-American, compared with 10.9 percent in the private sector. The percentages of African-Americans are highest in just those agencies that are most actively targeted for cuts by Republicans: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 38.3 percent; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 42.4 percent; and the Education Department, 36.6 percent.

The politics of austerity are inherently favorable to conservatives and inhospitable to liberals. Congressional trench warfare rewards those most willing to risk all. Republicans demonstrated this in last summer’s debt ceiling fight, deploying the threat of a default on Treasury obligations to force spending cuts.

Conservatives are more willing to inflict harm on adversaries and more readily see conflicts in zero-sum terms — the basic framework of the contemporary debate. Once austerity dominates the agenda, the only question is where the ax falls.

The Economist similarly wonders what happened to the US society that achieved so much after World II and before Reagan–who couldn’t even get past a Republican primary these days–when every one was focused on pulling the entire country up.  Now, the focus is on maintaining the extreme wealth and power of the few while inciting American against American anger.

On the face of it, neither side has gained from this stand-off. Only 45% of Americans approve of Mr Obama’s performance. The approval rating for Congress dropped to 9% in one recent poll. A plurality of Americans call themselves independents, and on the most divisive economic argument—how to solve the budget mess—two in three of them back a combination of spending cuts and tax rises. But politics is being driven by extremists who reject any such compromise (see article).

The right is mostly to blame. Ronald Reagan, a divorcee who did little for the pro-life lobby and raised taxes when he had to, would never be nominated today. Mr Romney, like all the Republican presidential candidates, recently pledged to reject tax rises, even as part of a deal where spending cuts would be ten times bigger. Mr Cain surged briefly to the front of the pack because of a plan that would cut personal taxes to 9% (see Lexington); Mr Perry lost support for wanting to educate the children of illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, in Congress, the few remaining pragmatic Republican centrists, like Senator Richard Lugar, are being hunted down by tea-party activists.

It’s easy to make fun of the EURO standoff, but really, what is the deal with the group of congress critters on the super committee right now?  These are the subset of power brokers who are ignoring poll after poll of US citizens on all sides of the political spectrum to support ridiculous tax policies, continue ten plus years of war spending with no war bonds, and ignore the results of a  huge cyclical downturn and lifeless recovery.  These guys experienced a 25% increase in wealth recently, what kind of stake do they have in solving the resultant problems of an austerity agenda?

I think all of this comes from spending too much time in Beltway, Washington DC and on Manhattan Island.  These are basically two places untouched by falling incomes, falling house prices, and any educational experience outside of law schools and esoteric Ivy League degrees.  Then there’s a bunch of know nothing imports that come in with backgrounds in religious extremism, rural isolation, and decades in dysfunctional state governments.  Our political and journalist class are basically spoonfed by plutocrats or isolated backwaters.  The carving up of the national voting map ever so often doesn’t help.  This nearly ensures that we get representatives that specialize in one voter segment and probably one industry. They totally don’t have to pay attention to anything remotely ‘average’ in America.

This is also a clue as to why none of these folks get the “occupy” movements.  I don’t know if you’ve ever headed over to Memeorandum, but it looks like the press is trotting out every possible outlier behavior possible in a society and smearing it to every one carrying a placard.   They all are so threatened that the average American might realize that other average Americans are focused on them instead of segments of each other they are in total panic mode!  I’ve been completely dismayed by a set of villagers that can justify police brutality against veterans and young women. The right wing is trying to scare ordinary Americans away from the picket lines with stories of old women beaten by protestors, small business people unable to do business due to exuberant drumming by lazy people and of stories of encroachment by mentally ill homeless and sexually predatory men.

Again, this is typical of the divide-and-conquer political strategies we see today.  Any one with any kind of nuance is drummed out of their perspective clubs.   I am by no means a supporter or slightly sympathetic of Rick Perry but I have to wonder if his statements about immigration that didn’t include alligator-filled moats and electrical fences didn’t lead to his eclipse by Herman “Racism isn’t a problem until I can use it” Cain.

Back to The Economist for a moment.

In other countries such a huge gap in the middle would see the creation of a third party to represent the alienated majority. Imagine a presidential candidate next year who spelled out the need for deep future cuts in spending on entitlements and defence, as well as the need to raise some revenue (largely by getting rid of deductions); who explained that the pain would be applied only after the recovery was solidly in place; who avoided class or culture wars; who discussed school reform without fear of the Democrats’ paymasters in the teachers’ unions. Better still, imagine a new centrist block in Congress, which might give that candidate (or for that matter a President Obama or Romney) something to work with in 2013.

And so the fantasy continues, for that is sadly what it is. Even if the money were forthcoming, there are all sorts of institutional barriers, especially to starting new parties, and the record of even very well-heeled third-party presidential candidates is bleak. Instead, the middle will have to be recreated from what is already there.

The immediate, rather slim, chance is of a grand bargain on the budget emerging out of a congressional “supercommittee” set up after the debt-ceiling fiasco. If it were to embrace a centrist option, politics over the next year would be considerably more civilised. But it too appears deadlocked, with the Republicans once again ruling out tax increases of any kind.

The way to deal with populist stirrings in the Republican party was to immediately co-opt any spontaneity in the tea party and surrender it to the Club for Growth, Freedomworks, and Americans for Prosperity.

In a forthcoming book (“The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”), two Harvard University academics, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, say that the emergence of the tea-partiers was “just what the doctor ordered” for a group of billionaire ideologues, such as brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, who lost no time exploiting the movement’s anger and energy. Dick Armey, the founder of FreedomWorks, and Matt Kibbe, its president, have been candid about their efforts to turn the tea-party movement into “a permanent grassroots army” and mount a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party.

We have another strategy for the popular Occupy Movement.  Since the plutocracy can’t get it shaped into their agenda, it must be demonized.  I was rather young during the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam movement. I did come in at the end of both and the uptick of the Gay and Women’s rights movements.  All of these social justice campaigns were subjected to police brutality, name calling, and attempted co-opts.  They stuck so long because of the basic rightness of the causes, the stubbornness of the activists, and the growing support among average Americans.  The only thing that gives me hope is that while I have no faith in journalists, politicians, and the power brokers of K and C street, I do have faith in average Americans.  If we can remember our shared vision and goals, we can steer us back on course to a shared prosperity.  Meanwhile, we need to fight the hate and the ignorance with everything we’ve got.  Right now, I think the Occupy movement is the closest thing we’ve got to the right way to do it.  Frankly, the fact that it confuses journalists and politicians and causes the right wing to go on propaganda witch hunts is a pretty good sign of how right it is to me.